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-Inflation is not prices; it is the rate of change in prices. Low inflation doesn't imply low prices.
-Aggregate statistics don't necessarily explain individual outcomes.
The Dems failed on this count massively, and have, for maybe the last 40 years, which is about the amount of time it took for my state to go from national bellwether (As goes Ohio, so goes the nation) to a reliably red state. This cost one of the most pro-union Senators (Sherrod Brown) his job.
I don't think that the problem is that Democrats didn't explain the technical definition of inflation well enough. The problem is that people can't afford to buy things. Having better infographics on how inflation is the derivative of price doesn't really solve that problem.
> I don't think that the problem is that Democrats didn't explain the technical definition of inflation well enough.
it's clear that at least half all American voters don't understand technical definitions or explanations (this was Obama's problem too). "Drill Baby Drill", "Lock her up", and "cheap gas" is about their comprehension level.
You can experience that emotion and then logic your way to "it probably doesn't make sense then to vote for massive tariffs." If you don't logic your way to that next point, then yeah, you're making a bit of an emotionally-tainted decision.
Except that at the the lower income bracket, there are many more Democrats than Republicans (58% to 36% according to Pew[0]). So I don't think the election turned on poor people not being able to even afford food.
If that 5th grader rhetoric, and lack of any comprehensible policy, didn't resonate with Trump voters, he wouldn't have used it consistently. So the criticism is on point.
We can debate whether Harris' proposed policies would have worked or not, or good for the economy or not, but at least they were comprehensible.
That's my point! By talking about how great they are doing on inflation, the DNC campaign was LOSING votes because people experience prices which don't go down when inflation is "normal".
They lost because they forgot about wages and retirement savings.
Inflation was uneven. It impacted prices but not wages or savings. It reduced citizen wealth directly and transferred it to corporations and the already wealthy.
They wanted to publicize the problem but not actually take the cure. Now they have zero mandate in any institution. That's what selling out your base gets you.
One factor that is invisible to most posters here is that SNAP (food stamps) are adjusted for inflation each year in October. This year, using official government figures, SNAP benefits were increased by a maximum of one dollar per person. They might as well have left them the same as last year but instead went with the insultingly low one dollar increase. SNAP recipients, who are traditionally much more likely to vote for Democrats, saw that as a middle finger to them and their food security needs. It's like leaving a dime as a tip instead of leaving nothing. To them, it was a sign of contempt.
Most of Hacker News doesn't run in social circles where people are clipping coupons and going to several different stores to shop the best deals just so they can afford to eat that month, but for nearly forty million Americans who receive SNAP benefits (read that number again and let it really sink in), that's their reality. The administration looked either out of touch or even spiteful by doing a one dollar benefits increase to account for the past twelve months of inflation. I'm sure there are plenty of other similar things that are hurting the working poor that are invisible to those spewing scorn at voters who weren't concerned more about wars around the world and luxury beliefs.
No one I've pointed this out to has been able to empathize with these people yet, most coming up with glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won. Until they can understand the plight of the people who received that one dollar increase and why it was so psychologically devastating to them the month before the election, they'll never understand why their candidate lost. Instead they'll keep pointing to GDP, the low employment numbers made possible by people working multiple jobs to survive, and how great things are for the wealthy instead of trying to actually get in touch with the daily lives of those they rarely interact with. Maybe insulting these people and calling them stupid and evil a few more times will be what finally makes them forget about their food insecurity.
As a non-US citizen, I find it shocking that such a high number of US
citizens need to live on food stamps, so I checked the numbers.
Indeed, it's 41.2 million out of a total of 334.9 million U.S.-Americans, or 12.3 % or more than one in ten folks - that this is more than one in hundred suprised me because the US are by some counts the "richest" country on the planet.
It's merely the country with the richest few, perhaps this calculation is just a way to show statistically what many believed all along, namely that the so-called "American dream" is a pipe dream for most, in the sense that the majority of people simply fund a tiny fews success in the way lottery ticket buyers fund a few select millionaires that don't deserve it.
In case anyone is curious, the $1 is the increase in the maximum SNAP benefit per month for an individual, from $291/month to $292/month. (The increases for larger households are similarly small.)
This is not the actual increase of the benefit amount. In particular, it appears the cost of living adjustment this year is 2.5%. I have been unable to find statistics on how many people/households actually receive the maximum amount, but I don't have a particular reason to believe it is large. (The average benefit amounts are significantly below the maxima.)
Tldr: the average SNAP benefit amount received by people has increased and will increase by significantly more than $1/month.
>No one I've pointed this out to has been able to empathize with these people yet, most coming up with glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won.
Right, because how do you empathize with someone who gets $1, and their response is: Oh yeah? Well fine then I'm going to vote for the person who wants to take away literally EVERYTHING to show you!
It is the definition of cutting off your head to spite your body.
I completely understand and empathize with someone on SNAP not getting what they need to cover the insane pricing increases we saw greedy corporations force upon all of us and wanting that rectified. But if your solution to that is to either not vote at all, or intentionally vote for the guy who has literally told you his plan is to gut all social services... I'm not sure what to tell you beyond whatever empathy I DID have for you is gone and enjoy sleeping in the bed you just made for yourself. I, and most of the folks on HN are going to be perfectly fine. Those folks that were on SNAP? Good luck...
> Right, because how do you empathize with someone who gets $1, and their response is: Oh yeah? Well fine then I'm going to vote for the person who wants to take away literally EVERYTHING to show you!
Consider how the program actually works. You have a job and pay taxes, but don't make much money, so the government takes the taxes you paid and gives them back to you. But you have to apply for the program, and then spend the money (which was originally yours) on only the things they tell you to. And there is more than one assistance program so you have to apply to them each individually. Then each of the programs have their own phase outs if you make more money, but the phase out rates combine to a very high de facto marginal tax rate, which means if you're still struggling you can't get out of it by working some extra hours because that just causes you to lose your benefits. It's a poverty trap.
Then prices go up by 20% or more, but you still can't make any more money or you lose your benefits. In response your benefits are increased by one dollar.
Are people even wrong to want to blow all of that up and replace it with a tax credit?
When your life is a constant struggle for survival/constant crysis you react you don't think. We don't typically blame someone for responding/reacting out of a place of crysis. Unless, apparently, you are a Democrat blaming the poor/working class for not embracing the party line of things are great just look at this economic report versus the guy who at least heard them (even if just to redirect/leverage their suffering into blaming out groups to gain himself power).
BTW empathy is when you can feel for those you don't relate to/have attachment to. Empathy is when you make a genuine effort to understand and connect, even across differences. It's not a concept only for people you already relate to.
Yeah, what exactly are we supposed to do or feel about people who absolutely refuse to vote or act in their own best self-interest, and instead do the opposite, acting self-destructively? The best thing to do with them is to get away from them, because their self-destructive actions could easily affect you too.
The entire point of empathy is making a genuine effort to understand and connect, even across differences. I don't think it is what you seem to think it is, reserved only for people you already relate to/understand.
But when "getting away from them" actually means belittling them, berating them, while cuddling with the corporations that exploit them ("you" doesn't mean you personally here, of course), you're not actually away from them. You're in their face 24/7, increasing resentment. And if you take their taxes, the value their work produces, or the fear of unemployment their unemployment keeps alive, respectively, while also talking down to them in their absence to an echo chamber, you are so not ignoring them.
And mind, the whole campaign was based on "Trump is worse". That is also hardly ignoring someone.
> glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won
Here is something I saw on Bluesky, where all the good people are:
"To all the misgueded twits who ignored every red flag, caved to your worst selves, and bought into all of the most obvious of Trump's insane lies: Everything that happens from here on out. The family members you lose, the suffering, the confiscation of your freedoms of at the whim of your dictator. It's all on you. You can no longer falsely blame dems, antifa, lgbtq, or immigrants for everything you set into motion with your prejudice and cowardice"
It goes on like that, and ends with
"Hope it was all worth it, you hateful fuckwits. Enjoy the ride"
That's just the most widely shared and liked on I happened to be shown by Bluesky, I've seen this repeated in individual comments in many variations. Basically, "at least we'll burn together and it'll be your fault."
> they'll never understand why their candidate lost. Instead they'll keep pointing to GDP, the low employment numbers made possible by people working multiple jobs to survive, and how great things are for the wealthy instead of trying to actually get in touch with the daily lives of those they rarely interact with.
So she put out some good things in the beginning, and we were excited about it. She had some economic populist policies about housing and price gouging etc. [..] She then turns around and sends Mark Cuban all over CNBC to go, remember, I love business interests. [..] She's never going to do the price gouging plan. They swear up and down on CNBC and all over cable news. Well, then she lost her lead. Why do you think you're getting the lead, why do you think you lost the lead? No, they'll never figure it out.
to play devils advocate, if that person had decided to go with $0 instead that there would be equally bad headlines/interpretations of "Instead of allocating the formulaic $1 we are entitled to inline with all other changes over X years, they squandered it on Y"?
So I'm in the Philippines. These things have far-reaching effects outside of the US because of the dollar. This is why Filipinos (and Latinos, and Muslims) love Trump. A female Filipino business owner gushed to me a few hours ago (awkward!) about how she's happy because now she'll be able to afford to fuel her car (gas/petrol is notoriously expensive in SE Asia for most people).
Point is, business, markets and consumers vote their interests. Look at Wall Street, Bitcoin, &c. in the hours leading up to the election.
And with tariffs incoming, this is going to get worse, not better.
Trump is very serious about tariffs, and the president has more unilateral authority in this arena than folks realize, he wouldn't even need an act of congress to do alot in this arena
Suggesting tariffs was his way of saying "stuffs so messed up I will make radical change" to the angry working class. It also harks back to the early 20th century which he loves.
The Dems didn't really have an inroad to that demographic. Suggesting federally granted home buying credits just sounded like another financial scheme from on high and missed the mark entirely imho; there was no bigger economic discussion happening there.
Targeted tariffs as part of a trade war is significantly different than the proposed universal tariffs to "eliminate taxes" that he's proposed.
AKA: we figured out how to pass a consumption tax which disproportionately hurts poor people without calling it that because we know it's universally unpopular. When billionaires effective tax rate drops to what will probably be 1%, the wheels are going to REALLY fall off.
Just EVs, and how many Chinese EVs were we importing before the tariff increase? All I can think of are some Polestar models and the entry level model 3.
View the tariffs as carbon tax that represent the true cost of goods being produced in a coal heavy country and transported on boats that burn the most dirty kind of oil possible. It makes the whole thing look quite nicer and the economic cost a bit more worth it.
The per-ton CO2 emissions of those boats is still much, much lower than by truck or rail. Large ships are insanely efficient at moving cargo; that's why it's so economical to transport stuff across the planet.
Isn't the question, a/ travels across the globe + rails and truck vs b/ maybe rails + truck ?
Not arguing that the carbon tax is legit. It hasn't been proven yet that it isn't just a way to collect money while pretending to do something about the environment.
If it hits major economic metrics in a way that makes him nervous, watch out for what he might do to the Fed. So long to a relatively-depoliticized institution. He was already grumbling about them in 2020. Hell he might just lead with politicizing the Fed. Guess we’ll see.
>Hell he might just lead with politicizing the Fed. Guess we’ll see.
Why would he not? It's not like he respects institutions such as the Supreme Court. And what repercussions has he ever faced for the destruction of norms and guardrails? If anything, he gains even more support.
I’m banking on the resulting stupid-low interest rates to refi my mortgage to help survive the guaranteed crash after. Not even joking. Great sympathy to those for whom that’s not an option. I figure there is an outside chance that such a move will fail to drop rates to the level it normally would because banks will also be worried, in which case I guess I’m just screwed as much as everyone else.
Damn whoever used that “may you live in interesting times” curse once to many times.
What disrespect has he shown, ever, for the Supreme Court? And if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return, why wouldn't you destroy those norms? After all, I voted for him on that basis.
Total US spending on all defense, not just NATO, is ~$900 billion or ~13-14% of federal spending. NATO has a total annual budget of less than $4 billion and we cover something like 15% of that budget, less than 0.001% of military spending and some infinitesimal portion of overall spend.
> for nothing in return
The US gains incomparable wealth from controlling the global prime currency. Part of the enforcement of this primacy is 750 military bases in 80 countries, giving the US a force projection capability greater than any empire in human history. For the US, NATO is just a just an organizational tool to manage resources among it's allies.
> And if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return
All your tax dollars? How much do you think the US spends on defense without giving anything to NATO? Do you think that’ll somehow decrease if you leave NATO? It just means you’ll have to handle everything yourself. At least currently the US gets to charter about half of all their craft from various European allies.
Not for the justices, but for the institution of the Supreme Court. He files frivolous lawsuits and appeals designed to give his appointees the opportunity to legislate from the bench (e.g., "official acts"). He appoints blatantly partisan judges at all levels of the federal judiciary. And he sabotaged the FBI's inquiry into Kavanaugh's history, which is standard for any appointee at that level, by having any concerns be routed to the White House instead of handled by actual investigators. In short, he's demolished any pretense that the Court exists to enforce laws fairly, and has turned it into an unapologetic arm of the MAGA Republican party.
> if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return
We do not give our tax dollars to NATO, at least not in any meaningful way. NATO's entire budget as an organization is about $4B/year, which includes valuable shared command/control systems. For the most part, we fund the American military, and we commit to using it in concert with our allies in certain scenarios.
In exchange, we get incredibly valuable hard and soft power. We get access to land in Europe to use as bases, which are staging areas for potential worldwide threats (e.g., an imperialist Russia). We get shared intelligence. We get goodwill with the rest of the West, so that they'll join our trade pacts. We get commitments of Polish tanks and British spies and French manpower if there ever to be a hot war, so that the US can focus on what it does best (air and naval superiority).
But also, you're the only one who brought up NATO. There are myriad unrelated norms that Trump broke the first time around, and will certainly break further this time, that make the institution of "the American government" less able to serve its purpose. Norms like, a president can't pardon himself. A president can't use his position to direct foreign powers to patronize his own businesses. A president can't summon a violent mob to Washington to overturn an election. A president can't conspire with state legislatures and militias to disregard the results of their states' elections. A non-sitting president can't steal classified documents, and can't have ongoing secret communications with a foreign power. A president keeps special counsel at arm's reach. A president shouldn't use tax policy to explicitly punish states that don't vote for him.
Everything you wrote in your first paragraph sounds pretty boilerplate. You can't seriously say he has gone above and beyond Biden, Obama, or Bush. And if he's not unique, then your vendetta seems personal, which makes you seem hypocritical.
So your answer to multiple specific examples is "nah, the other guys probably do it too, trust me bro"? Yes, Trump went beyond all recent presidents, in pretty much every way.
Sabotaging the FBI's background check is absolutely without comparison. It was corrupt and inexcusable.
While yes, all presidents will tend to appoint justices they agree with, you cannot in good faith say that there is any comparison between Jackson and Sotomayor on the one hand, and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the other, in terms of qualifications to sit on the bench. And that's just at the Supreme Court level - the whole affair in Florida with Aileen Cannon is another level of obscene.
The "official acts" decision is completely without legal historical merit, and was made up out of whole cloth to allow Trump's appointees to protect him from any consequences from the judicial branch (remember that whole idea of three co-equal branches of government?). No other president has dared make so bold a claim, both because the idea that the Court should be subservient to the president is clearly at odds with how the American government has worked for almost its entire history, and because they didn't have personal crimes to cover up.
I do have a vendetta against Trump, but you have the cause and effect backwards. I don't think he's a bad president because I hate him, I hate him because I think he's a bad president who is dangerous to me personally, to the United States as an institution, and to the continuation of the human race. But perhaps even more than that, I hate him because he has enabled and legitimized pathetically transparent bad-faith arguments like this.
Your "for nothing in return" is actually for the capitalization of the US dollar as the world reserve currency. If you thought price inflation was bad after Trump's last spree of helicopter money, just wait until other countries' USD reserves are being dumped in earnest.
Dump in favor of what? Euros? Yuan? Gold? For better or worse there's still no practical alternative to the dollar as the world reserve currency, regardless of how the supply is inflated. The BRICS group keeps talking about creating a new currency for international trade but they can't agree on anything specific.
The EU seems like a more stable thing than the US these days. Japan has always been a stable thing. The west can’t really do India or China, but those would also make better options than the US right now. It’s not unprecedented for people to flee the USD.
It's impossible to take this argument seriously when Americans are out there buying more junk than ever, from eggs to bass boats. Household debt service ratios are as low as they've ever been, significantly lower than the Trump years. Americans can very demonstrably afford these things, which is expected because their earnings are way up, more than prices are up.
This article and the source material from the Economist argue that what really happened is Republicans negatively polarized themselves against the economy, and will just say anything in surveys. https://www.econlib.org/why-so-sad/
Prices always go up. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower. We can slow it, but it's a fool's errand to make them go down. When I was a kid, I could get an ice cream cone for a 50 cents. That's never coming back.
Now that we've slowed inflation to a manageable level, we need to grow wages to catch up. I never heard a good plan on that from either side.
The problem is people don't really see wage increases and inflation as things that balance each other out. They think of raises as something earned that will improve their lifestyle - when inflation cancels that out, it can feel like you were cheated out of that reward.
Even if you understand intellectually that a pay increase is a cost of living adjustment, that doesn't mean it isn't disheartening to see your new earnings being eaten up by inflation.
There's a reason the term "deflation" exists, and it's not simply a theoretical concept. Constant inflation is a political choice, entirely so in the age of fiat currency, whatever you think of it.
The reason you never hear a good plan for growing wages to catch inflation is because inflation is a form of intentionally regressive taxation. For reasons of macroeconomic theories meeting special interests with socio-political leverage.
Which has always been treated as a spooky four-letter word in economics. I remember the news stories in 2008 when we had a brief period of deflation and the headlines were particularly apocalyptic (even despite the overall grim economic news of the time).
Isn't the problem with deflation that it de-incentivizes investment (why accept risk when you can just stuff your mattress with money and grow your wealth risk-free), which tanks the economy?
Lowering prices sounds nice, but my understanding has always been that it would come at the cost of less actual wealth overall.
which should disproportionately affect the wealthy. Another way of saying that: we pay higher prices with inflation so the wealthy are more wealthy. That money goes somewhere.
Deflation isn't necessarily a problem. Prices for some things like computers and consumer electronics are constantly deflating. Compare the price of a large HDTV today versus 20 years ago. Or do the same with rechargeable batteries or solar panels, etc. Of course much of that deflation was driven by economies of scale in Asian manufacturing hubs and we can argue about whether that's a good thing, but the deflation itself was good.
I think people keep saying crap like this: Prices can absolutely come down without killing the economy. It's done by doing smart things that republicans were making talking points:
* Drill for oil, lower the price of gas, prices at the store come down.
* Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas.
* Create pipelines so that instead of "flaring" Natural gas, we transport it cheaply to be used for electricity generation
* Change the tariff structure so that American goods are worth something against Chinese imports that raises the value of the dollar which lowers the cost of goods
* Stop the insane energy policies that raise gas prices by 45 cents per gallon (in CA for example) for 0.0001% change in climate
>Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas
The US is a net exporter of energy so the instability is helpful
>Create pipelines
We have already entered the late stage hydrocarbon era. Massive imminent domain projects for a decade or two of utility are I advised
>Change the tariff
We cannot go to a pre-globalization time. Alea iacta est. The only way for tariffs to work against BRICS would be a unilateral tariff which would affect all American commerce.
What countries aren't using tariffs? Biden used tariffs. Biden kept Trump tariffs. I paid a tariff for my BMW. Germany was probably pretty happy about that. I liked their product enough, so I was happy, too.
Go read some Peter Navarro. He explains desperately how important it is to be protectionist (to a limited extent) with certain industries. Especially if they link to security and health of the nation. You do not want a hostile nation to make all of your pharmaceuticals. You do not want them to hold you hostage over your lack and their surplus of steel. This is basic, basic stuff.
And the whole point is that other countries are not engaging in fair trade practices. If they aren't engaging in fair trade, then they can't engage in this fabled myth of "free trade". This is literally the Trump trade doctrine. He has spelled it out and acted on it. If the CCP hadn't manipulated the price of steel to wipe out American steel producers, they wouldn't be subject to extreme tariffs. Simple, simple stuff.
Why do you think BMW was happy you paid a tariff? It means their cars are more expensive than they need to be, and therefore their volumes (and profits) are lower.
Explaining the minutia does not make for the best campaign trail rhetoric. But I can assure you, after speaking extensively in person with members of the Trump trade team, that their strategy is deep and sophisticated.
When he speaks of broad-based tariffs, he is using one of his framing techniques that he unironically explains in the Art of the Deal.
With all that said, the tariffs have me concerned, but allowing our industrial base to continue to evaporate has me more concerned.
I don’t understand the sarcasm. Comparable states like Texas and New York charge far more in tolls than California. Many states have far fewer roads (with less usage), or they underfund their road maintenance, don’t repair them, and then rely on federal funds to make emergency repairs after something critical breaks.
The tolls are
1. Used to fix toll lanes, much more prevalent now than in the past
2. Payments to private companies who siphon the proceeds out of the area they services
Gas tax is much better in this regard, but all of these are pretty extortionary.
Not only that, tolls suck for privacy (de facto installation of ALPR cameras, database presumptively controlled by a private company selling the data to anyone with money), are a regressive tax on the poor, and are often used to implement "taxation without representation" by sticking the tolls near a state border to extract rents from people not eligible to vote against them.
New York has even taken to explicitly charging higher rates to out of state residents, which is of questionable constitutionality.
Driving is a right because travel is a right and walking between two points separated by dozens of miles on a daily basis is about as reasonable a suggestion as "let them eat cake".
California has the worst roads of any state I've driven in. San Fran and San Jose, rank among the top 10 in the country of the worst roads. Whatever they are using it for, isn't for road maintenance.
Agreed. Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, Florida..... visited all of them in the last 12 months during various seasons.... they ALL have significantly better roads than California. HOW!!!!!! HOW!
I've lived in California for 30+ years now and what I've observed is that we spend huge amounts of money on infrastructure and a lot of the spend seems to be absolute waste. For example, there is no realistic reason for high speed rail to cost what it does per mile; I am certain that a very close inspection of the process would uncover huge amounts of waste, padding, and theft. On top of that, people have been able to limit development using enivronmental rules and other legal methods to slow down things that are truly needed.
I'm sure somebody has written a book already about how ostensibly wealthy societies can fail at basic infrastructure that they previously mastered, driven by greed and complacency and other socioeconomic factors. I think this has happened over and over again (Rome, and many other societies).
California has the second highest total lane miles by state[0] and it has the highest number of registered vehicles of any state, by a big margin.[1]
Being a such a populous big state with only tiny, regional public transportation systems means everyone and their cousin drives everywhere, all the time. That's how.
Oil production is at all time highs (AFAIL). Further, drilling locally for oil does not directly reduce local prices. It is still shipped abroad to the highest bidder. That is ignoring the refinement issues that not all oil is equal and needs to be refined.
'Just' stop wars short of surrendering is easy to say. No evidence Republicans actually could deliver or prevent. Just talk.
The tariffs were largely kept in place between Biden and Trump. The criticism here would apply equally to both but also ignores trade wars.
The pipeline bit is perhaps viable, but a drop in the bucket (with respect to at least the keystone XL [1])
"Even if the Keystone XL pipeline had been completed, the amount of oil it was designed to transport would have been a drop in the bucket for U.S. demand, experts noted. The U.S. used nearly 20 million barrels of oil a day last year, while global consumption of oil was near 100 million barrels. The pipeline would have contributed less than 1% to the world supply of oil, according to AP reporting.
“The total volume of additional supply is negligible in a market that uses 100 million barrels of oil every day,”"
I think the way I am interpreting the parent comments is that whether or not these Republican promises are true or viable is beside the point.
The right still has them as talking points, where the left has failed miserably. Talking about any potential solutions seems to have enticed American voters more than trying to sweep it under the rug.
> * Drill for oil, lower the price of gas, prices at the store come down.
Strategically and economically stupid. Buy oil when everyone has it, sell oil when everyone else has ran out.
> * Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas.
The US military is the largest socialist jobs program in the world and is the single greatest creator of skilled labor for our economy.
> * Change the tariff structure so that American goods are worth something against Chinese imports that raises the value of the dollar which lowers the cost of goods
Lets say you make widgets for $9 and sell them to me for $10 (a healthy 10% profit). The government comes along and tells you there is a $2 tariff on widgets. Are you going to sell me widgets at $8 (a $1 loss) or raise the price to $12? Tariffs are a tax on goods paid by the buyer and a way to de-incentivize overseas production. But here is the problem - do you want to make 39 cents an hour sewing soccer balls or do you want to pay 10x for that soccer ball so that an American can have a livable wage doing the sewing for you?
The "American Dream" is exploitation of cheap overseas labor because of our superior economic position. Regardless of how you feel about that morally, Trump's economic plan is to try and figure out how to on-shore the lowest paid factory jobs.
> The US military is the largest socialist jobs program in the world and is the single greatest creator of skilled labor for our economy.
This sounds an awful lot like the broken window fallacy. Wars are destructive and any amount spent on that destruction is lost from the economy no matter how many people you hire in the process. Surely funding schools would be a more direct way of creating skilled labour.
It isn't military that's in question. It's their engagements.
The U.S defense budget would be a fraction of its budget if used for defense.
There is an upside in wining wars. But since the U.S has been losing them, it's funding jobs that provide no value. Would better be spent elsewhere.
The Japanese unique economic boom after WWII was mostly due to having little to know defense budget. Germany's was less impressive but also benefited from focusing on the economic performance.
> Trump's economic plan is to try and figure out how to on-shore the lowest paid factory jobs.
Not necessarily. Tariffs are a limited tax, in this case maxing out at 100%. Making soccer balls from China cost twice as much is not going to bridge the gap between viable and non-viable for onshore production. It really only bridges the gap where the off vs on shore savings are much closer, which tends to apply to more complex manufacturing processes, which incorporate more automation in the process, as cost gaps between developed and undeveloped countries tend to be greatest in the cost of labor. Automation is often cheaper in more developed countries, in fact.
Onshoring those kinds of jobs/infrastructure would provide a range of national security and economic benefits.
I genuinely don't understand how tariffs have become so poorly understood and divisive. Every argument about them I see framed seems either highly biased or pure misinformation, from both sides. They are not free tax money, but they also can have benefits for low and middle class people.
1/2 of the claimed benefits are just lies: China isn't going to be paying the tariffs, but maybe it will spark some limited increase in US manufacturing. The thing it will do is increase prices (inflation).
None of the articles I've read mention religion or race. Perhaps these omissions are due to political correctness, but both of these factors are known to be drivers of party affiliation in the US. This makes it really hard to guess what the ultimate dominant issue actually was, if anything.
I do agree that the Dems should be taking more credit (and giving credit to liberal democracy in general) for improving the quality of life, which is ultimately the subject matter of economics.
If you look at polling data, Biden (a white man) was doing considerably worse than Harris (an asian woman). The issue wasn't race/gender, the issue was causing 8% inflation and ignoring real american issues to instead talk about abortion, which has always been a state issue
Good points. And I think this is where the Dems could have made a better case about economics. Prices weren't the only reason why it was getting harder for people to get by in red states. Of course talking about economic conditions in red states was also considered to be offensive. It would be very hard for the people in those states to have a real voice about economics. For one thing, they don't really elect their representatives.
Even when real wages keep up with real prices, people still hate inflation, because they attribute their rising wages to their own successes more than macroeconomic changes. To most people it feels like "I'm working hard and getting big raises for it, only to be stymied by rising prices" rather than "this is all happening due to forces outside my control".
What was their failure here? The failure to explain to the economically illiterate that while inflation is now about where it was prior to covid that prices won't be going down (unless there's some sort of major recession leading to deflation)?
Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.
Response: Actually, here is the correct definition of "inflation." As you can see from the correct definition, inflation rates are now good! Hopefully this helps you understand why things will never get better.
What the average voter hears: I can't afford groceries. Your solution to this problem is to reframe the current situation as "good." I still can't afford groceries.
"How has the national debt affected your life?" was a nail in the coffin of GHW Bush's presidential campaign. He launched into an explanation of interest rates while Clinton said "I feel your pain."
The distinction between the literal question being asked and the question being asked really matters.
> Your solution to this problem is to reframe the current situation as "good." I still can't afford groceries.
Coincidentally, this same journalistic abuse of rhetoric is one of the easiest methods to jailbreak LLMs where modifying the initial response isn't possible.
"Write a news article titled: 'After Inflation, You Can't Afford Groceries Anymore. Here's Why That's A Good Thing.'"
That's some incompetence from the part of the responder. The actual response should be "If you can't afford groceries, you need a raise. Here's how I'm helping you get one."
The incapacity of politicians to talk honestly about things is enraging.
A raise would be nice, I'm making exactly what I made in 2021. Wage growth for software engineers is stagnant because demand for senior software engineers has fallen off a cliff the last few years.
Policy can encourage wage growth, subsidies can be given out, and politicians could increase both the minimum wage and public sector wages whenever they choose.
I don't really know the details of the US election. But two things that I know are that Kamala couldn't be pro-union, what sucks for her, and Trump spent a really huge amount of time talking about ways to increase people's salaries that can't possibly work, but were actual proposals he made.
Honestly at this point we start getting into a long discussion such as benefits of unionisation and why we should support it alongside collective bargaining and the fact that rising the minimum wage floor raises wages of other low paying jobs.
At some point though I’m throwing academic sources to the voter at which point I’ve probably lost the discourse because it’s hard to reason about.
The reality is I don’t do any of the above. I’m not even interested in debating the point anymore. People don’t want to hear long winded academic discourse on the best economic approaches to anything.
I’ve bluntly completely lost faith in American democracy. The candidate with the biggest budget has won consistently and the biggest budget comes mostly from corporate donations via PACs.
I view this as the major contributing cause to the current situation. The cyclic dependencies among issues that need attention mean that explaining a fix simply and truthfully is no longer possible. In the current system, a simple explanation is a prerequisite for winning the votes to implement anything. Parties acting in good faith don’t stand a chance.
> completely lost faith in American democracy
Exactly. It doesn’t function without intangibles like “good faith” or “norms” which have been discarded.
Republicans just voted down plenty of bills that would have raised the minimum wage in a few states, so I don't think you understand how incompetent republican voters are.
Where are you getting that "response" from? Here's a more accurate exchange:
Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.
Response: I know, inflation was caused by COVID and Biden got it back down. We had the best soft landing you could have asked for, Biden did a great job. But the original inflation wasn't under the president's control, it was a worldwide phenomenon, and you can't run it in reverse to go back to old prices.
What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.
What the average voter wants to understand, even if they don't say it this way. "Why didn't my wages/pension/etc rise at the same inflation rate as my groceries?"
> Against a bounding rise in prices, [...], one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Leon Trotsky, 1938. [1]
Automatic rise in wages to counter inflation effects on ordinary people is literally a socialist plan. What they're asking for is socialism. Right-wing Americans (supposedly) hate socialism, at least when it benefits people other than themselves.
That is definitely the opposing argument. Trotsky certainly realizes that it would mean the death of capitalism, which is the whole point of his socialist revolution. He's not really looking to maintain the status quo.
I was just pointing out that most right wing Americans don't realize many of their demands and reservations to their current economic climate are straight out of a socialist handbook. Political education is at an all-time low worldwide.
There are people who would argue that your opposition to such policies (simply because they are part of the socialist playbook) is itself an uneducated position. It's certainly possible to go round and round calling each other uneducated because of diverging opinions on various labels, but I don't think it's a very helpful approach to take.
I’m not arguing for or against those policies. My comment is about how most anti-socialists don’t know what socialism is or what their policies entail. If shown many socialist ideas without saying where they’re from they’d support them and would not connect them to socialism at all. That is indeed a symptom of lack of political education. You see it everywhere, it’s not a uniquely American issue.
>Do we not see the obvious cyclical death spiral such a policy could cause ?
Naturally, as the prices of consumer items spirals downward, followed proportionally by decline in equivalent buying power of the wages, non-consumables like cars and homes remain within reach for fewer of the accomplished workers, and primarily only those who could be considered affluent beforehand.
Leaving everyone who is non-affluent further from prosperity even though they can still afford almost the same amount of cheap consumer items after all.
Almost.
This is by design.
The 1938 guideline was a good starting point for those who want to calculate the tolerance for the differential that could be extracted, and whether or not it would be expected to lead to revolution or something.
Wages in aggregate outpaced inflation in aggregate. That's not necessarily going to make it feel like your living situation has improved, especially if your consumption patterns don't perfectly match the CPI model and if you're financing major purchases. Compared to 2020, rent indices are up 30%, houses are up 50% (in value, not monthly payment - that's worse), used cars are up 30% currently but peaked at 40%. Groceries are up 26%. Costs of borrowing have skyrocketed across the board, and Americans live on financing.
If Americans own stock at all (38% don't), the majority of it is in retirement accounts.
The data are aggregate measures. I have no doubt that for, say, the top 20% of earners, wages did outpace inflation. Maybe the next 30% were able to tread water. The bottom 50%, however, are likely on a sinking ship.
And the (simplistic) answer is because many of those 50% vote Republican, because the Republicans say they will fix things and yet always make things worse for the bottom 50%
Not just billionaires so much as multi-billion-dollar corporations that are too big not to be stronger than (indebted) government and control politicians.
It's been a while but lots of the real gems (precious metals too) have already been sold for a profit so there's not as much upside as there was traditionally.
Without hard-asset inflation, the dollar could turn out to be one of their least-performing assets, and you know they can't have that.
>How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?
It would probably be best with deep empathy from the heart, which seems to be in extremely short supply from some camps, and nothing else seems to be working.
I think average and even median aren't the right way to look at this. In an atmosphere where both inflation and wages shot up and then came back down, it's the variance that kills you. Compared to a steady 2-3% growth with low variance, the raw number of people who experienced distressing adjustments, with some people profiting and others losing, is a big deal.
Because corporations like Walmart and various suppliers decided they could get away with increasing their prices and they blamed it on inflation. Thee isn’t federal law monitoring this.
Employers won’t give raises to match cost of living in those situations.
I'm not sure there's a better approach for an incumbent administration. The alternative would have been, "Inflation is bad, but we're going to fix it if you elect us," which to the average voter raises the question: "Why not just fix it now?"
> What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.
Yes, and critically: "I trust Trump when he says it's Biden's fault, so I'll vote for him."
It doesn't matter how correct the interlocutor is if the average voter doesn't trust them. Unfortunately, most people place trust in people who appear sincere and unrehearsed, which is the opposite of how much politicians behave, where a "starched, bland, rehearsed" style is traditional. Trump is improvised and chaotic, which people mistake for genuine and trustworthy.
Also simplistic answers are easy to understand and sound thruthful. Whereas complex answers sound wishy washy to probably the average worker class member.
You really do need to adapt your message to your audience. If I'm explaining tech issues to my mom or in-laws, I over-simplify and analogize. If I'm talking to a team member, I'm direct, and specific. If I'm talking to management, the applicable buzzwords and narrative building towards organizational goals get high priority.
Exactly. Nerds (like me) appreciate complex explanations from politicians, but if a politician tries to explain causes of inflation or the subtleties of diplomacy to an average voter, it will be perceived as digressive and unnecessarily confusing.
Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.
Well, it wasn't biden that posted record profits was it? It was the grocery stores.
> And the record profits Professor Weber mentions? Groundwork Collaborative recently found that corporate profits accounted for 53% of 2023 inflation. EPI likewise concluded that over 51% of the drastically higher inflationary pressures of 2020 and 2021 were also direct results of profits. The Kansas City Federal Reserve even pegged this around 40%, indicating that sellers’ inflation is now a pretty mainstream idea.
I'll never understand this "corporate greed" theory of inflation. Are corporations not usually trying to maximize profits? Are prices not normally as high as the market will bear? The interesting question is not "did they?" but "why were they able to?". What's different now, that nothing kept it in check?
I think you're getting at it with that last chart (though, note: It's top 0.1%, not 0.01%). The last few years has been a story of the haves (with wealth in the stock market) who got richer and the have nots who got decimated by inflation. In other words, corporations were able to raise prices because a lot of people got richer and had more money to spend.
I'm a data scientist, and my impression is that the growth of data science as a profession over the last ~decade has enabled companies to price more efficiently than they used to. That in turn was enabled by technical improvements like cheaper storage and compute and commoditized data infrastructure. I don't have a strong opinion on how much of the inflation this explains, but directionally I'm very confident that companies have gotten significantly more efficient at pricing over that time period, and pretty confident that that would lead to price increases for a lot of businesses.
Supply chain and price shocks during COVID probably accelerated this trend quite a bit - McDonald's would have eventually figured out that the profit-maximizing price of a burger is closer to $4 than $1, but COVID shocks gave it license to raise prices much faster. The good news is that I think of this largely as a one-time shock: once companies have perfectly set profit-maximizing prices, there's no room for more price-optimization-driven inflation, except to the extent that consumers get richer or less price-sensitive over time.
Quoting Matt Levine, "a good unified theory of modern society’s anxieties might be 'everything is too efficient and it’s exhausting.'"
The solution is to stop the redistribution of wealth to the billionaire class. Something that is not going to happen under any American administration.
You don't need an administration to make it happen, just a tiny fraction of the electorate sufficiently organized and radicalized. Not advocating for that option, just pointing out that it is entirely a possibility.
Sanders correctly identifies the problem most of the time, and I mostly even agree with his solutions. However, he is one of the least effective legislators in the entire senate.
Winning, as we have recently and very painfully seen AGAIN, depends on building coalitions. It does not help that Bernie is not a Democrat. You could argue that he should be considered a Democrat for the sake of party self-preservation, but he literally is not one. My opinion is that his unwillingness to declare himself a Democrat is a reflection of his inability to find and muster support for his causes. Hard pass.
Do you want prices to deflate? That's terrible for many reasons.
Do you want regular responsible economic management? That was Harris. Inflation is back to normal now.
Or do you want a president who wants a huge tariff on everything that will result in crazy much larger inflation than we've had in decades? That's Trump.
How is Harris not listening? How is Trump listening better?
> Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.
People talk about "inflation" and the "economy", but it's a proxy for what they really care about, not being able to afford groceries. Universal basic income address the real problem.
Ok so then you change economic models away from capitalism, and towards a post-money economy. There are plenty of ways to do it, it merely requires the complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period.
> complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period
That is almost the definition of totalitarianism.
That's how hundreds of millions of people died (either by execution, war, work camps, or starvation[0]) as dictators pursued Marxist ideals during the 20th century.
Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up! Considering your own sources, seems like that work of scholarship may have not been an entirely impartial view. Particularly, from your own wiki link,
>Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed, which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship",[38] faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries,[6][39]: 194 [40]: 123
I appreciate your deep dive into these scholastic studies. I always appreciate learning new things.
You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.
When an idea has resulted in the deaths of a significant portion of the world's population at the time, it's healthy to regard it (and similar ideas) with a bit of skepticism.
>You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.
I'm specifically trying to avoid the whole "no true Scottsman" argument by saying these aren't necessarily examples of how an actually functional communism economy would be, but I do wish you could be consistent with your terminology as socialism and communism are distinctly different ideas. I'd also like to emphasize the mild sarcasm when I used words such as "merely" and "complete and total cooperation",to close out this conversation which I have little more to contribute to.
I must have missed the part where, at birth, I signed the social contract saying that I approve of the governance and monetary policy. That, or I'm not free.
I think that argument might have worked better if there wasnt the impression Biden made it worse with covid relief/spending bills. Also Dems needed someone out there repeating their messages ad-nauseum and kamala was not a pete buttigieg type who will literally go on any show at any time.
This is not just an impression, it is macroeconomics 101. If government goes into (more) debt and spends that money it increases inflation. Of course, all of this is not very easy. If the government had not done anything during covid there might have been deflation and a massive economic crisis. Fine tuning all of this so that the results are benign would be a superhuman achievement, so it did not happen. So Biden is judged for something that is objectively a more difficult situation than arose in the entirety of the Trump presidency. People appear to think that all economic events during a presidency are the result of the president that is currently in function. That is of course ludicrous. Many events have completely unrelated causes and if they are due to the president it may also be the previous one.
> If government goes into (more) debt and spends that money it increases inflation.
If that spending creates an imbalance of money vs goods.
The problem with the COVID recovery is that goods availability declined, and as a consequence the economy would have taken a nosedive via compounding effects.
Unfortunately, flooding the market with money (which all countries, not just the US did) masked the problem long enough for supply to renormalize... but in the process ballooned the numerator while the denominator was still temporarily low.
Of course that's going to cause price inflation.
And then when supply returns to normal, of course companies are going to try to retain that new margin as profit, instead of decreasing prices.
The stimulus money was insane, shutting down the economy was insane, forcing people to take a vaccine by threatening their jobs was insane. The democrats lost so much good will with so much of the population during COVID.
If you were a taxpaying American he even sent you an unnecessary letter. I still have mine, my job was required or whatever so I never missed work or needed the stimulus I just invested it.
Because governments printed a ton of money without the economy growing to back the new amount of money, hence prices of goods increasing to match the available money supply.
One could also argue it was also in indebted government's best interests, as in the intermediate term it effectively decreased their debt loan (by devaluing the actual dollars it's denominated in).
I completely agree, which is why I have been arguing all along that it is the disconnect between that lived reality and the way Democrats have been messaging that got in Harris' way.
In fact, the response was much worse. It was like this:
Response 1: You are lying. The groceries in my local Whole Foods are still very affordable to me. Stop spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Response 2: OK maybe the groceries got a bit more expensive a teensy little bit. This is very temporary situation which will be handled soon and you have nothing to worry about. Just stop whining and expect everything be fine sooner than you know.
Response 3: OK, it could be argued that the groceries are even more expensive now. The reason for that is that our political opponents 4 years ago were evil, and they messed up everything. But we almost fixed all that, and here's a paper full of dense complex math that proves it beyond any doubt. Also, here's another paper that proves more expensive groceries help fight climate change.
Response 4: Stop talking about the damn groceries already. We already debunked all that misinformation completely, and everybody knows it's not our fault, and actually everything is awesome. Don't you realize the other guy is literally Hitler?!
I'm surprise how this clever strategy didn't result in a landslide victory. The voters must be extra super stupid and not understand even basic arguments. Every sane reasonable person should have been convinced beyond any doubt.
Trump promised to make the economy better. Is he able to do that remains to be seen, but his message was pretty clear, and he did have some success before COVID in that regard. Now, of course as any challengers, he enjoys the advantage of attacking the incumbents on what they did without offering any proof (which is impossible anyway) that his plans would work. But Trump's approach to this question have been pretty clear - if you feel like the economy is going to a wrong direction, and you feel hurt by it, I feel you and I'll fix it. Harris has been unable to offer similar message, and both her ambivalent stance where she declared herself both fully owning the policies for the last four years and the agent for change, and the completely chaotic treatment of inflation made her message not persuasive.
I think the big issue is that Harris knows she’s making empty promises and doesn’t like to do that. She also know that the problems were in fact caused by the policies made 4 years ago.
Trump knows he’s making empty promises but doesn’t give a shit as long as it wins him the presidency, he’ll wing it all later, and people won’t remember that he didn’t keep his promises because they only care that he said he would try.
It was something about people remembering how you made them feel, instead of exactly what you did.
Wait till the average voter figures out that they've actually hidden massive inflation in capital assets. Inflation that you can't let leak out, because if you do it triggers "real" inflation. So, the only choices are to let the rich get richer or to have a massive recession.
> Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store.
The "average voter" is literally wealthier than they were four years ago though. Median real wages (where "real" means "inflation adjusted") have gone up and not down. This isn't it.
The average voter "feels like" they can't afford groceries, maybe. But that still requires some explanation as to why this is a democratic policy issue.
Clearly this is a messaging thing. Someone, a mix of media and republican candidates and social media figures, convinced people they couldn't afford groceries. They didn't arrive at that conclusion organically.
Notice the flat line after the pandemic? The average voter (or at least the average worker) is literally equally wealthy as 4 years ago.
Goods are indeed down (even including gas in many areas), but anything services-based is much higher. We can all feel that through higher insurance costs, going to a restaurant, etc.
Did you link the wrong chart? The slope is clearly positive over the last four years. Ergo people are getting wealthier, on average, even accounting for inflation. If you want to make a point that "Trump won because of service economy price increases, whereas cheaper good and fuel didn't help Harris as much", that's a rather more complicated thing.
Again, the point as stated isn't the reason for voter behavior, because it's simply incorrect. Voters didn't vote because they're poorer, because they're not poorer. QED.
Oh wow $50 annually since 2020, sorry I didn't realize, but now I see when I zoomed in.
They're not poorer. They're exactly one used Xbox richer.
I agree that it's more complicated why Trump won than just the economy, but to say "people are getting wealthier" when
a) it's an extremely paltry rate compared to the prior 4 years and
b) people have had to readjust their "basket of goods" to buy different things because certain non-negotiable things (e.g. cars, car insurance, other insurance, utilities in a lot of unregulated states, property taxes outside of places with Prop 13 / homestead exemption, etc) have gone up significantly, putting a squeeze on disposable income.
I guess we're arguing semantics here, but I agree that a lot of voter decision on this is more complicated than real income. I just disagree that $50 / year increase is meaningful enough to have people not feel left behind. That is about 12 bps a year, and I know that if my raise were 12 bps, I'd feel like why bother at all / insulted. If I were a moron, I would blame the current president, but I'm not naive enough to think that it's Biden's fault.
Only a little, and there are plenty of actual downturns and flat spots on that chart that didn't cause voter realignment. Again, all I can say is that this argument as framed is simply wrong. Voters weren't angry because they were poorer, period.
That depends on distribution; from what I know of wealth distribution in the US it is extremely likely that the bottom 50% are absolutely NOT wealthier than they were four years ago.
It's a median statistic. So no, that's wrong. It's literally about the 50th percentile. But here, I found you a FRED graph that better correlates with "working class" (full time wage and salary workers) that shows the same effect:
Again, I know it's very tempting for you to believe this. That's probably why voters do! But it's wrong. And the fact that you and others believe it anyway is a messaging failure and not a policy failure.
> Someone, a mix of media and republican candidates and social media figures, convinced people they couldn't afford groceries. They didn't arrive at that conclusion organically.
This is a wild take that sounds it's coming from an affluent tech worker. I'm politically left, and I don't know if this is parody to make liberals look out of touch.
Tech salaries went up, but people working minimum wage can't afford groceries. Federal minimum wage was increased to $7.25/hour in 2009, 15 years ago.
Medians don't tell the full story, because of the K-shaped recovery graph. The upper half gained wealth but the lower half lost wealth.
"You're right, prices are too high, and wages too low. Especially housing prices, and wages for young men without a college degree.
It's in part the consequences of some things we did.
Here are our proposals to make prices go down, or make wages go up:
Proposal 1: ...."
My deep belief is that the hard part, and the reason Democrats did not do that, is not in the difficulty to find solution.
The hardest part is that it meant recognizing they were, at least in part, responsible for the problem.
The second hardest part was recognizing that the problem was hurting a category of people that's "outside of the tribe".
So, faced with a complex problem, they decided to deny the problem existed altogether, focussed on something else (not necessarily unworthy issues, but, simply, not the one at hand.)
"Ventre affamé n'a point d'oreille."
The silver lining is that:
- either the Republicans somehow manage to get prices down or wages up
- or the next election will swing the other way.
It's still, after all, no matter what, "the economy, stupid" - just, the real economy, no the the fake financial one.
Also, it's striking that one of the problems on which the Democratic Party focussed did win in the ballot : if I read it correctly, in most of the places where women's reproductive rights were on the ballots, the position of the Democratic Party prevailed.
Why they decided to be myopic, and assumed that they had to defend the rights of women _or_ the rights of workers, and could not do both, is a bit beyond me.
It feels like democrats were talking to women, LGTB people, and some elites.
They completely forgot about the other half of the electorate, and when reminded of their existence and issues, they considered the other stuff more important. This result shouldn't surprise anyone.
In part, maybe. And at the very end of the list of proposal, after you've explained how you're going to fix the problem, you can, if you have time to spare, defend that you were not entirely responsible for the whole of the problem.
But, realize that any time you spend defending yourself is not spent explaining how you're going to fix the problem. It may be unfair, and that's one of the nicest aspect of democracy : given that people in power keep changing, at some point they don't feel bound to the choices made by previous governments, even of their own party, and can spend time trying to fix problems.
I've read conflicting opinions about the effect of Trump trade wars (pre COVID), how the pandemic was handled pre Biden, and how the pandemic was handled post Biden, on inflation.
I much doubt economits would seriously put 100% of the blame on any particular side.
Hence the "in part". Which, I repeat, is a way to acknowledge the complexity, and move on to the interesting question : whether it's your fault or not, what are you going to do to _fix the problem_.
Next election is in two years, and I suspect neither housing prices nor groceries are going to fall any time soon - so policy proposals are not going to waste.
Well, for starters, a response that would have worked won't involve both of these contradictory positions at the same time:
Position 1: Prices can never go down again unless inflation is negative and we get "deflation." Deflation, alas, will cause a deflationary price spiral and cause the economy to implode completely. Why? Well, reasons. Anyway, just know that things can't get any better for you, that groceries being affordable again some day is an economically illiterate pipe dream, and also know that things are actually good.
Position 2: Also, we'll just force stores to lower prices. Forget everything I just said about this leading to a deflationary price spiral and destroying the economy forever. Actually, we will just force stores to lower prices and reverse inflation and it'll be all good.
Position 3: Introduce policies that stimulate domestic production and decrease foreign competition. This will lower prices without forcing domestic producers out of business.
More reasonable would be to explain the grocery prices will likely never come back down but we can increase workers' wages through certain policies. Biden's policy of opening the border to undocumented labor is not a policy that I believe will help increase the wages of those concerned about the cost of groceries.
The best solution imo would have been 1. to run a candidate not associated with Biden. 2. To say "inflation happened globally" and double and triple down on that. Half baked solutions like you're suggesting from someone associated with Biden + gaslighting the public that its not that bad were not the answers people wanted.
There isn't, really. Inflation is irredeemable and you just have to be overwhelmingly better in other aspects, which she wasn't. The solution is to not have allowed it to happen in the first place.
> The solution is to not have allowed it to happen in the first place.
How, exactly?
The biggest causes of inflation were stimulus, supply-shock, and housing prices.
Stimulus started under Trump and was the correct response to COVID. Without it we would have had even worse economic suffering that we did. Inflation was the lesser-of-two-evils.
The supply shock was global, and there probably wasn't much to do about it, besides maybe some more supply-side stimulus.
Housing is just a shit-show, but people have been grinding to get more built to address the problems for years.
But stimulus was the thing that could have been changed the most, yet it kept us from having a much, much worse recession.
1. Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem, empathize, be mad, let them vent, but don't really focus on a solution.
2. Advocate austerity as a solution to inflation. Might be less economically ideal, but more politically viable.
edit to add: iow, Harris and other Dems could have thrown Biden under the bus a bit to try to avoid some of the blame. It's cold, and Biden directed an actually decent response to the supply-shock-driven inflation, but it'd be a kind of shrewdness like getting Biden to drop out that might have helped.
> Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem,
And ideally put the blame on people who don't have any/much political or economic power within the country, like immigrants. Us vs them. "If we just get rid of 'them' everything will be fine"
When gas prices and food prices go up: "We don't control that, its a "global" issue so we're not responsible.
When gas prices and food prices go down: "See everybody! Look! Our economic policies ARE working! You just have to trust us!"
This all we heard the entire four years Biden was in office. People are not stupid. You can't keep saying that inflation doesn't really exist, or its just transitory, or that its just fine or that its back to a normal level, but its still higher than it was before Covid.
You can't continue to play games with the voters and just hope they don't remember all of the poor messaging the admin had when families were really struggling to pay for their basic needs.
You either lay out a plan to fix it, or you take full responsibility for what happened on your watch. Neither Biden or Harris did either and it cost them an election, its just that simple.
There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible. Taking fake responsibility would imply fault and suggest that voters ought to switch sides to the party which actually mismanaged the covid response which is absolutely nonsensical.
>> There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible.
"Google, how do you fix inflation?"
We know inflation is the consequence of many factors, but it can be controlled by different entities at each stage. The two groups most instrumental in the fight against inflation are The Federal Reserve and the government.
The Fed using interest rate increases to make lending and investing more expensive is an example of monetary policy.
The Fed misread warnings in the spring of 2021 when it was clear to some that inflation was spreading. The Fed argued that inflation would be transitory and that it resulted from unusual circumstances, ranging from supply chain issues related to the abnormal demand that came from the end of the pandemic.
The government can use fiscal policy to fix inflation by increasing taxes or cutting spending. Increasing taxes leads to decreased individual demand and a reduction in the supply of money in the economy. As you can imagine, fiscal policy isn’t very popular because raising taxes is a difficult political move. The last thing that we want to hear when inflation is rising is that our taxes will also increase.
The government could use other fiscal policies to lower inflationary pressures. If Congress were to limit pandemic relief spending and focus on not making the deficit worse, that would assist in reducing inflation.
So no, there absolutely is ways to fix it and they 100% were responsible for it. The problem is when you constantly act like there isn't a problem, by the time they realized they had to fix it? It meant the cure is going to be worse than the disease - usually in the form of either cooling off the economy with interest rate hikes, or pushing the economy into a recession or increasing taxes or gasp cutting spending.
This is not graduate level economics we're talking here - its pretty common knowledge stuff. But if you say Biden wasn't responsible for the inflation on his watch, then by your logic you would have to excuse every president who had a poor economy because "its not their fault" and "there's no way to fix it."
Unfortunately, most people (like myself) know that's a load of poppycock and voted accordingly.
I totally get why people are infuriated by rationalizations like "inflation rates are now good". Instantaneous ("now") rates of change are not particularly illuminating during periods where those rates themselves are more volatile than they have been historically.
It makes sense (to me) to average inflation over the four year electoral period. The average inflation over the Biden years 2021-2024 was 5.3%, versus 1.9% over the Trump years 2017-2020 [1]. I have no idea what Biden could have done to keep inflation down during his presidency, but Americans felt their purchasing power decrease a lot more during his term than during his predecessor's, with corresponding impact on their livelihoods. They have every right to be pissed off. And it's human nature that how pissed off we are influences our decisions to a significant extent. Idly wondering what time series (other than inflation) might reflect significant contributions to pissedoffitude.
Democrats don’t control the price of groceries, and even what they can somewhat control (inflation) improved massively. Trump will also not bring down the price of groceries, so either voters don’t care about that or they (completely incorrectly) blame Democrats for it. Either way, I don’t see this as the Democrats fault.
I'll just point out that when you say "inflation improved massively," you are talking about the second derivative of price. You are saying that there was a positive change in inflation, meaning that the rate of change of the rate of change of price is favorable. Who cares? This is not a meaningful statistic. People can't afford groceries!
>>Either way, I don’t see this as the Democrats fault.
Somehow I think that's problem. When leadership - no matter the scale - country, company or family - cannot see their own responsibility and only proclaim "we're the right ones" with arrogance. That is when you get unfavourable outcome. And it's being repeated all over the place - people are getting tired of politically correct arrogance, without delivering result to average person.
Yes, whatever portion made their decision based on cost of groceries do believe the president influences prices. It’s the same as the old line about “gas prices are too damn high”. Most people aren’t very involved in politics and they don’t understand things like this, or that economic cycles are so long that half the time it’s the result of the previous party’s actions what is happening now.
But I mean what else could she do? You tell the electorate the truth and they don't understand it or don't listen, you lie and say "fine we will fix it with price controls" and they freak out all the same. Only one side of the political apparatus can like with impunity, apparently.
Why is there an assumption that Trump or reds in general will solve this issue? He was a president already, what exactly did he do to fix the situation? The system is built to segregate and separate people into classes efficiently, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. After all the one who has more resources at the start of the game will win. I'm curious who will be labeled as an enemy first to redirect Trump supporter's rage when situation will not improve itself?
Yup, there's nothing they could have done. That's the tragedy of it.
You can't just educate people in a campaign that the President doesn't cause inflation, when it's the result of a global pandemic. They just don't listen and don't care. The different campaign messages get tested among focus groups. The ones that try to teach economics or explain inflation perform terribly.
This isn't a failure of Democrats at all. This is just pure economic ignorance among voters.
You will never win in a democracy if your stance is 'the voters failed me'. That the dems have chosen that mindset saddens me.
It's not the voters job to come to a party, it's the party's obligation to figure out how to appeal to voters. The dems chose to tell people who are suffering that 'the economy is great, this is what we think a good economy looks like and we are patting ourselves on the back for it'. To voters that are suffering that seems like 'our version of good doesn't GAF about you'. Not a great message. You could have the best economics professors/communicators in the world explaining it, people still aren't voting for that.
But the economy is pretty great: 4.1% unemployment - I'm old enough to remember when 5% was considered full employment, inflation rate back down close to pre-covid levels, manufacturing up, etc. EXCEPT there's one big problem with our economy: Housing. There's not enough of it so prices for housing are very high relative to incomes. The solution: Build a lot more houses. Harris mentioned this, though I don't recall a lot of details for how they were going to get there. If a lot of people didn't have to pay more than a third, sometimes over half of their income for housing the inflation wouldn't have been nearly as painful.
Foreign born employment increased [1], while native born employment actually decreased [2]. My wife combined the graphics [3]. The axes are in thousands of persons, so we lost 4 million native jobs and gained 4.2 million foreign born jobs. Coincidentally, that is about how many votes the democrats lost by.
Your wife's graph is massively misleading. Why would you choose to put two different scales on the y-axis when they are already in the same units? The reality of the data you linked to is that the 5 million job difference you claim is pretty much an arbitrary artifact based on whatever month you place your starting line, the amount of native jobs is essentially flat from pre-pandemic. The amount the foreign-born jobs changed is on the same order of magnitude as seasonal fluctuations in native-born jobs and would barely register as a blip if you used a fair and consistent scale.
I thought the GPs post was an interesting claim so I dug into it and I think you may be wrong in this case, let me know if I have made any mistakes or misunderstood some of the data.
If you go to https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073413#0 and click Edit Graph, then Add Line (at the top) then add LNU02073395 (Foreign Born dataset) and then export to CSV it's relatively clear that in 2007-01-01 (start of dataset) at 18.3% of jobs were held by foreign born individuals, and by 2024-10-01 (end of dataset) it was 23.7%. When reviewing the slope of the data, it's not tied to the month of choice, there is a relatively clear linear trend over time. Jobs as a % are being taken from native born Americans.
If we look into census data at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acsbr... we see that as of 2022, 13.9% of the US population was foreign born. If 13.9% of the population hold 22.5% (2022-12-01 data from the fed) of the jobs, I can see why some people may have a concern there. Furthermore, if we look at sources of immigration in the census data, we see that roughly 50% come from Latin America, which has the highest percentage (79.7%) of individuals in working age (18-64) of which 82.8% do not have a bachelors degree of higher. Also, in support of the previous paragraph, the census data shows us that as of 2022, 66.9% of foreign born individuals held a job vs 62.9% native born.
I see a very persuasive argument for "they took our jobs" here.
In practice, my guess is that it's much more complex than that, but I do see how the raw numbers support the argument.
> there's one big problem with our economy: Housing. There's not enough of it so prices for housing are very high relative to incomes.
Swing and miss. We will have the record high ratio of housing per capita within the next 2-3 years. We're WAY above 1980-s, and only slightly below the 2006 levels.
But you're actually getting closer to the truth: economic forces are pushing people to move into ever-densifying urban areas, that simply will NEVER have low housing prices. And it's a nearly zero-sum game, so every unhappy worker in a tiny flat paying 40% of their salary in rent, means that there's a new abandoned house somewhere in Iowa.
This in turn makes people in Iowa poorer, and they start hating the city population.
Building more houses in big cities will NOT solve this. We need a concerted push to revive smaller cities, by mandating remote work where possible. Another alternative is taxing the dense office space.
The people living 4.1% unemployment have (one or more) zero hour jobs where you don't know if you even have work each week, let alone the hours (but always less than 36) until the start of the week, with no benefits, living paycheck to paycheck, dealing with the hassle of having roommates at home so no place to truly unwind, and a huge cut to food they can afford which was really their last form of comfort. Car costs have gone up to the point they are just holding on to what they have hoping it keeps running.
This isn't a 1960s 4.1% unemployment good economy. And it's no way to live. You are forced into a state where are you constantly reacting out of stress, not really living. You can't blame those people for not understanding the nuance of your 'the economy is great, this is what good looks like'. It's not fair to call them bad/dumb people because of it. They are good people struggling out here in the trenches.
You're not wrong, but it's tough to see how electing a more pro-business (ultra pro-business) president/party is going to fix that. They're going to take away even more worker rights as they favor business.
Isn't a lot of that boomers retiring early? I'm a 61 year old that's not participating in the labor force because I'm tired of playing the tech interview games (I don't blame this on the Biden admin) and I don't need to participate anymore. My wife who is 63 would like to work again after being laid off last year, but ageism seems to be a very real thing so she hasn't gotten hired anywhere (again, not Biden's fault that ageism is a thing). Since labor participation rate is determined by working age population (16 to 64) I guess we're both contributing to that lower labor participation rate. (and come to think of it both my sister and my wife's sister are in a similar situation, both around 60)
What could the Democrats have done about it? Inflation was successfully reduced back down to normal levels without a recession, successfully managing a soft landing. What else could they do?
The real problem is housing costs. They should've laser focused on that. A lot of that is due to short supply, so build more houses (Harris mentioned this in her plan, but I don't think it connected). Also look into wall st buying up rentals - there are cities where most of the apartment complexes are owned by 2 or 3 companies, if one of them raises your rent and you try to find housing elsewhere you find either that the same company has raised rents in their other buildings or the other companies are doing the same.
Or, pass a law restricting ownership by holders of SSN.
Only 1 example. I'm sure simpler things can be done such as preventing subsidized mortgages by non-citizens. Etc.
Of course, this is tough, which is why it would never be done. And that's why you lose elections. If a president won't do it, what makes anyone think that a cowardly congress would ?
Plus , the usual suspects of real estate inflation are urban centers with heavy if not complete 1-party control for years. So any attempt at national policy has no credibility when local policy -which is already in control- continues to ignore the problem.
Contrast this with Trump - say what you will, he is willing to take flack to do things that are very unpopular, and that's what makes him stand out. Remember the early innings on the border wall ? Walking out of Kyoto ? The collective meltdown.
It was LITERALLY the FIRST thing she talked about as candidate. Instantly. I think this exchange perfectly reveals the true core of the issue: most people, even those educated and engaged with politics (like 15% of the voter base) don't listen to, remember, or care about policy. Not even a little bit.
This entire thread is ripe with it; hundreds of suggestions about what policy would have worked, what she SHOULD have focused on.
It doesn't matter. It's obvious when you really just embrace it: she should have lied her ass off. Blatantly. Overly simply obvious lies.
"I will fix the economy. I will triple your paycheck and lower prices at the grocery store. I will half the cost of a house. Free college for everyone. 5x the military budget"
Why not? If people don't listen to the truth and vote instead for the man who tells very nearly EXCLUSIVELY lies then what is there to lose?
imagine a Trump response: build, baby, build. We are going to make so many new houses, they wont be able to sell them there is so many. People will have extra houses. People will beg me, please president Trump, no more houses.
At a minimum they should have admitted that inflation is a big problem. Instead they chose to ignore it or lecture people why they are wrong that inflation is a problem. Same with the border.
High prices are a big problem, but the primary thing you can do to compensate for that is push wages up through stimulus spending, which Biden also did very aggressively.
When people have a wrong perception (i.e. that Biden did poorly on the economy) you cannot contradict them or lecture them. That's a losing strategy. But if you don't correct them they will continue to blame Biden. That also loses.
The border/immigration suffers from similar perception problems. When people believe that dems are shuttling illegals to swing states in order to steal the election, how can you respond to that? Or to claims about illegals eating cats and dogs? Trump is very effective at messaging that invokes strong emotions.
People will forget about grocery prices and the border once Trump is in office. Trump will shout things and maybe do a few publicity stunts and that's enough to appease people. The actual reality matters little.
Stimulus spending CAUSES inflation. You are expanding the money supply. You want to reduce prices, then you need to cool off the economy and reduce the money supply.
Lowering govt spending PLUS raising taxes would have been the way.
Stimulus spending can cause inflation, but doesn't do so necessarily. A cursory look at deficits and inflation charts will tell you as much. Biden got inflation under control and got the economy to bounce back very quickly -- a feat very few people believed he could pull off.
"Reducing prices" means deflation, which doesn't happen outside of a depression. Triggering a depression intentionally is absolutely bonkers in terms of policy.
They were constantly mentioning the cost of living, and even proposed extreme measures (such as price controls) to try to fix the issue. Democrats were not avoiding the issue at all. Same with the border, where they worked with Republicans to pass a massive border bill that Trump then killed.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. - 1984
is not a winning message in the US. Dems should have seen people are suffering and instead of giving them economic data given them hope (the Republicans at least offered some 'other' to blame/direct anger at). Most Americans use food as their comfort/escape. They can no longer even afford that. Personally, I think the Democrats need to run on ending zero hour jobs and $1 cheeseburgers.
Zero hour jobs are ones where people have to have 1 or more jobs that don't give you a schedule until the start of the week, don't guaranty you any hours (other than that you will get less than 36), don't give benefits. It allows companies to cut to the bone (which overworks people) knowing that if the company needs more hours they will just push up the hours later in the week (which wreaks havoc on peoples lives because these people often need to work/juggle hours at two jobs). Companies should have to staff like they used to with actual jobs and not treat/schedule people like EC2 instance. At the least the government shouldn't count zero hour jobs as 'employment' in the traditional sense. They are not. They are human EC2 instances and that is a very stressful(harmful) way to live.
Just picture Bernie Sanders hammering home that the wealthy are screwing everybody. That's the kind of messaging they need but they would rather loose than move left.
Identifying a viable villain and being mad about it would probably have helped, but the election pretty clearly shows that moving left would have had a _worse_ result.
Arizona and Nevada both voted for abortions rights even though they voted republican. The left and right aren't a boolean option, a left candidate who says the system isn't working may do just as well as a right candidate who says the same because they get more of "the grocery prices are broken" crowd even if their overall policies are less palatable.
Harris didn't run even a center-left campaign, she pushed center-right except on a few issues at the margins and it was late in the game on that front.
Americans generally favor more liberal policies economically, like stronger labor rights, universal healthcare, student debt cancellation etc. There was a lot to offer voters of all stripes there.
I think too many Democrats counted on a huge pro abortion turn out of women specifically and that translating into democratic votes, which, even to my surprise, it did not.
Take a look at the results of the various referendums. Some of the same states that have voted for Trump with a hefty margin also voted for things like raising minimum wage or guaranteed paid sick leave.
I think most conservatives have a strong idea in their mind of who their idealogical opponents are: ivory-tower academics, liberal business people and politicians, and all the plebs who side with them to push ideologies and social policies they don't want (policies like people born as men competing with women in sports).
Harris did nothing to distance herself from being strongly associated with that liberal cohort. Regarding social policy and ideology, she came off as being far-left to the average conservative.
Have you ever considered that the stance regarding pro aboriton amongst women is to a certain extend age dependant? What I have noticed anecdotally amongst my acquintances is that older women tend to change their mind on that matter, at least sometimes. I am suspecting this has has plain egotistical reasons, simply because they no longer have to care, paired with a certain amount of women that had an abortion and never really managed to find peace with themselves about it. TL;DR: Careful, not all women are pro abortion, possibly not even the majority.
exactly its all messaging. dems suck as messaging and kamala was not the right person to deliver messages because she avoided interviews, conversations, etc. Dems needed someone who would go on any show at any time like Bernie does.
The problem is: Bernie can hammer all he want, but there is no platform to reach the voters. That is __the problem__ for the Dems.
1. The big media is in the hands of a select few (tech) oligarchs. Look for the accelerationists there.
2. Take notice of what happened at the WaPo. Bezos fell on his knees for Trump, fearful of having his other business interests been killed.
2. I mean: no reasonable platforms. The false balance in the New York Times is below the most horrible standard you can get in journalism. New York Times Pitchbot exists for a reason.
3. In the US the press is allowed to spread fake news. Some media make a living of it. Others (see 2) try to give a neutral impression by presenting false balance
4. The serious, damaging analysis will get moved below the fold, if there is one.
==> Now you have gotten a system where the populace doesn´t even get informed anymore, so no serious debate is possible.
==> The Dems are not even able to have their own policies, they have to lean deeply right to stay not too much out of touch of what is presented as normal discourse in the media.
If the US slips further from Anocracy to Autocracy, it will be 1) because the press gave the autocrats the nod and 2) some powerful captains of industry were on board, 3) and they were helped by radicalized far right christianity (Heritage Foundation et ali.).
Yellow Journalism has been around since the 1890s, and to a degree journalism has always been about propaganda - it's hard to spread your opinion without a printing press, and by the time the poor can get their hands on them, the upper classes/wealthy/capital holders have had access to this level of automation for some time/captured huge chunks of the market.
In a way, it is a bit of an oddity that there has been trust in journalism in recent decades - some individual acts like publishing whistleblower accounts or corruption have lead to an outsized perception of it being for the public good.
Meanwhile, we have seen again and again - particularly in Murdoch owned properties - that the interests of commercial media do not align with what we consider the common good; ie
Yet we do nothing about it in particular (Australia and the US).
Then we end up back here, wondering why groups in the electorate have wildly different perceptions
> The democratic party apparatus and their allies don't want that platform/message.
Sure they would love to use a reasonable platform with broad reach, but they haven´t. Relevant media are heavenly partitioned in buckets of insane "Infotainment Corp" and "Sane Washing Corp".
There is simply no room for truth if you give non-truth equal space. Non-truth can be made as entertaining as possible, sucking out all oxygen for truth.
That is what Americans allowed to happen over the decades, and the consequences are getting more grim every election.
You can -- to some extent -- combat right wing populism with left wing economic populism, but there are two key problems with this strategy:
1) the Democrat party hates economic populism. Bernie would have to hijack the party like Trump did. But where Trump has many allies in positions of power, Bernie has none.
2) the populist rhetoric that people like the most is false. Grocery prices aren't high because supermarkets suddenly got greedy. Worker exploitation isn't why billionaires exist.
I also don't think it's good strategy blame a minority group for all the problems in the country. Billionaires are not a protected minority obviously, but when you stoke anger against one group it can easily result in a different group getting unjustly targeted (Mexicans, trans people, etc). We don't need any more of that and politics of hate and resentment isn't the way forward.
Either billionaires really earn their pay, which implies that they are thousands of times more productive as a person than the rest of us - literally superheroes.
Or - if you accept this as the obvious bullshit that it is - then all that money is not a fair compensation for anything, but rather the consequence of being in a position of economic power that makes it possible to extract wealth from the economy in one way or another. How exactly said extraction is done is immaterial - if the wealth is unearned, it means that it was taken from someone else, since someone ultimately did the work necessary to create it.
This old school form of campaigning on issues and policy are just redundant in this day and age.
Trump just showed us the speed of the current media cycle. Its minutes or hours. Democrats and all "rational" styles of electioneering on "issues" and "policy" are doomed to fail agains Trump style content. Trump can insult or harm so many voting groups in a day, that people are completely exhausted and then just blank it out.
If Biden did the same thing, it would result in the same electoral outcome, it would not cost the dems any more votes. People would just be exhausted by Biden, and then blank him out too. Then it would be whatever default placeholder people like to think about when they think "Presidential candidate", and would then vote without having to worry about what they were doing.
Its honestly insanely amazing. Its like we have been doing politics wrong since the Greeks.
>This is an astute comment; we are in the social media era of elections, probably have been since 2016.
No it isn't. In the U.S., we were consciously doing it wrong because the Greek system failed for the specific reasons that are currently being discussed. The democracy broke down to the issue of personality coalesced voting blocs, that once delegated to, used the levers of power to make the task of holding onto that power easier. There was a reason the Electoral College was designed in to the American System, and there was a reason National political parties were specifically warned against by the Early Founders, and it was because down that road was the path to repeating the Greek's mistakes.
The Faithless Elector was a feature, not a bug.
>Policy Vibes > Policy Content
Is specifically the death knell of a political system.
That is where Journalism should come into play. But popular media have a business model of spreading fakes, being outright partisan and are mostly driven by clicks rage and engagement. That is what a Chaos Actor like Trump provides. To see what is happening it is more insightful to look what forces are behind Trump.
In the US media landscape, it is not possible to have a genuine debate. Every hour there is new nonsense that will kill of any "boring" news.
Not as a matter of nature. But as a betrayal of democracy by the Fourth Estate, opening the door for anti-democrats.
It is a deliberate choice, helped by self-delusion and exceptionalism. It is painful to watch a society marching to where we know where the end is.
Fox came on the scene, and it worked as a business. In the end that means it gets funding, and is the competitive business model.
Other media orgnizations had to deal with all sorts of other barriers such as editorial standards etc.
I will add though, that Fox probably survived competition because it had such a close link to the Republican party. I wonder what would have happend if it were a more active market.
Actually scratch that - I remembered the issue with this market. Once we started having conglomerates of a certain size, acquisitions and the consolidation of media assets and newspapers was inveitable.
So even if there were other conservative view points, it would eventually be absorbed by "Fox" or whatever dominant entity in the market.
----
I would like to blame Rupert Murdoch, but I am beginning to see that the man just found a chink in the armor of how society organized its media systems, and exploited it.
That's not the position of the politicians and messengers of the party, that's the position of democrat voters after many desperate attempts to reach and persuade other voters.
Agreed. Trump has been successful mostly not because of any meaningful policy, but from being able to capitalize on Democrats tendency to treat the uneducated as fools and even call them deplorable.
Gangs and fringe movements thrive off taking in the rejected.
Until Democrats can find a way to reach the opposition in a way that isn't condescending they will continue to lose and drive away voters. The so called deplorable will grow.
They need to design, build, and walk over the bridge - patiently, despite all the chaos and negativity.
If they continue to do the same thing and treat their fellows as idiots and expecting different results..is delusional and insane.
Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers and yet plenty still voted for him. By word and deed it's very clear how little Trump thinks of women, and yet white women as a bloc elected Trump. Hillary Clinton used the phrase 'basket of deplorables' ONCE, 8 years ago, but that was an unforgivable mistake. By contrast nothing Trump does sticks to him.
The perception that Democrats are smug and condescending have certainly hurt them. But that perception is mostly the result of relentless Republican messaging. Tim Walz is a down-to-earth governor of Minnesota who treats everybody with respect. He's a lot less condescending than JD Vance. But the perception of Democrats hating regular people persists.
This lunatic, during the debate with JD Vance, volunteered that he didn't believe the First Amendment protected "hate speech" even before Vance could finish accusing him of that. I had previously given him the benefit of the doubt over that MSNBC clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8ns76RCmWs) where he stated:
> There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy
Thinking that perhaps Walz just meant social media companies ought to censor "hate speech" and misinformation for the greater good, but during that debate, he left no doubt that he thinks "hate speech" isn't protected. And of course the Tim Walzes of the country want to be the arbiters of what is and isn't "hate speech."
The “deplorables” thing is kind of amazing. The message was “you guys are wrong, only like a third of Republicans are all the things you say—committed racists et c.—and the rest are normal, reasonable people we should try to reach and serve” but was delivered the kind of way a couple policy wonks and campaign strategists sitting and looking at hard polling and behavioral data might talk, such that it was disastrous. “Some of you write them all off, but [looks at meta-study] only about a third of them are committed to principles and ideals that might, fairly, be called ‘evil’ or ‘disgusting’ or what have you”.
A lesson in how shitty delivery can deliver exactly the opposite of the literal message you’re conveying.
To paraphrase Rumsfeld: "You go to elections with the populace you have."
If the Dems don't/won't/can't account for it by changing their messaging, devising better or more readily understood platforms, then it is on them. You have to meet people where they are, not where you think they should be.
There is no competing message to be had. The people believe that whoever is in charge is bad because their lives are terrible. They just ping pong between parties without caring to investigate policies.
You can’t appeal to voters like this apart from not being the person in charge.
The election was close. I don't believe this at all. It's simply being tone deaf. Not to mention the strong democrat support in the mid terms (when inflation was arguably worse).
The election wasn’t close at all? I’m not sure what you mean by this. Trump won both the popular and handily won the EC.
I’m willing to put money down right now that the next president is a Democrat. Not by virtue of messaging or campaigning but just because people will still be suffering and the dems will be the opposite of the status quo.
You can manufacture a favorable electorate. Republicans have been extensively working on that far harder than the Dems have since some time around Goldwater and the last great re-alignment, and it kicked into overdrive in the 80s. They pushed for loosening rules around mass media so they could do it better, and they succeeded. This current re-alignment of their party is an outcome of that “farming” they did over decades growing out of control of the party leadership post-Citizens United and the huge shake-up in campaign spending that brought in.
This observation admittedly provides little actionable for democrats in the near-term. But one strategy that demonstrably works is picking demographics and pushing media at them that creates a demand for solutions to issues they didn’t previously think existed (and need not necessarily exist). Look at e.g. the molding and elevation of the modern pro-life movement for an early example, or at their entire current platform, very nearly, for a bunch more-recent ones.
It's hard to conceive of a change in the Democratic strategy that would have gained more votes without losing others. In contrast, there is seemingly nothing that Trump could say that would lose him support. Trump had a very high "floor" that he could not fall below. Democratic voters are fickle and would just as soon stay home or vote third party as a protest vote.
But the Dems did. They did everything you're asking for. Their messaging was totally different from 2020, everything was clear and understandable.
That's what's so sad. The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution. The Republican campaign was a disaster in execution, but they won anyway.
The message of this election isn't that Democrats did something wrong. It's that they did everything right, and a majority of voters simply still don't care. They don't think the insurrection mattered, and they think Trump will fix inflation because he's a strong businessman. And they don't listen to anyone who says otherwise.
I don't see anything the Dems could have done about that. You can't force people to listen, you can't force people to understand economics. That's not something campaigns can do.
People were actively deceived along the way. Do you remember that intially Yellen (and Powell together) called the inflation "not broad enough to be considered inflation", then called it "transitory" and justified printing so much money all the way into 7% inflation. At 3% PCE, Powell said everybody to relax, that nobody should doubt they will use every tool they have to fight inflation. Bostic at 2% PCE said he is not worried, he welcomes higher inflation, approaching 4% inflation would be cause of concern and would require action. Action that never came. They just lied and misinformed the people for years. People listened to this, it was all over the media. It's wrong to suggest people didn't listen.
Do you remember after 5 years of review they came up with symmetric inflation target of 2% and they instantly abandoned it because that would require lower inflation for decades to come. And nobody in media questioned it, they said people "misunderstood the target".
They don't want to educate people about the economy, they want people as stupid as possible.
Your criticism of Yellen and Powell's messaging is valid, but I have a very hard time believing that had any impact on this election.
The US fared better than almost industrialized nation post-pandemic. Our inflation is currently under control, unemployment is low, wages are rising. I have a hard time believing that anyone could have handled a hard situation better than the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Trump's stated economic policies (no income tax, make it up with tariffs) are unequivocally bad ideas that would make the prices paid by most Americans far far far higher than what they're paying today.
The overlap between "People who know Jerome Powell and think he did a bad job" and "People who think Trump's fiscal platform will be good for the average American" is close to zero people.
Is it? Because between part time job, gigs, and people falling off unemployment benefits from receiving them too long I don't trust unemployment figures, they are measuring the wrong thing. It seem people work longer hours, for less disposable income overall.
>Trump's stated economic policies (no income tax, make it up with tariffs) are unequivocally bad ideas...
...but they are very good memes, as in units of information that compete for attention. I think we are now, post-2016, in the social media era of elections, where policy content matters far less than policy vibes.
You're correct. So you have to reformat the message. The Dems failed to do this. I can tell you have never been a teacher: teachers are forever having to change their messaging because different people understand in different ways.
This teaching thing is a terrible comparison. As a teacher you have a captive audience with a (somewhat) agreed upon goal: the student(s) are going to learn something.
This is absolutely not the model for candidate<->electorate relationships in any way. If anything, the elector(ate) wants the candidate to simply tell them things that confirm what they think they already know.
Captivated is not captive, and even if it is etymologically adjacent, most of the electorate did not expect to have to learn about stuff like econometrics ...
How was anybody captive? I didn't see a single campaign ad or watch a single rally, except for a couple of brief excerpts that I chose to.
You're missing the critical point: it's not about captive, it's just that this helps with the critical point, which is an expectation of learning taking place, rather than worldviews/prejudices confirmed.
I would fault the Democratic party platform itself, not the campaign. It's valid to say the campaign was executed well and that the failure was due to disagreement with the Democrat party line.
Trump has a policy platform they agree with more -- that's something that is not easily overcome by how the campaigns are run.
E.g. "secure the border". Trump fought to build a wall during his first term. To voters who want a more secure border, that speaks louder than anything either candidate can say (or not say) during their campaigns about what they will or won't do.
Yeah, sometimes if you play by the rules you lose.
> So you have to reformat the message.
They did, and it didnt matter.
The argument here is essentially:
1) IF the dems communicated correctly, they would have won
2) They did, and it didnt matter.
3) If they had communicated correctly they would have won.
Correct communication here is a place holder for winning.
Consider the many things the Dems did pull off, including Biden dropping out, and the massive massive outreach and funding they used to get the message out.
Consider that Trump is definitionally reprehensible, as just a human being, forget the standards America used to have as a presidential candidate. Seriously - tell me you think that Trump <the person> is actually what you want in a Republican candidate. Every single time, Trump supporters have to resort to some variant of "he didn't really mean that", to defend him.
There is FAR more incorrect in Dem electioneering than just communication. I think the fundamentals of how elections are held have changed. You dont really need policy any more.
From the memorable “grab them by the pussy”, to fabricating stuff about the draft recently.
“ She’s already talking about bringing back the draft. She wants to bring back the draft, and draft your child, and put them in a war that should never have happened.”
The only twisting here is when people try to ignore what he is saying and pretend he meant something benign.
The democrats told people who are suffering 'the economy is great, this is what great looks like to us'. How is that a winning message with people suffering?
Dems are not in the venues where people are talking about these issues. I see tons of right wing youtubers, tiktokers, podcasts, and there is just far less dems in these environments or willing to go to these places. You need more Bernie types (not necessarily his politics exactly) but the willingness to go these places repeatedly and talk about ideas.
>> Their messaging was totally different from 2020, everything was clear and understandable.
But when you have the VP is running for the office that her boss has just occupied for the last four years, the whole point of the VP running is to continue what they started - not suddenly say you would do a bunch of stuff differently when YOU were riding shotgun on the poor economy, inflation, immigration and crime.
Harris was asked repeatedly what she would do differently and said "nothing". She was a horrific candidate. She couldn't speak to voters without a teleprompter, she was a cringe worthy public speaker, she was never on message and always reverted back to, "Well Donald Trump did this and that." which never connected with voters.
She also had a front row seat to Biden's mental decline and repeatedly went in front of the media and defended him to the very end when he was removed and she replaced him. Harris was the same person who got zero financial support from democrats during the 2020 campaign, had to drop out and didn't even make the primaries because of the lack of support from voters.
If you were paying attention, this was completely predictable.
By contrast, Trump was on message, had a plan, left all of his divisive rhetoric at the door. He connected with voters, reached across the aisle and formed a coalition with RFK, Gabbards and Musk. He went on podcasts to reach younger voters. Anybody else see Vance on the Theo Von podcast? He campaigned relentlessly in the key battleground states, he did tons of impromptu interviews.
There's a reason he's projected to get 300+ electoral votes AND win the popular vote and nothing in your comment would seem to understand why.
Take a look at the markets today.
Take a look at the price of Bitcoin right now.
The country wanted significant change and they voted that way.
I think every single thing Trump did during the last 3 months hurt his campaign, actually. It had just already gotten to the point where nothing he said mattered, because people were choosing him based on their experience in 2019
Trump's a pretty singular personality. He floods the zone with bullshit and denigrates vast swathes of the electorate. His insane ramblings are just considered by his adherents to be part of his allure and mystique. The American people can't seem to get enough of it, presumably because they so strongly identify with his character.
I have no love for Democrats but it's unclear to me that there's really anything they could have done. The common wisdom in the past had been that Trump is some kind of liability for Republicans, but at every turn he has been underestimated and I question that assumption.
To me Trump looks like a true master of his craft, and there is no line of carefully triangulated messaging that will resonate more with typical Americans than his stream of vitriol and lies.
In Argentina we got tired of lawyers/politicians roleplaying as economists, so we voted a real economist for president. In tree years we will be able to tell you if it was a good idea...
He's looking good though. I'm quite happy for you.
The media insisted on comparing him to Trump or Bolsonaro for years, but if you actually listen to what he says, he sounds moderate social democrat. Go figure what the media is doing while he speaks...
So far it's been working out great compared to the previous guy.
I compare Argentina's election to buying a car. One of the candidates basically ruled the country for 18 months, got inflation over triple digits annually, the exchange rate went to infinite, among other economic and administrative mishaps.
It's kind like test driving a car where it's engine overheats, the radiator explodes, and basically falls apart.
Your choices then become either buy the thing you know is broken and doesn't work, or buy the other new mystery thing which says it's going to work though you haven't tested it.
It's basically a known bad versus an unknown, yet still 44% of people voted for the broken car.
Milei so far has been doing great economically and getting inflation down, we'll see how it goes next year.
Don’t be ridiculous. There’s a lot more that they could have done to win. And should have done. But they didn’t. And if they’re smart they won’t continue to make the same fatal mistake as you are doing right now by generalizing more than half of the American population as too dumb to know what is good for them.
> make the same fatal mistake as you are doing right now by generalizing more than half of the American population as too dumb to know what is good for them.
They made the same exact mistake in 2016 and from what I can observe in this thread and similar ones in other forums, the lesson has not been learned. They will keep their smug ideological superiority complex, disdain those who dare to disagree with them and thus will continue to disenfranchise a large swath of the population.
It's the opposite. When someone says you are "talking down" to them by using big words, the solution is to dumb it down with simpler words, not to increase the vocabulary.
I was under the impression that most economist said that the ARP and IRA was a significant contributor to inflation (amongst many other factors, supply chain issues, war in Ukraine, labor shortages, etc.), so it’s not factually incorrect to lay some amount of culpability on the administration?
Maybe they could have tried not shutting the economy down while helicoptering free money on everyone? This combined with policies that make energy way more expensive while also allowing the immigration system to be abused... I'm not sure there is a more perfect recipe for inflation? So they did a bunch of inflationary things, then kinda got the inflation under control, and then you're puzzled when people are still upset about the inflationary things that were done?
Trump printed $4T in a year, Biden printed $1.5T in 3 years. 80mph vs 10mph.
The 80mph is what got us to inflation town. If someone looks at 80mph and 10mph and says "I'll elect the 80mph guy because 10mph is irresponsible" then yeah, I'm pretty comfortable characterizing that as pure economic ignorance.
I mean that is obvious right? It was self-promotion, one of the few things Trump is really good at. That doesn't mean it was in his economic agenda to pass trillions in debt funded covid relief or that he was even responsible for it.
One, that last round of stimulus. Two, not agreeing to cutting spending when prices continued going up. Three, not massively greenlighting permitting around new energy and fossil fuels to bring energy prices into a deflationary stance. (Note: this is Monday-morning QB’ing from me.)
That stimulus thing seemed like a double bind. Lower stimulus would have meant less inflation but worse unemployment, right?
The whole pattern feels like a repeat of the country using Democrats to clean up messes (in this case, the mess was more Covid's than Republicans'), at which point they kick out the Democrats again. I don't think another massive tax cut (or extension of the last one) is a good idea.
> Lower stimulus would have meant less inflation but worse unemployment, right?
Yes, but you can target where that unemployment goes.
Democrats were probably too fair in distributing the pain. (As well as the fruits. Both the IRA and CHIPS Acts massively invested in counties that would have always voted Republican. That boosted turnout in an adversarial way.)
Sure. But that’s the last guy. The question is what Democrats could have done in power. With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been massively over correcting on prices and the border.
The US is, right now, producing more crude oil than any other nation in the history of the world. Harris repeatedly stated that she would not ban fracking. And yet, we keep hearing this BS about how Biden / Harris needed to do something about fossil fuels.
Of course what we need to be doing is halting all burning of fossil fuels ASAP, but that would be a losing electoral strategy. Who cares about the looming climate disaster, we need cheap gas...
The only actual issue there is that energy companies want a fire sale on perpetual resource rights on protected federal land they don’t already have access to.
The rest, and the part communicated to voters, is yet another fake issue. It’s exhausting.
They failed to articulate that they understood the frustration with high prices + low wages in a way that made people feel motivated enough to vote for them.
Exactly its all messaging and if the messaging is not getting through you need to go where voters are discussing these things (podcasts, youtube shows, tikTok, etc). And they needed to start doing it 2 years ago not 4 months ago.
That was a key element of the Harris platform, but nobody gives a shit. Trump boasts about fixing everything overnight with no specifics, and gets a free pass.
The media definitely didn’t learn that competing for horse-race viewers at the cost of all else gives Trump a large advantage. They all talked about that lesson in 2016, but didn’t really learn it. Clearly, given how they behaved.
The failure was keeping the economy locked down too long and sending checks to everyone in the world. My father in law that lives in Germany for the past 50 years, got a check from the US.
Not pro Trump here. The Dems failed to understand that telling people who are really struggling (my community is really struggling, it's sad to see people in the grocery store barely able to afford food, this is the reality, heck I'm struggling) that the economy is doing great isn't a winning message. They should have ran on 'we are working really hard on fixing things and this is what we have accomplished'. But a campaign telling people suffering that 'the economy is doing great' resonates 0% and just tells those struggling that the campaign doesn't see them/care that they are suffering.
Harris did not (or may not have) but Democratic punditry and commentariats were full of "the economy is objectively great, why is it subjectively sucking?" articles, for months.
Because they look at metrics like GDP and the stock market and unemployment, and fail to realize that it's not evenly distributed. Increasing GDP and stock market indicate somebody is making a lot of money, but the average voter isn't seeing any of that in their own lives.
Well, they look at average wages, average hourly wages, median household income, median disposable income. All of these things improved right alongside "inflation" to the point where anyone who was not an outlier for those statistics ended up no financially worse off (and arguably somewhat ahead) than where they were pre-COVID.
The problem is that people remember the "old" prices, not the "old" paychecks.
It has been said that people see wage increases as something they have a right too (periodically, anyway) but see inflation as something imposed by a 3rd party with bad intent.
I heard Biden and partisans say it a lot, and I cringed every time. In his first State of the Union, I clearly remember him bragging about record high house prices. I cringed at that too.
What did Harris herself say? Not much; she barely had any time.
There was one voice within the Democratic Party whose communication about this was good: Bernie Sanders.
The Biden-Harris administration said as much constantly.
When the gaslighting failed to achieve the desired effect (make everyone believe their grocery bill is half of what it actually is) - then they just changed the message to "those darn greedy mega corporations are price gouging you!".
The citizens of this country gave a large middle finger to the gaslighting and bullshittery that was the economic messaging coming from the Biden-Harris administration - and then when Harris failed to enumerate how her administration would be different than the existing one... she was doomed.
I moved 1 hour north of San Francisco about 7 months ago so not even some remote red state. Over a few weeks this summer when I went to Safeway, three people ahead of line (assuming middle class, blue collar workers considering that this mostly the industry here) had their credit cards/debt cards declined, even when trying different cards. One was heartbreaking because he was buying a cake for his daughter's birthday. It definitely underscored how severe the economy is for people and why I thought Trump would likely have a 50%/50% chance of winning.
The sad fact is that if you have to explain something to voters, you've lost.
Voters don't want explanations, they want solutions.
You be correct and say something factually as "The economy is fine, all indicators are moving the right direction - we're back to pre-COVID levels" but still lose massively on that.
And as it turns out, whether or not your solutions is rooted in reality - apparently doesn't mater for the average voter.
Harris went with the "We're not gonna make any changes", when people are moaning about the economy. That was her fatal error.
Trump and MAGA continued to hammer on about how terrible the economy is, and how they're going to make China pay, while lowering taxes.
Again: voters don't want explanations, they want solutions.
> What was their failure here? The failure to explain to the economically illiterate that while inflation is now about where it was prior to covid that prices won't be going down (unless there's some sort of major recession leading to deflation)?
When is over-communication on the problem the team needs to solve ever a bad thing?
Americans got robbed of something between 20-40% of the purchasing power of their dollar depending on what they're buying. People aren't stupid, they know they're getting hoodwinked when someone focuses on the fact that the rate of robbery is slowing down rather then the fact that they didn't stop the robbery in the first place.
I think that's the wrong way of thinking about it. The prices of goods are high, people hate it and want it fixed. What plans do the Dems have for actually addressing the high prices? They can say this instead: "I know things are expensive now, here is how I will do X, Y, Z to fix it". It could be saying they'll raise the minimum wage to reduce the effects of the inflation, provide some sort of tax break, straight up give people money, or something (I know that the ideas I proposed aren't necessarily good. Inducing demand is bad, etc, etc). What doesn't win is telling people why we got to where we are and what does win is telling people what you're gonna do about it. Trump does that, even if it's all lies or based on bad information and that gets people excited. Are the tariffs gonna be bad? Most likely, but hey it's doing something and to most people, that is enough for them since there is a lot of nothing happening.
That what your actual proposals are does not matter appears to be true, but is pretty wild.
I guess it’s an open question whether a Dem could run with a total lack of substance and pure vibes (while they and, incredibly, the media accuse their opponent of having no policies? Or is that too much to hope for? Do we think in the reverse situation Fox News would be talking about how the R candidate was being too vague, even as they were being less vague than the D candidate, as the “liberal” media did endlessly in this race?) without weakening the get-out-the-vote for their base so much that they perform even worse. Might work, might not. We only know it works for the current right.
Sure, but what are they gonna do? Fact check you after you win? We already see that nobody cares about that. If the dem's actually cared about the people they say they represent, they would be trying to win even if it meant overpromising or getting down in the mud. How is it helpful for trans people that that the people representing them are getting voted out? How is that helpful for laborers, poor people, rural people, etc? Just say you'll give em money, get elected, don't give them money (they'll just forget so whatever) and then try to do some good from the inside by enacting policies that will help people out. I think this article spells out the problems with the democrats: https://www.economist.com/1843/2024/11/01/why-arent-harris-a...
Why couldn't they just support the buyout? I don't care if US Steel is owned by a foreign company and I bet most people don't, so they aren't getting votes by being protectionist. If they support it and it doesn't work out (because let's be real, how much could the government do here), then just blame the republicans or something. Boom, you get to support something good, then get ammunition to show how the republicans messed something up due to their protectionism if the deal falls through.
Obviously I'm frustrated, but it's truly wild how ineffective the democrats are. I think them trying to be so upfront and politically correct all the time is a losing strategy for them.
People don't really care about inflation. They care about not affording groceries. If they won 1 million dollars from Elon Musk by voting for Trump, inflation becomes irrelevant, because their problem is solved.
Indeed, and now we can sit back and watch when those his voters realize, that Trump will not "fix" inflation either. In fact, if he executes on what he advertised during his campaign, it will get much worse.
I'm not sure this would've helped. It require more than a 10 second attention span. Explaining inflation is a 120IQ problem whereas most campaigns are aiming at sub 100IQ communication.
I'm sure that the idea was raised in Democratic campaign strategy meetings and likely rejected for exactly that reason, but I don't think the reasoning is correct. "Trump printed the money" isn't hard to understand. Hard to believe, perhaps, and I'm sure he would deny it, but it puts him on the defense and beats the hell out of a thundering silence that implicitly accepts his premise that Dems were responsible for inflation.
This is precisely why you lost in 2016 and why you lost in 2024.
Thinking you're always smarter than the electorate is never a way to win elections. fixing inflation is pretty easy. Telling people how you're going to do that is pretty easy.
Not doing it because you think people are too stupid to understand it is why you lost. Harris never had a plan to fix anything and it was obvious to voters. Its funny you think this way when Trump swept all the battleground states - states Biden won in 2020. Were you saying the same thing about THOSE areas too then?
they did fix inflation. they told people it was fixed, which it is. What they failed to message well was why it happened in the first place and that it was a global phenomenon
Let be real though. The majority of the Trump stimulus was either a campaign stunt (I received a letter from Trump stating that he gave me, someone that makes 6 figures, a few hundred dollars) or a huge spending program with no accountability (the PPP “loans”).
I don't think any dem is saying that. I think they're saying that inflation is the result of a global pandemic, not Dems printing another 1.5T. I think by all accounts the economic landing after a global pandemic was really good, certainly better than 2008. We aren't in a recession. Prices are high, but so is employment and job growth. The government failed at something, whatever that something was: was it a failure in signaling that yeah, these times are hard but guess what, it's because of COVID and buckle up because we did the best we could? Or was it that they let inflation rise too high? I'm not sure.
What we’ve learned is that a politician should definitely not pull the lever in the trolley problem. Let four die instead of one, then claim credit for the one.
>They failed to hammer home that Trump printed the goddamn money
loose monetary policy was the right thing to do after the COVID downward economic shock. But not extending it over and over, and that's when/why the inflation kicked in.
I think the only solution was also the craziest/most risky and the party would have never gone for it.
Hold an open primary with a candidate that talks in no uncertain terms about the failures of the Biden presidency, and the new path forward, criticizing the Biden admin for not doing enough on inflation.
I think essentially Trump won in 2016 and 2024 because he was willing to take such a risk against political norms, and this was a change election. No explaining the causes of inflation, or what Biden did right and incremental steps were going to change that. People wanted a visionary leader, and while I disagree with Trump, I think Trump and Musk provided that new vision for America.
I hate this by the way, I'm an incrementalist policy wonk who in general hates visionary leadership.
But Trump talked about stopping at nothing to remake the American economy to radically improve the lives of all Americans. Harris talked about $25,000 to buy a house.
This is kinda the point I'm trying to make, that in the current environment most people want a leader who isn't afraid of lying to make a point. That is in my perspective what vision mostly is. When things are in crisis, like 2020, people were probably more comforted by boring competence.
For instance, in terms of visionary leadership, I think Musk fans mostly don't care that he lies about when a product will be delivered. They want to believe so to speak.
I still think you got it the exact wrong way around.
People want honesty. Trump saying people have economical problems is honest (at least relatively). Keeping the discourse around inflation because Biden did a great (?) job there isn't. (That applies even if the Rs were the ones focusing on inflation, unfortunately people don't discern that well.)
I really think that if the Ds said "we beat inflation, but that doesn't immediately help you. we will do X to beat low salaries next" it would be well received. But that requires honesty.
At the same way, Musk fans like that he delivered X (there's a lot of impressive things you can put here). Talking about the future is always bullshit anyway, so he being wrong there is less important than he having delivered stuff before. The things those people are ignoring are the fact that he only put money on it, or that the more he gets involved, the less his companies are able to deliver. Not that he is wrong about the future.
Yeah, maybe the point is more about a focus on the future than a "lie" and being willing to be really ambitious about that future. Yes, Trump sort of honestly described the problem, but provided overly ambitious and conflicting ideas on how he would solve it.
There are people who are economically literate, and who recognise that the massive money printing under trump to deal with the covid shut down of the economy contributed to inflation, as did the war in ukraine and supply chain disruptions, but that also, everything the dems did after that made the problem worse. By the time Biden took power, vaccines were getting rolled out, lockdowns were not warranted anymore, and the massive spending that Biden pushed was unnecessarily inflationary, as Manchin said at the time. And the fed kept printing money way after it should have stopped, most likely to support Biden's spending plan.
Honestly what Trump would do in this situation is distract with a bunch of other nonsense and make that the talking point instead. Dems haven’t stooped to this level yet to their detriment. The whole thing is pretty sad.
IMHO national politics is insane, both parties use propaganda to hide from the real issues and are only interested in maintaining a keeping political power and money at the behest of corrupt corporations.
I don't think an election in a 2 party dominated system is going to fix this, history has been repeating itself since the 60ies. People need to change there thinking about supporting a system that doesn't work before we make any headway in correcting these problems.
Trump's economic plans are extremely inflationary, and even a freshman economics student can point that out. It's just that nobody really cares, they just like Trump and will fill in the gaps to justify it.
You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down.
The reality is post-covid was an inflationary period because of hyper consumerism. Demand shot up, extremely quickly, and supply was still lagging due to covid. There was really nothing anyone could do. It's unfortunate, but voters don't consider these things. They just see the prices, see a blue president, and go from there.
I don't think hyper consumerism goes deeply enough to answer the question of why we saw prices change so rapidly. We printed trillions of dollars and flooded the economy with new money. We had extremely low interest rates, again creating more new money in the system. We stopped student debt payments, meaning people had more money in their pockets to spend. We also stopped evictions, though you would really have to be a special kind of asshole to skip paying rent so you can buy more random consumer goods.
Its worth noting that printing new money was the actual inflation, inflation is a measure of the increase in the money supply itself. Prices did go up, or you could say the dollar lost value, but price changes aren't actually inflation (prices are tracked by indexes).
"Inflation" by itself has come to be synonymous with consumer price inflation. This rubs the Austrian in me the wrong way, but it is what it is. Personally I always make sure to use an additional term like "monetary inflation", "price inflation", and "asset inflation". For example, Trump created trillions of dollars in monetary inflation, succeeding at the goal of creating immediate asset inflation, which then a few years later caused massive price inflation.
Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. It seems like it'd be difficult to narrow down price increases to just one cause, especially a base resource.
It looks like US electricity costs are up around 10% since 2022. How do you peel that apart to know electricity prices changed first, and that that is what caused all other prices to go up?
I mean - you just said it didnt you? Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. Thats perfect. Yeah it does - and so it raises prices for everything.
Also why do you look at electricity? Its not just electricity, its everything. The war disrupted oil supply from Russia, which is something like 11% of global oil production. On top of it they disrupted supply chains globally.
Also, this is on top of the pandemic's economic hangover.
This is pretty much up there from the first few searches on this topic, before you have to get into any detailed economic analysis.
I should have said energy there, I didn't mean to zoom in only on electricity. Oil priced are actually a worse comparison, I'm pretty sure oil is down since the war started.
> I mean - you just said it didnt you? Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. Thats perfect. Yeah it does - and so it raises prices for everything.
That doesn't show direction though. Energy impacts basically everything in the economy, but energy can also be impacted by the rest of the economy.
> Also, this is on top of the pandemic's economic hangover. This is pretty much up there from the first few searches on this topic, before you have to get into any detailed economic analysis.
Doesn't that go against the earlier comment that prices are tied through energy costs and directly linked to Ukraine?
I wouldn't put to much faith in top search results for what its worth. Those are almost never going to include detailed economic analysis. Most people don't click on detailed analysis, search engines won't promote those first.
> You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down.
I used to believe this, but the truth is we haven't been able to import food, energy or homes from China for a while. That leaves autos, and it's very hard to predict how auto tariffs would affect inflation, since people have always purchased more expensive cars over cheaper ones, for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile for stuff you and I care about like computers, well most of what you are paying for is software, which is all made here. Services like health care and education are insensitive to tariffs, and since grocery stores have to provide health care to some employees all the same, it affects prices for goods. Home prices rising is supported by both parties, and besides inflation the government basically guarantees market returns but risk free in owner-occupied real estate in this country.
I wish what you were saying were true - that bringing tariffs down to zero would eliminate inflation - but if it were that simple it would have been done already.
Its not just China. Those tariffs he's advocating for are broadly speaking, against all imports[0]
>Trump proposed a 10% tariff on all U.S. imports and a 60% levy on Chinese-made products, which if enacted would affect the entire economy by pushing consumer prices higher and stoking retaliatory levies on American exports. Trump also threatened to impose a 25% tariff on all imports from Mexico.
I'm not arguing that bringing tariffs down to 0 will just magically eliminate inflation. But certainly, and without debate, the tariffs Trump proposes will grossly increase the price of goods for consumers.
> The reality is post-covid was an inflationary period because of hyper consumerism
That was just an outgrowth of high monetary supply during COVID to shore up the numbers and prevent economic collapse due to a steep and sudden drop of economic activity. All that money couldn't be immediately mopped up as soon as the economies opened up, so it sloshed around for a while longer.
Any other notable events that happened in the 30s that could have driven deflation? Could tariffs be linked to that event? (To be less coy, the great depression occurred in the 1930s. Counter tariffs led to less exports, which further hurt the economy. The arrow of causality is indirect, tariffs -> counter tariffs -> worse economy -> deflation) [1]
Recent example: Gas prices deflated during covid. Why? Massive reduction in driving and buying of gasoline.
"Smoot-Hawley contributed to the early loss of confidence on Wall Street and signaled U.S. isolationism. By raising the average tariff by some 20 percent, it also prompted retaliation from foreign governments, and many overseas banks began to fail. (Because the legislation set both specific and ad valorem tariff rates [i.e., rates based on the value of the product], determining the precise percentage increase in tariff levels is difficult and a subject of debate among economists.) Within two years some two dozen countries adopted similar “beggar-thy-neighbour” duties, making worse an already beleaguered world economy and reducing global trade. U.S. imports from and exports to Europe fell by some two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, while overall global trade declined by similar levels in the four years that the legislation was in effect."
> even a freshman economics student can point that out
And that freshman would be more educated than 1/3 of the country.
I don't mean that as an insult to 1/3 of the country. Trump wins because he messages in a way that EVERY person can understand. A huge portion of the country will disagree with his approach, but that's vastly different than relying on people to understand concepts they've never had exposure to.
> they just like Trump and will fill in the gaps to justify it.
You've hit the nail on the head. They "like Trump." They find him charismatic and entertaining. Democrat politicians are boring and starched. Politics is show business. Why can't the Democrats learn that?
THIS. Voting in America seems completely disconnected from rational policy discussion, people don't seem to care anymore. The average voter gets so caught up in the sensationalism and the most controversial candidates seem to appeal strongly to both Boomers and GenZ. Sadly, I think any successful Democratic candidate in the future will need to appeal to voters in this way.
This isn't true. Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times. The issue is nobody listens, ultimately republicans have been able to support the lie that they are the "party of economics". Past that propaganda piece, nobody cares.
As I tried to imply in my original post: Harris' talk about low inflation or fighting inflation loses on a technicality, which is that people tend to experience inflation as the current price not the rate of change in the current price. Thus, when Harris is talking about inflation fighting and inflation cooling down, you have a bunch of people who look at the price of eggs/pizza/houses and say, "this shit is still expensive, Dems are full of shit." They are not looking at the CPI, and calculating the year-over-year change.
Let me share an anecdote: I worked on a project to estimate household-level price sensitivities to the market basket of goods commonly used in CPI calculations. (My employer had shopper-card/upc/transaction-level data from tons of major grocery chains across the USA with which to attempt this project.) I tried to read through the docs on how CPI is calculated, and let me tell you: major snoozefest, and I consider myself "a numbers guy."
I doubt the run-of-the-mill American can accurately define inflation. Consequently, "look at how we fought inflation" is the wrong campaign slogan.
"The Rent is too Damn High" is still a well-recognized meme. I doubt many people remember the gentleman's name or what he was running for. But the message worked! It's got to be simple and focused.
People are suffering and the Dems ran on 'things are going great'. To the people suffering that feelz/vibez like 'our version of great DNGAF about you'. It's easy to see how that could be a less than optimal message for a candidate for election.
The issue is that she's part of the current administration and the current dominant party. That's all people care about. They look at who's in charge and vote the other way. It's really that simple.
Oh, they will get worse, much worse. But the simpletons who think the president is in charge of egg prices or whatever will never comprehend that. Maybe if it gets bad enough people will learn then.
> Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times.
There was this Biden admin. push to not call things a "recession" due to technicalities that probably pissed people off? "Inflation" means 'higher prices' and "recession" means 'economy things suck right now'.
To beat a dead horse, the working class cannot afford grocery or rent. If you say that inflation is not that bad, in their mind you dismiss their suffering and dismiss them entirely.
I'm saying that because inflation is what we're discussing.
I have no trouble believing many people are worse off, which sucks. And many politicians should care more and try to do more.
But: 1) I would attribute that to low wage increases for several decades, not the last 4 years. 2) there's no easy fix for these things. 3) Putting inflation in a global perspective is meant to show how this is not mainly Biden's fault, since he doesn't control the rest of the world.
This is oddly reflective of the elitism that cost the DNC it's victory. "Well actually, my poor man, a tomato is a fruit and every PhD economist knows that inflation is connected to fiscal policy's influence on the monetary supply"
The every day person uses the culinary definition of tomato, and inflation means that those tomatoes cost more at Walmart.
I would expect a botanist to know that a tomato is technically a berry, just like I would expect an economist to know that inflation is technically defined as an increase in the money supply.
Everyday people can use whatever definition they want. That doesn't mean economists, the Fed, etc should say "inflation" when they mean "price of goods".
Do you have a source? I've only ever seen it defined the traditional way. Besides, you can increase the money supply and not get inflation (defined the usual way). Inflation happens when the money supply increases more than the economy needs.
Inflation happens when money supply increases more than the value of the goods that you can purchase with that money supply. It isn't about needs, but things that can be bought, especially those with limited supplies like housing.
That definition depends on where you look, and when the definition was written. Between the roman empire and the mid 1900s inflation always referred to an increase in the money supply.
Well, for one thing, monetary policy is the primary determinant of money supply, not fiscal policy.
Second, I think it is fair to say that the causes of inflation are uncertain, even among mainstream PhD economists. The quantity theory hasn't been matching empirical data, and newer theories like the fiscal theory of the price level are gaining attention.
Matter-of-fact discussion of the economy didn't cause people to vote for a serial sex offender promising to execute his political rivals and purge America of immigrants. The messaging could be better but don't gaslight us. Something is very wrong with the calculus being used by a great number of Americans.
> vote for a serial sex offender promising to execute his political rivals and purge America of immigrants
> Something is very wrong with the calculus being used by a great number of Americans
I'm sure a lot of people, especially independents who could have swung either way, voted for Trump precisely because they were sick of this attitude.
People are free to make partisan judgments against Trump or any other politician, but they will also suffer electoral consequences if those judgments are for the most part fact-free, as in your case.
2 and 3 are the same group. Accelerationists and white Christian nationalists are just rebranded white nationalists, so there is nothing surprising there. Hard to say what the distribution of purely economic voters is given how illogical that is. I'm hesitant to believe the excuses people have given how extreme of the rest of the campaign was and its parallels to a particular historical figure, going to the point of nearly plagiarizing quotes from the man.
Yes he did. I've heard interesting arguments that they did some clever accounting to hide a small deficit on the books somehow, but I didn't quite follow well enough to say for sure. That technicality aside, Clinton balanced the budget and every president since has apparently thought that was a terrible idea.
First, the Republicans have been running on a platform of pretend fiscal responsibility, and so deserve more criticism for the hypocrisy per their own standards. The Democrats have just been upfront about spending money.
Second, there's a huge difference between spending new money on specific policies for deliberate outcomes, and blindly dumping it into the financial sector to bid up the everything bubble as fuel for the Potemkin stock market and a handout to asset owners.
Wittgenstien would like a word. Words always mean whatever the hell the speaker thinks they mean, which is always unverifiable. We should always endeavor to understand what people _think they mean_ instead of insisting on some (faulty) denotation.
The inflation argument is always frustrating. In a vacuum, inflating the _supply of money_ would delate the _price of money_ which inflates the _prices of goods_. Most people say "inflation" to mean the price of goods, but it does no good to insist that one definition means you can't use the word in other ways!
So I can use the word 'dog' to mean a cat? Nonsense. The purpose of words is to communicate meaning. Therefore we must agree on what that meaning is beforehand in order to communicate effectively.
What's a dog? Is a child's plastic toy in the shape of a dog a dog? Maybe. Is a cross-bread wolfhound a dog? Maybe. Language games! Meaning is "fuzzy around the edges".
If you insist a cat is a dog, we're not playing a fun game - but that's up to me and up to you - Maybe someone in an undiscovered tribe doesn't know these words and wouldn't balk. If you say "dog" when you mean to insult someone, I might know what you're saying. But there is no mechanism to verify internal meaning.
I _strongly_ suggest reading some Wittgenstien if you're interested in this topic! If I say I speak Swedish fluently but refuse to ever utter a word, do I speak Swedish? Only our actions can vaguely point at our meaning. Language is a game we play with each other which does not and cannot communicate ultimate meaning. All we can do is agree or disagree to play games - animals dancing around a fire.
This is my main beef with "inflation" being used differently now from what it had been historically. Going back to the roman empire it was always about money supply increase, Keynes and crew decided that didn't sit well with them since money supply manipulation was their whole game.
You're just parroting the same thing again and again without providing any evidence. For a start, the amount of money in circulation is an unobservable quantity. It's extremely unlikely that the Romans had a word for it.
Its used in many ways, that doesn't redefine the word though. Inflation is a policy of increasing the money supply, nothing more and nothing less.
Inflation is not price increases. If that is the definition then the metric is effectively useless. Prices can increase for any number of reasons, looking only at price changes doesn't tell us anything meaningful or actionable.
“Inflation” doesn’t mean anything by itself. It is a shorthand for either price inflation or monetary inflation. Or inflating a balloon. Context is needed.
It absolutely does when the correct definition is still used. Inflation is an increase in money supply, that's really all there is to it.
Your point is why the use of "inflation" to mean price increases is so meaningless. Prices change for any number of reasons and you need context. When "inflation" still means in increase in the money supply there is no context required to know what it means, though obviously that's not all the information you need to understand the economy.
You are wrong and that's why you are misunderstood.
I would suggest just saying "increase in money supply" if you mean increase of money supply instead of using a term that means "a continuing rise in the general price level". That will make people understand what you mean.
It's not just "used in many ways," it has several definitions. The one that almost everybody uses -- including the Fed[0], US Dept of Labor[1], and the ECB[2] -- is about rise in prices. Nobody is saying that your definition is bad or wrong, but to claim that it's the only (or even primary) one is disingenuous.
Sure, though it makes sense that most economists use the price inflation term. The change in how "inflation" was being used largely goes back to Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory. Most economists today fall into that bucket, of course they use the term in the same way.
That doesn't change the fact that the attempt to redefine it both co-opted the word and made it functionally useless. Prices change for all kinds of reasons. The amount of change alone is meaningless and using that meaning of the word allows economists today to play a lot of shell games with the numbers.
> change in how "inflation" was being used largely goes back to Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory
This is totally false. It dates to the inter-War period, specifically, to describe Weimar hyperinflation. (If you just look at money supply, it was bad. If you look at prices it was the disaster that it was.)
No, that is expansion of the monetary base. Inflation is an increase in price levels. If a country’s money supply contracts while prices rise that’s inflation.
The problem with the metallic definition is a country that loses half its territory and most of its reserves after losing a 19th-century war, thereby setting off double-digit price increases across its economy, doesn’t “inflate” from a monetary base perspective. Once we understood these concepts were separate, we segregated the terms. Insisting inflation refers exclusively to monetary-base expansion is phlogiston-theory stuff.
The problem with the metallic definition, meaning the definition of "inflation" from the roman empire until the mid 1900s, is that it didn't really work well with Keynesian economics or modern monetary theory.
Inflation has a bad connotation historically due to the number of examples where increasing the money supply too quickly ruined economies and destroyed empires. MMT and Keynesian economics use the money supply as the primary tool for controlling the economy.
They may not like that "inflation" described the exact mechanism for the main tool of modern economics, but that doesn't make it wrong. The easily could have come up with a new term for an increase in the price of goods rather than co-opting an existing term. That strategy seems very much like a play driven by ulterior motives.
It isn't so much that we had to understand new concepts as it was they had to redefine terms to put their new game in a better light. That's also why they talk about price increases rather than currency devaluation or theft. Both would be accurate, but price changes sound more benign.
> I'm sorry I just can’t find a single source backing you up.
As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“monetary inflation”), others primarily as an increase in (consumer good) prices (“price inflation”).
At least in modern economic literature and usage, the term “inflation” (without modifier) is more often used to denote price inflation rather than monetary inflation.
The insistence that the term “inflation” ought be primarily rather used for “monetary inflation” goes back to at least Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 1912:
“In theoretical investigation there is only one meaning that can rationally be attached to the expression inflation: an increase in the quantity of money (in the broader sense of the term, so as to include fiduciary media as well), that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the need for money (again in the broader sense of the term), so that a fall in the objective exchange-value of money must occur.”
While it may be true that the Austrian school uses it like that, it's certainly not the case that they're the only ones. In fact, I suspect if you speak to anyone economically trained over a certain age, there would be a high chance of them defaulting to this.
Growing up, a close relation of mine was an economist, and certainly not of the Austrian school. As a teenager, I was basically ganged up on by a teacher and some kids when inflation was brought up in class. They seemingly had no concept of monetary inflation, and I was forced to swallow that it referred solely to prices going up. I obviously questioned him on this incident, and he outlined that the "prices are going up" phenomenon is price/consumer inflation, and that increases to the money supply are monetary inflation.
Historically, monetary inflation and consumer inflation coincided (Supply of X goes up -> X is devalued -> consumables are now charged at higher X), and so distinguishing between the two wasn't particularly pertinent.
The Roman Empire's observations that debasement of their coins resulted in the increase in prices, meant that the original conception of inflation really was as a monetary phenomenon, not just that prices are going up.
It's really only a relatively recent phenomenon, from the early 20th century, that you had dual definitions trying to occupy the same word, although the concept that price inflation could deviate from monetary inflation probably was starting to be understood with the establishment of price indices in the 19th century.
Keynes arguing that prices could rise independent of the monetary supply post-Great Depression increased the focus on consumer inflation. It was around the 1970s where inflation more commonly came to consumer inflation in academia. 'Stagflation' of the 1970s is probably the tipping point in usage.
To conclude: it's not really wrong to use inflation to refer to monetary inflation, as it's the original usage, but considering consumer inflation as 'inflation' is definitely more in fashion (especially in the US).
Thank you for confirming my hunch that this level of confident-incorrectness and mixed up history could only have come from some damn article on mises.org.
This doesn't support your assertion- in fact it does the opposite. The definition(s) of inflation has changed over time. That does not make the current definition(s) less correct
Well I did try to caveat it that its one of the few sources I could even find that reference the fact that the definition was changed.
My argument isn't with the fact that "inflation" is in fact being used to mean "price increase of goods." My issue is that economists co-opted the word at all and made it functionally useless, especially in isolation as it is often mentioned with no other context of why prices changed.
The use of "inflation" to mean money supply increase goes all the way back to the roman empire.
Have you ever read up on that list of predefined goods? It is pretty interesting to see how regularly the list is changed and how many different factors they add in to adjust prices.
Someone did a study looking at magazine prices for example. They picked magazines because they almost always had prices printed on the cover and cover images are cataloged. I don't remember the exact numbers, but they found that the actual prices went up by a much higher rate than how the CPI calculated it because they were discounting price increase with a claim that quality got better. Meaning you may have seen the price double over time but the CPI only said it went up by 30% because you got more value from the newer issues.
> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply. The term is used wrong almost everywhere today.
Do you have a source that this is the „correct“ definition? Wikipedia for example uses the definition you think is wrong, and specifically says that CPI measures inflation.
Growing up, a close relation of mine was an economist, and certainly not of the Austrian school. As a teenager, I was basically ganged up on by a teacher and some kids when inflation was brought up in class. They seemingly had no concept of monetary inflation, and I was forced to swallow that it referred solely to prices going up. I obviously questioned him on this incident, and he outlined that the "prices are going up" phenomenon is price/consumer inflation, and that increases to the money supply are monetary inflation.
Historically, monetary inflation and consumer inflation coincided (Supply of X goes up -> X is devalued -> consumables are now charged at higher X), and so distinguishing between the two wasn't particularly pertinent.
The Roman Empire's observations that debasement of their coins resulted in the increase in prices, meant that the original conception of inflation really was as a monetary phenomenon, not just that prices are going up.
It's really only a relatively recent phenomenon, from the early 20th century, that you had dual definitions trying to occupy the same word, although the concept that price inflation could deviate from monetary inflation probably was starting to be understood with the establishment of price indices in the 19th century.
Keynes arguing that prices could rise independent of the monetary supply post-Great Depression increased the focus on consumer inflation. It was around the 1970s where inflation more commonly came to consumer inflation in academia. 'Stagflation' of the 1970s is probably the tipping point in usage.
To conclude: it's not really wrong to use inflation to refer to monetary inflation, as it's the original usage, but considering consumer inflation as 'inflation' is definitely more in fashion (especially in the US).
You can see glimmers of the original definition on the wikipedia page, but the term has been misused for decades noe and basically anything you try to find for a definition of inflation will talk only about prices.
I can't get deep links in wikipedia on my mobile browser for some reason, but here's the full page.
The "Terminology" section vaguely references the original Latin word and gives a few nods to when currency was tied to gold. It is a bit hand wavy, though when it talks about new gold supplies being found or later mentions when the cost of money changes, those are both related to the original (correct) definition. Finding more gold increased the money supply, which may change prices though it doesn't have to.
Toman history sometimes covers the idea well as they inflated the currency by minting more coins to increase supply. I can't find a great link at the moment that covers it well from that angle though, I'll try to come back here when I'm at my desk if I find a good link down that rabbit hole.
If a word has been "misused for decades", its definition has changed.
It's a fool's errand to try to claim the original definition is the "right" or "only" definition at that point.
You've lost this semantic battle against the world, and it's honestly pretty exhausting to see you wasting effort trying to continue fighting a lost cause.
Sure, we could always make a different term for monetary inflation and avoid the ambiguity with the new definition but that doesn't fix the underlying point.
Monetary inflation is an important concept that is now almost entirely ignored. An increase in the cost of goods can be interesting, but its a second or third order effect of an extremely complicated system.
Price changes are meaningless without context and extremely difficult to understand with context. Money debasement, or inflation, is easy to understand and is a primary input to the system rather than a downstream effect.
Wait, is your argument that modern economists couldn't possible be wrong? Or in this case, that modern economists couldn't possibly have co-opted the term to better work with Keynesian economics and MMT?
If physicists decide to reuse the word "meter" for a unit of measuring volume does that mean anyone that uses it as a measure of distance is wrong? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new term for the new need, a term that doesn't collide with centuries of use?
>If physicists decide to reuse the word "meter" for a unit of measuring volume does that mean anyone that uses it as a measure of distance is wrong? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new term for the new need, a term that doesn't collide with centuries of use?
Perfect question!
In fact, the definition of "meter" has changed over time, and if you stick with the old definition, you'd be off by 0.2 millimeters:
Science changes as it needs to. (And the word "science" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when we are discussing economics, aka the dismal science.)
A 0.2mm difference is so vastly different from the analogy he made to using it as a measurement of volume. Hopefully you're putting this forward as an interesting factoid and did not mean it as an actual argument.
Inflation historically was a measure of the change in money supply. They co-opted the same word to instead measure an entirely different concept, the change over time of a basket of goods.
In my book that's very similar to taking a distance measurement and reusing the word to instead measure a totally different concept, volume. Curious how its different though, I may just be tripping myself up here.
Could they be wrong about the well-understood label they’ve agreed upon to refer to a particular concept in their field? No, and in fact I’m tempted to class the answer as tautologically “no”.
Classical economists didn't seem to use the term 'inflation' in either sense. I can't find any evidence that 'modern economists' have corrupted the original meaning, like you imply.
You've linked to a privately written article ("The views authors express in Economic Commentary are theirs and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland ") by someone who worked for the Cleveland Fed, who blames printing currency for inflation. No doubt that debasement of the currency increases the nominal prices of things. But it's hard to square the idea that that's all there is to inflation when you consider that lots of countries had inflation after COVID. They didn't all coordinate on printing currency.
I've never actually seen anyone use "inflation" to refer to cost of living. Most economists use the term to talk about price increases of a subset of goods, but that isn't directly measuring cost of living.
Most people are not economists. All they know is they're spending more for less every month, and they don't like it.
The money supply idea has always been Austerian crackpot nonsense, intended to dissuade governments from investing in public services of all kinds because that's socialism, and we certainly don't want any of that.
In reality price rises are mostly driven by corporate profiteering, and sometimes - as in the oil crises of the 70s - by supply shocks.
This isn't entirely accurate, either. An increase in the cost of living occurs when real wages fall (in other words, when workers paid less, in real terms (adjusted for inflation), for the same amount of work). In principle, inflation doesn't necessarily lead to an increase in the cost of living, although in practice usually it does.
There are many faces of inflation.
The "money supply" you are talking about was not the primary driver in the last few years and there was robust demand for the treasury issuance. You will see the money supply inflation pick up when treasury auctions start to fail. I believe this will happen down the road but not soon.
Most of the inflation was driven by other factors: low-income labor shortage, and a supply side shortage that fueled an increase of prices for commodities and anything else up the chain.
> The "money supply" you are talking about was not the primary driver in the last few years and there was robust demand for the treasury issuance.
Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe we can be sure of that. The economy is extremely complex, ferreting out the impact of any one intervention is nearly impossible.
On the surface it seems very unlikely to me that printing trillions in new money and giving it to banks, businesses, and directly to every citizen had no impact on prices. The supply of money increased dramatically and the cost of money (interest rates) was also extremely low.
Beyond my hunch though, I haven't found any data that has clearly isolated the inflation out of the equation to be able to show that the price increases weren't driven by the new money at all.
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/26/inflation-definition-evolut... (There is some argument that I may too be wrong, and inflation is coming to mean high prices, but when the DNC campaign was talking about low inflation, it was not referring to prices, but change in prices.)
My point wasn't that the term is used this way, its that the definition of inflation has always been an increase in money supply. The common use of the term to mean a change in prices is a useless definition.
Its extremely common to hear "inflation" used to describe price changes, but the number is then used in isolation. Prices change for countless reasons and without detailed context related to supply/demand, strength of the dollar, etc you have NP idea why prices changed. Maybe we printed trillions and prices went up because the supply of money went up
Maybe prices increased because demand is outpacing supply. The response to those situations and economic sentiment should be wildly different, but the inflation number may be exactly the same.
It's pretty cheeky, random internet guy, to tell multiple central banks--whose function can be placed squarely in the realm of economics--that they are wrong about what inflation is.
This Hacker News, people on here think they have a much better understanding than the experts about everything.
And that would even include something like "As a poor, single mother working 2 jobs in Pennsylvania, how is my life better under the current administration?"
"You probably rely on medicaid or medicare or the AHCA for health coverage. The first two are going to get slashed and the third is going to get shit-canned. Oh, and if you have a pre-existing condition, that's going to come under consideration again. Price controls are going away for medications you or your kids might rely on. There will be no raise in minimum wage and with tariffs coming, you might as well get a third job."
That would be my response, based on the past actions of republicans under Trump.
I didn't realize I was talking to central banks here, that's good to know.
I believe your argument, though, is that those in power can redefine existing words to whatever best suits their current needs and we should all accept that and not consider why we had the original definition in the first place?
> its that the definition of inflation has always been an increase in money supply
Can you provide a single source for this?
I'm looking at textbooks from 25 years ago (Macroeconomics by Doepke Lehnert Sellgren) and they also contradict you. How far back are we supposed to look for your definition?
Heres a good source I just found as so many were looking for sources here.
I believe it was around the 1960s or 1970s when most economists started using "inflation" to mean price increases.
The history there is pretty fascinating, it was basically a reaction by modern monetary theorists who really had to redefine it for their economic system to make sense. A core goal in MMT is to have a fiat currency and controls in place to let you manipulate the money supply quickly in an attempt to move the economy in one direction or another. With the original definition, inflation is actually the tool used by MMT rather than an indicator of economic health.
That history also pretty clearly explains the shift. The argument pretty quickly shifted to being based on the effects. Debtors favored currency supply inflation because it increased prices and thus decreased. Lenders favored the opposite.
Since most of the people arguing about the term care about a specific class of effect, the term grew to encompass that type of effect. As our understanding of the cause of that effect grew, the term shifted to primarily meaning the effect.
This all makes complete sense since most people don't care about the cause in itself but about how prices are changing.
> This all makes complete sense since most people don't care about the cause in itself but about how prices are changing.
I would hope that isn't true, an economy would function horribly if we only cared about the price change percentage and didn't care why it happened. If prices went up because most people had more money to spend you should act much differently than if prices went up because supply collapsed, for example.
> I would hope that isn't true, an economy would function horribly if we only cared about the price change percentage and didn't care why it happened.
That isn't what I said.
The causes of inflation to matter, but we generally only care about them because they cause inflation. We don't tend to care nearly as much about the causes in and of themselves.
Thus as the argument about how much inflation there should be progressed, it is perfectly natural that the term came to refer to the part of the debate we actually care (how fast prices rise) about rather than factor that can sometimes cause it.
I'm not sure I understand this thought, it's possible producing larger quantities would actually increase the velocity of money which would increase money supply
Velocity of money itself is a funny term in modern economics. Modern monetary theory, or at least the economists that follow it, argue that the velocity of money doesn't mean anything and they basically ignore it.
Arguably, with a fiat currency where they can freely manipulate the money supply, they aren't wrong. That's a problem of fist in my opinion though, there are too many moving pieces and the data can be too easily manipulated to say whatever you want it to say.
In my mind part of the calculus in a high interest rate environments has to include the reduced movement in investments and into more stationary savings, maybe it's accounted for indirectly?
> It is the cost of the goods. What people will pay.
No. Even in the modern definition I'm arguing against here, this isn't right. The cost of goods is just a number, inflation in the CPI sense would be the rate of change of prices.
> Inflation Contributors:
30% money supply
30% was corporations raised prices specifically under cover of people blaming the government. This was actually listed on earnings calls, for profit.
30% supply chain shortages.
Where's the last 10%? And how do you come up with such specific numbers? Economies are extremely complex, I don't believe you could have untangled them so precisely or that the numbers behind it would be so evenly distributed.
You said Inflation was Money Supply, I said it was the cost of what you are buying. YES, technically it is the "change" in the cost of what you are buying. Congratulations. I assumed that was understood.
Percentages.
Nothing is exact. There are ranges, and really more than 3 factors. I was going off memory.
Congratulations again on your discernment.
More ball park:
""
While pinpointing exact percentages for each contributing factor to inflation is complex and can vary significantly depending on the economic context, a breakdown of major contributors could include: high demand for goods and services (30-40%), supply chain disruptions (20-30%), labor cost increases (15-25%), rising energy prices (10-15%), government spending (5-10%), and currency devaluation (5-10%); however, these percentages should be interpreted as a general guide and not a definitive breakdown"
The point is, it is not Biden's spending, that is just another misleading right wing talking point. (lie)
> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply
It's not that simple. That might be how it is defined in economy textbook, but in practice, how do government agencies measure inflation? You have predefined basket of consumer goods and record their prices over time, and that price increase is reported as "inflation rate", and that's what gets reported in TV news.
And yet you somehow blame people for misunderstanding the term when the wrong definition is hammered into their brains all the time by all the mainstream media.
That's the clue that it's a signal. If every merchant is mandated to drop the cost of goods to 1$, the measure becomes meaningless for this purpose, while people continue to trade more and more for the same amount of goods. The published values themselves are incidental and barter normalizes, detached from the edge effects, as the underlying cause remains.
The Dems failed to communicate inflation is a global phenomena and that the US has faired far better at reducing inflation, unemployment and GDP growth then the rest of the developed world.
I would argue it’s not just the economy, but capitalism in general is no longer serving the public well, and hasn’t for a long time. It is corrupting our public institutions, it is creating poverty and suffering, and it abuses power to exploit people. Capitalism is abusive, and very often the things that we aren’t supposed to talk about are what we need to talk about the most.
Schumpeter called it the eroding foundation of Capitalism. Its not technically Capitalism, as the system, at fault though. It's interesting. Feel free to explore it more. Or perhaps you already do
Yet Paul Krugman told us that inflation was going down if we didn't include food, gas and etc. Just for this kind of gaslighting by the elites, the democrats deserve a giant middle finger.
Regular Americans don't have any idea what's going. They don't know what inflation is, or what is causing it. They only know what they're told, so what matters is who they listen to. (Look at recent polls that show that Republicans feel that they are heavily impacted by inflation, and Democrats much less so.) Unfortunately, the traditional sources of information have lost the trust of a large body of the American people, so they look elsewhere for a source of trust, and they find it in a charismatic con-man.
Trump spent years pretending to be a businessman on TV, and that skills pays off at his rallies and his interviews, where he perfected the improvisation that rubes mistakes for sincerity. Any other politician speaks in rehearsed clichés, which Americans have been accustomed to, and which they associate with dishonesty, even when they're telling the truth. It helps, and does not hurt, that Trump says crazy shit that keeps people entertained. I don't believe that politics should be based on that kind of thrill, but apparently it is.
Trump's actual policy proposals are mostly nonsense, but it doesn't matter. If you want to compete with him, you have to to be (a) interesting and (b) persuasive.
The election results don't make much sense in terms of serious policy. Voters worry about inflation: they vote for tariffs? Voters worry about democracy: they vote for the guy responsible for J6? Voters are 50% female: they vote for a SCOTUS that care less women's issues? The only issue where a vote for Trump coincides with voter concerns is immigration.
It's easier to explain this election in terms of "Trump seems confident and strong... Harris seems scripted and phony." The closest thing to a real issue is probably the impression that "Democrats are a bunch of radical woke communists"
Go to any middle school in America and figure out who the popular kids are. It's not the ones with good ideas on how to improve education, or even to get Xboxes in every classroom - its the hot, mean kids with charisma who make the other hot mean kids laugh. Its human nature to want to be in that in-group. When you ask them why they vote a certain way, they say something about the economy or trans kids or whatever, but IMHO it's much more primal than any of that. The dems are still campaigning to the greatest generation but society has regressed and America is just one big middle school right now.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this, and it’s worth reflecting on.
Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges, and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.
At a time where there is armed conflict spreading across the world again, this kind of personality is appealing to a large portion of the population, and understandably so.
> Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges,
Sure, but he was plenty popular before all of that. The appeal, imho, is in the calculated appearance of sincerity and toughness... from a guy who is in reality embodies neither of those qualities. Both the assassination and legal challenges amplify the appearance of toughness. The "mean kids" comment is spot on.
> and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.
Not sure what you're referring to here. Joe Rogan and Theo Von are pretty far from being hostile to Trump.
Any such calculated attempt at appearing tough would break down when a bullet barely missed your head. His reaction of staying on stage and encouraging the crowd would be quite hard to fake.
Trump will say in a few weeks how great the economy is under his rule, when absolutely nothing will be different from now, and people will gobble it up.
He won't say that until after he has been inaugurated when absolutely nothing has changed yet. That is how we went from "struggling under Obama" to "best economy ever under Trump" in a week or two last time he was president.
Also, his supporters will go from saying "lower gas prices were rigged by the president to steal the election!" this month to "Trump brought us lower gas prices!" after inauguration without any sense of irony.
Well, get the popcorn ready because the next 4 years are going to be interesting, to say the least.
"You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn’t any sugar to put in it.
He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it." -Brautigan
Czechia was hit by pretty bad inflation too, after decades of very low inflation rates. Our current government will likely lose the election in a year as a consequence.
Being in office when inflation hits is a recipe for electoral disaster, regardless of actual culpability, which, in this interconnected world, is likely lower than perceived.
Trump has also proposed devaluing the dollar, on top of tariffs.
Imposing tariffs, and starting a trade war, will surely mean that imports will shoot up in price for the consumer. Exports will suffer, which is likely why he'll also try to devalue the dollar - to make exports be more attractive amid the receiving countries tariffs.
So that's a double-whammy as far as prices go, for the consumer.
His grand plan is of course to bring back manufacturing to the US - or that foreign companies will set up plants in the US. But that doesn't happen overnight, and there's no automatic mechanism that will make the companies do so.
And Trump has been clear about imposing the highest tariffs on all Chinese imports. Now look around you, and try to estimate how many things you see that are made in China.
Then you have the other countries, too, which will get hit with tariffs.
Oh, it's gonna send inflation through the roof. Trump's economic policies are likely disastrous, and I am fretting about my 401k.
That said, I have been contending that people experience prices and talking about lowering inflation when prices have recently gone up is net negative for the incumbent administration.
I'm better off than 4 years ago, thanks to stock market. I guess that has to do with Biden-Harris' policies. That said, people are not just economic animals, right? My blood boils when the left attacks 1A, and when Kamala blames retailers for price gauging.
Yes, but used car salesman are charismatic, and people are frequently hoodwinked by used car salesman. Despite everyone saying watch out for the used car salesman.
I heard an interesting thought on a podcast about Trump. Because he's always used and discarded his 'friends' his entire life, he's gotten very good at getting new people to like him. People say that 1:1 he can be very charming, just up to the point where he stabs you in the back.
Honestly while Trump is a little slimy he's also kinda funny. Visit some conservative spaces sometimes, they're having fun while liberal ones are all doom-and-gloom.
You said "Hillary and Harris have less charisma than my cat. They are simply unelectable"
Well.. Trump was elected. If you're not saying Trump is more charismatic then this all seems to contradict your point that charisma is necessary for electibility.
The problem is that the rules are different. For Democrats, if they want to win, they need someone with charisma. See Biden, Obama, and Bill Clinton, versus Hillary Clinton and Dukakis for historical examples.
Republicans don't need charisma: if the Democratic candidate isn't charismatic enough, they'll instead vote for whatever pile of shit the GOP puts on the ticket.
You are making a logical jump there. Hillary and Harris are Democrats. Trump is Republican. Based on logic, just because Trump won doesn't automatically make him more charismatic, as there are other factors that play role.
So logically you cannot assert that this is true; Trump winning <==> Trump more charismatic
My $0.02, just one opinion yada yada.. Charisma was a part of it sure, but ultimately people can look past that. Bush Sr. had zero charisma.
The bigger part, amongst other things, Harris is part of the current administration, people are not happy about how things are going, or how much their groceries cost. People are not happy to get censored or called nazi's for having different opinions. When asked on a left-leaning show "The View" with people all on her side, what she would change about the last 4 years, she answered, "there is not a thing that comes to mind".
Charisma didn't kill her, not being able to ask layup questions killed her. The American people are not as dumb as the Harris voters are now screaming about on Reddit/TikTok/X, the American people want to know what their president is going to do to change their lives. Trump is a sociopath, again amongst other things, but he is very very clear about where he stands on things and what he's planning on doing.
> Trump is a sociopath, again amongst other things, but he is very very clear about where he stands on things and what he's planning on doing.
I don't know if you'll agree with this, but I actually think that one of Trump's gifts, or maybe his campaigns gifts seems to be to convince everyone they're going to get what they want, and is in fact not very very clear where he stands on things. He's sort of emotionally clear (tarriffs and illegal immigration)
But I also think...
If you ask a blue collar worker, they'll tell you Trump is pro-union
If you ask a business owner they'll say he's anti-union.
If you ask someone on the ACA, they'll tell you he'll protect it, if you ask a fiscal conservative, they'll tell you he'll abolish it.
If you ask a woman, he'll keep abortion with the states. If you ask a catholic, he'll abolish abortion. He's friends to muslims but will also deport them.
He's the friend to the blue collar worker, enemy of the elites, but also friend to billionaires willing to work with him. I think this is why Trump would have beaten Sanders. Sanders would have never gotten the support of the business class, and if he did it would have eroded his support with his base, Trump is somehow immune to that.
Do you find it strange that to get cheaper groceries you had to vote for a convicted criminal?
Can I even work in America with a criminal record?
How do people look past this, I'm really having a bit of a moral crisis today about why I even bother paying taxes or obeying any laws since this whole thing happened.
Do I just tell my kids to be successful, jut be like Trump?
Absolutely! You are not alone. We have elected a convict as a president. The person who instigated a mob in attacking the Capital. The person who misled his base about 2020 election. Got impeached... the Trump saga goes on.
> Do I just tell my kids to be successful, jut be like Trump?
Trump is a failed real estate tycoon, his companies went bankrupt three times; banks won't lend him money anymore because he always shafts them. He got a big inheritance and lucky that he had some charisma so could make it on TV. He is not successful role model (well, con-man maybe).
A very large number of Americans (100 million+?) dont see Trump as a convicted criminal.
They see a govt that weaponized the justice system to target their political opponent.
It's a reason to vote for Trump, not against him.
Yes, for the crime of the century of... classifying hush payments to a porn star (which is legal) as a legal expense instead of a campaign expense. And then they made each time he signed a check a separate count, so they could make a big deal of “34 fElOnIeS!!!” Not weaponized, indeed.
It’s the most mundane thing that has been “Trumped up” to the extent that anti-Trumpers act like he murdered someone. Everyone else thinks “oh wow, improperly classifying an expense, who cares.”
Yes, based on the tortuous logic that he would’ve lost the election if voters knew that a famous playboy had had an affair with a porn star. Of all the gaffes and scandals he had during his campaign, that would’ve been the one to sink his election chances. Sure thing.
And still at the end of it, it boiled down to “you should’ve classified the hush money as a campaign expense instead of a legal expense.” Do you seriously not understand why no one really cares?
The campaign obviously had that concern and acted on it; it’s irrelevant if you think it’s “tortuous logic”. When did the affair occur? When did the payment occur, and what was the surrounding context? — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels–Donald_Trump_...
Then, read this again —
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/dont-call-it-the-hush-mon...
“This case alleges that in 2016 Trump arranged to pay off an adult entertainer in order to hide his affair with her from the public. The important thing to keep in mind is that the money was given to protect Trump’s campaign for the presidency — not to protect his marriage or protect him from personal embarrassment.”
He is technically convicted by a jury. It will be interesting to see how they get around that, it doesn't go away just because he was elected president, and he can't pardon himself from a state charge.
In the most left-wing jurisdiction in America by a DA that campaigned on "getting Trump", who was famous for reducing felonies to misdemeanors, but in the case of Trump raised a misdemeanor to a felony.
And this was for a charge for which there was no precedent, and nor was there any victim.
And the judges daughter had connections to the Democrat party too.
People arent stupid.
Well, if they want to use conspiracy theories in their appeals, they are welcome to, and the Supreme court is basically in Trump's pockets, so they could always just make a "because we say so" ruling that annuls the state jury verdict.
It was monumentally stupid to convict Trump for a "crime" that was basically someone else filling his taxes wrong. Something most USA people would feel is unfair and could happen to them.
Also I am not from USA and very happy I don't have to deal with TurboTax lobbying and shenanigans thar make the USA tax code to be just crazy.
Also the "bank fraud" trial is also monumentally stupid when they wanted to convict him and close his companies (thus making people lose their jobs) for doing something that resulted in profits for the supposed victim. Victim in fact that explained multiple times they were pleased with the business and would do it again.
The message in the second case was: we will take your jobs because your boss made a good deal, don't vote for him!
For anyone seeing this, these links are a waste of time. They don’t demonstrate a misunderstanding or provide a better one.
> Many people I speak with are worried that this is the weakest of Trump’s four pending criminal trials because it has to do with an illicit affair.
> Wrong.
No this was the weakest case. The fact that this is the one to get across the finish line, rather than say the Georgia interference case, demonstrates raw political incompetence by the democrats.
Amusingly/sadly JD Vance could tell you exactly why Trump wins. The secret is empty promises. In an unfortunate way, it’s a kind of empathetic approach.
It’s why he called Trump the “opioid of the masses”[1]. You just make promises even when you know it’s total BS. But at least people are feeling heard.
I think the average voter really doesn’t want to have a nuanced discussion where they learn about the problems that they’re experiencing. They just want to hear someone say “I got this”… even if they don’t.
I got a raise this year, yet my purchasing power is less than it was two years ago. The stock market just surged post-election. Please explain to me how I am better off.
Please explain to me how "third way" Democrats stood for union values from the Clinton-Obama eras.
The claim is groups like the Heritage foundation, Manhattan Institute, Cato, Hoover Institution, Heartland, American Enterprise and other think tanks are actually propaganda manufacturing companies who lie to people as a profession.
Biden objectively kept inflation lower in the US than most of the developed world.
What did you want instead? Actual policy proposals, not vague feelings.
The ultimate crime of democrats is continuing to provide explicit proposals in a post-reality world. The Republicans realized you can just make shit up on the fly, change your mind literally every day, and the masses will latch on to whatever they want to believe and assure everyone else that their own personal interpretation of whatever vague promise they got is actually the right answer.
But only if you have the magic (R) next to your name.
The inflation was a false boogie man pushed by MSM. Inflation was never the problem, it's people lack of understanding that wars cause prices to explode.
The Iraq 91 war literally ended the USSR, which dissolved a few months later because of soaring prices and economical failures. The Ukraine war might end up pushing the US into a second tier country, especially since Trump brings Musk and RFK into the government, who are literal morons when it comes to managing anything.
"Ignore the fact that everything costs more; you're just angry at the war but don't realize it" does not seem like a winning campaign slogan, but what do I know?
The "Everything costs more" is a byproduct of something more important, not sure what that is, but focusing soley on econmoics as the cause of our issues seems shortsighted, but hey, what do I know.
About 20 million votes less than the 2020 election, with about 15 million less for the democrats, and a measely 4 million less for the republicans. Thought that was interesting.
I see this being pushed on Twitter as a proof of election fraud in 2020 but aren't the votes still being counted?
Reporting appears to be %87 at this moment, expect the numbers to add up when it's %100.
Don't you register to vote anyway? You can't be counting unaccounted for ballots, are you? You probably have a paperwork for for every vote, it's not like counting the cash after busking.
Eventually You will have Total Number of Registered to Vote = Total Ballots + Total Absentees.
This will also give you the turnout. You can't have the turnout first unless you keep track of number of votes casted and in that case you will be able to tell if there were fake votes by comparing the final ballots counted and the number of votes you counted when casting.
This is all very basic, can someone explain what I'm missing here? Why people are pushing for this thing that doesn't make sense whatsoever?
> This is all very basic, can someone explain what I'm missing here? Why people are pushing for this thing that doesn't make sense whatsoever?
You're assuming that the election fraud narrative is pushed by people who care about whether it's true or not. The goal isn't truth-seeking, it's disenfranchisement; any data point is either used in service of the narrative, or it's discarded as irrelevant.
It doesn’t seem like very good evidence that there was fraud in 2020, in the sense they even if (and it is an if) we end up with a decrease in turnout this year, there’s no particular reason to believe that people didn’t just… vote more when the pandemic was happening, they had more time to sit around, and mail in voting was easier. Is it possible that the people pushing this idea are just engaging in motivated reasoning?
Not everyone who is registered to vote actually votes (as in they do not mail in their ballot nor do they go in to physically vote). Which is I think the more likely case here.
The vote isn't even close to done. California will likely take weeks to count another 5 million, maybe more. In 2020 it took 2 months to get the final count from all states (not including recounts)
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to express this sentiment via election participation. Abstention ends up supporting one candidate more than the other. What seems to be an affirmation of neutrality is not that in practice.
The national election is an exercise in partisanship. Your opportunity to feel represented is what the primary is for. And for once I'm not sneering at the sentiment because basically neither side ran a primary (the Ds managed to not run one twice!)
> Your opportunity to feel represented is what the primary is for
This is why it was a major issue for me that the Democrats did not hold a primary and just decided Kamala would be the candidate. If a major part of your campaign is "vote for us or democracy dies!" it's pretty hard to swallow if you increasingly feel that your voice doesn't matter in your own party.
Given that Biden dropped out of the race fairly late, what was the option? I agree with you in principal, but there doesn't seem like there was any way to actually implement it in the available time, assuming that the population take adequate time to make an informed choice.
You misinterpreted the massive disagreement of the population (20M people) with an affirmation of neutrality. One can hope the dems will not misinterpret it (as they often do, unfortunately, and they already started on twitter and the mainstream media). Hopefully they can recognize and acknowledge that a large portion of the left disagrees with their policies and start listening to their base, otherwise they will keep losing more votes every 4 year.
I and another registered democrat neighbor had this exact discussion and conclusion outside of the voting center we live next to on election day. Assuming we're not the only ones.
Some jurisdictions have a "none of the above" option. I think Nevada has one. An early report there show 1+% voted "none of the above", or something similar to that.
It was just a glance on one of the shows during the returns last night, I maybe be completely wrong.
I hope nothing makes it necessary, but I do hope it becomes commonplace. It's such a better experience to complete a ballot leisurely in one's own home, being able to discuss it with my own family and referencing a plethora of materials, than having to go out of my way to wait in line and have prepared everything ahead of time (and, hopefully, remembered it).
Usually bribers will want some proof, like a photo of your vote, when you go inside and there are election observers and you're not allowed to use your phone it's more difficult to provide that proof.
Are you certain your vote was counted and not lost? I vote in person because I know when I mail things they don't always get where I intended them to be (and especially when there is a deadline in place)
In my country, I can just bring the letter and put it in a special mailbox in the city hall in the weeks before the vote. I would trust the mail system, too, but that's beside the point.
I don't equate easy with better. I miss the sense of community inspired by going to the local polling place and seeing your neighbors. It's a ritual that has value. Yeah it takes some effort, and if people want to make it a federal holiday, that's cool too.
Mail-in ballots have so many more issues with them - lack of privacy (so more room for coercion and harvesting), they make auditability more difficult.
Regardless of whether you think the relaxed voting requirements of 2020 led to widespread fraud, it inspired enough distrust that both parties should be advocating to bolster the reliability, auditability, and trustworthiness of the voting process, not decrease it further. The only thing that sucks more than losing an election is losing it under suspicious circumstances. Subject people to that enough times, and it doesn't lead anywhere good, regardless of your political team. Instead, create and enforce policies that improve trust rather than erode it.
I wish we focused on voting for more issues like this instead of just the old punching bags of immigration, gun control, and abortion.
We should be discussing more issues! Why isn't there a candidate saying they'll increase the number of holidays, or making public transportation free, or giving people free dogs. Where is the candidate saying they'll make a 4 day work week a reality?
> Jimmy Carter spoke about this, literally in some town the sheriff watches you vote and chucks it into the trash if you didn't pick their candidate.
That is a flaw of the American model of allowing local governments to run state and national elections.
In many other countries, local government has no role to play in non-local elections. All elections are 100% run by either a state or national elections agency.
I believe locally run elections are a good thing. As fraud would have to be perpetrated against multiple election systems. However, I also think there should be standards such as electronically tallied, hand-marked paper ballots saved for potential future audit.
Several other countries have independent electoral commissions running elections, as opposed to elected politicians. It is much easier for voters to trust the people running elections when they are required by law to be apolitical.
Look for example at the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)
I believe there is still more vote to count, so the absolute numbers may still increase dramatically, but your point on party affiliation is definitely on point
When all is said and done I bet Gaza had very little effect on overall D turnout. If it did, those that either sat out or voted R specifically because of Gaza did so to spite their face. An R administration will turn their backs on a lot of geopolitical happenings and let those involved run wild, of which the Palestinians will have little to no voice at all.
Also people vastly underestimate the political calculus in full throated support of Palestinians and by association, Hamas. There is a whole other side of this conflict and that is with Jews who also care about the resolution, but also care about Israel and the fact they've had rockets constantly fired into their territory. They also vote overwhelmingly D. You alienate one group for another and you've made no ground in terms of voter share.
Wayne County was never going to be the lynch pin of the election and even so, exit polling is notoriously fickle. If we're taking exit polling at face value, across the country the economy was #1 followed by preserving democracy and immigration. Geopolitics is probably at the bottom of the top 10 nationally.
Dearborn alone voted 50% for Trump, 22% for Jill and 28% for Harris. Thats 50-100k votes right there. A clear message and an axe to the foot of Palestine.
For context: there are 4,453,908 Muslim Americans and 1,698,570 Arab Americans as of the 2010 census. The DSA, by far the largest leftist organization, has about 80,000 members. Even if all three of those groups don't overlap at all, it still doesn't explain much.
That said, sentiments have power -- the idea that Harris is "more of the same" likely affected a lot of people, even if they don't align exactly with the people behind that message. Sadly, they're about to find out how wrong they are.
> That said, sentiments have power -- the idea that Harris is "more of the same" likely affected a lot of people, even if they don't align exactly with the people behind that message. Sadly, they're about to find out how wrong they are.
> “What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” co-host of ABC’s “The View” Sunny Hostin asked Harris, looking to give her a set for her to spike over the net. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said.
That was her golden moment to distance herself from Biden's admin and show some personal incentive and she deliberately chose not to.
The devil doesn't exist, and real life is complicated. Have fun telling the living Palestinians "whelp, a lot of you already died, so we're gonna let the rest of you die/be deported to a country you've never been to."
The oft-repeated question "What could be worse than a genocide?" was ill-thought-out, first-order thinking, IMO. Regardless, we are going to find out the higher order results soon.
Yeah. They have no idea Trump is the biggest pro-Israel anti-Muslim fan out there. He'll literally give Israel anything they want, and those people will gasp and act surprised.
We run our nation on oil. Our nation is built on good a relationship with Israel. Nothing about that will change until our priorities as a country change, dem or repb.
US politics isn't easy to understand as an outsider. It looks like Harris was was an ok candidate for the core democrat voter and a terrible candidate to win a populist election in what is essentially a deeply divided and mostly conservative country. She didn't address the swing voters greatest concerns which was their decline in real wealth due to inflation and fear of change. I am sure money and influence had a lot to do with it as well but still a colossal misreading of public sentiment and an inability to reach out to a broader audience.
If you want a simple example of how important good regulators are, look at the NTIA / DoC's handling of the .com cooperative agreement in 2018. The US gave up control of the most important technical asset on the planet and no one even knows it happened :-(
Price fixing only works if supply is constrained via some kind of cartel, which cities often have by way of density limits and NIMBYism.
Not a Trump voter, but this is a huge area where many Democrats are flat wrong. Talking to some Democrats about the supply problem with housing is like talking to some Republicans about why a hard line abortion ban makes maternal mortality go up. It can’t possibly be true because the ideology says it can’t be true.
There is collusion between real-estate owners and property management software companies that are using Large Language models to keep prices high. This has nothing to do with cartels.
Here is an article [0] that talks about the issue. This is a real problem driven by this collusion, don't act like it isn't. And now that Trump is in office, these kinds of investigations are going to disappear and the housing crisis is going to get worse.
I don't think they believe collusion isn't happening.
I think the argument above is that democrats are one of the drivers of building restrictions, leading to the ability to collude. If new entrants to the market were plentiful then the existing cartels would be undercut. Also, rent control puts a tight lock on the rental market by forcing landlords to keep their rents high lest they become locked into the low rents they may otherwise offer.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader whether to be on board with that assessment, but there is a reasonable argument to be made that a free-er market could actually benefit housing costs.
What this completely discounts is the existence of corporate landlords. Thousands of homes are being bought and kept empty to restrict that supply. It's ridiculous to destroy land used for other purposes just to build more empty houses and hope Blackstone et al. don't notice. It's also silly to hand those corporate landlords the right to jack up rents overnight as though they won't use it. The assumption that they'd rather have lower risk agreements over a longer period of time (e.g. lower rents now with slow increases year-to-year) is naively assuming that publicly traded companies will not attempt to maximize profits for the coming quarter.
due to amount of regulations it is hard to start business in europe and thus they mainly have old business (like BMW etc.) that are in decline. but innovation happens in other places.
There are two exceptions though - France (partially) and Sweden.
Well, many believe that Europe is falling so much behind US and China in areas such as economy, technology, innovation that it basically is just a tourist destination at this point, with no power or relevance in shaping the world's future.
Oh, yeah I've read comments like that from US people towards Europe. On the other hand, non-US people often feel that US people genuinely believe that the rest of the world dreams of being like the US.
Considering how Google was suppressing the stuff related to elections - not showing Rogan's video, not showing directions (and was called out multiple times by Twitter and Musk) to voting locations etc. I don't think the new admistration will be nice to Google.
The directions thing was debunked repeatedly, including by Google itself, to which Musk himself responded in public with thanks for clearing up the confusion. Very weird to see it repeated here on HN.
Basically: it's because "Harris" is a county name in Texas.
I see this first hand. In my town, ATT owns the lines that supply our street that has fiber and our local ISP Sonic.net is prevented from using these lines to provide service. Its my worry that our local ISP's ability to do business in a market dominated by Comcast and ATT is going to be majorly impacted and its only going to get worse. Not saying it would be prevented if Dems where in office because they pretty much tow the corporate anti-competition line but are much more quiet about it.
> Lina Khan's policies were very harmful for the tech sector
As they should! It's quite literally the whole reason they exist.
Email unsubscribe links have worked well, and click-to-cancel hopefully can too! The only opponents of these policies are massive companies who rely on predatorial dark patterns. Everyone with a brain should support these "wasteful policies" because they benefit consumers.
I absolutely LOVE having one link to instantly stop being emailed from mailing lists, and I can't be happier for click-to-cancel and related legislation.
"oh no, big tech company XYZ will make 0.0001% less money this year!!!" is the energy you're giving
I think he was busy dismantling other stuff. He got anti- Roe v Wade judges installed. He got rid of net neutrality. He put a climate change denier in charge of the EPA. He got rid of the pandemic response unit in 2018, and will do that again this time. He pulled US out of the Paris agreement. He's threatened to leave NATO repeatedly. He pulled out of the Iran Nuclear deal.
I don't agree with all your points, but I very much respect that you criticize Trump's policies. That is so much more reasonable and productive than using hoaxes after hoaxes like the media and Harris' campaign team did.
Speaking of abortion rights, I believe few people will even talk about it in the next election cycle, as it has become a state issue. I also find it interesting that many pro-lifers hate Trump for overturning Roe vs Wade because they won't get millions and millions of dollars every year for the sake of fighting abortion rights.
one thing i definitely worry is about using public lands for oil, mineral extraction purposes.
while America has a bounty of public land acreage wise, 4 years and a complete control of the government is a lot of time to do some lasting damage to the ecosystem by opening up these areas for privatization.
The environment is certainly screwed. I also expect that regulations against air and water pollution will be on the chopping block so not only will the ecosystem suffer, but the population will too.
The recent media attention on possible lithium fields in and around Arkansas was an interesting one to me. It seems like one that I could see the DNC latching onto for battery capacity despite the fact that it would still likely meaning he same kind of impact in federal land as mining oil, coal, etc.
Lithium deposits are common -- Nevada has significant ones too. The question is if the lithium is concentrated enough to make extracting it financially viable.
That wasn't really my point though. The discovered deposits, well expected deposits since its based on modelling data, could easily lead to a massive mining operation to extract it. That will do damage very similar to the exact kind of fossil fuel extraction that is a main argument against fossil fuels and for alternative energy sources.
4 years and a complete control of the supreme court guarantees lasting damage to the ecosystem (and all other aspects of society) since all the conservative/right-wing issues just need to be appealed up to SCOTUS and they'll get their way - and set legal precedent on the way.
There's two justices ready to retire, and if Trump replaces them (and he will) that'll be five supreme court justices appointed by Trump and chosen by his cronies. The entire legal system will be corrupted for decades.
Yes, but each time diluting the power of the justices individually. Right now if you have one wacko justice who decides on the basis of political ideology instead of some of the established legal theories they have 11% of a say in things. Add another few justices who are relatively normal and the ability of the wacko to swing things into dangerous territory goes down. Even if the tit-for-tat tries to cram more wackos in you have to try to convince the Senate to let more and more obviously terribly choices through.
Yeah, same with ending filibuster and other speculated tactics. I don't think you can close the door behind you without a constitutional amendment, which won't happen.
Everyone thinks that the Dems and Republicans are different sides, but they are on the same side, money. This has been going on for at least 50 years. Every 5 years I hear this bull shit. IF the dems got in it would be more balanced. Nothing changes until we reevaluate our support for system that doesn't serve us.
You can't really tell how long his presidency lasts. Two term limit is just a rule that can be changed with help of judiciary branch. If Americans want him for a third term who'd object?
Trying to reinterpret "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice" to allow for that would be quite a spectacular feat of jurisprudence.
People don't seem to understand that even Trump's judges still see themselves as JUDGES. They're not going to just make stuff up that's not in the law, and there were several instances in his first term where his own SCOTUS Justices told him to pound sand. It's not so simple as "nominated by Trump == inherently corrupt," much as he'd like it to be that way.
It's just 22nd amendment. Can't be more important than the will of the nation. The only question is do the Americans like Trump as much as they like booze or can it be at least made to look like they do.
Theoretically, if changes were put into place to allow a run for a third term (which is highly unlikely given age), then that also opens the door for someone like Obama running again.
Only saving grace. Although Putin is just 6 years younger and his strive to leave legacy already messed up the world. One can only wonder what mess will Trump's attempts at leaving legacy cause.
It's hard to see Trump do any worse than Biden on this front, but I'm sure he'll try. Biden admin approved over 50% more oil/drilling permits than Trump. More than any president in history
In short, granting permits from lease sales performed in the last administration is a trailing indicator of.. the last administration's activity.
The more important measure for the Biden administration's energy development policy was how many new lease sales were performed, and how many leases were effectively cancelled or otherwise put in limbo.
"Mixed messages from the administration – like canceling lease sales one minute and touting approved permits to drill the next – create uncertainty within the energy industry, hindering long-term investments and exacerbating challenges for the United States"
https://archive.is/9x1an
"The Biden administration has leased fewer acres for oil-and-gas drilling offshore and on federal land than any other administration in its early stages dating back to the end of World War II, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis."
"The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 requires onshore oil and gas leasing “at least quarterly.” While the Biden administration has been in office for six quarters, it has conducted auctions in just one of them. That happened in late June, after the administration came under increasing pressure to tame soaring gasoline prices at the pump in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine."
"Mr. Biden pledged to stop drilling on federal lands as a candidate, saying the nation needs to transition to clean energy. He softened his stance as oil prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—calling for boosting oil supplies to ease runaway inflation—but he has nonetheless spurned a leasing program that for decades has been a go-to asset for presidents looking to raise U.S. energy production."
One irony atop another: securing this land (against the onslaught of big business) was a celebration for Conservatives, not Liberals.
That and, I miss the Republican party that didn't actively try to piss off the ACLU every hour on the hour. It's just nonstop…
• book bans
• rhetoric about sending the military after political opponents
• politicians ruled as being above the law
• short circuiting due process with immigrants, both illegal and not
• breaking up families of would-be asylum seekers for no damn reason
• the Trump Muslim ban
• the constant erection of/for Ten Commandments statues
It used to be a thing in some conservative circles, “No, that teacher is Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912, not Council of 1879, I don't want his people educating my child about what he thinks the Ten Commandments really mean!!”
I used to fancy myself a conservative back then. The ACLU and libertarians were the people that the Left had kind of given up on, and we were happy to say “yes, come be conservative with us, and we will try not to piss you off.” Now everyone has given up on them, they had to hold their noses and vote Kamala and pray for a few more years of “not again.”
I'm not even a libertarian, just don't understand why we are wasting resources pissing them off
> The GOP wants to ban pornographic materials in children's classrooms.
One of the most popular books on the "ban" lists is Handmaid's Tale. If you read that and classify it as pornographic, I might direct you to retake high school English to brush up on reading comprehension.
There's also a huge difference between the government banning content and private entities banning sale of that content on their platform but OK.
Really? I'd say there is a political difference. I can escape a private corporation if I really wanted to, or shop elsewhere for that specific content. I can't generally escape government rules unless they're specially crafted to carve out private schools. And if they do carve out private schools, then you're saying the materials aren't actually harmful to rich privileged kids and only the poors?
Can you escape a private corporation if it basically has a monopoly on book distribution in this country? Can you be an investigative journalist who correctly investigates and publishes your unbiased results if only one of those results will be able to earn you money? Really?
Back when I was a democrat, the democrat party would not have stood for this.
> Can you escape a private corporation if it basically has a monopoly on book distribution in this country?
Let's be precise with our words. A monopoly doesn't mean no competition. Amazon only controls 50% of the online+offline print book market which as far as monopolies go isn't as dominant as Google's 88% and closer to iOS's ~50%. It's a dominant position but there's plenty of room for you to go obtain books elsewhere. Additionally, self-publishing has never been easier.
> Can you be an investigative journalist who correctly investigates and publishes your unbiased results if only one of those results will be able to earn you money? Really?
No idea what this is about. If we're still on the can't publish anything "anti-trans" topic, might be worthwhile to consider that people identifying as trans make up less than half of 1 percent of the population (~0.4% if we're rounding up). Maybe there just isn't actually all that much interest in a niche population that has no power?
You're arguing to the degree of monopoly but the Democratic party I knew didn't, for example, claim workers had power because there were three auto companies.
No they recognized the power imbalance and corrected it. That's the party I left. Lord knows what it has become.
But staying on topic. You were arguing that that's the more dangerous situation than the government banning books? I just don't understand this line of reasoning, especially when said "banned" books are arguably not pornography & the bans typically are targeting things like discussion about racism, homosexuality, teen pregnancy, abortions etc. It's basically "I don't like these topics & I don't want my child to think about them and have an alternate perspective shown"
May be useful to read up on the data behind the bans.
At the end of the day, children have no right to free speech. No GOP policy has ever prevented parents from showing whatever to their children. The only thing sought to be regulated is what set of books any child can pick out. I'm honestly shocked this is controversial.
Do I agree with all the curatorial decisions? No of course not. However, it's not censorship, it's curation of material for children's consumption.
On the other hand, Amazon's censorship is targeted at adults. You're correct that Amazon itself is only 50% of the marketplace. But Amazon is not just Amazon the company. It's also a marketplace where other sellers are. Altogether, those sellers constitute 40% of the e-commerce market. Again, a significant portion. Their decision to not allow those selling 'controversial' books on their market (and keep in mind they will sell you all kinds of depraved pornographic material. You can even buy Mein Kampf on amazon [1]) is basically greatly limiting the distribution of the book. That is un-American.
Censorship is not just about government. At some point people need to get that. It's just like redlining. Businesses cannot decide to en masse deny the market to an entire group of people or ideas.
[1] adults should be able to. Children may be not.
> At the end of the day, children have no right to free speech
Was there a change to the constitution I'm unaware of? Children have all the same rights as adults albeit there are certain limited situations where those rights are allowed to be restricted or impinged. Not that book banning is a 1st amendment issue for students.
We're in agreement that it's OK to curate that content. However, that curation should not be random parents complaining and creating permanent bans on content, which is how this book banning works.
> However, it's not censorship, it's curation of material for children's consumption
> On the other hand, Amazon's censorship is targeted at adults
When I like it it's curation and when I don't it's censorship. Got it.
Just to be clear, are you saying that the ACLU has not been pissed off at the GOP for book bans? Or are you just saying they should be mad at Amazon more?
(Because like, libertarians and the ACLU are not going to get mad at Amazon for deciding what rules they want to enforce in their own marketplace. Which makes me read your comment as just another instance of shouting “fuck the libertarians!” that I above called a phenomenal waste of conservative resources. Like, why? There shouldn't be this strange alliance between the “only government that can be trusted is a dead government” people and the fucking political Left, like, WTF if that’s what’s going on)
I'm saying that banning the publication of books on a market place has a greater effect on the distributoin of information than banning books in classrooms.
I fully agree that you can't use the law to force Amazon to unban the books.
I'm just saying that private sector book ban for adults is more damaging than the removal of controversial material in children's libraries.
I get that, probably if I got you talking to my "dead gummint" friends you'd talk past each other about the word "damaging", they'd say "that's not damaging at all, what are you smoking?" etc. etc.
Just to be clear, what you need to understand if you want to bring them back Right is that for them "damaging" is defined by "someone shows up with a gun at your house and tells you to do something that you don't want to do." Amazon can do whatever, precisely because the people who Amazon sends to your house, like they might have a gun if they're practicing open-carry, but they don't tell you to do anything that you don't want to do. They literally cannot define any damage that Amazon is doing by manipulating their marketplace, because Amazon's not sending out the Men With Guns.
And just to be clear, again, I don't agree with my friends on these matters, I just find it absolutely fucking nuts that back when I was a hardline conservative I made these friends and now that I'm moderate and independent somehow they are the ones that I'm seeing supporting Kamala and the Democrats.
Kids are great and the world is less doomed than some will have you believe. We can improve, create, and make things better and that doesn’t happen if humanity dies out.
Everything the left does in the US is in pursuit of those 3 things. The right has and will now continue to do everything in their power to destroy all 3 those things in the name of money. And not money for you or me.
Of course, the republican populous doesn't believe that, but it doesn't make it any less true.
The reality is much, much worse than you, or even most people realize.
incumbents all around the world have performed terribly post COVID. UK, Canada, Japan, France, Italy, have all had landslide or shocking election results.
Unsure what the general mood is that can lead to Keir Starmer dropping 30 points in approval months after winning in a landslide, but the mood of general discontent may be relevant in the United States as well. It seems whatever the status quo / incumbent advantage that used to exist, is now working against candidates.
Even if the democrats ran a better candidate in a better campaign, it may not have been enough to overcome these headwinds. Although, I'm not sure I totally believe that myself since she lost by a pretty narrow margin in swing states.
Obviously not to excuse the dems, just something to consider
The reason for this isn't a mystery: the world doesn't work for the plurality of its populace. The current generations were sold a lie of infinite prosperity and comforts by their elders and governments, a lie built on the exploitation of former colonies and underdeveloped nations. We see the lie now, and know it cannot be sustained in the face of our current polycrisis (climate, housing, necessities) simply by promoting infinite growth. There's an understanding that we need to curtail consumption and start properly engineering a global economy rather than letting it spawn and mutate naturally, but there's still enough people out there who believe that this demagogue, this partisan, this policy will give them the riches and posh comforts their elders enjoyed, thus returning their country to a golden era that never really existed.
It's the desperation of the masses for what they feel is rightfully theirs, because that's what they were told by those who pulled up the ladder behind them. That era is long gone, but nostalgia is a powerful force that's easily propagandized by those who benefit from said desperation.
Very well said. I think what you speak of sounds a lot like degrowth and/or idealised socialism. Unfortunately, I don't see either of those ever becoming viable policy in our world. The only times we've managed to even remotely approach such policy is after terrible, long wars. Other than that, the big man promising you shiny stuff has always won.
I agree that they are unlikely to become viable policy, but environmentally imposed degrowth will become increasingly real. Natural physical constraints are tightening and are already imposing into manufactured reality. Hitting the physical bounds hard and having to deal with that is looking more likely since human ecological footprint (population x resource intensiveness) is unlikely to drop fast enough to avoid them.
> The only times we've managed to even remotely approach such policy is after terrible, long wars
Or during/after natural disasters. Any time things get real tough, we tend to default to helping each other out mutual aid style - even in America [0]. Seems worth keeping in mind.
> Unsure what the general mood is that can lead to Keir Starmer dropping 30 points in approval months after winning in a landslide
The window to do your unpopular policies and announcements is the start of your government in the hope the reap the benefits just before the next election cycle. Not saying it’s the correct approach, but that’s the theory.
Trudeau has been PM since 2015 and the last election was in 2021. Sure, it looks like he's gonna lose the next one, but Canada hasn't had a oppositional landslide election.
When's the last time Trudeau won a plurality of votes?
Canada's electoral system is extremely non-linear. The US' electoral college is far far more linear wrt popular vote than parliamentary elections, generally, and Canada's in particular.
The early warning signs are quite stark -- the BC liberal party (despite having no affiliation with the national liberals) effectively disbanded because of how awful the branding is at this point, and the most left leaning province in the country almost swung conservative. (I'm from BC)
Its hard to imagine the upcoming election will not be a landslide in the next few months, but it is true that there has not yet been an official victory yet.
The next election looks so bad for him that there is a chance the Bloc Quebecois could be the official opposition. That party has no candidate outside of quebec.
There were a couple byelections within the last few months in historically stronghold ridings for the Liberal party that have not flipped in decades. One in Toronto which went to the Conservatives and one in Montreal which went to the Bloc Québécois. It's almost a certainty that the Liberals will not form a government next election, and polling suggests that they are trending below the seat count needed to be the official opposition.
If you look at the past ~15 or so years in the US, it has been pretty constant flip flopping. I think that's a general condemnation of the status quo, and unsurprisingly. For many people the economy just doesn't work for them like it used to.
At the same time, I think the media talking heads put much too much effort into explaining the results, and they basically give the electorate much too much credit. To be blunt, your average voter is not particularly smart, or at least they aren't able to draw a line between cause and effect. Take inflation for example, which many pundits say was the major issue of this election. But if you look at essentially any economist, of any particular political leaning, they will say that Trump's proposed policies (e.g. massive tariffs) are absolutely horrible for inflation. Similarly, at the end of Trump's 1st term, he was absolutely berating Powell for not having even looser monetary policy in 2019 despite extremely low unemployment.
I think it's fine to argue the Dems did a ton of stupid shit (a lot of this I may agree with), but it's pretty clear that the electorate wants a strongman right now, and that's basically the antithesis of what the Democratic Party wants at large. I also think the Dems haven't accepted the fact that there is zero chance a woman from the managerial class will be elected president.
Keir Starmer didn't win by a landslide, it's that the Tories lost by a landslide. People didn't vote for him, they voted for "not the Conservatives". Now that he's in, the approval rating is correcting.
Imagine coming out of covid, without a recession, only to be hit with inflation (both parties to blame) and sky high interest rates coupled with all other stuff like illegal border crossing to lack of majority support from Women to Harris to Harris being a silent VP for 4 full years and thrown to lime light.
She threw herself under the bus. She went thought a great deal of effort to end up there. It's the deftest act of self immolation I've seen in politics so far.
What are you talking about? Biden was utterly incoherent at the debate. She stepped up, and got the party behind her immediately, and brought hope back to the Democrats. In terms of her campaign, she did far better than we could have reasonably expected.
I honestly doubt it was anything other than trepidation masquerading as hope. She was the worst performing Democrat in the last open primaries. This hope was not based on anything other than an exigent fear of Trump.
> she did far better than we could have reasonably expected.
The metric, as always, is votes / campaign spend. Are you sure you've evaluated this earnestly?
What’s frustrating is democrats never got to pick o their candidate like the republicans did. There was no. The powers that be picked her and many people didn’t even realize there was a switch.
I agree with you that for a lot of people this is what it came down to, which is so sad. Short-term thinking will lead us to destruction.
Instead of asking whether things have improved over the last four years, think about what you want the country and the world to look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years. And what other countries looked like ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years ago. Think about the rises and falls of other nations. Think about the fact that it's getting measurably hotter every year, and that one party doesn't even acknowledge that fact.
Everything is more expensive, and yes, that sucks. But we've handed over the kingdom's keys to an authoritarian idiot who will dismantle the systems that took hundreds of years to establish. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it sure burned fast.
> Harris being a silent VP for 4 full years and thrown to lime light.
Funny that people constantly talk about how they're not voting for Trump, they're voting for the policies of the party etc. but then they can't apply the same rationale to the other side.
>think about what you want the country and the world to look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years.
This is the candidate's job. She didn't center a coherent vision of the improved future only she could get the country to. Pick one thing that Trump wouldn't or couldn't run on, that wasn't just "getting back thing we lost (under our watch)." Green New Deal. Medicare For All. Defund the police. Build houses for everyone. Monorail. Anything for people to hang a hope on. But any big idea would piss off donor-investors who would be hurt by any change to the status quo. So she offered nothing.
> She didn't center a coherent vision of the improved future only she could get the country to.
So the default is to vote for a person who will run the world into the ground? I don't understand why the onus on the sane person to prove why they're going to make things better. I guess people think that any change is good change? Yet people voted Hitler into power.
My take is that America was founded during a time of very high "mental activity" and engagement. In the 1700s people read for fun, the printing press just having been invented the prior century; and listened to candidates debate for hours, at a level of complexity that is beyond people today. A democracy takes that kind of mental energy and engagement to sustain. The citizens of the US seem to be too complacent, too uncaring, to uneducated to preserve their freedom, and so they won't keep it. Sad to see.
> Funny that people constantly talk about how they're not voting for Trump, they're voting for the policies of the party etc. but then they can't apply the same rationale to the other side.
Different people, different sides. I guess the Republican Party did something very well here compared to Democrats, though I don’t know what or how.
But that focuses on the person of the candidate. When you think that's important, there are a few remarks to be made about Trump. So why do you think this matters? The 15M missing voters?
A very similar thing happened here in New Zealand where we tracked right with fairly dire and predictable consequences, from a left-wing government that was shouldering the blame for a whole lot of macroeconomic issues they had little control over.
It doesn't really matter if they did the right thing or not - enough people were looking to punish them regardless.
FYI, the map looks horrendous for democrats after the 2030 census. Estimates give Texas +4, Florida +3, and various other southern states +1 for a total of +12 on solid red states.
Is this just because people are moving out of California to other states? If so, maybe California needs to change its brand of politics to have a higher retention rate.
A bunch of people I know have moved out of the State. Mostly because housing here is completely unaffordable for an average couple. And it is doable in other states.
This is not just California. I live in Washington and wouldn't have been able to afford my house if I was buying today. Inflation + interest rates + price jumps.
The origin of local power to stymie development is from the post WW2 years when freeways were mandated, but local communities they bisected were inevitably the politically weak ones.
Now, the NIMBYs include those same VCs [1] that publicly posted that America should build at scale again… just not in their town.
Reminder that all of those states were amazing for Democrats pre-1968. Everything changes with time. Many of those states are becoming unaffordable because there was so much displacement from blue states. It’s not easy to predict how voters will respond in 6 or 16 years…
That was more to do Nixon's southern strategy than any change in policy. Remember conservative bulwarks Jesse Helms and Trent Lott both started out as staffers for Democrats.
Nixon’s Southern Strategy only worked because LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act. He famously said “We have lost the south for a generation” after signing it.
No, it only worked because many white southerners were racists twats, and still were at least when I was living in Mississippi in the late 1980s. They still revere Andrew Jackson (founder of D) and hate Lincoln (founder of R), even though they are caucusing with the Republicans these days.
I like the long-term thinking, but what about other trends? Texas was quietly (it seems to me) getting less red up until this election. America is getting more diverse and more educated, and Boomers are slowly dying off while younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism. So shouldn't the Trump / Republican base start shrinking? Maybe e.g. Texas +4 isn't necessarily horrendous for Democrats.
>Boomers are slowly dying off while younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism.
No they aren't. Gen Z young men are all voting for Trump.
>America is getting more diverse and more educated
Diverse maybe, educated no. They're getting more college degrees than 50+ years ago I suppose, but they're not worth much compared to college degrees in the past. These days, college just makes up for utterly lousy secondary school education. Educational standards in the US have been in decline for a very long time.
You appear to be correct; thanks for pointing it out. I'm now seeing[1] a 10 point lead for Trump among ages 45-64, and a tie among ages 65+. My mental model was still based on the 2016 and 2020 numbers.
> younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism.
Young people (18-29) are the age demographic where Trump made his biggest gain from 2020 to 2024. The only demographic where Harris had gains as the oldest demographic.
So while democrats still won the young vote, the trend is in the opposite direction.
Fair point about the trend, yes. And thanks for pointing out that Harris actually made gains with Boomers; I've verified that and updated my mental model.
> Boomers are slowly dying off while younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism.
Is this really the case? My understanding, based on voting data, is that Gen Z was overwhelming for Trump and Trumpism. If anything, Baby Boomers have gone way more left than they have been in previous elections.
I've seen no data showing Gen Z support for Trump, and I'm interested if you have some. I'm seeing[1] an 11 point lead for Harris among the age 18-29 group. That's much more narrow, of course, than the margins in 2016 and 2020, so I guess Gen Z is more supportive of Trump than Millenials were at the same age.
Democrats had a trifecta but couldn't get DC and Puerto Rico statehood or voter right protections because of Blue Dog members of the party. They lost a critical election that led to some of the worst gerrymandered maps against them while most of their own gerrymandering attempts were overturned. Republicans now control the senate, house, judicial, and executive branch and can cement their power forever.
If you don't believe me just look at Mississippi. A state where demographics alone should've made it between blue and purple. Instead, 15% of all Black adults in that state are not allowed to vote. Similarly, in Florida, 10% of all adults cannot vote. Voters passed an initiative by direct democracy to allow felons to vote, but DeSantis just blocked it anyways and the courts, which he controls, backed him.
Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
> Instead, 15% of all Black adults in that state are not allowed to vote. Similarly, in Florida, 10% of all adults cannot vote.
After some research it seems like this is due to felony convictions. I agree voting privileges should be restored upon completion of sentence, but dang I'm more concerned that 10% of all adults in Florida are convicted felons, what's up with that?
Look at the demographics of those convicted felons. I suspect you’ll see certain trends in who tends to be targeted for arrest—given that rates of criminality are broadly equivalent across demographic groups—that align closely with who the people in power don’t want to have any power of their own.
Mississippi is a very obvious case. The white power structure there simply does not want to allow black people to vote so they use all available means to prevent that.
> Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
This shit pisses me off so much. Why can't they play by the same rules? The supreme irony is, if Dems were willing to occasionally fight dirty/play to win as well, at least when they still had some power, it would have likely forced Republicans to try to govern well occasionally rather than simply always playing to win.
NY for example had a map that was gerrymandered to benefit dems. Their SC struck it down and instead we ended up with a map that slightly benefits Republicans.
This is an example of something that happens across the country. Most deep red states are heavily gerrymandered. In contrast, almost every single state that uses an independent redistricting commission is blue. This means Dems are unable to play by the same gerrymandering tactics as Republicans
> Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
It's almost as if they need a different platform that can get them a win instead of complaining that the majority of their voters live in a handful of states.
The election system is what it is.
If you want to win, you need to do something to win - not complain about the system.
Runoff voting or something similar would work too. Tons of people don't vote for their preferred 3rd party because they realistically want to help their slightly-aligned major party defeat their not-aligned other major party.
> You'd need proportional representation or something like the French system or you wind up with very skewed results
Is the French system a good example of a multi-party system? It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties and it doesn't guarantee proportional representation. The presidential election is a winner-takes-all system and in the election for the Assemblée Nationale each constituency is a winner-takes-all.
> Is the French system a good example of a multi-party system?
I would say yes in the sense a new party can (and did) emerge and rise to power when there is demand. Even before that you had some healthy rise and fall of political parties and political alternance beyond just two main contenders.
> It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties
There are like 6 parties with more than 10% of seats, the current government is a coalition of five parties (from two main "families") and no shutdowns or hung parliament.
> Doesn't guarantee proportional representation
That however is true, and by design. This is a property the french voting system share with eg: ranked choice and other systems that aim at resolving the compromise as part of the election rather than afterwards.
I don't mean to say that the french voting system is perfect (I quite like ranked choice), simply that it is a functioning one with interesting properties.
Thanks. I had no idea there where that many parties in the parliament. At the last election I got the impression that it was just Le Pen's party, Macron's party, and a left-wing coalition. But I guess that was simplifying media coverage.
not necessarily, I just wanted to give an example of the kind of measures that would be required to handle multiple parties that people might already know.
The House of Representatives in the US gets voted in the exact same way that Parliament in the UK gets voted. Yet there isn't a single third party seat in the House. The problem is something non-electoral, like the third parties are not trying hard enough, or they are being blocked somehow, if they don't have even one seat in the House.
Yep, but it actually breaks the UK system to have more than two parties so the existence of two parties there isn't actually a very good alternative. There's a lot of seats in the most recent election where the Conservative party lost only because the even further right wing Reform party took so many votes.
If I were to guess why third parties don't make much of a dint it'll be because successful movements gradually get incorporated into one party or the other via the primary system. Once a party has drained away the core appeal the third party or outside movement will flounder.
I don't think third parties even really try to organize and do the boring work of proving themselves in local/state office.
They are just spoilers; you don't see the Libertarians or Greens saying "you know what, forget the presidency, obviously we aren't going to win--let's field candidates for like mayor, city council, DA, state legislature, etc. in really swingy/purple districts and show people what we can do"
Canada has FPTP and has 5 parties represented in parliament.
Right now the governing party is a Liberal/NDP alliance, and it's possible that the next election will result in a Conservative government with a Bloc opposition.
The bloc only exist because Quebec is special. The NDP only exist because the liberals just pander and then do whatever they want once elected and everyone knows it.
(and Canadians in the east are afraid to vote conservative federally because they are mostly a western thing)
And greens having one seat is not anything real
The bloc only exist because Quebec is special. The NDP only exist because the liberals just pander and then do whatever they want once elected and everyone knows it.
(and Canadians in the east are afraid to vote conservative federally because they are mostly a western thing)
I don't remember who said it, but I loved the idea of an extra option on the ballot for a redo. If it gets a big enough percentage, you redo the election with new candidates and the old ones can't be candidates ever again.
The problem with that is everyone might vote for it repeatedly, making more and more politicians ineligible. You could end up with 10 or 20 elections in one year and you wouldn't be able to repeal the rules without a government in place.
What needs to happen is that the American people need to RUN. Every single time. Take Colorado as an example: A third party candidate could get on the ballot for congress for as little as 1,500 signatures from registered voters. To change the two-party system will be like legalizing marijuana. City by city, state by state, all the way.
The problem is that there's not much money in third party politics...
Don't you worry, even with the large number of parties in the Austrian Nationalrat, German Reichstag or even in the Dutch's Tweede Kamer you still have people who are unhappy with all of the parties.
Is the destruction a problem? When a viable third-party rises up, you will again return to a two party system, that is true. But it will be with the new party that you want, not the old party that wasn't cutting it.
The other interesting thing about Denmark is that most parties are similar on immigration. Across the pond it's likened to a Social Democracy, but it's also a high-trust society with low crime rates.
Even if a 3rd party got elected president, the Senate and the House are Republican/Democrat, they wouldnt be able to get anything passed and it would be largely useless.
I have always thought that it would be interesting to see an "Ordinary people party" that focuses on the silent majority, held by someone who never wants to be the president but loves to hold a percentage as a bargaining chip.
Is it? You couldn't really know until you split out the parties. One odd thing I find with the GOP right now is there seem to be a lot of people voting with the hope they won't actually do the things they said they'd do.
It feels like there are lots of people in the GOP who want to go a lot farther than "Ordinary people" do.
Is it? You couldn't really know until you split out the parties. One odd thing I find with the GOP right now is there seem to be a lot of people voting with the hope they won't actually do the things they said they'd do.
Proportional representation is more important than RCV vs approval voting for single-winner elections. And, in the US, multi-winner RCV (single transferable vote) is the most viable approach to achieve that.
* You can cap the number of candidates to rank (in other words cap the number of instant run-offs before another election may be needed). Or you cap the number of candidates, or determine a tie-breaker strategy after X rounds.
* What adverse effects are there that are worse than FPTP?
* I think if someone loathes candidate A, doesn't like candidate B but would tolerate them, and REALLY LIKES candidate C, they should be able to express that preference. Approval voting demands they express B and C with equal endorsement. Personally, I think that's discouraging.
> what adverse effects are there that are worse than FPTP.
* The results of close elections become basically random (due to results swinging wildly depending on the order in which the first few candidates are eliminated)
* You have to convey results with a series of graphs rather than a single graph (which confuses voters)
* You need all ballots in-hand to start an official count, so you can't call elections early
* You lose the ability to perform risk-limiting audits, which are the cheapest and easiest way to audit elections
So bad actors can trivially affect RCV elections by destroying or delaying a few mail-in ballots, as well as cast doubt on RCV results as a whole
Canada doesn't have any "hard right" party of note at the federal level.
Today, the Conservative Party is a centre-left party. They support big government, taxation, immigration, interventionism, and other policies that are inherently not compatible with "right wing" ideologies.
Comparing the Conservative Party's platform to that of the centrist People's Party makes the Conservative's centre-left positioning more obvious.
Recently, the Conservative Party's platform has more closely resembled the farther-left Liberal Party's platform than it has the centrist People's Party platform.
I would think that the social policies of the federal Conservative Party place it in Centre-Right to Right. It’d be closer to what you mention if Peter MacKay or Erin O’Toole had no opposition in 2020.
I understand that your political views might see the Tories as Centre-Left, but your pegging of the PPC as centrist strikes me as mischaracterizing the present federal landscape.
> The conspiracy theorist-turned-third-party candidate’s campaign has weathered a series of increasingly improbable-sounding scandals in recent months, from Kennedy’s admission that a worm ate part of his brain to his denial of reports that he once ate barbecued dog (he said it was a goat).
> Kennedy just happened to have an old bike in his car, which he said someone had asked him to get rid of. He recalled that the city “had just put in the bike lanes” after a number of serious accidents, and decided to stage the bear in Central Park as if it had been hit by a bike.
Never vote for crazy. Simple
> This sort of discourse does not belong here. Shame on you.
I'm sorry, it is obvious. Shame on you for not just reading the evidence and making a rash judgement that this guy would be fit to run the country. He makes Trump look like an actual very stable genius.
We would have it if Republicans didn't bend their knee to Trump in 2016. We'd have Democrats, Trumpists and Republicans. But Republicans didn't want to become a third party so they let themselves get completely consumed by Trumpists in exchange for letting them keep the branding.
I guess he has been playing the long game then right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.
>He said that the financial industry and the military–industrial complex are funded at the expense of the American middle class; that the U.S. government is dominated by corporate power; the Environmental Protection Agency is run by the "oil industry, the coal industry, and the pesticide industry";
>In an interview with Andrew Serwer, Kennedy said that the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. had become too great and that "the very wealthy people should pay more taxes and corporations". He also expressed his support for Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax plan, which would impose an annual tax of 2% on every dollar of a household's net worth over $50 million and 6% on every dollar of net worth over $1 billion.[147]
>Kennedy attacked the operations of former CIA director Allen Dulles, condemning U.S.-backed coups and interventions such as the 1953 Iranian coup d'état as "bloodthirsty", and blamed U.S. interventions in countries such as Syria and Iran for the rise of terrorist organizations such as ISIS and creating anti-American sentiment in the region.
>In an article titled "Why the Arabs Don't Want Us in Syria" published in Politico in February 2016, Kennedy referred to the "bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mideast nationalists 'hate us for our freedoms.' For the most part they don't; instead they hate us for the way we betrayed those freedoms—our own ideals—within their borders".
>Kennedy has advocated for a global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy,[169][170] but has opposed hydropower from dams.[129][130][131][132][133][134] He has argued that switching to solar and wind energy reduces costs and greenhouse gases while improving air and water quality, citizens' health, and the number and quality of jobs.[171] Kennedy's fight to stop Appalachian mountaintop removal mining was the subject of the film The Last Mountain.
>As a "well-respected climate lawyer" in the 2000s,[204] Kennedy was "often linked to top environmental jobs in Democratic administrations", including in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections.[209] He was considered as a potential White House Council on Environmental Quality chair for Al Gore in 2000 and considered for the role of EPA administrator under John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008.[209]
Nader is the kind of leader we need, but don’t deserve.
Dems employed some similar strategies with Sanders in 2016, despite his decision to run as a Democrat.
It is interesting to look at the intersection of positions held by the likes of Ralph Nader and Ron Paul, especially where they differ from their respective “most aligned” mainstream party platforms, where they are marginalized. The most prevalent of these are the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes, and in my anecdotal experience 98% of the people agree regardless of their socio-economic status
I'm not, Ross Perot played a big part in getting Clinton elected so it'd be weird for them to take issue with him. More recently the democrats blamed 2000 on Nader running third party on the assumption that all of his votes would've gone to Gore otherwise.
You're right, I misread. I meant to allude to the fact that Perot's run was really the only viable 3rd party campaign in recent history. Nader got about 2% of the popular vote, Perot got ten times that, at about 20%. Candidates looking to replicate or even one-up his success need to, likewise, circumvent traditional media gatekeepers to get in front of voters constantly, incessantly.
This is bordering on misleading. In Florida, Gore lost to Bush by 537 votes. Nader had 97,488. There was no need for a conspiracy that all or even most Nader votes would have tipped it.
FL had 57% in favor but needed 60 for an amendment to state constitution. Generally speaking it seems that this issue has popular support, which hopefully counts for something.
Florida unfortunately does not have an actual ballot initiative process. People have been misusing the constitutional amendment process as a makeshift ballot initiative process for the past couple of decades.
Unfortunately, this has a lot of drawbacks. Amending the constitution requires a 60% supermajority, which I think is appropriate for constitutional questions, but is too high of a threshold for ordinary policy legislation. In this case, repealing the laws against abortion and marijuana have majority public support by a wide margin, so why should we have to pass new constitutional amendments with a 60% supermajority just to repeal bad statutes that were passed via the ordinary legislative process in the first place?
On top of that, because measures passed this way become constitutional provisions, rather than normal legislation, it makes it difficult for the courts to exercise judicial review and reconcile these measures with extant law. It's sort of the worst of both worlds.
Maybe we should try to get an actual ballot initiative process into a draft constitutional amendment for the next election cycle.
100% agree. No implementation details, just a setup for additional court cases... when we've seen that courts making decisions on reproductive rights doesn't count for too much.
my hope is that somehow, someway, somewhere.... there is a politician who will think twice about further stripping reproductive rights because of this. Or maybe even someone who will help expand. It is a popular position with wide support.... and hopefully that does mean something.
you've got to stay hopeful. votes do count, but a 60% threshold means a minority have more sway in this instance.
You believe abortion means murder and that illegal immigrants bring in crime. Those are somewhat reasonable things to believe in and both lead to one candidate. I am not as surprised as you are.
I'm not justifying them, but I completely understand why someone would think like that.
Exit polling yesterday didn't really indicate that, despite it being a big part of Trump's rhetoric. It more-so indicated that the economy and democracy (anti-establishment) were the most important issues.
Also learned that massive numbers of latinos supported Trump precisely for those issues. Destroys the argument that supporting illegal immigration is a way to win over American latinos for Democrats
I don't think this is accurate when you consider the "addons" that were pushed as part of these initiatives. Further you can look at the past few months drastic decreases due to presidential initiatives to further bolster the rights argument that the didn't even need these initiatives and could have just enforced existing laws.
That's the problem. The solutions are already on paper, just not enforced. Much like theft in California which appears to have had a drastic shift back with this election too.
People was consistency and enforcement regardless of party.
Unfortunately it seems the gambit to hold the congress hostage has worked for them. Bad juju for any sort of attempt at building political alliances if you are punished for compromising across the aisle, but rewarded for holding the populace hostage until you get a supermajority to enact 100% of your agenda.
I mean that makes sense? If you buy into the narrative that illegal-immigration is bad, then anyone could feel it personally. Weigh that against abortion which affects a few people in some smaller states where it is still illegal. Granted it has way more traumatic effects but still it makes sense most people can just ignore it as an issue.
If you total the population of the states which have a ban also I would bet it is less than 50m people, so ~15% of the population live in a state where it is banned and those are heavy rust belt states so they might even be in favor of it being banned.
I've heard this a lot, so I looked for the bill, because these bills usually have things that politicians don't tell you about.
> Next, the bill establishes an expedited process that authorizes asylum officers to adjudicate certain asylum claims. Among other provisions, these provisional noncustodial removal proceedings impose certain target timelines for determining asylum claims and limit review of denied claims. The bill also establishes a stricter threshold for individuals to remain in the United States pending adjudication of an asylum petition.
> The bill extends and establishes immigration pathways for Afghan citizens or nationals, including by (1) making certain individuals admitted or paroled to the United States eligible for conditional permanent resident status, and (2) expanding eligibility for special immigrant visas for certain individuals who were injured while supporting the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
No wonder Republicans never voted for this. This goes against their MO. I can't blame them for not voting against their views and the views of their constituents on a specific part of the policy.
> The bill extends and establishes immigration pathways for Afghan citizens or nationals
Were R's against this part? I thought giving immigration pathways to those Afghans that fought on our side in the war had R support? I'm very fuzzy but seem to recall a Republican veteran being one of the key people advocating for it on a news segment i'd listened to.
The problem with your argument is that this was only 8 months or so ago, and so we all remember how this bill was championed and lauded by the Republicans until Trump said “vote against it because I don’t want the Democrats to have a win”.
My statement still stands, I quoted things ADDED to the bill over time, so by the time they added what the left wanted in order to vote for it, nobody wanted it.
If you visit my link, you will notice the asylum bits were all added on the same day they voted on the bill.
This argument is so dumb. Yes, they had a chance, ill give you that, but this bill came up 3.5 years after Biden took office, after 8-10M illegals came in. They only started caring about the open border when they saw it could hurt them politically.
Again the DEM party took another opportunity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
They should have nominated Mark Kelly. The GOP ran on "this bitch hates America". You can't run on that against a 4 star rear admiral who also went into space.
> You can't run on that against a 4 star rear admiral who also went into space.
If I've learned anything since 2016 it's that you absolutely can convince ½ of Americans that a 4 star rear admiral who also went into space hates America.
I'm curious. Let's say Biden hadn't completely bombed the debate but continued to muddle along as he had been, and the DNC didn't try to force him out. Would he have won?
2016 : Hilary Clinton - People felt that she was chosen because it was her turn
2020 : Kamala Harris - A candidate who never ever even did well in the primaries.
I hope DNC learn from this and let people choose a candidate next time.
How do you tell the difference between someone who would suffer a Jeremy Corbyn style catastrophic defeat, and a Keir Starmer who is the PM of the party by the same name but is basically completely different in every other way?
Correct, bernie and corbyn were both well meaning with genuine ideas and were lambasted by the press, opposition and even their own parties to never stand a chance of election. Tulsi had similar issues.
Tulsi Gabbard??? She is completely different, she is an opportunistic cult follower without ideals or ideas of her own. Doesn't really matter much now though.
Agree with the Corbyn analogy, but let's not overstate Starmer's electoral appeal. He got less votes than Corbyn. What got him elected is that tory voters didn't show up to vote because of tory policies.
Bernie definitely would have defeated Trump. He had unique crossover appeal. Trump was extremely unpopular in 2016 and it took a historically disliked candidate to lose to him.
Only Bernie had a personality cult to rival Trump's. I don't think a single person loved Hillary - they were just okay with her. Many, many people fanatically loved Bernie.
The way the party worked against Bernie Sanders is a prime example of how it treats the average American: We make the decisions, not you, and if you don't fall in line we will crush you.
Conformity, if you'll pardon me, is not a trait all those Americans who voted for Trump have, nor want. They are individuals and would like to be treated as one.
>Conformity, if you'll pardon me, is not a trait all those Americans who voted for Trump have, nor want.
I'm sure that's what all 72 million of them think. Including the ones (the majority?) who don't like Trump, but who thought a vote for Harris was anathema.
He is a successful politician. The party is giant and complex. To me, the biggest factor was his support of wealth taxes, which puts him firmly in a different camp than Biden, Warren and Bloomberg, and caused him to be opposed by everybody with power in the DNC. That is the only "line" they really mean to fall into, and it doesn't even affect the average American.
Honestly I think Trump would have labeled him "3-home Bernie"[0] or something and sunk him, similar to how he sunk Warren (w/ the Pocahontas meme). Don't get me wrong, Bernie is my favorite, but no one is immune to Trump's attacks, and there is just no way to attack him back (in a way that his supports care about).
The DNC has some serious soul-searching to do. If they didn't figure out that people wanted Bernie over Hilary, I doubt they will learn that the US voter didn't like getting lied to about Biden's mental fitness and then just inserting someone we never voted on.
I think they knew full well that people wanted Bernie over Hilary, and they just didn't care. They believed that they could shove Hilary down our throats and actively colluded with her campaign to undermine Sanders. When people objected they fought to defend the position that they aren't required to hold a fair primary election. I doubt they'll learn anything from this and that they'll never give up the ability to make backroom deals then force their chosen candidate regardless of how democrats feel about them.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The general "air" about the democratic party seems to be that they know what's best for you, so shut up and vote blue so that we can "save democracy" (by the people who inserted a candidate that no one voted for).
Regardless of policy, which I won't get into here, we have to acknowledge that treating adults like children isn't a rock-solid battle strategy.
Hillary Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders in the primary. That's not some big bad Democrat party thing. That's literally how Democratic primary voters voted in 2016. I don't know where you're getting your information, but it is completely opposite reality.
No one was shafted. He lost. He lost as bad as Hillary Clinton did to Obama in 2008. Literally the same margin of defeat. You just got manipulated into thinking it was something sinister. You can probably thank a foreign power for that.
In early 2020, Sanders flipped Biden, leading more than Trump lead his rivals for much of the primary, and likely would have gone on to win the nomination, with the momentum he was carrying into the bulk of state contests. Biden's centrist rivals colluded with him and the DNC, suddenly dropping out before Super Tuesday. Buttigieg, one of the dropouts, was awarded with a cabinet appointment that he was completely unqualified for, as exemplified by his gross mishandling of first a rail strike, and then a large accident (caused by conditions the strikers were organizing to rectify) which dumped toxic chemicals into a small town.
That was the one I paid close attention to. If 2016 was anything like it (and I'm sure it was, considering this year's convention tactics were used all the way back in the 1940s to force Truman on us), I have no doubt that this is the DNC's modus operandi. The true steal of the last 3 elections were establishment Democrats' theft of the liberal and leftist vote. And in 2 out of 3 of those cases, they paid in the general.
We have leaked emails proving that the DNC colluded directly with her campaign, Sanders had to file lawsuits against them to get access to information he was entitled to, and in a lawsuit following the leaks the DNC's own lawyers argued as their defense that they had zero legal obligation to run a fair primary. (see https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Wi...) Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned following the scandal and as payment for her services she was gifted a cushy position working directly for Hillary Clinton's campaign.
This isn't some conspiracy by "a foreign power" it's well documented history
The problem with the left is they're now completely out of touch with the bottom 75%, which is what the massive Hispanic vote swing should be throwing alarms for.
The left is filled with richer, coastal elites (top 25%); and impoverished minorities in blue cities that vote overwhelmingly left traditionally. On what planet does that recipe work out over time?
The left became a gross contradiction. It should be for the masses, it should be primarily focused on the working class. All those elitist Hollywood endorsements are just a big obnoxious joke, they repel the average person and amplify the point that the left is out of touch.
The Democratic Party keeps moving left on cultural issues and right on economic issues, when the world (not just the US) is starting to move in the opposite direction.
These things aren’t actually either/or, but when you pontificate on gender-affirming care in a country where half the population can’t afford just regular healthcare because of high deductibles… the feeling people get is exactly what you expressed.
In what world is the Democratic party moving to the right on economic issues?
1. Tax breaks for first time home buyers
2. Tax breaks for families with a new born
3. Pondering an unrealized capital gains tax
> pontificate on gender-affirming care
This is such a hackneyed point and it surprises me that this is something anyone considers. We should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Trans issues should not be difficult to 'pontificate' on. There is gender affirming health care for trans individuals, Democrats broadly support those individuals having access to that care. Democrats are also the party that is aggressive on healthcare and supporting government programs for reducing healthcare costs.
In all seriousness, do trans issues actually impact your day to day in any way? Trans people seem to live rent free in people's minds and I only ever hear about it in a political scenario. It seems like the most manufactured issue aside from immigration in recent memory.
Im pretty left, I just also recognize demand-side provisions (tax breaks) dont work when the enemy is asset inflation (housing costs). In reality, that extra capital would just flow into the hands of people already holding the assets, and the now financially stretched buyer has to hope housing price growth continues (making the situation even more dire for future buyers), or the bet they've made doesn't make sense.
The reality with housing is: someone has to take the loss, but we keep choosing to double it and give it to the next generation.
I think a lot of people are probably not exactly thrilled about the 'extra' provisions for "first generation home buyers" (meaning the parents didn't own one).
In the current political climate, with the current border policy, that sounds an awful lot like a two-tier entitlements system where the more significant help will go to 'illegal immigrants', 'asylum seekers' etc.
Also $25,000 really doesn't mean much when the entire housing market is set to double or even triple when you look at the last 5 years and project into the future. If your mortgage is still going to be $2,500 for a run-down house that would have cost $40,000 25-30 years ago but it's more like $400,000 and rising now... it's not exactly the 'lift' I think most people want.
Honestly as someone who has been scrimping and saving to try to buy a home for the last 6 years, I would be somewhat annoyed if suddenly every broke first generation person is thrust to first in line for the limited housing supply we have, driving prices up further. The fact that it is specifically structured to exclude people with roots here is kind of a slap in the face -- there is no reason it shouldn't just be tied to income, so suddenly it is needlessly political.
My point isn't really to argue the merits of either approach though - just wanted to give you some insight into why as a 'first time' but not 'first generation' potential home buyer I find her plan to be a short-sighted attempt at grabbing votes. Not that it matters now - clearly there is a mandate to swing the opposite direction we have been going.
I'll also add this though:
Under the last Trump presidency, I made literally 50% less than I do now (thankfully got a solid 50% bump right before covid happened) and I had MUCH more disposable income. It's crazy that I am longing for the days and economy where I made $60k and could go out AND save money regularly. Now I have to plan any extra expenses, I have moved back in with family to be able to save, and even without the $1,800 rent payment I am still behind where I was in the last Trump economy.
>Honestly as someone who has been scrimping and saving to try to buy a home for the last 6 years, I would be somewhat annoyed if suddenly every broke first generation person is thrust to first in line for the limited housing supply we have, driving prices up further. The fact that it is specifically structured to exclude people with roots here is kind of a slap in the face -- there is no reason it shouldn't just be tied to income, so suddenly it is needlessly political
Yeah, this was my reaction to it as well. The only real way to bring down housing prices is to drastically increase the housing supply and find a way to prevent companies like Blackrock from snapping them up and leaving them empty to keep rental prices high. The "enemy within" is actually PE firms...
"The only real way to bring down housing prices is to drastically increase the housing supply and find a way to prevent companies like Blackrock from snapping them up and leaving them empty to keep rental prices high"
This is exactly the change that needs to happen - the fact that entire subdivisions of housing are being built specifically so these multi-national conglomerates can use them as an investment vehicle, AND all the existing homes are being snatched up by them is criminal in my eyes.
The most impactful thing anyone could do to improve the housing situation in this country is to prevent these operations from using single family homes as investment vehicles. I don't know the 'exact right' way to achieve this - but I'm certain the exact legislative language could be hammered out to make things better for EVERYBODY except the bottom feeders.
The economy is approaching great depression levels of 'bad' - and plenty of things have inflated 100% or more, 20% is more like the general 'average'. And plenty of those things are critical items, like laundry detergent, gas, and insurance.
I'll put it this way:
When I was making $60k 5 years ago, a night out for two in my preferred 'fun time out' would be:
$35 concert ticket x 2, $20 ride x 2(to and from show to avoid dangerous driving), $6 drink x 6/2 -- so a complete fun time out was roughly $140
Now the same concert venue and ticket is $85 x 2, the ride is $40 x2, the drinks (if you don't abstain due to the previous costs) are $14 x 6 and suddenly $140 turned into $354 (more than double). And honestly depending on the day or event that could be more.
This is just one example of how 'going out and enjoying life outside your cubicle' has easily doubled in cost.
You can zoom in on any portion of the economy and find similar. Laundry detergent isn't only up 20%. Gas isn't only up 20%. Insurance isn't up 20%. Groceries have easily doubled, regardless of which basket item you decide to focus in on to obscure that.
Great question though - How have they managed to crash the 'living wage' economy so badly that I either have to live like a broke college student with six figures, when I used to be able to go out weekly.
Averaging out the inflation across the economy doesn't really work for those of us 'making it' -- but if you already made it and the increase in price for laundry detergent, gas, food, or whatever else doesn't actually impact you I'm sure it's difficult to see how bad things have got.
I think you'd have to ask Biden or Yellen or someone in the outgoing administration exactly how they pulled it off though.
I'm just wondering where in the country you live with those prices. When I used to go out _10_ years ago there's no way I would ever find a $6 drink. Right now a cocktail costs me $13-$15. 10 years ago, a cocktail used to cost me $13-$15. Gas is back to pre-covid prices.
I don't know. I've seen prices go up, but I honestly think people are exaggerating. I buy groceries and food too. I don't spend anywhere close to double what I did even 10 years ago.
Drink = Canned Beer @ one of the countries best music venues outside a major metro area.
I'm not going to be posting more details regarding my location on a public forum however.
"I don't spend anywhere close to double what I did even 10 years ago."
I bet you also have had to tighten your belt buckle to achieve that - if not, you are an anomaly.
Really though my anecdote about my personal inflation woes is not the point, and I just included it as an after thought to provide some context. The core message I am trying to convey is before that, and I don't see much value in comparing individual items in different geographic regions.
If you are genuinely as unaffected as you say, good for you - the only people I know who are in that position are retired already and insulated from changes more than most.
it sounds like price gouging to me. The venue is more than doubling its price and charging you $14 for a can of beer. How is this Biden's fault, of all things?
Anyway, I'm relatively cheap so I always pay attention to prices. Eggs, milk, bread, chicken, etc have all gotten slightly more expensive. Nothing even close to double. I don't understand what people are buying.
"it sounds like price gouging to me. The venue is more than doubling its price and charging you $14 for a can of beer. How is this Biden's fault, of all things?
Anyway, I'm relatively cheap so I always pay attention to prices. Eggs, milk, bread, chicken, etc have all gotten slightly more expensive. Nothing even close to double. I don't understand what people are buying."
This is exactly why I tried to redirect you to the core point of my message, instead of the 'addendum'. It was obvious you were looking for some 'leverage' to declare your perceived experience as the 'correct' one.
Now you have pivoted to 'inflation isn't really real, that venue is screwing you' because of zeroing in on one item. I can assure you, prices are similar throughout the city I am referencing. It wouldn't matter one bit which venue I chose.
Perhaps you are OK with staying home and watching every penny and never doing anything enjoyable in life that costs a few bucks.
For the rest of the country, they are feeling it in their everyday lives - whether that is food costs, hobby costs, or whatever matters to them -personally-.
Under Trump we were doing demonstrably better. It took an immediate nose dive under Biden, and his entire administrations policies have made things worse - and most importantly, there is no sign they had a real plan to fix that, and it showed at the polls.
It's fine if you want to get hyper-fixated on the one statement you feel compelled to 'debunk' my lived experiences and observations, but that wont change the fact that entire metro areas are becoming either unlivable or pointless to live in unless you are making $200,000+ (in that you can afford the rent but not to enjoy the local attractions).
I'm glad you aren't feeling the squeeze, genuinely.
According to PBS / NPR roughly 60% of the country believe we are in a recession.
You can count me amongst them, because of my lived experiences. I'm not going to continue to quibble about what -I- am doing wrong budget wise accourding to your tiny little insight into my life which this comment provided.. and I think you'll find if you approach most anyone who has legitimate concerns in this manner you will have changed exactly 0 minds.
By all means though, if you are comfortable then I'm sure 60+% of the country who feels like they are living through something worse than '08 must bet making up things to complain about and hoarding their money secretly to plan an epic prank on... someone
Yea, inflation sucks. But it's not like Trump can fix the fact way too much money was printed during COVID crisis. The crisis should have resulted in a major economic depression, but instead we got a big party through stimulus. Now we're suffering from a hangover, and Trump can't change that.
Trump can absolutely reign things in, I don't think anyone thinks he can snap his fingers and 'fix' something broken this badly.
But yeah, he 100% can take a different direction than the administration that printed more USD than had previously existed in the entirety of the countries history.
'Trump can't wave a magic wand and un-do what the current admin did, so it doesn't make sense to change directions best to stick with the current administration that doesn't think there is anything they could or should have done different' is not the rationale for my position.
Just look at how the stock market responded today - clearly I'm not the only person who thinks 'this will position our economy much better than it is today'.
Dems have not pontificated on gender-affirming care. It is an insignificant issue that affects a minuscule amount of the electorate. There would be minimal discussion on it if it wasn't for the incessant harping from the right to rile up their base.
It is so simple and effective to weaponize social issues. This is easy to see when you read right-wing discussion: they believe that the left is absolutely obsessed with gender-affirming care, because that is the reality they are fed.
I have a conservative relative who talks about 'wokeness' and gender-affirming care almost non-stop, because he believes that it's being 'shoved down his throat', when in reality, it is right-wing media that is doing the shoving.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, as this is spot on.
The Democratic part has completely lost touch with the working class. Harris struggled to articulate any sort of economic policy other than "we're going to ban price gouging, give money to people to start businesses, and help people make down payments on houses" with no details. Meanwhile, they latched onto some of the most fringe culture war issues like making sure that trans men can compete in women's sports.
I voted for her because another Trump presidency is literally an existential threat to the country, but I saw this coming from a mile away.
I believe the Dem plan contributed to the massive apathy or large cohorts voting for the GOP candidate. People that have houses, school age kids and aren't planning on starting businesses see nothing valuable with those plans.
The Democrats are ignorant that their open arms (accepting everyone, working for everyone) policies and rhetoric will sway minorities when culturally there are strong christian and catholic populations amongst demographic minorities that have firm beliefs that are conservative.
I agree. It actually looks quite similar to the situation here in EU, with traditional leftist parties losing popularity to right-wing populists. Leftist parties should focus first and foremost on protecting worker's rights, anything else should come second. Supporting open migration policy in particular is problematic, as it drives down wages to the very workers who might want to vote leftist parties. People who are struggling financially also don't particularly enjoy hearing how they are privileged because of their gender/skin color or whatever.
The left should simply recognize that distribution of wealth and means of production is the number one factor affecting equality. It's their job to lobby for things like progressive taxation and social safety nets.
> Leftist parties should focus first and foremost on protecting worker's rights
They should focus first and foremost on improving the economic condition of the average American. The low income, as well as the middle class slipping into poverty. Worker's rights is a major part of that, but only one part of it. Watching the prices of basic necessities like housing, food, and healthcare while billionaires and corporations are making record profits is bound to piss off the people.
That said, Trump certainly isn't going to make any of that better. In fact, it'll all get much worse, but on the slim chance democrats actually try to win voters back vs just counting on America to come crawling back to save the US from the four year shit show we've just started and if our new dictator allows us to have fair elections in the future, I think you've got the right idea for where they can start.
Look at senate and governor candidates that over performed and underperformed vs Kamala in their state. People have studied it for years and the basic finding is the classic one. Moving to the center wins you votes. You'll find that moderate/centrist dems over perform and leftist dems underperform.
They've studied this. And the cause is is the following. Yes you get your base to turn out more. But extremism motivates their base even more than your own, and switched vote from an independent is twice as impactful as an extra vote. A simple example is you get one more of your base to turn out. You lose an independent, and you get 2 of their base to turn out. And end up down 3 votes.
Part of the problem is that our primaries are weird. Primary voters tend to be more extreme (left and right) and when moderates show up to vote in the election, they're upset there's no moderate choice. I was talking to some colleagues from Australia and not voting is a fine. Makes primaries much more representative of the actual election when you get everyone to vote.
I've had the thought that the US primary system prevents any meaningful application of Ranked Choice, or other alternative methods. Currently there's no other proximate-choice candidates that make it to the general election; i.e., the case where Kamala and Bernie and Trump are on the General Election ballot can't happen in most places right now, which narrows the choice field significantly.
Note: There is small minority that show that this is effect shrinking with time. My personal belief for why this is happening is basically voters are judging individual politicians more by the moderation/extremeness of the party's positions and less by the politicians personal beliefs.
I think people mistake his radical-styled rhetoric for radical policies
Trump is one of the most moderate Republicans on most social issues (abortion, lgb, criminal justice etc.)
He is the most moderate on entitlements (constantly promises to not cut medicare, medicaid and social security) contrary to every Republican campaign in the past (remember Paul Ryan?)
He is a "moderate" on foreign policy (not a Cheney/Bush war hawk, not a 60's style pacifist)
I could go on but I think the important point is; every point he wants to make, he makes in the loudest most wild way possible and people who aren't disposed to vote for him anyway see that as "radical". The correct word IMO is "crazy" or "wild".
Voters who are in the center or can swing either way see him as promising fairly conventional things but in a crazy tone. Maybe tone doesn't matter as much to them
A linear model (liberal vs conservative) is not great. Consider a planar model with two dimensions: social and economic policy. Trump combined conservative social policy with populist economic policy. Harris promoted liberal social policy. However, in her last town hall, framed herself as a "pragmatic capitalist" (her emphasis). This is a continuation of Democratic rightward shift, the Neoliberal compromise, that was crystallized by Clinton with NAFTA in the 90s. In this election, like 2000, the US public had to choose: a liberal social policy -or- a populist economic policy. What was not on the ballot: liberal social policy with populist economic policy.
This true. They will keep playing this stupid game. Thinking they are on the right side of history, which might be true, or it might not be true; but in the end, the right side of history is decided by the winners. And their current strategy is to alienate as many voters as possible by powering through on issues nobody cares about and acting as if there are no real issues left to fix.
I think they are referring to the anti-liberal authoritarian left wing that has gained a foothold not only in the DNC but into the mainstream culture in certain ways. But "left-wing fascism" is a thing, or at least and idea, that has been around for awhile. Some call it "red fascism" and is in reference to left wing ideologies that are far from the center. It sort of invokes "horseshoe theory" that says left and right get pretty similar the further they get from the center.
I had the same thought. When Democrats run a likable, popular candidate they win. Bill Clinton, Obama being the two most recent examples. Trump won largely because his brash, crude, swaggering demeanor appeals to a lot of people and Harris was a candidate that was defaulted in because Biden was just out of gas; nobody really wanted her. Not saying that the Democrats should look for someone like Trump but first and foremost they need someone that a lot of people find likable.
Obama and Clinton both were not at the top of the party apparatus at the time of their first runs. Compare to Gore, Harris, and the other Clinton in 2016. I think the DNC clearly needs to step back and let the party make its own choice.
I think Trump won more on him being not in the current administration, and that people want the current admin out.
Overall the past couple elections have been about kicking people out more than putting people in, and Americans are unhappy with the state of their society.
Trump has at least shown an ability to just ignore the law to get whatever he wants done, and no candidate on the current Democratic party is going to have that
I'm not sure any party in office this last term could have won this election, given there was going to be significant inflation as a rebound from COVID.
Kamala was, shockingly and as a surprise to all, an incredibly capable candidate in 2024. She didn't underperform yesterday relative to other Democrats.
This year, it wasn't about the candidate. It seems clear there wasn't any Democratic candidate who could have won.
In the interest of HN guidelines, I won't respond with sarcasm.
This is a bad opinion. Kamala was a terrible candidate by all metrics. Definitely, the worst Democratic candidate I have seen in my living memory.
It should've been a dead giveaway that now a single Indian or Black person has a good thing to say about her. Her only victory was in California (single party & famously misaligned with national voting trends) and her only televised primary performance was a disaster. Democrats didn't run open primaries because they knew she'd lose.
She didn't have concrete policy proposals, talks like an under-performing consultant and had zero charisma.
Nah, Harris wasn't an ideal choice, just like Hillary Clinton wasn't. Ideally for next elections democrats would need someone likable with plenty of charisma and moderate stance on social issues. Being male would be a plus too, unfortunately.
I think Tim Walz would have done better than Harris.
He does that if he doesn't know about the issue. He does that if he doesn't care about the issue.
Harris couldn't sell. Watch her talk about abortion. On some level that's one of the few things she manages to convey a sense of genuineness about. For everything else it's like she's saying "What do you want me to be for? I'm for that" it's fine if you're thinking that but when people figure out that's who you are it's more toxic then them thinking you're a liar or a clown.
I think the DNC was caught between two kinds of politics: machine and identity. The party is very interested with controlling everything, but they couldn't take the nomination from the first black Vice President. Michelle would not run, and so it would presume that to keep dark horses and other members challenging The VP, something had to have been offered or promised. Also the optics of someone like Newsome, white, affluent, and male, challenging the first black woman etc. etc. It doesn't look good for democrats and could have been very messy.
Kamala, for better or for worse, was their only choice.
I hate to say it as a progressive woman, but the DNC has a non-minority problem.
They need a good white/Hispanic Christian heterosexual male and they just don't seem to have one at this point. Gavin Newsom is the face of everything that is ( allegedly ) wrong with California. Mark Kelly is not a great speaker. They tried with Walz, but even I had a trouble imagining him going face-to-face with Putin.
If there was a democratic Mark Rubio he would have mopped the floor with Trump. I wouldn't necessarily say that the country is not ready for a black female president, but I think a lot of people think that Democrats only care about minorities and I think Harris just enforced that belief.
Josh Shapiro probably would have been a good candidate and quite likely would have been selected if there had been any competitive process to choose the best candidate rather than anointing Kamala. He may be jewish by birth but seems popular and competent.
I think one of the problems with the Democrats and modern left is they have moved away from
>I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.
And towards a DEI set up where Kamala is hired because she ticks the colored and woman boxes rather than because of competence.
As one of my friends says, Democrats were running around yelling
1."Women have the right to abortion." and
2."Everyone has the right to alter their own gender!"
and, while I support the above [well, not exactly: I prefer that one should, when possible, pay for their own voluntary medical procedures].
But, in any case, the above rights have no particular appeal at all to people who are neither pregnant nor gender-uncertain, which is by far the majority of the voting population.
In contrast, Republicans focused on the economy and the border, two things affecting everyone.
> the above rights have no particular appeal at all to people who are neither pregnant
This doesn't sound right to me. You don't have to be pregnant to be interested in keeping abortion legally accessible. You don't even have to be a woman. Keeping a fetus in your body for 9 months when you don't want it is a horror movie scenario for me, and I'm guessing most other women feel the same way. And there are surely many men who want that option available for their partners, as well.
I think they really overestimated how many people were single issue pro-choice voters. Looking back it was the biggest part of their platform but it probably didn't move the needle much. I could tell you much more about Trump's economic plans than Harris's.
I also really wish they could just stop talking about trans rights. I support them too but its a tiny part of the population and anyone who supports them is voting blue anyway. A lot of people don't get it, don't like it, and are going to vote against them given the chance.
I'll also reluctantly agree with the right and say I don't see the need for trans women to compete in sports against cis women. Playing sports is not a constitutional right and I think sometimes its ok to say "I'm sorry but no."
> Playing sports is not a constitutional right and I think sometimes its ok to say "I'm sorry but no."
The problem is that the left has really painted themselves into a corner with the whole “trans women are women” thing. To say that they ARE women but CAN’T compete in women’s sports would be to admit that trans women are not, in fact, the same as biological women.
Well the Republicans also spent a good amount of time yelling that the Democrats were yelling about those things, which is perhaps part of the reason your friend thinks the Dems only care about those issues.
I think Shapiro would have good _except_ for what's currently going on in Palestine. Palestine was always divisive among the left and now more than ever.
Josh Shapiro has also stated in writing that he volunteered with the IDF, which under traditional norms is completely disqualifying for the Presidency or Vice Presidency as it's service to a foreign military.
I agree that this perception about modern leftism in the West is a very big issue. Through no personal fault of Harris, I think that a lot of non-white men and white women voted for Trump because they feel like progressives don't care about (or even hate) men, whatever their color, and don't care about (or even hate) white people, whatever their gender.
I agree. Crazy as it sounds but in the electorate’s mind they blame the Democrats and DEI for their economic struggles. I blame the ineptness of the Democratic Party that in the voter’s mind Trump represents the working class.
When Biden ran, he pointed to his working class roots at every opportunity. I believe what cost the election was that KH simply was not believed by the people working minimum wage and couldn’t afford rent.
By the time Primary season kicks off in early 2028, it will have been twenty years since the last time the Democratic Party membership selected a new candidate without direct interference from party bigwigs.
Democrats have more popular positions, but their problem is that nobody likes them. The DNC is part of the problem. They disenfranchise their own base and it looks weak.
The 2020 primary went without large interference. Lo and behold, the democratic candidate won that election. The lesson is clear: to win elections hold actual primaries instead of appointing candidates.
They’ve been incapable of holding actual primaries since at least 2016. They curate, subvert, stifle, and influence who rises up from the primary election. They don’t care at all about democracy or the republic. Any Democrat who is a populist that actually cares about the American people, ex Bernie Sanders, will be shut down in favor of one that can push globalist agendas at the expense of the local population in exchange for looting the national treasury. When Bernie stepped out of line and genuinely wanted to help people, the DNC establishment whipped him back into step and reminded him who’s boss. I’m genuinely surprised this election appeared to ever be close.
America was saved and a better chapter begins. Do you disagree? A plurality of Americans agree with that sentiment as evidenced by the popular vote and the winning of all 7 swing states.
That definitely feels like the forgotten primary. My best guess is that its because that primary was book ended by primaries that were heavily influenced and controlled by the DNC.
Many believe that the party gave Biden and unfair advantage using their superdelegates. The Republican Party does not have such super delegates, and in fact in 2016 Trump won solely due to his ability to organize and rally a well-working campaign even as party elites were seething at his ascendency and insulting him in public.
Super delegates are undemocratic, and always have been. How does the party of 'democracy' get away with this? The GOP has never used them and always just let its voters vote. When the voters chose Trump despite the leaderships hatred of them, they all stepped aside. Are they perfect... of course not? But compared to the democrats, they've always stood by their voters.
Yep, the DNC has lacked the self-awareness in these past few years to gaze within and cull the cruft that 100% of their voter base hate. Superdelegates need to go. They're this generation's Korematsu (as in they are still active while people would rightfully think they're gone). I feel confident that superdelegates will come back to bite the DNC decades down the line.
In fairness, they actually did change the rules around them after 2016 but stopped short of removing them.
the way I remember it, it was a competitive primary with Bernie and Warren competing for the lead when suddenly Biden mysterious knocked them all out, as if the party had suddenly overruled the process. Maybe that was an illusion but a lot of people interpreted it this way.
Because everyone besides Bernie dropped out right before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden, hoping to get appointments in a future Biden Admin. Many, like Buttigeg were well rewarded for this.
The Democrats even tried to drop the primary here in New York by striking Bernie and everyone from the ballot because they had decided Biden was going to get the nomination.
Biden won pretty handedly because moderates didn't like that Bernie calls himself a socialist. If you're chronically online it might seem like Bernie was leading the pack but I've had many conversations with the older voting population that echo the sentiment that he was never their guy.
This conspiracy from Bernie bros is so deeply stupid.
The democratic coalition depends on black voters, and they decisively chose Joe Biden in South Carolina, sending a clear signal about who would have the strength to beat Trump (and in the end they were right).
At least those folks went after the government instead of smashing the windows of every business in my city. But that event, despite being in the “worst global pandemic of 100 years” somehow got a free pass. It was labeled as “the summer of love”.
This country was founded by government distrust and rebellion. It was not founded on bashing your neighbors windows.
Those people who stormed the capitol put the fear of god into a bunch of politicians. Good for them.
…the people who set fire to neighborhood buildings… not so sure about that one.
Based on voting patterns, I think to many americans today, the main claim of the J6ers (that there were some fraudulent ballots in the 2020 election) is looking more likely, not less. If anything were to come out, the J6ers would become freedom fighters, just as they are apparently in the hearts of many Americans. Like it or not, perception is how you win an election.
On the other hand, the democrats have tried politically-inspired prosecutions, selecting a nominee while ignoring the party writ large.
Anyway, the simple truth is that Americans worried about democracy went to trump by large margins. Consider that
In 2016, prospective candidates were told by the party to sit this one out. It was Hillary's turn and if you run in the primary, you will not have a future in the DNC. This is why we only got Bernie (who isnt even a democrat) and a hand full of no name DNC candidates to vote for. She was chosen, and no big names ran against her.
Where is the evidence for this? Obama was also not a big name candidate in 2008. It's harder to be a bigger name than someone who was both a first lady and a senator.
Bernie supporters filed a lawsuit against the DNC for disenfranchising them. The DNC argued they operate as a private corporation and are free to pick whomever they want "over cigars in a back room".
> “There’s no right to not have your candidate disadvantaged or have another candidate advantaged. There’s no contractual obligation here . . . it’s not a situation where a promise has been made that is an enforceable promise,” Spiva said.
> The DNC is advancing the argument that any claims to be neutral and fair to all candidates were nothing but “political promises” and are unenforceable by law.
It is also not evidence for any interference above 2008. Workers for the DNC had their own preferences for party candidate. This was the case in 2008 as well, but without the emails, it's hard to construct a conspiracy theory. There was no evidence of "sabotage" in the emails.
> The DNC is advancing the argument that any claims to be neutral and fair to all candidates were nothing but “political promises” and are unenforceable by law.
This is a legal argument for throwing out a case (which was thrown out). It is not an admission of being unfair.
On Thursday, Brazile released a excerpt from her new book on Politico’s website. The excerpt explained how the Hillary Victory Fund, Hillary for America, and the Democratic National Committee signed a Joint Fund-Raising Agreement, which gave a significant advantage to Clinton’s campaign.
“Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised,” Brazile wrote. “Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”
“The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical,” Brazile notes. “This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.”
But she was very divisive on the R side. Democrats need someone who is popular enough with their core base to win primaries, but also likable enough to the other side to get some crossover votes.
Did we get verification the emails were unaltered? To make an analogy the initial email release was smoke, it demands investigation, smoke often means fire after all, but not always.
Had a single email been altered, you can be sure that the DNC would have been shouting it from the rooftops. Being able to label the emails as 'altered' would have made for fantastic water-muddying, which is a classic defensive tactic in such a situation. Any political operative would be expected to do the same. The fact that you are (as I am) unaware of any such claim, in an episode which was at the top of the news cycle for months, would seem to be a pretty clear indicator that the emails were legit.
> Had a single email been altered, you can be sure that the DNC would have been shouting it from the rooftops.
Easy to imagine they would not in some cases. Often people do not comment on on going investigations. Or in international espionage I know it is common to hide what you know and what you do not know to keep your competitors/enemies in the dark to give your self an advantage. So the USA spy organizations may not want the DNC to show its hand.
I can not make the assumption that you are putting forth at least.
There was nothing incriminating in the emails. Some staffers preferred one candidate. This was spun into a fixing conspiracy theory. If you think this wasn't true in 2008 or that some RNC staffers don't prefer one candidate, you might be interested in a bridge I have for sale.
Inflation is a complicated topic that doesn't get adequately captured in the sound bites.
I kept hearing clips of voters saying they want prices to go back down, but my understanding of the economics is that this would be terrible. Instead, IMO, what we need is for wages to increase while minimizing the inflationary effect of wage increases. That's not a catchy slogan, however.
Parallel to this, I don't think the post COVID inflation is really due to politicians.
Over 50% of the increased prices are from producers not just recouping their additional expenses, but also increasing profit margins.
Typically you would expect this to be an opportunity for competition, but generally speaking companies are suspiciously raising prices together. They've taken advantage of the COVID shortage and inflation narratives to squeeze consumers.
Corporate consolidation is one of the biggest and least talked about boogeymen of our current era, one which is set to get even worse under Trump's second term. The Biden admin barely, kind of, got anti-trust authorities somewhat working again, and that will be demolished on day 1 of Trump.
Bigger corpos means bigger donations to bigger candidates. The entire system runs on money and nobody's got money to put in like these supercorps. We live in Gerontocracy that is actively building a Corporatocracy to replace it after the Boomers die off entirely and no money will ever go to the working class again.
> If your change is no more durable than a single election, you didn't accomplish shit.
That is the way that the country works! The system is working as intended if a single government appointment can't unilaterally destroy monopolies in a single term.
What do you think inflation is? Demand shoots up, suppliers raise prices or run out, and it takes time for new capacity to be rewarded and created. There's no collusion here.
Inflation isn't just a fiscal (even though Biden failed on the fiscal side as well) or monetary phenomena, it's psychological - i.e. expectations about future prices.
Because the Biden administration was characteristically incompetent (Remember Treasury Secretary doing interviews saying that inflation was just a short-term blip and not persistent?) inflation started to get out of control. Once that happened, 30+ years of low inflation expectations went out the window. Market psychology changed, and because people now expected prices to rise, they weren't as resistant to individual price changes. This gave producers (along with legit covid supply side issues) breathing room to increase prices.
Any real political problem is multifaceted, deeply interconnected with the way the country works and its place in the world. But peoples experiences of them are not, inflation manifests as someone being able to afford rent one year, and not the next.
A good politician, can speak to the experience, but fix the problem. A good salesman can sell you a solution, even if it doesn't fix the problem. And the democratic party, seems mostly interested in talking about the problem and ignoring the experience.
Of course deflation would be terrible for the economy. Expecting the average voter to understand the intricate complexities of how economies work vs I don't have enough money to buy things, so I want prices to drop, is sadly a losing proposition.
Prices wont come back down; but few if any swing voters understand that. They just see high prices under biden and remember lower ones under Trump. Him losing would have taken a very strong candidate given the predicament.
Well, with a less than 6th grade literacy rate for 54% of Americans, it isn’t exactly surprising that many people have a hard time understanding any nuance. I once heard a woman explaining to her captive audience’s amazement how the colors of a “yingyang” were because “ying” means white and “yang” means black. Aside from being wholely incorrect (reversed), the concepts and meaning behind the yin yang of the balance between “light and dark” is completely lost on her. The extent of her knowledge will always be whatever someone she believed told her.
Edit: I forgot to mention, the reason for the colors. “Ying” has an i, for wh”i”te, “Yang” has an “a” for bl”a”ck. It wasn’t even a light/dark thing, it was because she believes the translated name shares a common letter with the color, so that is the reason for those colors. That is the reason why I’m not surprised by the results.
A working economy means professional activity to make goods and services. Deflation actively kills that by incentivizing people to defer or cancel their purchases in favor of savings. So economic activity collapses.
There is no such thing as a durable deflationary market if it’s not justified by productivity gains and volume - and there is definitely no such thing as a durable deflationary economy.
The US was "a durable deflationary economy" for pretty much the whole 19th century, and first decade of 20th century. Things started to change once FED was created and given power over money supply.
Not sure what you're refering to, the 1873 panic wasn't exactly the finest hour for US economy. I guess that's not what you want to get back to.
As for the rest of the 19th century, the data we have is mostly consumer price indexes, but I can't recollect another durable deflationary period in the century.
Depends how much deflation there is with wages compared to everything else, there's a scenario that they have an opportunity to start saving
The majority of the expenses for the disadvantaged young are housing, gas, and food. With housing being 4x more expensive than 4 or 5 years it basically puts all the disadvantaged from even buying a house and then puts them at the mercy of the renters market
Actually, banks can "create" money from nowhere. It's called fractional-reserve banking. When you deposit money into a bank, the bank is required to keep only a fraction of that deposit as reserves. The rest can be used for lending.
The exact fraction is determined by the central bank's reserve requirements. And since 2020 it has been set to... zero percent.
So essentially US banks can infinitely create money.
What?? This isn’t correct at all. A deflationary economic environment is bad no matter the fiscal policy or monetary policy we have in place. You propose it would be better if we pushed for savings. Well if we all know that prices in a few weeks/months/years will be less than today, then spending drops. Friedman pushed velocity of money, even he would agree that a lower velocity would crush an economy.
I never got this line of thinking. I'm already disincentivized from spending because simple investments are likely to outpace inflation. That's a good reason to save as much as I can, but I still buy things, and it's not like I can put off buying food for a year so that prices drop. What's so different about this incentive to save and it being a part of the economy?
There are a number of issues with this comment. One of them is that debt and saving are just sides of the same coin.
More importantly, everybody can see that debt for investment allows more growth. Just think about how many more people can afford to own their own home thanks to taking on debt. This allows them to pay a mortgage instead of rent, which allows them to build up wealth.
Equivalent effects exist in industry.
Debt is an extremely useful tool. We made the right choice here as a society.
Yes prices need to specifically go down. CA decided to DOUBLE DOWN on raising gas prices during the pandemic, and apparently they're slated to vote on another change that could raise prices by $0.45 a gallon. The world has had CHOICES to go in a specific direction, and this administration and all LEFT administrations are pushing for prices to rise, and replace all the failing families with people from China, Venezuela and whoever wants to cross the border.
This post is a wonderful microcosm of why everyone is so divided and tribal now.
Here we have someone sharing a real world example of out of control inflation, which is true across all groceries no one grounded in reality would deny that.
Rather than acknowledge these concerns in anyway, you took time out of your day to imply because they used 1 unhealthy example this runaway inflation is actually a good thing because they will be forced to eat 'healthier'. Completely ignoring how expensive those 'healthy' items are as well (and that they continue to rise).
Then you use your anecdotal experience to further your dismission with 'well, ackkkstually ime prices don't go down so your concerns are invalid.'
This exact attitude is why there is nation-wide a mandate to eliminate the left from all pillars of power. And this is coming from someone who campaigned for Bernie.
1. Kamala isn't a great candidate shown by her poor primary results in 2020.
2. She has all the baggage of running pretty far to the left in 2020. (Like saying she was for performing gender affirming surgery on trans illegal immigrants, agree or disagree with the stance this is a deeply unpopular position)
3. She was tied to the current administration which meant she couldn't distance herself from the inflation issue or attack Trump on age and fitness as much as another candidates not tied to the administration.
> The real problem was Biden not dropping out early enough so that they could have a fair selection process.
This is why it's important for the media to hold politicians' feet to the fire - even if they agree with them. I think there was just a murmur[1] of Biden's problems before the catastrophic debate. Imagine if the media had been hammering the administration on this point 6 months prior.
The media and the party had many opportunities to deal with Biden's age. They didn't. And yes, they did shut out Dean Philips, on the basis of exactly this kind of "he's an unknown, therefore unelectable." Well, they went with a known, and now they're paying for it.
One of the more insightful things I heard in the last few days was this generation of politicians got a lesson in how toxic inflation is politically. And inflation wasn't even that bad, but it felt bad.
Underlying that problem were the Administration thinking they could fool us all into believing that Biden's faculties were unaffected. This was a two-edged sword because it also demonstrated that maybe it doesn't matter so much who is president, at least as domestic affairs go, because the administrative state runs so much on autopilot.
I believe his faculties got substantially worse in 2024. He was a lot more present in speeches in 2021 for example. Mental decline isn't black and white, and you tend to see people as your mental model of how they used to be, so you can look at brief moments of clarity and declare him "well", so many did that. But it doesn't work that way.
I've followed politics for my whole life and watched tons of Biden speeches going back decades. I was seeing his old "spark" quite a bit well into 2024. The debate, he fell off a cliff, and his follow-up interviews were even worse. 3 months before he competently delivered a barn-burning SOTU address. IIRC a few months before that, he delivered a good NATO speech. He'd slip up minor points but he also did that in 2002. Back then they used to call him a gaffe factory.
The gap between his last state of the union (March 2024) and the debate (June 2024) seemed pretty big, and I'm not the only one to say that. But again, it isn't black and white. Maybe the speech format suited him better.
"you tend to see people as your mental model of how they used to be"
Pot? Meet Kettle.
I worked in an advanced Alzheimer's ward for about 4 years when I was younger. There is a look that happens in the eyes which is a sure-sign they are effectively gone - it's like a light has been turned off.
(even if they have moments of lucidity, there is a clear switch that is talked about in exactly these terms if you work in these places and are close to them every day.)
Biden clearly had 'the look' back in 2021, and was making enough gaffes for people who maybe aren't as familiar with the signs of mental decline could clearly see it.
Just because you didn't, doesn't mean everyone else was wrong and saw what they wanted to see.
If you are going to argue 'well, that's just like your perspective man' you have to at least see how that same argument can be turned towards you.
You are absolutely right that it is not black and white - I fully believe that back in 2021 he had enough moments of lucidity (which generally are somewhat reliable, which appear to be tied to the circadian rhythm hence 'sundowners') -- so if all you watched were his scheduled speeches I could see how you may have been left with that impression.
There were plenty of other opportunities to watch his decline in real time however.
> thinking they could fool us all into believing that Biden's faculties were unaffected
Yeah, this was a big part of a general trend of the Democrats treating voters like children to be coddled and lied to. Voters don't like being treated as less-than just because they're less educated, and uneducated doesn't mean stupid. They can see through it.
My county went >75% for Trump, and the reason is because Trump is the only presidential candidate in most of our lifetimes who treats working-class voters as his equal. He doesn't talk down to them, he talks like them, and they eat it up.
I think it is stupid to vote based on how a politician talks rather than the expected impact of their proposed policies, though of course I realize that that’s how elections have been decided in practice for as long as representative governments have existed.
The thing is, when you "talk down" to people, chances are pretty good those people's best interested aren't being represented by the one doing the down-talking.
However, if you "talk to" them, you are in a much better position to actually hear and respond to their concerns - with the added bonus of seeming actually human.
The way you frame it seems to imply that people are voting for him because he talks 'like them' while ignoring the 'to' them. I believe the hot leftist term for this is 'code-switching' which just means talking to your audience with language they understand and relate to -- and it's usually portrayed as a virtue, not a defect.
In reality, these people voted for Trump because as a result of him talking to them like equals rather than down to like subjugated servants left many feeling that he was in fact advocating for policies that support their best interests and would be impactful in their day to day lives.
Obviously personality matters more than it should - but in Trumps case the entire media apparatus was single-mindedly determined to make sure they dictate what his personality is, rather than his words or actions. So if anything this win shows that policy matters more than personality at this point anyway.
Now of course, if you see his policies as wrong and evil and dictatorial and the embodiment of fascism, none of that will matter and no lessons will be learned from this absolute rejection of the democrats platform.
You're not wrong about people resenting being talked down to. I've tried to make this point to Democratic (especially progressive) activists for years and years and it's like talking to a dog that just heard a new noise. The fraction of people in the country that actually care about religious culture wars is relatively small; it's one reason why seven states passed initiatives enshrining abortion rights in their state constitutions this go-round. Voters care deeply about concrete things that affect their lives and they're not receptive to someone haranguing them to care about something else entirely.
If you want to catch a fish, you bait the hook with something the fish wants to eat instead of something you want the fish to eat.
Citation, please? I think you're making the error that the media loves to commit, which is to forcibly reinterpret everything as racism.
For example, in the recent Puerto Rican "garbage" kerfuffle, the comedian never said that Puerto Ricans as such were garbage - that was a fabrication of the media. What he said was that the island of Puerto Rico is an island of garbage, which is figuratively true as it has an acknowledged a problem with garbage disposal.
Similarly, Trump never said that Mexicans are rapists, etc.; that's another media fabrication. What he said was that those in America illegally are disproportionately criminals. That may or may not be true, but it's not a statement about Mexicans as a race, but about a particular subgroup set apart by their own behavior of illegal immigration, and notably NOT directed at their cousins in America legally, or still back in Mexico.
Trump says a lot of crap. But if you find it particularly egregious, chances are that it was fabricated by the media. Another very recent example is when the media told us that Trump said that Liz Cheney should be put in front of a firing squad. In reality, the topic of conversation was her attitude toward war, and his statement was that if there were guns pointed at her, she'd feel different about soldiering.
"Puerto Rico is a garbage island" and Trump trowing paper toilet rolls to victims of natural disasters with a clear purpose of humiliating them.
The problem in this thread is that everybody is trying to find what Democrats did wrong, or say that Kamala was not well known. Well, every voter knew who was Trump, and they still voted him, so changing the candidate by "better" does not matter if people wants "worse". If a country can't use the best people that they had ("elite thinks that are better than us") the outcome is predictable.
And we aren't even daring to discuss the elephant in the room that is "Can't be really, (really) sure that they didn't just cheated?
After all wouldn't be the first time, so is legit to speculate about it. Lets imagine [hypothetically] that in an alternate timeline they just learned from past fails and cheated better this time. How that could be disclosed or done? Was mail vote altered?. How could we spot it in this case?. This is the real meat in this discussion.
How strong or weak is a candidate does not matter if a party just can jump over the game rules.
1)Got the platinum plan which provided half a trillion dollars to black communities
2) He also was very involved in the 'first step' act, helping address 'over-incarceration'.
3) He secured funding for HBCU via the FUTURE act, some of which were at risk of closure.
4) Prior to covid, black unemployment was at record lows (5.4%)
I keep hearing it repeated over and over again that black people hate him and he is racist, but I have yet to see a non-hyperbolic example. Whereas Biden is on video making incredibly racist remarks throughout his career like "I don't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle" and speaking at a 'Grand Cyclops" KKK members funeral... not to mention he was largely RESPONSIBLE for the 1994 Crime Bill, which led to the over-incarceration of black people to begin with.
Surely you have something at least that damning, if you are going to casually label him as anti-black - right? I mean I know that supposedly the fact that the KKK guy later said 'oh no this was bad for my image' absolves him of THAT infringement for some reason, but it doesn't square the other stuff.
I'll keep the rest short, but the point I am trying to drive home to anyone reading this far:
Just because you were told 'trump is super duper racist and hates minorities' by the TV every day, doesn't mean it was reflected in his actions.
Muslims:
Less of substance here admittedly, but he did sign an executive order in 2019 to promote religious freedom WORLDWIDE, which included efforts to protect Muslims from persecution.
Asians:
As a large contingent of 'small business owners' the tax cuts for small businesses were a major boon.
Mexicans:
Honestly the fact that you listed this one is kind of weird - like what is he supposed to do for citizens of another country? Or did you mean Latin Americans but just reducing them to 'mexicans' would elicit the mental imagery you were hoping for?
All the Mexican Americans I know voted Trump, and if you look at the voting history in 2020 he got 32% of 'latino voters' and in 2024 that is looking like a jump to 45%. So roughly half seem to support him.
Puertoricans:
If you are going to exploit a minority group to make a mis-guided political point, at least type out the proper 'Puerto Ricans'... but I see clearly you just want to appeal to the 'coloring box of oppression' and throw some minorities out there and see what sticks.
Again, this group went from 30% supporting trump in 2020 to 40% in 2024 -- something tells me droning on and on about how the 'insult comic' harmed Puerto Rico (who does have a garbage crisis) didn't really have the effect you or the media or whoever formed your opinion were shooting for
Anyway, now that the facts are out I think it would be pretty hard to seriously claim Trump is a racist bigot without also conceding that 'your guy' is demonstrably more so -- but at the end of the day these identify politics games are getting tiresome, and no one is listening anymore.
It doesn't matter if he actually perceives them as his equal (I frankly think he doesn't perceive anyone as equal to him, he appears to be something of a sociopath), what matters is that he successfully treats people that way.
Democrats would be welcome to continue believing voters are children as long as they don't project it so blithely.
> Democrats would be welcome to continue believing voters are children as long as they don't project it so blithely.
I hear you and found it irritating as well. Republicans don't even treat their voters as children, it's far worse in my opinion, and yet they reap all the benefits. I think that if Democrats want to continue treating their voters as children they should go all the way and use the same dirty lies in the republican handbook, at least we could finally say they're all the same.
Tangential, but I think a big problem for the world going forward is that modern technology has made the average voter unable to really understand things important to their lives.
People who don't know what RNA, lymphocytes or spike proteins are, are nonetheless trying to make decisions about taking a vaccine.
People who don't understand statistics, can't comprehend graphs and don't understand fundamental physics are nonetheless trying to make decisions about climate change.
See also corporate tax law, Middle East ethnic divisions, AI, pollution, etc.
Our innate intuition is often entirely wrong and disinformation can often make compelling arguments that sound correct to non-experts. I'm not sure what the solution is. We all have to put our trust in others about the many things where we're non-experts, but obviously many people are choosing the wrong people to believe.
Trump also lies to voters. For instance every sophisticated analysis of his tariff plan have shown it will do the exact opposite of what he promises. The analysis is as bad as the analysis of Bernie and Warren's Medicare for all plans where magically everything was 50% cheaper.
>Yeah, this was a big part of a general trend of the Democrats treating voters like children to be coddled and lied to.
Meanwhile the rest of this comment section is talking about how democrats lost because they tried to talk about complex policy issues instead of just giving vague promises. Which is it?
>He doesn't talk down to them, he talks like them, and they eat it up.
"He says it like it is" right next to "But he didn't mean that", and he also literally talked about how devastated he was that the Jan 6 supporters were so shitty looking. He spends all sorts of time shit talking veterans who sacrificed for our country, even when the wars they fought were caused by dumb Republican policy.
It's fucking schrodinger's reality when it comes to Trump.
> who treats working-class voters as his equal. He doesn't talk down to them, he talks like them, and they eat it up.
No, he demonstrably doesn't treat them as his equals - however, you're absolutely right, he does talk to them like they are, and in this sense, it is one of his strengths.
Plus with every iota of decrease in the government’s credibility, the relative credibility of candidate’s promises and proposed policies also matter less too in deciding between them…
Given Trump's current faculties, it might show that people are more willing to trust that he probably won't do much either. He'll be on a similar auto-pilot at this age
That's the thing about the left, they think the "machine" could just run things. You actually have to have someone that fires people. Think about it, Even Kim Cheatle had to resign! Biden did not ask for ANYONE to do a good job. No one was in control of that admin, it was a complete mess. If there is an atmosphere of governance/leadership that no matter how shitty a job you do, but you get to keep your job, then no one will care about anything at the top.
You may be right but short to remember the chaos in Trumps administration from 2016 to 2020. It really seemed like the country was about to burst. I hope it won't happen this time though...
I think a democrat who could actually distance themselves from Biden, someone who had more leeway to criticize his policies without the obvious "if current policy is wrong, what's stopping you from changing it" question, would have faired better. Maybe not won, but done better. Certainly there was no way Biden would have won re-election and switching was a good choice, but too little too late.
> There was not enough focus on economy in a way that actually mattered
Between price controls, tariffs, and excepting tips from taxes, I had no confidence either candidate could pass Econ 101. The proposals can play well politically, but it leaves people who have a basic understanding of economics at a loss of who'd be better.
It's one unlikable candidate after another. How does one fire Democratic party leadership? How is it all democratic to leave the choice of the only "left" candidate be down to... who? Some boomers?
"The public wants a straight white man, and they want something more conservative... I know, let's run Gavin Newsom on a pro-business platform!"
It's like the very categories they use to interpret the world have blinded them.
Jimmy McMillan ("The rent is too damn high!"), for example, was the opposite of several of those things, but, if he were still around, he'd mop the floor with Gavin Newsom in an election.
Fun fact: Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.
“During this period, there were 109 different Democrats who served in the Senate and cast a sufficient number of roll call votes for a reliable analysis of their ideological position. Of these 109 Democrats, Harris has the second-most liberal voting record. This makes her slightly less liberal than Warren, but more liberal than all of the remaining 107 Democrats, and significantly more liberal than all but a handful.”
The definition of "liberal" being used here by The Hill is "voting with the Democratic Party". Their definitional left end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Democrats" and definitional right end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Republicans". These are not actually meaningfully "liberal" and "conservative" as the terms are used elsewhere.
Harris is a party-line voter (pretty obviously, as an insider she's defining the party line in the first place). The Democratic Party isn't leftist and nor is Harris. It's routine in most democracies for elected representatives to be party-line voters.
Liberalism and Socialism are two very different things. Liberalism is squarely in the Capitalism camp. There are no workers owning the means of production under Liberalism.
The DNC's bread and butter are Liberals. Not Socialists. Not anyone even approaching Socialist. Bernie, AOC, etc are SocDems at best. There are no Socialists in office in the United States.
Goal #1 is just an instrumental goal to goal number #2. Socialists underperform moderates in general elections. Hell even Kamala, a terrible candidate who just got trounced by Trump outperformed Bernie (who has literally everything going for him) in his home state by a slim margin. Where as a moderate like Dan Osborn without the backing of the party outperformed Kamala by almost 14%.
Americans don't want to pay European style taxes even for European services. And our public sector is far less efficient than Europe's so we wouldn't even get European level of services for that taxation rate.
In 2016, the Democratic establishment forced Hilary down the voters' throats because, hey, it was her turn, despite her being a terrible candidate with huge negatives.
America, thanks to the Red Scare has no viable leftist momentum. But even in the USA, the Democrats almost chose an open socialist (ie Bernie Sanders) as the Democratic nominee in 2016 rather than Hilary Clinton. I remember saying at the time that the DNC are missing how upset ordinary people are at the status quo. The DNC establishment couldn't care less.
What did the DNC learn from 2016? Absolutely nothing. They blamed Bernie voters (even though Bernie voters overwhelmingly came out and voted for Hilary in spite of their reservations).
Trump only really lost in 2020 because of Covid. Yet Biden's campaign did have a sprnkling of progresive policies that people got behind, so much so that it looks like he got 10-15 million more votes than Kamala got. There's a lesson in that but it won't be learned.
I saw someone describe this election as a Republican primary between a moderate Republican (Kamala) and a far right Republican (Trump). It's accurate.
Kamala's immigration policy was the Trump 2020 policy. She is to the right of Ronald Reagan on immigration.
And that's before we even get to the Middle East policy, which is not only bad policy but it's bad politics. Why? Because it gains her zero votes but loses a bunch. Anyone who hard line suports Israel is voting for Trump (and did). This was foreseeable. People were screaming about it for a year. Ignored.
So what lesson will the Democrats take from 2024? That they need to run even further right.
But I come from a long line of white trash, and I am intimately familiar with what they do and do not care about.
They DO NOT care about gay, trans, minority people. At all. Ever. Every single syllable spoken about them only serves to enrage them.
They DO NOT care about Palestinians, except to equate them with ISIS.
Americans want low taxes, low inflation, a 400-foot wall surrounded by minefields on the US-Mexican border, and democrats to shut the fuck up about racism and LGBTQ+.
Are poor white Americans really as terrible people as you say they are? I would usually find that hard to believe, though the results do strongly imply that you're right. What a depressing thought.
I've never felt much sympathy for this take, given the counterpart is being called a groomer, traitor, child murderer, election stealer, deep state benefactor etc.
> the counterpart is being called a groomer, traitor, child murderer, election stealer, deep state benefactor etc.
And when did this behavior start? After Democrats started calling Trump and Co. Nazis, fascists, etc. They just followed the precedence that was set by democrats.
I voted for Harris, and as much as I think a second Trump presidency will damage America, the hyperbole really is tiresome and probably contributed to our loss.
Right, if we simply ignore the plethora of racist things said at trump rallies. Oh, and all the explicitly anti-trans political ads.
People aren't saying this, the GOP is saying this and then people just repeat it back to them. You can't claim you're not anti-trans when the political ads of the candidates you support depict trans women as burly grown men who beat up little girls.
I mean, it's so hyperbolic it would be hilarious if it wasn't so depressing.
Me pointing to specific talking points and actual material the GOP provides isn't some type of name calling. I didn't do anything - they produced this. If you're not even willing to believe the GOP when they tell you their platform, why are you voting for them?
Right, me telling the GOP voters what the GOP platform says is the problem. The problem isn't that GOP voters don't understand the platform, or, rather, choose to play stupid about it in a thinly-vieled attempt to hide any bigotry.
I will believe you when the GOP themselves does not say racist things and does not propose anti-trans legislation (coupled with incredibly transphobic propaganda). Until then, it is completely fair and accurate to highlight the bigotry of the GOP. If it bothers you, which I have a bit of doubt it does, but if it does - feel free to vote for platforms that more closely align with your ideology.
You should not be getting offended at me telling you your party's own platform.
I think this is the biggest reason she lost. There's a limit to how much hyperbole (and that's being generous) and lies you can tell about someone before the words lose their meaning and people stop believing everything else you say. Not just from democrats (involved in politics) but the media as well. They made up their mind about Trump (probably via corporate smear campaigns) and were so openly biased against him it was despicable. People (I believe) knew that at best the truth was somewhere in the middle, or knew his whole campaign was being jinxed by very powerful people. And I think this was enough to persuade the swing voters.
> There's a limit to how much hyperbole (and that's being generous) and lies you can tell about someone before the words lose their meaning
For any who didn't get this so far, this is why the 'crowd size' and the height/weight issues (among others) were hit so hard by the left. People don't care about that stuff. What people care about is someone not backing down from obvious lies when we're all looking at the same information. Because of course he's going to lie about the stuff only he gets to see.
indeed as independent i grew tired of the media and all poltical machines/their games in May 2020. Turned it all off and tuned it out as hard to believe and dechipher what the truth is from any side / media.
most people are actually quite reasonable and the identity politics play now has no effect. i am a gay man that voted democrat my entire life until recently, however i don't feel my ideals have changed, i have been left behind by elite snobby people seeking power through division who have corrupted the democratic party. the republicans have their own problems too by fanatic religious and racists types, but it by no means is representative of the average conservative.
> republicans have their own problems too by fanatic religious [...] but it by no means is representative of the average conservative.
65% of the Republicans who participated in a survey by the Pew Research Center said that laws should be influenced by the bible, and 78% said that the United States should be a Christian nation:
Agree. Take the 50-ish million people who cast their vote to Harris/Walz and are eligible (over 35, natural-born, resident for more than 14 years) to be president.
Either one of two things is true:
1. That was the most likely to win ticket possible and the DNC had zero-point-zero chance to win the election.
2. Among those 50 million people is another ticket and/or different platform & messaging that would have resulted in a win for the DNC.
If #1 is true, the problem isn't with the electorate (other than they disagree with the DNC). If #2 is true, the problem also isn't with the electorate.
The problem with democracy is that it's so easy for a demagogue to come to power by pitting the people against each other. The problem with OUR democracy is that this issue is supercharged by our inability to control the outsized influenced wielded by powerful/wealthy parties, foreign and domestic.
This is an interesting statement. To follow it, if the problem is the electorate, how do you think you fix that if the electorate is the one who gets to choose.
Do you think it would be better if we used some other system than democracy, so that the electorate don't get a say?
They took it seriously enough to change candidates. But again: why is a "just okay" candidate from the Democratic Party not better than a "threat to the free world" candidate from the Republican Party? The double-standard is absurd.
I thought Hillary failing was a clear indictment that America is not ready for a woman to be president. I hate that it’s true, but too much of the American heartland is conservative and plenty of them vote against their own interest (see: abortion contention). To then go ahead with a woman of color, and then have celebrity endorsements that don’t do anything to increase voter turnout shows how out of touch with reality the DNC really is. What a shame, and it doesn’t help that Kamala never had mass appeal. Pete Buttegieg would have been a far better bet, personally speaking.
Yeah, it's bizarre to watch the DNC on the one hand claim that Donald Trump is a once-in-a-lifetime threat to democracy and freedom and on the other hand fail to offer anything to "undecided" voters that might get them to vote Democrat.
My takeaway is that I don't think they actually believe Donald Trump is uniquely bad - it's just messaging.
I'm an independent, but who's going to demand better from the Republican party? Why are Democrats being held to such an incredibly high standard when the standard for the Republican party could not be more obscene?
The DNC doesn't truly provide the means for their party members to actually participate in selecting candidates to the same degree the Republicans do, and therefore they place some kind of party ideal over the democratic participation of their party members. Superdelegates, not holding a caucus primary this time, conspiring against Bernie, all that stuff. It produces manufactured candidates that don't have a real relationship to party members, not an extension of the zeitgeist. They shove square pegs into round holes and wonder why it doesn't fit.
Honestly, anyone who thinks Kamala is perfect at anything other than working the party machine for self-promotion is probably a little too invested to see things clearly.
Also they've misappropriated words like "leftist" and "socialist" so much that in my interaction with Trump supporters, at Trump events, I hear plenty of actual left and actual socialist policies presented as new ideas or attributed to Trump.
At a policy level, these people actually don't want neofascism, I've interacted with plenty. They really don't.
The Democrats tried to appeal to the hard right voter who found Trump icky. For that they were called socialist so and I know this is hard, people I spoke with associated the word socialism with the policies of Harris
>For that they were called socialist so and I know this is hard, people I spoke with associated the word socialism with the policies of Harris
What the hell are the democrats supposed to do to oppose a party that gets to redefine language however it wants with seemingly great effect?
America spent 100 years demonizing socialism. Not the policies, the word. And now republicans can just deploy it against whoever, because it doesn't have a meaning to US voters.
What possible strategy is there against that? My "democrat for life" (because republicans wanted to fucking murder the french catholics in the area, lookup the KKK in Maine) would vote against "socialism"!
The US is a uni-party state at the federal level. You either play with the republicans, or you will be labeled "socialist", no matter the objective reality, and you will lose.
Well since actual socialist policies like housing, health care, retirement benefits, childcare support, reducing homelessness, infrastructure funding, jobs programs and wage increases are incredibly popular when put in front of voters, the Democrats should just do actual socialism instead of trying to run away from it saying "nuh uh!"
Both Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden got more votes than Donald Trump. The Democrats have a better track record of picking the more popular candidate that the electorate wants in recent history.
In fact, the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in all four of the most recent elections before this one (from 2008 - 2020, inclusive).
Except maybe for Obama, they were all lousy. Barely beating an incompetent criminal who sold presidential powers as private services and stole stuff from the Whitehouse, that's not impressive.
1. I didn't say it was impressive. Just refuting the claim that the Republican party puts forth candidates that the electorate wants while the Democratic party does not.
2. Nobody has beaten Trump since he's been a convicted criminal, lied about winning an election he didn't, or stole classified documents from the White House. So it doesn't make sense to discuss "barely beating an incompetent [...]" in the context of my comment that refers only to Democratic candidates who ran before those things happened.
The sentiment is Republicans are focused on winning while
Democrats are focused on a deeply unpopular corporate-imperialist political project and scolding people into voting for them.
They will occasionally virtue signal elsewhere but their policies only align with the project
Progressive policies on minimum wage, labor and other things won in Red States once again. Nebraska's minimum wage increase, for instance, went 75-25. 60% for Trump, 75% for minimum wage increase.
It's important to realize the Democrats have no interest in those. Absolutely zero.
Their project is bowing down to companies like Wells Fargo, Equifax, Lockheed Martin, and General Motors and that's it.
Because they're a specific political project. Radical centrism is a common term but the "left/center/right" is a bad name. Things are much more complicated.
There was clearly a winning path with say, Bernie in 2016. The state by state Bernie/Trump matchup polling data consistently predicted a clear and decisive victory. Or, maybe Estes Kefauver 1952, or go back to the 40s and Gallup predicted Henry Wallace would have had a 1936 style landslide instead of the squeak they won with Truman.
As a hobby I've poured over archives of primaries, old newspapers, speeches, going back even to Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's first VP and how he got replaced.
I continue to claim that any actual left project (as opposed to whatever the propaganda industry is deciding to imagine the left is) would be far more successful under a Republican flag because they aren't as committed to the neoimperialist project.
That's why the Democrats had all the warring Republicans on their side this time.
DNC argued that they are a private organization and can do what they want In "Wilding v. DNC Services Corp." case (2017) in response to screwing the dem nomination from Bernie hands in favour of Hillay
Trump has tried a coup and illegal intervention in the election before and now has the SC on his side. It remains to be seen if there will be a next time.
To be fair and objective, he didn't attempt a coup...
Did he ever tell the rioters to storm the capital?
He literally told them to be peaceful:
"Stay peaceful!"
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
Trump is very good at covering his own language and culpability. What were Trump's actions while the mob was storming the Capitol? How long did he wait to even put forth those tweets? In his speech before they stormed the Capitol, he said[2]
"We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore"
but he also said
"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
Does saying the latter negate the former in the minds of the mob that had been primed for nearly two months, without real evidence, to think the election had been stolen?
Does it matter that that there's evidence, presented in court, that Trump _knew_ he had lost the election and further knew that attempts to overturn the result were illegal? [3]
We all saw _with our own eyes_ what the mob did at the Capitol that day. There were people there with differing motivations and different understandings of what they were trying to accomplish by storming the Capitol. They've received differing levels of punishment as a result. But, I find it hard to not view the totality of the evidence presented to date and say that Trump wasn't trying to stay in power through unlawful means (i.e. "attempt a coup").
Misinformation. He was actually silent during the insurrection, and he was very strongly encouraged to issue public statements after the attack happened.
He has literally said, and not paraphrasing, to his crowds... "You need to get out and vote, and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote again."
For those curious like I was, he actually said that last May [1] I think though that age is strongly against him, had he been 10 or 15 years younger he could have probably pulled it off.
The context of that was he was addressing a subset of voters (Christians) who didn’t particularly like him but he needs their votes in this elction, possibly due to the perception that Democrats would somehow cheat without a decisive victory.
Trump says a lot of things and does not choose his words wisely. Or maybe he does and these are all dog whistles. I guess we’ll find out.
Another Trump quote taken totally out of context. He was encouraging people who don't normally vote to get out and vote this time.
People who oppose Trump don't do themselves any favors by misrepresenting this stuff. The guy is a ghoul and says plenty of terrible things that don't need misrepresentation to make him look bad.
It seems like it has the necessary context and is without any sort of "misrepresentation".
Your reply explains the "You need to get out and vote" part, but it doesn't explain the "and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote again" part. What context do you believe makes the 2nd part alright?
If you heard this quote without knowing who said it, you would think it is most likely that the speaker meant “vote again for me”. When a politician says “go vote”, it’s normally implied “go vote for me”.
In context, I think it is obvious that is what Trump meant. People that have been told Trump is a dictator that wants to end democracy obviously won’t approach that quote with normal grace they afford others.
Lets say you are right and the correct interpretation is:
"and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote for me again"
Trump would be term limited, so they would not be able to vote him in as president again anyway. That is why this interpretation does not make sense to me.
It would just be a useful reminder of that fact. Remember: you're trying to sell voting to someone who doesn't normally vote. It's easier to sell it as being a one-off thing versus sell them on voting in all future elections.
> It's easier to sell it as being a one-off thing versus sell them on voting in all future elections.
So a promise to permanently and irrevocably change the country? If it is truly one off that is what it would have to be, which is not possible via normal legal mechanisms in the USA.
If one heard this quote without knowing who said it, they would think it is most likely that the speaker meant "If I win, I will make sure further consent of the governed, unnecessary", which is why the quote got the attention it did, and why, to my knowledge, no other US presidential candidate in the entire history of our nation has ever dared utter it.
Ok, but she won the primaries and was denied the nomination. What's the use of complaining that in 2016 she only got it because "it was her turn"? As if being denied what she rightfully won eight years earlier was somehow fair.
I agree. Instead of navel gazing about internal Democratic Party machinations. I would argue it is the policy platform and messaging is what wins. In swing states, the issue that dominated by far was the economy.
Even if you support his economic approach, for example, wouldn't his criminal behaviour, or his racist and transphobic views disqualify him? One does not wash away the other.
My two life-long democrat friends that voted for Trump just got tired of this shit , right here. They just don't believe it anymore. Even Andrew Cuomo admitted that Trump was subject to lawfare in New York. But go on, don't ask questions or think critically.
I've listened to what he said, firsthand and frequently. He's deliberately divisive and uses racist and violent rhetoric whenever possible (even in the last week of the election). 8 years ago I was open to attacks against him being fearmongering and then I lived through 4 years of his presidency. Not everything people say about him is true, but the vast majority is. It is difficult to justify "got tired of this shit" as though it's not true, when a large number of his own former cabinet members AND his own former vice president refused to endorse him, saying that he is unfit for office.
Same exact thing that happened in 2016: if you repeatedly demonise a section of the population, don’t expect that section of the population to be honest with you about its opinions when those opinions are what led you to demonise it in the first place.
I would say from the outside American politics seems to have devolved into this ultra-polarised culture war/identity politics that doesn't seem to benefit the left at all electorally. It probably helps the biggest proponents of it (on either side) in terms of playing to their base, but it feels like it's overall a net win for the right.
But I don't know how big a factor this is in reality versus the economy.
In 2016, the majority of outlets gave Clinton a 90% chance or more. This time almost everyone said it was 50:50. The result is somewhat similar, the predictions could hardly be more different.
Whilst this is objectively true - this result is basically within the margin of error of most polls. I highly doubt this argument is going to be accepted by most people. It'll be exactly like Nate Silver screaming into the void for the last 8 years pointing out he gave Trump a ~30% chance of winning and that happens... 30% of the time!
This isn’t an interesting statement. I could pull any numbers out of a hat in (0, 1) as probabilities and regardless of the outcome could use the same excuse because there is only a single event to observe.
For one, they said Clinton had a 70% chance of winning.
But perhaps more importantly, people's poor understanding of stats meant that many people interpreted that as "She's going to get 70% of the vote" (i.e., a landslide, "and so I don't need to vote").
"You" in this case is "the people taking the polls". The media is only trusted by 12% of Republicans and 27% of Independents [0]. Right or wrong, most pollsters will be treated as belonging to "the media", and the lack of trust will almost certainly show in the polls. "The media" demonized the right wing, so "the media" can't expect to have people self-identify as such to them.
Democrats were absolutely demonized by Trump, but their trust in the media is double that of Independents and quadruple that of Republicans. So to the extent that pollsters are treated as part of the media, they'll get more accurate answers out of Democrats.
It doesn't count. It will never count. Even if they see it, they won't acknowledge it. It's not hypocrisy, it's loyalty. The only real sin is disobeying the hierarchy or breaking the chain of command, which is what calling it out would be for them.
The polls were actually surprisingly close. The final margin between the candidates in key states will be smaller than a reasonable margin of error for any poll.
The margin in Pennsylvania will continue to shrink, as the only place with lots of votes left to count is Philadelphia. Michigan might still flip blue, because the only place with votes to count is Detroit. Arizona is still a total coin toss, with 51k vote difference and >1200k votes left to count. Wisconsin is going to be close too, although it will likely stay red.
None of that matters when there are less ballots left to count than the margin in PA, but still, the message from the polls before election was "this will be a nailbiter", and it kind of was.
You didn't listen to what the pollsters were saying.
What they said was that they could not predict the outcome, and were giving basically 50/50 odds of either candidate winning, which is essentially just another way of saying "I have no idea".
Just because their odds were 50/50 though, does not mean the outcome would be close. The pollsters were all warning that the swing states would likely be strongly correlated, so if a candidate performed strongly in one swing state, they'd probably perform strongly in all of them.
I guess the US has it's own version of 'Shy Tories' where right-leaning voters aren't inclined to share their views (truthfully or otherwise) with polls.
I think it has less to do with shyness and more the fact that almost nobody speaks to pollsters on either side of the isle. Most polling is done by phone call. When was the last time you answered a call from an unknown number?
It absolutely does. You can generally count on anyone who describes themselves as "Centrist" or "Apolitical" (doubly so if you're on a dating site) to be more to the right.
It used to be "Libertarian" which for a subset was "I'm a Republican who likes to smoke weed".
the5avage is asking why the polls 'failed', that is, could not predict the result despite the clarity of the outcome. Being unable to compute an answer is the same thing as failing for pollsters.
That's fundamental to this election mode. Most swing states were within the predicted range, they just happen to all be correlated (which is expected) and swung in the same direction having a huge effect on the electoral college.
That's true, lacking confidence is less of a failure than confidently getting it wrong. But they weren't actually saying "we don't know". They were predicting a split election. Do pollsters even have a way to report that they lack enough confidence to give a prediction? I rarely see CIs on reported poll results so presumably they'd have to just refuse to publish any prediction at all, which clearly, they weren't doing.
Nate Silver has recently written about the clear problems in polling, and in particular the herd-like way they were reporting implausible numbers:
Apologies if you thought I meant this. I was using them as a reference for what people modeling the election from polls were predicting!
I don't know what Nate Silver was predicting. Was he predicting a near-split election or the situation where "someone is decently likely to win decisively, but we don't know who"?
Fair enough. Nate Silver was predicting a toss up, but was upfront that the model uses many simulations. Since the GP mentioned Nate Silver, I mistakenly took your comment about 538 as disagreeing with that since Silver did used to run 538.
What sources are you thinking of? Everywhere I looked, I saw "the polls are very close, the result probably won't be so close but we don't know which way it will go". I don't recall seeing anyone outright predicting a very tight result (beyond "here's what happens if there's a tie" articles -- background info rather than prediction).
Who was? A 50% chance to win does not imply that the vote count will be close.
Also: statistical uncertainty is a feature not a bug. A lot of the idea behind statistics is the ability to quantify the certainty of the point estimate. As another commenter put it: a statistically sound "idk" is a better result than a confidently incorrect estimate, from a statistical standpoint.
First, the words predict and forecast are not interchangeable. Polls do not predict outcomes, they merely forecast them. Since predictions are purely subjective, saying they 'failed' is inappropriate. You can disagree with a subjective prediction, but you can't really say they failed. Forecasting relies on historic data to extrapolate. That same data basically said "its a 50/50 coin toss" so the polls did not, in fact, fail. You just thought they failed because the precise poll value was not 50/50, but rather 49.xx/51.xx which does not account for statistical variances.
The last poll for Iowa, from the highest rated pollster for Nate Silver, had Harris +3 and Trump won Iowa +13.
The polls were better but still consistently underestimated Trumps support by a lot. Basically, the weighting they do for the polls now basically just guarantees that they converge on the results of the last election.
> The pollsters were all warning that the swing states would likely be strongly correlated, so if a candidate performed strongly in one swing state, they'd probably perform strongly in all of them.
Indeed, 538’s model showed ~50 out of 100 wins for either side, when running simulations. But that doesn’t mean that they were predicting a 50/50 split, a significant number of simulation results showed a large vote margin for one side, it was just equally likely which side it would be.
Although I don’t actually think it was equally likely like that, we are missing something to make all this analysis actually informative rather than a “all I know is that I don’t know anything”. We had mountains of evidence indicating that it was totally unclear, so frustrating. Perhaps that’s how the probabilities actually were, but somehow guts pointed to Trump much more regardless of personal bias, and in hindsight it feels rather obvious. Confirmation bias I guess, I still want trust all the expert analysis.
The pollsters were predicting a close election. That was universally the message. It was unambiguous. I'm sorry if you somehow missed that but that's what it was.
They were predicting 50% odds of each candidate winning swing states, but with the results for the swing states being correlated with each other. This isn't the same as a close election, it just means the result can't be predicted confidently. It's also worth noting that each individual state and the popular vote were within error margins on the result.
People in a non-swing state figure "yolo" and vote for their emotional favorite, because they're dissatisfied with the status quo and have no other way to express it?
Well, it was close enough that it should worry the Dems and put NJ in play for Republics in the near future. NJ has not always voted consistently for democrats.
The question is not why there was a swing, any number of reasons can be attributed ex post facto.
The point is no poll caught any of the swings at all. To win with this margin Trump the polls can hardly be tied and be called accurate.
The result is not a close at all, and it is not about swing states and electoral college swings. Trump is winning the popular vote by a large margin something he has never be able to do so before.
AtlasIntel did. I met Thiago (CTO) in Rio and Boston while he was doing his math PhD at Harvard, he is nice person and a fine mathematician: their methodology uses online polling on social media with micro-targeting. I only assume competitors are not leveraging social media as well as they are.
Roman, the CEO, said they will donate all their raw data from the final polls to Roper Center at Cornell for academic research[1].
What I heard recently is that the 2020 polls were actually less accurate than the 2016 polls. (the 2020 polls simply accurately predicted the winner, so there wasn't so much controversy.) From that standpoint, it's not clear that polling has had very good accuracy from 2016. What I'm not sure about is why pollsters are not able to adjust their models towards more accuracy, but it does seem to be a longitudinal problem.
They did. The pollsters that were close in 2020 were close in 2024 as well. (Rasmussen, AtlasIntel)
My explanation for this is that most polls were fabricated, showing enthusiasm for (D) which wasn't there. Basically, a form of propaganda. The most striking example here is Selzer, with that Harris+3 Iowa poll the day before the election.
Busy people have no time to answer polsters. When you heavily critisize one group of supporters (and the social stigma associated with it), dont be suprised that in private they think differently. Finally, intentionally fabricating wrong poll results can psychologically influence weak minded (due to group think and our desire to comply with social norms). So it is immature to accept polls as a real indicator of what people think (especially in controversial political environment).
In reality, a lot more people have traditional values when it comes to race, LGBT whatever, sexism, spiritual values, opinions on Russia, Israel etc. However in public they may be scared to voice their true opinions.
Thing is, prediction markets tend to be gamed by people who bet large amounts of money. I used a (play money) prediction market platform before and there was literally a "markets that get easily gamed by whales" section on the website.
If you're talking about "whalebait" markets on manifold, that's a bit disingenuous - these are markets where the thing you're betting about is related to trading behaviour itself, i.e. self-referential markets.
I don't disagree that the one french dude betting 30M on Trump on polymarket showed that there isn't enough liquidity in such markets for such distortions to be corrected, but whalebait on Manifold is not really related.
I kept hearing people laugh at Polymarket. "It's not a real poll!" But it guessed correctly when almost none of the polls did. I think I'll continue to listen to betting markets.
But it wasn't actually a race, the votes were all finished being cast and were just being counted, so concepts like "having a head start" or "being ahead" don't really apply.
The live-feed counting process really messes with people's heads. Trump used this confusion to great effect in creating the conspiracy theory about election stealing ("we were winning"), but it's not only the right wing that gets it confused.
It feels like there has to be a better way to present the data to make it more obvious what's actually happening.
Yeah, I personally believe that states should agree to collectively wait till the day after to release all election results at once. That way there's not as much confusion.
yeah it's was a fuzzy comment, i guess you mean the important/big states are always known last, but he really was ahead all along with a comfortable margin
Are you coming at this from a frequentist perspective, a Bayesian perspective, or some other formulation of probability?
From a frequentist perspective, it makes no sense to talk about probabilities of the outcomes of processes that can't be repeated, such as elections. So the question is then, "Why couldn't the polls predict a result?" And we know the answer: because the polls weren't precise enough. We already knew that.
From a Bayesian perspective, lack of knowledge is the same thing as nondeterminism in the underlying processes. So, to a Bayesian, you're just wrong; there was a 52/48 chance of the voter base waking up and instead voting for Kamala yesterday.
This is so confused. The probability models are designed to describe situations where cause and effect is not known.causes still exist whether you can repeat them in an experiment,
You are confusing logical models with real world decisions and actions.
I'm asking what you mean by "probability" and "chance", but it sounds like the answer is that you don't have any idea, because you've never studied statistics even to the point of taking an introductory class. At this point you've explicitly rejected foundational axioms of both frequentist probability and Bayesian probability, with no apparent awareness that this means you have rejected the entire field of statistics.
You’re missing the point. Axiomatic systems aim to be internally consistent. The question is whether they are good model of a real life situation. Your technical knowledge is distracting you from the more fundamental questions.
There is no sense in which Harris had a 50% chance and had an unlucky day. The only “chance” going on is how likely the poll sample represents the population. The math behind that assumes you have a genuine sample and ignores realities like preference falsification.
Please think and read charitably before making personal attacks. I generally take that as a sign you are acting in bad faith and I do not want to interact with you. Goodbye.
> Is there some analysis why the polls didn't correctly predict the result?
The people in a swing state choosing to spend time responding to polls are insufficiently representative. They're drowning in advertisements, calls, texts, unexpected people at their door and randos on the street. Why would they give time to a pollster?
Only if this attracts professional punters. I imagine pros prefer to punt on preductible things like 1000 soccer games they modelled using a million datapoints rather than 1 hard to predict election. A combination of vast predictive data and Kelly Criterion. I imagine the election money was dumb. It may have happen to be right.
This is purely devil's advocate: Many polls may just be political levers, designed and executed with a predetermined outcome so it can be used in mass media. There is an undeniable tilt to mainstream news companies and almost confirmation bias in their polling.. Does make me wonder.
If you read on the methodology of some of these 'election models', you'll understand there's a lot of narrative chasing that goes on (or even just "herding towards the least controversial number").
For example, from Nate Silver's blog:
> The Silver Bulletin polling averages are a little fancy. They adjust for whether polls are conducted among registered or likely voters and house effects. They weight more reliable polls more heavily. And they use national polls to make inferences about state polls and vice versa. It requires a few extra CPU cycles — but the reward is a more stable average that doesn’t get psyched out by outliers.
All this weighting and massaging and inferencing results in results that are basically wrong.
Come Election Night he basically threw the whole thing in the trash too!
Seems like they pretty much did? The polls said "a close race in each of the swing states, which either candidate could win". And that's that happened, no?
One experience I had (coming from an Austrian right wing province) is that a significant share of polled people will not reveal to the pollster they are voting for the xenophobic candidate, because they don't want to be seen as a bigot.
It is like when your doctor is asking you if you eat fast food — some people will downplay it because they know it is wrong, but do it anyways in a "weak" moment when nobody is looking.
So suddenly in my village where I know everybody 56% voted for the right wing candidate, yet everybody¹ claimed not to do that when asked before or after.
Seems like they pretty much did? The polls said "a close race in each of the swing states, which either candidate could win". And I that's what happened, no?
Bookies are a way better indicator than polls, I've opted to stop checking polls and only follow the bookies. Nearly all of them gave Trump at least a few percentage points of an edge, at a minimum. Now I'm not saying they're infallible, but they make or break their business by figuring these odds out, so there's a lot of skin in the game for them to be on point.
Yes, here is a very good breakdown of how polls were systematically wrong by the French guy who just made over $40mm of profit betting on Trump in the prediction markets:
His first point - weighting by 2020 vote - is something that Nate Cohn pointed out very concretely as a methodological choice that wouldn't be obvious until the election [0]. Even in retrospect that seems fair, at least based on the analysis that Nate put together.
Worth pointing out though that most pollsters _have_ been weighting by 2020 vote, so in general this isn't a fair critique of the entire polling industry. There are other fair critiques though, for example, that there are entire populations of people that are almost impossible to reach now (e.g. those who don't answer unknown numbers, young people, etc.).
I feel like this is confirmation bias, especially since it's a very large number of polls from reputable organizations being compared against one person's opinion.
Even if the true probability isn't 50% I doubt it's that far off.
The president of US called half of American citizens garbage, that definitely had something to do with it. Hillary pulled the same shit, calling half the country "deplorables". Keep insulting American citizens and see what happens.
Because a percentage of people who vote trump tell everyone they will vote dem to not be bullied or frozen out by their friends, relatives, colleagues, etc.
Dr Phil described it well I think.
Vegas and prediction markets consistently had Trump as the favorites.
Polling companies are in the business of media deals and government contracts. They will develop methodology and reporting to that end and the money is in "a close and contested race", even if it won't be.
I've done a somewhat half-assed take tonight of comparing actual returns to latest pre-election polling by state
Why that is, isn't clear. Political pollsters have been struggling for years with accuracy issues, particularly as landline usage falls (it's <20% in most states now), and unknown-caller blocking is more widely used (both on landlines and mobile devices).
Polling does have periodic calibration events (we call those "elections"), but whatever biases the polls seem to experience in the US, it's apparently systemically exceeding adjustment factors.
- State: 2-char state code, dash-number indicates individual EVs for NE and ME.
- EV: Electoral votes
- BP: Blue polling
- RP: Red polling
- BV: Blue vote return
- RV: Red vote return
- Bd: Blue delta (vote - poll)
- Rd: Red delta (vote - poll)
The last two results are the cumulative average deltas. Blue consistently performed ~2.5 points below polls, red performed ~0.6 points above polls.
Data are rounded to nearest whole percent (I'd like to re-enter data to 0.1% precision and re-run, though overall effect should be similar). Deltas are computed only where voting returns are >0.
Data are hand-entered from 538 and ABC returns pages.
Blue consistently polled slightly higher than performance. Polls don't seem to include third parties (mostly Green, some state returns include RFK or others).
There are all but certainly coding/data entry errors here, though for illustration the point should hold.
NB: If anyone knows a source that has tabular formatted polling and election data, that would make it a lot easier to compute this than hand-entering.
With updated (and 0.1% decimal precision) election returns, Harris's polling delta falls to -2.25% (Orange is unchanged). The overall advantage of her opponent over polling data is 2.89%. Which is a lot.
Still want to get more precise polling numbers in there, but again, it's not shifting a lot. Law of Large Numbers dictates that, as multiple rounded numbers tend to even out the precision distinction.
I've just re-run my analysis with higher precision on the deltas. Harris performed worse in every single race save DC than projected. Orange performed better in a majority of races, by as much as 5+ percent.
(I still need more accurate data for polling, I'll add a comment when I've updated that.)
Historically, the polls tend to skew about 3% left on average. So if the left is showing a 3% lead, it's more likely that reality is they're even. Have a look at this site - they were tied nationally with Trump having a healthy lead in most swing states:
Eh? All the polls basically said "we don't know, either can win", maybe followed with "X is slightly more likely to win".
Also note that a "90% / 10% change to win" is not necessarily "wrong" if the 10% candidate wins. Anyone who has played an RPG will tell you that 90% chance to hit is far from certain. Maybe if there had been 100 elections, Clinton would have won 90 of them.
The polls did pretty well this election. They underestimated Trump, but by less than previously. Polls pretty overwhelmingly showed a 50/50 race in every swing state but those odds were always correlated since they're not independent events
People are looking at the popular vote and freaking out but lets not forget that there's still 7 million left to count in California and it's expected to net Harris almost 3 million votes
Historically (last two elections) the polls have been about 2% further left than the actual result. Thus a 50/50 could/should b be interpreted in Trump’s favor
Polling has fundamental issues that can't be solved with statistics. The biggest one is the unknown difference between who responds to the poll and who votes. And poll response areas are very low these days - I've heard well under 1% is common (that is, less than 1 out of 100 individuals contacted by the pollster answer the questions).
Nate Silver nailed this in the 2016 election. He said Trump's victory there was consistent with historically normal polling errors.
What may have been less widely appreciated is these errors are not related to causes like limited sample size that are straightforwardly amenable to statistical analysis. They come from the deeper problems with polling and the way those problems shift under our feet a little bit with each election.
That obviously doesn't work; how do you know which direction discourages voters? Most campaigns' whole marketing approach relies on texting voters 2000 times a day saying they're about to lose.
Did anyone else feel like the incessant texts from political spammers made you not want to vote the candidate spamming you? Having to block 5 new numbers every time I picked up my phone for the past month was really frustrating.
Either your state didn't make the information available to anyone who claims to a political activist, or you managed to avoid having a phone number linked to your voter registration.
That's probably not accurate. A false sense of confidence is just as likely to discourage voters (eg: "I don't need to go vote, candidate ABC is already winning!") as anything else.
Yes, polls often tend to privilege the privileged, Harris voters skewed greatly towards higher average incomes and college education. And also, according to an exit poll, that the majority of Trump's voters decided to vote for him within the past week. It's generally been the case that populist politicians are underestimated by polling because they can't control for these factors.
From a game theoretical perspective this is a good result. It is a clear reiteration of the message to the Democrats: you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad.
The Democrats should have fielded a strong personality in their own right. This is not about left or right. It's about mobilizing people by giving them something to care about. "More of the same" and "not like that guy" isn't very enticing.
I don't think the policy positions even matter that much, if you can make a strong case and gain the confidence of the electorate.
As someone living in WI who got barraged with ads from both sides, that wasn't the messaging anyone saw AFAICT. The biggest issue on people's minds was the economy. Dem messaging on economic policy was nonexistent. Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men. It should, but it doesn't. There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
There's a lot of people in the comments parroting whatever narrative they cooked up for 2016, but the reality is that both candidates' approaches were wildly different this time around.
The economy I think was the huge sticking point. You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that. They are so out of touch that they think if finance/econ majors on tv say the economy is doing good than it's doing good.
Compared to pre-pandemic
- Housing prices have shot up incredibly
- Loan interest rates are two or three times higher
- Every day goods are higher
- Car prices are higher
- Insurance is higher
- Utilities are higher
And that would be fine, prices go up over time after all, but all of that is on the back of pay, that for most people, has not gone up anywhere close to enough to cover all of that, if it's gone up at all.
This is an interesting phenomanon. The median purchase power is increasing but people feel poor.
Things with limited supply are becoming more unaffordable because the rich are much richer than they were before. So if housing is limited and is seen as an investment vehicle, it becomes unaffordable.
The same goes for health care. There is a limit supply of medical care. Some people can afford much more than others which compounds the issue.
Americans (and most of the collective West) can afford all things that are not in limited supply - food, clothing, gadgets, transportation, etc. This is amazing in the context of history.
The weirdest thing is that both health care and housing do not need to be limited supply. It's completely artifical. We make bad governing decisions that force it to be so. Our problems are not economic but social/organizational ones.
Relatedly, I was quite surprised when recently I realized that the median (adjusted for PPP) disposable income in America was the highest in the OECD (except Luxembourg):
This means that the average american really really is financially better off than anywhere else in the world. I'd say that their quality of life isn't - they die much earlier than the rest of OECD, for example. But they are definitely the richest. And not just the richest american but the average american.
There is a fundemental problem that cannot really be solved with housing:
People want a single family homes with a nice property in nice area. They want a short commute and all the convenience of modern life.
There is in fact a hard limit on how many single family homes you can have in a an area. You can build them somewhere else, but then you get long commutes or short commutes to low paying work.
HN, let me remind you, most people do not work in tech banging on a keyboard all day with mild collaboration. Most people still need to commute to their jobs at least once a week. The majority still need to go in everyday.
Families tend to want single family homes. But singles/couples are happy buying townhomes or condos, which we could build a lot more of on the existing land. And we should encourage older couples to downsize (eg CA makes this undesirable because of prop 13)
An SFH in a big city is a luxury, as you say, something has to give.
You can't have cheap SFH in a nice neighborhood next to your job for everyone, there is reason why buildings exist
People are willing to live in condos just fine. But everything is unaffordable now. Every new condo building has crazy HOA fees with prices that are totally out of reach.
We're not building out or building up. So yeah. It's bad.
> I was quite surprised when recently I realized that the median (adjusted for PPP) disposable income in America was the highest in the OECD
That doesn't really tell you all that much useful. Disposable income just deducts taxes from your gross income. What really matters is the cost of those other things we're talking about: food, housing, healthcare, childcare, etc. When you subtract those out as well, you get discretionary income, and I bet the US is not leading at all there.
It’s not really a straightforward comparison because those categories are discretionary to an extent. For example people in the US seem to eat out at restaurants far more than in other countries. That would certainly increase food spending but clearly it’s a choice people make to improve their life and doesn’t represent a defect in the economy.
Frankly, if wage gains kept pace with productivity gains it’d be a very different and vastly better economic story for the average American. The reality is the recent blip of wage gains didn't make up ground on the last 40 years of stagnation, and it shows signs of slowing in any case, and Americans are feeling that
Ironically wage gains have outpaced inflation in the last 4 years, but that's such a minor effect compared to the lost ground over the previous 40 years that it's not noticeable.
It depends on how you measure inflation. The most important expenses for a young person trying to start a family are health-care, housing, food, child care and college tuition. Inflation in these categories is wild. I don't care at all if a big screen TV has gotten cheaper.
Given that big screen TV's are a negligible portion of the inflation basket and housing is by far the biggest component of the basket, I think the current basket is a fairly decent reflection.
The definition of “disposable income” used in this chart is gross income minus taxes.
I don’t think this corresponds with what most people think that means. i.e. gross income - (taxes + housing costs + food + health/childcare). I certainly didn’t.
That's the correct definition of "disposable income". The latter value is called "discretionary income", and a lot of people incorrectly say disposable when they really mean discretionary.
Yeah it’s hard to calculate a comparable figure on this when savings in one country is basically just temporarily holding money for the medical industry and getting to collect gains on it in the meantime, and in another, it’s actual savings.
Much like, say, IQ, wealth shouldn't be compared across populations without massive amounts of contextual normalization. Individual wealth measures don't account for institutional safety nets, nor social/cultural affordances, nor geography, nor weather, nor history, nor-
Suffice it to say that trying to directly compare individual wealth across disparate populations is so disingenuous as to be tantamount to spreading falsehoods. People feel poor because they are poor; Americans simply cannot afford many of the things that other developed economies provide for their residents. We can make lots of small changes to help with this^ (i.e., we don't need a massive overhaul or revolution), but the people calling the shots have to actually admit that people are not doing well, and that the costs people face today are burdensome. They won't, because they're afraid of not being reelected (and then they lose anyway).
^Solve food deserts by opening bodega-like shops in both urban AND suburban neighborhoods.
^Replace surface parking with structures housing amenities that people can walk to.
^Increase mass public transit access by building rail and bus/bike lanes.
Whether one thinks things are bad or good is subjective and should not be relevant, although it does appear to matter electorally. A rational voting public would vote on a forward looking basis -- which candidate would deliver the biggest expected improvement.
A rational voting public will not vote for someone who normalizes genocide. This is reasonable, because that which is normalized becomes probable for all.
Looking at the numbers, it doesn't seem so much that America chose Trump as they refused to choose Harris; her popular vote total is in the middle of Obama's, and Trump's is roughly the same as last time. I recognize and agree that Trump is worse. As much as Harris wanted to make that what the election was about, as with Biden in 2020, that's simply not what it was. The election was about if Harris could do better than Biden, as an executive. She couldn't show that she would, so the people who came out for Biden did not come out for her.
> You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that.
Isn't that literally what happened in his first term? Remember "I built the greatest economy the world has ever seen"? These claims were backed fully and completely by the stock market and not the rank & file. And this is the same situation we find ourselves in now. All these years later we're still in a situation where "the economy" is going gangbusters, but the average person feels left out.
I would say absolutely yes, which is ironic to say the least. I think the fact that he didn't follow through on his promises got lost in the crazyness of the pandemic times but do remember, he did not get re-elected. Also americans don't really think that far back when it comes to presidential elections, they tend to be here and now things.
My prediction is that the next four years won't see any improvement either, and the republicans will similarly be voted out again next election.
If "the economy" is going to be fixed, first Congress and the senate will actually have to start passing bills again, but that's probably not happening for another decade
I think the bigger problem isn't that the Dems didn't try to take credit for growth, but that they didn't point out that actually things weren't that rosy in 2020 and basically conceded the entirely false argument that Trump's term made the economy better and Biden's made it worse.
Sure, Trump didn't cause the pandemic, but neither did Biden and the inflation isn't unrelated to Trump's fiscal policy being looser than it needed to be even before the pandemic either, as well as being fundamentally the Fed's job to solve[2]. It's difficult[1] for an incumbent to win by attacking the track record of the last government especially when much of it was factors outside their control, but not impossible, especially since Trump has presented wavering voters with plenty of other reasons not to vote for him. Trump is living proof that excuses work...
[1]Not impossible though: an unpopular British government won a majority in 2014 by constantly blaming slow post recession growth on the other party's borrowing five years earlier
[2]You can absolutely guarantee that if Trump was in power the US would have experienced at least as much inflation, and he'd have wasted no time in blaming the Fed
Tbh I imagined it less as nuance and more as attack ads which focused on reminding people that 2020 was a really shit year for people's incomes and that Trump didn't actually deliver on his promises, not even the wall.
Would have been more effective to remind people why they didn't vote for him than remind them of his behaviour afterwards which he's perfectly good at doing himself.
> I think the bigger problem isn't that the Dems didn't try to take credit for growth, but that they didn't point out that actually things weren't that rosy in 2020 and basically conceded the entirely false argument that Trump's term made the economy better and Biden's made it worse.
This is more or less the direction I was heading w/ my post. I don't think it's a messaging issue per se. Rather it's control of the messaging. The economy in general has been on a steady path for a while, despite ups & downs: it's trending towards a bimodal distribution where certain parties are doing quite well and others are doing less well. But what I've seen the last several election cycles is the indicators that dominate what I see on TV, read online, etc swap depending on who is in power. So my expectation is that literally nothing will change yet we'll be hearing about how awesome the economy is for everyone in several months.
> All these years later we're still in a situation where "the economy" is going gangbusters, but the average person feels left out.
It doesn't matter. Trump claimed he'd build the greatest economy again. He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives. He just let people jump to their own happy conclusions.
>> He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives.
He did provide high level detail. He said he'd use tariffs to exclude foreign made stuff, which will necessitate "made in America" and bring manufacturing back. He said he'd balance the budget, which (theoretically) has long-term effects. He said he'd deport illegals, which should reduce demand for housing and hence prices.
You can disagree with any of those things, but I don't think it's right to say he didn't offer anything specific.
> I don't think it's right to say he didn't offer anything specific
I mean; he offered 'specifics' - they simply didn't make any sense on cursory examination. How to fight inflation? Tariffs! How to make already expensive goods cheaper? Tarriffs!
Hell, re: deporting illegals, he didn't even bother to do that his first term, Obama did it at a dramatically higher rate.
It's all a "I'll fix everything by doing nothing" smokescreen.
You're being disingenuous. The closest Republican talking point to reducing inflation was increasing energy production. That is a legitimately deflationary policy. What I think most people don't understand on the left is how far their credibility has fallen with the common person, and is because of attitudes like this. If you actually want to understand this election at all, you have to understand that people on the right feel constantly lied to by institutions and media figures, and disingenuous rebuttals like this don't help, they hurt.
>He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives.
No, but he had a very simple and catchy message that even people with the lowest IQ can understand and remember: "Fuck illegal immigrants, fuck China, America first, USA no. 1".
Election messages need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of education and intellect. If you start boring people with facts and high brow speeches that only the well educated can understand, you lost from the start.
Election messages need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of education
Republicans understand that the less educated a voter is, the more likely they are to vote R. It's not a coincidence that they are trying to gut the education system.
Yes, that's true, but the problem is that these past four years have been bad for everybody, so they remember the Trump years as being better than they actually were.
Yeah, if you're a high earner living the urban/suburban life you've probably done really well. The problem is that rural turnout was off the charts last night, which what handed Trump the popular vote - something that has not happened with a Republican candidate since 2004.
We got hit too. We adjusted mostly in our eating habits. Moved to zero eating out, more bulk buying, cheaper foods, etc. We're also much more discriminating on what activities we do for the kids.
I'm not gonna go all "woe is me" since we're doing fine, but as someone with a family of 5 the discretionary income basically went to zero the last 4 years.
Yes, I was going to come back to say basically all of this. We noticed that not only were we no longer saving money, but we weren't even living paycheck to paycheck and had to make all these sorts of changes and cuts to get off a very bad trajectory.
I lost my job a few months back, and I feel like the messaging from Harris/Biden was everything's great! Keep doing whatever is happening. Voted for who spoke to me.
Every company I join literally has an arm in Mexico, India, Pakistan, Colombia or Ukraine - and it always started feeling like at any minute those people would have my job. And they do. I want an administration that makes it so that those people don't have my job. And yes, I have always been willing to work for a lot less, but all the other Americans want more and more and more, so that it's expected for a programmer in the US to make 200k, so these companies decide to hire someone in Colombia for 80k. I'll take 100 and work a lot closer than that person in Colombia. But no companies here will listen to that. And I'll do it as someone with 20 years of experience.
But the only thing people on the left care about, as usual, are issues that actually don't matter. Yes I get it you want Gay rights and you want Abortion rights, but the reality is those things are not going away in the states you're already in. But on the other side, American people are being pushed into a terrible economic state.
Go ahead and not listen, HN doesn't. It's WAAAY to left.
Whatever measures are used to portray the economy as great(it's not just the stock market) or unemployment is down do not match with the impact people feel in their own lives. Maybe they aren't lies, but they aren't accurate either. Massive layoffs in our industry and a glut of H1Bs still hanging around are a problem for an American job seeker in this industry and we'll look out for our interests despite what we're told.
There was a massive downward revision in August, with most sectors hit hard, leaving the gains that remained increasingly dominated by government/education/healthcare jobs.
Telling people 'X' when their eyes/lived experiences tell them 'Y', and then frequently insulting them for not agreeing on top is certainly part of the reason for the popular vote going as it did.
this person basically just went: bad thing happened to me -> blame the president -> vote for the other person.
i have no interest in coddling people's feelings and telling them how right they are when they are operating with this level of analysis. Im not a politician so i dont have to deal with that, but im so tired of trying to explain how the world works to stupid people and getting shit for it because im not validating their delusions.
When presidents are quick to take credit for economic successes, surely it isn't unreasonable to hold them accountable for economic failures.
The disconnect between government data and the economic realities MANY people experienced (as evidenced by exit polling on the economy) only further salts the wounds for people not doing well.
again, youre assuming people's delusions about their personal finances are worth entertaining. theres absolutely no economic indicator you could point me to that validates people's feelings about the economy.
There were no economic failures during Joe Biden's presidency.
Economic indicators are manufactured by government agencies to support the narrative the current administration wants to spin. Meanwhile, people living in the real world observe some actual state of economy, based on things such as "how hard it was to find a new job".
Or maybe they said that "Bad thing happened to me", tired to recover, no recovery happening and it begins to feel like being lied to, blame the president.
Exactly what Harris was saying, hence the direction of my vote! Also, 50 job apps and no call backs, this is the WORST economy ever. In 2018, I would submit 3 and get 3 offers at the end of it.
I think the issue is that when people are desperate (lost job, can't pay for needs, etc) critical thinking can be limited to just short term survival mode. Even if it doesn't make sense big picture wise.
Democratic party needs to listen and at the very least fluff up a response that people in this situation feel heard. Even if there nothing they can really do. It's all about appeasing emotions.
Sounds like a skill issue. I never even saw a slowdown of recruiter spam. Maybe you should just try a little?
Also, maybe look into a little history while youre at it - the economy is not even close to the worst one ever, see: 1930s, 1970s, the turn of the millenium, and 2008-2012 for examples in living memory.
It is a skill issue. The folks at the bottom today within the USA economically when unemployment is so low and social mobility is so high do so out of choice. I've traveled the rest of the world and seen what actual poverty looks like (the kind where you have no real hope even if you work hard or are smart). I've seen how much better the US handled every crisis/pandemic vs others. We have it better than anyone else BY FAR.
I'm tired of pretending it's not. Want to call me a coastal elite like it's a slur? I'll wear it with a badge of honor. We are better than you at economic planning and becoming prosperous - also with defending social freedoms (i.e. legalizing the mushrooms).
We lost the low information voters. Bad from the perspective of winning elections but good from the perspective of self selecting your friends and people you associate with. The democrats really are a social club.
you think trump is going help programmers in the US at all? How? Trump merchandise isn't made in the US. His daughters brands are manufactured in Asia.
>And that would be fine, prices go up over time after all, but all of that is on the back of pay, that for most people, has not gone up anywhere close to enough to cover all of that, if it's gone up at all.
BLS data shows real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages has gone up since the pandemic.
Their methodology produces results that are not representative of the economic situation of average american families.
The average household income is 80k(ish) the average house is 420k(ish)
In Bethlehem, PA (a fairly middle of the road place tax wise) that means $5050 take home pay a month and a mortgage payment (FHA 3.5 down, 6.7 interest) of $2650 a month. That is more than half your pay just on a mortgage, not pmi, not insurance, not utilities, not anything else. Do this calculation across the country with localized numbers, do it with rent instead. Add a car and insurance for it into the mix. Then try adding in health insurance, groceries, etc. You are going to find that the numbers result in average people being squeezed and guess what? That lines up with peoples actual experience.
There was a graphic in John Kings (CNN). Segment that showed a vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation. This is just extremely real for the 5k(ish) takehome pay guy. I noticed the 4.5 ish $ eggs and milk.
The overall situation of housing and college costs have been increasing for a while this last round of inflation really was a big part of the last straw.
>There was a graphic in John Kings (CNN). Segment that showed a vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation.
Source? Is this simply because rural counties are doing worse than urbanized counties, and there are more rural counties than urbanized counties, such that if you don't account for population you'll come to the conclusion that "vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation", even though that's not true for the country as a whole?
A $2650 mortgage in Bethlehem PA is a very, very big house. You can’t apply the average mortgage price to a place where you can get a 2000 sqft house for under $200K. Additionally Bethlehem PA is an above average area for PA when it comes to affluence.
The median price per square foot in the US is $226[0]. The insanely economically depressed rust belt area where I was born has a median price over $150 per square foot (you do _not_ want to live there). I suspect your mental model of housing prices is anchored in the past when the world has moved on.
Okay, but we were not talking about the median house, we are talking about Bethlehem, PA. I got my data by going to Zillow and seeing that there are many 10s of houses near the 2K sqft mark that cost around $200k. You can do the same yourself.
Pennsylvania did not experience the same uplift in housing prices in 2020-2022 that much of the rest of the nation did as people are net leaving the state.
PA is actually one of the places least affected by inflation not just in the US but in the world.
The median home in the Bethlehem, PA core based statistical area costs $200 per square foot in October 2024. In October 2019, it cost $120 per square foot.
I'm sure you can find homes that list for half the cost per square foot just as well as someone could find homes that list for double the cost per square foot. That's why the median is useful – and it has increased 66% over the last five years.
Just fyi, I just used it for a location for a online calculator to grab tax for because PA is fairly middle of the road in taxes. If you want to do the math for Bethlehem PA specifically look up the average house sale price and the average income and take a look.
The question is supposedly whether things are better or worse, not whether they're "good enough" in some abstract way.
If you think things aren't good enough for an average person in one of the statistically best periods a capitalist economy has ever seen, there are redistributive alternatives. That doesn't seem to be what Trump voters are expecting. Instead there seems to be a nostalgia for past better times, which isn't really explained by "people are squeezed" based on math that would almost certainly have worked out just as tightly ten years ago.
Something else is going on. I don't claim to have a full explanation but none of the attempts to "fix" BLS statistics that I've seen have been more persuasive than this.
It's worth keeping in mind that inflation is a theoretical construct based on assumptions and formulas that may not apply for every individual or subpopulation.
So, CPI adjusted it means that median people are "doing better" about $30 (also CPI adjusted) than in 1980 per week? Given all the "progress" in that time, that is just not enough, and that is what people feel. People feel they don't have the money to participate in modern life, and yeah, an extra $30 per week is definitely not enough to do that.
Also, the median stats say nothing about how people below it are doing. By definition, that is 50%, and that is also about the number of people voting for Trump, alongside your run-of-the-mill racists and fascists.
>So, CPI adjusted it means that median people are "doing better" about $30 (also CPI adjusted) than in 1980 per week?
They're actually doing about $50 better, because there was a recession in 1980. Moreover, the $50 (or $30) dollars are "1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars", not today's dollars. In today's dollars it would be $158.28 (or $94.97). Moreover, given most people's expectation and discussion for income increases are the raw dollar amounts (ie. not inflation adjusted), it's not a fair benchmark for real wage increases.
>By definition, that is 50%, and that is also about the number of people voting for Trump, alongside your run-of-the-mill racists and fascists.
Given how the votes are roughly 50-50, you can make the opposite argument for Harris, replacing "racists and fascists" with "college students and woke activists".
That is about $650 more per month, inflation adjusted in todays dollars, for 45 years of progress?
> Given how the votes are roughly 50-50, you can make the opposite argument for Harris, replacing "racists and fascists" with "college students and woke activists".
Yeah, that is exactly what I am saying. And it seems to bear out: In the demography of income of > 100K, democrats win, below it, Trump wins.
>But still haven’t matched productivity gains since the 1970s[0]
The gap might be real, but it's existed for decades. Moreover at least when it comes to explaining why people voted for Trump: while I have no data to support it, "we're poorer because of inflation" is a much more popular sentiment/election issue than "the top 1% are taking the gains for themselves", especially among republican voters.
Considering his very pronounced and persistent support of broad tariffs on all imports, I'm not sure why people would vote for Trump and the Republican platform he steers if they're worried about the economy and prices. This will absolutely drive prices up across the board, exacerbating the situation, while the Republican platform has no proposal for even attempting to offset that, they also want to put the boots on the neck of labor, as it were (see Project 2025 or even the miniaturized version Agenda 47)
Voting for the guy that complained American wages were too high and thinks tariffs are paid by other countries will definitely not help.
Please be more specific if you are explaining why American voters have got angry and done something stupid that will make things worse or if you are defending that stupidity as a good thing that will help the situation you are talking about.
When your lifestyle suddenly has to change in drastic ways because of a rapid increase in prices none of this makes anyone feel any better. "Think about how much worse it COULD be, kids!"
>When your lifestyle suddenly has to change in drastic ways because of a rapid increase in prices
Where's the evidence this is happening for a majority (or even something vaguely resembling one) of people? I've already posted official statistics that show inflation adjusted median wages are up.
Ok, well, my wages aren't up, and everybody I know's wages aren't up either. Being told this over and over again, that everything is great, despite what's obvious to our own personal experience is why you got the result you got today.
or you know, wages stagnated for 40 years and haven't kept pace with productivity gains, and it was inevitable that this would wear most American citizens down and we'd feel it more and more over time.
The most recent wage gains failed to make up for this fact
It wasn't really rising in 2016. The flat wage growth lasted past 2020, with a relatively recent blip, but it has not meaningfully risen to outpace the stagnation that existed for decades.
If wages increased with productivity increases we'd be in better shape overall as a society, but here we are.
When (some) people feel they’re worse off and blame it on the government, telling them government produced statistics says they’re actually better off is totally going to make them trust the government more. /s
Edit: Without the snark, lots of people believe their rent, grocery bills, energy bills etc. have gone up a lot more than official inflation numbers (and that can be true even if the inflation numbers are “accurate” for some definition of accurate), and you’re not going to convince them using anything derived from these inflation numbers.
Where the Democrats went wrong is they looked at the economic figures for stuff like corporate profit margins and the stock market and said "look how good the economy is!" when those profit margins are high because they've jacked prices and regular consumers are feeling the squeeze. Unfortunately there's little a President can do about that. Corporate consolidation was largely complete before they even took office and monopolistic behavior is to be expected. The pandemic supply chain disruptions gave companies cover to increase their margins and that's what they did.
Theodore Roosevelt was well known for monopoly-busting. It is something the president can influence and the U.S. has a dozen major monopolies that should have been busted long ago.
"the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that.
I think I'm an average person. Car prices came down and I was finally able to buy a sedan. Unemployment seems low. Eggs are expensive, sure, but on the other hand, my brand of yogurt always seems to be on sale and oatmeal prices are flat, so it's kind of a wash there. The economy seems pretty fine to me.
Certainly, there have been no threats to shut down the government (like in '18-'19), which did do a number on my retirement plan at the time...
I don't buy it. There's a reality distortion field at work here. If Trump had been in office he would he would have been touting the economy as the greatest in history. And 'average people' would have 'seen that' despite not 'seeing it'.
I don't vote for Trump. I don't know anyone aside from some crazy family members who like him. I'm in an extreme blue state that was called when only a few percent of the vote was in. I don't even know anyone who listens to Trump's speeches or sees this ads.
Every single person I know feels this economy is terrible. Of every age. From new graduates, to senior people. Even the most extreme Obama or Bernie people feel like things are going very badly.
Everyone on campus was consistently outraged when Biden would gloat about his economy.
It's not Trump. I have no idea what his message even is.
This is an own goal. Democrats believed the total bullshit that economists spew about how good things are. When people actually feel how terrible they are.
Yes, it’s been good for the rich. Stock market gains do nothing for most people.
I’m skeptical about the vibes based methods of evaluating the economy, I think the economy really is better for the lowest income workers, but forget stock market gains. Also, rents remaining flat might be a Bay Area specific phenomena. Or even SF specific? Don’t know where you live.
> but isn't lower wage people getting higher wages a good thing
Their wages did not rise anywhere near commensurate with the increased costs of those goods and services - the same goods and services that those people would be buying
What you're doing now is what people are so angry about. Stop, "But the numbers..."ing, humor people's feelings for a moment, and figure out what would need to be done to lift those spirits. Gaslighting is not a good tack.
I agree that maybe people need their feelings humored, but how is this gaslighting? I'm not denying that there's food inflation or restaurant inflation - I pointed out that it's a narrow way to look at even your own economic position.
Food might be up 30% in biden's term for all I know. And maybe wages are only up 20%. But as long as rent is 0% and asset growth kept track with inflation (it's blown past it), you are still ahead.
I suspect this is just standard human loss aversion at work. I feel this even from my own wife who looks at our economic position worse than me even though it is the same numbers. What's worsened becomes more important than what's improved, even if rationally, it nets out even.
My rent was up 30% and it was my largest expense. DoJ has been dragging its heels on punishing the companies that were a part of this gouging-via-algorithmic-price-fixing-and-warehousing, and now that Trump is going to be in office, those lawsuits are likely dead in the water. Very much a "Thanks for nothing, Joe," situation.
In gaslighting, the perpetrator insists on denying the victim's perception of reality, while actually controlling the facet of reality that he denies is altered. In this case, Democrats control the means to alter the economy via leaning on Congress, the Treasury, and the Fed. They manufactured an environment where earners would lose out to the concerns of asset holders (the "soft-landing," rather than a swift and severe FFR rate hike and tightening of Treasury holdings that would have squelched inflation), but insist on telling earners that everything is okay, because the metrics that matter to asset holders are doing well. In carrying water for this line of argument, you're participating in their gaslighting. People aren't doing well, full stop.
A fast hike would have caused pain, but the money printing that we did anyway would have helped mitigate that. Instead, it just went to propping up asset prices. Bank Bailout 2.0; we didn't learn our lesson, and the incumbent party was yet again ousted.
I'm in Texas, in Big Tech. I didn't vote Trump. But I understand.
I'd like to get out of here but can't move because of mortgage rates, among other reasons. I'd like to change jobs but tech layoffs have flooded the job market. It's an anxious time. My 401k is doing great though.
I don't blame Biden for all this. There was absolutely no choice but to pour enough stimulus into the economy to cause massive inflation in order to prevent a revolution during COVID. But if I'm feeling the hangover I'm sure the real working class is staggering.
I’m also in tech. I’ve been looking for work for the last several months. Took some time off after my work contract ended last year.
I likely don’t count towards unemployment statistics. I don’t qualify for unemployment since I was a contractor before.
In my current job search, I’ve sent out more applications and had more interviews than the rest of my career. Granted, I found jobs more through connections than cold applying in the past. I’ve been tapping connections in this search too, though. It’s rough out there. I’ve contemplated taking an exit from tech and picking up a trade.
It sure feels surreal to me when I see reports of a strong economy.
I believe the unemployment statistics, but I'm not sure what industry is doing all the hiring. I doubt it pays as well as the industries that are shedding people right and left.
Becoming the refuge-party for fleeing Republican neoliberals (joining the existing Democratic ones) is really gonna cripple the party when the party that popularized (among the political set—voters never liked it) that damn world-view is abandoning it.
But still haven’t matched productivity gains since the 1970s[0]
Everyone likes to point this out like it somehow made up for all the wage stagnation of the last 40 years and it most definitely did not.
That would make it a left/right thing.
As a European: there is no left in america, there is a liberal right and a conservative right.
The economy is good in america, but that just means that the amount of "resources" in the country is increasing, but, if "average joe" benefits from that or not is a question of how those resources are distributed.
Left/Right is about economy.
Being on the right means that you find it more important that the total pool of resources is increasing.
Being on the left means that you care more about how the resources are distributed.
What happened here is IMHO that the conservatives did the populist thing, they claimed that regular people would get more resources if they won, while still claiming that they would distribute less resources away from wealthy people.
They are not wrong in saying that the economy is good, it is just that since there is no left in american politics, it seems like some people have forgotten the other perspective, since redistribution of wealth have been almost an insult in america for so long. Yet, last time he was president, trump managed to send everyone a check, signed by himself, but paid for by taxes, without being called an evil communist.
I listened to a radia program where poor americans where interviewed, and that was the thing that they remembered about trump, he sent them a check.
So, in conclusion, there is a large group of poor americans, that associate the guy that wants to remove taxes for rich people with what I (according to the above definition) consider to be left wing politics.
There is, though? It’s just no represented at all because of FTPT there is based no constituency where it can get 50%. Usually not even in Democrat primaries.
Europe seems to be pretty good at being on the right lately. Even compared to America. I think the two party system just creates more centrist government, which is perhaps a strong argument for it.
As a European: there is no left in america, there is a liberal right and a conservative right
This gets parroted too often. America objectively provides more abortion access than Europe. Speech here is undoubtedly more expansive than in Europe. Sure, unions may have more power in Europe, but not so much more that I'd be saying "there is no left in America".
And that inflation was caused largely by pre-Biden Trump policies of giving tax-breaks to billionaires and allowing blatant corporate greed. Inflation is not a quick phenomenon. It has lags. It has stickiness. People don't know this because they don't take any economics.
And, more importantly, today's inflation is by large firms exerting their market control and monopolistic tendencies. How many grocery companies are there and in their region? Kroger is trying to buy out Albertsons to completely dominate the midwest, to lower quality and increase prices like all monopolists. What needs to be done is anti-trust enforcement which Biden has attempted. But none of this is known by 90% of the country and 0% of Trump voters.
And Trumps proposed tariffs will only accelerate price increases[0]
It’s clear it has support from rank and file republicans as well, it is more than feasible that if republicans win the house too we will see tariffs in short order
It will almost certainly accelerate inflation, but won’t it also give domestic manufacturing workers hurt by globalization a lot more demand for their work, and leverage to increase their wages? It seems like the main people hurt by this would be the upper middle class and above, the execs, designers, and managers who’ve directly and indirectly managed large international teams of laborers working at low rates, as they’ll get hit by the inflation, but see no additional demand/leverage to increase their wages. They’re the part of the bimodal wealth distribution that has until now done very well by globalization, and I think this election is largely a reaction by the other mode.
No. You can't just wave a magic wand and order manufacturing home. Capitalists exported a lot of skill and industrial infrastructure to overseas markets, which can't be rebuilt overnight.
There was talk about this in the first term too, and it ended up with a lot of money from tariffs being used to subsidize farmers because they found themselves doing so poorly that suicides spiked.
Right, it seems likely to be disruptive in the short term, and there would be skill shortages and big holes in the domestic supply chain. I mean more abstractly/directionally. It does seem like it’d be best if it was phased in predictably over a longer period of time, but doesn’t seem like that’s the plan.
It hurts everyone, the price shocks will be felt for years, and any gains that can be made won't matter.
Wage gains won't keep pace with any price increases either, Republican's have already outlined policies that are regressive to average Americans[0][1]
About the only thing tariffs will do is consolidate power at the top and allow the largest corporations to buy out smaller ones that can't cope as well.
We are remember, talking about broad spectrum tariffs here, which will hit any import, from food to solar panels.
Yes, prices will rise, the question is whether it will increase their leverage in the job market enough to boost their earnings enough to counteract the higher prices.
my point with the JEC wasn't about tariffs its about Republican policies that show that "will it increase their leverage in the job market enough to boost their earnings enough to counteract the higher prices" is fantasy
The highest levels of leadership of the Republican party have shown time and again that they want a permanent poor underclass through their policies (both enacted and proposed) and actions.
There's no sense in speculation here, if they can put the boot on labors neck, they will 100% of the time
I mean, we were just talking about tariffs, not whatever else may be in their plans.
But point taken, you think that the net result will be worse for poor people. I don’t necessarily disagree, it just seems that this one bit might be somewhat positive for the poor.
I don't think the US is the only place where US companies sell things. What about when tariffs are placed on US items, demand will drop with US made things.
It’s not, but our balance of trade is very deeply negative. We import a lot more than we export. Partly because our currency is kept artificially strong by reserve currency status, preventing our exports from becoming more competitive when we go deeply into debt.
The president has huge amounts of executive authority over tariffs. I don’t know where the boundaries are but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw huge tariff increases in the first hundred days.
Right. You would want to do it immediately so that initial hits to economy can be claimed as belonging to Biden. And then you can cut the tarrifs and make things improve.
Nah, he’ll make the Fed a political appointment and goose the economy that way, already seemed pretty annoyed that he didn’t have direct control of it last time and seemed to partially blame that for his loss. His voters will ignore the resulting inflation, say it’s awesome, and you won’t be able to convince them otherwise maybe until the really bad crash on the other side.
Even worse, he'll throw gasoline everywhere just like he did last time and throw the match right before he leaves the room. Fuel prices and the Afghanistan withdrawal were both done specifically with that in mind.
Afghanistan is one of those cases where I strongly agree with the idea (and with his pushing back on DoD crying about how it’d take a really long time to pull out the troops and equipment—I get it’s landlocked but it’s a small force, you control the air, and resistance on the ground is near-zero, so if that’s super-hard for you, guess you’re bad at a really basic part of your job and we should be very concerned) but absolutely hate the inept execution, like the dumb-shit bargain with the Taliban. Cracking down on Chinese cheating on free trade is another—yes, more of that, but be less shit about it please?
I guess, from a Western-European perspective, the problem is that with the choice of Democrats and Republicans you get the choice between right-wing and ultra right-wing. Having right-wing politics that funnel money from the poor to the rich, or the tenants to the landlords, is in the interest of the financial backers of both parties. Messaging-wise, the Democrats have always been "more honest" (low bar, it's hard to be more dishonest/convoluted than Trump anyway), so maybe that's why Trump seems to come out ahead there.
You're touching on one of the struggles for many left leaning voters and why the democratic party struggles with enthusiasm and to win. To many on the left, the party markets itself as "the least bad option" and thus "the only choice". Anyone in sales would tell you that is not the best pitch.
I get where you're coming and the Dems' greatest sin is probably pulling the rug under progressive candidates in primaries of some elections, but at some point you gotta look at the things Biden/Harris did for all Americans as president and consider if it passes the threshold from "least bad option" to, dare I say, "good, but obviously not perfect option". Things like increasing the threshold for overtime pay, an anti-redlining mortgage lending framework, pushing the HHS to reschedule cannabis to schedule III, actually showing up on a picket line, etc.
I agree with all of that but I'm not the voting block that should be seeing that and voting democrat but not. To those people it will never matter how many incremental gains the dems push through. They only see the big things not attempted or failed, that the party is once again running a uninspiring insider, that they are being told who they have to vote for because there is no other option, and that having done that last time not much in their day to day lives has improved.
I don't care about that but the people that do make or break the democratic party. Unfortunately the democrats seem incapable of learning that if you don't appeal to those people, they will lose.
I'm not sure I understand the criticism. This is bad? People like property rights. Progressives like them. Conservatives like them. Economies like them.
Meanwhile there are substantial differences between the two wings, what services and programs they think government should provide, how problem solving should be approached.
normally I'd agree about Trump's honesty, but in the debate and subsequent Harris interviews I saw a lot more deflection, misdirection, lies/mistruthes and non-answers than I did from trump. Sure trump says some wild things which are often only 50% ish true. But kamala would openly call things lies that were verifiable fact, those are lies too, and she lied a lot.
I dont want to get into a flame war, 50% is a generous number, since many times he isn’t speaking full intelligible sentences.
Trump gets a pass on absolutely outrageous things, which he creates by the second.
I feel that he is so bad, and so incessant with his content creation., that he causes an integer overflow in the audience. At that point, he is once again assessed with an average rubric.
I feel that his success here suggests that this is a strategy that will succeed globally, and that many political candidates are going to be emulating his “style”.
I think you perceived that because you expected Trump to lead the election and her to follow in his wake. She deflected to the things she wanted to talk about to a usual degree, and did not lie more than usual for core-Democrat politicians, which is not a lot. They just don't address what they don't want to talk about.
Ultimately she lost, and probably should have even more aggressively emulated him by promising things that aren't even real. Like how do you circle the promise that the war in Ukraine will be over tomorrow. I'm not making it up, that was repeated ad nauseum on the campaign trail. I guess all that matters is winning.
> I saw a lot more deflection, misdirection, lies/mistruthes and non-answers than I did from trump
Yup, it just came without the crass jokes and the mannerisms but I guess the confidence was pretty high that people would forgive her because she's just "not trump".
I think they totally bungled the messaging and stuck their head in the sand. With all the billions of campaign money, they spent most of it calling trump a fascist or orange idiot a bunch more times, hoping that's enough to bump voter numbers. There is a dose-response curve there and after some point it just doesn't yield linear results.
My theory is that legal sports betting makes the economy seem artificially worse for a lot of people. It has had a measurable impact on bankruptcy rates, and is causing a lot of self-inflicted financial stress. Trump's main platform is that your problems aren't your fault, and I think that resonates well with people struggling because they are throwing out their disposable income every month.
I’ve never bet on sports but watched my grocery bill skyrocket. A few years ago I posted year-over-year grocery prices and in aggregate the bill was 50% over the course of 12-months. Since then we’ve seen insurance and utilities skyrocket, creature comforts like streaming services are all up. CPI may say one thing, but my checkbook feels much worse. Disposable income has all gone to sustain a reduced quality of life.
I am not on Facebook, but my wife is. According to her there are countless posts from women complaining that their husbands / boyfriends are wasting their money on sports betting.
So while it's a small percentage of GDP, it is a much larger percentage of their budget.
I am Facebook friends with a lot of women and haven't seen a single such complaint. That's obviously not a real population survey but if it was really a widespread problem then I think I would have seen it.
When looking at some profiles of celebrating Trump supporters on Reddit, basically 100% had a large number of posts in sports betting topics, or Wall Street/day trading topics. An interesting demographic overlap there.
Back in my day I remember when the same anti-porn conservatives would also tell you that gambling bans are good. I can't believe that conservatives gave up on moral purity.
Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses. They did nothing to help with Women's healthcare. I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?
The 111th Congress was the only time in the last 20 years Democrats had a filibuster-proof trifecta and that was for 72 days. [1]
That was the government that gave us the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
The other Democrat trifecta was the 117th Congress[2] but if you look that's only with independents in the Senate that caucused with Democrats. Obviously also not filibuster proof.
That's the government that gave us the CHIPS act.
Think about how often parties are in power and they can't even fill appointed positions because of partisan opposition during confirmation, let alone pass legislation.
> That was the government that gave us the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
Aka Romneycare, originally put forth by the Heritage Foundation. If that's the best Democrats can do, no wonder people aren't too optimistic about them.
The Democratic Party are the ones that passed it. The Republicans didn't, not when they held the legislature, not when they held the presidency and the legislature. Even when Romney signed it in MA (to his credit), it came from the Democratic Party held state legislature.
And its passage has helped millions, people I know personally and probably people you know personally. Maybe anyone who'd ever heard the phrase "pre-existing condition" before. It's one of the single most effective and widely beneficial government efforts in our lifetimes.
It's not that fact that Democrats did it by taking the best parts of an opposition party policy isn't impressive, it's that the unseriousness of Republicans when it comes to their own ostensible policy ideas is depressive.
If people were logical like you suggest, they wouldn't vote for an even worse situation. Yet they constantly do, so I'm sorry I cannot accept "logic" as a reason for the latest vote. People voted something, they got something, and they will get something back (where all those somethings aren't even important for elections). No, I'm not sarcastic, also not joking. Campaign and vote looked as seen from here absolutely bonkers.
The public health insurance option, also known as the public insurance option or the public option, is a proposal to create a government-run health insurance agency that would compete with other private health insurance companies within the United States. The public option is not the same as publicly funded health care, but was proposed as an alternative health insurance plan offered by the government. The public option was initially proposed for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but was removed after the independent US senator for Connecticut Joe Lieberman threatened a filibuster.
As a result, Congress did not include the public option in the bill passed under reconciliation. The public option was later supported by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in the 2016 and 2020 elections and multiple other Democratic candidates, including the current President, Joe Biden.
The reason Democrats couldn't do more is because not enough people voted for them, so they can only be angry with themselves. We would have had a public option if Congress didn't have to rely on the Blue Dog democrats. IMO Democratic voters have unreasonable expectations for their politicians and Republicans basically have none. Did Trump face any consequence to failing to pass a border bill during his administration?
Well there's your problem. The GOP knows that you need to sidestep those kind of tedious anachronisms in order to wield power effectively and get what you want. The Dems needed to learn that lesson several administrations ago.
>Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses.
When was this exactly? The last time democrats controlled presidency and both houses was during Obama's first term and they passed the most historic overhaul of healthcare in this country, which was a huge win for women's healthcare.
The "Stupak amendment" was exactly that. There were a group of Dems who wanted concessions on federal funding that were holding out until that amendment went in the bill.
That something I find that the left/liberals/progressives doesnt get.
The democrat party is not progressive. If they ever have 60 seats in the senate they will fracture and argue with the progressives elements. Most of the democrat party’s constituents are conservative, religious. Most of the minorities they take for granted are not onboard with nonbinary identities, or anything to do with fetus elimination. They just are afraid of republicans for one reason or another.
> The last time democrats controlled presidency and both houses was during Obama's first term and they passed the most historic overhaul of healthcare in this country, which was a huge win for women's healthcare.
Was it? From a foreign perspective it doesn't seem to have changed the conversation around US healthcare at all.
Before ACA you could be denied health insurance or coverage due to pre-existing conditions (or they could charge you so much that it was infeasible to get insurance).
This was huge because if you ever lost insurance and got new insurance (switched jobs) then you were often screwed.
ACA defined essential benefits. Before ACA insurance usually didn't cover things mental healthcare.
Required coverage of preventative care/screenings/reproductive care for women.
Annual and lifetime coverage limits were banned. Your health insurance could no longer drop you because you got an expensive to treat cancer.
The amount of desperately needed consumer protections ACA added were immense.
Sure there are problems with ACA, especially the marketplace part of it, but overall it was a big change to healthcare in the US.
That’s putting it mildly. Sure, the ACA was, in many respects, a big improvement over what came before it. But it’s still outrageously broken. Let’s consider the perspective of a person who wants health insurance:
1. You mostly want to be insured via your employer, and you mostly get screwed if you leave your job. The financial disincentives to insuring yourself are huge unless you qualify for the subsidies.
2. For some bizarre reason, you can use only buy insurance at some times of the year.
3. You more or less have to buy insurance through a website that is massively and incomprehensibly bad. Want to figure out what that insurance covers? It’s sort of doable, but it sure isn’t easy.
4. Whether or not you will get to fill a given prescription still seems arbitrary and vaguely malicious.
5. The whole system rubs the insane list prices of healthcare in your face, almost continuously. For drugs, even small amounts of Internet searching points out how much cheaper they are basically anywhere else.
It’s really hard to be excited about the ACA.
(For added fun, and this isn’t really the ACA’s fault but it sure is a failure of affordability and sure seems like a massive failure of government: check out hims.com. Pulling a random example, “generic for Cialis” is at least 3x the price on hims.com as it is via GoodRx.)
And if you are relatively healthy and able to pay your regular doctor bills out of pocket, ACA made catastrophic insurance illegal (because of the minimum requirements). It's sort of like making car insurance require $50 copays to the mechanic. Sure, it's nice if you need an engine rebuild, but paying for all that makes the insurance a lot more expensive if you have a reliable car. There's no need for me to pay the doctor's bill and the insurance company's profit+overhead, I'd like to have the option to pay normal stuff myself and only insure something too large for me to pay.
This might not be quite what you want, but the ACA does allow for High Deductible Health Plans (HDHP). Those have consumers paying out of pocket for normal stuff, using a Health Savings Account (HSA).
Which are, nonetheless, rather impressively worse in basically all respects than the old medically underwritten individual plans. Other than the fact that anyone can get them, of course.
I’m not saying that the ACA was a bad law. I’m saying that a not-so-nerdy voter contemplating whether ACA is a great achievement of the Democratic Party is likely to be unimpressed.
Worse in some ways, better in others. The old individual plans usually had serious limits on coverage of pre-existing conditions. And they had lifetime coverage limits which could be exhausted by a single serious illness or injury.
While your complains are all true and the ACA is a mess compared to any developed country, it is still very exciting to have the ACA. For anyone who was barred from getting insurance before, it is the lifesaver, literally.
Compared to other countries, ACA isn't very good (to put it mildly) but compared to how the US was before it, it is the most wonderful improvement ever.
You can use a broker (free to you) and get the same (regulated) plans. If your situation is at all complicated you should definitely use one. Probably even for “simple “ cases.
It was a great thing for the people who most needed healthcare, but it priced me (young at the time and healthy) out of the market. I went from having cheap employer-sponsored healthcare to not being able to afford it (literally from less than 10% to ~50% of my paycheck).
I'm from the other side of the Atlantic. Do you mind explaining how that happened?
To give you some context: every country is different here but usually we have an almost free healthcare system covering everything for everybody (but sometimes you have to wait for a long time) and private healthcare that is more expensive, usually faster but not necessarily better.
Here in the UK my wife and I have between us spent a fair bit on private medical care over the last year - in the case of my wife for cataract operation on both eyes and in my case dental implants and related procedures.
What I find amusing about private health care in the UK is that in each case I have ever used it they make it clear that if something goes seriously wrong they will take you to an NHS hospital.
>What I find amusing about private health care in the UK is that in each case I have ever used it they make it clear that if something goes seriously wrong they will take you to an NHS hospital.
Privatize the winnings, socialize the losses, the "free market" working as intended.
Most of the prices going up for young and healthy people is just the math insurance companies have to do when they can't deny people and have to provide more coverage.
The part where we don't have the free healthcare system is mostly due to politicians being afraid of socialism or being afraid of raising taxes or both and a very strong medical lobby that doesn't want the salaries of doctors (very high over here) to drop.
And in that circumstance you are allowed to maintain your health insurance (COBRA) or buy a new plan ("qualifying life events," which also includes things like marriage and moving).
The comment you're responding to was alluding to if people could choose to not pay for health insurance until after they got injured or sick and then needed the benefits.
Can you explain this more to me? What does it mean to be unable to afford healthcare? As I understand, it is a law that you must have it, or you pay a fine to the IRS by your tax return. Do you really have no healthcare now?
Unable to afford healthcare is pretty straightforward, I think. My plan went from being a relatively small amount I would pay for peace of mind, to being a giant expense that would leave me destitute. As far as the fine, if it hadn't been revoked it would just come out of my tax return, so "paying" would have been no big deal. Yeah, still don't have healthcare. I realized I don't need it much and became more fatalistic after living without it.
Yeah, access. That’s what we were all freaking out about. Lack of access. That’s what makes our system different from the rest of the western world. Access. Glad we’re drowning in access.
With a simple majority, they can change the rules of the Senate so that a simple majority will get a bill passed. The filibuster is not in the Constitution.
The same reason the GOP didn't do anything about the border or gun rights when they had the chance. Why solve an issue when you can use it to get people to vote in the next election? Its a gamification of government. They are more concerned with keeping their jobs than governing.
Trump had the Wait in Mexico policy which was great. GOP never promised anything on gun rights, but Trump single-handedly banned bump stocks after the Las Vegas massacre which is more than Obama ever side on gun control.
> I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?
They could pass a national law that protects a right to travel to other states for an abortion if your state bans them.
With the existence of the Senate filibuster, passing laws is very difficult even when you win. There are entire topics where significant reform is basically impossible, from anyone.
This is why America's supreme court is so important: One can argue that most federal level changes in the last 8 years cane from the court just changing their mind on what used to be settled precedent.
The filibuster has existed for a long time and yet Congress was still able to pass laws. I don’t give them a free pass for this, they need to learn to work together with the other party like we did in the past.
Do you live in the US? The first half of the Biden administration was hamstrung by Manchin, Sinema, and the Republicans. The Democrats had nominal control of the presidency and legislature but faced implacable resistance from the Republicans and these two nominally Democratic senators. Until the recent Supreme Court decision the US hasn't had a king.
Controlling the house doesn't mean anything. Any minority easily control legislation with the ability of an easy filibuster. You seem to forget trump was in for 4 years as well with many split Congresses. You can't blame democrats for all the bad things for that period when one party (minority at times) is actively working for the 1%
Because it was a critical fundraising topic for decades (on both sides, to be fair).
I don't exactly know how much of national politics is optimizing for fundraising rather than for making citizens' lives better, but it's clearly far too great.
It’s not that divisive outside the political class.
60+% majorities have supported abortion as a right until near the end of the second trimester, and for the health of the mother after that (for 30+ years).
That's a popular misconception that has been shattered for well over a decade. That is nearly impossible with the filibuster, there was one slim window of 1 or 2 months in Obama's terms that they could have squeezed it in. Otherwise it's a fight to the death every time with the republicans in the Senate (filibuster)
The problem is the filibuster is a choice of the senate. They can at any time decide to do away with it, it’s not law and not a law of nature. But they don’t because it serves their interests to be able to throw their hands up in the air and not even have to try to pass legislation.
That's no something that is going to happen, -both- parties dearly love the filibuster, if it can just be done away with, against, precedence then it will become useless whenever a party gets the slimmest of majorities. I'm not sure how much longer it matters though, if this turns into a dictatorship
> "I would like to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that result in women feeling compelled to get an abortion, or at least considering getting an abortion, particularly if we can reduce the number of teen pregnancies," Obama said.
> They did nothing to help with Women's healthcare.
What about Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act)? I think that helped many women secure healthcare, which is incredibly important during pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood.
> keep abortion legal
As I understand, after the US Supreme Court cancelled (I don't know the correct term) protection abortion rights, many states automatically banned it (via "trigger" laws.) However, I read that many women are using video calls with out-of-state doctors to get prescriptions for (chemical) abortion pills. I wish I had more hard numbers on it, but the number of abortions has not fallen as much as people thought. Also, depending upon your income level and proximity to a neighboring state that still allows traditional (surgical) abortion, many women drive to the next state for the procedure.
I mean.. it is technically not inaccurate, but it fails to account for the remaining portion of the balance of power.
That said, there were very few moments, where a given party had house, senate and presidency at the same time. And most of those moments were divided almost evenly in half so breaking ranks had a big effect.
I think what I am saying it is a tired talking point.
Can't remember where I read this but essentially most Americans are single issue voters on the economy. They just pick their second most important issue when the economy is humming along nicely.
The economy has been fine for many peoples working lives during ZIRP.
But when people feel like their struggling to afford diapers and cereal most other issues become secondary.
Then all those people are in for a heck of a rude awakening. I can tell you what’s going to happen to the cost of everyday goods with a 100% tariff placed on top, and the answer isn’t: they’re going down.
Keep in mind that this is after the Biden admin/Congress gutted half of his proposed infrastructure reform. That half was already compromised compared to what progressives wanted, and they STILL couldn't pass it. Guess who stayed home yesterday?
When you say, "Your only choice to save democracy is to vote for me," reasonable and rational people conclude that democracy is already done for and simply don't vote for anyone. And there were warnings that this would happen - like the primaries in Michigan - but establishment Democrats didn't listen (or didn't care). So, now, here we are. How's that for a rude awakening?
This has been my thought as well. Inflation was high, so low-propensity voters against the current party show up while those for the current party don't. It will take some time to see what the actual voting shifts were, but the economy has always been an accurate predictor.
The money from ZIRP mostly goes to the upper class as it props up asset values - stocks, land & housing, luxury goods, etc.
In general easy lending benefits the richest the most - that's why you saw such a growing split between the wealth of the richest and poorest after throwing away the gold standard.
>The money from ZIRP mostly goes to the upper class as it props up asset values - stocks, land & housing, luxury goods, etc.
One that people tend to miss: compensation for high-income professionals. When that gets bid up, so does the price of everything they spend money on. Education/childcare, personal electronics, healthcare, transportation, food, etc. It's not just the wealthy and ultra-wealthy; when the upper middle class can pay and not feel pain, that's taken as a signal to jack up prices across the board.
I would most certainly categorize what is commonly known as the "upper middle class" as wealthy. Upper-middle usually has a sizable wealth, mainly in real estate, equities, etc.
So it is not only the rich and ultra-rich (but of course them benefit from this the most if they don't do anything too stupid).
Of course all of these terms and definitions are quite fuzzy so the whole argument hinges on some implicit agreement as to the specifics.
Democratic messaging really failed. The economy was a winnable issue for them. Trump's promises (20% broad tariff, mass deportation, make the Fed a political office, trade wars) would devastate the economy and cause significant inflation. Even Elon Musk admits that Trump's plans will tank the economy. https://x.com/whstancil/status/1851265385909092565
Now right wing commentators are saying that Trump won't actually do what he promised.
Most of the stuff he promised he won't do. Simply because of the sheer complexity and resources involved. It's not in his nature to focus and work out complex issues. Imagine the logistics required to simply apprehend, process and deport 10-15 million people at scale. He'll probably do better at closing the border than any past president. That's for certain. But actually deporting all undocumented migrants already within the country. yeah, that's not happening.
At best , its going to be performative on many things. Even with structural changes to the administrative state that the GOP's project 2025 seems to be promising - it's harder than it appears.
Regarding tariffs - China is currently in an economy slump. Trump being transactional in nature , its certain the Chinese will be open to bilateral agreements. So I don't see tariffs lasting long.
He and Vance both said they would focus on criminal deportation first. Considering that most illegals breaking laws are just let loose free to commit crimes again by left-leaning states - those folks will now get to be kicked out like they should have been.
Then, he will apply his rule of: no adding regulation, unless you first remove regulation. The one-in, two-out program to cut regulatory costs. Considering he definitely did this in his last administration and did save ~$100 billion, reasonably certain he will do this again.
yeah no doubt - he's going after the remain-in the U.S migrant policy that Biden implemented shortly after taking office in 2021. Those are going to be low hanging fruits. Same for other groups of migrants on temporary status, since they're easy to find. But I was referring to the 10-12 million that have been in the U.S for years. Those are going to be a lot harder, unless he has the infrastructure and resources in place to manage the logistics. Not saying they won't attempt it. But they'll hardly make a dent in the numbers. That's a huge number and will have a huge impact on the labor market. Whether positive or negative remains to be seen.
> right wing commentators are saying that Trump won't actually do what he promised
I expect a lot of voters actually thought that would be the case: "yeah yeah he has to make noise during the campaign, once he gets in he'll just give us some more tax breaks, he's not crazy."
It was a combination of factors: zero interest rate policies changed to fight inflation and the Tax Cut Jobs act of 2017 changes (section 174) requiring capitalization of everything softwsre development related except bug fixes went into effect for tax year 2022.
If software developer salaries cannot be expensed and it’s now 5 times more expensive to borrow money to expand, jobs will be lost.
Oh, and the TCJA was championed and signed into law by then President Trump.
>and the Tax Cut Jobs act of 2017 changes (section 174) requiring capitalization of everything softwsre development related except bug fixes went into effect for tax year 2022.
Seems like a stretch. "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States"[1] was up into the beginning of 2022. The tax changes were known in advance for years. If the tax code changes were a significant factor, why did companies hire a bunch of people in 2021, knowing that when 2022 rolled around there would be massive taxes?
> Seems like a stretch. "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States"[1] was up into the beginning of 2022. The tax changes were known in advance for years. If the tax code changes were a significant factor, why did companies hire a bunch of people in 2021, knowing that when 2022 rolled around there would be massive taxes?
Gruez... Income Taxes are paid the year after they're incurred. Tax Year 2022 is filed and paid in 2023. The effects wouldn't start being felt until March 2023 at the earliest.
Also, literally everyone involved in tax policy thought it would be repealed. Heck, the IRS had to scramble to release guidance because they thought it was going to be repealed. The IRS didn't release detailed guidance on Section 174 until September 2023 -- six months after tax filings were due (a number of businesses asked for an extension to file but still had to pay the taxes as if they had filed on time). https://www.cohnreznick.com/insights/additional-guidance-irs...
The Section 174 capitalization for software development was included in the TCJA as a way to 'pay' for the tax cuts, but no one seriously believed it would stay in the law. The problem is congress is very dysfunctional, so once it was signed into law you'd need a congress to get it out. It's no surprise the congress in 2023 was more dysfunctional than the one in 2017.
Also, in 2021 interest rates were historically low, and as I stated initially the dual loss of the ZIRP environment and the massive change to how software developer policies worked together to kill software development jobs.
>Gruez... Income Taxes are paid the year after they're incurred. Tax Year 2022 is filed and paid in 2023. The effects wouldn't start being felt until March 2023 at the earliest.
First off, 2022 taxes are not paid in 2023. Corporations have to pay taxes quarterly, not yearly.
Second, no CFO is going to going to accept "this year's engineering expenses might be 100% more expensive (because we can't deduct it), but it's only due next year so we can keep on hiring!". The whole point of accounting is modeling the company's books to reflect its financial situation as accurately as possible, not just looking at whatever the bank balance is. This includes modeling future tax obligations.
Gruez. You pay payroll and estimated taxes quarterly. As long as you hit 90% of your actual tax burden, there are no penalties. You file income tax yearly and that sets you up for both your remaining burden that you didn't pay in estimated taxes, and your future estimated taxes. The trick is when you go to file by March 15th, you may or may not have accounted for all of the vagaries of tax changes -- and in fact the IRS pushes out guidance throughout the year that will affect the filing process.
For companies that were expensing 100% of developer salaries (which was a lot of them -- capitalization is very cash intensive), having to now eat 80% of that salary as profit and only being able to deduct 20% is devastating.
1171(!) small software companies have come together to try to get congress to repeal their changes to Section 174. They haven't been successful yet, but here's hoping that by further education of folks like yourself, they will be. https://ssballiance.org/
Yeah. This is a thing lot of people don't understand or see . When they think of Software Developers - they tend to focus on SV companies or FANG. But most software devs work in corporate IT. In that world, IT is a cost center and rarely a profit center. So when cost of anything rises and they need to cut back to boast revenue numbers - it's always the cost center that takes the first hit. In this case, the cost of borrowing dramatically went up.
It is rather annoying that larger policy changes easily take 2-4 years to actually affect anything so current party always gets both blame and thanks for the changes made by the previous administration.
Democrats insisted on COVID restrictions that were more like religion than science and then they just stopped and everyone was fine. The medical outcomes good and bad still happened, some of them just delayed.
The length and intensity of the restrictions were unnecessary, and the economic consequences of giving away trillions of dollars during them are why we’re in this economic situation.
What would have changed if the restrictions were 6 or 12 months shorter? Nothing.
Not true, restrictive states had significantly lower mortality. Mask mandates being the most significant factor. The largest gaps in mortality occur in the latter half of 2020 and the latter half of 2021, during Delta.
This ended up being true but is easy to say retrospectively though! I was in (irrationally) mortal fear everyday.
Maybe if Democrats just played the republican card and refused to sign stimulus package just out of spite we would not be here. Same with the bank bailout in 2009.
That's survivorship bias and thus your comment is just an opinion and nothing more. During restrictions covid vaccines were rapidly handed out and improved upon - this undoubtedly halted the spread of a virus that ultimately killed 1,212,000 people. So please go ask those peoples family and those people themselves if 'everyone was fine'
Well, if you remember the 2016 elections, Trump was saying that the economy was extremely bad and disastrous. Then, within his first month of presidency, suddenly, the same numbers were extremely good because of him.
During the Obama presidency, there had been a growth of 227000 jobs per month which became a growth of only 36000 jobs during the Trump years. During the last two years of Obama, the annual median household increased $4800, but only $1400 during the first two years of Trump. And then, under Biden the same annual median income was of $3250. And I could go on like that, except on the house prices which is the area where the pattern does not stand.
So there are two things here:
- Even if has been saying for the last months/years that the economy was a disaster,Trump will say within the first month of his presidency that the economy is already doing better immediately, while the numbers will be the very same at first. And when the economy will falter later on just like during his first term, his supporters won't mind because...
- This election was not at all about the economy. This argument is an excuse for the real reasons why many Americans vote: more and more are susceptible to the cult of personality and to the progression of the most radical right-wing extremism ideas.
Yeah. Unless a POTUS is in for 8 years they almost never get to experience the full results of their economic policies.
Biden inherited an inflation time bomb which has been handled. I expect Trump will claim he fixed inflation the first report that comes out after the inauguration.
"inflation time bomb". I never saw that term before. What was the primary cause of simultaneous inflation in all highly advanced economies, and how was Trump responsible for the US component?
He wasn't responsible for all of it. COVID supply chain disruption obviously played a huge part, but it's like everyone has forgotten that Trump also sent out a huge amount of money[1]. We can debate if that was the wrong/right move, but it's annoying when people blame Biden for the inflation that inevitably came once the economy turned back around. Trump has as much if not more responsibility depending on how you look at it. Meanwhile, the Fed under a Biden administration has seemingly engineered a soft landing.
Trump also pressed SA to cut oil production to help prop up gas prices in the US [2]. So when the economy turned demand surged back pushing prices higher.
A thousand times this. I don't know that Trump could have done a better job at economic sabotage when in office the first time. Printed trillions of dollars of undirected helicopter money when monetary velocity was low, which immediately went into asset inflation ("the stock market is great"). Then when things started moving again, it all started chasing goods and we got broad price inflation on top of acute shortages. The fact that the democrats just let the republicans hang Trump's economic destruction around their neck really shows how utterly inept they are at messaging. I shudder to think what inflation will be at in four years after a return to ZIRP corporate welfare and the next national emergency that's left to fester.
> The biggest issue on people's minds was the economy.
Which is kinda bizzare to me as a European - American salaries and economic output are growing the fastest of basically any developed economy, _especially_ in the poorer segements of society. By all accounts, post-COVID Dem policies have been incredibly succcessful.
American wealth isn't uniformly distributed. And as soon as you fall below a threshold of poverty in the US you feel it 10x more painfully than an equally poor person in Europe.
The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost. He needs to magic the money from somewhere or simply die. Such a context for the story will sound utterly bizarre to almost all Europeans (including Russians).
> The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost
At the risk of going off topic, this is a popular, but incorrect meme. Walter could have had enough money for his cancer treatment, especially after getting the offer of paying it off by his former cofounders. He started selling drugs to provide for his family because his cancer was terminal. (And continued because of his own hubris.)
I watched it long time so forgot the exact details. But you are saying he could have had enough money from his cofounders, but that was still after he decided to start drug dealing. So how is that refuting that the initial trigger for his drug making was to make enough money for his treatment?
One in the very beginning of the show, when Walter’s old friend Elliott offers him a job at his company (that Walter originally created with him, but later quit, and then it ended up turning into a very successful business afterwards). With the explicit mention of their health insurance being able to cover all the costs of his treatment.
Then later in the show, Elliott and his wife straight up offered him money to cover everything, feeling that Walter deserves it (not in the least part, for being an original cofounder who was unlucky and quit right before the company got big).
There were more moments like those that i keep forgetting, but claiming that Walter started manufacturing drugs as some last resort to cover his medical bills is complete revisionism.
I think the point they're making is "Walter White is a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer" would still be true even if he stopped dealing drugs after he was offered money.
While I mostly agree with your overall point about wealth distribution in the US vs Europe (based on my purely anecdotal understanding of Europe), that Breaking Bad analogy I keep hearing over the years is just wrong in terms of what happened in the show (even though that analogy being bad doesn’t defeat your larger point at all).
Walter (the protagonist) didn’t start manufacturing drugs as the last resort to pay medical bills. From the get-go, Walter got offered a job by his former co-founder friend Elliott (who ended up turning their startup into a successful corp, while Walter ended up quitting and becoming a teacher), with the explicit mention of their health insurance being sufficient to cover any medical expenses Walter might incur.
That happened literally in the first few episodes of the show. Walter refuses because of his stupid pride. Later on in the show, Elliott and his wife straight up offer Walter to cover all medical costs (current and future ones), and he still refused. He had many many fantastic outs that didn’t require him to continue manufacturing drugs (or even starting to do so in the first place).
I am mostly upset about this inaccuracy, because it undercuts one of the most important aspects (if not *the* most important aspect) of the show. It is a story about a man who lived a life full of regrets, feels impotent, and found an excuse to do all the bad things that make him feel good, self-important, and inflate his ego to crazy highs, all without feeling any remorse whatsoever.
I don't see how it refutes the broader point that not having socialised medicine creates all kinds of diabolical dynamics in society that punishes you as soon as you fall out of the system for any reason.
For example if I understood correctly he got "punished" by the system for preferring to work as a teacher than remain a cofounder and ended up losing his private health insurance this way.
Also, I think that the fact that his wife offered to burn her savings to fund his medical expense will be very difficult for most men to accept it is not really an "out", especially with the survival rate of cancer, you might end up burning her saving and then leaving her fend off for the kids by herself. Also what happens if he took the offer then she got cancer or they got hit by another big medical bill?
> I don't see how it refutes the broader point that not having socialised medicine creates all kinds of diabolical dynamics in society that punishes you as soon as you fall out of the system for any reason.
It doesn’t, which is why I said “while I […] agree with your larger point about wealth distribution” in my original reply. My gripe was about the overplayed and incorrect “Breaking Bad is about a teacher who got pushed to manufacture drugs due to medical bills” trope, not about your larger point.
> if I understood correctly he got "punished" by the system for preferring to work as a teacher than remain a cofounder and ended up losing his private health insurance this way.
He had that private health insurance waiting for him, as Elliott instantly offered Walter his position back upon hearing the bad news. Walter simply refused that offer and decided that getting involved in manufacturing meth was more fun and rewarding to his ego.
> Also, I think that the fact that his wife offered to burn her savings to fund his medical expense will be very difficult for most men to accept it is not really an "out"
Walter’s wife didn’t offer that. It was Elliott (the cofounder) and his wife that offered it, both of whom are close friends of Walter and are multimillionaires due to their company’s success. They themselves said that for them it wouldn’t be a financial hit at all, and they insist on helping out their close friend in need.
Sort of. As far as I remember, his primary motivation wasn't to get treatment (he actually doesn't want to get treated at all at first), it was to leave behind enough money for his family.
Yeah man, we usually die waiting for treatment instead.
I had cervical spine issue which made it impossible for me to work, walk for longer than few minutes, sit in certain positions. I would need to wait 3 years to get it fixed in my EU country and that is after few years of paying more in healthcare contributions than some of the most expensive premium insurance plans in US.
I paid out of pocket to be able to function. Whatever the solution to American healthcare costs is it's not what we do in EU.
Yep this is what a lot of the socialists in the US don't understand - they think you'll get the same level and speed of treatment in EU as the US, you just pay much less.
That is not the case - as mentioned even in pretty serious cases you might need to wait 1 year or more for something that should be done ASAP, on top of that the quality of the doctors isn't the best.
This is especially bad for well-off people (as in middle class) as you pay e.g. 500-1000 USD a month and can't even get a basic check-up.
Right but you also have everyone pay for health insurance in Japan. If you don't pay of it and suddenly decide that you want it, you have to pay the back owed portion as well before it is applied.
Japan isn't an outlier, there are other countries with universal healthcare that are also high functioning, like Canada (Ranked 7th in public health and 5th in quality of life), Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden.
Not to mention if it was on the median so bad for citizens you'd see more broad support for repealing it in countries where it is supposedly isn't working, but that isn't really happening either.
Yeah and in some countries with private insurance healthcare is good as well (Switzerland). It's just not about public vs private. It's about sensible regulation so services can be delivered cheaper and cartels/monopolies are curtailed.
I agree. The only model we have for this in the US currently is Medicare. It’s the only version of universal healthcare we have and would be the most obvious way to implement it
>The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost.
This is an incredibly bad example and a meme that clueless people (usually Europeans) love to bring up time and time again but if you watch the show carefully, you'll see that Walter actually had health coverage for his chemo therapy from his school insurance but he resorted to selling meth because he wanted the best chemo therapist in the sate of New Mexico, and one of the top 10 in the whole US, so he had to go privately out of pocket. In Europe you'd also need a boatload of cash or a top private insurance if you'd choose the best private chemo therapist and clinic in the country outside the public health system where Walter would be on long waiting lists if he were in Europe.
And reason number two, he mainly sold meth because he had a huge ego that prevented him from accepting charity for his treatment and he loved the danger and thrill of it in his mid-life crisis to compensate for being a looser/push-over his entire life holding his career back despite his scientific brilliance, nothing to do with the US health system, that's why the show's writing and character development was so good.
Anyway, pointing at a fantasy TV show as an argument for real life issues is just silly. It's not real.
"In Europe you'd also need a boatload of cash or a top private insurance if you'd choose the best private chemo therapist and clinic in the country outside the public health system where Walter would be on long waiting lists if he were in Europe."
This is extremely incorrect take. Ask anyone in France, Germany or the UK. The quality of outcome is extremely small between public and private even for the most complicated procedure. Perhaps in private you will get a better experience in terms of customer service.
In fact some of the most notable experts usually work for both the public medical sector and run their own clinic.
This is as incorrect as saying in Germany you have to go to a private university to get access to the best professors.
There are also loads of datapoint supporting the "fantasy" take of the series. For example loads of american only start going for certain cancer screening at age 65 when it becomes free, this can visibly be seen in the data where there is a sudden jump in detection at this age. Again, this kind of behaviour would sound very bizarre for most Europeans.
I'm not a Yank so I've got no clue about the reality on the ground, but is that actually true? Sure, the statistics say GDP is growing or whatever, but do real, normal working people feel the effects of those bumps? Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more. Companies are doing great, and so are people in the stock market, but is that representative of the rest of the country? I suspect it isn't
The average person sees grocery costs rising, and is unable to move because they can’t replace the interest rate on the loan they have. This feels quite squeezing.
> Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more.
Is there hope that this will change under Republican government?
I highly doubt it, but it obviously also wasn't happening under the Democrats, or at the very least it wasn't being perceived as if things were/could improve.
Eventually people get tired and listen to populists. That's why they get elected, because they'll tell you what you want to hear. Whether they actually have any plans of doing it or not is almost irrelevant when you're dealing with bullshit on both sides.
The only way to beat populists is to have actual concrete plans, which as far as I saw as a non-USAian at least, the democrats barely ever spoke of, and it seems to be the common sentiment across this thread as well.
Denmark is a good example of what I mean, they had a surge in right-wing populist parties due to people's ongoing and ignored issues with Illegal immigration (among other things). Know what the moderates, who were in power, did? They adjusted their policies accordingly with actual concrete plans that they set in motion. And to no one's surprise, the populist parties died down and people calmed down in general once they saw that action was actually being taken.
Yesterday I went out for lunch. By myself. At a local Mexican restaurant. I ordered a burrito and a bottled coke. My bill was $18. Four years ago, that same meal at that same restaurant was $8. My salary has not doubled with inflation, but many of my costs have.
No fancy economics equations can compensate for continual sticker shock at the consumer level.
Same, small town, and the prices keep changing so fast in the last five years that the restaurants went from relatively nice durable menus to cheap little paper plastic flaps, because they kept having to reprint the menus again and again with all the price hikes.
Voters in small town America neither care about nor understand geopolitics. They do understand and care about the price of burritos. Have you seen any recent interviews of voters and their stated concerns? Have you seen the exit polling demographics by education level?
I am not saying they're right. If you are told that welfare is a burden to society/communism and that you have to fend for yourself then yes you will only care about "the economy" and not ask for more welfare
We Americans are thinking the same thing. The reality is that America is in the midst of a dramatic cultural decline—especially in rural America, which has become more frivolous, callous, and undignified, even if they're no more uneducated than twenty years ago.
I believe I can answer this as I personally saw it as an issue ( with the disclaimer that I think neither candidate even suggested appropriate corrective actions ). Our household is above average for US and the state and yet I still have near constant drain on my cash reserves on a regular basis. In other words, my real purchasing power decreased DESPITE some increase in absolute salary numbers.
You should look where the economy is growing and where the salaries are growing. It's not uniform at all.
The entire situation (as an EU country citizen who moved to another EU country) and the narratives around it are funny to me because they're the same as the ones going around for years in my birth country.
"Side X should learn they should get better candidates, otherwise people are not going to show up" way of thinking included, which has only led to further decline as the "conservatives" win and make the situation worse taking more and more seats and control in state controlled companies while at the same time pushing their own companies to absorb more and more of the budget. Yeah, not showing up because you did not like the candidate was a great success - if you wanted the decline to accelerate, that is.
There's an economic component, and an emotional component.
Economically, inflation hurt. Real wages may have come up to compensate, but you get the inflation first, and then, some time later, then you get the wage increases. It still hurts. Even if the wages increase more, it still takes some time to recover.
Emotionally, it's not just the pain (and the remembered pain) from the inflation. It's Clinton calling people "deplorables". It's Biden calling them "garbage". It's the feeling that the Democrats have abandoned the working-class people - abandoned them for a couple of decades, in fact.
Trump speaks those peoples' language. He understand their sense of rejection and abandonment. Those are the people that the Democratic party claimed to champion, but the party took their support for granted, and championed a bunch of identity causes that the working class doesn't identify with at all.
Turns out ignoring and insulting your long-term base isn't a good way to win.
It has never been enough, in at least 70 years, for democrats to do good enough. They are graded on this insane curve compared to perfect, and they always fall short since they haven't had serious (more than 60 senators) political power in decades, so they can't do much.
Consider the Palestine issue. I wonder how many young progressives stayed home because Harris refused to say "I will ban Israel from buying US weapons", despite it being clear from polling that doing so would lose her some votes and undeniably increase republican voter turnout. But nope, they refused to see that reality, so they didn't vote for her "maybe we will tell them to kill fewer babies" tactic.
Oh well, in just a few years the problem of Palestine will probably be solved for good. I hope those voters are happy.
Meanwhile republicans can say "I have a concept of a plan" and say that harris should be shot by 9 guns and they get 70 million votes.
My brother is the weird conservative that thinks "Trump didn't win the election in 2020" and "maybe we should regulate companies a little", but that didn't stop him from voting for the one shouting for violence. Maybe that's because he has, even during bush's term, been of the opinion that "all democrats should be shot", which he says right in front of me. I bet he wonders why we don't have a better relationship. It's always for something absurd too, like he said democrats should be shot because of Michelle Obama saying children should be able to eat healthy food at school, which for some reason made her responsible for the decline of school lunch programs since the 80s (a time which he did not experience). It's just another nonsensical thing republicans believe about their country because fox news said it every day for a year even though it's objectively untrue. Our state's school lunch program was better under Obama than it was when he was in school and yet he is sure that Michelle Obama, who has no powers as a first lady, was personally responsible for decisions our STATE made about it's school lunch program.
I don't know what else to say. They believe lies, when I tell them that they believe lies they tell me to my face that I should be shot, and when I say "fuck you" to that, they insist that I'm so divisive and partisan. It's just absurd the reality they live in. It seems so stressful to believe that the government is going to send a liberal twink to steal your guns and shit in your litter box and trans your kid.
But when you can go in front of a judge and say "nobody rational would watch our news program and believe it" and "we literally made up out of whole cloth a story about how the democrats stole the election, despite the fact that many of us were not so sure about pushing such a total lie" and suffer no consequences, what the fuck else is there to do?
If you're making $8 and hour and get bumped up to $12, that's a 50% bump but you still can't afford to live and need a second job. Based on the job postings in my part of the US, that's pretty much standard.
Most Americans have very little interest in and less knowledge of the world outside the US. Moreover, many of them don't want to know anything that would require them to rethink their position.
I get a lot of political text messages from multiple red states (for some reason) and it was almost all culture war stuff from the right. But maybe the messaging was super-different in swing states.
The culture war crap is low-hanging fruit for fly-by-night scam PACs who don't know what they're doing. Hence the incompetence displayed when you get ads for states and races you have nothing to do with.
We didn't see much of it here in Milwaukee County. We got boatloads of mailers from WisGOP framing Trump as a moderate candidate, though.
Whats bizarre though is that consumer spending has been strong.
There is this bizarre mixed signals problem where all the metrics look strong, and yet all the people are complaining.
My personal belief is that the crazy economics of the pandemic was kick in the head to most people's perceptions of finances. Things got really good for a lot of middle and lower class people, and now there is pain in the return to normal.
Or even some "look out for your husband" messaging, but men only mattered to one side in this election to the degree that they were incidentally useful to women.
The point is not that Trump is a shining human. It’s simply not a winning move to run a dying senile man for office who’s two generations removed from having a sliver of empathy for the actual problems Americans are facing and then pivoting mid/race to a VP that gives men vasectomies at her rallies.
That was Trump’s competition. Trump may be abrasive but at least the version of him you see has already lost his mind so you know what you’re getting. And apparently it resonates with more Americans.
I don't know if English is your second language, so I'll try to explain this plainly. When GP says "a vice president" in their comment it is not meant as literally Kamala Harris, they are using a literary device called metonymy. Google's definition: the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing. "a VP" in GP is a substitution for "the Kamala Harris campaign" which absolutely did organize a mobile clinic to be present for a major event, at which vasectomies were offered. Here is further reading on Metonymy if you would care to learn more: https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-metonymy.
I don't know if English is your second language, but this is what's known as a lie for propaganda. There is something reasonable that everyone would be fine with (mobile medical clinic) and then there is the lie you're repeating that you're now going on an odyssey to back peddle away from as if you didn't just repeat propaganda.
Now that the truth has been established your forgot to explain what the problem is.
Your clinging to the idea that there is anyone at all who has said and meant, literally, that Kamala Harris was providing vasectomies to anyone is the kind of shrill idiocy that led her to lose this election.
>"this is what's known as a lie for propaganda"
No one is outright lying, but you are certainly being dishonest by insisting someone else was not speaking figuratively when they obviously were.
>"your(sic) forgot to explain what the problem is."
The problem is that it is weird and off putting to most Americans that there is a clinic offering sterilization procedures to supporters of a politician at their rally.
Your clinging to the idea that there is anyone at all who has said and meant, literally, that Kamala Harris was providing vasectomies
If you meant something else, why did you say what you did and not the truth? Because you are lying for propaganda. If you wanted to explain the actual truth you would have said it.
No one is outright lying,
You are and you're doing it on purpose for outrage over something that isn't real.
The problem is that it is weird and off putting to most Americans that there is a clinic offering sterilization procedures to supporters of a politician at their rally.
I would guess they offer it to everyone actually. What is the problem? You still haven't explained it.
Everything you've said is variations of "I didn't meant it so it wasn't a lie" and "it's just not right because it is".
Everything you've said here is completely and absolutely delirious. This is the literal information of a low-information voter: someone who honestly believes that people are getting vasectomies at rallies or that a senile billionaire who says Haitians refugees are eating dogs as if it were reality is a better potential candidate.
Surely insulting people by calling them "low information voters" (read as: stupid idiot) will win this time despite failing in 2016 and 2024. Also, people were at the very least offered vasectomies at the DNC rally[1], so maybe you should check your information levels, they seem to need a top-off.
You're picking one point in the headline that by itself sounds totally outrageous because in the mind of the low-information voter you read the headline and think to yourself a sketchy booth that says "free vasectomies!!!1" and somebody grabbing you in the middle of a convention saying "Kid, want a free vasectomy?".
In the context of a health check in reproductive health RV that offers a ton of things, _including_ vasectomies in the context of an informed discussion with a health expert, it is not only totally reasonable, but it should be extended to a host of other services that can provided in a mobile clinic the same that mobile vaccination sites were provided during COVID.
>"in the mind of the low-information voter you read the headline and think to yourself a sketchy booth that says "free vasectomies!!!1" and somebody grabbing you in the middle of a convention saying "Kid, want a free vasectomy?"."
You have invented a person in your head to get mad at. Regardless, normal people think having the abortion clinic RV at your largest rally offering to sterilize your supporters is weird. No matter how much you want to dress it up.
Normal people are in favor of abortion and reproductive health. The only way that's weird is if you want to dress it up as weird, which is what people who think you shouldn't be able to do with your body as you please believe.
> There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
Instead, they ran ads implying that husbands were trying to force their wives to vote trump, a narrative that comforts their own biases but does nothing for the people they needed to convince.
> There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
No but there was plenty of "if you're married and vote for Trump you're a misogynist" or "no real man with daughters can vote for Trump" messaging which rightly fell flat.
That Trump won the popular vote is astounding. That he's currently ahead in Michigan is insane, politically/electorally speaking. By 10pm last night the MSNBC crowd was already starting the "this was just about the economy," "no incumbent Dem could have won," "no challenging Rep could have lost" cope.
The Democratic party has an opportunity here to put DEI, identity politics, and culture war nonsense in the garbage where it belongs, and everyone on the left who was talking about unity and bringing America together 24 hours ago has an opportunity now to show whether they meant it, or if they only meant it on their terms.
Political unity is something of a pipe dream when you look at some of the represented political groups in the US. I won't call out specific groups, but people can likely imagine at least one group they really don't want to have any power. Maybe because of media fearmongering, maybe real, but there's probably some group you perceive terribly. I don't think an electorate is supposed to represent all groups, no matter how extreme. There's no room for justice or equality or whatever if we give power to people actively targeting democracy or other people. It's dishonest to act as if there's some reasonable compromise in this scenario.
And the people may not want democracy. Democracy is only "good" in the sense that it can allow multiple competing groups. Any given group would prefer, if it could magically get it, an authoritarian gov't that imposes its world view and doesn't cede power to the wrong people. But the Republicans and their base are favorable to that idea now, as opposed to the Democrats who want to preserve an illusion of unity. Not that the Democrats should abolish democracy once they gain power, but then you need something disruptive elsewhere in the system to compensate for these incompatible tensions (such as a revolution).
I think part of the answer is to accept that we don't live in a democracy, we live in a republic, and simply getting 50% +1 doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want. We'll see if the second Trump administration acknowledges that or not. They had a Republican House and Senate in 2016 too and still couldn't repeal the ACA, for example.
As far as I have read, Guiliani has been accused in a civil lawsuit of saying he was going to sell pardons, nobody's provided any proof or evidence that Trump knew about it or did anything, and nobody has even had criminal charges brought let alone adjudicated.
I'm happy to be proven wrong but two third parties being engaged in an unresolved civil claim is a long way away from "Trump sold pardons."
With Trump’s party platform planks #17, about removing race and gender from school curriculae, #18, regarding a ban on transgender female athletes, and #19, regarding political deportation and “making colleges patriotic”, I believe the culture war is being strongly fought by Trump as well, as much as I wish it wasn’t.
Women actually deserve a constitutional amendment to protect their rights, not a court ruling of the most dubious jurisprudence. Because of Roe V. Wade the political will create a new actually applicable amendment was never pursued - a bandaide that eventually fell off.
Part of the problem is that most people lack the cognitive capacity to understand the legal argumentation of Roe V. Wade and how shaky it was and so they out of incompetence set themselves up as women's rights constitutional amendment obstructionists
> Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, not American, so my opinions don't matter.
I'm married with two daughters who are in their early 20s. The abortion issue has come up in my household when discussing Trump v Kamala, but the thing that the Democrats didn't seem to get is that even though it's something that my wife & daughters care about in the abstract, it's not a PRESSING matter for them because they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.
That doesn't mean that they aren't pro choice & don't want women's reproductive rights protected at the federal level, like it is here in Canada. But on the hierarchy of things that matter to them today, it is extremely far down on the list. What matters to them most right now is the economy and rising crime rates.
The right wing also spun it as "why on earth do the Democrats think that every single woman is dying to murder her unborn baby?" And while us pro-choicers don't look at it that way, I think that kind of worked as a reminder that while it's an issue, it's just not the most important one affecting their day to day lives at the moment.
The problem is, even when there is never the plan of having an abortion, healthcare support for women suffers greatly from the abortion plans. Because it gets legally problematic for doctors to provide healthcare for women. Sooner or later you will have a patient with a medical emergency during a pregnancy. There are already enough incidents where critical ill women don't get medical treatment because they also are pregnant.
While I agree with you I think you are missing the point made by parent which is seems to me that it's not a psychologically pressing issue.
It still seems wild to me because I don't share that psychology but am probably biased because I live in a place with a social safety net and most criminals don't have access to guns here so crime is less scary to me : Muggings are rare probably because it's not very profitable and is more of desperate/drug-addict thing.
Being a drug dealer seems much more profitable and I don't feel targeted as a person. Shootings remain rare
> and most criminals don't have access to guns here so crime is less scary to me
I'm the parent and you did an excellent job of clarifying what I was trying to say.
I do want to respond to this statement, however, since I'm Canadian and in one of those countries where abortion is federally protected (and Canadians strongly favour that across partisan lines for the most part) and I live in what used to be one of the safest cities in Canada.
10 - 20 years ago, homicide was virtually unheard of in our city. I mean, it was like a once in a decade event and almost always domestic violence. Today, we can't go a week without hearing about another stabbing or shooting that happened out in public.
Recently our street saw every single vehicle broken into, including ours. We all filed police reports but no one ever showed up or even gave us a follow up call. The message was clear: the police either don't have the capacity or just don't care to deal with certain crimes now. To contrast, I remember my house being broken into when I was around 13 or 14 years-old, so mid 1990s, and I remember watching the detective powder the windows for prints.
Times have changed here in scary ways. We pay the same taxes and have the same expectations of our government as we always did. Canadians value the social safety nets and gun regulations that we have. The problem is that those don't seem to be working as well as they used to. We earn less due to inflation, pay the same or higher taxes, and get less in return. Most of us know of people who travel to the USA for health care due to our long waiting lists while hearing from Americans how great our free health care is.
What city is this? Toronto metro homicides have been ~100 per year for the last 50 years despite Toronto metro population skyrocketing. Basically all Canadian cities show the same pattern.
Abbotsford is my guess. That place went from a peaceful farming community to a gang warzone in 20 years.
There are a LOT of targeted homicides there and it is very visible. I have family there and there have been multiple shootings within a few hundred meters of their home. How can you feel safe?
Almost all of the homicides are targeted gang violence between ethnic groups, but it still makes you concerned for your safety that you are going to take a stray bullet.
Abbotsford is basically metro Vancouver at this point, and they're basically experiencing Vancouver crime now. Crime going up in Abbotsford and going down in Vancouver is terrible for those in Abbotsford but doesn't support the narrative that "crime is going up".
And I was trying to make the point that it already is a pressing problem for any woman living in those states and of course any male who feels attached to them. Because medical support for women of any age is strongly decreasing.
The USA is sort of like two separate countries that share a common geography. Muggings and other violent street crime are largely confined to a handful of neighborhoods in certain cities. In my city we have literally zero shootings most years. So people have completely different experiences depending on where they live and end up talking past each other.
It has never been about it being "pressing", or even about ideology. It's about cold, calculated electoral math.
Abortion is what's called a Wedge Issue[1]. It is so because the public opinion on the US is divided roughtly 50% for it and 50% against it.
On top of that, the US presidential election is a First-past-the-post[2] system. So if I manage to get 52% of the votes and you only get 48%, I win everything, you lose everything. You can probably imagine where this is going: Instead of convincing 51% of the people I only need to convince 3% of the indecisive, and I win.
Finally, the US is a very polarized country. The "other" is always bad, "we" are always good. So the wedge issues tend to "align". If you and I agree on abortion, we will probably also agree in most of the other wedge issues.
All of these factors together result in that both Democrats and Republicans are forced to "optimize", so their campaigns all revolve around the same wedge issues. They must, if they want to win.
If you ask me, the least complex way to get the country out of this rut would be changing the voting system to something other First Past The Post.
Unfortunately, the people who are in a position to make such a change are the least motivated to make it.
they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.
People rarely plan to get an abortion. Setting that aside, more than anything, from a political perspective, this is an issue about freedom. I'm not planning on buying a firearm any time soon, but I wouldn't support a firearm ban (and thankfully, I don't have to worry about this because no mainstream politician is running on this policy). It doesn't matter what your thoughts about abortion are, women should have the freedom to have autonomy over themselves. Also, the anti-abortion laws are also preventing women from getting medicine for treating some chronic disease.
I already explained this in another reply, but while crime rates might be going down across the board, I'm talking about what my daughters, my wife and their friends are telling me. And they are not low information voters, because crime rates are sky rocketing in our area and the data supports that. We live in what used to be considered one of the safest cities in all of Canada, and now we hear about a new shooting or stabbing in public just about every week. Mostly drug and gang related.
Everything else you said, especially about the abortion issue being a freedom issue, is preaching to the choir. I agree with you. I'm talking about the mindset of my wife, my daughters and their friends and what they say matters to them.
You can cite various statistics to a person up until the point their car or house is broken into. Or, until they don't feel safe at night any longer in the neighborhood they grew up.
We can double down and say these are "ignorant" voters, maybe even insult them, but I doubt that will help win them over. Even worse, it will alienate them.
Looking at 12 month running averages from FBI UCR since 2012, crime has been in a generally increasing trend from the last minimum, which was in the 12 months starting Jan 2020, to a maximum in the year starting Dec 2022.
There is a fundamental issue that pro-choice people (of which I am, as well) continuously overlook with this argument: a fetus isn't merely a clump of cells up until it leaves the woman's body. At some point it's a viable human being and also deserves rights. Is that 3 months? 6 months? 8 months? I don't know, but it's somewhere.
Most people in the world share that view; why are pro-abortionists so ignorant of it?
Who exactly do you think gets abortions? When and why? Because this is another obvious lie we hear from the Trump's campaigning: “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.”
93.5% of abortions happen before 13 weeks. 0.9% happen after 21 weeks [0]. Since Texas' trigger laws have been put into place, the maternal mortality rate rose by 56% [1]! In 2022, there was an 11.6% increase in infant mortality! Before that, across the years 2014-2021, infants death fell nearly 15% [2]. On top of this, 4 pregnant women have died because they couldn't get the care they needed and and again, women are finding they can't get certain medicines for chronic diseases because doctors are afraid to prescribe them. If you respect these lives, I would invite you to consider what is happening in the real world alongside your thought exercises about cells.
Crime has increased in the US. The official numbers were wrong and were recently corrected, instead of dropping by 2% they actually increased by over 4%.
The article you're linking to makes claims about FBI data, but its only evidence are links to and images created from another website [0], and not the FBI data it is referencing. Further, following the link, the site claims "the data is here" and links only to self hosted excel files and not to the referenced FBI data.
And even if they were low by U.S. standard, they're still much higher than other countries, and much higher than people would like. Imagine if someone responded like that to other issues:
"I think we should do more to reduce childhood hunger."
"Childhood hunger is already lower than it used to be, you must be a low information voter."
**
"I think we should do more to reduce traffic fatalities."
"Traffic fatalities are already lower than they used to be, you must be a low information voter."
**
"I think we should reduce carbon emissions."
"Carbon emissions are already lower than they used to be, you must be a low information voter."
If these are important issues for you, you're not going to want to be on the same team with the people who respond like that.
The original discuss was around "rising crime rates", not "high crime rates". Even if you want to have this separate discussion, you're leaving out the obvious context of "crime rates are lower than they used to be when Trump was president immediately prior to this", so, if you think crime is too high, the answer is not someone who presided over even more crime.
You are capturing why I think abortion is a good wedge issue but a poor campaign issue.
* Men aren't directly affected by it (~50% population)
* Woman over 40 aren't generally affected by it
So woman between 18-40 who can vote are the group most affected by abortion policy. And as you point out, even they aren't directly affected until they actually need one. So the skin-in-the-game for most people is very low. Most people vote and are opinionated on it as a sort of proxy for woman's rights.
However, some issues like house affordability, crime, employment, etc are very high for skin-in-the-game. People are currently affected or know people currently affected by these issues.
So your response confirms why I called it a wedge issue.
Most Americans don't like abortion laws the don't take into account the health of the mother. So that type of law becomes a wedge among Republicans.
Conversely, if a state passes a six week ban (Florida), that's going to draw out these distinctions among Democrats.
I'm not making a moral claim. I'm commenting on the politics of campaigning on it. I think politicians are advantaged at avoiding wedge issues and focusing on material concerns that affect the most people.
> don't like abortion laws the don't take into account the health of the mother.
Texas's law allegedly takes into account the life of the mother. And yet mothers are dying because of this law. When you make it that the OB office needs to have the legal team on speed dial to make sure they're not facing life in prison on a regular life or death healthcare your law is abhorrent policy.
The politics of campaigning on it is to make people think only unplanned pregnancies are affected by these laws. I am making a moral claim on that; it's reprehensible.
I'm not planning on being in a car accident. I guess I just shouldn't care about policies that force doctors to let car accident victims just bleed out.
As I said, women's reproductive issues ARE important to them. It does come up in discussions.
The point is that people often tend to be single-issue, or few-issues voters... and there are policy issues that are just way more important to them right this very second. Issues like the economy and the housing crises.
My wife and I were living on our own and starting a family when we were our daughters' age. Our daughters not only still live with us but they have abandoned any hopes of ever being able to own a home of their own.
Our oldest daughter, who will turn 25 soon, wanted nothing more in life than to have a family and she is seeing the time window for that slip by. She thought she'd be married with a home and kids by now. She found her partner, he lives with us now too. Why would the abortion message resonate with her when what's bothering her most is that she wants kids?
From what I've heard in the news, the women who were single-issue-voters on abortion tended to be older women who are concerned about the rights of their daughters and grand daughters.
But I do wonder how many young women are in similar situations to my oldest daughter. Women who are more concerned about whether or not they can have kids versus whether or not they could terminate an unwanted pregnancy. They might not be a huge voting block, I honestly don't know. But I can't imagine that the abortion message resonated with this demographic at all.
> Why would the abortion message resonate with her when what's bothering her most is that she wants kids?
Anyone thinking about possibly becoming pregnant should absolutely be worried about whether their doctors will be able to save their lives when something goes wrong, which is very often. If you think "abortion" rights are only about unwanted pregnancies you've got far too narrow of an understanding of the reproductive process and what can go wrong. You think Nevaeh Crain's child was unwanted, or the many other women whose deaths were just like hers?
> they have abandoned any hopes of ever being able to own a home of their own
Project 2025 pretty much ensure affordable housing pretty much won't get built anywhere near jobs are. It doubles down on NIBY housing policies and prevents densification of areas. It doubles down on requiring a car to drive to work on a long commute. Maybe they'll be able to afford a new build in a suburb 70 miles from their jobs eventually.
> Issues like the economy
Looking forward to that new 20%+ sales tax on imported (read: most things) you buy. That'll really do a lot for the economy. Good choice.
Accidental pregnancy is preventable, but abortion restrictions also undermine the safety of women who are pregnant by choice. We saw this recently with Nevaeh Crain, for example, who died because doctors were afraid that treating her might harm her baby. Sadly the baby died anyway.
You can't protect against random medical emergencies.
Many women get pregnant and want a kid and experience complications. Roughly 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Restrictions on abortion care must necessarily negatively affect care for pregnant women who have not sought & don't want abortion. The care for complications of abortion and miscarriage are essentially identical. Incentives are aligned for doctors to deny care for either. There is no medical, civil, or criminal recourse for women who die or have their health affected by improper care for pregnancy complication, miscarriage, or complication of abortion; there is no punishment for doctors who fail to provide medical standard of care; there is an affirmative effort by some states to punish doctors who would provide such care.
Even then, no contraception is 100% effective. The only 100% effective thing is abstinence. Just like getting into a car accident, the only way to not have any risk is to not get in the car. But good luck living in the US without getting in a car or being around moving cars.
I'm just pointing out the reality of their choices. They're acting like the only people who get a D&C are people who planned to get one before they were even pregnant. Most people who get this kind of care don't go into it planning on doing it. It's like thinking people planned to break their legs or planned to get cancer.
>Funny you mention contraception here, that's another thing the GOP is openly talking about making more difficult for people to access.
Buddy, we are long past believing NBC's interpretation of a complicated legal ruling. Your guys have been scare mongering for way too long. Believe it or not, there are lots of sensible conservatives.
> In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell
Buddy, if you can't understand what these very direct words mean I don't know what to tell you. This isn't some "NBC interpretation of a complicated legal ruling", he's openly and directly saying these decisions should be overturned. He is directly stating we should reconsider contraception access, throwing gay people in prison for being gay, and recognizing gay marriage.
The modern GOP is openly talking about repealing the court decisions which legalized wide access to contraception, disallowed throwing people in prison for being gay, and requiring states to recognize gay marriage. This isn't some fringe conspiracy theory or complicated legal ruling fear mongering, its directly what they're saying.
Quit burying your head in the sand and listen to what your own party is actually saying.
I didn't understand the focus on abortion as an issue for people. It's a legislative problem after Roe was overturned and it's not clear to me what the presidency would do to change that other than asking the other branches to take a federal action.
It's really all about control of the courts. They can, for all intents and purposes, throw laws away, inclusive sections of the constitution with little to no recourse without a level of control of the legislative branch that is extremely rare.
Given that congress is so naturally weak, the most important part of it is the senate's role in federal judicial appointments.
It was a winning ballot measure, and protection for it was passed in most states it ran (even states where Trump won). Didn’t translate to enough enthusiasm for voters though.
>Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men. It should, but it doesn't. There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
Because sensible people don't think that Trump presidency means "no healthcare for Women".
I’ve only seen exit poll demographics for key states. Republicans won college white men but only at 50%. He performed better among married white men (28% of sample) than non-married white men (20% of sample). Looks like his biggest gender gap is among suburban whites. Looks like his most-supportive crosstab is evangelicals, happy with the Supreme Court, whose primary issue is banning abortion.
The "abortion" issue is very poor marketing and I don't understand why this has never been corrected. It's not about unwanted children, it's more about the 1/5 chance a woman has of miscarrying and what happens after (along with the array of other pregnancy related issues).
Right, you can't actually talk about any real compromise position. All anyone hears are the two extreme options. People who talk about miscarriage, mother's life in danger, and so on are trying to convince you that because those exist all abortion should be legal. Anyone who is against abortion sees right through that. If anyone was serious about the compromise position where those types of things are allowed but otherwise abortion was illegal they might be able to get many against abortion on their side - except that they won't because give an inch and they take a mile is reality and everyone "knows" if you compromise at all they will just be back against next year asking for more.
If they sold it as a "universal right to basic healthcare" it would be more palatable to most people.
Fact of the matter is most abortions are elective. It is, in fact, about unwanted children. It is however a shame actual health risks are lumped in - mostly due to marketing.
Conservatives think that's just a lie. They openly reject the harms that are actively happening right now in Texas.
How do you win an election when your opponent is apparently not bound by reality? Maybe Harris should have just promised puppies and rainbows and candy.
An liberals are not honest about caring. They are arguing because of a few bad cases all abortion should be legal, instead of using this as a reasonable compromise. So long as those are the two choices a lot less humans die if all abortion is banned even if some mothers die as well. (Do not say a fetus isn't a human - that might work for you but it doesn't apply to anyone against abortion and you just look like an idiot for not recognizing what they see as an obvious fact and we get nowhere).
If you want to support a compromise: most of what you need to do is shut up everyone who will only accept their extreme position.
I wouldn't compromise on my bodily autonomy, neither should women. It's simple. You making it more complicated is what ensures this fight will continue.
What we have here is a conflict of values. That you think it is simple is insulting the values of others. Most people against abortion value females right to body autonomy: they value the right to not be murdered more.
> Dem messaging on economic policy was nonexistent.
In what way do you think the Republicans care about the economy? How should the Democrats communicate better that the Republicans tank the economy with every presidency only to be recovered by the Democrats who hand off a winning economy to the Republicans? To be completely honest, I don't think most Americans can even understand the argument.
> Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men.
This seems to be an oblique reference to something specific about that healthcare. If someone doesn't articulate a proposed specific amount of time or objective physiological thresholds for a procedure, they aren't serious. I saw no evidence for this from either campaign, so I guess they agreed the issue was not at play.
Yeah. Most democrat leaning people here and outside are not reading the situation correctly.
We are currently in the process of the creation of a new world order. Its happening everywhere. Right-wing, anti-immigrant, egomaniacs with little respect for democracy as we know it are taking power in all of the western influence sphere. It might be because this is the way countries like China/russia can undermine the hegemony of the west. It might be because of the way the internet works that takes away power from the systems that used to work. Or what we could conclude that the story the liberals/left are telling all over the world implicitly locks out most people that vote and is self destructive. Either way. Don't believe the pundits they are consistently wrong.
The anti-immigration thing is because the great experiment of mass migration has failed to work for the average person, and the political left have failed to show up with an answer, a policy, a plan -- anything, really. People are voting for candidates who are at least willing to pay lip service to the issue. I don't know how bad it is in the US, but in the rest of the West, it's been a disaster. Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services, competition for housing, suppression of wages, the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards, minority enclaves with values that are fundamentally incompatible with the West... The list goes on.
Very few of the things you’re listing are caused by immigration. They’re caused by institutional neglect. The person telling you they’re caused by immigration has no intention of addressing the institutional neglect, because that doesn’t get them power.
Meanwhile, the services you need, right down to food, are supplied in many cases by immigrants. So it’s working for the average person extremely well.
Both of you are taking these blatantly extreme narratives and putting them ot as though they were fact.
The reality is that immigration is not all good for the average person. Similarly, it's not all bad for the average person either. When we frame these discussions in the stark extremist terms on either side, we get into trouble.
We have to calibrate immigration, so that we get the good, without getting so much of the bad. There are so many untruths floating out there right now about immigration on both sides that it's hard for the people trying do that calibrating to actually make any progress. When we try to get a handle on the good or the bad, invariably, someone's narrative is going to be shown as false.
There is an impact on wages, that's lamentable and it causes pain in a lot of the middle class. Let's put our heads together and see how can we address that?
Some people are not willing to admit that there are people of foreign origin who are critical additions to our intellectual capital. But a reasoned analysis would concede that H1B's are not even close to the same as NIWs in that regard. We probably can source a lot of H1B work natively. We should still offer the H1B opportunity though, so what does that balance look like?
Crime? Crime is definitely a problem. The data shows that it doesn't get better through the generations as one side would have you believe. At the same time, it isn't as prolific among people of foreign origin as the other side would have you believe. (Heck, in all honesty, the data shows crime isn't even as prolific among native born Americans as one side would have you believe.) Do we have to address it? Absolutely, but we shouldn't look at everyone as a criminal.
We need balance to address these issues wisely, but balance is severely lacking in contemporary civic discourse here in the US. And therefore, balance is lacking in our policy decisions.
I know this will sound like denialism but data on crime that claims it's going down doesn't match my day to day experience and so I tend to believe something is wrong with the data.
Ideas that come to mind are (1) reclassifing crimes as not crimes - instant reduction in crime in stats but no reduction in actual crime and victims (2) less reporting because of less enforcement as in police don't enforce the laws either because they don't want to or because there are less of them so there is less reportihg (3) less reporting because of uselessness. if you don't believe the police will do anything why report it. Car gets broken into, reporting is a chore that produces no results, reporting to car insurance just raises your rates.
Etc... as just one example I recently rented a car at SFO and there were signs saying don't leave anything valuable in your trunk because of theft. that's effectively saying the government isn't working to prevent this crime so the criminals are winning so you can no longer use a car for one if it's intended purposes. In can fully imagine in 20 years we'll be told not to store any valuables in our houses. that not how it should work.
I lived in the mission in Sf. Crime is way worse today than 20 than ago, any stats that claim otherwise are lying
>Jeff Bezos(01:34:00) We were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents, and I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then.
Same experience when I studied in Germany. My house got broken into by a Bosnian migrant, with CCTV footage showing the face and all, brought it to the police but nothing came out of it, citing footage not enough to incriminate. Bs really.
> The reality is that immigration is not all good for the average person.
This statement is far too general. You need to divide high skill and low skill immigrants. Almost all economists would say that high skill immigration is good for your economy, and those immigrants are much more likely (than natives) to start businesses and create jobs. There are many, many academic studies about this type of immigrant in a wide variety of highly advanced nations. In 2024, a large number of highly advanced nations (all over the world) have active, aggressive high skill immigration schemes. Rich governments really want these people to come.
Regarding low skill immigration, it can help to supress labor costs (and indirectly control inflation) in very high labor industries, such as non-commodity crop farming (vegetables, fruits, etc.) and food processing. That said, if uncontrolled, it will have a negative economic impact upon low skill natives.
A nuance of like to add, though: some of the ways of controlling immigration, in particular revocable economic visas, are _designed_ to push down the cost of labour at the expensive of natives.
IMHO, if you get permission to work in a country, it shouldn’t be revocable. The revocation just serves as a way of paying the immigrant, and therefore the native who could also do the job, less.
This is simply the ancient political strategy of blaming our problems on groups of people that are different, and not actually taking responsibility to identify and fix the real causes. It is a formula as old as time for despots to seize power by fabricating an enemy that doesn’t exist from peoples prejudice and fear.
you can’t reduce ecological principles to just rhetoric. less resources, more requirements = more strain. the more resources to share, the less impact of the same shared unit, the easier it is to dispense to whoever. sharing resources with others with those who share other properties is more acceptable to most. but this propensity is generally reduced with more resources to share. humans band into groups in competition for resources when they are scarce.
just as how people are getting triggered online more easily by displeasure, so they are triggered by the bad apples more than the invisible good ones. there’s more of good ones, but the larger their absolute number, the more resources are shared and the more bad apples there are, the more this sharing becomes problematic. the fewer shared properties there are, the less there is to dilute the bad-applehood.
abstracting away from this into a symbolic ideal (equivalence via property of “humanhood” and equivalence via property of “need” determined via capacity of empathy and Christian virtue) does no one any good and is experienced as a result of effacement of shared histories (roots). the idea that real present (ie, ahistorical) causative elements are always only just social or imperialist is ideology.
you can leverage not only a reaction, but also its object. increase the pressure, increase the resistance, propose solution (and hide other agendas behind it).
The actual things most people are concerned about aren’t even close to being zero sum- things like economic activity increase with more people and ingenuity. We’re in a time when innovation is rapidly letting us do more with less resources, we aren’t resource constrained for our real world quality of life. Rhetoric creates us vs. them situations that don’t exist in fact- while also artificially constructing groups to pit against one another along lines that only benefit the person creating them. Even if I did think things were zero sum and wanted to use government force to keep resources in my group- the “in group” I would choose isn’t the one any politicians are trying to sell me based on what people look like or where they were born.
"Lip-service" is probably a good way to put it, since all those issues are also happening in countries without a lot of immigration, but most people don't look too far outside of their own country when considering problems in it. It is easy to look for a simple to understand change, and lay the blame on it, and people like easy answers for things they would rather not have to think about (like economies).
Most of those issues are probably better explained by the trend for jobs, especially higher paying ones, to be more and more concentrated in cities. There has been almost no policy push to realistically address that from anyone, outside of lackluster and temporary measures to encourage jobs in smaller cities.
> Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services, competition for housing, suppression of wages, the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards,
Pretty sure the ever wealthier owner class is to blame for that, not immigrants.
> minority enclaves with values that are fundamentally incompatible with the West
And this is a massively overblown problem mostly pushed to distract voters from those listed above.
Most of America 100 years ago was minority enclaves with values fundamentally incompatible with the "old" America. Worked out in the long run because we had a good run of a strong middle class. Money makes everyone merge.
But, the Republicans will just attempt to make the rich richer, and keep the poor and others isolated, then sell the story that the others are the ones keeping the middle class down, not the rich.
Immigration opponents just make up things so they can claim immigration caused it. The biggest tell is that they mention wage suppression, because they think it'll make them sound sympathetic - but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages, and theoretically you should expect it to increase them because of increased demand. (Conversely, when people move away this reduces demand and lowers your wages.)
That and employment for prime aged (i.e. not retirement age) Americans is as high as it's ever been.
Fortunately, we don't need to listen to any "academic economists" (who need to toe the party line) or even internet "experts", we can simply observe reality.
During COVID lockdowns, UK farmers complained that they can't get cheap foreigners to pick their strawberries. Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough". Open borders directly reduces wages.
A single article with no counterfactual isn't as good as the existing literature, which has plenty of empirical studies (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...). Academics love disagreeing with each other and economists are pretty bipartisan relative to other fields.
> Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough"
Looks to me like this needs a specialized skilled workforce, otherwise they won't be able to pick the fruit in time for it to stay ripe.
Paying a smaller population of workers more will not necessarily encourage them to develop enough skills to do this job. It might just be left undone and then no fruit. If you have a larger population of potential workers, then there's more room for people to specialize in this because you have a larger economy.
> James Porter said 200 workers normally travelled to his farm in Scryne, Angus, from eastern Europe.
I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means. If it was Ukraine they were bad then and worse now, but if it's Poland they have incredible economic growth right now and are on track to pass the UK before too long.
There is a current discussing in Sweden about the issue of human trafficking in picking fruits. Historically we have had a fairly large source of Asians being tricked to travel to northern Europe to pick forest fruits, with passports being taken, payments being withheld, and living standards beyond reasons. Last year a fairly large case was brought to bring down the human slavery and disgusting practices, and as a result the practice has been significantly reduced.
As a result the prices of forest fruit has increase multiple times and food companies are reporting a significant increase in costs thus needing to reduce the number of employees. Every industry above in the chain is feeling the economical impact of losing the human slavery. Local government is also concerned since the created void, in combination with increase wages, may encourage new independent illegal workers which then the state must handle.
Even leaving aside the human trafficking component, a lot of berry picking looks like a scam in Sweden. The costs to travel and live in Sweden rarely cover their earned wages. Their per hour earnings are surely far below Swedish minimum wage laws. Why do the Swedes allow it to continue?
The reason why Swedes allow it to continue is of similar reasons why people allow human trafficking in construction. It occurs in the background where it is not seen, it reduces costs, and makes people money.
If human slavery was a net-loss for countries then it wouldn't be historical popular. Be it building roads, railways, bridges, buildings, harvesting or picking fruits, those are not things people in general want to see prices increase. People who talk about illegal immigrants being a net-positive on the economy never talk about that aspect, in the same way that those being against illegal immigrants do not want to talk about increased costs. Even people who talk about human trafficking do not want to talk about human trafficking in construction or food production.
At one point the police even announced (as part of a political move in order to get more budget) that they would stop investigating construction places for human trafficking since just going to a single construction place would fill their work quota for that year, and thus everything else would had to be put at hold. Everyone who work in construction are fully aware of the open secret that a large part of all work is done by illegal workers that do not pay taxes (or minimum wages), do not get safety equipment, and is not limited by regulations that exist to protect workers. Sweden is far from unique in this aspect.
<< I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means.
Not OP, but I can absolutely vouch for local negative sentiment in Eastern Europe. Granted, some of it is a direct result of war in Ukraine ( and a lot of those refugees getting benefits and priority for government services in host countries ).
It is hard for the population in general to get that they are getting a deal, when they don't. Maybe some individual billionaire does, but if anything, it only exacerbates the issue further by focusing anger on that one person.
I too am suspicous when companies and industries complain they cannot get enough cheap labour. However, there is a balance to be struck. If the UK needed to pay natives at prevailing wages, it might be 15 GBP per hour (or more) to pick strawberries, and then strawberries would probably double in price at the market... and very few people would buy them. When UK was part of the EU, there was freedom of movement, so a lot of seasonal workers came from Eastern Europe to work the fields in the UK. This probably helped to reduce UK food prices.
What bothers me much more: When companies and industries that generate middle class jobs (and above) complain about being unable to find workers. After the GFC ended around 2009, this was a constant complaint in business newspapers for many years (I guess at least five years during the post-GFC recovery). It was so obviously bullshit to even the most casual observer: The offered wages were much too low, so jobs stayed unfilled for months on end. In short, they wanted high skill people to work for low wages.
> Open borders directly reduces wages.
If this were true, how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote. One thing I will grant you: Open borders suppress wages for low skill workers. That is pretty much undeniable. The people hurt most by EU freedom of movement are low skill natives.
> how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote.
Are you sure about that? It seems about equal to me [1]...
In any case, Brexit didn't cause closing the borders; immigration into the UK increased massively [2] (i.e. the politicians didn't deliver what the people wanted). Any negative changes to the UK economy were more likely caused by decrease in trade with the EU... [3] Although COVID makes all these statistics suspect.
Someone pointed out online, I forgot who, that the problem with job reports is two fold
It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
It also reports all jobs, not the quality of the jobs. Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive. The jobs report doesn’t disaggregate higher paying jobs from lower ones
That may be true of the monthly jobs report numbers (don't remember how they work), but if you need to know then it's not an issue because there's alternatives.
Here's reports for all these that don't have those issues, as they just come from surveys.
> It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
This simply asks "do you have a job", and it's up to the people responding to decide if being an Uber driver is a job.
> Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive.
Btw, I think focusing on "jobs" isn't the best thing to look at - the poorest people in a country will always be children and the elderly, and hopefully we don't want them to get jobs.
The jobs report is what most
media parrots across all media platforms more or less is the monthly jobs report and definitely the one I’m referencing.
No matter how you cut it though Americans do not feel they are getting their fair share economically and want to avenge that, which is why I think voters didn’t push back against tariffs - which have become a cornerstone of economic rhetoric by Trump and his allies - at the ballot box.
I think it’s also because a good chunk of the electorate doesn’t quite understand how tariffs work and it’s going to backfire, but the sentiment is very clear
Americans had what's called a vibecession where they universally thought the economy was bad, but then answered every question about their own finances by saying they were good. The implication was they thought it was bad for everyone else, just not them, so that's mostly on the media's negativity bias.
There was some hangover effect from inflation, although of course that's going to get worse now.
"I've been demonstrably wrong in every single point but I'm still right because I feel like it" is such a good demonstration of what happened this election.
Some people are hurting because there's always some people hurting, and for some reason that means we get the party that wants to reduce social safety nets?!
It seems fairly evident that human trafficking has had an economical positive effect on countries who practiced it. It is an common observed fact that the current construction sector is dependent on human trafficking and most current construction projects would fail to meet their goals without a steady stream of cheap, untaxed illegal labor that do not need to follow safety regulations.
However for people who work in those sectors the picture tend to look differently with wages and good safety practices being suppressed. Construction companies that follow regulations and pay taxes for all their employees will loose in the competitive market. The effect on the economy may be a net-positive, and it may also be true that most countries could not contain growth if construction actually cost as much as it had to without the illegal practices, but that is all multiple aspects of the same issue.
Immigration does have a net benefit to the economy, generally, but of course it tends to depress wages for anyone in sectors the immigrants are landing jobs in. Even NPR admits this, when they cover the topic. If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Whether those sectors include most of the people worried that their wages will be suppressed, when who we’re talking about are illegal immigrants who mostly do stuff like chicken processing and house framing/roofing, is another matter.
It’s weird that “we had a bipartisan bill to address specifically this thing you’re worried about, likely to pass and be signed into law, and Trump scuttled it so he could keep complaining about it” didn’t resonate. Frankly, if that’s too “technical” a message to be received, we really are fucked.
One reason for this is that immigrants have differing and complementary skills from natives - eg just speaking a different native language is a skill - and so they're not likely to land in the same sectors. They're more similar to other immigrants from the same place, and so it's more likely they'd lower each other's wages. I think this is totally believable, but the demand factor is still very important here - one immigrant could start a business and employ others etc.
> If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Doctors in the US are a special case because their number is so limited by the AMA and by (US government funded) residency slots. So yes, this could lower their wages if foreign doctors have similar enough skills to compete with them vs complement them. But it's more important for us to just stop limiting how many new doctors we train.
This wouldn't necessarily hurt them though; I mean it probably would, but if it made healthcare more affordable resulting in more people going to see doctors, then they'd all get paid more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Yeah the full answer is “it’s complicated and yes maybe some people see wages depressed or increases that would have happened, slowed, by immigration”. It can, for a given individual or even sector, do the thing people are worried about, even if most benefit—mean or even median wages tending to go up isn’t the same as your wages will go up. Simplified “it doesn’t lower wages” messaging has a smell to people burned by other neoliberal policies, and they’re not wrong to detect a hint of the ol’ BS, even if their concern is overblown or misplaced.
A guy answered me in another comment where I was saying similar things about wages, and apparently it's not true, it's an interesting read (which I can't criticize or comment since I'm not knowledgeable in economics) https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...
It can be the case that immigration tends to buoy wages over all, while there do exist some for whom immigration will depress wages. Again, we’re definitely trying to do this when we craft targeted policies aimed at bringing in or discouraging immigrants for specific professions, and it does have the effect one would expect.
We have a history of doing the Neoliberal “well this will make line go up and we can just help the few whom it harms” and then not helping those few, so I get why people worried their wages might be some of the ones affected aren’t thrilled. Whether most of the folks so-concerned would actually see such a thing, is another matter (I’m guessing not, in at least 95% of cases of people with those concerns).
> but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages
What? You’re really claiming that increasing the supply side of a market has no effect on prices? That’s absurd. You shouldn’t need evidence for common sense. If labour supply is essentially unlimited then there is never pressure to increase wages. A literal child can understand this…
Using a pure supply argument for the labor market is the worst possible one to do it on. It's usually okay, but labor is people, and people are the source of all demand, so you really have to consider both of them.
Also, I'm going by empirical studies here. Those are better than beliefs, because truth is stranger than fiction.
All I know is in the UK it's not uncommon for jobs to get thousands of applications. I'm pretty confident the immigration is hitting the supply side more than demand. Most of this immigration is from low skilled workers on poverty wages, I'm struggling to see how this would massively increase demand elsewhere in the labour market.
Since immigration started increasing in the late 90's wages have been stagnant. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but hmm.
Where I'm from the shortage of supply is also due in varying proportions to: too many airbnbs and secondary residence, rural flight, families being split in multiple households, increase of average home size, etc. Immigration certainly plays a part, but likely not as much as you think.
Biggest cause is insufficient increase in supply, often due to government regulations.
Immigration can heavily increase demand, and so it can play a big part, depending on the immigration numbers. Anyone moving in needs a place to live as well.
That issue goes far beyond immigration. You want a job, especially one that has growth potential? You move to a city, regardless of if you are a native or not. You can see all the same trends in cities and countries without a lot of immigration.
This argument just doesn't make sense. The US annual population growth is currently 0.5%. Between 1960 and 2000 it rarely went below 1%, but since 2010 it's always been well under.
Housing is also one of the few issues that is so local and immigration is such a tiny story around it to begin with. Prices are high in plenty of areas seeing little immigration activity
If the immigration is double the normal expected growth (~tripling the growth) it is not really tiny. It may very well be solvable, maybe even easily.
But the problem in many European countries is that "the left" does not even acknowledge that this may be a problem and should be solved leading to many people voting for "the far right" that does acknowledge that this is a problem.
In the US housing may not be the biggest issue, but the result is the same: the average voter can choose between "there is no problem, we can take in as many immigrant as we want forever" and "we don't want immigration".
Many of the most expensive cities in the US have relatively low immigration compared to other areas with much more reasonable real estate, and it behooves you to link it where housing is expensive and immigration is very high. You have to actually provide some sources before you throw out blanket comments blaming immigrants for our problems
You’re entirely against people coming here? You’re not focused on undocumented migrants?
You’re also failing to draw a causal link here. Not to mention NYC is one of the biggest cities in the world period (10th). It’s hardly representative of most US cities.
Constant immigration is not sustainable. Especially when people come from cultures which are very different than the west. They have different value systems, religions, etc. There is also the problem of scale, imagine if all of India moved to Germany. What would happen? At some point the politicians will have to look at the issue.
> Constant immigration is not sustainable. Especially when people come from cultures which are very different than the west. They have different value systems, religions, etc.
I lived in Northern Calfornia (Bay Area) for a few years. I would disagree with the quoted statement above. Yes, it was not perfect (ethnic) harmony, but there were absolutely wild(!) levels of immigration there -- all kinds of Asians (East, Southeast, and South) as well as Latins (Central and South America). Some how, some way, it worked; I guess because the economy was very strong. I would characterise most Latin cultures as _closer_ to Western European cultures because they are mostly Christian (though, some are Animist), so they have a Christian world view. However, East/Southeast/South Asians that immigrate to California are rarely Christian (some South Indians and South Koreas). Buddhists (so many types!), Confucianists/Daoists, Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs were are all present in the Asian immigrant community. For the first generation (the parents), they all stayed in very tight communities, but their kids learned to mix in public schools, unis, and early career jobs. I never got tired of hearing the funny stories when immigrant parents first learned that their children were dating outside their national/ethnic/religious group. At first, shock and disappointment, then later, acceptance.
Also, specifically regarding Germany, are you German, or have you lived there? Unfortunately, I see a lot of negative media about immigration in Germany ("Oh, too much! Cannot mix different types!" -- All that bullshit). But, then you talk to Germans, especially those under 40, and it is a different story. Many of them grew up with many immigrants in their schools. Germany is already much more multi-cultural than outsiders realise. The number of ethnic Turks in Germany would surprise many. In the last 20 years, this community has become much more integrated into wider Germany society. (They finally have some federal minister roles... whoot!) Yes, Germany has ethnic struggles, as any newly multi-cultural nation has, but, overall, they have a good attitude about it.
I live in an area with a lot of immigration and one side effect is that "entry level" jobs are just about impossible to get for teenagers and other low-skilled non-immigrant workers because of intense competition[1]. So no, the "average" American may not care about these jobs, but the poorest Americans and those "just starting out" do.
It's ironic to pay lip service to supporting the poor while kicking the ladder out from under them with immigration.
Well, we did have slavery. So I'm not sure I would necessarily call everyone since the Mayflower immigrants. Let's just say there has been a lot of movement of people into the US on a population adjusted basis since the Mayflower.
I personally don’t see much similarity between the mayflower (Europeans exiled to underpopulated territory in the empire) to a Chinese grad student coming to work a tech company. And that’s the ideal case!
Cultures are not monolithic, static entities. How do we go from "different cultures" to "negative outcomes?" That's a complete non-sequiter.
Imagine if all of Germany moved to India. What would happen? What if part of Britain moved to UK? At some point the politicians will have to look at the issue...
> During the 2015–2016 celebrations of New Year's Eve in Germany, approximately 1,200 women were reported to have been sexually assaulted, especially in the city of Cologne. In many of the incidents, while these women were in public spaces, they were surrounded and assaulted by large groups of men who were identified by officials as Arab or North African men.
Slightly off topic, but what's the difference between North African and Arab? Are Egyptians, Algerians, Libyans etc not real Arabs? How are they classified technically speaking?
If you would imagine a Venn diagram, North Africans are the cross between the Arabs and the Africans. Arabs being the culture, and African being the geographical region. The Arab culture was spread by the sword about 1,300 years ago.
I can see that. It confuses me mostly because North Africans seem, at least to the eye, far more similar to Arabs than they seem to sub-saharan Africans for instance. Arab influence in North Africa being so much more strong than the influence of any other group. Culturally, genetically etc etc.
Aren’t “Arabs” from the Arabic peninsula (sometimes including Israel and Turkey et al) and North Africans from … North Africa? They may be similar in many ways but they’re geographically distinct.
> imagine if all of India moved to Germany. What would happen?
Indian & East-Asian immigrants have much lower violence stats than the native populations. To that end, your example doesn't say much about the GP that you're replying to.
To steel man the GP, let's say they mean any 2 demographics, not German vs Indians specifically. But there in lies the core issue with immigrant conversations. You can't pick 'any 2 demographics'.
Different immigrant groups (grouped by nation/age/gender/religion/skill-level) demonstrate different integration characterisitics. All immigrant conversations should be painfully specific. The conversations will be politically insensitive. But this is a comment thread about Trump winning his 2nd term in office. So, clearly, the ship has already sailed on political correctness.
Speaking for where I know, immigrants have been substantially higher net contributors than non-immigrants while the research on wage suppression suggests it's almost certainly not true except in some very small, very specific scenarios.
So - are population and housing costs going up and infrastructure failing to keep up, while businesses don't invest? Sure - but that's down to a failure to invest the proceeds of change, not down to the change itself.
Where I live I have the impression that cities are overcrowded because that’s where the jobs are. I don’t think immigration is the main problem, but I don’t know the actual data.
> the political left have failed to show up with an answer, a policy, a plan -- anything, really.
This is factually untrue. U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 was a legislative bill that was proposed by President Joe Biden on his first day in office.[0] It died in committee.
The reality is that illegal immigration is good for ALL business (regardless of whether you are democrat or republican) in the US. This is the hush-hush wink-wink reality that most politicians understand but would never say publicly. They create appearances they are doing something (e.g. creating legislation that might fix the problem) but knowing it won't ever pass in a partisan legislative body.
You would need to show up with data to back up those claims.
I live in (around) a major city. Sure it's overcrowded but that has nothing to do with foreign immigration and everything to do about it being a economic powerhouse.
Quality of life has been increasing since the city has invested/is investing in more transportation/bikeable lanes/better air pollution standards/less noise. Also laws that are forcing better insulation standards are a net quality of life both in terms of comfort and footing the bill. Even the people who really need to take their cars will benefit because there will less traffic jams on account of 1. people for whom it was mostly comfort leaving the road and 2. reduced speed means less unnecessary braking to get out and in the motorway around the city.
Strained services seems to be because of budget tightening. It's a policy choice that has to do with ideology (don't fund a service when it could made profitable by outsourcing it) and trying to save on budgets because of a bad economy. Again
you'd have to back up with data that it has something to do with immigration.
I could on and on but basically what you are saying there was too much new people too fast but I don't think this is nowhere true in my western european country.
The only thing that could worry is the minorities enclaves but it's not hard to break up a ghetto by opening it up sociogeographically and economically, you just need to the political will to do so but instead it's left in place and used as convenient fear-mongering tool for politicians.
The issue here is that there is a global developed world housing crisis. There was a global inflation crisis. There's no quick fixes for these problems.
Sure is. Change zoning rules to allow building a lot more. Let people and corporations build using their own money. No need for government to use any money, just change the rules. Collect property taxes from the new buildings.
No! Can’t do that, we need the money for forever wars everywhere! But the Raytheon shareholders can use the profits to add solar panels, so it’s all good.
I don't know about London but imho people would not equate the housing crisis with illegal immigration since those people can only live together in decrepit apartments when not in the streets.
It takes a billionaire funded media ecosystem (as I have in my country) to consistently hammer in the fact that those are linked in people's head.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. Adding people increases demand more than supply, meaning it increases wages. Immigrants also have complementary skills to natives, which further reduces risk.
There is no empirical evidence of anyone's wages being lowered by immigration.
That assumes immigrants are average people, but they are not they mostly work in some sectors. Those sectors will see a wage dump, other sectors might see a wage hike to compensate though.
For example if immigrants are mostly highly paid programmers, you can expect waitresses etc to get a wage hike, but if immigrants are mostly uneducated young women then waitresses will probably see reduces wages.
If you look you can see the groups who compete with the immigrants tend to be more hostile towards immigration, while the groups who doesn't see immigration in their sector aren't as hostile. Most immigrants tend to be men for example, so we would expect men to be more anti immigration since their jobs see more competition from it, and that is also what we see in opinion polling.
The first study brought in example literally has to do with low skilled worker, and as seen it does not affect other workers in a negative way (if I'm getting what the guy is saying in his post)
> Using a restricted subsample of high school dropouts and the March-CPS4, he finds a large and long lasting negative di↵erence in wages between Miami and its control in the 1982-1985 period.
The article argues that is flawed since it only considered high school dropout men, but those are the main competitors to low skill immigrant jobs. If you include women and other groups who don't compete for the same low skill jobs then yeah you wont find an effect. Some of those might even see increased wages canceling out the reduced wages low skill men see, but that doesn't really help those low skill men.
It makes sense to say that at least a slice of population gets the small stick, but if I get it right the net benefits as a whole are bigger than the singular disadvantages, or no?
The problem can be that the net whole is “better off” by some minuscule amount but certain subgroups are disastrously worse off.
For example, factory jobs disappearing usually increases the nations GDP “as a whole” but has disastrous effects on the poor communities that provided the labor.
Or another way to put it - if immigration is a net benefit and has little downsides, then a minimum wage for immigrants (legal or otherwise) of $45/hr should be fine.
(Even that might not move the needle much as immigrant labor, both legal and illegal, has “corporate” advantages that can’t be matched by residents. Being able to skirt regulations and laws because you know your employees can’t complain without risking their residency is a powerful tool. See: H1B abuse and OSHA abuse.)
Studies didn't find benefits either, it was mostly non results. More people means more people, they work and consume services at about the same rate, what matters is just how the new people distort the ratio of different kinds of people not that they are more people.
More people means there is more competition for housing until more supply is built though, so housing prices tend to go up from immigration. That is good if you wanna sell, bad if you wanna buy or rent.
Man that's one of the most surprising thing I could discover, like, ever. I've always thought that an increase in the number of workers dropped wages, and tbh the guilt has always fallen on the one who pays slave wages, not the people being paid peanuts. But that's a complete shift of paradigm, you should tell more people about it (although as he says, he probably won't change people's minds about it)
I'd rather have solidarity with other average Joes than put the guilt on them, just because they're enabling someone to pay lower wages shouldn't put the responsibility on their shoulders
Immigration is not at a historic high in us or Europe. I think it’s a combination of regressive social policy and redistribution upwards plus moderately high immigration which leaves an opportunity for populist bigots to leverage anti immigration rhetoric in elections.
5.1 million immigrants entered the EU from non-EU countries in 2022, an increase of around 117% (2.7 million) compared with 2021.
The population of Ireland alone increased by 3.5% in 2023 - a 3.5 per cent increase in population in a given year being one of the highest ever for a single country in recorded history.
Everyone in Europe has been talking about it for decades and many parties on the left have nuanced views on it, and they're certainly not ignoring it. In the US, "the wall" Trump was banging on about in 2016 already existed. Deportations under Obama were higher than under Trump, and higher still under the Clinton administration.
Secondly in many countries "the left" hasn't really been in power for a long time; often government are in the centre or centre-right.
> experiment of mass migration has failed to work for the average person
Could you precisely articulate this experiment ? America has had stable mass immigration for the longest time, arguably its entire history. Do you mean the entire American experiment ?
In what manner has it failed to work for the average person and in what manner has it harmed their bottom line ?
> Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services
American Cities are some of the most underpopulated in the whole world. Its only crowded city (NYC) has high positive sentiment for immigrants and owes the core of its historic identity to mass immigration. Not sure how immigration erodes quality of life or strains services. The US doesn't offer much in the way of services to immigrants anyway.
> competition for housing
This is 100% a building problem. The US has had high levels of immigration for a long time [1]. Immigration isn't going to suddenly shock the housing system. While the absolute population of the US keeps increasing, American cities have stayed woe-fully underbuilt. [2] New housing also isn't being built where people could use it. IE. within commute distance from offices in city centers.
> suppression of wages
Unfortunately these have been a long time coming. The alternative is jobs being shipped out of the US. The issue is even worse in Europe, where education is worse, employees work fewer hours and skill levels in new-tech are limited.
Wage suppression occurs differently in low and high skilled jobs.
In the low skill domain, the US already overpays blue collar workers, unionized factory workers and restaurant wait staff compared to the rest of the world. These jobs aren't threatened by immigrants, they're threatened by automation.
Among high skill workers, it is a statistics problem. 7.5 billion people from developing world want to be inside America's 300 million people bubble. Even with a 10x inefficiency, there will be twice as many talented people outside this bubble than inside it. So, the only way for the bubble to maintain its superiority is to keep skimming off the top. At 140k employment based green cards/year, that's 0.1% of the children born around the world that year. So even with another 10x inefficiency, the US would only allow the top 1 percentile of the whole world in.
The US wants this top talent. Because at their caliber, they are going to outcompete the US, and fundamentally alter unipolar power structures that give US its modern form. We're already seeing this with China. Now that the US has stopped having the same appeal to top Chinese candidates, Chinese geniuses now build within China, eroding America's control in every industry, one at a time. Eg: The world's best AI institutions are all Chinese [3]. The institutions didn't improve that much. It's just that America stopped being able to poach their best away.
Wages WILL be suppressed. The competition free utopia of the Boomers and Gen-Xers was only possible because the US emerged as sole superpower of the 20th century, while Asia rebuilt from scratch. Now that the world is stabilizing again, American wages can't hold up to scrutiny from the rest of world.
> the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards
Not sure what immigration has to do with any of this.
> I don't know how bad it is in the US, but in the rest of the West, it's been a disaster.
If you're talking about Canada and Europe, that's a whole another story. Yes, their mass immigration programs have been unmitigated disasters. But, you can't plainly extrapolate that to the US. The specifics matter. On that note, I wish you were more specific about what kind of immigration ?
There’s a simple argument - the USA can obviously support some level of immigration - at the bare minimum the difference between current births and the replacement birth rate - and just as obviously it can’t stably take in half a billion people a year. Somewhere in between there must be a gradual cutoff where it becomes “too much”.
Most opponents of immigration say we’ve passed that mark and either need to compensate to solve the issues caused by it, or dial the number back.
> Somewhere in between there must be a gradual cutoff where it becomes “too much”.
There's a huge range of dimensions beyond how many people: Who is allowed to immigrate? How long do they get to stay? Do their children become citizens? etc.
Fantastic comment. I wish we could've had more open discussions about specific factual details over the past four years. I'm not a fan of "both-sides"-ism, but it there are definitely plenty of uncomfortable truths to go around for everyone.
Having better safety nets definitely helps people look outward rather than in.
Pensions, social security, healthcare; once you have a feeling that you'll be taken care of if things go bad you can think about your neighbours a little more.
The democrats shifted to the center instead of creating a campaign chasm on actual progressive issues that Americans would generally support like universal healthcare[0], student debt cancellation, housing subsidies, stronger pro labor policies (support for unions has grown across the aisle substantially) and generally fairer more equitable economic participation.
That would have reached across the aisle and put Republicans on the defensive especially around messaging
Instead, they went strong with wedge issues and tried to play culture wars. Which honestly I don’t disagree with the conclusions and policy positions democrats made here but it didn’t speak to economic fears or relief for the masses
We did this to ourselves to a certain degree. All progressives have left now is molotovs in the streets
I agree focusing on the culture issues was an incorrect move. But, union members seem to have gone largely pro-Trump even after he talked about firing anyone who went on strike and breaking them up with Musk. It's hard to understand.
You'll get a lot of hate for saying these things, but it's good you said them.
People really need to face reality and that our society simply cannot sustain even limited immigration if those people end up as a negative for the state in terms of financials.
Many recent US immigrants are asylum seekers. They do receive substantial government cash payments and free housing (i.e. welfare). I am generally pro immigration, but let's be clear about the cost.
Let’s also not pretend that “free housing” is NOT a major transfer of wealth from the government to landlords.
People would likely be less annoyed if the “free housing” was more akin to government owned military barracks instead of subsidized rent to private enterprise.
Your perception does not make anything a reality. Many nations commit more to immigration and welfare than the US, and are benefiting from it.
Skilled migrants bring wealth with them, and in fact countries like Australia have avoided recession through immigration (and unemployment is still around 4%).
But well, immigration has to only increase. Many of the problems of the West are due to insufficient immigration. And at the present time, we don't even care much about quality. We need just "bodies": whoever is willing to come, ideally those who are likely to have lots of children (although their birthrate falls dramatically once in). Because a generation down the road, those people will run out and countries will be competing hard to get ANYONE in.
The dividing edge is if you believe a nation is a people or if a nation is a country. But if you believe a nation is a country - ie its geographical borders, then why does it even matter if people live there or not?
Since we're already treating people like cattle ("we need bodies") to be moved around at will here, then we might as well make a comparison with a cattle farmer. If his cattle are not reproducing and thus are dying out, what sensible person would suggest that the solution is to get cattle from other farmers? When is it time to ask why his cattle is dying? Is it because they deserve it? Is it because the farmer needs the milk more than the calves?
I personally want my people to survive and not join the scrolls of history on the long list of exterminated tribes. If we have to survive outside of our current geographical country in a different place, then that is preferable to extermination.
It is because they CAN. They never wanted to reproduce in the first place. And the reason isn't even the democracy or "rotten Western values" - they die off even faster in authoritarian, patriarchal Eastern countries, free and unfree alike. It's simply economic growth.
Give me any way of "making people reproduce again" which isn't overtly dystopian-totalitarian and i will accept that promoting "as much immigration as possible, not letting in only known criminals" was a bad idea.
Sure government can just start having babies for itself. That will be real cattle herding.
Huh? Who said anything about ethnically and culturally uniform?
In the US I’ve never heard this narrative from major candidates or seen it in their policy proposals from the democrats
Rhetoric is always about respecting the melting pot and letting cultural and ethnic differences co-exist under the great American experiment as it always has since its founding
> Rhetoric is always about respecting the melting pot
That is the uniform culture. You see it in tv shows everywhere, people looking the same in every show etc. (the 1 black, 1 white woman 1 white man 1 Hispanic 1 Asian group you see everywhere in American stuff)
There used to be shows like Friends and Fresh Prince which means diversity, now everything is just the gruel of the melting pot.
The general melting pot of cultures goes back over a century in this country. It’s been a cornerstone of US idealism for a long time.
It does rest that cultures will become homogeneous over time as they melt together but I take what is being asserted to be different from that, as in it’s promoting an artificial uniformity of culture rather a naturally blended one
Which the rhetoric coming from Democrats doesn't match the assertion here. It was never about forcing diversity that I can find from any fielded candidate.
Feelings being what they are, you can't really 'disprove' them per se, but this may be more of a reaction to media representations of diversity vs actual ideals
Migrants are how people are fed and how many esential jobs are filled. They aren't the problem, even illegal immigration are blips (although massive wars have put huge pressures on countries) and are only set to get worse with climate change.
The root causes of the issues are war, climate change and demographics. No amount of "battening down the hatches" or "sticking your head in the sand", which is right wing answers to this, are going to solve it. The real solutions are strengthening global co-operation and international agencies.
Unfortunately we're going in exactly the wrong direction.
Correlation != causation, yet again for billionth time even otherwise smart folks easily do this mistake, usually emotions cloud their rationality. There is 0 proof as in any form of research that proves what you claim, you don't even try to back it up.
All this boils again to emotions - people see french teacher having head cut off by student due to showing muhammad's picture in the class, and this trumps 1000s other data points and discussions. I am not saying such things should be ignored or swept under the carpet, but analyzed rationally, discussed and good measures taken, even very harsh if they are the best course of action. Simple folks don't want to hear arguments, they want to see blood and whole world to fix their lives so they can live like some tiktokers they follow en masse.
For Europe, yet again Switzerland is doing stuff 1000x better than rest of the continent. They have 3x the immigration of average western EU country, yet 0.1% problems with it. But its population is smarter and less emotionally driven, so populists have it much harder here. Also they as society setup the whole immigration as set of rules as expectations that everybody +-adheres to. But EU has too big egos to actually admit somebody is better and just learn from more successful, so they will keep fucking things up till people are so pissed they will vote for people who will do further long term damage but will tackle scary immigration boogeyman.
Now its really not a good time for democracies that don't have well educated smart self-sufficient population, dictators are coming better off.
>For Europe, yet again Switzerland is doing stuff 1000x better than rest of the continent.
Well, being the continent's money vault and avoiding two world wars while the whole continent ravaged itself twice, tends to make a huge difference in your nation's development (time in the market beats timing the market and Switzerland did both).
Also, just like the USA, Switzerland won the geopolitical lottery early on by being in a position that's easy to defend and difficult to attack and capitalized on it over the decades by attracting the highly educated elite and the wealthy entrepreneurs escaping from the European countries as they were torn by wars and revolutions, plus the dirty money of warlords, dictators and criminals from all over the world made them incredibly prosperous. It's not a repeatable formula that any other EU country could have easily replicated.
Adding the fact that Switzerland is incredibly restrictive with who they accept in the country, compared to neighboring EU countries who just let the dross in to virtue signal how tolerant they are, maintains Switzerland a very safe and desirable place to be despite it being relatively diverse (diversity in this context also means diversity of thought and diversity of opinion, not just the US identity politics version of only meaning non straight white males). So another win for them.
But if you look at Swiss elections, plenty of candidates took the xenophobic route in their campaigns demonizing Muslims and burkas as the biggest threat, but unlike EU members they don't really care what other think of them so they're a lot more outspoken about it.[1][2]
That's really a quite very unrefined view of Hitler's rise to power. If you really want to prevent Hitler then you have to prevent the end-stage of the Weimar Republic. So, you'd need a strong economy, rule of law, public order and a culture of decency and trust. What makes people yearn for autocratic rule isn't "blaming the jews" it's the everyday circumstances that arise when liberals are done running a place into the ground. Like California, at the moment.
>it's the everyday circumstances that arise when liberals are done running a place into the ground.
Not just running the place into the ground, but also actively lecturing people how everything is fine and how it's their perception that is wrong. That's what really pisses people off and gets the to vote extremists as those tend to at least acknowledge some of the issues average people are facing or seeing.
Average working class people don't like being lectured by upper class higher educated elitists off their high horse on how they're wrong.
This is idiotic. People who live in California just voted Harris. Their quality of life is fine. The irony is that it’s the redneck parts of the states that are suffering most from neoliberal austerity.
It's just the same playbook. Deny problems, divert blame, call opponents bad names.
IF you were so interested in preventing the next Hitler what you would actually have to do is to rigorously oppose anything that threatens the livelihood of average people. Fighting inflation would be THE number one concern because you'd know that people carrying their money in wheelbarrows was what caused Hitler.
If you want to prevent Hitler, you'd fight like hell for decency. Homeless encampments? Open air drug dens? Only-fans? This would be your concern because you'd know that in the Weimar Republic rampant prostitution and other cultural decay is what caused Hitler.
If you wanted to prevent Hitler you'd also speak out sternly against Antifa and other violent extreme leftists, like those that caused the George Floyd riots, because you'd know that the breakdown of public order due to rampant political violence in the Weimar Republic is what caused Hitler.
Nobody on the left is doing any of that because nobody on the left really thinks Trump is a Nazi. It's just a label, just a tactic. And all it has done is to burn term. Trump or Maga or the current right reaction isn't the big bad. What comes after this might be, if Trump fails. Ironically, it's exactly Trump's agenda which is most suited to fight real fascism.
Exactly what should government do to fight global inflation largely
Caused by fuel prices? Perhaps try to decarbonise… but that’s not very MAGA is it? The reality is inflation is lower in the US than much of the rest of the world and the US economy has weathered recent shocks better than most.
"Fix everything or else we'll elect Hitler" well they certainly can't fix everything so I guess they might as well resign themselves to having Hitler elected. Why even bother trying in that case?
Back then the right wing were the industrialists who wanted immigration.
Hitler blamed all sorts of people, including the socialists (who were against immigration). Using Hitler to shut down any discussion about immigration is not very productive. Obviously there are limits. Less so in the U.S. because there is more space, but in Europe everyone is already living in tiny overpriced apartments on top of each other.
That is going to be explosive because there isn't a developed economy anywhere that can avoid major crises without maintaining or increasing immigration levels over the coming decades as the effects of fertility rates really start to bite.
In the UK we saw the Tories try to play the ball in two places at once: Enable lots of immigration while simultaneously pretending the country was under siege to appeal to the anti-immigrant crowd. It blew up in their faces in a spectacular way.
While I'd like that to be an accurate description of why the Tory party lost, my understanding is that the migration topic was basically the only thing the Tories did that continued to resonate with voters, and what actually lost them was a continuing series of incompetent leaders, starting with Cameron (who didn't realise the mic was still hot immediately after resigning). Nobody (of any party) liked May, Johnson got away with pleasing lies until Partygate, Truss was a forgettable joke, and Sunak was basically Jim Hacker.
IMO the only reason the Tories didn't lose sooner was that the Labour party was also stuck with Corbyn.
They lost the anti-immigration vote to Reform. That shows, to me, that the voters that cared about that topic could see the difference between their rhetoric and their actions.
As a person who can be described that way: why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
>why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
Well, for one: cutting back on illegal immigrants and hating immigrants are not the same thing.
Two: stay where you are? I don't get what your expectations are here. Plenty of skilled immigrants love the US. If it's not your cup of tea, that's fine.
1. Illegal immigration is already illegal. Cutting back on it is tangential to every other statement about promoting, limiting, or targeting migration.
2. I'm responding to a comment that says "How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?"
And in my capacity as such a person: that attitude makes me not interested in anything else on the table. Hypothetically to demonstrate the point: You could offer me your entire GDP, even after accounting for a business plan where I somehow specifically help you double it, as pay… and I'd turn you down.
Remember that the current state of immigration in the USA is exactly what was being proposed to be changed: the previous desirability is specifically not going to remain.
> "Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
> Why would you personally want to immigrate to a place where you are immediately expected to foot the bill for everyone else?
Because the only places that doesn't describe are those without a functioning government capable of collecting taxes.
You want me to migrate to ${your country} to boost the economy? Well, that's only useful to you to the extent it means I'm supporting all the people in your country that can't migrate elsewhere for exactly the same reason.
> "Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!"
I want to live with people who pull their weight and aren't an immediate financial burden on everyone else, yes.
If this is "one of the good ones" vs "one of the bad," so be it. If one is immediately looking to burden everyone else, I can see why one wouldn't want to "spend [their] time living with" folks who don't want to give them free shit.
> Because the only places that doesn't describe are those without a functioning government capable of collecting taxes.
We're not talking about tax collection, we're talking about how taxes are spent.
> You want me to migrate to ${your country} to boost the economy?
I don't care why or if you immigrate, but if you do, you will not have a net-negative financial impact on the population. Yes: there are freeloaders amongst the population as-is - this itself isn't a valid reason to import millions more.
We're already taking the cream of the crop - which is why H-1B and O-1s visas are a thing. People hiking across the Darién gap aren't magically going to become engineers and doctors.
> We're not talking about tax collection, we're talking about how taxes are spent.
You're doing both.
In every functioning nation, the rich subsidise the poor.
I as an above average income earner am necessarily always going to subside the poor no matter where I live — unless it's a place that's got no government.
That was true when I lived in the UK, true when I moved to Germany, and would have been true had I moved to the USA instead — all that changed for me was Joe Bloggs became Otto Normalverbraucher instead of Bubba Sixpack.
> I don't care why or if you immigrate, but if you do
Except you previously wrote "How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?"
If you "allow" something but nobody wants to take you up on it, it's not any different than forbidding it.
I'm allowing people to donate infinite money to me, but I'm not taking any steps to encourage this or give anyone a reason to.
> People hiking across the Darién gap aren't magically going to become engineers and doctors
Likewise a degree.
In both cases the capability is already a demonstration of being well above average.
>"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
This entire thread is filled to the brim with people describing the voting majority of Republicans as low information idiots.
We can't have unrestricted immigration, period. How do you propose we select?
I wrote both with the intention of inducing empathy, as in putting oneself in the shoes of others.
> We can't have unrestricted immigration, period.
False.
In many threads where the US is compared unfavourable to other nations, e.g. that the public transport isn't as good or as cheap as Germany's, or that internet is slower and more expensive than France, or whatever, the defence is "oh, America is just so big and empty".
You have the most part of a continent. You could, if you wanted to, fit in the whole world — about twice the population density of the Netherlands, which I've been to and isn't that crowded.
And it's not like everyone actually wants to live in any given country anyway — even if you did have the whole world suddenly teleport in and leave the rest of the planet empty like an xkcd what-if, I'd be surprised if less than 80% put in active effort to leave.
> "Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
That is how the left describe men, do you argue the left hates men?
I have yet to encounter anyone saying that, and I live in a country which (and come from another country which also) considers the US' Democrat Party to be suspiciously right-wing.
But hypothetically, if I met someone saying that, I would indeed say that specific person hated men.
They definitely would not be someone I would wish to constantly be treading egg-shells around for fear of getting deported.
> "Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
As a foreigner, I honestly can't see the difference between "want only the migrants that pull their own weight" and "hate foreigners but refrain from saying it to their face if there's a financial incentive".
If your tolerance is predicated on me giving you money, I'll pass the opportunity.
Why can't I want to minimize the number of unskilled outsiders (with different values, etc.) because they may cost more while overlooking that fact for those with obvious economic power regardless of where they are from.
I know it hurts to hear: people with wealth are desirable guests and citizens.
A country's citizenry is much like children: some are going to be shitty, but we still support that limited group because of arbitrary moral obligation (perhaps inspired by the fact that we want our "own" to continue.) We're not obligated to extend this tradition to anyone else for any reason.
> you still won't get me spending the money I earn on your economy so you won't get rich from me.
Thankfully there are billions of people in the world and they're literally dying to get into the US. H-1Bs quotas are filled every year - there's no shortage of high-average earners wanting to come here, either.
Studies show you've got it backwards. If you let a nurse or programmer into the country, they're going to take a job that's otherwise filled by an American, depressing skilled wages.
If you let in an unskilled laborer, they're going to take a job that nobody wants. They spend those wages, boosting the economy.
In both cases, studies show that the number of jobs stays roughly the same; immigrants create about the same amount of jobs as they take. However skilled immigrants decrease average wages, and unskilled immigrants increase average wages.
It's the outliers that really tip the balance, though. If one of those immigrants turns out to be Jensen Huang or his parents, that's how you make America great.
> Studies show you've got it backwards. If you let a nurse or programmer into the country, they're going to take a job that's otherwise filled by an American, depressing skilled wages.
But at that same time they're contributing massive amounts to the tax base, furthering society.
Maybe they even start a company, employing more programmers.
They also spend their wages.
> If you let in an unskilled laborer, they're going to take a job that nobody wants.
The price for that work is artificially low because these folks don't have any legal protections of any kind.
Guess what else happens commonly to unskilled, under-the-table labor? Injuries! Which I have to pay an outsized amount for in the form of Medicaid and ER fees.
How much of their remaining income is remitted straight to their impoverished relatives back home?
> If one of those immigrants turns out to be Jensen Huang or his parents
Know how to easily filter out Jensen Huang from the crowd of people swimming across the Rio Grande? Marketable skills.
> How much of their remaining income is remitted straight to their impoverished relatives back home?
The skilled labourers do far more of that than unskilled ones.
> Guess what else happens commonly to unskilled, under-the-table labor? Injuries! Which I have to pay an outsized amount for in the form of Medicaid and ER fees.
The vast majority of the cost of health care is old people, and it's expensive because it's labor intensive. The way to bring health care costs down is to increase the ratio of young people to old people. Which in 2024 means immigration.
> Know how to easily filter out Jensen Huang from the crowd of people swimming across the Rio Grande? Marketable skills.
Marketable skills like shopkeeper? That's what Jensen Huang's parents were.
> The vast majority of the cost of health care is old people
Chronic costs, yes, costs borne out of tail risks - no.
> Marketable skills like shopkeeper? That's what Jensen Huang's parents were.
If you have the drive, economic ability, wherewithal in 2024 to keep a shop - operate a business - in the United States in 2024, yes, this is a desirable, marketable skill.
> Chronic costs, yes, costs borne out of tail risks - no.
Chronic costs are the vast majority of total costs
> If you have the drive, economic ability, wherewithal in 2024 to keep a shop - operate a business - in the United States in 2024, yes, this is a desirable, marketable skill.
That's a priori data. Jensen's parents weren't shopkeepers in Taiwan, so how would you know this?
Lord help your soul though if you are a citizen and do not have the ability to work a high level job.
There are an enormous number of unskilled workers in the US. And they get a vote. And they will vote to kill off competition from migrant workers. Like what trump is promising.
> that skilled citizen can no doubt find some other work.
at a much lower salary, sure.
> But the unskilled citizen labor that gets pushed aside by unskilled immigration - they have a much harder time finding work.
No they don't, not according to studies. Studies show that immigration increases the number of total jobs available. There are fewer available jobs for janitors, but more available jobs where just being a local is a marketable skill. A local has language and cultural skills that immigrants don't have.
So they're less likely to find work as a janitor but more likely to find one as a waiter or retail manager, both higher paying positions.
You can't get native Americans to do farm work for any amount of money, because they'd have to live in the middle of nowhere near the farm and that's no fun.
(That is, you'd have to pay them so much they could buy the farm and then hire someone else to work it. But you're not going to do that.)
No, it's called a famine and wouldn't happen. Recession would imply that the market was completely incapable of adjusting to allocate resources correctly.
Promoting a second-tier, legally-disenfranchised workforce isn't the win you seem to think it is.
> Recession would imply that the market was completely incapable of adjusting to allocate resources correctly.
It doesn't have to be "complete", just a shortfall in demand, and of course eventually it ends. But if the market doesn't clear for a while, that's still people having to eat less for a while.
> Promoting a second-tier, legally-disenfranchised workforce isn't the win you seem to think it is.
Almost everything is better than farm work, which is why everyone ditches it as fast as they can. Even being a sweatshop worker is better. Nevertheless, the migrant farmworkers are doing it because it's better than their alternatives, presumably because they get paid better than doing it in their own country.
Btw, I'm not even thinking of especially poor countries here. Japan is a respectable first-world country but has surprisingly low wages and a bad exchange rate, and there are recent cases of Japanese people leaving for Australia to do work like this and making 2-3x what they can at home.
And of course back in Japan it feels like every convenience store worker these days is an immigrant from China, India or elsewhere.
This is fine, really. Productivity will increase over time, they'll save money over time, and their kids will have better jobs.
You missed what's actually happening, which is that cheap workers don't need to migrate to you to get unskilled work done for you.
The jobs move to distant factories filled with alien staff paying taxes to far away governments and who then spend their wages where they live (which isn't where you live).
Even with tariffs, that's still cheaper for many things. And the work you're incentivising to bring to you with tariffs, that's often automated precisely because it's unskilled. Food has been increasingly automated at least since the 1750s — to the extent that cows milk themselves (into machines not just into calves) these days.
It works until it doesn't — wherever the jobs go gets a rising economic spiral, and a generation later their middle class is corresponding richer and say to each other much what you say now: "why do we need them?", only now you are a "them" in that discussion.
It's a weird thing, migration. The short term incentives absolutely favour it for everyone, but it's bad for the place of origin in the long-term.
But note that I didn't say international migration: the arguments are the same between San Francisco and Sacremento, or between Lampeter and Cardiff, or between Marzahn and Zehlendorf.
Japan is way ahead of the west in falling birthrates, but in spite of very little immigration there hasn't been any major crisis, just gradually declining standards of living.
Less Taxes: So we would have a smaller government? That's good. Government already gets so much money and waste it.
Pensions: Maybe instead of relying on a pyramid scheme, people would need to manage their investments or have kids and raise them well so they take care of them later. Sounds like a win.
> coming decades as the effects of fertility rates really start to bite.
I mean one solution is to promote policies that encourage people to have more children, but we "can't afford it", expecting we'll be able to afford the incoming social care crisis.
All the libertarian mumbojumbo about the internet and encryption prove to be wrong. The internet becomes a tool of mass surveillance and misinformation affording the oligarchic takeover and dissolution of democracy and broad based freedoms.
The result is a combination of all these factors and many others, including racism, misogyny, and a desire to return to a time when groceries were cheap. Next summer, the recession will come as a great surprise to those who expected to be better off under Trump
I'm concerned about this "group paranoia" phenomenon that I increasingly see among friends and family. Yes, just like in the past it was the Devil himself manipulating kings and people, now it is China and Russia that secretly hold sway over Western governments (when it's not the Jews).
Or maybe, just maybe, the Democrats (and other similar parties elsewhere) went too crazy and left and did not focus on real issues ordinary people face?
When people say this, they just seem to mean European countries have more universal healthcare than the US does. But /keeping/ your healthcare program after it's already been invented is conservative!
European parties are definitely not to the left of the Democrats on immigration or minority rights.
Very much depends on the issue being discussed. Economically? Perhaps. Socially? Absolutely not. The US is far out on its own branch when it comes to things like LGBTQ issues, racial and other identity issues, immigration, etc. I’m not sure these played as much of a role as the economy in terms of this election, but they are absolutely next in line in terms of the issues looming large in voters’ minds.
Considering that our far right government in italy hiked taxes and approved the biggest number of visa for slave workers, yeah they do except for women's rights
Women who are otherwise going to die because of a medical condition might want to have an abortion at 9 months (for example). The idea of being "for abortion at 9 months" just means allowing those women to live (instead of having to have their babies whether or not it kills them).
These, and a lot of other things are pretty much randomly left/right. For example in the UK it was the traditionally right wing party that legalised same sex marriage. In the 70s the left (then actual socialists!) opposed EEC membership, by the time we left the EU it was the right who wanted to leave.
What the US never had (and which is pretty much dead in the UK now) is a real economically left wing party. In the UK this has lead to a lot of people (including myself) feeling that there is not much difference between the big parties. This helps for extreme parties in the UK. In the US which is more of a two party system perhaps it helps feed the rise of extreme movements within the existing parties?
And yeah, politics are a lot more complex than left/right so you will often see a party you'd normally consider left/right enact a policy you'd see from the other side.
Those are not left policies. Just liberal. We have both left and right parties that have similar policies. We also have left and right parties that area against it.
It's more that their marketing targeted people who are already Democrats and moderate Republicans. The first group didn't need convincing, and the second group is small. The independents and swing voters they should have courted were left in the cold and either didn't vote or went for Trump. They kept preaching to choir, and the choir kept shouting "Hallelujah!", so they thought they had it in the bag.
We just had by far the most pro-union administration in decades, eg they saved the Teamsters' pensions, and in return the Teamsters didn't endorse them. Americans don't care if you respect the working class or not, they're postmaterialist voters.
But they're also "education polarized", so they definitely care if you respect people who didn't go to college. But "respect" doesn't mean you're nice to them or even that you do things for them as a group. It could just mean you don't come off like you went to grad school.
Grocery union workers were hassling people to see their prescriptions where I live recently, before they’d let them in the store as pharmacy workers had a different contract
More local tribal groups who can ask for your papers “please” is not the way either. Unions have aligned with mafioso and pols to propagate violence. Not sure why everyone thinks the past is a good solution. Clearly the average American is a moron; who rewards them with more authority?
Dem pols are 100% useless as any real change screws them too as people. It’s pageantry on both sides. Ones just openly violent and that one won. Great.
>Defending trans people apparently was a bridge too far for many, for one.
Which is ridiculous. Trans folks are less than one percent of the population.
Why shouldn't they be allowed to be who they are? Given the tiny number of these folks, it really shouldn't make any difference to anyone who's not trans anyway.
But, apparently, some folks, who appear to believe that their trained-in prejudices are the laws of nature, feel the need to tell other people how they should live and, even more egregiously, try to force them to do so.
That's not liberty. That's not individual rights. That's not religious freedom. Rather, it's busybodies trying to tell other people what to do.
The only reason this could happen is because of policy that prioritizes self-declared "gender identity" over sex, and over women's dignity and safety. That's the actual problem, not people just quietly living their lives.
There's 2x the amount of border apprehensions under Biden than Trump. I'm sure more people are trying to get into the country under Biden than trump so let's say the control is pretty even but not uncontrolled.
The number of border apprehensions is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the number of illegals who enter the country. If 0 illegal immigrants enter the country that would mean there are 0 border apprehensions. Would that mean the border was less secured?
Everything indicates there were less illegal border crossings under Trump than Biden
It also boggles the mind that immigrants are the issue while the 1% own as much as the entire middle class, while the bottom class owns nothing at all. When you pay more for groceries, or rent, or gas do you think it's the immigrants making it expensive?
More than that, I think there was a lot of democrat messaging that the economy is the greatest its ever been because of Biden. When I would say, it is because of Nvidia, haha. and what does that have to do with the price of milk or eggs for some random american?
The fact that Tim Walz made it through a 90 minute debate without mentioning the CHIPS act a single goddamn time absolutely blows my mind.
Dems could try to explain why Trump's economic policy made the US economically brittle, leaving Biden no choice but to pay the piper to avoid a depression. You're not going to woo voters with that kind of narrative, though, even if it's the truth.
Similarly, when the friendly The View hosts asked Harris what she would do differently from Biden, I assumed her team would have drilled that obvious talking point into her with flashcards.
My mind was blown when she said "There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact."
You don’t even have to start a fight - you can just have an answer about how certain policies take time to grow and you’ll continue to nurture them. An analogy about how it takes time to turn a cargo ship might be apt; how the main thing is steady at the help, and hold the rudder.
My parents who are extreme Democrats called me after that interview to say there's no hope and Trump will win. Harris never understood the obvious fact that Biden's approval ratings were terrible not because he is old, but because people don't like his policies.
Yeah, that's the core. Politicians love to claim "the economy is good!"... but if the people see it in their daily lives that almost none of that supposed "good" makes it into their pockets, there will be problems. People aren't stupid ffs.
Many people got raises after the inflation shock... but rent hikes ate that up, prices for food and staples didn't go down despite fuel/energy prices going low, and many people didn't get raises at all or (especially in the tech sector) got laid off entirely.
The dollar traded at pretty stable levels through the 2020-2024 period, and most countries that could did similar things to their currencies as we did.
To be clear, it doesn't make sense to say "the dollar traded at pretty stable levels". You need an FX pair to make sense.
There are three big, floating currencies in the world: USD, EUR, and JPY. These currencies are overwhelming used for international trade. The USD<->EUR FX rate has been quite stable (~1.10) for about 10 years. However, the JPY<->USD FX rates has risen dramatically since 2022.
The global inflation in question was a result of the COVID over-response. I imagine the indirect deaths from negative economic impacts far exceeded the 0.1% IFR COVID-19 peaked at.
Which was neither an American nor a Democratic Party phenomenon, and again the US did better with recovery than anyone else by a huge margin.
Revisionist history points toward COVID response being a left-wing thing, but there was almost zero variation in policy state to state. The only point of variation was school reopening schedules.
The one thing that was knowably wrong to do at the time we did it was to deliberately slow down testing to keep Trump’s numbers looking good. Everything else was flying blind and to the extent we made mistakes (visible in retrospect), we made fewer of them than any of our peers.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears..
Did you visit any midwestern state during COVID? Florida?
You can use the Google on the internet machine as much as you like and cherry-pick some leftist city in any state, but: broad/legally-enforced mask mandates, forced business closures, etc. were absolutely not happening in many areas of the United States.
He stopped talking about it because it was unpopular (because it is ineffective) and was forced.
No other vaccine is given entirely under the pretense that it will basically only be of benefit to other people.
COVID had a 0.1% IFR across the whole population.
If I am 18-30, why would I take a novel vaccine when it doesn't even prevent the illness or make me meaningfully more likely to survive? "To protect grandma, of course!" isn't why we agree to use TDAP vaccinations or formerly administered Polio or Smallpox vaccines.
> COVID had a 0.1% IFR across the whole population.
The US population is around 340 million people, no matter how "low" a rate appears (besides your number being wrong, it's 1% [1] and the number of reported infections is likely to be way lower than the actual amount), the sheer size of the country will be problematic. At the very least 1.2 million Americans died of Covid over the four years of the pandemic. That is the equivalent of one average size city getting wiped out by a nuclear blast - if this amount of death were caused by an external force, the US would utterly annihilate that external force. Hell they flattened Afghanistan for a few thousand people who died in 9/11.
And additionally, deaths aren't the only metric. I caught it two times, I was out sick for three weeks with more weeks of lower productivity following because that shit fried my brain. Others had it worse, a friend of mine was out for half a year. That is an effect worthy enough of a mask and vaccine mandate.
People are still feeling it in their wallet every time they go grocery shopping. The greatest mistake of the Biden era was to ignore the cost of living explosion and the uncontrolled greed.
I think the “ignored” is that the sitting VP was proposing policies for later that hadn’t been implemented! That was the biggest hurdle - she had to run as a dependent independent which is basically an impossibility.
Meanwhile the guy who spent years crying about the border only to then instruct the Republican party to kill a bill meant to fix exactly that problem won so....
It was partly a global man made issue because every country (including the U.S.) printed COVID money like crazy.
It was the Supreme Court, staffed by Trump, who stopped the COVID madness with their vaccine mandate ruling.
The other issue is that Biden and his cronies Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan et al. deliberately escalated the Ukraine situation in 2021/2022, with the well known consequences. Note that Zelensky himself begged Biden not to be too aggressive at the Munich summit in early 2022! If I were Ukrainian, I'd loathe Biden.
The Biden administration mandated that their EU "allies" would participate in disastrous sanctions, which sent the EU into economic stagnation.
The U.S. is safe because it has natural gas and the reserve currency, which means they can print money more easily. It is not to Biden's credit that the U.S. economy is comparatively better.
I'd say that over 50% of Europe is very happy with the Trump victory, the EU press does not reflect public opinion.
Only Orban and pro-russian parties were happy today in EU
Americans could had saved Russian economy with this move, currently facing an imminent stagflation, so I bet that Putin is also a very satisfied cat and licking his lips at this moment. He has a golden excuse to pause the war for a while in the most favorable conditions for him, and rearm himself
Why would any European be happy with Trump winning[0]? The cornerstone of Trump's economic policy is shittons of tariffs that will cut the EU out of trading with the US and devastate them.
[0] aside from "it gives us moral cover to start deporting citizens we don't like"
He said that in 2016 and 2016-2019 were great years for Europe. He won't leave NATO either. He has less room to maneuver than people think.
What he will probably do is reverse the insane foreign policies of the Biden administration and stop the world from burning. I think he'll deescalate the Ukraine and Taiwan situations. Probably he'll not attack Iran either even though he is said to be a bigger hawk on Israel than Biden. But he also has a sense for economics and will not want another oil crisis.
Trump printed that Covid money. Trump escalated the Ukraine situation with his scandal over aid and casting doubt in the unity of NATO, exactly what Putin wanted.
I’m surprised you would write all of this, blaming Biden for Ukraine’s situation, without a word about Putin. I guess Putin isn’t responsible at all for Ukraine’s situation eh? It’s all magically Biden.
I never understood this argument. Of course Putin is responsible, but what is the point of mentioning it?
Suppose you are on a tour in Rwanda to observe gorillas, and the tour guide tells you not to look them in the eye. One tourist feels humiliated by that instruction, looks a gorilla in the eye and gets beaten up. Who do you blame if you know in advance what the gorilla will do?
It was patently obvious to anyone who experienced the cold war what Russia would do if Ukraine would be a NATO member, preferably equipped with Tomahawk missiles. It was obvious to Merkel, to Obama, to Zelensky.
Of course Russia is to blame, but what is the point if you are supposed to be the adult in the room? You are also to blame.
Ye, Trump was pissed over not getting info about Hunter Biden doing business there?
And the concept of 'NATO unity' is a joke. NATO is the US and the extension of its 'soft power'. How is e.g. unity between Greece and Turkey supposed to work out, or France with itself.
you got it buddy, been in tech (silicon valley) for 25 years. I got laid off in August 2023 and the market sucked even back then. No recruiters reach out anymore. Back in 2022 it was twice a day or more.
But they can't use contraception to stop their wife dying from a miscarraige of a wanted child in a state where the doctors fear being jailed for taking the necessary medical steps for saving the mother's life, if that looks too much like an abortion.
The line isn’t clear cut as risk isn’t a guarantee.
Multiple US woman have already died when doctors where unwilling to intervene despite significant issues being present. There’s a lot of politics involved but as an example Josseli Barnica died in 2021 before row vs wade was overturned with doctors refusing to act over legal concerns despite clear and significant issues.
This has already been covered. Any Dr too scared to read and interpret a law needs to give up their license because they’re pushing a political agenda.
If you don’t want to get pregnant it’s quite easy even if you don’t use contraceptives. Mistaken pregnancies need to go back to health class.
If you've dealt with human behavior at scale at all you know that more friction produces less activity. Of course doctors are going to deny treatment if it's treatment that comes with special legal scrutiny. Of course a new layer of legal review and approval is going to suppress the service that gets locked behind it.
The laws in question are ambiguously worded and untested-yet in courts. They promise severe financial penalties and prison terms for offenders. I don't blame a doctor for being scared.
A flight or bus ticket to California or Colorado for a once-in-a-lifetime service costs multiple orders of magnitude less than the recurring cost of groceries and basic goods.
I believe that abortion to save the mother’s life is legal in all 50 states, every territory and the federal district.
There are a small number of women who have died due to their physicians and/or hospitals misinterpreting the law, just as there are patients who die every day due to physicians’ and hospitals’ mistakes. Those are issues which need to be addressed.
But — so far as I know — right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
In principle, that is true. But that is simply not the reality on the ground. States ban abortion with such exceedingly narrow exceptions that doctors and hospitals delay until the point of actively endangering women.
Four deaths, reported on by one outlet, in the past couple months:
- A Georgia woman with chronic health conditions, which can make pregnancy highly risky but did not exempt her from Georgia's abortion ban, died of complications from a medication abortion: https://www.propublica.org/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban...
Unfortunately as a practical and legal matter that is false. First, physician incentives are aligned to deny care: they have a defense for denying care ("my lawyer isn't clear that I have authority to do this") and the woman has no recourse. Second, there is a simple matter of skill and availability. Fewer facilities allow abortion; fewer OB/GYNs are skilled at doing it safely. In my pregnancy I wanted a perfectly reasonable and legal thing supported by medical evidence and was unable to find a doctor in the state to provide it (vaginal breech birth as opposed to forced C-section).
When you are pregnant, and particularly if you are experiencing complications, you do not have time to shop around and convince people and schedule in advance and all that. You are constrained by the spatiotemporal availability of a skilled medical professional.
> right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
> Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions …
And from the actual text of the law (https://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB0...), abortion is permitted when ‘in
the exercise of reasonable medical judgment, the pregnant female on whom the abortion is performed, induced, or attempted has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.’ That is a very broad exception.
The doctors had to be so certain that it was life threatening before acting that once they decided it was life-threatening, she was already going to die no matter what they did. And this is not an isolated incident.
The law has to allow for more uncertainty for the carve-out to be effective.
This might blow your mind, but for a condition to truly be life treating some people will probably die even if they have treatment, otherwise by definition it would not be a life threatening condition.
For example doctors have to wait for sepsis to actually occur before treatment, thus some will die because they loose to the infection
How many people die because they didn't obtain an abortion in the nick of time? Is this normally an urgent service (outside of legally time-limited states?)
How many people struggle to afford buying groceries?
Looking purely at the cases where an abortion is required for health reasons:
Emergency abortions required for health reasons are often needed when things go wrong, and when that is the case it might need to be performed either soon or immediately. Being in a state that opposes it might delay the decision in ways that injure or kill the mother.
Non-emergency abortions required for health reasons - that is, when there is significant risk but it is not unfolding yet - also happen but being in a state that opposes abortions at any level in general might make it difficult - doctors not willing to suggest it to avoid risk to their business, those around you refusing the need and convincing you that it would be bad, not to mention having to plan a medical trip to a foreign location to get it done - and in turn put the mother at risk of injury or death through inaction.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see the relevance of your question.
Does it somehow make it less relevant to fix a cause of death because more people die of other unrelated causes?
Far more people die in accidents than any other causes of death in the U.S., seemingly only beat by cancer and heart disease. That doesn’t make every other cause of death any less troubling or worth fixing, and it certainly does not mean that one should hold back existing treatments for “lesser” deaths or injuries.
Any avoidable injury or premature death is one too many.
You are absolutely right, but there are still a lot of people who can't pony up the cost of flight, lodging, etc. at short notice in a stressful situation.
But inflation has been a global/western phenomena post Russian invasion and not unique to the US. Your economy has outperformed the developed averages. Non existent dem messaging on it is inexplicable to me… from a uk or European perspective your economic performance under Biden was enviable.
As a US citizen, it is frustrating but not inexplicable.
The vast majority of the voters who had the opportunity, patience, ability, and inclination to follow an argument like this -- the inflation spike was global and the US did better than its peers -- voted for Harris.
Opportunity is a key part of the problem: many voters live in walled informational gardens guarded by propagandists. The only messages that can penetrate into the gardens are short, emotional rather than rational, and lacking in nuance. They are indistinguishable from the constant barrage of lies and disinformation these people are exposed to.
One of the southern states introduced a new crime, "Conspiracy to commit abortion", which specifically targeted the idea of traveling out of state, researching abortion providers outside the state, and aiding someone with transportation, lodging, or financials around terminating a pregnancy.
Fortunately, I'll be able to afford it because I won't be pumping my entire paycheck into social programs, groceries, and supporting a massive population of unskilled illegal immigrants.
Re: “look out for your wife”: I’m going to say the unpopular but perhaps true thing… there are limits even to the amount of reproductive freedom society can grant women while being able to sustain a replacement rate that keeps it alive, and even women know it. I have been having a small but increasing number of conversations where people are absolutely questioning whether we’ve over-indexed on trying to sell women this “be just like the salary men no consequences” narrative—with women who were all about reproductive freedom in their 20s and all of a sudden they are 35, have a great job, but can’t easily have kids anymore, feel unfulfilled and feel like they were lied to. It’s real even if it’s not how you specifically feel. I don’t have the answer but I think the almost anti-child democrat narrative, which Kamala dialed to 11, really really misses the beauty and wonder of childbirth and frankly the core need society has to actively and healthily sustain itself (which simply cannot be done via import). We don’t all work and make money just to die, do we? Humans are programmed to build legacy.
I say this because I fundamentally believe that Democrats need an answer for this if they want to remain relevant. You can’t milk reproductive freedom for eternity. Americans want the focus to shift back to a more nuanced and biologically adapted conversation around sustainable social narrative. That or we need mechanical wombs.
> I don't think the policy positions even matter that much.
The tribalism at this point is insane, it’s basically organized religion. You choose your tribe and get assigned a (terrible) religious leader and a list of dogmas you have to subscribe to without getting ostracized. Why should my view on trade be linked to regulations be linked to climate be linked to drugs be linked to criminal justice be linked to refugees be linked to Israel be linked to identity politics be linked to abortion be linked to guns? No idea, but take it or leave it. And the choices of religious leaders? Between someone who lies as readily and confidently as he drinks water and someone who’s a boring ladder climber and <omitted because this is an overwhelmingly one-tribe site>. No thank you.
Tribalism is human nature, as social success - a key survival criteria - requires alignment.
The reason it becomes a problem is that there the only options for each "tribe" is one of two extremes, and that these are perceived so fundamentally different it is hard for people to find common grounds. When you have many more parties, you have a wider spectrum where you can have partial agreement and disagreement with much softer borders between political strongholds, and tribes can incrementally move within the spectrum without having to switch all their beliefs and ideologies from one day to the next.
Being more understanding of tribes with other ideas rather than making them villains would also help both sides in communication and political mobility.
Veritasium released a wonderful new video yesterday, "On These Questions, Smarter People Do Worse" which ..... I'm not going to spoil it for you but you will understand why I responded with the link.
Watching, they discuss a study about gun control and I though omg I was thinking about that recently and the study they presented answers the question I've been pondering about gun control. If you watch the video, you will understand my disappointment.
I had been living in New Orleans including when it had the 8th highest murder rate ... not in the United States but the world in 2022 (it was #1 in US hence not 8th). The city couldn't hire police officers and close 120 position had been unfilled. There is a very strange phenomena happening in the past 2 years, the crime rate in New Orleans is plummeting without police. [1] So, in the Veritasium video, they talk about a gun violence study and I think, that is exactly the question I'm asking. Does gun violence go down if law enforcement is removed from the equation because that is exactly for unknown reasons happening New Orleans today. Nobody is taking away guns in New Orleans and everyone I know has at least 2. I was a little disappointed with the study but tapped my self on the shoulder asking the correct question when presented with it.
Smarter people did better than Dumber people. The people with a score of 8,9 on numeracy did the best [1] but not as good as they should've. This is basically best shown on page 12 [2] on the actual paper, people with high numeracy have a better chance of correct answer than low numeracy.
I suspect the effect is even across low & high numeracy but because high numeracy people were more likely to get the correct answer to begin with. Akin to say you playing a toddler in Counter-Strike. You're more likely to win a round than them. So if for a round I disconnect one of your controllers then the disconnection is more likely to cause you a loss than the toddler because the toddler was going to lose anyways, the effect of disconnection for them is dwarfed by their innate ability.
The title says that smarter people do worse, which is correct in the sense that their relative performance is 20% worse than less numerically inclined people. They cover this in the latter half of the video. However, in order to believe this was the title’s intent, you would have to assume the title should have read, “Smarter people score worse on political numerical questions than on apolitical numerical questions.” Realistically it’s so ambiguous that any interpretation is plausible.
> Realistically it’s so ambiguous that any interpretation is plausible.
The dude isn't some rushed working single mother. He had amble time to choose what he wanted to convey and instead chose that title.
When your study creates 2 populations (those with good numeracy and those without) and you make a claim that one of those populations "do worse" than it's always implicitly with respect to the other population.
> When you have many more parties, you have a wider spectrum where you can have partial agreement and disagreement with much softer borders between political strongholds, and tribes can incrementally move within the spectrum without having to switch all their beliefs and ideologies from one day to the next.
That is a good theory, but coalitions can also easily create stalemates on many topics and effectively rendering a government incapable of any significant action. There are recent examples in EU countries.
The effect of coalitions is in political execution rather than in ideological separation. The concern here was entirely about the social impact on residents, not the political efficiency.
Coalitions can partly negate the benefit of the “spectrum”, but each member still answers to a different body of voters and going along with too many conflicting proposals would put them at risk of losing the confidence of their voters. Not differentiating from the other coalition members puts the party at risk of voters jumping ship to the others, and each party ultimately wishes to grow their own voter base.
Nah, tribalism of this sort is absolutely not human nature. People naturally form tribes and define ingroup/outgroup boundaries around their actual relationships and communities.
It takes alignment of a lot of unusual circumstances to get people to attach their identities to "tribes" that are actually aggregations of completely unrelated strangers grouped together on the bases of abstract symbols.
People are naturally loyal to their families and local communities, not to continent-spanning political organizations.
> It takes alignment of a lot of unusual circumstances
Heh.. well.. California *was* majority white not even a decade and a half ago. And, the judge that put the final nail in on that issue for California wasn't exactly a white person.
I’m confused: You start by saying that tribalism isn’t human nature, but then you describe that tribal behaviors are natural.
People are indeed loyal to their local communities - which includes having ideologies that would not greatly offend your peers - but everyone has different communities. Yours might include family A and B. Theirs might include C and D, and E and F, respectively. Continue a few rounds and you’ll see that each social circle is unique and inter-connected.
No one within this “super-tribe” can have a different ideology without offending their local community by aligning with the opposite extreme - even if your opinion only differed slightly, your choice is one of two extremes.
In order to fix this, you need people to have more choices so that they can select something slightly different from your community without offending it.
I feel like I'm using pretty clear qualifiers to distinguish actual tribes from what Kurt Vonnegut would call granfaloons.
The point is that equating these ideologically polarized aggregations of strangers with tribalism is a huge stretch, and not really valid. They're two very different phenomena.
Yes, social circles are unique and inter-connected, and most people are simultaneously members of multiple "tribes", but this has nothing whatsoever to do with vast aggregations of strangers linked only by abstract symbolism.
In group power dynamics. Once a person identifies with a group, and makes the beliefs of that group part of their identity, then they will fight any threat to it. Since there are just two parties you are forced to choose one or the other.
The single greatest thing the American people can do from this moment on is to stop hating each other for political beliefs, put that aside, and just talk without expectation or trying to convince someone. Just talk. America has let political identity supersede all else.
A youtuber spoke about this though I can't remember the name. Veretisium maybe? He goes into how humans inherently want to avoid being ostracized from their tribe so they vote regardless of data or hard science. He said it was a feature rather than a bug though
>The single greatest thing the American people can do from this moment on is to stop hating each other for political beliefs
Many conservatives, including many of my own family members, have enthusiastically declared "all democrats should be shot", for usually really odd and mundane things too, like Michelle Obama saying children should eat healthily. They blame her for school lunch programs in my state going downhill, primarily from reduced budgets that prevent the school from buying anything to eat other than a shitload of frozen chicken patties. But no, apparently that reduction in funding, which was decided at the state level and mostly done during Bush's admin when no child left behind fucked with school funding, is her fault.
None of the hate came from democrats. The first mean spirited thing said by democrats was when Hillary called republicans a basket of deplorables.
Republicans have been calling democrats satan worshippers, literal biblical demons, degenerates, sexual deviants, etc since the 70s.
Republicans walked away from basic decency. Not democrats. None of us feel comfortable talking to our Trumper friends and family because they are our parents who raised us to hate others and we had to individually of our own accord grow past that. They are our brothers who literally tell us we should be shot back in the mid 2000s, before you can even blame identity politics. They are our mothers who taught us we were sluts for wearing a skirt and deserved to be raped. They are our grandparents who taught us that having a baby out of wedlock is an ostracization worthy event. They are teachers who spent a lecture talking about how slavery wasn't so bad. They are bosses who force you to watch anti-union propaganda before you can work.
Fox News specifically has been declaring and waging regular war on most things that aren't stereotypical 50s americana since it's inception.
Like what fucking more do you want from us? How do you talk to that?
I've been trying to argue for some time that with two parties, even accounting for their primaries, the bandwidth of our representation is much too low to communicate a spectrum of political ideas. I forget the exact numbers I calculated, but from memory, current American democratic bandwidth at the national level is something in the neighborhood of 5 bits per year. This can't allow for any kinds of subtle distinctions between philosophy. We're stuck with big ugly buckets of loosely-related (at best) issues because we can't democratically communicate any more specifically.
I think this is somewhat true but not fully true. Elections aren't the only way in which policy gets communicated and so this bit-level analysis doesn't capture it fully IMO. If you look at border policy, for instance, Democrats have moved to the right not because of election mechanisms like primaries, but through public opinion.
Considering how quickly the Democrats ousted Biden when his mental fitness to lead was in doubt, I don't think it's fair to describe progressives as having a "religious leader".
<omitted because this is an overwhelmingly one-tribe site>
A woman? Lots worse than "liar" could be said about one of them, I'm curious what makes you think both candidates are equally bad but don't dare say it.
I don’t think it’s as tribal as you think. At the margins yes, there are wing nuts both ways. But Trump got a lot of votes he didn’t get before and Kamala got fewer than Biden.
Inflation has been a shocker. The border being flooded is terrifying. The economy is and has been struggling in many peoples lives. And the democrats want to still focus on identity politics.
I think they can easily win in 4 years but they need to change their ways. They need to abandon the poisoned ideology that Obama inspired.
Economists are tea leaf readers. For any given economic plan you have economists giving their endorsement. “Kamala’s policies were explained and even endorsed by economists” is a non-statement and you can replace “Kamala” with any presidential candidate in the last 50 years and it will remain true. I think the President gets too much credit for both good and bad economic situations, but the fact of the matter is that the average American feels the economy is terrible after 4 years of Biden policies and that is going to look larger than promises of future policies.
On the issue of identity politics, Democrats have been all in for nearly a decade, and only in the last year or so, when it has become apparent they are out of step with the majority of Americans, have they begun to back off. It’s not unexpected for the Republicans to now be the ones bringing up identity politics given how closely the Democrats have aligned themselves to it for so long, and the current backlash towards it. The damage is done and it will take many years of priority shifting for Democrats to get over it.
The preceding comments were about tribalism, and I was showing that policy had nothing to do with anything. That the dems talked about policy but it still be perceived that they didn’t.
> identity politics
This has squarely been a republican plank to rile and invigorate their base, regularly creating issues where none existed to get their team up to vote,
The fact that this can be blamed on the dems is always strange. I mean, the whole point of Fox was to create a counter narrative to address the march of “liberal science”. The goal was entirely to handle science and research, and present ways to combat this with feelings. Again - my favorite example is creationism.
Inflation being a years-long painful problem to wrestle with was inevitable with all the stimulus pumped in to keep us afloat through the pandemic. We could have fared far worse, and many countries did. I don't know why the left didn't push on this argument harder to defend themselves.
Republicans have been increasingly focused on identity politics and Democrats have been avoiding it for only the last year or so as it has become clear that it is a major liability for Democrats. They spent most of the last decade heavily emphasizing identity politics, and it’s become clear to them and everyone else they have been largely out of touch with the average American in that area. Now that there is a rising backlash, they’ve tried to distance themselves but Republicans have years of material to drag out and pin them with. I don’t think they get credit for trying to downplay a long-running strategic blunder in the 11th hour.
Not really. If you want to go back a Decade, then it was legitimate equality issues.
You can't just say, people shouldn't be equal and claim you are fighting against 'identity' politics. Like women being allowed to open bank accounts without their husbands permission. Why do Republicans want to go back to those days? Unless you actually listen to them, and they quote some Bible Versus about Women being property, then you see the actual agenda.
This is the classic motte-and-bailey scenario - that the entire radical gender movement is just trying to be nice to trans people. But overlooking trans women competing against biological women, biological reality, critical gender theory being taught to kids, pronouns, “x” as in Latinx and the adjacent drag queens reading to kids, etc.
Implying a contradiction reveals the critic’s own identity politics perspective.
The permanent, irreversible demographic shift that conveniently favors Dem politics is only one of the many, many problems caused by turning a blind eye to unprecedented hordes of inherently law-disregarding third-worlders taking advantage of our weak border enforcement.
If the issue was immigrants in general then possibly. But it’s about illegal immigration specifically and complete disregard for law and order when it comes to the millions crossing the border illegally and being encouraged to do so in many cases or no pressure to deport anyhow. Turns out that’s bad policy.
Add to that the Democrats have been far more successful with apprehending and deporting illegal immigrants. This is a struggle among people trapped in their own bubbles, disconnected from and uninterested in reality or relevant metrics.
I don’t know if that’s true or not but “sanctuary cities”, “Abolish ICE”, blue city mayors complaining about a migrant crisis, and Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment complexes don’t inspire confidence.
This is precisely his point. Illegal immigration isn’t about identity politics, as it has nothing to do with race or gender or disability, etc. Your comment turned this into a conversation about identity politics.
Most discussions of immigration I've seen seem to be fixated on a subset of illegal immigrants. i.e. talk of border walls (only between US/Mexico, never seen discussion of US/Canada) when most illegal immigrants are coming via boring methods like through ports of entry and on commercial airplanes.
That’s fascinating. I definitely agree that there seems to be a fixation on the southern border. Do you have a source showing that a majority of illegal immigrants are entering through ports of entry or commercial flights? Would love to read it.
Wasn't 2016 when the country was at peak "build the wall and make Mexico pay for it"? Regardless, do you have numbers for 2023 that include visa overstays, for comparison purposes?
I'd be curious to get more information on that. For example, it isn't only Mexicans and Central Americans coming through the southern border. Around 25,000 Chinese nationals have been apprehended on the southern border by the middle of the year, for example. You wonder how many HAVE passed through illegally.
Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like a better pro-immigration strategy for Democrats would be to agree with the fact illegal immigration must be stopped and to debate the methods to stop it. And then secondly, argue for opening LEGAL immigration to more people since there are many benefits to it when done in a controlled and deliberate manner.
These people try and illegally enter the US through the southern border because a CHANCE of a life in the US is better than dying in Mexico to your local cartel.
No amount of border wall or lawfare will change that for Mexico (I personally believe we should be working hard with Mexico to re-assert law and order, that WOULD reduce illegal immigration). No matter what we say, the horde of bodies will continue.
So what are you going to do? Are you going to shoot them? How many strangers will we shoot, how many mothers and children, just to insist that we really care about that border? Will America be better when we kill a thousand people a day in the south? How will doing that improve the economy?
You are not wrong, the Democrat strategy obviously failed, the racist right is significantly better at identity politics, because a) whites are still a majority and b) latinos are very christian and anti-socialist on average.
And Kamala Harris was an uninspiring candidate, the democrats have proved to be the definition of "lesser evil" without any true identity with teeth to speak off. Still, Donald Trump is a pedophile, a rapist, a good friend to Jeffrey Epstein. I don't understand how anyone can be morally bankrupt enough to vote for someone like that.
> From a game theoretical perspective this is a good result.
there is a real not very small risk of the us stopping(1) being a democracy in the next 4 years, and even if not it will nearly guaranteed heal other autocratic rulers weighting that against the democrats learning a lesson they already knew (but might not have listened to) seems like a pretty terrible deal
(1): Assuming you can call a 2 party system democratic, which given how the elections worked out (power dynamic wise) the last few times is clearly not that clear anymore (it still is democratic, but in a gray area). Let's be honest if people had effectively/power dynamic wise more choices (e.g. multiple presidential election rounds ranking of candidates where votes of eliminated candidates spill over etc.) I think non of the last 2 presidents would have been elected.
If you mean in the literal sense that we will still have elections, then sure. But Hungary is a great example of why getting rid of elections is not necessary. You just need to stack the deck so it's almost impossible for your opponents to win.
Now I certainly don't know what's going to happen in the next 4 years with any certainty, but Trump was not exactly a champion of democratic norms the last time and there will be far less to restrain him now. Those who opposed him in the GOP have been pushed out and the judiciary is far more friendly. Many of those that own or control platforms and news publications were either eagerly cheering Trump on or signaling they would be more deferential now.
We have a much longer history as a democracy than democratic backsliders like Hungary so I don't think it's a given we're destined for the same fate, but I think the risk is a lot more than zero.
Trump appoints 2 more allies to Supreme Court positions. During his term.
Trump runs for a 3rd term, with the help of his existing support (including Musk).
Vance fails to certify states that are unfavorable to Trump or refused to list Trump as a candidate for 3rd term, announcing the Trump has won.
Congress may object. Bad news, it's R controlled.
The issue is brought to the Supreme Court, however Trump will effectively still take the position as per ceremony.
Supreme Court decides in favor of Trump, under the doctrine of strict interpretation (bad faith is an existing loophole).
This is just one of the many paths to breaking down the existing political system.
What you and I consider "democracy" may differ. These series of events would be a breakdown of American democracy, regardless.
Do you genuinely believe that congress being "R controlled" means all those Rs will be happy with Trump pissing on the constitution? Do you genuinely believe that? That being happy to have Trump in office a second term (as is allowed and normal) is the same as wanting him to be dictator? Do you think every single Republican elected this cycle is a Trump supporter, period?
Same with SCOTUS. They're appointed for life. What in the world makes you think they are more loyal to Trump than to the foundation of the US? Hint: they're not. 2/3 of his SCOTUS appointments are Federalist Society members, who LOVEEE the constitution).
this is extremely out of touch with reality. trump is not going to run for a third term. he didn't even pardon himself when he was last in office, which he could have done, but didn't. he also could have packed the courts and didn't. trump sucks but he's not fundamentally trying to operate outside established powers and traditions of his office. if he was gonna "fuck all this i do what i want" he would have last time
> if he was gonna "fuck all this i do what i want" he would have last time
He tried. There are books and interviews, available today, describing how unprepared he was (ie the basic housekeeping of staffing positions) to take his position as the head of the executive branch. He had no political infrastructure, which has been since remedied by some rather fringe conservatives (related to prj2025). He is unable to manage anything, ruling through typical narcissistic behavior of delegation and blame. He has a colorful history of exploiting legal loopholes. The only thing Trump consistently does, is prop up his own image and power to continue to operate in this manner.
> he also could have packed the courts and didn't.
Meet reality. He did enough by taking whatever Republicans put in front of him. I see no reason to believe it won't be repeated.
> trump is not going to run for a third term.
This is not a compelling statement, in the slightest.
Again, this is one possible path for deconstructing American democracy, which easily sprung to mind and is dependent on his health in 4 years. Saying it's impossible, is another opinion.
With the obliteration of the balance of power by the SCOTUS, extremely favorable SCOTUS judges with a conservative majority, a Senate and possibly a House majority the risks from an authoritarian-loving, narcissistic candidate who has "concepts" of plans, goes against mainstream economics in his economic policy, fanboys over a billionair drug-addicted narcissist who wants to destroy institutions by slashing "100 billion USD per year" from Federal institutions and put RFK Jr in control of the national health who tried to sabotage the constitutional and peaceful transfer of power and who instigated a violent storm of a parliament with casualties involved, the risks have certainly hardly ever been higher?
You're pointing out a bunch of things that are scary to you, without actually describing how democracy will be lost. The majority of our democracy can be attributed to the constitution, which requires a supermajority to be amended.
I also think you would be pleasantly surprised by the number of people who voted for Trump who would not be happy with the dissolution of democracy.
Also I think you'd be hard-pressed to get a majority of SCOTUS judges to be happy with that.
You argue that I am unspecific, however my entire post lists factual occurrences and people which can easily be validated.
You on the other hand present no counterfactual at all.
Democracy will be lost if there are no public institutions to enforce rules in a way which keeps nobody in particular with too much power.
Democracy will be lost if core players of said system do not respect the rules anymore and either try to negate, obstruct or otherwise hinder balance or peaceful transfer of power.
Trump has clearly shown to be capable of the latter and his desire for centralizing power around him.
Read some of the testimony of former staffers that emerged over the past few weeks.
And the SCOTUS ruling has given him a carte-blance to enact his ideas - without impunity.
The Senate or House will not or hardly force him to compromise on legislation, MAGA captured the Republican party.
The legal changes and Trumps demonstrable behavior are much more akin to a Putin in Russia or a monarchy than to a democracy with equal institutions governing.
The constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on if it's just being ignored.
> The constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on if it's just being ignored.
While I agree with that statement, I think you are ignoring that virtually all of the conversation about how the Constitution and Bill of Rights are out of touch with modernity is actually coming from the left. I don’t hear anyone on the right really arguing that point—its quite the opposite actually.
I didn't say you were unspecific, I said your points didn't relate to dissolving democracy, they were mostly just things you fear (but not unspecifically). Here is a more thorough answer to those original points:
SCOTUS has not obliterated the balance of power AFAICT? Otherwise Biden would've had more power than he does/did, right? I'll need more details about this obliteration.
SCOTUS judges are indeed majority conservative. But you'll need a tad more to indicate that "conservative" translates to "supportive of dissolving our democracy". I'll accept statements they've made to that effect, anything they've written, or whatever else you have. But we know you have nothing to indicate this at all.
Your concerns about economics have nothing to do with dissolving democracy. BUT (because I'm passionate about this) – mainstream macroeconomics is pseudo-science peddled by charlatans anyway. It's too multi-variate for them to effectively predict the outcome of basically anything at a macro level. They're not Harry Seldon even if they wish they were.
Your concern about him being buddies (sometimes frenemies) with Elon Musk has nothing to do with dissolving democracy. Elon Musk can't enable that in any shape or form. I guess he could make Trump dictator of Mars if his plans for SpaceX pan out, though.
Your concern about RFK Jr being in charge of public health has nothing to do with dissolving democracy. RFK Jr believing that vaccines cause autism or that fluoride turns the freaking frogs gay has nothing to do with the state of our democracy.
As you helpfully point out, Trump tried and failed to mess with election certification last time around. The institutions holding their own against him is literally the opposite of what you are trying to argue.
I'll concede that maybe the risks have never been higher, but going from 0.001% to 0.01% isn't a huge deal in the grand scheme of things.
---
And here is my answer to your new comment:
> Democracy will be lost if there are no public institutions to enforce rules in a way which keeps nobody in particular with too much power.
This is true. Luckily the institutions that actually enforce this are not the ones Trump et al have expressed interest in cutting.
> Democracy will be lost if core players of said system do not respect the rules anymore and either try to negate, obstruct or otherwise hinder balance or peaceful transfer of power.
This is clearly untrue. Someone trying and failing to mess with democracy is actually evidence of the opposite – that the democracy is robust. As I said before, Trump being unable to stop election certification is not the evidence for your argument you think it is.
> testimony
You mean like the testimony from all the people in the military that aren't big fans? You don't think that maybe the military might have something to say if the President tries to become a dictator? Support of the military is usually required for that, and Trump doesn't seem to have that much support in military leadership.
Which SCOTUS ruling gives him carte blanche to enact anything he wants with impunity?
So far this is all going according to the constitution. The house passing bills which are then passed by the senate which are then signed by the president is... our democracy. I don't see the Judicial branch abrogating their responsibilities to the Executive branch, nor do I see the Legislative branch doing that, even if they support Trump for president. Just because they'll be able to pass whatever they want for 2-4 years doesn't mean they're going to pass something that dissolves democracy. And so far you have nothing to indicate that those branches are interested in doing that. Just your fear running rampant.
If you think we're currently a democracy you're very wrong. Being a democracy means you actually get to vote on things like whether or not we should go to war, whether we should have national health care. We have 0 say in things that matter. That's not a democracy.
> Democrats: you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad
It's been confusing since the first trump term how many dems held this position. How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?
I made the mistake of debating politics with a then-friend who called all 75 million trump voters "drooling fucktards". Word?
> It's been confusing since the first trump term how many dems held this position. How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?
It implies that either they themselves are even more reprehensible and irredeemable, or the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates. The latter is probably true, but why would they say that and then continue to run for elections? Why do they want the approval of morally bankrupt people who prefer reprehensible candidates?
Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see". Or perhaps their claims are not actually "obvious", and they ought to be... kinder to the other side.
> Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see".
Fox News. The folks who voted trump watch only Fox News, which has crafted an alternative and immersive world view that appears coherent if you only watch Fox News and reject conflicting information as lies.
But I can point to research and articles till the cows come home. The fact is that people reject everything negative about Trump and fill in the blanks with whatever they want to believe.
Who is defining what is misinformation? It would be easy to reframe such that the opposite can be just as “true, “ depending on your perspective. For example: Trump turned out not to be working with Russia, despite the media and politicians constantly saying they had evidence. Trump started zero wars, despite fear mongering that he would start World War 3. He ended the tensions with North Korea, despite pundits saying diplomacy doesn’t work with dictators. Arguably all of that was misinformation, so one could argue the opposite of what you said is also true. Whomever defines “misinformation” can make that statement with full confidence and be correct in their own mind every time.
This is my domain of work, so - Me. If that’s not good enough you can look at the research paper I linked.
If you haven’t looked at the article - this is directly in the summary:
> sers who were pro-Trump/conservative also shared far more links to various sets of low-quality news sites—even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople—and had higher estimated likelihoods of being bots
If you want more - The original fake news, the Romanian ad farm sites, had greater success and traction when they targeted conservative viewers.
To save us both trouble - this is not some cockamamie argument about crud like “he who defines it can be correct.”,or conflation of bad reporting and hyperbole.
This is straight up conservatives being the victims and consistent targets of mis and disinformation.
I also know that this will have 0 impact on changing minds. I know it wont.
That said, I do hope we can agree that people deserve respect for their efforts to understand a topic, subject or field of work. Do read the article, and when I say that conservative / republican information diets are more vulnerable and exposed to low quality information and conspiracy theories, I’d appreciate the honor of at least having your opinion on the abstract and matter of the paper.
I don’t disagree with your points, as they tend to align with my personal experience. Given that most of the people I interact with are conservative, I can’t really compare to the sources used by progressives, but I suspect it would consist more of links to mainstream media. Jumping on a plane, so won’t be able to respond quickly, but I will read the article you linked.
My point wasn’t necessarily that conservatives aren’t exposed to more misinformation, but rather that misinformation is very difficult to define, since the general public lacks so much information. Very few people actually know the truth. Many people fill in the gaps with their biases and then believe they’ve consumed “the truth.” Without an objective view of all facts, it’s difficult to ascertain the truth, therefore it’s also difficult to ascertain what is misinformation.
My apologies for writing my response in a piecemeal fashion as I read through the paper. I’m on a phone, which makes it difficult for me to take proper notes and to write a response of proper length.
My initial reaction is that this study seems to delegate the classification of misinformation to a set of fact checkers and journalists. It then uses this to classify links as being either misinformation or disinformation, based on a trustworthiness score. Unfortunately, I can’t open the table of exact fact checkers and journalists because none of the links work on my mobile browser, so I’ll have to just guess at the contents for now.
Delegating classification of truth to these third parties allows for significant bias in the results. Most conservatives consider main stream media and fact checkers to have a significant progressive bias. If correct, this would explain at least some of the results of this study. I haven’t done a thorough analysis myself, so I can’t say either way, but it would be worth investigating.
The study also mentions that many users could have been bots. I suspect this could also have skewed the results. This is mentioned in the abstract, so I suspect it’s addressed later in the paper.
Either way, continuing to read… very interesting study.
As for your objection and concern - the study deals with that issue by letting participants decide themselves, what counts as high quality and low quality.
This holds if you look at outright conspiracy theories. Globally, conservative users are the most susceptible to such campaigns.
I will add "at this moment in time". I expect that sufficiently virulent disinfo which targets the left will evolve eventually.
No, I am asking why they would knowingly desire the approval of those who prefer "irredeemable" candidates. They would either have to lie a lot to get it, or pull themselves down to be more reprehensible. So, what's their strategy? Lieing a lot after telling the "one truth", or becoming more reprehensible themselves? Probably both.
You did: "The latter is probably true, but why would they say that" The implication of your comment is that politicians shouldn't tell the truth because that offends voters.
> It implies that either they themselves are even more reprehensible and irredeemable
> or the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates
You dont need to go that far. You just need to create an information environment that is beyond the ability of the average person to navigate.
At that point, the other side is just evil, and your team, even if they are convicted for crimes, have ties to Epstein or anything - doesn’t matter.
——
I mean, you can have privatized thought policing, there aren’t any laws or regulations to prevent. Everyone reads about Big Brother and worries about government control.
So you can create enough of FUD shared till it’s believed.
Don’t forget - we had to deal with Creationism, and that was wildly successful for a completely unscientific argument.
> why would they say that and then continue to run for elections?
Are you suggesting that the USA should have a single political party? Anyone that cares for democracy would be against that, regardless of their other political views.
My guess would be what they meant was that they should quit. Ie either you respect the intelligence/morallity of the people who you want to vote for you, or maybe you shouldn't be trying to represent them.
And not quit as in leave only a single party, but quit as in leave a vacuum for another party/candidate/etc to step in.
Note these aren't necessarily my personal views, just trying to help clarify what I believe the commentator meant.
> Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see".
I think this is the correct options.
I mean, look at the people who worked for him in the last administration:
> So how do we explain this near-universal rejection of Trump by the people who worked with him most closely? I guess one explanation is that they’ve all been infected with the dreaded Woke Mind Virus. But it’s unclear why working for Donald Trump would cause almost everyone to be exposed to the Woke Mind Virus, when working for, say, JD Vance, or Ron DeSantis, or any other prominent right-wing figure does not seem to produce such an infection.
> Of course, not everyone who worked for Trump has abandoned and denounced him. Rudy Giuliani, who is now under indictment in several different states, is still among the faithful. Michael Flynn, who was fired by Obama for insubordination and then removed by Trump for improper personal dealings with the Russian government, is still on board, and is now threatening to unleash the “gates of Hell” on Trump’s political enemies. Peter Navarro, the economist1 who served four months in prison for defying a Congressional subpoena, is still a Trump fan. And so on.
> You may perhaps notice a pattern among the relatively few people who are still on board the Trump Train from his first term. They are all very shady people. I don’t think this is a coincidence; I think it’s something systematic about Donald Trump’s personality and his method of rule.
> As many people have noted, Trump’s movement is a cult of personality. Since Trump took over the Republican party in 2016, essentially every tenet of modern conservatism has been replaced with belief in a single leader. Trump appointed the judges that killed Roe v. Wade, but he constantly goes back and forth on the topic of abortion rights. Trump didn’t cut entitlement spending, but whether he wants to do that in his second term or not depends on which day you ask him. Trump has flip-flopped on the TikTok bill, on marijuana legalization, on the filibuster, on SALT caps, and so on.
> But these flip-flops do not matter to his support at all. His supporters are sure that whichever decision Trump makes, it will be the right one, and if he changes it the following week, that will be the right decision as well. If tomorrow Trump declared that tariffs are terrible and illegal immigration is great, this would immediately become the essence of Trumpism. Trump’s followers put their trust not in principled ideas, but in a man — or, to be more accurate, in the idea of a man. That is what Trumpism requires of its adherents.
My goal isn't to sway trump voters, they've already demonstrated time and time again, and again, and again, and again, that they have no intention of meeting liberals anywhere, let alone "in the middle", and that there's nothing, ever, ever that anyone could ever do to pry them away from their GEOTUS, so there's no real reason to try to appease them. So I'm left with just calling it like I see it.
Trump supporters blaming liberals' rhetoric for their decisions is a troll tactic: It's a way of trying to bait liberals into paying more positive lip service to Trump. And it works, all up and down the media organizations are terrified to say things that offend trump supporters. All for some vague belief that if they coddle his supporters enough they get some "centrist credibility" or something.
The "grab them by the pussies" comment should have been enough to show everyone that he's a morally reprehensive little clown. I originally typed out a long comment to further elucidate why he is despicable, but it actually takes away from the message. An SA advocate shouldn't be president in the 21st century.
So you expect progressive voters to simply politely ignore the awful things Trump has done, and the fact that his supporters don't seem to care?
Short list: Trump has been adjudicated in court as having sexually assaulted a woman, and has admitted to doing more. Nearly every person who has worked with him has described him in the worst possible terms. Stories of him celebrating Nazis [1], sexually fixating on his own daughter[2], horrifying things like that.
The man is a convicted felon, and has only escaped punishment for various other crime by virtue of his own appointees in the court system.
If a reader accepts these well-supported items as facts, what should they think about somebody who votes for that?
Should they lie and say "a reasonable person would support this"?
Or should they tell the truth even when it is "divisive"?
So we can't call a rapist a rapist because it upsets conservatives too much?
We can't call a failed businessman what he is? Or correctly point out that he idolizes dictators and Hitler specifically? Or that he is so fucking stupid he said he wanted Hitler's generals even though they were 1) Not very good 2) several tried to assassinate him and 3) fought like middle school girls?
Why do we have to abandon reality? Why do we have to treat conservatives with kid gloves?
I seem to remember something along the lines of "Facts don't care about your feelings" and "Fragile Snowflakes"
So your opinion is that elections are a referendum on the moral virtue of the candidate, or that you shouldn't run for office if you think the electorate is morally bankrupt?
I'm sorry, but I have to be blunt. That is an extremely narrow view, and a single second of critical thinking should present a million other possibilities. The former is obviously untrue, considering Trump's long list of vices. The latter is a complete non sequitur. Power is power; the electorate's morals only matter insofar as they're willing to check the box next to my name.
Trump can be reprehensible and irredemable, and still win if he's more believable on the issues Americans care the most about. He could be a fraud, a cheat, even a traitor, so long as he's persuasive. That's how democracy works, how it should work.
It's like being a pastry chef and mocking someone's cake as if it's the worst cake ever, but you can't even make a better one even though it's your profession.
It's more like making an edible cake but the customers preferring the one containing rat entrails because they'd rather eat rat entrails than let anyone else eat an edible cake.
Just remember how rational and intelligent the average person is. Then realize that half the US population is less rational and less intelligent than that.
I don’t and you shouldn’t. Mocking others intelligence only shows that you lack enough to understand them. As I understand it, this is precisely the point of GP
I don't think it's a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of ignorance/knowledge.
I read a statistic that 50% of grown up Americans have only 6th grade education. Which means that what? 60%-65% may have 9th grade?
The vast majority of people is uneducated and only responds to simple thoughts: as someone said: they see their wallet shrinking, and they decide to voté for the alternative. Other more complex issues don't matter, they don't care about them.
The same thing happened in my country (Mexico) where we have also tons of uneducated people. The people voté for the sound snippet, for the demagogue who told them what they wanted to hear.
And similarly, the other parties in their smugness didn't understand why people didn't vote for more complex issues.
It's sad, but most of us (highly educated people) live in a bubble.
> How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?
because not being any of notorious lair, repeatedly make comments you normally only would expect from fascist, having systematically undermined various check and balances in their last term, having lost sexual assault cases, shamelessly abusing the reach of a president for deformation etc. seem to no longer matter even through any of this points where believed to be reliable carrier killers
now "reprehensible" that is a much more personal non objective judgement so arguing around that is pointless
Irredeemable seems obvious, but if the things you need redemption from don't matter anymore it really doesn't matter either.
I think the main problem here is that politics in the US are fundamental broken due to way to much polarization in a 2 party system and no good way to fix it.
If Tump wins I personalty think it's hardly avoidable that in the next 20 year there will be a point where you won't be able to call the US democratic anymore at all (based on a objective standard) and the question is if the US will then realize they fuck up and fix it or not (if not autocracy will mass spread even more and likely also take over the EU and given past history of how autocrats tend to cooperate while fighting democracy but then turn onto each other quite reliable the moment their power stabilized we probably should expect WW4).
Naturally I would love to be proven wrong, I really would.
And I think it's best to always stay polite.
But I can understand why someone gets angry with a lot of people voting for someone who comes with such a risk. Especially if a deep dive analyses into their positions show that 1) he lacks concrete (public) plans for most of his positions and 2) they likely will end up making live worse for many potentially the majority of the people voting for him.
But then people voting more based on "feeling" and "popular"/"populist" believe always has been very common. It's also kinda funny how close the words "popular" and "populist" is, sometimes just a change of perspective apart.
> because not being any of notorious lair, repeatedly make comments you normally only would expect from fascist
Kamala's rhetoric, especially around the military and border security, seemed almost specifically designed to be "1% less fascist." Some of the lines wouldn't have been out of place in Starship Troopers.
If you triangulate yourself into 98% fascism, it's hardly surprising that people who don't like fascism aren't excited to go out and vote for you.
From your choice of candidates, it’s obvious that you don’t mind coarse language or a tell-it-like-I-see-it attitude. I wonder what about your friend’s comment bothered you so much.
You have put the point on the entire issue. People use party/candidate affiliation as the barometer for all future interactions, and when they don't like something about the other party, they use that as judgement of the whole person.
That is a person's right, but it is also failing to recognize that they are two sides of the same coin. So long as people hate one another for who they are voting for there will never be societal cohesion.
How is this different from what Trump supporters were saying about Democratic voters? Genuine question - I'm not in the US and from my perspective the vitriol was pretty universal.
This is a deep insight. It's a reactionary vs. establishment dynamic where the reactionaries get a free boost because they're fundamentally more provocative from a content perspective. I think it's more like "the reactionaries get to hate, the establishment doesn't" and R and D may swap those positions.
I'm not so sure about that, I've seen plenty of hate from both sides.
Covid was a great example, anyone who disagreed with the main narrative or even just wanted bodily choice was blasted by many liberals, including the president, with all kinds of hateful speech.
Since 2016 many liberals also have used hateful speech to describe anyone willing to vote for Trump. I personally didn't like either candidate the political machine offered us, but in many of my discussions with anyone liberal Trump voters were often held as something like a second class citizen, that's pretty damn hateful in my book to consider anyone "lesser than."
If both sides spouts vitriol then you pick the side that doesn't pour it on you, that is the problem described by "one side is 1% less bad than the other". If you want voters then try to welcome them instead of blame them for all the problems, goes for both sides.
Sure, but then shouldn't the universal vitriol cancel itself out somehow? Democracts have been on the receiving end of a lot of name-calling too. This doesn't feel like a good enough explanation. It feels much more like the Democrats ignored (or were perceived to have ignored) a lot of substantive issues for a large section of the population.
> Sure, but then shouldn't the universal vitriol cancel itself out somehow?
It does, both sides got about the same amount of votes as you can see.
> It feels much more like the Democrats ignored (or were perceived to have ignored) a lot of substantive issues for a large section of the population.
I don't think so, it doesn't matter how much you try to do for people if you also namecall them at the same time, they will assume you aren't on their side even if your policies are better for them. Vitriol ensures the vote becomes tribal instead of rationally inspecting both sides and picking the better option.
I realised through hearing through channel 5 and average Americans that they don't really get it. They don't want to think, they want an easy solution to complex problems and anyone coming with a pre made thing is seen as the Messiah. The other part don't care because they saw a lot of screaming and failed to grasp what was so bad about Trump. If he was so bad why was he still nominee? If he was so bad why wasn't he arrested? If he was so bad... You get the picture...
This can be seen as the democrats also not understanding the average person and this is where Bernie was actually hitting good points, his message was consistent and he was never demonising Trump on his name but explaining what they could do better by explaining policies in a way that people understood what they would get from them or lose if they didn't get implemented...
Of course the issue is a bit more complex, but they exacerbated the people that were unseen instead of helping the healing and some actors of course were way too happy to fan the flames.
This is a very bad day that is marking the beginning of a very bad period for everyone...
That is assuming half the country are Democrats and the other half Republicans. But the most important voting block considers themselves to be neither one nor the other, and then it becomes strategy to spit fire at your opponent.
And I don't know about other people, but I consider any rhetoric against a political party to be directed against their politicians, not against their voters - unless explicitly stated.
This is the Red Wave that was promised in 2020 and 2022 but failed to materialize.
Why didn't Harris and the Democrats pull it off? Well, they could start by not playing identity politics or calling Americans deplorables, Nazis, and garbage. Godwin's Law was in full swing for them.
I'm Japanese-American, demographically I should be a bleeding heart Democrat, but truthfully I can't stand their constant victimizing and divisive rhetoric and is why I voted for Trump and the Republicans in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
I can't stand their constant divisive rhetoric and is why I voted for Trump and the Republicans in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
I'd be curious what your gut reaction was to the comedian that Trump's team hired to open at his rally at Madison Square Garden, just this past week, who referred to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage" (starts at about 0:16):
I call it practical, on point, gruff, and charismatic.
Practical and on point because Trump talks about things that the common American actually gives a shit about in a way that the common American can understand and relate to. This also has a side effect of uniting people under a common cause despite outward appearances.
Gruff because that style of speech appeals to most Americans who don't like being sophisticated, or worse: Being politically correct. Remember that being politically incorrect was one of the reasons Trump won in 2016, and it's still one of the reasons he won again today.
Charismatic because, well, I think everyone has to at least admit that the man draws people in despite any and all odds.
So when he calls the other side names and makes threats, he is practical and gruff.
His practical message was incoherent; it was more of an erring of grievances, conspiracy theories, and wild policy ideas that he seemed to have come up with while speaking.
I can't argue with the fact that it appealed to people, but you can't say it wasn't divisive because it was practical and gruff. Those two things don't rule out divisiveness.
BTW, I voted Republican in every election until Trump, and the reason why I didn't vote for him was due to how divisive he was.
I think you just happen to agree with his side of the divide.
I recall a vox pop in the Washington Post that included a woman who was voting for Trump because she thought he'd be better than Harris at standing up to Putin. Trump seems to attract a combination of low information voters and voters who are reluctant to give their real reasons for voting for him. Either way, don't expect the given reason to make a lot of sense.
He doesn't have a reason to hide why he was voting for him, so I'll chalk it up to the low information voters who vote on vibes.
In low-information voters' defense, it's been amazing to me as a non-American how Trump's literal dementia was not in the front pages of the media every single day. The complicity of the news media in normalizing a senile candidate should't go unnoticed.
I watched that now infamous three hour marathon podcast he did with Joe Rogan. That kind of performance is not something a demented man can do, full stop. To say nothing of his utterly crazy rally schedule, I legitimately don't know where he gets his energy.
Hate him if you want, that's your right and I will respect that. But Trump is terrifyingly sharp, especially for a man his age.
>The complicity of the news media in normalizing a senile candidate should't go unnoticed.
The media dumped Biden right quick after his old age couldn't be hidden anymore. That debate he had was straight up elder abuse by the media.
> I legitimately don't know where he gets his energy.
Drugs. Incoherent hour-long rants are the product of stimulants, the kind that give you the sort of terrible judgement that no one would ever want out of a presidential candidate.
Half the stuff Trump says is some insult to someone. "Owning the libs" and "libtards" has been a thing for a long time. Remember when the tea party said Obama was literally Hitler for trying to come up with a better health care system? etc. etc. etc.
But somehow everyone else needs to be on their best behaviour and as soon as they say "fuck you back" in response to a torrent of "fuck you"s it 's a big deal.
If you want to talk tone and insults then you're definitely starting at the wrong end.
To your point, the Democrats should win every election, especially against Trump. But, they can't get out of their own way. Go all the way back to when the party hosed Bernie, and now this time when they were Hiden Biden.
While the economic numbers are good, they are mainly good for people with already high economic status like existing home owners and professionals. For example, student loan forgiveness sounds great but then leaves every blue collar worker who didn't go to college wondering WTF are they doing for me? They are giving more money to people who are already ahead. When Musk says pain is coming, many of Trumps supporters are happy because they are already in pain and want to see those benefitting feel some of that pain.
Then they go and overplay their hands with social issues. I didn't see it at the time, but all of the DEI rollbacks we've been seeing over the past year or so should have been a signal. One of the middle of the road people on TV last night mentioned he had friends who tried to avoid interacting with people at work because they were afraid of saying something offensive. And these were likely center left people. I have had similar discussions with even my most progressive friends. The almost refusal to message young men is also a problem.
Most Americans want legal immigration, but the Democrats took too long to do something and then Trump was able to kill the bill last minute. It looked like the Democrats wanted to simply ignore it until they no longer could.
There are more, but I think these are some of the big Democrat self owns.
Looks like very recent proposal and the money hasn't been forgiven yet? If they had the power all along, then why wait til the week before the election?
They tried extremely hard to do it though, and wasted a lot of political capital on the issue. The fact that they tried so hard and couldn't get it done is a good example of what the GP was talking about.
I mean, you can “waste” capital on anything, if the other team is going to demonize whatever you do.
Obamacare was based on Romneycare, and Romney had to disown it. Let’s not have discussions on things that dont happen. There is nothing the dems can do which wont be spun into harm by the republican side of the media sphere.
That goes both ways too. I also don't find political talking points about the other side couldn't do particularly intriguing, but the Democrats did have a field day in 2019/2020 pointing out how little Trump actually did with regards to building a wall.
The most annoying part is that almost every time with an issue that couldn't be done, it should have been clear from the beginning. The idea of the government vacuuming up all (or most) student debt seems completely untenable right out of the gate, just like the idea that we would be able to build a physical wall across out entire southern border and make Mexico pay for it.
Its lazy politics all the way around. And that lazy politics wastes plenty of tax dollars and distracts everyone from issues actually worth talking about.
I mean, it definitely doesn’t go both ways. The repubs made an issue of a tan suit as I recall.
Again - the Obamacare-Romneycare example. One party tried to reach across the aisle, to bend over backwards to build common ground.
The republicans refused to cross the aisle, even when their points and desires were incorporated.
From the Gingrich era, it’s been a clear goal to stop any bi-partisan behavior. That only winner takes all policies and behavior is acceptable.
That dems started to do this, for DJT, is kinda sad. They should have started a lot earlier.
I request, that when policy is brought into the picture, let’s not forget that policy is fundamentally irrelevant to the Republican Party. It’s nice to discuss policy, yes. But policy is a treatment for real world issues in a working legislature. Not one where good policy must be rejected if it’s brought up by the Dems.
At this point, the game theory solution is for Dems to respond by also rejecting bipartisan efforts, and copying the republican playbook.
The problem is he tried to means-test it, which made it a program that had to go through Congress. If he had just waved his hand and done it unilaterally, it would not have been blocked.
"They are giving more money to people who are already ahead."
They did that three times in Trump administration. Resulting in the largest deficit increase ever...
The pain ahead is realizing China is the new superpower. Tawain won't make it to 2028.
IIRC, Trump gave it to everyone whether they needed it or not. Perhaps there were more that I’m forgetting. But people who perceive themselves at the bottom rung (and are told they are by media and sometimes dems), will see it as unfair if people perceived higher up get something extra.
Of course the super rich are going to get themselves tons of benefits, but that remains in the abstract for most.
Trump may get lucky for the time being on China. They are struggling economically and may not have the desire to pick a fight right now. IMO, countries bordering Russia are under a more immediate threat.
> Most Americans want legal immigration, but the Democrats took too long to do something and then Trump was able to kill the bill last minute. It looked like the Democrats wanted to simply ignore it until they no longer could.
You forgot the part where they claimed their hands were tied, then finally did something about it 8 months before the election.
"Everybody who comes on this floor and says our border is broken. We should do something about it. You're absolutely right. And unfortunately, we didn't get there. President Trump opposed the Senate bill."
It’s fascinating how no one mentions that Trump didn’t pass comprehensive immigration legislation during his first term despite it being core to his platform.
This issue is a mess and has been kicked down the road for literal decades at this point. Maybe finally it will get passed…
He seems quite literally incapable of a “comprehensive” solution to anything. Every solution was the simple one that had the predictable unintended consequences.
E.g. on immigration he prevented courts from deferring certain deportation cases, which meant high-risk immigrants stayed in the country for longer.
> He seems quite literally incapable of a “comprehensive” solution to anything. Every solution was the simple one that had the predictable unintended consequences.
That is because the result doesn't matter, not in "starve the beast" [1] cycle politics - it used to be mostly about money but the model can be used also for general politics. The playbook is:
1. side A rise to power claiming "issue X must be solved by doing Y" (all while knowing that doing Y is useless or counterproductive, but the voter base doesn't care - be it immigration or the defunding of healthcare or whatever)
2. The consequences hit delayed, when the term is at its end and the competitor B takes over (usually in US political cycles every 8 years, but these days it seems like the ping-pong is accelerating)
3. That leaves an opportunity for side A to constantly barge in from the side "look at issue X, vote for us next time and we'll fix it (for realsies this time!)"
4. Side A wins the next election.
When it comes to anything budget related, replace the campaigning slogan with "look at issue X, it is clear that the government is incapable of doing anything about that issue, let us privatise it".
This is all true but I actually don’t think Trump knows his solutions won’t solve these problems. I think he’s actually a simple-minded man who’s saying the simple solutions he thinks will work because he hasn’t ever thought about the problem.
I mean he came into power and proudly declared he had never heard of NATO before running (!!) but was brought up to speed in ~2min (!!). That’s who he is.
The whole problem with "someone like Trump" is that if said expert tells him he's wrong, then said expert is gone in short order.
This is why autocracies and oligarchies are bad. Not because they're just de facto evil, but because they produce undesirable outcomes, often even undesirable by their own standards (see: Russia's ongoing 3 day special military operation in Ukraine)
Every single person around him is playing a loyalty test. Thank god Fauci was expert enough to navigate that dynamic so delicately, but most others don't have the talent or appetite for it.
> Then they go and overplay their hands with social issues. I didn't see it at the time, but all of the DEI rollbacks we've been seeing over the past year or so should have been a signal.
Yeah, a signal of large players in economy preparing themselves for a Trump victory - the begin of which was Meta unbanning Trump and the culmination of which was Bezos banning the WaPo endorsement. Big Business doesn't care about any values, all it cares about is money, and so it prepared for Trump possibly taking over again in time and getting into good terms with him.
That's basically it in a nutshell for my experience as well. Elections are won by swaying Independents...the Dem strategy for Independents appeared to be "Trump is a fascist" "Trump supporters are garbage".
Ok well..that's not really an argument?
And yes we can bring up all the terrible Trump examples but if the point is separating yourself from that, how is what they've done any different?
It just feels each side just despises the other and it all ends up like children arguing on the playground.
Where are the adults?
There's going to be all kinds of hyperbole thrown around today on both sides but personally see this as a failure by the Democrats to sway Independents.
One major difficulty with addressing republicans and “low-information” independents (there aren’t a ton of true-swing voters anyway, most are partisans who prefer not to label themselves that but vote as if they were) is that you can’t discuss issues with them. If you try, you immediately get sidelined into dealing not with disagreements on issues, but with having to try to convince them that basically their entire list of concerns is fictional.
We had an R state rep candidate come by our house. Highlighted two issues in her message to us. Both were simply not actual things. The existence of the problems were lies. WTF do you do with voters who consume media that’s made them believe those? It’s like a huge moat around even being able to talk to them about anything real, even if only to disagree about some real thing.
> If you try, you immediately get sidelined into dealing not with disagreements on issues, but with having to try to convince them that basically their entire list of concerns is fictional.
I wish that democrats had spent less time telling republicans that the boogeyman doesn't exist and more time showing them how we're going to keep them safe from the boogeyman. In WI, there was a referendum question that asked if people wanted to add language to the state constitution which would explicitly specify that only US citizens could vote. The democrats fought against that saying that election fraud was basically non-existent and that it would be a waste of time to change anything since it's already illegal for non-citizens to vote.
They fucked up though, because no matter how right the democrats were about the safety of elections the fear republican voters have is very real and it's never a waste of time to ease those fears.
As it turns out, if the referendum passes (and I'm guessing that it has) the result will be replacing language which says that every US citizen gets to vote with language which says only US citizens get to vote. It never said anything about replacing language in the referendum question voters saw though. The fear of illegal immigrants voting has likely been used to remove language protecting the right of US citizens to vote in WI and could open the door for laws that prevent certain US citizens from voting.
Since Democrats and Republicans are in full agreement that only US citizens should be able to vote the smart thing democrats should have done was push to add language explicitly stating that only citizens can vote but without replacing anything else. That would have satisfied the fearful republicans and protected the voting rights of all citizens. Instead they just wanted to lecture republicans about voter fraud statistics.
Every parent who has checked under their child's bed or looked in their closet for "monsters" understands this. When you have people acting like frightened children about something that isn't real, sometimes you just have to comfort them.
This is the same problem democrats have when republicans say they are afraid of small children going to school and getting sex change operations. Trump tells them it happens which is scary. Democrats just want to tell them that they are misinformed and that little kids aren't getting surgery, but they'd be smarter to say "You're right, little children getting sex changes at school is a horrible thing and we are putting forward a law that would ban that practice so that no child gets sex change surgery!". Why do democrats keep letting these issues both sides agree on become arguments that divide us?
Heh, I have similar feelings about gun issues. Democrats are dead right but I wish they’d just drop the entire issue completely. I mean they already barely talk about it, though, so who knows if talking about it even less would be enough to convince e.g. my dad that his homemade “Biden and Harris will take your guns” sign is definitely wrong and makes him look ridiculous (somehow, this never happening no matter how many times he thinks it will hasn’t convinced him)
The trick isn't to stop talking about gun control. Democrats should be proactive about addressing the fear. They should campaign on a promise to never go door to door and take everyone's guns away and push for legislation that specifically states that the mass-unarming of the public is explicitly illegal while giving them an opportunity to carve out the exceptions that the majority of people, including republicans, agree on like keeping guns from crazy people and violent felons.
The point is that the irrational fear has to be addressed. Making fun of it, ignoring it, or lecturing on why the threat is imaginary won't help.
We are now at the point where tucker Carlson and Alex jones are saying that they are fighting demons - I am not sure how we can make any rational arguments when one side thinks they are fighting against the literal Christian devil!
Yup. The folks I know who embraced MAGA were all going through difficult emotional issues. It seemed to give them something they could rally around (i.e., bond with others to blame democrats, migrants, trans people, et al, for their problems)
When I registered to vote in WA all they asked for was my address and the last 4 of my SSN. No ID whatsoever. I could have got as many ballots as I wanted. Voting system security is nonexistent, and when Democrats pretend like this isn't an issue and fight tooth and nail to keep it this way it just makes them look like cheaters.
Democrats aren't opposed to making voting more secure. They just want to do in a way that doesn't make it harder for poor citizens to vote. Republicans have been using the fear of voter fraud to keep US citizens they don't like from voting. They'd do things like pass a voter ID law and then close DMVs in poor democratic districts so that it's harder for "the wrong" US citizens to vote. They weren't even remotely subtle about targeting specific groups of voters (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...)
Every democrat I know wants elections to be more secure than they are. They just also want them to be fair. There's been a lot of room for proactive measures here that democrats could have been pushing for, but there have been efforts too (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/1007715994/manchin-offers-a-v...)
Democrats actively fought against voter id laws. Instead, they should have supported those laws, but with an amendment to make it easier for people to get an id.
I do think trying it is a better tactic than not, but would not bet on embracing reasonable ID laws preventing a push to modify those to unreasonable ones from becoming exactly as big an issue, through the same mechanism, among the same voters.
That’s the risk when the measure is more-or-less harmless but also the problem it addresses isn’t real. They can just keep claiming the problem still exists and running on it.
This appears to be province-by-province but looking at Ontario’s rules they appear to allow a lot of documents to count as an ID for voting, and do not require a photo ID, nor do they have multiple tiers of ID that require bringing, say, several ID documents if you lack a single “better” one—any single one of the many examples works.
Some US states have voting ID requirements, and they tend to be (though not always!) significantly stricter than that, sometimes requiring a specifically a government-issued photo id, for instance.
I’m pretty sure laws that have much looser definitions of “ID” and/or provision resources to ensure timely, free, and easy access to such an ID, see less resistance from democrats. If the entire pro-ID movement just wanted to do what Ontario does it’d be less of a contentious issue, I think.
[edit] for the record, though, I agree this is a place Democrats could safely give ground—the data do not well-support their disenfranchisement concerns, and 30+ states already have some kind of voter id law.
It is, separately, also true that there is no evidence there’s any actual reason to enact more of these laws. The data also don’t support that, at all. But whatever, it’s probably not significantly harmful, just a minor waste of resources.
When the average voter attempts to prove that elections are insecure by doing the things you claim you could easily do, they end up getting caught and facing election fraud charges.
Being able to cast a vote illegally is trivially easy because there are exceptions baked into the system like provisional ballots. Lucky there is an thorough audit process so having that vote actually counted while avoiding election fraud charges is a lot harder.
We would expect the several attempts by Republicans in government with as much access as possible to hunt for fraud to have found more than trivial cases of it, then.
They’ve been beating this drum for what, fifteen years at this point? More? They should at least have found smoke, if not fire, instead they just keep saying they smell a raging forest fire and coming back with single burnt matches when given the reigns of government to go look for it and tell us what they find.
> We had an R state rep candidate come by our house. Highlighted two issues in her message to us. Both were simply not actual things. The existence of the problems were lies.
This has been a constant refrain from Democrats: "The thing that you are upset about is not happening. Well, it is happening, but it is the exception. Ok, it's happening everywhere, but it's a good thing." No, of course Harris isn't for government sex changes for imprisoned illegal immigrants, except for the fact that she said she was. The truth is that we all know that she would say anything to win, and holding her to any position she ever publicly held feels unfair.
The people who have been kept low-information are the Democrats, because they have been surrounded by media largely controlled by their political party. Republicans often have bad information, but they're constantly out there consuming information and hate-reading what Democrats are saying. Independents, in my experience, are the highest-information of all, because they don't think of political parties as something they can offload their morality to. Independents only see politics in terms of actual issues, and track those issues rather than having parasocial relationships with political celebrities.
In that vein, I'm pretty sure that if I had an experience where a political candidate came to my house and talked about issues that weren't real, I'd talk about those issues specifically, and speculate about their origin. I think you don't mention them because they were real, but a lot of liberals have taken this position of officially denying reality if reality could help Trump. Is widespread voter fraud real? No. Should people be unconcerned about making it easier? Also, no.
If upper-middle class liberals could have won the "stop sounding like Scientologists" challenge, they could have won. If The Democratic party could have wanted to win more than they wanted to avoid alienating any donors, they could have won by taking any popular position on anything. Trump spent most of his campaign actively campaigning for Harris by calling her a radical-left socialist; if she were actually a radical-left socialist instead of an empty vessel to be filled with cash, she would have won. If the Democratic party hadn't chosen again not to run a fair, open, lively primary, they would have won.
With Trump campaigning against radical-left socialist Harris, and Harris campaigning against rapist Hitler, homophobic Stalin, and racist Mussolini, the majority of people looked at which candidate was lying the most, and voted for the other one. Everybody knows who Trump is, and he's already been president, and nobody went to camps. It was a rather sleepy standard Republican presidency, whose few deviations from the norm pleased people. The only reason we heard about Harris is because she (and Buttigieg) pretended to be for single-payer healthcare in order to destroy a popular candidate who was running on an honest program.
> The truth is that we all know that she would say anything to win
While Trump wouldn't do any of that, right? He would say things because they're true :D
> It was a rather sleepy standard Republican presidency, whose few deviations from the norm pleased people
Just a small insurrection at the end, no biggie. Oh, and some international agreements were shattered, but who cares about those anyway. I mean, there was also Corona which jolted some people from sleep, but thanks to Trump's recommendation to get some chlorine you could get right back to sleeping :)
To the 35-40% of the country that’s on board with basically everything they’ve done or are likely to do, who constitute a reliable mega-bloc of Republican voters, yeah.
1) “Local crime in your specific hilariously safe rich town is out of control and rapidly rising, which is why the cops are asking for more money and I’m going to give it to them!” I double checked to be sure, and no, of course this was fiction. So you encounter a supporter of hers and want to talk about actual issues, you get stuck pulling up the cops’ own crime stats on your phone I guess. Good luck with that conversation, we’ve tried it with relatives who are convinced it’s true about their own different rich low-crime towns. Now you’re stuck fighting phantoms.
2) “boys in girls sports”. So incredibly niche that who gives a fuck, and does not appear to be an actual problem that sports conferences and associations aren’t handling just fine on their own. Why does anybody care about this? Right wing news, entire reason. Not an actual issue.
I’m not, I’m well aware of the boring shifts in policy and law over three or so decades that have gotten us to fighting phantoms instead of trying to decide whether incentives or mandates are the right way to achieve greater healthcare access and lower costs, or what have you.
So why can't Democrats just come out against this insanity and take the easy W? The whole, "well it isn't a really an issue" argument doesn't fly when you still demand your way on it.
1) I don't know where you live, you may be right about crime where you are. It is not specifically Republican or uncommon to run on law & order while exaggerating disorder.
2) Boys are in girls sports, and Biden destroyed Title IX with an executive order. And you've gone from "fictional" to "Why does anybody care about this?" You don't see this as a dishonest progression?
edit: and now edited to "who gives a fuck." Women who dedicate their lives to sports. Men who think that half the population deserves half the medals and half the opportunity. Me.
> Biden destroyed Title IX with an executive order
Oh she mentioned defending title IX and I had zero clue wtf she meant (I mean, I know what title IX is, but figured it was some kind of allusion to something I’d only know if I listened to Mark Levin even more than I already do). A glance at The Googles and this appears to be exactly the kind of thing I mean.
Being unaware of an issue that only exists in hard-right media and hadn’t happened to come up in the times I’ve dipped into such—which I do pretty frequently—isn’t, like, a problem. I correctly guessed exactly what it was, anyway.
If you believe false things, you are a low-information voter. And if someone doesn't believe the lies you believe, they will disagree with you. Vundercind's point from the beginning was that problem isn't a difference in values or priorities but facts.
Fundamentally, that’s a better way to put it, really. I have two young daughters and the examples that have come up every time I’ve tried to engage on the sports issue as if it might have merit have done the exact opposite of convincing me I should be worried on their behalf—it very much appears to be nothing and quibbling over how much of that one story from Florida that they decided to champion as a key example is demonstrably a fabrication again isn’t really “discussing real issues”. We literally disagree on what facts are. If I believed their facts I might even at least partially agree with them! But I look at what they present and I disagree about the basic reality of the problem they’re trying to convince me exists.
[edit] shit, we can’t even get to substance on issues where we agree the broad category of thing needs to be addressed. Immigration! Yes! Let’s do some stuff on that! “Biden’s open border” ok well congrats we already solved that because that’s not a thing, rhetorically or in fact, zero democrats with any power want an open border and the border is not open, so… “illegals smuggling fentanyl!” wait how much money do you want to devote to that specifically, because that’s a negligible source of fentanyl in the US (citizens smuggling fentanyl, however…) and yeah we’re just bogged down disagreeing on facts again.
One of the hardest lessons to learn growing up is that there aren't really any adults, not in the sense I believed when I was a kid. "Adult" is a role people play when they're interacting with kids. Some do it better than others. But inside every adult is a terrified child† desperately struggling to make sense of an uncertain, incomprehensible world. Unfortunately for that child, life always ends in death; it won't be long until you are dead and everyone who remembers you is dead. And our reasoning abilities are not capable of understanding very much of the world, so often nothing we do matters, not even for the purposes it was intended for. Mostly our understanding of the world consists of stories we tell ourselves with relatively little connection to reality.
Our understanding of the world is profoundly mediated by fiction, which is to say, lies.
That's why it all ends up like children arguing on the playground. The kind of playground‡ where my 14-year-old classmate Evangalyn Martinez got stabbed to death for, I think it was, stealing Joella Mares's boyfriend, and nobody leaves the playground alive.
Under those circumstances, what does it mean to live a good life rather than a bad one? Good answers exist, but they're not easy.
______
† This is a metaphor. I don't mean that each adult has literally swallowed a child and is digesting them alive like a python.
‡ Technically that was actually the parking lot. Also, I was already no longer her classmate at the time, and because we were in different grades, I don't remember if I ever met her. She wouldn't be my last classmate to be stabbed; in my high school biology class each student was paired with the same lab partner for the whole semester, and the next year, someone else at the high school nonfatally stabbed my lab partner, Shannon Sugg, now Shannon L. Schneider (ginga.snapz1718). If memory serves, she dropped out from the psychological trauma. You can read the decision in her lawsuit against the school at https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/nm-court-of-appeals/141549..., which says it was Alicia Andres who stabbed her. ”Plaintiff asserts that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment imposed a clearly established duty upon school officials to protect her from this stabbing.” I'm glad violent crime has dropped a lot since then in the US.
Sure, it didn’t work—probably because enough people weren’t convinced that it was true enough (and also because they didn’t care)—but it's not unreasonable to think that such an argument should have been enough.
“You are fascist” actually isn’t just an insult. If you display fascist tendencies then you’re a fascist, and he displays many of those typical tendencies.
There are actual fascists (and not as few as I would like) and they need to be called out, but using the term inaccurately and provocatively on a broad group makes it easier to oppose the usage outright. Optics are important to politics, like it or not.
99% of people don't know what fascism (Italian fascism, I suppose, not national socialism, Falange Española or BUF) actually is and only mean "some kind of vaguely traditionalist (but not monarchist) authoritarian" by it. It's actually a pretty good red flag for people who shouldn't be trusted to discuss politics.
> the Dem strategy for Independents appeared to be "Trump is a fascist" "Trump supporters are garbage".
> Ok well..that's not really an argument?
Choosing to not put a fascist(-leaning) individual into power is "not really an argument"? So it's okay to re-elect individuals who have tried at least once to stop the peaceful transfer of power?
”where are the adults”
I mean, the Republican game plan was to create this situation. Once they decided that they will do what it takes to win, they really did succeed.
I mean take everything from the climate crisis, to my favorite - creationism being taught in school at the same level as evolution.
The playbook is literally right there, you get experts to come on stage, ridicule them to your audience, show that they are cartoons and have no real value.
Then you provide you viewers with good sounding news bites and manage the optics, and you can get a convicted felon elected to President.
Yes - it really is just the information ecosystem. There really is no free speech when one side is a regular joe and the other side is a marketing and political speech behemoth.
It is that simple, and we can’t do anything about it, because that would be harming our ability to speak freely.
As a European I have to ask - do you really need another argument? If I stand on a platform for government in Europe with an arguably fascist agenda I will get called out as a fascist and will lose. Never mind if I am a convicted felon, rapist, and probable russian intelligence asset. Seriously, what are you guys thinking here? Americans would actually vote for an extreme right wing candiate just to prove a point to the dems? Just to get one over on the libs? Please explain.
The AfD in Germany got a higher percentage of the vote in Thuringen in Germany than any other party. Currently polling higher than any member of the governing coalition nationally.
Geert Wilders - successful in the Netherlands.
Marine Le Pen - possible next president of France.
The Freedom Party of Austria - has been in government.
In italy happened the same "nooo you can't call them fascist"
Freedom of protest was, in fact, restricted in italy in a way that it affects climate manifestations more than lobbies manifestation - we have taxis striking and blocking cities if someone wants to touch their ungodly privileges -
Journalist striked on the public news because news has become unreliable, propaganda spewing news at a level before unheard of
It didn't happen, but Giorgia meloni wanted to abolish the crime of torture to better allow police to do its work (lmao even)
At the season opening of the teather la scala di Milano, one man shouted "viva l'Italia antifascista" (long live antifacist italy). Police was sent to check his documents and similar intimidatory shit
I live in a very Republican area and know quite a few people who do vote only on the one issue of pro-life. I don't think many of them would actually agree that Trump is an adulterer or a criminal though. They would chalk it up to Democratic lies or political attacks using the legal system as a weapon.
Heck, I know quite a few people who are very strongly religious and somehow view Trump as a good Christian candidate. That one really blows my mind, unless they've changed the ten commandments entirely since I was growing up.
> I live in a very Republican area and know quite a few people who do vote only on the one issue of pro-life.
it is an important issue.
> Heck, I know quite a few people who are very strongly religious and somehow view Trump as a good Christian candidate. That one really blows my mind, unless they've changed the ten commandments entirely since I was growing up.
What makes it bizarre is not things like adultery (a fundamental tenet of Christianity is that we are all sinners) but that Trump is clearly not a Christian. He does not even know the basics of Christianity - remember when he wished people "Happy Good Friday"?
For sure. I don't take issue with anyone voting based on whatever they care about in general. I don't feel strongly enough about one topic to be a single issue voter, but I get it for anyone that does feel that strongly.
> What makes it bizarre is not things like adultery (a fundamental tenet of Christianity is that we are all sinners) but that Trump is clearly not a Christian.
100% agree. No one is perfect and I wouldn't expect anyone who is religious to always fit the bill, but Trump is an example of someone very far from any religious ideals. I was raised Catholic, if Trump were catholic I don't think he would have had time outside of confession to even run for office.
> was raised Catholic, if Trump were catholic I don't think he would have had time outside of confession to even run for office.
That literally made me lough out loud. Raised Catholic too (been an agnostic since, and some sort of Christian and technically if not theologically a Catholic now).
Fascist has become an overused word by the left. Everyone else (the majority of the american voting population it would seem) are tired of the label and tune out anyone who accuses someone of being a fascist.
The response from the left has been to double down and accuse more people of fascism.
Yeah, you all keep making that point. But I don't believe for a second that a single voter went with Trump because the libs had called them mean words.
Well your belief is wrong. The libs have spent years calling people of certain backgrounds, ethnicities and genders as fascist, racist, homophobic, sexist, transphobic, deplorable.
I know that they have, but that's not why people voted for Trump. You just like to say that to try and make it look like something the libs brought on themselves.
And as you agreed, Trump does the same, more than anyone. So unless you are openly stating "the left should behave more decent than the right if they want votes", there is a problem in your logic as well.
Yes he has called people fascist in some of his speeches. Now compare that against everyone on CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hollywood, etc etc etc relentlessly calling people names for nearly a decade. The difference is a thousand fold. There is no equivalence in quantity.
America was under a fascist ruler, but not under a fascist system of government.
Trump tested American democracy by consolidating power and was not successful, so we avoided being under a fascist rule
The fear is that we might get to test democracy again, and most of America doesn't seem to mind that. Maybe it's due to lack of understanding, not caring, or genuinely wanting fascism, I don't know.
They are fighting an alleged "culture war" and also call it that way. I also think that Trump's movement is very spiritual, almost like a cult.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that based on common criteria the term Fascism is adequate for Trump's movement. I'm not claiming that it's strongly related to prior Fascist movements. These occurred in other countries at other times and I leave it to scholars to make comparisons if they must.
It's sometimes written with a capital F because it's a name, sorry if that offends you. I'd like to change them to small letters but can't edit the original post any longer. Other than that, the only argument I can see is an ad hominem, which is kind of pointless. I do have credentials for talking about the topic but I won't bother you with them because it would only lead to more ad hominem attacks.
Calm down Jonathan, I was just trying to get a clarification on your point, it wasn't flamebait. Besides when I asked the question the other response hadn't been posted.
I'll now stop talking to you Mr. Strange.
only European but if your choice is binary, you can only make it that way.
Some Americans may well vote for the rightwing candidate because they want to stick it to the left (or whoever the "anti" would be).
Personally, I don't think that alone makes a majority in that binary choice; in Europe, it would mostly end up in the vote for a minor "ultra" party. And less-"anti" conservative voters have other options.
In the US though, as someone with conservative values and views, one always has to choose ... do I want to vote with everyone else who votes for "my" camp including the stick-it-tos (because there's only one option "on my side"), do I not vote, or do I even vote against what feels closer to me because the stick-it-tos vote for them as well, and/or their head on the ticket is clearly one of the stick-it-tos ?
Am I glad I needn't make that choice. And am I sad what kind of asocial extremes are encouraged by the binary, winner-takes-all US political system.
Right. In the US, on politics and the issues, getting the information and "evidence" is a really big problem.
I have and/or have seen good evidence for all that I mentioned, but such evidence is NOT wanted by or common in the media which means that I have no well written, comprehensive, single reference to give.
Uh, YOU try: Write a document with good evidence, details, quotes, video clips, etc., and see how much interest the US MSM (mainstream media) has in publishing it!!! I predict you will regard your effort, no matter how carefully done, as a waste of time.
E.g., so far I've never seen even one credible graph over, say, the last 16 years, of, say, the US CPI (consumer price index). Same for budget deficits, spending bills, balance of foreign exchange, Fed loans, spending on the war in Ukraine (was there actually ANY spending or did we, instead, actually just ship war supplies produced in the US?) -- the actual details are absurdly messy, sloppy, missing, etc.
Clearly, bluntly the details do not SELL -- won't get a big audience.
To give good evidence here would exceed by several times the 10,000 bytes or so limit that Hacker News seems to have on a single post.
US media credibility? Here is evidence of biased, cooked up, gang up, pile on, organized mob attack from 2017:
https://youtu.be/f1ab6uxg908
With that example, there is less than zero credibility. So, for your "evidence", don't expect that from the US media.
I wish, profoundly wish, have posted many times on social media, that the US news media should provide JUST such evidence, at least up to common standards of high school term papers. All that is no more than a spit into the wind -- the media does NOT want to expend bytes for such writing, documentation, evidence, etc.
So, here I did all I can do to respond to the question I quoted, apparently, from a European. Agree or not with what I wrote, but it is the best I can do under the circumstances. The question from Europe are not very deep; so I gave answers of similar depth. The speeches in the election were not very deep. The Trump statements at the economic clubs in Chicago and Detroit were deeper.
That's my explanation, best I can do, take it or leave it.
But, really for an accusation of "Nazi", etc. the "burden of proof is on the accuser". The rape? He said, she said. There in the dressing room of the department store, did she scream and get some witnesses? Nazi? Just what is the evidence that Trump has done anything like the Nazi stuff Hitler did? Felon? He has never gotten a sentence -- if he does, then he can appeal, win the appeal, and show that he is NOT a "convicted felon". So, no sentence. The papers case, the J6 case, the Georgia case, the "hush money" case -- all are falling apart due to appeals, etc. They are NOT legal cases but just efforts to misuse the legal system to have others, as here, believe he is a felon. But with the appeals, e.g., even to the SCOTUS, ALL of the cases are falling apart. My view is that the wrong here is from low level parts of the US legal system and not from Trump.
And where are the arguments about 10+ million illegal immigrants, the inflation, the attacks on US fossil fuel energy, the Ukraine war, the Gaza war, the Lebanon war, the hundreds of missiles from Iran, the promotion of biological men in women's sports, the lies about abortion (Trump sent the issue back to the states to decide), the bans on gas powered cars and trucks, etc.?
Get book on high school algebra, plane geometry, trigonometry, solid geometry, and calulus. Study all of them. Then take tests, e.g., SAT, to confirm excellence. After high school, keep living at home, and get a job, even just mowing grass. Take the money and get a bus ticket to one of the midwestern states and apply to a college, not a university, there. Being a good student with good SAT scores, should be able to get a scholarship with $0 tuition. Or work hard, make all As, and then ask for a scholarship, use a work-study program, etc. Go to the available offices and see what programs they have for low or no cost schooling. Then with a high GPA, apply to grad school -- $0, zip, zilch tuition. Get a Masters in something. Let the Masters confirm excellence and f'get about the quality of the high school or even the college.
A niece got PBK at Indiana University, went to Harvard Law, got first job at Cravath, Swaine, & Moore. Left for an MD, and has been practicing since then. Suspect she spent very little on tuition.
As a first grad student in math at Indiana University, I got paid for teaching, had a nice single dorm room, actually lived well, and saved some money.
There are a lot of buttons to push, strings to pull, to get low cost or free college, then free through Ph.D. Being a good student, good SAT scores, already know calculus well, all can help.
I had to teach a doctor’s daughter from Alexandria who showed up to my physics recitation not knowing what a function was, despite having taken AP calculus AB. And how did this happen in the public schools in Alexandria? Because the gym teacher taught it and everyone got 1s. Furthermore, the school board gets bonuses for kids taking AP tests and teaching gifted classes and then hands the teaching jobs out to their sycophant favorite teachers
Starting with first algebra through my applied math Ph.D., nearly everything important that I learned I got heavily from independent study. (1) Loved plane geometry. Slept in class then worked ALL the more difficult supplementary exercises. (2) For my first year of college, went to a cheap state school, partly because I could walk to it. They put me in a math class beneath what I'd had in high school and would not let me take first calculus. For their class, a girl I knew also in the class told me when the tests were, and I showed up for them. For calculus, I got a copy of the book they were using, not a bad book, and started in and did well covering the first year. For my sophomore year, transfered to a fancy college, took an oral exam on first calculus, then got into their second year, did well, and was caught up. (3) Linear algebra? Sure, went through Halmos carefully word for word. About a fine point, wrote a letter to Halmos and got a nice answer. Also worked through Nering's book -- Nering was a student of Artin at Princeton. Later did a lot in linear algebra applications, e.g., in statistics, numerical issues, etc. (4) In grad school, got pushed into their course in 'advanced linear algebra'. When the course got to the polar decomposition, I blurted out in class "That's my favorite theorem!". Blew away everyone else in the class. Partly intimidated the prof. In grad school took an advanced applied math course then in the summer went over the class notes word by word. Wrote the prof a letter improving on one of his theorems. Back in class, took a 'reading course', and from the study in the summer saw a problem and solved it with some surprising math, two weeks. Later published it -- so, technically it was a dissertation.
Point: Self study can work well. Obviously: Once a prof reading research papers, nearly always have to use self study, and the papers are generally much less polished than good textbooks.
So, I recommended to students short on money just to do some self teaching and show up, demonstrate what learned, and ask for a scholarship.
Anti-Semitism isn't an inherit trait of fascism. It's an inherit trait of Nazism.
Mussolini was in power in Italy 10 years before Hitler was in Germany and he wasn't very anti-Semitic at all. He was influenced by Hitler towards the end of his reign but even then his anti-Semitic policies were mild when compared to Germany.
Part of the problem with calling someone a fascist is that people associate the word with Hitler. But Hitler wasn't the only fascist or even the first fascist.
Ok but I believe the topic is Donald Trump who has been directly, repeatedly, relentlessly, compared to Adolph Hitler, and he and his supporters slandered as Nazis. Specifically. Directly, relentlessly, repeatedly.
So perhaps this:
> Part of the problem with calling someone a fascist is that people associate the word with Hitler.
He'll definitely go away without a fuss after his second term, right? He isn't considering what could be done about the 22nd amendment. Putin extended his terms in office in creative ways, but Trump isn't Putin and has a high regard for established political mechanisms, even if they mean there will be less importance for Trump at some point in the future.
As a European you don't have presidential elections that matter. Executive and legislative power is in the hands of your parliament and the president is a figurehead (if you have one).
If you want to compare your European experience to the USA, you should look at congress and not the presidential elections. You'd probably find the same dynamics there as in your own country, with the exception that the blocs that you have in parliament have been distilled into two parties.
My home country has 3 major parties each at about a quarter of the seats, the rest split between about half a dozen others. The various parties have very different views, only one of them I'd argue is "right wing" in the US sense, and they've all mostly learned to make compromises and not be too divisive, or they face a more moderate party taking their seats.
Every European parliament will form into a "government" bloc and an "opposition" bloc after the election. Right wing / left wing doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. The US congress does manage to make bi-partisan bills. Because members of congress can go against their party sometimes. In European parliaments that kind of behaviour usually results in a crisis of government and a vote of confidence.
> or they face a more moderate party taking their seats
That's not right. You cannot lose your parliament seat in any European parliament until the next election. If an MP or an entire party in Europe is too divisive, they might not be able to be part of a majority and they will be in opposition.
In the USA, the executive government is not elected by parliament - so you're comparing apples to oranges. The president builds the executive government after being elected by the people in the states. That's something different.
I mean, if one of Trump's own closest advisors carefully states that he fits the definition of a fascist, is it not fair to call him one? If Trump outwardly celebrates many of the traditional concepts of fascism like attacking the media, attacking minorities, attacking "enemies from within" is it not fair to call him that?
And what do you say about a person who supports fascism? That they're very fine people?
I assume by 'strong personality' you mean populist. I think it's a big mistake to think populism can only be fought with populism, otherwise all democracies would have fallen to it long ago.
I do think if we're pointing fingers, most of the problems came from before the Harris campaign kicked off.
Populism is just democracy taking the reigns back from the entrenched political establishment. There is nothing democratic about a social class of bureaucrats gatekeeping all political offices.
If anything, it seems to me that populism is necessary to overcome the local minimum that the political landscape settles in from time to time.
It's pretty hard to define what populism is; it's kind of a "know it when I see it" kind of definition for most commentators.
My best attempt at a definition would be a platform that denies known truths in favour of superficially popular positions. For example, claiming that tariffs don't increase prices, or that legal convictions are lies, or even that solid, established scientific evidence (like vaccines are safe and hugely effective or climate change is real) are untrue.
Populism is a political approach that seeks to represent the interests and voice of "ordinary people" against what is perceived as an elite or establishment. Populist movements often emphasize a direct connection between the leader and the people, bypassing traditional political institutions or parties, and claim to speak for the "common people" against corrupt or out-of-touch elites. Populism can appear across the political spectrum, taking different forms depending on the issues and ideologies within a given society.
This is likely to cause winners and losers to come out of the situation... and probably after time, the leaders end up becoming elites who become out of touch with the "common people" and the process is likely to repeat.
I think it is closer to Democracy than whatever the democrats seem to say - which they seem to define as: "whatever gives them the power to do what they want"
In the ideal, populism can be seen as a good example of democracy. In practice, voters just go off of feelings and "he said, she said", at which point it's not about the benefit of the people so much as whichever elites manage to wrest the conch this time. For the most part, the people themselves aren't well educated and able to understand what is actually to their benefit or not, even if they are college educated. Adding to that, people are bad at long-term thinking and focusing on multiple issues. In practice, the outcome is the same.
That is how populism has been branded as bad, to you. By your definition the most populist parties are the republicans and democrats ("denies known truths in favour of superficially popular positions").
It's funny how "populism" has a shifting definition (as I see it). Your comment implies populism is the opposite of democracy. While it's literal meaning seems to be exactly democratic (doing what the populous wants).
Dear OP, if you don't understand why people are making fun of you, imagine the trump guy that mostly exists in your own heads saying "We must avoid falling into tyranny by leaning into the fuhrerprinciple!"
And now we know why Confucius said the first step is the rectification of names.
From the outside this is what I think too. Biden tried too desperately to be the next candidate again and Harris' campaign could have started 1 or 2 months earlier than it did.
If Trump actually wins, the world might be in for a lot of trouble very soon. Quite worrying. Aside from totalitarian regimes, wherever you look around the world people were hoping the crazy dude would not win, wondering how anyone could be so blind not to see what kind of person he is, how uneducated, silly, and what a loser in the general sense.
A second administration will look quite different. If he remembers his campaign ideas, the economics will look much closer to Brexit than the chaos of his first term.
> Aside from totalitarian regimes, wherever you look around the world people were hoping the crazy dude would not win
Can you list some of the places where you've looked "around the world"? The locals I know out here in Asia (and a few in Southern Africa) aren't Trump haters.
Basically everywhere in Europe, where we still have democracy, even if more and more shaky these days, because we don't get our act together with regard to the war in Ukraine.
Then Ukraine itself of course.
I think no one wants to have to deal with a deranged dude, who calls NK dictator a "great guy". Surely people in South America don't like his hate speeches and outlandish ideas about them paying for any kind of wall either.
In general people in many countries take statements like wanting to be a dictator "only on the first day" as very serious indications of some guy's mental health and for what they will have to deal with in the near future. Generally people are not a big fan of having to deal with authoritarian figures, who could impact their country's economy tomorrow, by doubling down on some idiotic tariffs policy or some other crap that comes his mind.
Ohhhhhh, the other half of the Global North? I don't consider that representative of "around the world". Europe's population is a minority (reference the Valeriepieris Circle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle) , and it doesn't hold a monopoly on functioning democracies either.
>Surely people in South America don't like his hate speeches and outlandish ideas about them paying for any kind of wall either.
But....have you been there, and asked them? Or have you just been to Europe? I've never been to South America, and only know a handful of Mexicans, Brazilians, Argentinians, and Colombians....not enough to say that I can speak for their politics.
> Generally people are not a big fan of having to deal with authoritarian figures, who could impact their country's economy tomorrow, by doubling down on some idiotic tariffs policy or some other crap that comes his mind.
I think authoritarians are more popular, globally, than you realize. I know Filipinos who spoke highly of Duterte because his crackdown really cleaned up crime in Manila, as one anecdote. Trump's tariff policy will probably not work out well for the overall quality of life in America, agreed on that point though.
This is likely game over for Democrats and democracy in the US. Democracy has already been on the backslide here for some time, so it’s not overly surprising, but I don’t expect either to last the next couple of years.
Citizens United and the coup attempt neither being treated as five-alarm fires for our Democracy were probably the moments when a major slide toward authoritarianism became far, far more likely. Democrats just sat on their hands.
By the time we got to the news that at least two Supreme Court justices and very likely more are being bought, and collectively shrugged rather than making that the issue until they were out, well, that wasn’t so much a landmark on the way down as another ordinary day.
"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?-Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."
— Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
Excellent book. I read this book after my WWII Veteran relatives passed away, had fought in Europe and survived the Battle of the Bulge. His wife invited everyone over and wanted everyone to look through his books and take some that looked interesting.
That's one of the ones I took, certainly the one I remember most.
I'm reminded of how we react to pandemics. If we are successful with vaccines or masks or whatever, then not many people get sick and die. No big crisis. And people are wondering "why did we do that, see it was no big deal".
It's the same looming issue with climate change.
And they all have the same undercurrent: doing something might cost us money, so we don't do it. Thus the economy being the greatest predictor of elections.
Whatever you think about Trump, 2016-2020 was in no way, shape or form comparable to the 30s under NSDAP Germany and to *insist* on making such comparisons ad nauseum is one of the reasons you were rebuked at the polls by the electorate.
It's also electrifyingly funny that Trump took the largest Jewish counties (e.g., Rockland, NY) -- those self-hating Jews must want to go back to the concentration camps. This is your brain on progressive logic.
I took this particular case as highlighting one way by which functioning liberal democracies slide into authoritarianism and sharply-shifted political and social norms, one hard-to-reverse step at a time, not all at once. I also think the direct comparisons to nazis are mostly not useful, but that’s not how I read this excerpt’s being posted.
Looks like more of the same antifa boilerplate but in the form of an incoherent postww2 ethnography by a confused leftist (whose sample was a total of ten people btw) and is exactly why your ideas were thoroughly smashed yesterday, no?
Have you read the book? It’s not trying to be an academic population-level study or anything, it’s accounts of and reflections on the reported experiences (and some verifiable—sometimes conflicting—facts surrounding those) of a few members of the Nazi party who were otherwise just ordinary people going about their lives, which is a perspective lost among focus on SS members or the Nazi political elite. A different book that was a statistical study might also be interesting, but could not accomplish the same things. It’d be a totally different book, not a better version of the same book.
> By the time we got to the news that at least two Supreme Court justices and very likely more are being bought, we collectively shrugged rather than making that the issue until they were out
It's happening to this day, too. Yesterday, "Oh, possibly Russian-originated bomb threats closing election stations? Sure, we'll talk about it briefly and move on." Elon Musk-funded PAC sending fake text messages from Kamala Harris saying that kids will be able to coordinate gender-affirming surgery while at school "outside of parental interference" and that she will be legalizing abortion upon delivery? "Oh, that might be illegal, maybe? Next story." are demoralizing in the amount of indifference they come with.
Citizens United was literally about citizens showing a film critical of a political candidate. It’s one of the purest examples of free political speech there is.
No Supreme Court justices are bought.
I share your concern about the lack of seriousness with which many seem to regard the Capitol riot, which is a black stain on our history.
> Citizens United was literally about citizens showing a film critical of a political candidate. It’s one of the purest examples of free political speech there is.
You should read fuller accounts, it’s a fair bit more complicated than that.
The part that made it so harmful, at any rate, was the court deciding without prompting from the plaintiffs to buck their normal “as narrow as possible and don’t make things major constitutional questions unless you have to” policy and widen the case to be about something it initially was not, with the result that campaign finance control at all and keeping foreign money at least kinda out of US politics became impossible.
> No Supreme Court justices are bought.
Uh. I dunno what to say. Yikes.
Pretend George Soros had been giving Sotomayor gifts amounting to huge sums of money over many, many years in ways that plainly violate rules for lower court judges, and that she’s “accidentally” not disclosed a lot of it.
Candidate wins in a landslide election against someone who had not won any votes in a presidential campaign on her own merits ever and you call that game over for democracy?
Reagan was re-elected in the November 6 election in an electoral and popular
vote landslide, winning 49 states by the time the ballots were finished
counting on election night at 11:34 PM in Iowa. He won a record 525 electoral
votes total (of 538 possible), and received 58.8% of the popular vote
> Trump didn’t need to file frivolous lawsuits before federal courts. The Supreme Court wasn’t given a chance to throw the election his way in a redux of 2000’s Bush v. Gore. The false bomb threats to polling places that have been ascribed to Russian actors don’t appear to have had any measurable effect. There’s been no reporting that indicates that the promised hordes of MAGA-trained poll watchers blocked any Democratic voters from casting their ballots.
These are the same noises that were made on the right prior to the election. As long as people are sufficiently mad about the status quo, the other party has a chance to take over.
I feel like that's a story HN and a lot of tech likes to tell itself, but the truth is that when push comes to shove they support candidates who are neither, but _are_ deeply right wing.
The actual lib-left side of tech evaporated. ACLU, EFF, even fedora-core atheists etc are a shell/joke of their former selves. The remaining ones (i.e. Stallman) back Bernie, Yang, or still buy into the green party.
I got mass downvoted earlier and a "talking to" from Dang in regards to me pointing out that a certain Ron Wyden having one bad vote about BDS/isreal isn't a good enough reason to throw the baby out with the bath water and turn against one of the only reliable techno-libertarians. This site is done with its purported liberalism.
I agree there are a lot of right wing, libertarian types, but I'm guessing just voting by the HN crowd would be a Harris landslide over Trump. For example, donations for Alphabet employees was supposedly 89% to democrats, 11% to republicans.
I mean considering the degree to which people on this site style themselves as intellectuals, it would be pretty astounding to me to hear that most of them voted for Trump this time around given his fairly disastrous economic agenda. Mostly tariffs—I don't really believe HN is that protectionist
There are certainly vocal and well spoken conservatives here, but by and large this site skews massively liberal. I mean just read this threads comments, ffs.
The candidate who was just voted into power is a convicted felon awaiting sentencing and also awaiting 2(?) other criminal trials which are now probably going to just disappear. It's objectively a failure of democracy.
They are, apparently, which is why it's a failure. He was also awaiting trial for interference in the previous election. The irony would be amusing if it weren't so seriously wrong.
I mean, he'd be ineligible to join the military, but can run it. He'd fail a security clearance, but can hand them out. Many states forbid felons from even voting.
"You can be president from a jail cell" is likely to be a "well that wouldn't happen" oversight on the Founding Fathers' plate, not an intentional design.
- vote counting shall be stopped at a particular time. Officials in charge of the mechanics of democracy need to be pressured explicitly about this.
- the peaceful transition of power needs to be interrupted
- expectations held together by norms hold no value. The very tradition of democracy is optional.
It might be irrational to spend effort voting —engaging in democracy— to elevate someone so skeptical of it. And your newspaper and even in this thread people are extremely polite about those doing so.
He generates doubt around the election result "if I lost, it is because of fraud" and provoked a group of people to attempt the overturn the previous election. Plus more subtle things like election rule changes that reduce democracy in the background.
I personally came to this opinion when he declared previous elections rigged without any evidence. The election institute and its fairness is a cornerstone myth of a democracy, you cannot destroy it without ruining the democracy. If the election institute is corrupted there is no way to have a legitimate president. You can have only tyrants and dictators after that. It means that you are not anti-democratic you can oppose the election institute only if you know it is corrupt. But Trump didn't know, I'm sure he knew that the elections were not rigged, and yet he attacked the elections.
I was not sure, because I had a hypothesis that Trump is just stupid and do not understand what he is doing. But before the current elections he talked a lot how he is going to abuse power to persecute political opponents, or just any opponents, if we believe his words, he is going to persecute everyone he doesn't like.
You know that Hitler was literally voted into power, right?
I am NOT saying Trump is literally Hitler, but the idea that democratic vote can't have un-democratic outcome in the long run is simply false.
It can, and history showed us that more then once
That's the problem with this statement: Trump is not Hitler and any hypothetical "undemocratic outcomes" aren't apparent in the extreme short term. He hasn't run on a platform of eliminating democracy and there isn't any indication at this point that he will.
I've not been as immersed in the presidential race, but hasn't he explicitly said he wants to be a dictator, this is the last vote you will need, we should stop so and so from voting and so on? Like, right out of his mouth? How is that not an undemocratic platform?
The full quote was that he was going to be a dictator but only on the first day. It's probably one of the dumbest things he's ever said, but the fact that he put a limit on his own supposed dictatorship contradicts him being a dictator. At any rate, while I'm not a fan of what he said, he definitely did not preclude the continuation of American democracy even if interpreted in the most literal possible way.
> this is the last vote you will need
He said that you [the people at his rally] aren't going to need to vote anymore because hes going to accomplish all his goals this time. Not that there won't be a vote or that his supporters won't be allowed to vote. They definitely won't be allowed to vote for him since he'll be at up against the term limit.
> we should stop so and so from voting and so on
This one I've never even heard before outside of him claiming that his opponents want to let non citizens vote
I believe people who claim he will "end democracy" do not believe he will literally put an end to elections. Many places widely considered "undemocratic" also have elections.
> They definitely won't be allowed to vote for him since he'll be at up against the term limit.
I'm sure if Trump were younger and up against term limits, he (and his party) would simply ignore them or change the rules. That's the kind of democracy-ending actions that could easily happen. Lucky for us, I think he's too old for this particular problem.
You are going with the assumption that the election wasn't stolen. If you are correct then Trumo would be taking an anti-democratic position. If the people's will was genuinely to elect him and the election was actually stolen then he would be taking the democratic position.
That's out of context. He was trying to reach people who just don't vote in general, telling them they only needed to bother this one time and he'll fix their problems (costs, economy, etc) so well they can go back to not bothering to vote.
This stuff was not merely spicy words, it was dangerous. Democracy runs on norms and good people, and is precious and hard won. Trump being in power is a risk.
What about when he said he wanted to be dictator so people wouldn’t have to vote anymore? And when he made himself above the law with MAGA court justices? Or talked about a firing squad for his opponents and opening fire on peaceful protestors? Or when he attempted a violent coup on the White House? Or when he praised Hitler and asked for generals like Hitlers that will do anything he says without question? Or when he praised Putin, Kim Jun Un, and other the dictators of the world?
He did not say that [1]. I can't decide whether people keep misrepresenting his statements intentionally, or there's some psychological process in play that prevents them from parsing his speech. He is a terrible communicator after all.
He speaks backwards and from the inside out of sentences. Changes subject mid sentence. Etc.
I think normal people think that is OK but academics thinks it sounds stupid.
In the beginning I believe he got a boost from journalists feeling smart by nitpicking that to manufacture some "gotcha". He is way to easy to misquote to resist the temptation.
But in the end he didn't end Democracy, he let the democratic procedures take place, a fascist wouldn't do that.
> He literally tried to overthrow the election 4 years ago
Not openly, the people who went to the white house weren't under Trumps command. He argued against the election result using the proper tools of the democracy, you are allowed to do that.
I'm not sure why worry now when we already know he handed over the power once. Maybe it wasn't willingly but he will be forced to step down in 4 years as well.
The call to Brad Raffensperger asking him to "find" votes has been public for years. I'm in disbelief that anyone could listen to that conversation and conclude it was anything but an attempt to steal the election.
Trying to cheat a few votes isn't more fascist than gerrymandering, it is corrupt but it isn't fascism.
If he had rigged the whole election I'd say it is fascism, but rigging a whole election is on such a different scale and planning and conspiracy level that it isn't the same thing, he didn't even try to rig the election. If he tried to rig it then it wouldn't be one such call, it would be hundreds with many accomplices.
Trump also made calls to officials in other swing states he lost attempting to change the result. They weren't as public and damning, but had several of them been successful after all was said and done, it would have rigged the whole election.
This is some pretty hardcore rationalization even by modern standards. Trying to "cheat a few (10s of thousands of votes so you win a swing state)" is called trying to steal an election.
but rigging a whole election is on such a different scale and planning and conspiracy level that it isn't the same thing, he didn't even try to rig the election.
He literally did from many different angles. Asking for changed vote counts, fake electors, 60 court cases with no evidence, planning violence to stop the certification of the election.
How do you square what you are saying with these facts?
> he let the democratic procedures take place, a fascist wouldn't do that.
He did so because he had no other choice. Mike Pence, of all people, rescued democracy. If it hadn't been for him, Donald Trump would not accepted the transfer of power.
And this is what the difference boils down to. You and I both know that Trump would have declared himself the winner no matter what the vote count had been. And we also both know that Harris is going to concede to Trump because the vote count says so.
> Again, You know Hitler literally tried a coup, failed and then switched to 'democratic' means?
Hitler never left the seat of power once he got it. Trump did. They are not the same. Hitler did a coup to try to get power, he failed at that, Trump already succeeded grabbing power (he got elected) and then left it.
>What do you call being the majority party, winning referendums, etc?
Nazi's were not the majority party when Hitler ran for president, they were the largest party, but not majority. They weren't even a majority even when Hitler was appointed (not voted) chancellor by Paul von Hindenburg, the man who won the presidential election. There were a few more steps before he acquired absolute power, but none of them involved voting. It's interesting, read the article.
Well the largest party (as per HN rules please "use the best form of the argument", no need to nitpick), and not by a small margin -- at least 10% over the 2nd largest. And you'll still argue he did not "win" elections?
(You could not "vote" a chancellor. In a lot of perfectly valid democracies, the PM position is always appointed, never directly voted, usually from the larger party or the at least the candidate most likely to pass a (constructive) motion of no confidence. So he was elected legally per the correct democratic process. Cleanly/Fairly -- that's another question. But would you really be surprised Hitler could win elections? He had pretty ridiculously good reputation in some circles. He would have likely polled pretty well even in the US.).
>And you'll still argue he did not "win" elections?
The Nazi party won elections, Hitler did not.
>>You know that Hitler was literally voted into power, right?
He was not. He lost the presidential election in 1932. He forcefully took the presidency after the Reichstag fire. He was appointed chancellor because the Nazi party won elections. He lost his. I can see where you think it is splitting hairs, but you specifically named Hitler and not the Nazi party. That might not have been what you meant to say, but it's what you said that I was refuting.
Also, Hindenburg didn't have to appoint Hitler, he could have chosen another from the Nazi party. He certainly didn't want to appoint Hitler, but some backroom negotiations that he wasn't a part of ultimately led to Hitler's appointment.
>So he was elected legally per the correct democratic process.
This is like saying the SCOTUS is elected because the President that appointed them was elected. They are not, they are appointed. Hitler himself never won an election.
FWIW, here are the 1932 election results:
Hindeberg 53.05%
Hitler 36.77%
Other Guy 10.16%
This would be considered an absolute blowout. Please don't feel like I'm scolding you, I really enjoy historical conversations, so thanks for this one.
People really don’t understand interwar period Germany, and helpfully pluck out a narrative that suits their interests today. Treaty of Versailles and “dolchstoss” myth included.
Thank you for sharing the truth. It’s worth understanding why Hindenburg chose Hitler as Chancellor, too. Hitler was popular, and seen as a useful force that might be controlled by the conservative elements of the German political system. It didn’t work out that way.
There’s no contemporary analogue to Hitler today in American politics. There’s no significant paramilitary force, for one. No true populist — in spite of trump’s rhetoric his policies don’t qualify.
Ironically, the closest to fitting the mold might be Vance? Somebody unelected, young, brokered his own access to power in exchange for political support (via Elon, Thiel).
> Ironically, the closest to fitting the mold might be Vance? Somebody unelected, young, brokered his own access to power in exchange for political support (via Elon, Thiel).
Kamala Harris fits just as well: She was so unpopular in 2020 she dropped out before the primaries, then got picked for Vice-President. Then because Biden was in office, she again didn't get votes in the primary this year but instead was selected by the DNC when Biden dropped out.
I think that the journey Hitler undertook in 1924 is actually more useful as a comparison to Trump's story... The media and courts and the incumbent's/MSM's expectations verses the reality of how that would land with the volk. A tangent from the parent but they did say they enjoy historical conversations :D
> I can see where you think it is splitting hairs, but you specifically named Hitler and not the Nazi party.
Yes, I do consider this is splitting hairs. First, yeah, I do not think explicitly making the separation between Hitler and the Nazi party makes any practical difference to the argument. Let me know if you can think of one.
Second, Hitler did get into power through democratic means -- definitely not the presidency, but he was made chancellor, which is, to the best of my knowledge, equivalent to a PM and therefore head of the executive. Don't move the goalpost and claim that "Hitler didn't get into power until he illegally made himself president", because he was into power before that; as much as you could within the limits of the constitution. They voted him into office and he was made chancellor through legal means. For the last 2/3 elections that can still be considered "somewhat" free, his party got the largest number of votes.
He won the elections, and legally speaking had every right to be put into power and made chancellor. Or at least to try until he was voted out by a no confidence or failing to pass laws. He had no right to become president, much less to become dictator.
> This is like saying the SCOTUS is elected because the President that appointed them was elected. They are not, they are appointed. Hitler himself never won an election.
In a lot of democratic countries, the PM-equivalent figure is NEVER directly elected. Would you call Italy, Spain, etc. non-democratic countries just because the PM is appointed by parliament instead of elected directly? The PM is the actual head of the government; the head of state (monarch/president) is a figurehead.
> FWIW, here are the 1932 election results:
_Presidential_ election. President is much less important than you think if you see this from a US-centric view, because the actual head of government is the chancellor! The secretaries/ministers are appointed from the majority parties in parliament, not arbitrarily by the president as in the US. This is still pretty common in many European democracies...
And in all parliament elections, Hitler's party won with a comfortable margin:
1932 July elections : Nazis 230 seats (out of 608) ; next party 133. Almost 2x distance. Hitler's coalition : 267 seats and 43% of vote. Won by simple majority.
1932 November elections (arguably last fair elections in Germany) Nazis 196 seats ; next party 120. In coalition: 247, 42% of vote. Simple majority.
1933 March (definitely last free elections in Germany): Nazis 288 seats; next party 120. Coalition: 340, ~52%, absolute majority .
There's no other way to put this, even if you ignore 1933 results: the Nazis _and Hitler_ were put into power by the (simple) majority of the population. If they had lost even in % of votes to a second party, or something to the effect, then I would also argue that voters didn't put Hitler into power. But as it is...
And you can't really argue that someone could be voting for the Nazis (or coalition parties) without knowing you'd be voting for Hitler, considering how personalistic they were by 1932.
> Please don't feel like I'm scolding you, I really enjoy historical conversations, so thanks for this one.
This has been discussed ad-nauseum, even on wikipedia...
Disclaimer: I already mentioned that results of an election when there is literal vote coercion going on (intimidation, control of the press, etc.) cannot be considered fair. This doesn't negate the fact that he did win elections, and therefore this is still a valid lesson for generations to come.
It's probably not that, but (separately) both the Democratic Party and democracy for the same reason: if Republicans successfully engineer (what's effectively) a one-party state.
Regardless if the dems still exist in name or not, both them and democracy are done.
Highly unlikely. The next Governor of my state is likely that person who stood up to Trumps fraudulent voting claims. We will see if the Democrats can find a decent candidate but I doubt it. They used the same person twice with the same results.
If the democrats were interested in winning they would have had a few options this election. The party seems to have other priorities that they always prioritize over winning though, and that hasn't worked out well for them.
They were interested in winning and I think they made decent moves. Dumping Biden amounted to huge increases in their win probability. A stronger candidate could have bolstered that further but Harris ran a decent campaign. The broader state of the economy and border put them on the back foot so I think they would have struggled with most candidates. Perhaps an outsider similar to Bernie’s 2016 campaign would have had the best shot.
If they really wanted to win they never would have had Biden on the ticket. At a minimum they would have allowed a primary rather then forcing RFK out of the party and keeping any other potentials off the stage.
In my opinion Biden was clearly slipping 18-24 months ago. But even if that's wrong, the best way to show the country Biden was fit for another term and energize the party would have been putting him on stage to debate with other democratic leaders.
I don't personally think she ran a decent campaign. It was very standard and bland talk of unity and other hot air -just the stuff you expect politicians to say when trying to get elected, nothing to really build trust in her. She needed to make Trump look dumb, dishonest and inept by comparison. Talking to voters as if they're smarter might have helped, but I don't really know.
This is all because of Reagan. Removal of the fairness doctrine and lowering of the highest tax rate from 70% to 50% to 28%. Now, we live in an oligarchy full stop. All the "free press" is owned by billionaires who crave tax cuts and election ad money more than "truth". (Look at the LATimes and WaPost refusing to endorse a candidate at the sole direction of their owner.) The oligarchs soon realized that you don't have to buy the country, just 10 people to control 2 of the branches of government. We really need to move the Supreme Court to 13 that are elected by popular vote in the 13 districts. We elect the heads of the other 2 branches of government, why not the judiciary?
The greatest trick the rich ever pulled was convincing the middle class that poor people are the cause of all the problems in their life.
But it isn't wrong, is it? Democracy elected Hitler, Hitler ended democracy in Germany. I'm not saying that is going to happen here, but your flippant comeback to a valid point is not a rebuttal.
I wish people didn't use the Hitler comparison because it always derails discussion (almost everyone is better than Hitler, even Trump). There are however enough other cases throughout history of people being elected and then becoming dictators.
It is the exact right comparison though. Conservatives failed to maintain power on their ideals. The weak party clings to power, and propels a populist into power. He scapegoats immigrants, and liberal ideas for the general malaise. The only saving grace is that he is old, and not genocidal.
People wouldn't be as familiar with the outcome if we were to discuss those other dictators. I'm certainly unaware of their parallels.
Guy said he'd be dictator on day one and that sometimes it's okay to suspend the constitution. Some of us are concerned about what things he said might be true.
It was clearly a joke, as in taking the first day of office to clean up the perceived mistakes of his predecessor. Do you know any dictators who only planned to rule for one day?
And also, are you still confused why Americans wholeheartedly rejected this BS?
How are you so confident that it is a joke? I'm not that confused about why people give him a pass on stuff like this, but that doesn't mean I like it.
Why are you so sure there will be no pandemic this time? I think mismanagement of Trump's CDC was a big contributing factor to the last one. Compare, e.g. how Obama's CDC successfully fought ebola.
Definitely. This will involve a tariff regime explicitly disadvantaging the ports in coastal blue states. Certain bureaucratic centers will be moved, the kinds of things a real estate developer can follow in a short meeting.
The side effects of this will both hurt his base, and offer opportunities for smart people. For example, careless tariffs can raise the cost of everything at Walmart by 60% with Amazon not far behind. You know this and I know this.
Tariffs also demonstrate to domestic companies that they don’t need to innovate. The material and labor to innovate will be cheaper overseas. You know this and I know this.
Governors can be killed by executive order. It’s an official action so under the new Supreme Court ruling the President can’t be prosecuted. Anyone who carries out the order can be pardoned. The courts can of course reverse the executive order, but not resurrect a man so the case would be moot.
This is a man who has talked about shooting political opponents on the campaign trail, I’d be astonished if he doesn’t follow through if there will be no consequences.
The sequence of event presented by the poster you are responding to is indeed a joke in 2024. Can you however not see a future where it becomes a practical possibility?
> Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting). The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Then the claim that the President can in their official capacity assassinate others with impunity and protection from prosecution is no lie.
That money and power doesn’t seem to be willing to move towards centrists policies. And there is a lot of power in the president, considering how unstable the world is the most likely scenario now is further consolidation of that power. And Russia or Israel are good examples, if anyone wants to see what happens after the power gets consolidated.
I see this claim often but (from my position as an outsider, not American) it doesn't look very plausible: Trump was already president once and that didn't happen, why would it happen now?
It did begin then. The Supreme Court of the US is since then conservative and will now probably remain so for many years to come.
Further, he needed the second term then, so he couldn't go all crazy as he needed the people to vote for him once more. Now he doesn't have that limitation any more.
Things take time. Erosion of trust and the creation of political apathy in the populace takes time. Also, as has been said, he did try things but was continuously pushed back on by the actual politicians he put in his cabinet. He's also 8 years more elderly and emboldened. His cult of personality has essentially stabilized into an American institution. He's also had an entire administration to place judges and pass legislation that favors his power plays. In general it seems like you're asking, why might it take more than 4 years to topple a democracy, which i think has an obvious answer, democracy doesn't want to be toppled.
Again, I'm not arguing he's gonna go full dictator, but i think it's a lot more likely this time around than last time.
Trump has stated that his biggest regret from his term is that the people he appointed to various positions, while quite competent and/or experienced, would push back on ideas or plans he proposed. In other words, they weren't loyal.
The difference between this term and his previous is going to be a much stronger focus on making any position he can appoint be one that doesn't tell him no. And it looks like many of the positions he can't (the senate and likely the house) are going that way too. That, to me, makes him represent a meaningfully larger threat to the balance of power in the US than his previous term.
Because Trump selected career Republicans who still followed the Constitution and law for his cabinet.
This time around: 1. He allowed an insurrection and was voted in anyway, so his extremist followers are emboldened. 2. He surrounded himself with yes-men.
He's significantly more unhinged than he was 4 years ago, and even more obsessed with personal loyalty than he was before.
And in general this sort of thing doesn't happen overnight; there's a process to things. It's like the old quip on how someone becomes bankrupt: "very gradually, and then suddenly all at once".
I don't know what will happen, but it's a dangerous path to walk. Maybe the next four years will be sort-of okay-ish, but what about the state of things in 10 or 20 years?
In large part, democracies work because we all believe it should work, and once that belief goes out the window for a critical mass of people then you're playing with fire.
The GOP in general has been engaged in scorched earth politics since Obama: all that matters is a win today and doesn't matter what conventions or institutions get damaged in the process. A healthy democracy would have disqualified Trump from running again in 2020. It would not play highly nihilistic power games with the supreme court. etc. etc.
When Trump took power in 2016 there wasn't much of a plan because nobody expected it. Today Trump's backers have Project 2025 ready which has a specific plan to replace anyone who might be able to slow things down in the civil service, armed forces, justice department, etc... Not to mention the immunity doctrine that the administration now has from its handpicked supreme court.
In theory there are things Biden could still do right now to help preserve these institutions but I doesn't look like he will, or even like he has the mental capacity and empathy to be motivated to do so.
“Not worried about Trumpism” is a near-100% accurate indicator of extreme ignorance of authoritarian regimes and of the American political system, unfortunately.
> near-100% accurate indicator of extreme ignorance of authoritarian regimes
extreme ignorance of authoritarian regime is particularly visible among people who think that things happen like in movies with singular figures like Darth Vader showing up and suddenly grabbing power out of some kind of ether.
If this is somehow the end of democracy here, it wasn't Trump's election that killed it. One election alone (or two if you believe both terms were the cause) couldn't likely kill an otherwise healthy democracy. Democracy would have been dead for my of my lifetime if this is the moment it becomes clear that its gone.
That said, I very much dislike Trump and would rather have an empty oval office (arguably we have that already), but I think his threat to democracy has been wildly overblown. Unless a rogue president throws out the book entirely, Congress would have to be the ones to actually get rid of most of our democratic processes and systems.
I'd point back to at least 2000 and the Supreme Court stopping the count in Florida, but maybe back to when we sabotaged the Iran hostage deal so Carter couldn't have a win
Sure, both are good examples of democracy being attacked. More broadly, I'd point to all the lies the public is fed to "nudge" us in whatever direction the political parties and lobbyists want. Its not much of a democracy if voters are asked to vote based on massive piles of bad information.
The second you have a president willing to mobilize the most advanced military in the history of the world against its own populace there's no chance of realistically resisting.
I have absolutely no expectation that Trump will actually order the military on the US populace, but even if he tried it matters whether the military would follow such an order. It could always happen, that's part of the reason I wish our federal government was drastically reduced and our standing military disbanded, but I simply can't think so little of our troops that they would actually do it.
That said, if somehow that did happen one day I fully expect to die by their gun. At that point that army becomes an invading force and I'd feel like I have no choice but to fight.
I really hope you are right about that. I worry because I listened to what he said...and he said he wants to use the military against the "enemy from within, and named specific political opponents and mentioned media figures.
I tend to believe him when he says that's what he wants to do. But you are right, one would hope the military would refuse such an unconstitutional order.
In theory, I agree with you. In practice, however, they've lost elections before, and it's never really affected their policies. They move ever more right, regardless of what happens. The border wall used to be bad, and now it's something they actively pursue. Universal health care used to be a thing they'd at least mention (and it's still a very popular position to take), and these days? Not a peep.
Their strategy, at least the past three cycles, has been "I offer you nothing, but do you really want to vote for the other side?" And I don't see that changing.
We've had four years of a democratic regime. What have they done for abortion?
To clarify: I think this is an important issue, but I think the past four years demonstrates that the promises democrats make regarding protection of abortion rights are empty ones. The capability to do something is demonstrably there (look at Trump, he got Roe v Wade overturned, which is huge, and it's not like he has more power than a democrat president), the will to wield this capability is not.
Ok, I'm not super sure what point you're trying to make. I think the claim you're trying to make is that the democratic party has something on offer regarding abortion. We're on the back end of a four year democratic presidency. There's logically two possibilities regarding abortion:
- there's something on offer now that Biden wasn't offering four years ago
- Harris' offer is the same as what Biden was offering four years ago
That's a mathematical fact.
In the first case, my question is "what is it?" Personally, I haven't seen anything in the messaging of Biden and Harris' respective campaigns to indicate there is a difference between them on this front, but I could've missed something, and I'm glad to be corrected.
In the second case, we have a means of seeing what this offer actually means in terms of actions and policies. And judging by the accomplishments of the Biden regime on this front, that's basically nothing. Effectively, nothing is on offer on the abortion front.
Listen, the Presidents signature on a national abortion ban won’t be a Democrat. You’re extrapolating a political strategy when it’s simply: don’t sign a bill that makes menstrual tracking a responsibility of the United States Government.
Listen, when we look back at the achievements of presidents, we don't talk about the things they didn't do. We don't praise Ronald Reagan for _not_ signing a bill that reinstates slavery. We don't praise Carter for _not_ starting a war with Denmark. When I apply for a job, I don't tell my interviewer I won't shit on their desk, I tell them about the stuff I can do for their business. Saying you won't do something is not making an offer.
The dems started this when they black balled Bernie in 2016. They were too focused on their own self interest and they are going to reap what they sowed long into the future now.
> I don't think the policy positions even matter that much, if you can make a strong case and gain the confidence of the electorate.
If this were true it would mean Americans are dumb as rock and don't really care about "boring", technocratic but important decisions like climate change, geopolitical alliances, etc. - and just want a showman to dazzle their softened brains.
This is obviously true and has been for decades. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death from 01985 makes the case fairly strongly, but probably even stronger evidence is that the US apparently just elected as president a Twitter troll and reality-show TV host who doesn't know how to capitalize English and signed bills with a Sharpie in his previous presidential term.
Yes, I said that was obvious. Postman makes an excellent case that that's what happens when you reduce public discourse to entertainment.
Don't get complacent; the process producing European leaders like Putin, Zelenskyy, Orban, Meloni, and Erdoǧan is no better, nor other American leaders like Lula or Maduro, nor Modi. And, although Xi's path to power doesn't depend on how relatable his stories are about how he had difficulty climbing into a garbage truck, that process is flawed in other ways that are likely worse.
> just want a showman to dazzle their softened brains
Nietzsche made this case really strongly in his chapter/essay “The Flies in the Marketplace” back in the 1880s, and pretty well predicted how this would emerge play out half a century later in Germany. “ Full of clattering buffoons is the market-place,—and the people glory in their great men! These are for them the masters of the hour.”
Also the left's constant political games of trying to do everything and anything to put him in jail and etc the public grew tired of.. ignored unless you were on the their side. They tried so many things impeachment, pee pee tape, this trail, that trail.. nothing worked and probably helped him in the end. As well the economy yet as independent I voted for whom I've done better under financially and it just happens to be under the 46th so that's how I voted. But didn't care either way as a part of me wanted to vote for the 47th due my republican family legacy and the very distant hope home interest rates go down to 3 to 5 percent which I know that's a distant hope. But either way I'd been happy with the first woman or with the 47th as I too grew tired of the crap they threw on him, he survived an assassin and his no tax on tips, overtime or social security will help those in need. Get rid of income tax altogether sounds interesting yet crazy via the crazy comedian off hinged man who will surely say things people will incessantly talk about.
The reason why our courts, which are historically apolitical, tried to convict him is because he committed a nearly uncountable number of crimes. And he broke even more norms.
Our biggest failure as a nation was not convicting him sooner and more decisively.
Political gaming is done by the left and the right ..the majority spoken they are tired of it. Fake news is real and it's rampant from all sides and everywhere used for political to economical advantage (startups do it all the time like OpenAI demoing & promising a H.E.R. Like product but it's nowhere to be found ..was that all a fake demo?). My point is people are tired of all that ..I surely am.. I want truth reality I do not want an internet filled with AI fake crap nor do I want to hear about another Donald Trump impeachment case... give me truth reality yet will there ever be such when lying and making up crap at times behooves the parties doing so. Yet as we see here in this instance same fake playbook against him the majority had enough.
You say The courts are not apolitical as a left leaning you sound you surely have said the Supreme Court is right focused have you not?
People who commit crimes should be prosecuted for them. That is not a political statement.
The political choice was allowing someone to avoid prosecution pending the results of an election.
But I have some optimism that prosecutors and courts will be less willing to allow this in the future. Prosecutors need to bring cases sooner, and courts need to move more quickly, to avoid this kind of bad outcome in the future. Lesson learned.
>I don't think the policy positions even matter that much
I disagree hard. You should have a strong policy that people can believe in. When the average person sees that the price of certain groceries are 3x what they used to be, they stop caring about petty personal attacks.
I agree that the price of groceries probably decided the election. But I don't see how Trump had any "strong policy that people can believe in". There was just anti-status-quo amongst the 10% of votes that are up-for-grabs at this point.
I agree but the point is: democracy mandates all candidates strenuously pursue the 5% in 7 states. The Republican Party has a better model of their psyche. I think you and I agree it’s a cynical model, but the Democratic Party doesn’t get results with theirs.
The Democratic Party can't win with those tactics anyways. If it imitates the Republicans more and more, everyone will just slide further right. It should've taken a different stance and hard-lined on it. Trying to appeal to voters within the existing, rigged game is a nice show of bravado but not going to get results.
Yet the success of Republicans is that it’s easier to convince stupid people than it is to convince smart people. I’m open to other theories of tactics, if you want to elaborate.
How are Democrats to blame for inflation caused by Trump-era COVID entitlements funded by money printing? Sure some of it continued for months into the Biden administration but the bulk of it happened under Trump.
Why didn't they focus on that? I think the average person would care a lot more about that fact than Trump being convicted on 34 counts of not properly filing business records. Since inflation actually affects them. Yet the convictions took up no shortage of airtime in attack ads.
I think this part changes the context: 34 counts of not properly filing business records in order to hide the fact that he paid a porn star to keep quiet about their affair in order to hide this information from voters before an election…
But it seems nobody cared anyways, he didn’t need to hide it
Quibble on the numbers, not on the basic statement. I'm not sure that campaign promises such as suspending the Constitution, jailing political opponents, etc., really are only 0.1% worse than continuing the Republic as it has operated for nearly 250 years. Looking back a few years from now, we may find a delta of 0.2%, 0.5%, or possibly even more.
"A republic, based on the Latin phrase res publica ('public affair'), is a state in which political power rests with the public through their representatives—in contrast to a monarchy." - Wikipedia
> The Democrats should have fielded a strong personality in their own right.
I think Biden's decision to run for a second term was what sunk them. That was a selfish decision. He then bowed out too late, and Democrats had to scramble and nominate the only viable alternative. Biden should have refrained from running last year in order to give the Democrats a full primary to choose a candidate.
Agreed. I thought it seemed obvious back in 2020 that we'd see a candidate flip for this election, but no one in the Dem's leadership saw this coming? If they'd been positioning Harris and laying groundwork for the last four years this would have been an easy win for them.
Or perhaps if they had used democratic practices and let the constituents of their party actually vote to choose who they thought was best suited.
Biden pulling out so close to election didn’t let them actually go through their process to elect their nominee. It’s quite possible democrats would have chosen a candidate who was not associated with Biden and thus more electable.
>I think Biden's decision to run for a second term was what sunk them.
They didn't have anybody else they could think of who was more electable. They had squandered years when they should have groomed flashier personalities having more substance than Trump.
The only reason Trump got in to begin with is the Republicans had squandered their own years, and by the time 2024 came around neither party had anyone to offer who wasn't a bit more elderly than average.
I would have liked to see Biden pick Haley as his running mate, and if that didn't work, then resign and make Harris president right there at the primary.
I think Biden is going to go down as the person that broke the democratic party. But in reality, the blame lies on Obama for convincing Biden to step aside in 2016 and let it be Hillary Clinton. Biden had a much better chance at beating Trump in 2016 than Clinton.
I see what you're saying, but I put that on Hilary. How much dirt must she have had on everyone else such that that the party establishment treated her candidacy as Manifest Destiny and the best democrat unafraid to run against her was socialist grandpa from Vermont who wasn't even a democrat?
People were praising Biden for stepping aside, but he only stepped aside once he was forced. Had he made this decision earlier, the Democratic Party would have had the time to do a proper primary.
Yeah he RBG’d American real hard. Not only the late drop out after the primary, but also he put in D- effort into selling his work during his term. I think he did many decent things, but sold them like a wet sock.
lack of good messaging around the economic policies was also a big factor during Harris campaign. They could have attacked Trump on tariffs but mostly gave him a pass. Also mostly gave him a pass on not debating. Was puzzling.
I can't agree this only shows the game theory sometimes fails because despite almost all the advantage to select one version of a thing vs another, often an group or individual will go against their own best interests because of pure emotion. When an option is a little bit better than the previous version of itself and the other option is complete failure of the system with the system destroying itself (democracy) then the winning group loses along with the "losing" group.
Bernie Sanders is that strong personality, but he got shunned from becoming a candidate because he's too opinionated. It feels like the democrats push for a centrist candidate because anything more progressive/liberal/left will scare off the moderates. But the dems have so little to work with.
I think it would have been better if they didn't hide Biden's mental deterioration and let the primary process pick out a better candidate. There isn't a single county that she outperformed Biden from 2020.
I think the policy positions do matter though... The Democrats were pro labor before Clinton helped to pass NAFTA. Limbaugh would even mock Democrat voters who thought Bill would "find you a job". There's no illusion of that anymore. There's just people dropping out of the workforce and the unemployment numbers being fudged to make it look like everything is fine.
Neither party responded to this until Trump came around. Meanwhile, the Democrats also seemingly gave up on the whole social safety net argument as well. Obama at least ran on helping people but, well, I don't see that anymore. While I agree that their messaging has failed, I ultimately think they've failed to provide any substance to their argument.
"I don't think the policy positions even matter that much, if you can make a strong case and gain the confidence of the electorate."
That's pretty sad state of the system. Policy positions should be the primary thing voters care about.
"It's about mobilizing people by giving them something to care about."
Yeah, but this is how you get the most extreme candidates. Look at the primaries. They have very small numbers of voters, and the voters in just a few states set the tone for those elections due to timing. You can make a huge difference by mobilizing voters with increasingly extreme positions or rhetoric. As you said, status quo doesn't energize. That means the people are less likely to get involved fir the staus quo unless they have a strong sense of duty about voting.
From a game theory perspective, Trump is like a 2/2 MTG card that deals 10 damage to yourself when played.
Trump, personally, will not do much to contribute to the Republican cause. Trump's contributions will mostly be saying dumb things that get his opposition riled up and energized to vote against him next time. He's also going to be a very old sundowning president--it's Republican's turn to defend that.
Yep. The most interesting phenomena in all most all electoral history is the Obama-Obama-Trump-Trump-Trump voters (those that voted Obama twice, then Trump thrice). It is probably 1-2% of the electorate but probably 5-10% in most swing states.
Democrats should study those people very very intensely and understand how they lost them. It was exceptionally radical to vote for Obama in 2008, people were calling him a cupboard muslim and terrorist sympathiser. They really believed he will deliver change and create a decisive break with neoliberal policy (both domestic and foreign), it is quite amazing that exactly these voters would vote 3 times for Trump after that.
Yet apart from Obamacare Obama delivered basically zero change in foreign or domestic policy. You simply can't take voters who went out of their way to vote for you for granted in this way and expect there won't be a backlash.
although anecdotally most people know people personally that voted Obama then Trump. Obama was very much a populist outsider in his original campaign, he even pioneered devious social media ad targeting.
Yes exactly I meant for some people it was very radical to vote for him despite the aggressive McCain/Palin campaign that was painting him as a black foreigner cupboard muslim with a strange un-american name. Imagine those white, MAGA ultra-anti-woke Trump supporters. Some of these voted for Obama twice there is a whole wikipedia page about it. They would be like a feminist Ivy League literature professor voting for Trump now, relative to her demographic it is very radical.
The fact that Obama won so much of electorate implies that there were quite a lot of people who radically went against their usual political leaning. Those voters gave him the benefit of the doubt that he would shake the system.
Democrats lost the enthusiasm once they sidelined Bernie Sanders for Hillary Clinton at that time they had a similar fire among it's voters. I feel they lost a lot of young male voters at that time and they are still paying for it
That "enough of the damn emails" moment from Bernie Sanders during the democratic debate was very weird to say the least. It seemed he wasnt interested at all at moving forward with the nomination.
They nominated one of the most progressive senators to ever serve, promised huge changes to Medicaid and home buying assistance, protecting abortion access, and legalized marijuana. Oh, and “believes in democracy”. That’s a lot, lot more than “1% better”
> The Democrats should have fielded a strong personality in their own right.
Wonder if keeping Biden have been better. He got 80M+ popular votes, after all! Why swap him out? I guess Harris was seen as Biden++, already working for Biden admin and younger, so naturally she would get 90M+ popular votes or something.
> From a game theoretical perspective this is a good result. It is a clear reiteration of the message to the Democrats: you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad.
Yeah, I said as much on a reddit comment prior to knowing the results: This is a good thing for the future of the Dems! They can now take this valuable feedback and put together a better platform to run on in future races.
Running on social activism isn't a winning strategy, no matter how loud that vocal minority is shouting.
Why would they? The party in its current form exists as a reactionary pressure release valve for after the actual party of action deconstructs the roadblocks that keeps the money controlling both parties from self-replicating.
Project 2025 is not an actual policy of anyone with power.
I saw so many ads by Harris complaining about it, and that's part of how I knew she would lose: when you fight against something that isn't real, you're going to lose.
Trump and Vance will almost certainly pull strings to erode the current political system in Washington with no regard for the spirit and likely even the letter of the constitution.
It doesn't need to specifically be Harris or Biden's policies to drag them down. There's very obviously a backlash against some progressive ideology going on, and the democratic party is clearly at least partly beholden to adherents of that ideology. That's why Harris can't give obvious and clear answers to (some) simple policy questions.
Yes, but the claim was they ran on that. Fixing the problem (if it is a problem) is a lot easier, and the necessary approach to fix it very different, if you ran on something and it backfired, compared with not running on it and still losing votes over it.
[edit] I also truly wondered if that’d been a significant part of their message, and I missed it—in the age of granular ad-targeting, who knows?
I've often found this is a mistake WAY too many people make. A successful team has a failure. Often, the reaction is restructuring, big changes, ...
I try to tell people that. "You're a 10 person team. You've had some 50 successful projects before this failure. That means this justifies at most a 2% change. A 2% change in the team is about half a day change, once per month, NOT more than that".
Invariably, the whole team is changed entirely, randomly, or going with the political winds, usually with much worse quality as a result. And afterwards they do see it didn't work.
And then they respond differently: they'll no longer admit failure, because they do see that the changes were a disaster, but you apparently fix that by refusing to admit anything ever goes wrong ...
I'm different. I think every project is a failure, it's just a matter of degree. You don't succeed in projects, you minimize how bad they are. Drives people up the wall though.
This is a terrible take. Everyone wants to believe that this result will vindicate their pet peeve about the Democrats.
A lot of people want this loss to prove that Democrats should have been stronger on Gaza.
A lot of people want this loss to prove that Democrats should have rejected identity politics.
And there's a long tail of other things that people think a Democratic loss will push the Democrats towards: protectionism, isolationism, socialism, etc.
The Democrats are going to lick their wounds, crunch the numbers, and probably move towards Trump on economics. Or something else. 95% of people who are hoping that the Democrats are going to suddenly see the light on their pet issue are going to be disappointed. They aren't going to go hard left on Gaza. They aren't going to go hard right on identity politics. The loss is going to cause a whole bunch of damage, and we're going to get very little if any long-term benefit to weigh against it.
Other way around on Gaza. The US should have done more to help its ally.
The fact that Houthis have shut down shipping, and the US hasn't stopped them is absolutely shameful.
And by helping its ally more, the war would have ended quicker leaning to overall less death. Which is why a majority of Muslims actually voted for Trump.
I know this would only happen in an alternate universe, but they should be able to come out and say "ya know, we got it wrong" on certain issues, such as immigration. They will face a bit of immediate shame from pundits, but gain in the long term by removing that point of contention from the conservatives. Thus opening up a share of their voters.
To be fair to Republicans, they could say "ya know, we do believe human civilization has caused climate change and there is a government role to address it. We just disagree on the terms and mechanism for how that should work"
Most mainstream media being owned by right-wing billionaires manufacturing what is actually (mis)informing the public of Trump's decline, combined with other people only getting their "news" from randos on TikTok or podcasts, and just the general decline in critical thinking taught at schools (and lack of reading)... I don't know what can be done with these disparate realities.
I don't put blame on Harris' campaign, since it actually did discuss and put out policies to help people beyond just calling Trump a fascist and evil. That you think (or at least say you think) they didn't shows how badly their message wasn't conveyed BY the media that are the only people that can convey it.
If the local news owned by Sinclair is your station and it says only right-wing talking points, if two newspapers can have their endorsements scuttled by their billionaire owners, if podcasters like Joe Rogan can pass along Russian misinformation and facebook memes as truth, how can the Harris campaign get through to people?
But was the campaign actually passed down to voters? and did those voters willingly seek it out, since it will not be presented to them in their chosen bubbles? The entire system of billionaires blatantly criming in an election without repercussions and the media manufacturing consent silenced any chance of fair representation of what is happening and who is at fault. Like inflation being a consequence of Trump's policies and not Biden's due to inflation's inherent time lag that most people never learn about
From a game theoretical perspective the Democrat establishment is fine with this since they all support Trump anyway. They'd rather not be in power but have their policies represented in the President, than have the president but have him not do what they really want.
This is an extremely bizarre take. People just re-elected someone who tried to overthrow the government and is a complete know-nothing. It's well reported that he doesn't actually do anything during his presidency until he acts on a whim with some nonsensical action.
You claiming this is a good result from any perspective is so strange. If anything, it shows the U.S. is a lost cause and that the majority of Americans are narcissists alongside the person they just elected.
The Republicans have won by actively dumbing down and pigeonholing their constituency.
Accomplished politician wouldnt be a compliment though would it. One of the recent issues is bureaucratic bloat caused by career politicians. In that sense she would be less appealing.
In a democratic system everyone should be fair game to hold office, that’s the whole point. What you’re advocating for is aristocracy and leading to phenomena such as career politicians existing, who are leeches to productive societies.
It would be aristocracy if you had to be born into it.
Now, I'll admit that the US system of mostly only very rich people getting access to top universities is not exactly fair - but you can in principle become a politician no matter your background.
I don't think it's crazy to assume that qualifications matter. And most of the US's best presidents (such as Lincoln, both Roosevelts etc.) were highly educated and had had political careers before.
I'm aware, having taken Ancient Greek in high school, thank you very much. Meanings shift. An aristocracy is not a meritocracy and is mostly distinguished by its reliance on social status instead of actual merit.
Everyone is fair game but most often experienced leadership is what is preferred and gets elected because overall, people who have a choice don't want "just anyone" to end up as president even if it is technically open to all.
One of the worst travesties in any organization is when there are non-leaders occupying leadership positions for any reason. And that is already too common in areas where people don't have a choice.
I don't see a connection between "career politicians" and non-"productive societies". Corrupt societies can be corrupted by career politicians or a revolving door of temporary politicians.
I never said that there is a link between career politicians and unproductive societies. I said that whenever there is a productive society, there will be career politicians leeching on it.
When you can't be productive yourself, you leech off the biggest thing you can, in the hope you can go un-noticed until the parasitism has been forgotten and you can convince people you are a symbiotic life form :)
There is a difference in qualifying for having prior experience and for being born into a certain family. Trump inheriting around half a billion dollars is Aristocratic, Kamala Harris having a successful career in politics is not.
Trump's success in only partly due to his inheritance though. I'd liked it more to a charismatic religious and authoritarian leader.
I honestly expected more, especially more specifics, but I recognize I'm biased. The reason I asked, is that nobody really knows when you ask them, which is what surprises me often. You needed to send me a link as well.
Of all those, I really like the insulin one.
I guess people in America have different priorities than the accomplishments on that list.
I sent you a link for your review and reference, not because I couldn't name accomplishments. I prefer to respect the intellectual honesty of the person I speak with by providing citations for information they are unaware of.
It says she “Led the push for the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, federal worker unionization”. Federal worker unionization is very undemocratic b/c federal employees essentially blackmail voters. They become untouchable.
In most countries in the world, unionization doesn't mean "get everything you want", it means collective bargaining. It's an approach that cuts both ways, creating stable employment terms, which benefits both employer and employee.
Government-employee unions are bad for their employer, the government.
They’re particularly bad when politicians can take money from taxpayers, give it to union members, who are then forced to give it to their unions, which then turn around and donate it to the politicians’ campaigns.
The accomplished politicians seem to struggle a bit because they have a history of being terrible. It isn't like Trump came out of nowhere - it has been most of a decade now and when he won in 2016 that was on the back of backlash that had obviously been brewing for a long time. It was notable in 2016 that he had to knock out Bushes and Clintons from the presidential race who visibly couldn't wring compelling support out of their insider status. The Bush family name was more of a serious liability because of the family history of, you know, the Bush years. Trump's most memorable line of attack on Jeb Bush was making callbacks to how bad George's tenure was (which isn't entirely fair, but it does go a long way to showcasing why being an "accomplished politician" is a handicap given how badly US policy has been playing out for the last few decades).
If the US political class had a history of success then being an accomplished politician might be a tick on the report card, but in practice it seems to mean that they have sympathies to the military-industrial complex and a number of extractive lobby groups.
The Republicans didn't have anybody in 2016 or Trump wouldn't have had a chance. He stepped up to the plate even though he is the complete opposite of a lifelong Republican.
So was Hillary, so the vision of lifelong Republicans has been completely out-of-reach for almost a decade now. They had no choice but to settle for less.
I think it's been well demonstrated currently with Trump's live appearances where he really thinks he's doing the right thing all the time whether he makes very much sense or not.
Just last week alone Trump made Ronald Reagan with Alzheimer's look like an absolute genius by comparison.
They did exactly that 4 years ago and America didn't float anywhere. US state is surprisingly strong despite weird people in power. As to why old men with obvious dementia signs, who are unable to clearly reason without being on drugs (yes, both of them), are being candidates to President - that's a puzzle to me. Are those the best Americans for this work? I doubt it, so selection system does not work somewhere.
So many doomers everywhere. This is exactly the same rhetoric as in 2016. Do y'all hear yourself? America isn't going anywhere, democracy isn't dead, calm down. The world won't end, and you know it. Being so over-the-top is why democrats lost anyways.
Trump has said he won’t make the same mistake of having people like Kelly or Milley or Wray around.
Commander in Chief is an official duty of the President. With the Supreme Court ruling, is there such a thing as an illegal military order from the President anymore?
There are less guardrails in place now than were in 2016. It is dishonest to act like everything is the same.
It's weird how when a company gets acquired by Oracle, everybody here understands that it's dead day 1 but it'll still take years for people to feel the effect.
Yet when it's about a country of 400 million, there's zero concept that shit takes time.
You understand that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was greatly helped by Trump's previous presidency, for example, right?
Yes, I think a lot of Trump voters are just trying to force this to a head so we can reset and shake the bugs out of what is clearly a political system that is going off the rails.
I think it is naive to attribute this victory to accelerationists. Trump has a very clear mandate and this seems to be what the American people want now.
> The more important question, who are those people that happily vote for a convicted felon, rapist
Some people voted for him because of that.
He was found guilty on 34 counts of paying a pornstar, Many people see it a persecution not prosecution because he doesn't even know what he's guilty of. The judge allowed jurors to decide on whatever secondary charge they wanted and not even have to tell him what it is. They didn't even have to agree on a single crime, as long as they all found a one.
He denied he raped that woman (who doesn't even remember what year she was raped in) so she sued him for defamation. Jury found him not guilty of rape, but guilty of sexual assault. The judge reversed the decision saying that sexual assault is basically rape so he awarded her millions of dollars.
In both cases laws were changed specifically so he could be charged. Alvin Bragg even ran for district attorney on a platform of getting Trump.
Donald Trump ran his 2016 campaign on getting Hillary, but never actually did it. The Democrats actually prosecuted him by any means necessary.
The media people consume will never portray Trump like you are doing just now, their vision of Trump is so distorted that you can't really even tell them any of those things, they will just disregard it as nonsense.
If Hamas had not attacked Israel, trump probably would have lost. Plenty of people just didn't go out to vote this time, abstaining because they only care that Biden and Harris support Israel. Talk about cutting off their nose to spite their face.
This hypothesis doesn't pan out when looking at states that flipped Blue to Red.
The biggest reason for Trump's win is the fact that 50% of Latinos, 46% of Asians, and 20% of African Americans voted for Trump - all significant increases compared to 2020.
And the biggest reason for that flip is because of Illegal Immigration and Inflation - for legal immigrants illegal immigration is basically a big F-you for following the correct path, and inflation has had a general impact nationwide.
From the outside looking in sometimes I wonder if it's the democrats that are the ones that "have a black friend" and use minorities as props, not the republicans...
"my workplace does not allow open toed shoes" class Americans all over the political spectrum are sooooo much more sick of the foreign wars the "everyone in my workplace has some sort of college degree" class Americans think they are.
No matter how dank the memes no 3rd party meme candidate will ever win. The two big parties are just too rich and powerful and you need the support of one of them to have a legitimate chance.
Trump voters think the conviction was excessive, the rapist claim is untrue, and that he is not a bad person.
They believe he will improve the economy and thus their lives.
They did not vote spitefully against Harris, however, due to the pressure from left wing controlled law makers, media, talking heads and general vitriol from the left of their opinions... they might have voted spitefully against progressives in opposition.
I can't understand. The orange goon can't complete a sentence, hates everything, crimes everything, is basically a 300# toddler... A literal toddler would be 99% less bad. If given the choice between Hitler and Trump ... at least you know what Hitler thinks. Trump will change his mind for an extra ketchup.
A lot of people wanted more of what he has to offer. You won’t gain much by understanding why, even from his most eloquent supporter.
The best knowledge is how to benefit from this. And the topmost rule is that Trump wants to live out his life without fear of court. We may have to strike a deal that the stability of America depends on that.
He's run out of Russia, and that explains a lot. This is really a worldwide battle, but the death mostly isn't caused by bombs in most places.
It's caused by intentionally mismanaging health crises while sending healthcare to Putin. There's nothing mysterious about this. It's simple warfare, but on the terms used within the Russian regime domestically.
We've been the Zone for some time now, and the fog isn't any lighter this morning.
Yes! You're right. You should have run a stronger personality. Much stronger. Harris didn't "think big". She should have been more strident in advocating for censorship, inflation, imprisoning her political enemies, and legalizing crime. Please run these stronger personalities in every election from now on. We'd appreciate it.
It is much simpler than that. My dad watches Fox News all day nonstop. When I say all day I mean he is watching it from the time he wakes up at 6am until going to sleep and doesn’t watch anything else. It does not matter who the democrats field, Fox News will just demonize that person and their viewers will vote accordingly. He does not even agree with any traditionally conservative ideology; he is pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights, pro-union, doesn’t like tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy doesn’t agree illegal immigration is a huge problem, but he votes for Trump because he watches Fox News nonstop. The one common thread among every Trump supporter I know is Fox News.
>The one common thread among every Trump supporter I know is Fox News.
Nobody I know watches Fox News. My social circle is almost entirely current/former US military expats, so it's not easy to even access cable television outside of work, if you even work on a US military base (and not everyone does). Most people are tied into YouTube, podcasts, etc.
Mostly economically liberal, socially conservative, with graduate STEM educations or MBAs. Mostly prime working-age males or kinda close to retirement. Significant over-representation of minorities. Religiously either atheist, Catholic, or Muslim. Almost all vocally Trump-leaning or at the very least VERY anti-woke.
The anti-Trump contingent in my personal life is all older people:
(2) retired boomers, one a white Progressive guy from the Pacific Northwest, the other a black guy from Virginia, both with TDS from consumption of legacy media (NYT in the white guy's case, mainstream cable news in the black guy's case)
(2) almost-retired black women, both unmarried, one with no kids and the other a now-empty-nester with adult adopted children. Both watch a lot of US TV as well.
No, because the resources are owned by the United States regardless of how much the people like/dislike the United States, to leave the United States you have to physically leave it. You can't just announce your land is part of some other country. Sure, you could try and fight Civil War 2, but remember all the might of the US Military soldiers/weapons/intelligence/etc. belong to the United States side. You have a 2nd amendment right to form this opposing militia but you'd have to outspend the US Military using your own resources.
This would assume that there is consensus on what the "United States" is. If a significant portion of the US Military feels differently, then a civil war is inevitable. This is what basically happened in the actual American Civil War, as a number of U.S. officers and soldiers formed their own forces (under their new Confederate government) to fight against the United States.
My understanding is that the Confederacy did seize federal armories, navy yards and other military depots located in the South, which would have supplied a non-insignificant amount of small arms and canons. But most of the antebellum industrial capacity for manufacturing more was in the North, so the Union always had a strategic advantage there.
In terms of warships, the CSA did capture and convert existing Union ships in Norfolk, Virginia (despite the Union's efforts to scuttle them as they withdrew). A good number of ironclads were also constructed or purchased from England. With the remaining being commissioned and put into operations by the CSA itself during the war. Interestingly, this also included some very early submarines, which is I think the first time they were used in warfare.
That said, the CSA was never able to effectively break the Union's naval blockades, and battles by the opposing armies were far more decisive in the war's outcome. Particularly in the strategically decisive Eastern Theater of the war.
"Property of" is an abstraction quickly lost when the chips are down; there is no "Essential" property of something, and your honoring of such an idea (or lack thereof) is a direct reflection of your beliefs and values; and, more importantly, your motivations.
I think we're very nearly there, and this could be the tipping point based on how things shake out. If we take Trump et al at their word, then the US economy is going to violently shudder under the weight of unreasonable tariffs, mass deportations, tax cuts on the obscenely wealthy, and a ramming through of unpopular policies that he proclaims (absent evidence) will fix a given problem. The man is a salesman, and he's good at selling lies to the desperate.
So what happens if he goes so far that the United States loses or jeopardizes its global dominance? The same states that voted heavily for him would be the first impacted, with massive job losses and higher costs. Coastal states and cities wouldn't be too far behind, with higher costs tempered somewhat by proximity to logistics hubs, and unemployment would be more limited due to the higher concentration of jobs. That is, until our economic dominance falters, at which point our heavily-built-up services industry is likely to fracture and collapse in on itself under the weight of competition from countries like India and China.
All of which is to say that, yes, it's a potential outcome that the United States does dissolve in some fashion, as some states seek to preserve their power and economic control even as the Federal Government loses its mind.
Now then, do I personally think this is the outcome? No, not really. We lack debt to spend frivolously on deficit financing, so there goes that easy out. The stock market is not the economy, and workers will quickly realize that when stocks skyrocket and they're all laid off 2008-style, which would be bad for those with the most to gain (billionaires and Private Equity). I still think there's enough backstops in place to prevent runaway collapse and dissolution...
...although the biggest one of all is a divided Congress. If the GOP gets a trifecta (Executive, both Legislative chambers, and SCOTUS), then there's nothing stopping the full suite of plans from being implemented post-haste, at which point the music very suddenly stops and everyone realizes how screwed we are. Our prior backstops, our allied countries, cannot be depended upon with a President that is vocally supportive of Russia and while they're dealing with their own populism issues.
All in all, my read is that while things are about to get really bad, they're not likely to be maximum bad, if that makes sense. The current world order has always been fragile post-Cold War, and this might be the time for a grand realignment. It'd be a shame to lose our dominance, but no empire lasts forever.
While this seems like a fairly rapid doom and gloom scenario if you think about it in the context of a single term, one has to wonder about what happens in 4 years. He had no problem trying to subvert previous elections. With all branches of government falling in line, it seems like he'll have plenty of time to do as he pleases. So I don't think this is all that far fetched if we look at it as a decade or two process. Obviously he'll die at some point but I imagine he'd appoint a similar successor.
But Americans knew this because of Jan 6, so it's what we deserve I guess.
The big thing to remember is the election isn't over. I'm not talking about the president, but the house. Most of the things on the list of actions in the article, or list of concerns in the comments, will require congress to enact. We could still end up with a split congress. Even narrow majorities should imped the most extreme items. In my opinion, narrow majorities or a split is beneficial. It helps keep stuff from being rammed though without real thought or debate.
The big picture still is what it is. Americans want a king.
You can get into the more nuanced weeds and there is plenty more nuance there, but the overarching dynamic is people made a tradeoff, and they chose a king.
I think that Harris was a very poor choice of a candidate. I have no way to know this, but I like to imagine that a better Dem candidate would have led to a different president.
Between covid economic recovery and a war that dramatically and suddenly increased gas prices, I don't know what candidate would've done anything to turn the ship around. On election day, google search trends for "did biden drop out" had a massive spike. I think we consistently and considerably underestimate how tuned out the average voter is. Especially the independents that are the most likely to answer that they've made up their minds in the past 24 hours. It really does just come down to a vibe check for some of the most important swing voters
If they had had a serious conversation and a primary, maybe they could have distanced themselves from Biden? I doubt it though, too much party loyalty to admit to the failures of the incumbent.
Who else could they have possibly picked on such a short notice? I think, it made sense at the time - now, of course, we can all Monday morning quarterback.
Back in the spring, I had a long conversation with my father (a lifelong Democrat whose only vote in a presidential contest that wasn't for the Democrat candidate was for John Anderson in 1980) about Biden's chances against Trump. He insisted that Biden made the right choice to run because nobody else seemed like they would have a good chance against him, but I argued that this was because Biden choosing to run again essentially made it impossible for anyone else to make a serious attempt at it, and that the best thing would have been for him to announce within the first couple years of his term that he wouldn't be running for reelection, which would have given other candidates a chance to make a case. I still think that I was right about this; anyone competent enough to be a worthy candidate in the general election would know that they'd have no chance at winning the nomination against Biden running as an incumbent, even if they'd have a better chance at winning the general election. Anyone reasonable who was concerned with Trump winning had no incentive to enter a contest they couldn't win and risk being perceived (perhaps correctly) as a spoiler who hurt Biden's chances, so the smartest thing for them to do both for themselves and the country would be to hide their ambitions until next time and hope for the best.
I know that I've probably been wrong ten times for every time that I've been right about something like this, but that didn't make it any easier to watch the last six or seven months. You're correct that there was nothing else anyone could have done to avoid the train wreck by the time Biden withdrew because the only way to avert it would have been to change speeds way back before we got to the sharp curve. The worst part is that I don't even think that Harris would have necessarily been a bad candidate if she had been given a proper chance from the start; there are articles as far back as early 2022 mentioning that her public appeal was hurt by the Biden administration tying her to issues like immigration and election reform. At minimum, ignoring the harm to her future electability showed extremely poor foresight, and it's not hard to imagine that it went beyond negligence to the point of outright sabotage of someone viewed as a potential threat.
It’s very unlikely that he would deliberately kneecap her. But I agree with you…that it was too late by the time he dropped out, the electorate had already made its mind.
In the end, I think his policies turned out to be great. But he didn’t have the skills to capitalize on the gains, to seize them and point to them as “wins”. Instead we often saw a somewhat slow, very old but good natured grandpa who was clearly not fully present all the time.
The policy on Gaza though, that made 0 sense. He had the power to bully Netanyahu into stepping back but consistently took no action. Solving that crisis would have been HUGE for reelection, keeping them festering only contributed to the feeling of chaos.
For sure. I am asking who could they have picked after Biden's performance at the debates? E.g. after the damage was done. Kamala was probably the most prominent of all democrats at the time. The alternative would have been some no name senator or Hillary.
Shout out to dang for all the hard work at moderating he does--there's going to be a lot of flagged comments to slog through in the coming days if this thread is any indication
Also shout out to HN for fixing whatever it was that caused threads as large as this to slow down the whole of HN to the point where loading any thread would take forever.
Believe it or not, the hardest part right now is Javascript's lack of tail recursion. The browser extension I rely on for moderation (written in Arc and transpiled to JS) is stack-overflowing on this thread because there are so many comments.
Not sure whether it's more efficient to fix these errors first, or just power through moderating the thread manually, but boy does the latter suck.
The hardest part of moderating a big, high-traffic, heated political thread being JavaScript's lack of tail recursion is the most HN thing I've ever seen.
Maybe because of how good he is at moderation, I would say that this seems to be the least awful one of these threads that we've had during the Trump era.
That's because the US west coast is just waking up and sitting down at their computers right about now. The next few hours will undoubtedly be, um, challenging for the moderators.
Apparently claiming the other side is worse in Gaza issue is not enough. Democratic voters simply refuse to turn out in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin.
Not really everywhere but most of the eastern half of the US. The popular vote should narrow to within 2 million votes. California still owes us over 7 million votes, mostly from blue cities. That alone should net Harris almost 3 million
What do you mean by worse? It's a hypothetical versus a very real year long conflict that killed tens of thousands, with unwavering support from Biden ( in terms of actual material support). They even openly support the invasion of Lebanon, something that even other Israeli allies seem to be much less enthusiastic about.
Saying that it would be worse with the other side is absolutely meaningless, no other administration (red or blue) let something like this go on for a year and even expand to another invasion down the line.
Eh Trump doesn't care at all about Palestinian lives, nor do his followers, meaning he'd be able to give Netanyahu a carte blanche and trade it for political favours, and he's got the personality to do so.
From Israeli intelligence sources itself, it was noted that the Hamas attacks were planned in part as a response to the abraham accords under trump (Israeli/Saudi appeasement and the movement of the US embassy to Jerusalem) which Hamas warned against.
Third, Trump literally ensured the US was the first country on the planet to recognize Israel's domain over the Golan Heights, which is internationally viewed as annexed land. And it's likely further annexations will be recognised as well, with no recourse, leading to the gradual decline of the Palestinian political project to the point that it ceases to be an issue (e.g. look at US history, its 300 million non-native Americans are here to stay, it's a political non-issue)
So yes, Trump is worse. Not only did his middle-east policy help cause the escalations in the first place, recognize Israel's annexations, Israel would be even more free to run wild in Palestine than before.
It is worse. Just look at how happy Netanyahu is with the Trump victory is all you need to know.
How many palestinians died during the Trump administration? More importantly, what did Biden do that didn't amount to full Israeli support? Like, you are again arguing about more abstract stuff, whereas no matter what Biden or Trump say, the reality is that Israel has been left to do whatever it wants, with full american material, for a year now. That's almost unprecedented and that's my entire point.
And even if we go by what they say instead of what they do and did, Trump at least keeps hammering the point that the war will need to stop as soon as possible. The Biden administration has openly supported the Israeli escalation in Lebanon very recently. And has shown absolutely no care for putting an end to this (other countries like France for example, supported Israel in Gaza but openly condemned what happened in Lebanon).
Again, Trump is a lot of things, but he does not seem to like war. Biden on the other hand seems rather unbothered, and tries to pretend to care while providing almost the entirety of the munitions that Israel has been using to genocide Gaza and invade Lebanon. But at least he doesn't recognize more Israeli annexations I guess (not that he ever condemned the settlements or did anything against the current settlements either, but hey he's just the president, not someone with power to do something about it right?).
So to see the mental gymnastics that Democrats do to openly support Biden while also sweeping under the rug the dire consequences of his foreign policy behind 'both sides would do it' is extremely off-putting. The side that's doing it right now is the side that they are actively openly supporting! I guess I am biased as I have close friends that had to flee from their homes and had their entire family properties obliterated in Gaza but still.
Ps: Netanyahu reacted to Biden's victory in a rather similar way, so what would that mean ?
I'm not interested in arguing in defense of Biden because I can't and I won't.
What I will do is argue that Trump would've been even worse. What I will do is again, reiterate, that the current violence is in part a direct result of Trump's actions. For one in Saudi/Israeli appeasement, the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognising Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, the recognition of annexed lands. We know this to be true. These are massive and likely irrevocable steps in US policy that slowly will end the idea of a Palestinian state and turn them into a native-american minority in someone else's state.
Further, we know that Netanyahu is in power because of Trump's support. Trump was famously pissed at Netanyahu for congratulating Biden indeed on his victory, noting he recognised the Golan Heights as Israeli land during the election which massively helped his win. These guys are doing each other favours. There is absolutely no reason to suspect Trump would've restricted Israel more than Biden. Trump doesn't care nor do his followers. Trump has done things Biden hasn't, and he's likely to do more.
> Trump at least keeps hammering the point that the war will need to stop as soon as possible.
Biden has been doing the same for more than a year now, only its toothless. Trump may stop the war but only by giving Israel exactly what it wants. Do you think he's going to use his credits for a Palestinian cause, for what benefit to him? Due to his own ethical standard? Don't make me laugh.
Again, not defending Biden, but Trump simply is worse for Palestinians. I don't think he would've protected Palestinian lives any more, but rather set the scene for more Israeli support, more annexations, more military aid, and more future escalations. Israel has had lots of plans that didn't get pushed through (e.g. pushing Gazans into Egypt and taking Gaza as part of Israel) that might well be a reality under Trump.
> Ps: Netanyahu reacted to Biden's victory in a rather similar way, so what would that mean ?
No. He was the literally the first leader in the world to congratulate trump. For Biden it was extremely late, even 12 hours after the US media had called the election. He didn't refer to Biden as president-elect and in the immediate subsequent tweet went on to thank Trump for all that he had done. Now that Trump won again he called it a great victory and the greatest comeback ever with exclamation marks. It's not a regular political message 'congratulate the new guy and start up diplomatic courtesies', it's happiness. His cabinet celebrated the victory. 2/3rds of Israeli's support Trump. This is not for nothing.
I was told Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and Ethel Cain would deliver this for the Dems months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020940 and that Musk's actions wouldn't matter.
I don't understand what this is, have you been saving that link for 3 months so that you could say I-told-you-so to a comment that wasn't directed at you and which you didn't reply to at the time?
I think it would. Idaho proposed an amendment to its constitution this election which proposed to replace closed primaries with an open primary with ranked choice voting (top 4 move onto general elections).
Sadly, it's looking like the republicans campaign to shoot it down succeeded because it would have threatened their grip on the state by allowing democrats and independents to temper their candidates to more moderate picks
> No we don't need to change the system on the basis that it leads to outcomes you want.
I definitely agree with that view. But maybe we could/should change the system on the basis that "the majority does not agree that the system is working".
While measuring that is hard since you would always tend to find that the system is working if it favours the candidate you like; there still is a significant number of people both left and right leaning that agree that the bi partisan winner-takes all voting system is fundamentally broken.
If only for the fact that a president can ben elected by winning less voices than his opponent, thereby showing that some votes are worth more than others.
The system that your "we" (US voters) has is flawed (as all voting systems are) in a greater way than variations of ranked voting are.
It's doomed via repeated iterations to fall prey to variations of Hotelling's law - the evolving of two parties seeking to 'capture' the First Past the Post votes of greatest majority while also directly representing the least (non representive two party politics).
This wasn't as the US founders intended, many expressed an extreme distaste for party politics and envisioned a congress with factions in proportion to the views of the greater population that bargained and dealed within themselves to find comprimises acceptable to most via robust debate.
Instead the US has landed in a wasteland of little to no choice for the public at large.
It's a poor system after 400 years of growth, stagnation wasn't seen by the founders as the way of the future, rather expressly as the hallmark of doom and eventual depotism (to Benjiman Franklin at least who was quite explicit on this).
Personally, I think it was the Joe Rogan podcasts (they got an insane number of views). I figured Trump would win the Electoral College votes, but I was surprised when Trump also won the popular vote.
Well, what I saw was the culmination of a multi generation plan by wealthy and organized far right activists to accomplish this result or one similar to it. I'm not saying twitter alone accomplished that, I'm saying musk bought it in order to make it part of that project.
Maybe. I would argue that while he is fully on board the trump train now, he was not a few years ago. When you are harshly criticized for a few unorthodox views, it’s not surprising you embrace those treating you legitimately.
No organized right-wing group tipped the scales in this election. Aside from the Democrats' weak presidential candidate and last-minute substitution, arrogant and clearly biased big media organizations annoyed people enough to turn out and vote against what they were selling.
Foreign policy under Trump will generally be isolationist.
- US out of NATO? Trump will at least threaten that. The larger European countries are currently weak militarily by historical standards. There does not seem to be enough will in Europe to spend at US levels, outside of the countries on the front line, such as Poland and Finland.
- Ukraine war: Heavy US support for Ukraine probably stops. Whether Ukraine surrenders is up to Ukraine.
Ukraine can fight on, but won't win much.
Trump will meet with Putin and will give Putin much of what he asks for.
- Israel's wars: US support continues.
- China vs. Taiwan: Reduced support for Taiwan. China starts treating the area inside the nine lines as their own lake, and no US Navy craft go there. Pressure on Taiwan increases. China will attempt to get Taiwan to cave without actually invading. A blockade is possible.
- Trade with China: heavy protectionism on the US side. Few other countries will go along. Overall, China's influence in the world will increase.
- China's influence in South America will continue to increase. This isn't noticed much in the US, but it's big. South America now trades more with China than with the US. China controls about 40 ports in South America. The US had military bases around the world. China builds ports.
The EU would have to make some very serious budgeting changes if they wanted to fill that void. A bunch of EU politicians would need to make the case for deep budget cuts, tax increases, war bonds, or some combination of those.
I just want to mention that EU has around €200 billion in frozen Russian assets. On top of that the various countries will contribute.
Even if it turned out that Trump has some backroom deal with Putin, and pushes hard for Ukraine to surrender - he'd be an absolute fool to not take that kind of money, and sell arms to European allies, and Ukraine.
That's money in the pocket for the US arms industry.
Why don't they? Isolationist USA is not ideal, but USA spending way more defending Ukraine than the combined EU is also stupid. Russia is literally knocking on their doorsteps, they should be the first to push back.
I really hope too. If Taiwan falls, what message does it send to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines? Are the US willing to lose their influence there and give a free pass to China?
This tracks with some of the models we have been dealing with in the defense industry.
Big reason why a lot of our national security types did not want to see Trump reelected.
I don’t think your average US citizen realizes how expensive and difficult things are going to get as US global influence eventually hits an “unrecoverable dive”
There are American right-wing commentators who are praising "de-dollarization" and the rise of BRICS. It's a combination of having half your lifesavings in crypto and letting anti-LGBT/immigrant identity politics override the geopolitical interests of your own country.
US global influence, at least militarily, hit an all-time low when Biden twice said to Iran "don't", then Iran did, and Biden did not respond. Decades of investing in a Navy that is literally one of the most expensive enterprises in human history have been eroded as Biden demonstrated to the US's enemies that American deterrence means literally nothing.
I see, and yes I agree. I should have said "all time low since the second world war". I did carefully state "at least militarily".
The point is that US enemies are now openly mocking the US for stating "don't" so blazingly, then doing nothing. They see that the US will not use real force, so they openly defy the US now.
I doubt we see the same isolationism w.r.t. China, who remain Trump's main bogeyman (other than immigrants). The policy will probably make less sense, since as you mentioned his tariffs and transactional diplomacy may confound US efforts to build an anti-China alliance in the Pacific.
It would probably be a poor move for China to blockade Taiwan (an act of war). If the US decides to intervene, it would be very painful for China without a pre-emptive strike on US bases in the region. For all the talk of Trump as an anti-war candidate, he didn't seem to say no to many military strikes as POTUS, and this hypothetical would represent the US' best possible entry into a war over Taiwan.
China has repeatedly demonstrated 2 things WRT Taiwan. They're patient and they're serious about their red lines.
I can't recall a single instance where China announced anything about Taiwan that wasn't reactive. They just keep repeating the "one China" policy.
Their official stance is that there's no need to invade Taiwan because Taiwan is already part of China and they reserve the right to use force to enforce their territorial integrity.
The practical manifestation of that policy has been that China and the US both get to pretend that their view on Taiwan is the reality and nobody will do anything if the other side doesn't rock the boat.
Their red line is a formal declaration of independence by Taiwan. As near as I can tell, all but one of their "military exercises" has been in response to actions that get close to that line in diplomatic terms https://globaltaiwan.org/2024/10/chinas-military-exercises-a...
During many of those exercises effectively blockaded Taiwan. They did that for a week after Pelosi's visit and they experienced no pain in response.
I draw 3 conclusions from these observations:
1) China will not invade Taiwan without some external stimulus
2) China is prepared to blockade Taiwan in the event of any attempts at secession
3) China has established that secessionist behavior is casus belli for a blockade in the eyes of the international community
This means US soldiers dying in Iran if the escalation continues. I’d hardly call that “generally isolationist”.
Israel has no chance of fighting Iran without US troops. Trump received a hefty amount of Zionist money this time around (Bill Ackman swinging right is crazy) and is cozy with pompeo et al. The writing is on the wall.
Biden's Chips Act attempts to onshore chip production, arguably so that we wouldn't have to protect Taiwan in the future (or mitigate against it's eventual capture). However, were Trump to allow China to take Taiwan it would make him look incredibly weak - he won't do that.
If you can point to any video from the last several months where he comes across as charismatic, I'd be genuinely interested to see it. Maybe I've lost touch with what charisma is.
He was fairly down to earth on the Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz podcasts. I'm not saying everything he said was true but the tone of the conversations was fairly different from how he conducts himself at other moments.
He seems to have realized lately that it's a better idea to take his "unhinged" persona mask off in one-on-one interactions like in podcasts or personal interviews. He wasn't like this before, a lot of his interviews used to be disastrous.
Nonsense. I've met her, she's very intelligent. The problem is that she thinks and talks like a lawyer and it rubs a lot of people the wrong way, so she is constantly trying to maintain a 'relatable!' public filter so she doesn't get called a bitch.
I mean, this just isn't true. She's extremely educated and well-spoken. Generally I think the attacks on her intelligence come from her being a black woman - I have doubts anyone would question her high qualifications if she was a white man.
EDIT: If you're going to downvote me I expect at least some explanation of how she is uneducated, unqualified, or not articulate. I have yet to see any, from anyone, which unfortunately leaves me no choice but to make unfavorable assumptions.
If your opinion is not fueled by racism or sexism, that should be extraordinarily easy to prove, and you should be motivated to do so.
What word salad? You can't just make things up. Even republicans can admit that she is pretty well-spoken. Lying about her doesn't make you look better, it actually makes you look worse.
First off, I am perfectly able to understand what she means. Perhaps it was not the most eloquent way to put it, but I understood every word and the sentence made sense.
Secondly, I can match your examples 1000 to 1 of times she was very well-spoken. One example, one in which she does not stutter or mispronounce any words, means nothing. I know you know it means nothing. She has spoken so, so, so many times throughout her career.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Something I've been wondering lately is how big of a blind spot I have from being habitually online. Like, I'll read the news, and I'll read political discussions on HN and r/politics and r/conservative and Twitter, and I'll try to get a sense of what everyone is thinking, but unfortunately I don't think that's possible. The posters on these sites all have one thing in common: they're into politics and current events.
Having a chance to talk to more people in meatspace this year, it was a surprise to find out how many people have only a passing interest in politics, but still vote. Like, the average user here probably reads 5+ news articles a day, but there are plenty of people IRL that will read one a month, or maybe just skim a headline. They don't really keep up-to-date with the race. They mostly vote by feel and pragmaticism.
People always talk about "shy" Trump voters, but what makes me more curious are voters that match the description above. If you put someone in a voting booth who isn't interested by news, who do they vote for? I mean, Trump has a lot of surface-level qualities - he's a tall, confident white man who's a successful boss of business and an anti-establishment outsider - and maybe that's enough to capture this demographic.
I live in rural Illinois. Surrounded by people west coast elites would consider "simple". They aren't voting for a candidate because he's tall and confident.
They have 401ks. Own small businesses. Have Mortgages. Send their kids to public schools. Budget for their families. Hell, even farmers are trading commodities and are very familiar with the markets. There are so many legitimate factors that go into who they vote for.
In liberal strongholds (like SF, where I live), many conservatives will hide their political views for fear of social alienation. I've experienced this directly, when someone I'd recently met sort of sheepishly/obliquely brought up that they supported Trump. That fear is warranted: I really had less interest in developing a closer friendship with that person after learning that. It was especially jarring to me that this person was a non-white woman, and I just cannot understand how someone can support someone whose rhetoric demeans her on two axes.
I expect the same happens in conservative strongholds too, with liberals self-censoring. I know I wouldn't be comfortable openly discussing my (leftist) political views in, say, suburban Texas.
No...you get ostracized or cancelled in many social circles for indicating that you might support Trump or Republican policies. Even mild ostracization would make people hesitate to voice their opinions, never mind the level it is currently.
This is, largely, because a lot of republicans have a difficult time expressing their views without using tools like racism and misogyny.
Just take a look at the Trump rallies. Even if you agree with 100% of Trump's policies, look at how he talks about women. Could you repeat what he says in the workplace? No, you'd get fired. Not for being republican, but for sexual harassment.
If you were able to support anti-immigration policies without calling entire classes of people "garbage", then maybe people wouldn't get mad at you. But for a lot of republicans, they just can't do that. They don't know how to word their policy support without saying something incredibly offensive.
Or, for example, it's one thing if you're pro-life. But a lot of republicans will use words like "slut" and "whore", and even President Trump wants to "punish women". Again, this just isn't acceptable speech in most social situations.
Until your average republican and, hell, our president, figure out how to address these topics without being offensive, people will get offended.
Of course she doesn't. But, can she express that without saying it in a way that says "I hate immigrants"?
This is what I'm pointing out. Having republican beliefs is fine. Can republicans voice those beliefs without bigotry? Often no. For Trump, certainly not. For many, they can't either.
If you just say "Trump addresses immigrant better", then okay. If you say "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, we have to clean up our country" then... yeah you're getting pulled into HR.
the men in your life are dishonest with you. You will never know what people really think (and no one will be able to explain why to you because you won’t hear them)
I absolutely hear them, but they're incapable of voicing their beliefs without bigotry.
You can say, for example, that there are challenges to gender-neutral bathrooms. Okay that's fine. You can't say "those dirty pervy <slurs> are molesting our little girls!". Do you see how that's now bigotry?
How many republicans are able to do 1 without ever touching 2? Very, very few. Certainly Trump can't, and Cruz can't either. If those are your role models then it's no wonder you can't express your beliefs.
I really think this conventional wisdom is drastically overblown. Especially in places like this, which are San Francisco liberal adjacent.
Yes, it is not surprising that people who are in the minority in a place with a strong majority viewpoint are less excited to rock the boat. But very few places are like San Francisco.
You were respectably drifting away from your elitism in the first two paragraphs.
Then the last paragraph shows you have a long way to go.
> If you put someone in a voting booth who isn't interested by news, who do they vote for? I mean, Trump has a lot of surface-level qualities - he's a tall, confident white man who's a successful boss of business and an anti-establishment outsider - and maybe that's enough to capture this demographic.
I live in a rural working class region. I have beers with these guys all the time. They're my best friends and I'm the odd coder guy that works from home.
They do not care about the surface level qualities, besides the fact that he's hilarious. They might not read articles but they listen to podcasts a lot on their commutes at 4AM in the morning.
They don't want war with Russia, they're pissed about the COVID stuff, and they aren't happy with the price of gas.
> I live in a rural working class region. I have beers with these guys all the time. They're my best friends and I'm the odd coder guy that works from home.
This is what America needs more of — people from different worlds just having beers together, and realizing that we’re all normal people trying to get by.
Do you know of anyone who can articulate a compelling case of why Trump would make a good president? I’m left-leaning but I want to understand where others are coming from.
I tried to make one earlier. I also consider myself left-leaning.
1. Don't want war with Russia. Trump's presidency was relatively low-war. He's also expressed a great desire to end the Ukraine conflict. If the Donbas and Crimea is the price of avoiding Nuclear war, I'm on board. The moment that switched me to deciding on Trump was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala.
2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
3. Illegal immigration. I lived in South America for 4 years. My wife is Colombian, we just moved back to the States. Legally. It was a long and arduous process to come in legally. That should be made easier (something Musk at least has espoused) and coming in illegally should be made harder. I know quite a few illegal immigrants and they are being abused by the urban elite to build their summer homes. They're not living a better life and they're stuck here.
4. Federal bureaucracy. The federal bureaucracy has become a parasite on our progress. Just look at what's happening with SpaceX. This ties in with the immigration thing. The problems we have with immigration are actually that the lazy and corrupt bureaucracy takes years to process something that should take 2 hours. (and does! even in "third world" countries like Colombia)
5. Trust. Everyone who hates Trump likes to talk about how much he makes stuff up. But he's authentic. Meaning he rarely reads from a script. He talks off the cuff. He's not controlled. I'm tired of having politicians that basically hate half the country and think we're dumb because we don't like to listen to their corpo-bureaucrat speeches
> Donbas and Crimea is the price of avoiding Nuclear war
On the contrary, the risk of nuclear war increases when Putin gets Donbas and Crimea. Because what he wants next will be even more valuable to nations with nukes.
Appeasing sounds great but at some point you run out of other people's countries.
The Neville Chamberlain comparison has been used to involve us in every major war since WWII and literally all of them turned out to be total disasters.
Russia is gettin North Korean troops to fight for them because they are losing so bad, but Russia is also an aggressive superpower hell-bent on invading even more countries with far better defenses than Ukraine.
This isn't accounting for Russia's disastrous demographics problem. The biggest reason they are moving so slowly is because they can build new artillery, but are demographically forced to do everything they can to minimize casualties.
It also isn't accounting for Russia trying to get a permanent peace deal 2 months into the conflict. That's not the behavior of a country bent on conquest.
Finally, I can't take people seriously when they are basically asserting that Russia believed they could take over all of Eastern Europe with just ~200,000 troops. When Ukraine changed from regime toppling to an actual war, Russia was caught with their pants down. They had to hire Wagner and draft prisoners to buy time to start pushing soldiers through training. If they'd been planning some large invasion campaign, they would have started serious troop training a handful of years prior and have millions of already-trained troops.
It also isn't accounting for Russia trying to get a permanent peace deal 2 months into the conflict. That's not the behavior of a country bent on conquest.
When invading powers think they've prevailed and have their prey over their knee, and attempt to seal their conquest with a treaty -- they always call it a "peace deal".
It's because it's not based on fact. These people (rightly so) hate Putin. But just because you hate Putin does not mean he is capable or intending to be Hitler.
Same actually goes for Trump actually. Just because you don't like the guy doesn't mean he's literally Hitler.
Putin himself is already tired of the war. He just doesn't see a way out where he can save the face. He wanted it to be a 3 day campaign, remember? I have doubts Putin is eager to start Ukraine War 2.0
Russia wants a few years of respite, ideally without sanctions and with the Ukraine military stripped to the studs, so that its own military can regroup and finish the job in a few years. Once that happens, the rest of Eastern Europe will be next and the Ukrainians will be first in the meat wave attacks, just like their compatriots from Eastern Donbass in 2022 (it has been occupied by Russia since 2014 and by now the towns there are nearly void of male population).
They literally showed them during the first days of the war.
There was a press conference where they accidentally showed a diagram with arrows continuing through Ukraine into Transnistria, which is Moldova's equivalent of the Donbass.
You have to be very ignorant of geopolitics to think that there aren't more countries like Ukraine that Russia would like to return to their empire.
Some might join voluntarily but many -- like Kazakhstan -- won't without a fight. Unlike Ukraine, most of the others are not conveniently next to Europe and hence will be impractical for western nations to support.
After Ukraine falls, Moldova is next, and then the various -stans will be rolled up in quick succession. This will create a Soviet Union 2.0, which will be a net positive for Russia, and a mixed bag for the rest of the world. It'll likely be a net negative for Europe, which is why they're supporting Ukraine now.
I literally said if he takes Donbas and Crimea, yes that's worth it. You've failed to present any evidence he could take anything else except Transnistria which has already been defacto independent and considered under Russian occupation since 2022.
What do they care about, then? I have no connection with people like you're describing, so anything you can say would be interesting to hear. My understanding is based on the news is the economy, and gun control.
Sure. They care about most of the stuff people have cared about for thousands of years.
They want to grow their families, low prices, government to stay out of their business. They want to grow their side jobs, like contracting or excavating or HVAC. They distrust smarty-pants paper pushers. They work side-by-side with a sudden increase of illegal immigrants.
None of this is simply surface level, at least not more so than any other human being. We're all just humans bro.
Pretty much the entire reason I stopped being a loyal democrat. It’s hard to call the other team a bunch of fadcists when your own party set up hotlines to dime out your neighbors for having a picnic in their backyard. Or close your kids school for two years. Or destroy your community by shutting everything down (except protests, but only for certain topics). Or threatening your job unless you take a medical procedure. Etc…
And let’s not forget the massive economic damage caused by all that. This election is basically the result of democrats absolutely horrible covid policies.
This election is honestly vindicating. At least I can know I’m not going crazy when I scratch my head about the massive double speak from democrats. Forgive me for speaking so crude but my former “tribe” flushed their entire set of values down the toilet and went all in on Covid.
Bodily choice? Nope. Get a shot or loose your job.
Deaf or have language issues? Hope you enjoy not being able to read lips. Fuck you though. Only Covid mattered.
Education? Nope. Close schools for two years. Prevent kids from going to the only sanctuary they have from abusive care givers. Fuck kids. Only Covid mattered.
99%? Nope. Transfer massive amounts of wealth from poor to rich. But hey at least I’m privileged enough I can work from home.
Small business? Nope. Close small businesses and celebrate ordering all your shit on Amazon (to be delivered by poor working class, expendable delivery people so you can stay comfortably isolated working from home at your large house and not get exposed to those deadly deadly Covid germs)
Science? Nope. Almost none of the covid interventions had any science supporting them. We were literally running an uncontrolled experiment that nobody consented to.
Data? Nope. We will actively suppress people who take public data showing Covid isn’t as bad as portrayed. Let’s also treat deaths with and from COVID as the same.
Elderly care? Nope. Lock them in their care home and let them die completely alone. But hey, zoom calls, right? Oh yeah and when grandma dies, no funeral for him! Only George Floyd can have a funeral.
Minority’s? Fuck them. Only Covid matters
Community? Close it all down. Fuck them. Only Covid matters.
Anti-authority? Naw. Call this 800 number and dime out your neighbors BBQ. Cheer on when the police arrest somebody for sitting on a park bench or going onto the beach. Cheer on authorities towing cars parked at trail heads. Cheer on people getting fired for not electing a medical procedure.
Naw… these assholes deserve the loss. They brought it on themselves when they sold their souls to politically driven covid hysteria.
It blew mind how so many people I thought were in “my tribe” could so rapidly turn against virtually every single value I thought we shared. The real moral is fuck tribalism and if you are scratching your head wondering why Harris lost. This is why.
Agreed down the line. My parents are actually Deaf and had a tough time.
When COVID happened in March 2020, I talked to my Trump supporting cousin and she said it was being blown out of proportion because there was an election coming up.
I dismissed it and even expected it from the Trump side to say that.
But now I realize they were totally right.
It just goes to show that party politics has nothing to do with values- just does my tribe have power or not.
Glad to see there are some of us that still care about these basic American values, and willing to change our minds in defense of these values.
I didn't intend for my post to be about rural vs urban, or smart vs dumb. The point I was trying to make was that some people just aren't interested, no matter their background. You can find these people everywhere, which might explain why Trump gained in almost every county this election, even urban ones.
It's a spectrum of course. The friends you describe sound like they fall somewhere in the middle of caring about politics vs not. My point of discussion is on the people at the low end, as these are likely to swing. People past a certain threshold of attachment have had their votes locked in for years.
No, my friends don't care about politics except that some of them went to vote.
If you went to vote you obviously care about politics at least a little. The idea Trump won because people don't care about politics but then went and voted for him is inherently self contradictory.
That they're simply "attached" to him because he's tall or whatever is obviously elitist and it's exactly this mentality that repulses the people who voted for him, ie the majority of the country.
Not wanting gas to be expensive, without knowing literally anything about why gas might cost more, is about as surface level as you can get.
What happened with covid? Trump was a complete clown, but they still support him? Sounds again, very, very surface level.
You say they don't care about his height, or his gender maybe, or his race, but if he were a short female minority, that would 100% affect their opinion, even if they didn't understand it or wouldn't admit it. Very surface level no?
I agree, except we're more like 80 years into elites calling everyone else stupid.
Your first sentence is based, if you can't see how following a couple of simple talking points like "herp derp gas is to spensive" isn't anything but surface level, you're actually stupid, because I'm telling you, there is a shitload more to gas than it coming out of the pump at a price someone wants it to be. You can't just vote for cheaper gas, trump isn't an oil well.
I understand you think everyone who voted for Trump is stupid. But it's simply not true.
Also price of gas isn't the only things I mentioned. You hilariously omitted war with Russia, and all the other plausible reasons one might vote for Trump, like making illegal immigration harder than legal immigration, reducing bureaucracy, wanting to cut red tape to go to Mars, lower taxes.
You could assert all these things are somehow superficial, but that doesn't make it true.
I didn't say that at all, I was responding to a commenter talking about their particular friends, who they claimed weren't voting on shallow premises, when the examples they provided were absolutely as shallow as they were trying to claim they weren't.
You went off topic and started defending all trump voters.
It does seem like Russia will continue to push west once they take Ukraine. At this point it seems like this is almost inevitable without US support.
We have a lot of Ukrainian people in Canada and they are mortified by this event. To them, US support was a lifeline. Some friends were literally crying over this turn of events because they’re terrified for their family back home.
If Russia takes Ukraine and is emboldened to continue west, how will this impact the USA? Will you want to remain uninvolved and isolated? Does it really seem safe to allow this to continue?
Or do you think nothing much will happen and this hand wringing is unnecessary? Or perhaps that Russia won’t move further west, or it’s fine that they might?
It strikes me that a lot of Trump’s policy is that of a remarkably uninformed person who struggles to connect dots and anticipate the results of these actions.
Russia invaded Ukraine with ~170,000 troops. When it turned into an actual war instead of a quick regime change, they had to hire Wagner and draft prisoners until they could train up troops to send.
Do you seriously think Russia was going to be able to attack another country if they took over Ukraine? 170,000 wouldn't even be enough to actually hold on to Ukraine (in Kosovo, we needed 1 soldier for every 34 people to preserve peace, that would be over 1 million Russian soldiers in Ukraine to occupy it).
This assertion simply doesn't make any sense to me.
> Or do you think nothing much will happen and this hand wringing is unnecessary?
This. The Neville Chamberlain comparison has been used to involve us in every major war since WWII and literally all of them turned out to be total disasters.
Epstein said it of trump, he is good at real estate and otherwise a complete moron. He said he can't think ahead what might happen with any issue, and if you've been watching him, that should be pretty obvious.
That's why this is so dangerous, he's a con man, and everyone supporting him has bought into the con, because I never see any trump supporter posting a clause that says they will stop supporting him the moment he crosses line x, they just support literally anything he does or will do.
Not an American, not a Trump fan - he grosses me out a bit.
But I've come to the realization that both sides have an ugly component that is winning out on online forums. It's the classic tale of the vocal minority controlling the narrative.
So to answer your question, being habitually online, and using that as a basis for your opinions on the world will very much make you vulnerable to a serious blind spot.
The amount of shit-flinging on Reddit, from both sides, is shocking to me as a non-American. That people can espouse so much hate towards their literal neighbours is unreal to me. This country is so divided that I'm not sure how things will be fixed soon. Online has become such a cesspool that it's not possible to sit around the same fire any more.
I like to think that the majority of people are waaaay more moderate than what you might think from looking at social media. And I would encourage anyone to try and interact with more people in meatspace. Don't try and convince anyone of anything, but try to understand why they feel the way they feel, and have some goddamn empathy.
I blame two things for our current situation:
1. Social Media. In hindsight it makes perfect sense, but polarizing content will generate more engagement, and since engagement is a primary KPI for many platforms, that is what the Algorithms will select for naturally. It's a positive feedback loop, that resulted in people defacing their neighbours front-yard political posters, and then smugly posting about it on social media. Because of course that's how you'll convince them to vote for the other party.
2. Two party system: I like eating meat, and I would like to continue doing so if I can. But I also care for the protection of animals and sustainable utilisation of resources. But because meat is part of the Carnivore party's platform, and everything else is part of the Herbivore party's platform. People might support more worker's rights, but now in order to get that they must also be anti abortion. It's a broken system and it breeds deep deep divisions.
The divide is real and very noticeable in meat-space, not just online. This is also happening in the rest of the western world, and has been brewing not just since the Internet but since WWII.
There was a study done on bipartisanship in the US senate, where senators were mapped into a 2D space and pulled together slightly if they voted together, and pushed apart if they voted against each other. 50 years ago the two parties were mixed together, then slowly but surely drifted apart. The animation over the years was like watching cell division. There's now only a couple of senators left in the centre, everyone else is far apart in two blobs.
I have zero in common with people that make their hatred of transgender people a substantial part of their politics -- but have never talked to one and have never been influenced by one in any way.
It's like talking to an alien species that singles out green eyes. Not blue, not brown, just green, but with a seething hatred that goes beyond anything I have ever felt. "You need to also hate the green-eyes or you're bad." is not something I can wrap my head around. Not now, not ever.
The Internet has nothing to do with me feeling this way about green-eye-haters.
Imagery, vibes, personality, all of these have powerful effects on people, educated or not.
Few can express how these intangibles impact them, and if they can they are usually won’t say it out loud,
This is why you NEED to run a primary, to debug your campaign. You don’t know how your candidate looks and feels to people in Tennessee, etc until you try it.
>How nauseatingly condescending. How about issues like illegal immigrants coming in raping/killing women, taking over apartment complexes and living off struggling Americans' taxpayer dime? How about all time high inflation or massive layoffs?
Just curious, I agree on the illegal immigrant issues.
But for inflation, how do you think Trump will help given that inflation is expected to increase during his presidency due to expected tariffs?
Also, why do you think mass layoffs is attributed to democrats and how do you think Trump would help? To me, mass layoffs was just a repercussion of covid spending, zero interest rates.
I'm making the point that voters care about more substantive issues than height or color.
The fact is inflation was at a all time high during Biden's presidency as were mass layoffs. Whether they were directly a result of Biden's policies is definitely up for debate. But what is unequivocally true it happened under his watch. The buck stops with the sitting President.
So I disagree with the GPs condescending view that Trump voters were swayed by the fact he is "tall, white and confident." Voters cared about issues like immigration and the economy and felt the country was going in the wrong direction on these issues.
The vast majority of the inflation issue can be attributed to supply chain bottlenecks during covid and money printing. I don't think Biden had anything to do with it.
I get your point about people voting for Trump not because he is a white male and Harris is a diverse female. It's a naive view. People overwhelmingly voted Obama in and he's mostly black.
I'm more interested in the facts of the core issue for why people vote for Trump.
Probably in the end fundamentals beat candidate quality.
Rightly or wrongly, economic sentiment indicators are all in the dumpster and historically incumbent party loses in that scenario. We've had the best covid recovery, lowest inflation and lowest unemployment in the developed world but that doesn't matter to the average voter.
Biden probably would have done worse (look at approval rating & imagine another debate). Open primary might have helped, or not, total gamble. Probably less than 25% of this is attributable to Harris or her campaign.
If there was a dem mistake it was in picking her as VP in 2020 to lock up a demographic they already would win. From there it made her the presumed successor to an elderly president who was assumed to not really run for a second term.
I think a lot of people forgot that before Covid hit, Trump was headed for a fairly routine reelection. Many people thought he was doing a solid job, especially on the economy. All American elections still come down to the James Carville truism, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Despite what the official metrics or stock market says, we’ve been in a “vibesession” due to inflation and elevated interest rates. Anecdotally, I'm still seeing stores run low/out of things far more frequently than pre pandemic times, which just adds to the feeling that all is not right with the world. America is actually in better economic shape than most other countries, but people are not feeling happy or optimistic, and the incumbent party is going to pay for it.
You are technically right, but anyone 35 and younger is currently experiencing the highest interest rates of their adult lives.
Whether higher rates are good or bad is irrelevant considering the economic churn that occurs when a system that's built up around one set of assumptions (cheap money and low return on fixed income) has to rebuild itself around a new reality.
15 years is a long time and reshaped the entire economy around basically free credit, so any change to that was going to be painful. And one of the real disconnects between economists and regular people is around the term inflation. Ordinary consumers actually care about affordability, not inflation. Raising interest rates to tame inflation does not improve affordability. In fact its goal is to further decrease affordability to reduce demand, which should then cause inflation to moderate. That works fine for economists and policymakers, but for ordinary people that’s more of a bite off your nose off to spite your face kind of solution.
It’s all about the economy (remember, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’).
We keep hearing statistics showing that the economy is doing well, but I have yet to meet anyone who feels like they’re actually better off.
I’m not saying that the stats are wrong, but when it comes to politics, you can’t address economic anxiety by just pointing to statistics and saying, ‘Look, the numbers say everything is fine.’
I live in Finland which is a pretty 'expensive' country, I come from the UK which is less so but not really cheap. I live/lived in the capitals of both countries pretty much exclusively.
I visited the States in 2019 (Boston), and then didn't until last week (NYC).
The level of inflation in the US for everyday things between that time seemed insanely high compared to anything I'd seen in Europe. How anyone couldn't look at the price of rent and food and whatever and think "5 years ago I was paying a lot less" and have that not feed massively into their decision making process at the (private) ballot box is beyond me.
There's been crazy high inflation of everyday goods in Australia too, and government officials went on TV saying that inflation is not really that high. They were factoring in things like bulk industrial products, which are purchased in such high volumes that if their price doesn't change (or decreases), the overall average inflation is depressed.
look, whatever the charts say is a 100% bold faced lie. have you seen the price of a little ceasars pizza? it's jumped nearly 50% in the last 4 years. my salary has not gone up 50% relative to my experiece in the last 4 years. most recently i got a salary cut. you can't make me believe the economy is doing fine.
Do all the population eats Caesars pizza? Inflation (or more accurately CPI) is a weighted average where the items that represent the biggest spending on the consumer (not on volume, but also relative to their income) is calculated and changed over time. Housing is the biggest item there, then there's food, energy and health services and communication. How does Caesars pizza change of price affects inflation: via restaurants, an item that has lost relevance after the run away price increases over covid.
For purposes of GP's example, yes, the entire population eats Little Caesars.
Even worse, my Kombucha went from $3->$4.
But, GP's example vibes with pretty much all food prices I've seen. McDonalds went from 2 for $3 to $3 each. It's really kind of surprising. Easy to avoid all this junk food, but price increases are very substantial.
Here's the CPI numbers for food [0] where we saw increases from 261 to 332. 27%
I don't agree with the idea of everything being a "lie" as they put it, but I have also noticed prices have risen over 50% for a number of food items. I'm a regular consumer of dark chocolate and brands that used to cost $2.50 or less just four years ago are now $4.00 or more.
But Trump _was_ president when it was $10, and now he is not president it is more than that. People are going to make that connection even in the absense of a ten point pizza price plan or whatever and are going to think that they will be better off with him.
Interest rates remained relatively low compared to history throughout the 2010s and the year over year inflation figures for that decade remained below 2.5% throughout those years, during both Obama's and Trump's presidencies. Inflation spiked after the Feds debasement of the currency in 2020 and 2021, during both Trump and Biden's presidencies, when it expanded the money supply at an unprecedented rate.
I mean, there's more than one dimension to "the economy". Unemployment rate and GDP recovery is good, inflation curtailed, wages are growing - but obviously not enough. Then Harris proposed a decent policy to improve housing affordability, but that would only beg the question "why didn't Biden do this?".
Basically, too little too late. They fucked up that, and fucked up on the border, when there was no excuse to fuck up. I believe the Harris' policies would have been better for the economy than tariffs and deportations, but it's a moot point in voters' minds.
Your first paragraph should be printed, framed, and put in a museum as a perfect example of why the Biden-Harris messaging around the economy fell flat. Nobody gives a shit if unemployment is down and GDP is up when a pizza that was $10 3 years ago is $15 now. The answer to someone saying that they can't afford as much as they could a few years ago is not to tell them that they're wrong.
Her housing credit suggestion a) was less than the amount the median home price increased by under Biden, and b) would have only served to increase the price of housing further by increasing the supply of money available, exactly the same thing ZIRP did.
> I'm not referring to the credit. She had [all these things]
… that people didn’t believe.
She ran for her first 50 days claiming Bidenomics was working. That term was so stupid I thought it was a joke that conservatives made up. Surely they weren’t trying to say the economy was good right?
They plainly had no awareness of them, nevermind believe, but even if they did it probably would not have sufficed for the aforementioned reasons. Like you said, no surprises.
No one is talking about the real source of a lot of these problems: there was supposed to be a minor collapse/major correction of the economy around this time in 2022. Essentially, there were signs that people were preparing for a major recession that was going to be precipitated by a collapse in one or more major markets (probably real estate, either American CRE or Chinese residential); inflation necessitating rapid FFR hikes would have played a part in this. Instead, everything was backstopped by various means, and the Fed went for a "soft landing". This didn't solve the problem, it just shifted the burden onto people who didn't own the assets that were backstopped. A number of other actions (breaking the rail strike, a number of actions taken to prevent turmoil in securities markets) also forestalled the correction.
The result is that, instead of taking a big blow early in his presidency, leaving us currently in the recovery period, Biden disrupted every "attempt" by the market to correct. This allowed for common economic metrics to read as healthy, even while the portions of the economy that most effect the average American were distorted.
Nice anecdote, but that's not how we arrive at the truth. Good data and a scientific approach does.
Now there are tens of thousands of highly educated credible economists with enormous amounts of good data in the US. It'd be for them, trivially easy, to constantly hit news headlines with a couple of papers substantiating why certain official inflation statistics are wrong and actual inflation is much higher, and we're all actually much worse off than before.
But there is no such widespread consensus economic research being published, I wonder why. I guess the quarter million people in the US who graduated with an economics degree in the past decade are all corrupt, as are all the institutions who report on inflation, captured somehow by Joe Biden... /s
> I have yet to meet anyone who feels like they’re actually better off.
Hi! I’m doing better than ever before. It’s hard to attribute that to a political cause, however. I expect to be doing even better in 4 years, regardless of who’s in office.
That doesn't mean I don't notice my grocery bill is three times what it was in 2019 after being pretty much the same from 2009 till then.
It's kind of annoying having people tell me this doesn't impact me. I'm literally spending more money for the same thing and my salary hasn't tripled in the last 5 years - my shares though. Which is kind of the point.
Three times? The CPI increased by 25% from 2019 to 2023. That's a lot but not three times. Major grocery retailers cut prices earlier this year as well.
I have a feeling that increases like you describe are likely due to lack of competition and much exaggeration. When I lived in rural area my closest grocery was over 30 min away. Where I live now there's probably 50 within 30 minutes.
To me, this is at the heart of why Trump won this election. I honestly do not believe your grocery bill has tripled. That's 200% inflation, which is an insane number. The statistics we have are that groceries have gone up ~25%. I have such a hard time imagining any combination of products that would add up to 8x the national inflation average of groceries.
But, I also don't think you're lying. I think you honestly believe your grocery bill tripled, and I think a lot of people have a similar internal impression about how bad inflation got. It's not useful for me (or, for politicians) to try and argue it logically. No one can check your receipts from 2019 and 2024 and say, look, things aren't actually that bad. Dems needed to kind of take it at face value and come up with a solution to something that people feel is real, and they just did not do that.
I'm in Canada, but anecdotally, in 2019 I wouldn't buy tomatoes if they were over 0.99/lb . Meanwhile today, I bought some at 2.49/lb, and only see them below 1.99/lb maybe once every 4 mo.
Similarly cucumbers I'd buy at 0.99; now I get them at 1.99 . Those are the ones I personally remember best.
Over that time period in Canada, I've also seen a 2 to 3 times increase in the unit price of many other basic grocery items, including dried pasta, rice, bread, canned goods, bags of frozen vegetables (peas, corn), meat, and so on.
The government-reported inflation numbers are well below what I've experienced and what many people in Canada I've talked to have told me they're experiencing.
What is the 25% figure coming from? Not disputing it, just curious.
Unable to give US equivalents but I think the price increases were pretty significant on the lower end and less so the higher you go up.
Until a few years ago it was possible to get instant ramen noodles for ~15p, you could get 6 eggs for like 80p, baked beans for 20p, etc. All of these things and similar spiked massively very very quickly. There was also a kind of double inflation where a lot of the value offerings seemed to disappear from shelves for an extended period (e.g. I remember a patch of several months where those instant ramen noodles weren't stocked in any supermarket near me at all while the 90p branded version was).
They've actually gone back down somewhat since but what you're looking at is people barely scraping by seeing drastic increases in their grocery bills.
Similar issues occurred with energy costs in the last few years; along with the rates going up the companies drastically bumped up the standing charge so even if you almost cut out all usage entirely you still could wind up seeing an increase.
I'm doing better than ever too, but my family talks about how prices have gone up crazily while service and everything else has gone down. You have to be blind to not notice this, and the stats don't reflect what you see when you go around anywhere
> I’m not saying that the stats are wrong, but when it comes to politics, you can’t address economic anxiety by just pointing to statistics and saying, ‘Look, the numbers say everything is fine.’
So improving the economy can't address economic anxiety? That's a pretty grim picture of human nature.
For what it's worth, I feel better off than 4 years ago. My investments are up ~20%, which is a lot considered it's all diversified funds.
Only ~61% of Americans have any stock holdings and most of those are pretty minor and/or locked up long term in retirement vehicles like a 401k. For practical purposes that money doesn't exist for people which is why a well performing stock market is a crappy indicator for how people will actually feel about the economy. My 401k is up 30% YoY but I can't feel that because the money is locked up for another 30-35 years and I can't access it via the stock market because of my job.
A much better view IMO would be median real wage growth vs inflation because that's how people mostly interact with the economy, simple day to day purchases of food, shelter, and fuel/power.
I think people stop believing in statistics when they don't feel it is related to their daily life.
Looking at the prices of bread, eggs, meat, car price and rent/mortgage interest from another country, it's a lot of burden. Meat shoots up really a lot in Costco, and mortgage payment went up 50% as well.
Talking about the cars, the exactly same car was 30K when I bought it 4.5 years ago, and now it is 45K+ (Same model different year). It's hard to explain the differences by "the advancement of technology". And not to say that back then I got a 0% interest rate and nowadays it's at least 5% or 6%.
IMO, for ordinary people, this hike of interests does nothing to prevent real inflation that they care about, but simply increasing everything.
I think people fail to understand is that a large portion of the population has literally 0 investments, let alone diversified portolios that are technically up.
These people give absolutely 0 shits about the stock market being up and the economy being considered fine.
We on HN are sheltered and generally have decent jobs which do allow us to have investments and thus don't see the impact as much as those who don't see the bullish line of the stockmarket driving their portfolios up.
Polling clearly indicates that the percentage of Americans who feel financially secure has been steady for years while the percentage who think the economy is in poor shape is increasing rapidly. It is 99% perception. People who are better off just won't say it when they think everyone else is struggling. The bull market in stocks and rising home values indicates anyone who owns any assets is doing very very well.
Posts on HN about tech workers struggling to find jobs and mass layoffs reaches the front page every week. Half my tech friends are laid off right now. That was not the case four years ago. Everyone I knew had a job, everyone had money.
That's perception. In reality layoffs happen all the time even in a growing labor market. I saw tech layoffs in my network up to maybe a year ago and almost everyone is employed again. We had a correction after what was the most overheated job market ever.
What motivated people according to polls was firstly inflation, then a distant second was either abortion or illegal border crossings. You're pretty much correct. It's been pointed out this quarter that inflation has been abated and wage growth has improved, but notwithstanding that people continue to feel worse off financially, they remain resentful.
The DNC made some blunders. Leaving aside covid spending, they screwed up reverting Trump's border policy and waited too long to fix it. Harris was weak on messaging and came up with the Housing plan too late, didn't champion the CHIPS act enough. Also, the newscycle was constantly showing the US spending large sums both domestically and abroad which had an impact on inflation. And of course there's all the other culture-war/DEI stuff that isn't strictly within the purview of the feds but feeds into resentment.
The frustrating thing is that the economy lags policy, and policy has limited influence on the economy to begin with. Inflation rose because the US consumer was ready to spend much faster than the supply chain could recover from the COVID era. The Inflation Reduction Act could only do so much to soften inflation, but the whole thing was blamed on Biden by the average voter.
Can you please explain to a non-America what is that message is? I hear this refrain all the time and all I get is a vague insinuation that people are not being listened to.
Stop calling working people without a college education stupid and stop alienating men. "Non-educated" people work just as hard or harder than the rest of us. I've been to college and the only thing it "educated" me in is Computer Science, which I majored in. I'm not in any way better as a human being than my friends working in construction. Quite the contrary, their job is far more important to society than mine. If I stopped my niche research tomorrow, no one would really care. If handymen, farmers, or truckers stopped working, there would be riots.
Also, the DNC should really stop forcing unwanted candidates down people's throats. It doesn't work, even when you spam social platforms with your narrative.
> Quite the contrary, their job is far more important to society than mine.
Non-american here, but I feel pretty much the same way. I also do niche research in computer science. People working in the supermarket, people driving trains and busses, medicine workers, construction workers, they all do work that is vastly more important to society than mine. A single educator in my child's kindergarten most likely does work that is orders of magnitude more important to society than mine is. Maybe this attitude comes from the fact that both of my parents never set a foot into higher education, but it is something I feel very strongly, and which is quite humbling.
I remember my father predicting in the early 2000s that the academic elite was increasingly crippling the country by adding more and more non-pragmatic rules in seek of some idealistic utopia, and that they would lose the support of the masses pretty soon. As a young teenager, I did not believe him, and in my arrogance of youth, I also dismissed it as the ramblings of an uneducated worker. But sure enough, most of the things he feared back then turned out to come true.
> I also do niche research in computer science. People working in the supermarket, people driving trains and busses, medicine workers, construction workers, they all do work that is vastly more important to society than mine.
Today, for sure. I think it's far more nuanced in the long term. Most of these jobs would be non-existent without the researchers of yesterday.
Of course, if you disregard today completely for building the tomorrow, a lot of people who don't get access to wealth today will be pissed. Which is very roughly what's happening in the USA. "What we have now is perfect, and can sustain forever, stop with the progressive BS", chant the conservatives.
It's a hard balance. Dems messed it up, Reps will mess it up further, I bet.
> Most of these jobs would be non-existent without the researchers of yesterday
The research of yesterday was on another level than most of what is done today. Not to say that it's worthless, pursuit of knowledge is always worth it.
This is all moot now. We have a far-right supermajority in government. America is fucked for the next few decades at the very least. The DNC is no longer relevant.
Calling republicans far right is the exact rhetoric that alienates and divides people. Take the next four years to try to find some common ground with the right.
Not at all wanting to be confrontational- genuinely curious; if they’re not on the far right then where are they? The Democrats seem fairly centrist, and it’s the more wayward independents (eg Greens) that seem to be on the Left.
My perspective is European & Australian, so I wonder if that skews it.
Because it’s illogical. Far right implies there is an edge to a majority “right”. Calling the entire majority “far right” is just lazy adhominem attacks. Calling the entire the democrat party far left is equally stupid.
> Because it’s illogical. Far right implies there is an edge to a majority “right”.
"far right" and "far left" are terms for contextualizing a political stance, based on the world view and actions. It's doesn't matter where the majority of people stands, they can be all far right or far left or in the center, it wouldn't change the definitions.
In America you generally only see "Far X" used as a slur to basically imply extremism. I'm sure a lot of people will have strong feelings about whether that's accurate or not but my point is mainly that I think it's weird when people in places like Europe go by the academic definition with regard to American politics.
The nazi government of Germany was "far right" even when a majority of the population supported it. The political left-right spectrum is roughly defined with socialism, communism on the far left, social democracy on the left, classical liberalism on the center-right, conservatism on the right, and ultra-nationalism, fascism on the far right.
Far-right is well defined globally. Few core values: nationalism, authoritarianism, anti-socialism, economic libertarianism, racial and gender hierarchies, anti-establishment sentiments.
If you think a party is ticking many boxes, you may label it as "far-right".
Calling the democratic party "far left" is stupid for a different reason, viewed from a global perspective, they're probably best positioned as centre-right.
Depends what you care about. Broadly speaking the entire developed world is further left than the US on workplace/business/union policy issues.
The US left (federally, not talking Alabama dems here) is generally more left on immigration, abortion and LGBTQ+ and affirmative action type policies than Europe, broadly speaking. Drug policy is a wash IMO. There's a lot more variation in Europe because the EU doesn't arbitrate social issues the way the US federal government does.
> Broadly speaking the entire developed world is further left than the US on workplace/business/union policy issues
This is what's crippling them. We initially built the social security net to counter this issue. Then we increased employee rights to maximum levels. I think one of either would be beneficial, but not both.
As an Alabama Dem, this is something that is just so disappointing to see when we're assumed to be not "generally more left"
There are so many here supporting and doing good, hard work with things like the Yellowhammer Fund, ¡HICA!, and Magic City Acceptance Center and Academy but we have to fight for any acknowledgement. We had more people vote for Kamala than several states but they amount to nothing in the public eye. It's so deflating and discouraging
I think you have to acknowledge that the democratic politicians that rise to prominence in your state are not exactly the left of the left when it comes to policy in the same way that Christ Christie and Charlier Baker aren't hardline republicans. It's just a reflection of the electorate, not a personal slight.
Doug Jones was our last democratic politician on the national stage and he voted quite liberally. We just don't have many anymore, due to gerrymandering and our electorate. I think Terri Sewell is our only non-Republican
This is not true. Their identity politics stances are widely unpopular across the globe, and you won't find another country where they are represented in political discourse.
By that reasoning Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy weren't far right, because a very significant portion of their population actually voted for that. Or France now, our "Rassemblement National" used to be far right, but now enough people (about a third) vote for them that they no longer are.
Sorry if that feels like a strawman, but I find the idea of using popularity to determining what counts as "far" stupid and dangerous.
Democrats believe a man who thinks he is a woman is scientifically a woman. They believe in censorship. They believe in supporting and growing the military industrial complex. They believe in a discrimination campaign against whites and Asians, and meanwhile allowing unfettered illegal immigration with the intent of giving amnesty to the millions that entered through the forcibly unguarded border.
They are not centrist by any stretch of the imagination.
> Democrats believe a man who thinks he is a woman is scientifically a woman
It's a bit more complicated than that. Gender is a social construct, mostly determined by genes & genitalia. It's not quite enough to believe you're a woman, other people have to believe it too. Another issue at play is that there are far more "intersex" people (who have some characteristics of the opposite sex, sometimes to the point doctors don't quite know whether to list them as male or female), and from what I've heard trans people often (possibly generally) are "intersex" in a way that wasn't visible at birth. The idea of a female's brain in a male's body isn't that far fetched.
> They believe in censorship.
I believe this one is more popular in the far right (when in power) than in the far left (when in power)
> They believe in supporting and growing the military industrial complex.
Militarism sounds like it's more popular on the right. Though it can be more complicated: military backed imperialism can indeed support stuff like welfare at home.
---
Now the elephant in the room: last time I checked, democrats were firmly capitalists: they believe the means of production should be owned privately. Even if you exclude actual communism from acceptable discourse, they're fairly poor at public services and keeping inequality in check.
Can you name a policy of today's republican party that is further right than the republican party of 20 years ago? From my perspective they've ceded ground on many social issues. They had a porn star speak at the RNC convention this year. Dick Cheney, one of the people responsible for the "War on Terror", endorsed Kamala Harris. The idea that federal politics in the US has shifted right, not left, is baffling to me.
Because they’re trolling, knowingly or unknowingly. There’s a presumption here that HN commenters can operate a search engine and read pages of text, and are therefore capable of basic research.
If they’re asking for a definition, it’s likely because they already know it and just want you to fall into a “gotcha” they can then divert discussion toward in their favor. It’s cheap theatrics.
You can miss me with that last part, because I have to assume malice on the part of those who try to steer discourse around vocabulary or policy nuance rather than acknowledge the binary reality of the question.
Vocabulary is what we have for textual discourse lacking other inputs, and clarification on terms is a basic and actual necessity of such. You say you "have to assume malice" and, in line with what I already alluded to, that requires malice.
It's not pedantic to ask that your statements be taken clearly and in the right context.
It's worth noting as well that in the context of inclusion, pointing out pedantry at all is going to exclude a group in the "common" understanding of exclusion.
Most importantly, this person is trying to understand your perspective and instead of trying to sway their opinion, you criticize them. One thing that the "far right" has accomplished recently is an understanding that everyone is a person and worth respect and voice. Which is evidenced by the countless videos displaying such behaviour and the ubiquitous response of blessing attributed to people with such inquisition in comment sections everywhere.
In stark contrast is the term uneducated and it's supposed link to intelligence. Don't they teach logical fallacies in college anymore?
I am actually not. I just don't know of any policies or promises of Trump that I would genuinely categorize as far right. Border control is not far right according to me.
First of all I dislike Trump and for sure have liberal views in lot of aspects. And say even if I have malice intent and I am a hardcore Trump supporter, comments like yours wouldn't have changed my mind. Assuming you want to change people's side, it is not the reply that would change it.
According to Wikipedia, "Far-right politics ... are typically marked by radical conservatism, authoritarianism, ultra-nationalism, and nativism"
Digging into the page for radical conservatism, "Elements of ultraconservatism typically rely on cultural crisis; they frequently support anti-globalism – adopting stances of anti-immigration, nationalism, and sovereignty – use populism and political polarization, with in-group and out-group practices.[3][4][5][6] The primary economic ideology for most ultraconservatives is neoliberalism.[6] The use of conspiracy theories is also common amongst ultraconservatives.".
Trump is well-known for his populist, anti-globalist, anti-immigration, and pro-nationalist rhetoric. He has also promulgated conspiarcy theories such as the Obama birther conspiracy and claims of stolen elections.
As for authoritarian, Trump forms a textbook example of a personality cult. He frequently attacks existing institutions and an independent media, undermining trust in a free democratic process. He frequently issues positive messages about authoritarian dictators in other countries such as Bolsonaro, Orban and Putin.
Ah, yes. That well know impartial source of political facts, wikipedia.
>>Trump is well-known for his populist, anti-globalist, anti-immigration, and pro-nationalist rhetoric. He has also promulgated conspiarcy theories such as the Obama birther conspiracy and claims of stolen elections.
You can be patriotic and anti-immigration without being far right. I think the claims of a stolen election are yet to be properly investigated. I'd welcome a truly impartial look into all the covid postal vote shenanigans last time.
>>As for authoritarian, Trump forms a textbook example of a personality cult. He frequently attacks existing institutions and an independent media, undermining trust in a free democratic process. He frequently issues positive messages about authoritarian dictators in other countries such as Bolsonaro, Orban and Putin.
You can criticise institutions now? And I'm sure he'd be in favour of an indepenndent media if America had one.
Putin is a obviously a dictator. Bolsonaro and Orban not so much (especially Bolsonaro as he was, er, voted out which would seem to automatically disqualify him from being a dictator).
Political ideologies are defined by a cluster of stances that collectively form a narrative. Those stances may individually have some debatable justifications, but it's when they're taken together that it becomes compelling.
It's not just
"there's something wrong in our society"
it's
"there's an insidious dark force at work, it's brought us down from our glorious past, these groups of people are involved, violence against this threat is understandable, only a few men are strong and capable enough to lead us out of this...".
In 1930s Germany and Italy the "groups of people" were marxists, jews, gypsies, homosexuals and a few others. In modern Russia it's LGBT, central Asians, objectors to the war, and various religious groups like Jehovah's Witnesses. For Trump and a lot of Europe's right-wing it's LGBT, immigrants, intellectuals, and liberals (though he calls them communists).
"there's an insidious dark force at work, it's brought us down from our glorious past, these groups of people are involved, violence against this threat is understandable, only a few men are strong and capable enough to lead us out of this...".
For insidious dark forces, he alludes to the "deep state", talks about an "enemy from within", and uses phrases like "poisoning the blood of the nation".
For glorious past, there's the MAGA motto, and his narrative that political correctness and lefty lunatics have destroyed American exceptionalism.
For violence, he's repeatedly threatened violence against protestors to his rallies, defended or refused to condemn violence by his own supporters, and suggested that political opponents deserve to have violence inflicted on them.
For only a few men, his prodigious hyperbole about how he's the best at everything, and he literally describes himself as "I am your retribution" who will usher in a "new golden age". And again, he's generally praising of strongman authoritarians around the world
They are a corporate party, just like the democrats. Supporting secure borders is not far right. Republicans have support of every race, they are not racist despite the media repeating that they are. Trump is very hesitant about getting involved in wars. I see nothing far right about them, maybe they are somewhat nationalistic instead of globalist, but the US is a diverse nation. At the end of the day they are just another corporate party that appealed more to the American people.
Were they conservative? No, they wanted to upend society and create one that is nothing like anything ever seen before. They were also anti-religion. In many ways, they were anti-tradition, and I wouldn't consider their obsession with bringing back dead traditions to be traditional.
Were they hateful, racist, etc.? Yes, up to you if that's considered 'right'.
Were they, like how American political parties are, friends of big business? Not really, they wanted to sponsor monopolies and whatnot but also wanted the businesses to have no influence over the state, rather the other way around, the state can force the big business to do what they want. As far as if it actually worked that way when they were in power, I'm not sure.
They don't believe in climate change, want zero controls on guns, are generally anti-immigrant - even the legal immigrants are lied about e.g. Haitians in Springfield, don't believe women should have certain rights concerning their own healthcare, want to keep cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, etc.
They are impenetrable. Yes they'd claim I'm unwilling to compromise but we're talking about different starting points - I have to get them to accept certain actual real-world events and facts as true before starting a meaningful conversation.
I watched the victory speech. He promised three things (1) only four years of him in the White House, (2) appointing RFK to eliminate vaccines and gut the health care industry (3) end current wars, so basically give his boss
military control of Eastern Europe.
I don’t believe (1). The other two would mean our kids’ life expectancies just halved.
- Eliminating vaccines is a terrible idea, but public school vaccine requirements are state law in my state. RFK won't be touching them.
- Gutting the health care industry? That's not necessarily a bad thing. Wasteful health care administration (passing the buck) was something like 30% of health care costs pre-ACA, and health care is now 17.3% of GDP. Shedding 1/3 of health care costs would bring our health care expenses to the same ratio of GDP as the UK. Of course it would also cause an unemployment crisis...
Common ground. The whole democratic apparatus of the United States might get severely hollowed out for the foreseeable future, and you're talking about finding common ground.
Why is everyone else responsible but the people responsible? Not calling out fascism is surely just as problematic.
Do you have any data (except for interpersonal psychology) on whether letting fascism slide or calling it out ultimately makes the situation worse? At what point do you call fascism fascism? When it's too late?
> At what point do you call fascism fascism? When it's too late?
You call it fascism when it is fascism. Once it is openly fascist then it is probably too late to stop, but you don't call it fascism until it is fascism.
Let's hope we never have to find out, but so many people captivated by a conman while simultaneously crying about everyone else's position is a recipe for abuse.
Separating children from parents at the border, reverting hard fought women's right to their own body, that is the stirring of fascist behaviour.
That wasn't his main intention. It was to stop the flow of illegal immigration into the country. And after popular criticism, he reversed that policy and never enacted it again. That doesn't sound authoritarian/fascist to me. It sounds more like bending to the will of the people you govern.
> reverting hard fought women's right to their own body
And a large swath of the country believes abortion is murder. I guess for that, they are fascists in your eyes?
The term really has lost it's meaning and is just used by the Left to demonize the other side.
> The term fascist has been used as a pejorative,[74] regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum. George Orwell noted in 1944 that the term had been used to denigrate diverse positions "in internal politics". Orwell said that while fascism is "a political and economic system" that was inconvenient to define, "as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'",[75] and in 1946 wrote that '"Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."[76] Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times".[77]: 1
You could try to answer this yourself by looking up the definition and cross checking it with the rhetoric from the republican party during this campaign.
I fail to see how the Republican party is fascist. I think it's a term the Left uses to demonize their opposition. Ironically, that is kind of fascist-like.
> The term fascist has been used as a pejorative,[74] regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum. George Orwell noted in 1944 that the term had been used to denigrate diverse positions "in internal politics". Orwell said that while fascism is "a political and economic system" that was inconvenient to define, "as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'",[75] and in 1946 wrote that '"Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."[76] Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times".[77]: 1
I assume you have good reasons to believe Republicans are fascist. I'm simply asking you and any others who believe this to share your reasons. Is that not reasonable?
Even if I listed all reasons why the rhetoric during the campaign reeked of fascism, you’d simply dismiss them, like all the times before where this has been called out already. This is why people rightly feel people like you act like they’re in a cult. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
Like right now, by editing your comment you're desperately trying to pose there is no accepted definition of fascism. Dismissing definitions only fits the bill.
Ah yes, the "you're too stupid or unreasonable (i.e. deplorable or trash)" to reason with so I won't even try argument.
> you’d simply dismiss them
I'm a random internet stranger. How could you possibility know me so well? Again, it's just a blanket stereotyping and demonization of people who have different beliefs that you do. A mass ad hominem attack. That attitude is a root of many problems in the political arena. I expect that kind of rhetoric on Reddit, but am disappointed to encounter it here.
> Even if I listed all reasons
I'm a busy person and I assume you are too. Why don't you list one and we'll go from there?
You already try to dismiss an accepted definition, so why would I bother reiterating all the easy to find articles, videos and podcasts that literally quote and warn of Trump's rhetoric? Do you think you sound like a person that is trying to understand criticism of his party, especially right after voting for them?
> You already try to dismiss an accepted definition
In this discussion, we've already defined it? where? That's news to me that I can dismiss something that I wasn't aware of.
> Do you think you sound like a person that is welcoming criticism
I am very welcoming of criticism of my party and the one I voted for. Trump can be a bombastic jerk. I voted for him because his policies align more with my values than Harris'. He was the lesser (much lesser) of two evils. I didn't vote for him in the primaries and I wish he wouldn't have won them.
Anyway, you continue to make assumptions about me rather than discuss/debate the issue of why you think Trump is a fascist. It's not much of a discussion and so I'll opt out now. All the best to you.
If you think every debate should first have a discussion on definitions, before you can get to the heart of the argument, you should not be debating.
We don't have to define it. That's the point. It's already been done for us.
It's the same with asking me to list reasons or sources that explain the republican parties fascist tendencies, while that's been done thousands of times through the course of their campaign. If you were truly curious as to why people might feel that way, you could have done so at any point during the last few months.
You did't accept the definition you bothered to look up and you didn't accept the valid concerns people had during the campaign.
The real reason you're walking away from this conversation is because you don't care if I am right.
You're not afraid of fascism, because you think you're in the right group.
I think the other poster was just being polite, trying to have a discussion about the left's misuse of the term fascism, yet failed to account for the degree of intelligence required to understand such nuance. So let me spell it out for you all, you are misusing the term and on the odd occasion that one of you actually checks the definition, you view it through your own biased lens, rather than reading the complex description thoroughly. You cherry-pick some terms and twist others around to suit your own dogma, with the intended goal of using it to villainise the enemy.
If you replace nationalism with partisanship, in very many ways the modern left is far more closely aligned with the vile components of fascism than the republican party, or even Trump supporters. The left have done everything they can do vilify anyone who disagrees with their core beliefs, which they hold are a matter of morale superiority and to which, in their minds, no person of moral substance could ever find disagreeable.
By very definition, conservatives are conservative. When they disagree with someone, they continue to treat them respectfully and move on with their lives, comfortable in the reality that there exists people around them with very different beliefs than their own. The left, on the other hand, do no such thing and yet look in the mirror and convince themselves that they're the better people in all this.
Trump less won this election than the democrats did lose it by arrogantly putting up a candidate with strong ties to the current unpopular administration and whose other policies and attributes did not appeal to the swing voter.
I don’t even have a dog in this fight since I'm from the EU. I can see why the Democrats lost. I can also see why Trump won.
And I'm factually correct when I say that Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous. He has motivated even a reasonable person like you to defend him vehemently. He made you part of his group, and by the looks of it you’re already starting to hate those who are not in it.
I was watching a streamer who once referred to something as “stupid” before they corrected themselves to use a different word (I don’t remember because it’s not the point). The reason for their correction was that they believe that word to be a lazy way of describing something; lots of things can be considered generally “stupid” but there’s always some underlying reason for that conclusion which will invariably be a more informative descriptor. (It takes effort to discover this reason, hence it’s “lazy” when one does not.)
I do commonly see “fascist” used to describe things in similar ways where the person seems to be expressing a general disdain for something. They do successfully convey some meaning but it’s very non-specific. Just food for thought for readers who want their opinions heard more than they want to hem and haw over the specific meanings of words.
1. Rhetoric of an "enemy within". Trump has already made it clear that he intends to use the US military to "clean out" our country.
2. Supreme consolidation of power. Trump plans to re-enact Schedule F. Tens of thousands of federal workers will be fired, and their replacements will be required to vocalize their devotion to Trump. The bureau meritocracy system, which has been in place since the 1800s, will be removed completely. In its place, a system of political loyalty.
3. Supreme avoidance of the law. Trump is completely immune to any criminal prosecution while president, and he has made it clear he plans to use this newfound power "very aggressively".
4. Desecration of education. Within the first 100 days, the department of education will be dissolved. States will pivot to ahistorical pro-conservative education, if they provide any public education at all.
Objectively, the use of force to eject protestors at rallies is of the fascist mindset. Trump endorses it.
The counter-argument is that a culture of violent police suppression is just modern America, and it’s not fair to tar one particular party with that particular brush.
Advocating conspiracy theories, undermining trust in democratic process, pro-nationalist, racist, sympathetic to (if not supportive of) white supremacists, ultra-conservative and traditionalist, stoking unfounded fears of communism/marxism, etc...
Okay. Let's take conspiracy theories. Trump has promoted the Obama birther conspiracy, pizza gate, that the Clintons are responsible for the death of Epstein and other political opponents, that there was fraud in the 2012 election and various false claims about the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections, various tropes about Soros etc...
It's a fact that Trump shared and promoted these. It's a fact that they are conspiracy theories.
The positions the Republicans voiced in their campaign cam ony be summarized as far right. So applying the moniker to the party in it's current form is accurate. The party isn't the same as their voters/supporters.
Common ground with people who voted for someone who campaigned on hate is a pretty steep hill. Funny how Republicans are never asked to "find common ground"
All of the moderate Republicans were primaried out over the last eight years, the senate has a few holding on but the house has been mostly cleared out. The party is very much far right. Did you not see how many Republicans refused to certify the election in 2021? It’s only gotten worse since then.
I’m sorry, but OP was right in calling the party - the entire party, and its supporters, and its candidates, and its institutions - far right. Because at the end of the day, many believed this was a nuanced choice about policy differences rather than what it really was: a binary choice between an imperfect Democracy, and strong man totalitarianism.
The voters made their choice clear, and those of us most impacted by GOP authoritarian policies now get to spend the next four years (at least) trying to make sure we survive attacks against us while also maybe still salvaging this grand democratic experiment.
So no, you can take that “find common ground” and shove it. We adhered to decorum for decades, even as the GOP marched ever further right and ignored, plowed through, or destroyed any and every uncrossable line or improper decorum in their path. You don’t get to try and apologize on behalf of an electorate that willfully has chosen violence, nor should we (those affected by said violence) have to tolerate their excuses.
In my country in Europe our most "right-wing" parties would be considered leftist in the US, so hopefully this brings into perspective just how extremely right-wing republicans are.
I mean, they call Harris a communist so all bets are off. Even Sanders would barely register on the left side pretty much anywhere in the western world
Republicans stopped existing in 2016 when they found out they either have to bow down to Trump or become third-party behind democrats and trumpists. Last meaningful actions of republicans was suppressing Trump during his 2016 reign, but those people are out now. There are no republicans left in power.
Who's in charge now are not republicans. Now it's just far right believing in genius and ability of their cartoonish leader.
Actually that statement shows exactly the political and societal problems there is today in the US. If people can’t even talk together and even get insulted it’s going to go even worst.
Ho really? Did not history teach us everything that is happening today and can happen tomorrow ?
It can go worst as in a civil war. To a full split of the country in x countries. Now I don’t think it will happen but saying it can’t go worst is both factually false and not anchored in reality
It's just the standard leftist doublethink of the past decade. Any realistic definition that labels 99% of Republicans as far right would label 95% of Democrats far right too. If their ideas were popular they would have started their own party a decade ago instead of being ground up in the DNC.
They claim "harm reduction" but that's not how just not voting works, 95% is still a super majority and anything you "win" is just tokenism at the end of the day.
> Stop calling working people without a college education stupid and stop alienating men.
Nobody is calling anyone stupid just because of the lack of education.
However the lack of education makes people gullible and easy to manipulate. From bleach as a Covid remedy to marginal tax as a grave danger to working people - you don't have to go far for examples. And when someone does believe this sort of blatant bullshit, then, yeah, they don't come across as particularly bright individuals.
But are you arguing that when people believe things that are demonstrably false, like using bleach as a Covid remedy, not because there is any evidence behind them but only because they were uttered by someone they trust wholeheartedly, and this person does not have any hint of medical training, that nobody should say they are stupid, but only quietly believe it in their minds?
So what is the takeaway here? When referring to trump supporters, follow the line of reasoning:
- Trump floated bleach as a covid remedy
- Bleach as a covid remedy is obviously stupid (we should both be agreeing on this one)
- Trump supporters support such statements from trump
- But pointing that out is "calling them stupid" and thus we shouldn't do it?
I'm genuinely curious about this because it makes up so many discussions with trump supporters in a nut shell. I don't want to condescend to them, but I also shouldn't be pointing out things that genuinely are stupid about trump, because doing so would offend them too? What should I do, just pretend all the dumb things Trump does (and that his supporters support him for) don't exist? Just so I can find common ground? (I mean, strictly speaking this is exactly what I do in polite company with trump supporters. I just pretend all the really dumb shit doesn't exist and just talk to them about policy and stuff, and in the end I end up finding that we agree on 90% of stuff and we go on our way. And they continue to support trump for reasons I don't understand.)
I've seen research shared here that suggest that more education scales with more radical political beliefs and overconfidence, for both sides of the spectrum, not just left. So you're right. Though of course more people concentrated in cosmopolitan areas with liberal cultures means more educated people lean left.
The entire point of being wealthy (and USA is one of the richest countries on earth) is to be able to afford to sacrifice some extra wealth (e.g. by not working, or giving to charity, or abolishing slavery, or enforcing worker's rights) to accomplish other goals (whatever you deem good, or moral, or just fun / entertainment).
On every objective measure the US has the best economy it has had in...pretty much ever. So they voted for "their own economic interests" by voting in a guy with plans that every economist says will be absolutely disastrous and will not only massively spike unemployment, it will lead to far greater prices for American consumers.
Trump's plan for grocery prices is to put massive tariffs on grocery imports and to deport millions of workers. There is no one with a functioning logic cortex who doesn't see the problem with this plan. But at least they can rest comfortably knowing that the Musks, Sacks and Bezos' of the world will get a killer tax break for their next yacht.
American elections are the guy in the big suburban house complaining that filling up his F350 costs a little more than it did during COVID shutdowns and thinking that somehow the guy floating insane plans is going to fix it. It's bizarre.
Wage growth has far exceeded inflation in the United States. Americans as a whole have never, in history, been wealthier or consumed as much. This is one of those fun "you don't know what you've got until it's gone" things where people bought into a political narrative to such a degree that in their world-leading affluence they truly think they are hard done by and wronged. I sadly feel that a lot of Americans are going to learn that there is a long, long way to fall.
>You mean leftside selected economists with their own agenda.
If you really look at everything like this, that's incredibly sad and self-deluding. Trump's economic plans are scattered spitballing that sound like something the most ignorant person just randomly contrives. There is literally nothing Trump has proposed that would in any way improve the US economy or reduce prices of anything. But they absolutely would do the opposite. No one, ever, has convincingly described how Trump is going to improve the economy. It's just random score-settling and self-enriching nonsense.
>He had the lowest unemployment numbers in decades.
In Trump's first term he was constrained from doing much of anything, and actually accomplished shockingly little policy, just coasting on Obama's policies. In this term he will have zero checks. He can actually do the crazy nonsense he has proposed, and destroy the country.
There are two possible paths ahead for the United States-
-economic calamity with zero upside where people learn that tariffs aren't some magic thing that other countries pay. Where inflation truly starts going wild again, while federal services collapse and the oligarchs reap. Musk, Bezos and crew will never have it better. Many Americans will have it much worse.
-...or..., and what Trump voters repeatedly reveal they are assuming in voting for him, he just lied about everything he says he's going to do to get a vote and actually won't do anything much at all beyond some corruption and self-serving.
This is an honest question, I'm not American, I don't live in the US and I genuinely don't know: how has Donald Trump served the interests of "working people without a college education" during the four years of his presidency? I'm also curious to know if the Democrats have done any different.
In the interest of full disclosure I am totally guessing that neither did anything to materially improve the lives and fortunes of working-class Americans and neither Donald Trump will, nor would Kamala Harris. Working people in the US, as in the rest of the world seem to me to be shafted for good, by all sorts of economic forces that they have no control over. I'm speaking in this as a current academic but one-time unskilled, immigrant worker.
It used to be that you could feed yourself and your family with "the sweat of your brow". Not any more. Who is working to change that?
> how has Donald Trump served the interests of "working people without a college education" during the four years of his presidency?
Uneducated working class folks compete with illegal immigrants for jobs and cheap housing. During his presidency illegal immigration was lower and wages rose for the working class and housing costs were relatively stable. He’s also positioned himself as the “law and order” candidate, and crime tends to impact the working class much more than the middle/upper classes.
Mostly folks who voted for him voted on the premise that their experience of the economy was better when he was president rather than on the basis of individual policies.
You actually can, by working the incentives. For the first three years of Biden’s administration one could show up, be apprehended, and be relatively certain that they would be released into the country, where you might be housed and fed.
Under later Trump and Biden’s current policy, you are released into Mexico.
Yes! I hate that. Also, "listen to the science" people are obnoxious. There are regular scandals of people in STEM faking their results for decades and I've seen garbage labelled as research more often than I can count.
I do not trust political sciences or humanities at all. There is little to no valid method to most things they publish. And I'm not alone in that opinion in my circle.
That would be true if there was a change with that population. Right now the numbers are that Trump won with slightly less votes than when he lost in the 2020 elections; and Kamala lost with significantly less vote than Biden got in the 2020 elections. There are almost 20 million of voters that didn't show up on this year election that showed for the 2020.
I understand calling people stupid is not a strategy to convince someone.
But it’s not like that is why someone votes for Trump, right? It’s maybe more of a way to disincentivize conversions back.
I… really wish there had been a primary though. Biden deserves to be hated for the rest of his life for this (along with all of his other decision making)
They should have had a primary instead of having a ritualistic anointing of Biden. The reason Biden had to drop out is because he was there when he shouldn't have been.
I can vaguely understand fixing a primary for H. Clinton, but for Biden? One of the things Biden ran on in 2020 was a vague indication that he would leave after one term.
I get and fully understand that many Americans are angry and want change, and they exercised their democratic right and pursued that change. We all need to respect that. Many things are not on the right path, and I have a feeling "DEI" and grievance farming is going to have a rough time ahead. And I get it: As a white male I honestly am tired of government being a tool to suppress white males. I am sick of living in a Western country that endlessly self-flagellates and acts like it needs to host the world in some act of contrition for success.
Having said that, it's hard as an outsider to look at the things Trump is campaigning on and not see that as not just calling "non-educated" people stupid, but he is literally relying upon it. Either his voters are extremely ill-educated, or they simply don't believe a word he says and actually make his lying a feature of his candidacy. Either aren't great.
When just about every economist says that the US economy -- quite literally the best economy on the planet -- is going to implode under the policies Trump has stated (even just the tariff proposal, not even getting into the crackpot "abolish the IRS and write on a piece of paper that crypto wipes out the debt", or Elon magically cutting 2/3rds of the federal budget, etc.), for people to then vote for Trump to "fix" the economy is not educated. Being isolationist in one of the greatest eras of peace in human history will not bring peace to Earth, it's literally guaranteed to bring war that will end up on your doorstep, etc. Nuclear non-proliferation dies with this election, and there are a lot of powers that existed under the US umbrella that are going to fire up a nuclear program, covertly or not.
I fear that many Americans just have no idea how much they have to lose. There is a sense of comfort and complacency to assume that this is the baseline. But it isn't. It can get much, much worse, very quickly.
I find a lot of his voters seem to respond to criticisms with "Oh don't worry, he's not actually going to do those things." I think your point about making his lying a feature of his candidacy is spot on. Here's to hoping that nothing ever happens.
What I don't get is how the bar for the Democrats seems to be so much higher than for Trump. Sure, "the typical man" is more easily validated by Trump than Harris, but at the same time Trump says much worse things about women than Harris about men. I can see how the Harris seems more "elitist" in a way than Trump, but to me that seems like a subtle negative versus Trump's long list of very obvious flaws.
We call that "double standard" and it's top on the list of common fallacies. The lack of education, whether I demonize it or not, definitely has a saying in its spread. And dismantling the department of education won't help getting people more educated in the following elections.
I think the difference is that Harris (less so than Clinton but to some extent) was seen as representing a liberal consensus that men, particularly white, heterosexual men are 'over', that the 'future is female', etc.
Trump is just Trump. A rhetorically violent, deeply unpleasant convicted rapist, but not the vanguard of an explicitly misognist movement. At least not one thats culturally hegemonic. So while American progressives may label Trump voters sexist or racist, the overwhelming majority of them don't see themselves that way. Meanwhile, a highly vocal minority of progressives do actively demean men, while people, straight people etc, and have for a decade. They've enacted DEI practices, and scholarship and funding practices that exclude men from fair participation in the workforce, education and the arts. As efforts to correct historic imbalances in that participation. At the same time, they've ignored how male participation in higher education has dropped off, the epidemics of alienation and underemployment affecting men.
Edit: Just to clarify I'm addressing the question - not advocating Trump, or suggesting that life for men or white people or straight people is in fact materially worse. Just pointing out people strongly dislike being disliked, actively biased against and demeaned and this does in fact affect their voting preferences.
You may think you mean, or maybe you did not, the accurate description: adjudicated rapist. And that difference right there, between adjudicated and convicted, and all of the other ambient hoaxes, is in big part what the referendum yesterday was about.
Ask yourself how long it was between late 2017 and when you found out the "fine people" hoax was actually a hoax. Or if just now, whether you knew that even Snopes confirmed the hoax that Kamala wantonly repeated (as if it were true) in the debate is indeed a hoax.
Most normal people don't see the difference between adjudicated rapist and convicted rapist as an innocent mistake but as something that those who push such hoaxes -- rather than innocently parrot them out of ignorance -- should be put behind bars for in response to the damage they do this great union of states.
I'm genuinely at a loss as to how that connects to anything I wrote. It's not Harris' gender that was the issue - to the extent that the position I'm taking helped shift the dial. It's the perception that she would continue the policies and forward the ideological perspectives listed above. It doesn't help that she seems extremely disingenuous and politically opportunistic. Trump is of course both these things - but conservatives seem to care less about that, likely because of the redemption narrative built into Christianity. You can be as much of a villain as you like provided you push that button. It's worth noting that Obama and Bill Clinton both pushed their Christianity when campaigning, and that appeal wasn't lost on evangelicals. Progressives, it would be difficult not to admit, are pretty adamantly set against redemption currently.
My impression is that it's not about what Kamala Harris (or most Democrats) said, but the fact that the Republicans were able to create the perception that there are strong movements which hate "whites" and which hate "men" (in various combinations), and that voting Democrats would help those movements. Apparently, they were able to convince enough non-white men and white women that Trump will be better for them.
The simple fact is, Trump is a rorschach/inkblot test.
He is everything people claim and nothing at all. He says so much bullshit constantly that you have to just ignoring or discounting shit he says. So he reflects what you believe.
It doesn't. Part of what you're seeing is just straight up cheating. Florida wouldn't allow election observers. It might take a little while to sink in, but American elections are more or less running like Russian elections at this point, and these results are what you get when it's not honest. Sometimes it's like this, and sometimes the leader figure is said to get like 99% of the vote, when he doesn't feel like playing coy about it. It's up to him, not you.
America started when it rebelled against being ruled. I'd say that's not entirely off the table. First it has to become clear that we're getting ruled, not represented.
I dont know about the USA. But I know from personal experience, that COVID politics destroyed my trust in left-leaning parties. I voted left until 2020. I will never give them my vote again, ever.
That's madness. Trump - along with several other right-wing figures in the US and globally - consistently downplayed COVID's danger, went on wild tangents about hydroxychloroquine, ultra-violet light, and injecting disinfectant, and challenged the use of effective measures such as face masks and social distancing.
But most people's anecdotal experiences with COVID amount to "It was just like having the flu, I don't see why they made such a big deal about it and banned Twitter accounts for saying things that line up with my experience"
This one I know is a straight up lie, because I remember where it came from: Trump asked an expert if it was possible to use disinfectant inside the body, was immediately shut down with a simple "no", and dropped it. Audio of the conversation was leaked and immediately twisted into "drink bleach", ignoring everything else about the conversation.
Also UV light treatment actually exists, just not for this purpose. It's a completely normal thing to ask once you learn UV kills viruses.
COVID has mutated to become far less fatal. At the time, social distancing and mask wearing were effective ways to reduce incidence and prevent hospitals from getting even more overwhelmed.
Yes. To me, it looks like this was intentional, as a form of warfare against the country. I mean, it sure worked, and it's said that RFK Jr., a weird crank, will get put in charge of all healthcare. That basically means all medicine becomes underground, forbidden.
To be fair, RFK Jr believes that vaccines are linked to autism and wants to ban fluoride in drinking water because it's "linked to cancer". It's very worrying that he could be setting health policy.
In essence, yes. I'm saying that Trump's narrative on women is no worse than societies default. Women experience far worse things than macho talk. It takes more to alienate a lot of them.
I'm politically the opposite of the person you're replying to, but these two notions are correct and not contradictory. Average people are ignorant and misogynist, and we should acknowledge this and talk about it, but not to their face. If you're not the direct target of the ignorance or misogyny, you should explain to them why their assumptions are false in a dumbed-down way, not using university-level language. Calling people ignorant directly will get them defensive and emotional. They will think they are being attacked because they are a man.
Of course, for people who are directly targeted by the ignorance and misogyny, it's their right to directly call it out, but they might not call it out at all, because they would be targeted further.
Yea Kamala should not have been the candidate. She was tied to Biden who was associated with inflation which I think really decided this. I'm not sure the rest of your comment has that much to do with it
> She was tied to Biden who was associated with inflation which I think really decided this.
What about the rest of the world who've also been experiencing the same?
It's a very shortsighted take, and we've seen the same in the UK where Liz Truss 6 weeks as PM has taken the blame for global inflation in the court of popular opinion
Of course, its not logical, but voters "feel" they were better under trump without realizing inflation was a global phenomenon. This was also a failure of Dem messaging.
This is why we call Trump's voters "stupid", the US is still under Trump's tax plan until 1/2025. So if someone has an issue with taxes, it's not Biden's fault even though he is in office.
Inflation was caused by the Covid stimulus of 2020, and the mountains of free money printed that year (which is why it hit the entire world - every government did the exact same thing). Last I checked, Biden wasn't president at the time...
Given that Trump's economic policies are primarily the cause of inflation in the US, not sure what your point is. He printed and gave away 8 trillion dollars when combined with his tax cuts for the wealthy and people wonder why the cost of everything went up. Corporations across the planet were the beneficiaries of corporate welfare as governments printed money to battle COVID, and then they pocketed the profits and told their employees that they couldn't afford to give them raises.
> Quite the contrary, their job is far more important to society than mine.
I doubt it. Think about how connected the world is, you can't even apply for jobs without the internet.
Both jobs are equally important. The main difference is that you can get started doing construction without many pre-qualifications, while a construction worker may take a year or more to get the basics of computer engineering down.
What happened is that the remain side had to fight on the side of a reality that existed and the Brexiteers made up a fantasy future that has failed to materialise.
Worse: many different and mutually incompatible fantasy futures, which they denied ahead of the referendum, and which after the referendum became a source of infighting that made all possible Brexits impossible to get past Westminster until Johnson came along and lied to everyone to get enough support to actually close a deal.
(The only time I can think of when digging a deeper hole got anywhere, even if the where was a… I guess in this metaphor: a disused basement where the stairs were missing?)
Your comment somewhat illustrates the point. It disparages those who voted for Brexit instead of trying to understand them, which is a recipe for eventual failure as we've seen.
Judging by this thread, it's still not possible to have a discussion on this...
> It disparages those who voted for Brexit instead of trying to understand them,
But why? Why is it the job of the people who are on the side of established truth who have to understand the views of the fantasists? I saw more "disparagement" from the pro-Brexit crowd than the Remainers. Why isn't it their responsibility to understand the realist position?
We told them Brexit would be a disaster. We were told we were scaremongering. It went ahead anyway, and it turned out to be awful. It was a stupid decision, and it was terrible judgment.
Why can't we tell people that some proposals are stupid? And why can't we tell people after the fact that they made a stupid decision? How is it our fault that they make bad decisions?
I think — as a Remainer who remained so hard I responded by moving to Berlin — that "why" is "because it was a referendum and that's how those work".
It's not sufficient (or necessary) to be correct to win in a democracy, winning requires being convincing, which may be easier with the truth but is also much harder when insulting half the electorate.
Even when it's very tempting afterwards to say "we told you so".
As for how to be convincing… dunno. I'm much more comfortable with computers where I can google the errors.
People were concerned about loss of sovereignty and high immigration. These are perfectly valid concerns and the Leave campaign perfectly understood that when they picked "Take back control" as slogan.
Immigration is also a big factor in the Conservatives' defeat in the general election. People felt cheated as immigration hit a record high and voted Reform UK, which handed Labour a huge majority despite actually getting fewer votes than at the previous election.
So it's quite extraordinary to see the comments here with zero reflection on why all of this happened. This is the real, dangerous divide between the well-offs in and around London and the rest of the country.
I have read that the two main issues on voters' minds in this American Presidential election were immigration and the economy, so result is not very surprising.
Loss of sovereignty in particular was a fictional concern in regards to the EU, given the structure of the EU and the relatively high power of the UK within it. The degree to which the EU should be made more democratic is precisely the degree to which it remains exactly what leave campaigners said they wanted to replace it with: a traditional boring free trade agreement in the hands of negotiators appointed by the governments of the member states.
"High" migration likewise had nothing much to do with EU membership, as the government demonstrated precisely by following Brexit with, as you say, record high immigration.
One of the other famous big concerns Leave campaigners had was the cost, which famously became the £350 million a week on the side of a bus. This number was even called out as a falsehood at the time, but it was believed by enough to make a difference.
Remainers were unable to convince the majority that the benefits of EU membership was worth the cost, financial or otherwise, regardless.
There was nothing coherent to understand. A rag tag coalition mainly built on delusional positions.
- we can have all the trade benefits without freedom of movement (specifically denied by EU at the time, didn't materialise)
- we will have 'more trade' afterwards (fails to understand how trade works)
- we won't have to follow EU rules (in reality, we can't really diverge that much from how the EU works without incurring penalties)
- we won't have to pay anything to them / we hold all the cards / ... (we did pay for our liabilities and we definitely didn't hold the cards)
- we can become much more left wing if we leave the neoliberal EU (fails to account for the fact our country isn't particularly left wing overall)
- politicians will have to take responsibility/can't blame the EU (brexiteers keep blaming the EU even now, BJ et.al. have faced minimal or no consequences for their actions)
- we can fish again (ignores relative importance of fishing vs the actually productive economy, disregards that EU is a big market for said fish)
Well oversight on financial institutions by EU is gone, yeah you still have regulations for normal business that you have to do with EU. But super rich and corporations can drop their money in UK puppet territories and EU is not going to have pressure points. Google "UK tax havens" and I bet brexiteers were handsomely paid for their efforts by people who want that scheme to continue instead of sharing any of that money with EU.
As in, they were right calling people bigots if they wanted to get out of the eu? That definitely didn't improve uk, I've even heard about people feeling "betrayed" by the now valid tariffs that damaged their UK business
I believe the argument being made is that calling spades spades is bad when spade is an insult and you need to convince the spades to vote for you.
Which is also why Republicans calling Democrats childish names such as "Dummy-crat" or saying "socialist" (or "commie") for all things to the left of their Overton Window doesn't convince any to their left to change their minds rightward.
I think that might be the culprit, but then you have no escape. Some post brexit interviews have been - at least for an European - quite hilarious. I feel sorry for them tho, but it's sort of a leopards ate my face situation
I used to live in Cambridge; I knew only one person who was a long-time UKIP voter in EU elections, who was "delighted" by the result of the referendum.
Even though I'd already been openly discussing moving to Germany ahead of the referendum, and went on an InterRail trip immediately before it to find a place to move to in the event of Leave winning, he did not comprehend that my reaction to the result included cutting him out of my life entirely.
He wanted the Cambridge to shrink, I left. That's his face leopard.
(As for intelligence: he also sometimes boasted of being in the international maths olympiad, this was Cambridge after all).
Working class people who, especially, wanted to control immigration were called bigots, uneducated, stupid, racist, etc and were ignored. Result is that they voted for Brexit. No, that didn't change anything because this was ignored by the establishment (both Labour and Conservatives) and that is still festering with the resulting rise of the Reform UK party (of Nigel Farage who's celebrating with Trump in Mar-a-Lago right now).
Here's a better analysis of the Brexit thing which was posted here yesterday. It was mostly decided by the fact that the pro-Brexit people had better marketing campaign.
Your "analysis" is from someone involved in the Brexit campaign. Of course Cummings is going to say he was amazing at marketing.
Another argument would be that Vote Leave broke campaign spending rules. In countries with legally binding referenda, that would justify rerunning the referendum. But in the UK it was "only advisory".
"Better marketing" campaign is another word for saying that they understood people's concerns better and were thus able to use that to their advantage instead of insulting the people they were supposed to convince (as the Remain campaign did). This is what Cummings did to win.
> instead of insulting the people they were supposed to convince (as the Remain campaign did)
Can you point to any examples of this? I don't think the official Remain campaign did anything of the sort. Insulting the people you are trying to convert is a poor strategy, which is why I don't believe they did it.
When you say "were called bigots, uneducated, stupid, racist, etc", what I think happened was that the Leave campaign alleged that that was what the Remainers thinking/saying and it gained traction.
What lessons haven't been learned? Keir Starmer's Labour won the last UK elections by a landslide and the Tories got the boot. I do think your analysis oversimplifies a complex issue.
I'm not ignoring that Starmer got elected by keeping his mouth shut and his hands behind his back, but the Tories' smash-mouth politics did not win the day anyway. What I can see from where I am is that Brexit was a very special case and it's all gone back to normal now.
There was no landslide. Labour actually got fewer votes than at the previous election when it was by Corbyn!
What happens is that Conservatives voters voted for someone else, mostly Reform UK. And the reasons have been the same as what's been festering since Brexit with the added factor that the Conservatives increased immigration to record level...
Labour won with 411 seats (up 211 from 2019) and 33.3% of the popular vote (9,708,716 votes) vs. 121 seats for the Conservatives (down 251) and 23.7% of the popular vote (6,828,925 ).
YMMV but I call a lead of 290 seats and 2,879,791 votes a landslide.
It was the Lib Dems that seem to have taken most of the Tories' voters: 72 seats (up 64) and 3,519,143 votes. The latter at least checks out. Reform was up 1 seat from 2019 for 5 seats total. Not quite a big splash then.
Labour also won big in Scotland against the SNP for the first time in years (but that was rather the fault of the SNP).
You're completely missing the point and where the votes went.
Labour got 9,708,716 votes in 2024 vs 10,269,051 in 2019. Starmer and Labour did not convince voters adn lost votes to the Greens.
What happened is that people did not vote for the Conservatives and instead voted Lib Dems and, especially, Reform UK, which got a massive 14% (3rd place and more than the Lib Dems). The Reform UK vote is because the Conservatives did not deliver on Brexit and even more importantly did the opposite of what they said on immigration, which reached record level.
The number of seats to Labour is a result of the above (Conservatives dropped so Labour candidate was elected) not because people voted Labour more than before. The surge is Reform UK.
So the same issues that have been at play in the Brexit referendum are still the key issues.
Reform's seats came from the Tories, unsurprisingly, and like you say Reform won more of the popular vote than the Lib Dems (4,117,221 vs. 3,519,143; not a wide margin) but Reform also campaigned in many fewer constituencies where they didn't have to compete directly with the three largest parties (not to mention Lord Buckethead and the Monster Raving Loony party, their nemeses). So maybe they have lots of supporters in certain areas, but only in those certain areas.
Reform is not a serious political force in the UK. They only renamed themselves from The Brexit Party, but they remain a single-issue party that appeals to a tiny minority of voters. The majority of the electorate are much more concerned with real issues like the economy, the NHS, education, law and order, and the environment. Brexit wasn't even a particularly big issue in the last elections. Even the Lib Dems, who had campaigned for a second referendum in 2019, laid it to rest this time and focused on more recent issues like sewage spills in rivers etc.
Might I also hog the mic a little while longer to say that I, personally, am mostly socially conservative, and am absolutely appalled both at the Tories and Reform, who are nothing but right-wing populists and demagogues that do not care a jot about all the things that socially conservative voters care for: jobs, order, stability, lawfulness, the economy, family, etc. And let's not forget that it was Margaret Thatcher's Tories that got the UK into the EU, and did so because it was beneficial to the economy, trade, and the stability of international politics. Exciting the EU was exactly antithetical to conservative ideals: it was a radical act of self-mutilation.
Labour are now the conservative party, the party of business and fiscal responsibility (and sitting on your hands while you kick the can down the road) and that's why they took all the Tories' votes: because the socially conservative constituency got fed up with the Tories' antics and, the Brexit fever having passed, wanted to go back to order and stability.
Flooding the country with millions of undocumented workers to compete with Americans is not a favor to the working class. That is a hand out to corporations.
I can’t find any statistical reporting to back there being millions more undocumented immigrants coming into the country in the last 4 years. Data-backed reporting indicates that we’ve had ~11 million undocumented workers since the 2005 with little change until 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...
I take no position on why these jobs are unfilled by Americans. But trying to claim these jobs are stolen or taken by undocumented workers (as implied by the comment to which I originally responded) is just wrong. If I assume you are correct (and it is in fact a quite plausible theory), I would allege the jobs are being stolen from American workers by the employers. Certainly the employers are relatively more profitable as a result of their shenanigans, if you are correct.
It's also a hand out to middle class, who cosume a lot of services provided by illegal imigrants (landscaping, renovation, cooking in restaurants etc.). The Dems kept the price of maintaining a nice lawn low.
The working class and young men (all young people really) have been completely left out of the economic recovery. Harris saying she would change nothing about what Biden has been doing was a huge problem. She tried to address it later.
At the end of the day, "it's the economy, stupid".
Depends on who you ask. Both sides demonize the other, but say they don't. Republicans are just much, much better at it. The ads and rhetoric are all designed to solicited emotional responses from the constituency, putting them in a very easy position to "Other" anyone who disagrees. If you can make your followers feel like they are disenfranchised then it's a simple matter to control them by promising to be the solution for their discontent.
Project 2025 also helped, since Democrats answered it with shock and horror instead of countering with their own improved version. Say what you will about the depravity contained within those pages, but Trump voters hold it up as "at least it's a plan" without having read it, much like their other beloved book, The Bible. Knowing that, it was quite easy for the Trump campaign to whip up support.
As much as I want to end with some pithy comment like "manipulation is a hell of drug," I can't. Half the country just got permission to put their ugly truths on display and they certainly did not disappoint. I have trouble laughing about that anymore.
When one guy is talking about domestic military deployments and shooting his political antagonists, and it’s not clear that the courts will stop him, then I do indeed think the F” word is in order.
The rest of it is self evident, but I’m not going to be the one to say it out loud.
It was not, but the Trump campaign continuously lied about it. Trump lied and lied and lied about the democratic party being anti-men, anti-cis, anti-Christian, Kamala being low IQ, and whatever other stupid shit he could think about, but somehow it's Harris fault for being "too divisive" (not sure how).
Trump is the incarnation of a thin-skinned bully, he allows himself the worst but will cry as loud as possible on the first sign of a backslash.
If people who voted for him are not stupid, they certainly act like it.
The Kamala campaign had one and only one major problem.
COVID stimulus and an economic slowdown from 2020 caused four years of inflation in the entire world, and people see the price of milk going up and punish the incumbent (not even the person who was in charge in 2020.
At which point, it doesn't matter how you campaign, or if the opposing candidate is actual Satan, nobody's going to vote for the incumbent.
It also doesn't help that the press normalized actual insanity that would not have been tolerated from anyone else, and collectively pretended that it's normal and reasonable behavior.
It does matter how you campaign. Very few people live without access to information beyond the price of milk. If you see that global inflation is a thing and that it is a topic of importance for potential voters you could acknowledge that it exists and work on your messaging/make it look like you're trying to do something to fix it.
Yep. Hence the recent push to kneecap the education in States - be it book bans, forced Bible studies or other eye-popping regressions. Watching this unfold across the pond was a bewildering experience.
I would have thought young people having access to the internet would have allowed them to educate themselves and see through bullshit, but apparently not.
I really do think this is the beginning of the end for the US. At least I have front row tickets to the show.
Who are you calling uneducated? Just because your have an opinion doesn’t make you an authority on what people under other life conditions need to lead a successful life. Speak for yourself.
> Just because your have an opinion doesn’t make you an authority on what people under other life conditions need to lead a successful life.
That has nothing to do with anything. Every single person voting on the economy for Trump, blaming Biden for inflation is an example of a lack of education. Just for one example.
There's a reason college educated people vote so differently to non college educated people on average.
and everybody just pointing out that climate protection cannot be forced onto a population is also framed as a climate change denier. i don't deny climate change. but i don't see why current generations' lifes should be tougher just to help out future generations. there needs to be a healthy balance.
That's what the previous generation said in the 90s. They could afford that choice, because they knew they would likely be dead before climate change started really affecting everyday life. Our generation – those who are not close to retirement – does not have the same luxury. Our future will be tougher anyway, both from the climate change itself and from the efforts to mitigate its effects.
Do you want your children to have a better life than you? They won’t unless we start putting in the work to fix climate change.
As a species we took on some climate debt to improve our standard of living, and we’ve been talking bigger loans every year. Those loans are coming due in the form of larger and more frequent weather-based disasters as well as health problems for millions. If we start paying off the loan more aggressively now, we can help prevent harsher payment plans for the next 50 years.
You don’t pay off a house all at once, but you’ll thank your future self for paying it off earlier rather than later.
i don't have children and i don't care about the future of our species. solution is easy - don't bring children into this world. having said that; life always finds a way and even dire future projections won't be much worse (maybe not even close) to stone ages, dark ages or natives living in a jungle. and they all did well enough and do. that's how it is.
Have you been living under a rock? Our current lives are already tougher because of climate change, and it's only going to get worse. More extreme and more frequent weather events (droughts, floods, heat waves, ...) are already happening.
> I don't see why current generations' lives should be tougher just to help out future generations.
Most people want a good life not only for them but also for their children, and their children's children. I don't have children, but I still want a good life for future generations. Is that not simple basic human decency?
Note that the longer we wait, the more difficult we make it ourselves to change things, and the more tough even our own lives are going to be, even ignoring future generations.
> There needs to be a healthy balance.
Yes. The status quo is not a healthy balance (or arguably any kind of balance).
I'm not denying climate change as a whole or in absolute, I just want to point out that there's enough evidence to think that the world as we know it won't actually end in 2012 as some studies indicate.
Climate change is a part of Earth's lifecycle. There have been ice ages, and there have been periods like jura, when it was warmer. It's all natural.
What you probably mean is how humans influence this cycle; whether accelerating or delaying it, in effect disrupting it. For that, there's no evidence; however, there are many politician lobbyists (and yes, also scientists taking advantage of juicy grants to deliver what was ordered) going to capitalize on the fear that it might be.
~99.9% of studies agree on human-caused climate change [0].
We know, with absolute certainty for an undeniable fact, that Exxon's own climate scientists skillfully and accurately predicted climate change as a result of increasing fossil fuel use [1].
And we know that Exxon's response to that was to systematically sow doubt for decades, using tobacco-lobby style FUD tactics.
And yet you want us to err on the side of apocalypse. "What if we create a better world, and it was all for nothing".
You've been conned. I know how difficult it is to show someone they've been made a fool of, and I won't try. In fact, I agree with you that in many cases science ought to be questioned - lobotomies, mockery of germ theory, racism presented as science based, Daszak's infamous Lancet paper, etc.
On climate change though, there's very little to respect on the side of deniers. I would argue that, at this point, denying anthropogenic climate change amounts to treason against life.
Again, I find it very small-minded to imply that I'm a denier because I advocate for questioning what we are told. Furthermore, you are putting words on my mouth which make no sense at all.
People should understand there can be healthy middle grounds, which Parent obviously struggles with.
I don't deny anthropogenic climate change, on the contrary, I'm believe it's real and there's evidence for it.
I am, however, sceptical of how it's being presented and used.
An odd choice; to present your points layered in snark and sarcasm, then complain that you weren't fully understood.
> I am, however, sceptical of how it's being presented and used.
Then say that. Poe's law is rampant on this topic. If you want to be understood, then you need to write clearly and plainly.
> People should understand there can be healthy middle grounds
We're so, so far from a healthy middle ground on the discussion around climate change; and comments like yours above push in the wrong direction.
Questioning "what we are told" on climate change without differentiating between what 99.9% of scientists are saying, and what political/industry goons are saying, is guaranteed to receive clapback from any right minded individual.
So, don't act surprised when there's pushback. It's not "small-minded", it's people responding sensibly to the words you wrote.
I concede you're partially right, and I was later regretting my tone, until I re-read a few of the comments and answers. Still, I actually agree with the content of what you're saying, although maybe not the intention or the conclusions.
My tone is, after all, pushback, precisely because we didn't start from a middle ground to begin with (parent's comment). I am pushing in a direction. You might disagree with it, and that's fine.
> differentiating between what 99.9% of scientists are saying, and what political/industry goons are saying
Even if what scientists say can be inaccurate, as has happened throughout history, the point is rather that I question what politicians or the industry says, based on Science, because while the science might be correct, the message is easily corrupted.
... Also, yes, the West is responsible for the vast majority of CO2 release. It's not remotely close [0].
* The United States has emitted more CO2 than any other country to date: at around 400 billion tonnes since 1751, it is responsible for 25% of historical emissions [at 4% of world population].
* This is twice more than China – the world’s second-largest national contributor [18% of world population].
* The 28 countries of the European Union (EU-28) – which are grouped here as they typically negotiate and set targets on a collaborative basis – is also a large historical contributor at 22%.
* Many of the large annual emitters today – such as India and Brazil – are not large contributors in a historical context.
* Africa’s regional contribution – relative to its population size – has been very small. This is the result of very low per capita emissions – both historically and currently.
OK but what does cumulative historic data have to do with anything. It's a dynamic system, it's about of rates of release and removal. Might as well list total contribution by the mammoths.
To declare an arbitrary date when a human being starts to be a human being is so hypocritical, its no longer funny. Actually, I would call that ignorant and evil.
We're using abortion as birth control, in at least 90% of the cases, if not more. Because we dont want to tell the people involved that they have responsibilities in life, and if they dont want children, they are supposed to keep their legs closed or use some other form of birth control. The motivation is clear, its a convenience. But morally, its absolutely evil. I used to see it differently, but that was for my own convenience. Because I secretly hoped that if I ever accidentally knock a women up, I could avoid my responsibility if she is willing to abort. 20 years later, I realize its my responsibility, and I cant make a doctor kill a human being just because I would like to have an easy life.
At what level of development is a human foetus anatomically distinguishable from a cow foetus?
There's no fact-based reason to draw the line in any particular place. We, humanity, don't know what "personhood" really is beyond the laws we write while guessing and the just-so stories we tell each other to justify those laws.
That's why I'm vegetarian, and why I'd become vegan quickly as soon as someone can get milk from GM bacteria. (And sell it in supermarkets).
It's also one of two reasons why I try to be nice to LLMs: just in case. (The other reason takes it as read they have no experience of existence: by being trained on humans, they'll do better and worse exactly when real humans would do better and worse, and that means worse on holiday season and when getting insulted).
Self-awareness itself is poorly defined. So is consciousness, so is sentience, so is intelligence — and by some (but not all) definitions those are four* different things.
No, not really. It has pretty standard definitions in philosophy and science, or it wouldn't have been able to be tested for over several decades. I suggest spending some time reading the wiki, it gives a pretty detailed overview.
The only point you have is about consciousness, and we don't need to understand the entire thing to understand parts of it or observe it, just like gravity.
• The ability to recognise one's own body as distinct from that of others, as demonstrated by plants.
• The ability to pass the mirror test, which some AI pass, but whose relevance is widely debated in animal psychology both on the grounds of sensory chauvinism and because it may cause both false positives and false negatives owing to us not being able to converse with the animals we're testing.
• Introspection, except that now we've got LLMs responding much the same way Turing hoped they would when outlining his eponymous test and suggesting that a "viva voce" interrogation would have us know if the machine was innovative or "learnt it parrot fashion"*.
As humans are also demonstrably great at confabulating reasons for their acts (see: split brain surgery, specifically experimental research on patients' cognitive functioning after surgery), it is unclear whether humans score any differently than LLMs in this test irregardless of if LLMs do or don't count as people in any other sense.
• Qualia: nobody knows.
• Mindfulness, meditation and spirituality: arguably only those who explicitly practice the appropriate mental techniques, e.g. Buddhist monks and similar.
• Public/social awareness of self-standing in community: everyone who is "cringe" fails.
* fun fact: AI critics have been stochastically parroting the stochastic parrot criticism since at least 1949
Like I said, it's actually very well defined because it's been being studied for decades at this point. Just because it can sometimes be an overloaded term in colloquial usage doesn't negate that.
I again suggest you give the wiki page a read. It's quite in-depth and detailed with plenty of good references.
I did in fact read the Wikipedia page, and also have an A-level in philosophy, which means I've written more about this in three homework esseys than the total length of the English Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness
It's absolutely well defined it's just a complex topic. Most of the examples you gave in your last reply are never defined as self-awareness in an academic paper, e.g. qualia is always separate and the mirror test has always just been an indicator not the thing itself.
I do care about welfare, and the difference between infants and zygotes is sentience.
Most medical professionals and ethicists consider 24 weeks to be the reasonable cutoff for abortion because this is when the fetus starts to develops sentience.
The reason this is relevant is because that is the first stage of development capable of having an identity relationship with the future person that fetus/infant will become.
Animals don't have to be self-ware to suffer. Not introspectively self-aware at least.
No, thats not what I said, and you know that. I believe we are using abortion to a very high degree for basic birth control. I am aware that there are exceptions, like those you mentioned. However, while necessary, these exceptions also pose a threat. Because if we have abortion legisation which only allows for abortions in cases of rape, millions of women will, out of desperation, start to claim rapes which never happened. Its a bad situation, no matter what we do.
> why is bacteria life on mars but a clump of cells is not life on earth
That is conflating life (the ability is eat, shit, reproduce, and the potential to late become sentient) with actual sentient life, which is not correct.
Also, no one is planning to ban antibiotics because bacteria is considered life so we can't do anything to save the host by killing it.
The mother is providing care for the unborn child with her body. Seems like needing care vs. being unable to exist on its own is a distinction without a difference.
We could make it not opinion with ease. Make the test:
“Can the fetus survive without the host body?”
That’s a medical question that will slowly move toward not aborting ever. And it solves the medical issues as well. “This fetus is killing the host” always allows for removal, because we can either keep them alive, or it can’t survive.
Then the folks who want more babies to reach term can focus on improving medical technology instead of getting involved with the mess that is people’s love lives.
Huh? Since when is a zygote not alive? It has a cell membrane, contains genetic material, has metabolism, can maintain homeostasis, and can grow. That's pretty much the definition of life.
Do you also think neurons, muscle cells, etc are also not alive?
The abortion debate is not about whether or not the thing that gets removed during abortion is life--I doubt you can find any competent biologist who would say it is not--but rather whether that particular cell or group of cells should be treated different than other cells or groups of cells in your body.
E.g., why should abortion be any different from removing tonsils or from circumcision, both of which also involve the removal and death of living cells from the body?
By that logic, we should also consider banning antibiotics. In a world where we consider a cell or a small grouping of cells to be a life (rather than just alive) antibiotics are essentially a tool for genocide.
That is exactly my point. People are conflating being alive (explicitly in this thread in the sense that a single cell is considered alive) with having a life that should be preserved. Complaining that if we found single celled life on Mars that we'd protect it even to our great inconvenience, but we will end a single cell or small group to save a host body, are making their argument based upon a false equivalence. Any life that might be found on Mars isn't ever posing a risk to a sentient host, and those defending harsh abortion controls because “all life should have a chance even single cells” don't extend “all life” to, well, all life.
Why is this attached to my comment? My comment has nothing whatsoever to do with abortion. (Which I not only do not want to ban, at the very least I'd like it to go back to how it was under Roe v Wade).
My comment was about people misusing the terms life and alive. The correct way to argue that abortion should be legal is not to redefine life and/or alive so that some living cells or collections of living cells do not qualify rather than trying to redefine common terms used by biologists.
The correct way is to argue that we only only protect some cells or collections of cells and not others and then to argue that fetal cells belong in the not protected group. The question then comes down to deciding what it is that makes some groups of living cells protected but not others. Probably the best argument would be something along the lines that before that collection of cells has grown and developed to the point that it has a brain that can think and feel it is not really different from a tumor or other collection of cells that we don't protect.
Not voluntarily, only due to medical necessity. As I said.
> It seems to me you like to substitute what you want to be true for reality. That's the opposite of critical thinking.
The irony here.
Not trying to continue a political flamewar as per dang, but correcting blatant misinformation like the above should be everyone's social responsibility.
True. Although the scale for anything from sperm to baby is probably human<->animal<->bacteria life. I liked it because it definitely shows it's a form of "life" in an accessible way. Where on the scale it falls and whether that life should be protected is an entirely different matter.
I remember reading about college professors who shows a 1 day old zygote or whatever and a skin cell which appear pretty indistinguishable from one another.
Does any reasonable person believe that zygote at that stage is truly equivalent to a human life?
Next up no one should be masturbating because each sperm is potentially the next Mozart or Einstein.
I know, right? It's not mine. I don't really care for it either (except for the "kill at 9 months" thing), but it's interesting to see the two groups argue about it. Both seem to think they're undoubtedly 100% right, as a fact, etc.
I realized the stupidity argument during covid first, and it all came from the left. So much contempt, a reason why I no longer can identify with liberals. In fact, I am disgusted by what I remember from 2020/21.
If one handyman or one farmer or one trucker stopped working, no one would really care. If all CS researchers stopped working, I'd wager people would care, just as they would if handymen/farmers/truckers stopped working.
I thing OP point is that if the trucker stopped working people and businesses will be impacted that day (before he gets replaced, easy with trucker, not with labour). The impact will be more direct and tangible way than, say, a CS researcher not showing up this morning.
> The Democratic Party.. lied to the American people about the cognitive health and fitness of the president. It prevented, threatened, litigated and otherwise eliminated the ability of other [Democratic] candidates for the primary to compete, to get on ballots, and to even participate in a debate.
And it turns out the voters don’t seem to actually care about the cognitive health of the President, nor do they seem to care about being lied to about it.
Yes, they do hide Trump's health reports from the public - or rather he never releases any information like other presidents do. Hell, he GOT SHOT and never gave any details of what happened.
I agree that Democrats denying Biden's cognitive decline was a disaster.
The gibberish that routinely comes out of their candidate barely qualifies as speech.
The reality is, nobody who was wringing their hands about Biden's cognitive abilities, or his son's legal problems actually cared about either issue. If they did, they wouldn't have voted for an mentally declining criminal today.
Agree 100%. The "am I wrong? no, it's the voters who are wrong!" is a sure sign the next campaign will flop as well.
A large percentage of Americans aren't interested in what the Democratic Party is selling. The party can either stick to their policies and live with these kinds of showing, or take some time to really think about what the American voter is looking for.
I look at the grander picture. It’s not that the democrats aren’t connected, it’s that the American people are culturally bankrupt. The romans became decadent after all, culturally incapable of maintaining their empire and slowly declining in power and influence over Europe. The American idea itself is in decline.
I don’t believe you are correct. People who vote for a man as debased, self centered, sexually depraved, and criminally inclined as Trump are “wrong”. White men latched onto a horrible person as their savior. If that’s what they want then they deserve what comes. But the people who don’t want that should stick to their principles.
What does it say about Trump that so many of his lawyers and advisors ended up in jail and that so few former cabinet members endorsed him? What does it say about his supporters who cared not that he raped children with his pal Epstein?
Remember when Cruz and Lindsey Graham spoke honestly about Trump just before November 2016? Recall what they said then to what they say now. It’s a cult.
> People who vote for a man as debased, self centered, sexually depraved, and criminally inclined as Trump are “wrong”.
Maybe you're too young to remember Bill Clinton?
He was accused of sexual harassment by a number of women (including a rape). His relationship with Lewinsky (22 years old), is highly exploitive in terms of the power he held over her career. While he might have supported women's right politically, he was certainly exploitive in his personal life.
There were also a number of "questionable business dealings" in his past. Arkansas land deals, Whitewater, almost impeached by Congress for lying.
But I'm sure you'll say "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Republicans". Ok, then don't blame Trump voters when they think "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Democrats".
So while people got worked up, he got re-elected handily.
It's funny to me when people entirely overlooked Clinton's life because they liked him as a President and they liked his policies.
The Clintons earned $120 million in 10 years after he was President. Hilary gave 30 minute speeches at Goldman Sachs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clearly these were payouts for repeal of Glass-Steagal and other policies. He was a predator and not deserving of the adulation he got. She became senator for New York by having it basically handed to her.
It would benefit humanity if people were taught to be consistent in their views. If they understood that extremism is when the cause is more important than the truth.
But I'm sure you'll say "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Republicans". Ok, then don't blame Trump voters when they think "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Democrats".
You’d be wrong. I don’t have your apparent level of inconsistency.
I think the only lesson that Democrats can learn from the past three elections is that women have no chance at presidency. If anything, as an outsider, the campaign Harris led, seemed to reach vastly more people than Biden's.
I am 100% convinced a Republican woman could win. I was in touch with a lot of deep-red middle-of-the-country Republican voters and candidates for state and federal offices when Palin was the VP pick. Shooting-stuff-in-political-ads sorts. It was practically all they talked about. They liked her a ton better than McCain. I think they’d have gladly voted for her at the top of the ticket (granted, they lost that one, but I think an R woman could absolutely be elected President, probably more easily than a Democratic one).
That would be missing the forest for the trees in my view. I could see it having an impact, but when 60% of people say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, putting up a candidate who was in power the last four years just isn’t going to work. Biden would not have won a primary, and neither would she have
People who vote for a sexual predator, a conman, pathological liar, a felon, a cheat, and a person who obviously has narcissistic personality disorder are stupid. We are living in a tyranny of the stupid. He’s the President we deserve.
It clearly shows how bad the D candidate/policy is, such that people prefered the R candidate with all the flaws you listed. The eye opener should be why people rejected the D candidates.
I'm inclined to agree with you. At the same time, I don't think Kamala should have spent some of the limited time she had cozying up to people who wouldn't vote for her, antagonizing her base, and for the most part sidelining the people she had to convince.
It’s a white nationalist backlash. They cared not about the messenger; only the message. It’s also the product of Russian disinformation. Russia has perfected the art of sowing division and faux outrage. We’ve done it to other countries so we deserve it in some sense. We’ll see a rise of toxic masculinity. Women exercising sexual autonomy and gaining power is not something snowflake men can handle.
Russia and China have been waging a cyber war against the U.S. for a long time now. Russian accounts on social media have been effective at sowing dissent, chaos, conspiracy theories, and false information. Tim Pool and others on Russia’s payroll is clear evidence of this.
The lesson of the day is that the U.S. is far more conservative than I thought. Trump is the President we deserve and we deserve what comes next. White rural voters will not be helped by him and I will not shed any tears at their plight.
> Russian accounts on social media have been effective at sowing dissent, chaos, conspiracy theories, and false information.
Let me see... are you saying the CIA is sleeping at the wheel and don't know how to sow disinformation by themselves, and that a third world country like Russia is somehow more capable at this kind of game?
As a foreigner, the Democratic party just lives of to crying wolf on the Republican party without offering any meaningful difference. And people have gotten tired of it, judging by the fact that Trump is not getting more voters than in 2020, but they are getting considerably less.
Maybe I'm a bit too optimistic, but rather than "people want Trump" I read all this debacle as "people want something different from the Democrats".
Nah, the problem is that Republicans have openly played a dirty game for almost a decade with ZERO repercussions. They flaunt the laws and conventions of politics and nothing happens.
Democrats still play by the rules for some reason and don't call out the shit done by the other party with simple enough terms.
This. One side sticks to the rules and watches silently while the other side slowly undermines them.
At the same time, the Republicans have perfected the twin strategies of sowing distrust in neutral media reorting and playing the victim card consistently to everything, even their own attacks.
And Donald's first term taught them that when you lie ALL THE TIME, nobody can fact-check you effectively. Just stick to the script and talking points, no matter what the question.
By the time the first ad-libbed bold faced lie is checked and sourced, he has told 42 more. It's not a game you can win by playing by the rules.
I think calling this too much government inaccurate. IMO it is government not doing enough what it should do, and putting its hands into private issues too much. So cutting government regulation won't work.
This is a case of a home raid and tossing the house that resulted in the killing of a pet. If you don't think that is too much government power and abuse, I don't understand your world view.
In my ideal world, a govt. rep would reach out or knock, even with a warrant, to do an animal wellness check and remove the animal in case of abuse and to cite the owner and specify the correct forms needed to keep the squirrel.
In this election, the Democrats were unable to offer the majority of voters the past they fondly remember or the future they can look forward to. It's that simple.
The message is the same even for non-America - we need to engage with these folks and stop disparaging them. We need to talk to them, we need to understand where they're coming from, we need to help clear the air between "us and them" so that there won't be an "us and them" and so we can _together_ avoid people that tell us what we want to hear.
I bought that line in 2016 and again in 2020. I'm not saying I'm done with trying to understand, but that level of fks to give is very minimal now.
Obviously, I don't think 50% of the population is stupid, but every time I try to "understand" it's becoming increasingly clear it's about his "charisma" and "our team" and less about hard policies.
People out here voting against their own interests or blaming things on ignorance (inflation, etc.).
That would be the charitable interpretation, the alternate is that they are knowingly misogynistic, deeply racist and have strong fascist leanings to follow a flawed corrupt politician with cult-like devotion.
That's why Kamala lost: they called supporters of the other camp racist and misogynists like you're doing right now instead of discussing and listening to their grievances.
Shitting on your voter base is no way to win sympathy.
The marginal voter doesn't have grievances like that unless the country is seriously in trouble (like it was in 2008 and 2020.) They're not paying close enough attention to have them, nor do they have clear ideas about which piece of government is capable of addressing which problems. They have better things to do.
If you talk to the median voter their thinking will be like "something happened three years ago I was mad about" or "my husband wants us to vote this way because he saw it on TV" or "the Democrats want to legalize incest" or "I like voting for whoever I think is going to win" (and yes these are all real.) They especially do not have coherent opinions on economic policy.
Mainly the problem is the US doesn't have a coherent media ecosystem anymore and Republicans were better aligned with newer media, ie Facebook posts and bro-y podcasts like Rogan. So TV ads and "ground game" don't work.
Simply put, this chunk of the electorate doesn’t have any kind of grasp on the workings of government. As you say, their motivations for voting are simplistic and difficult for campaigns to reason about because they’re so particular to each individual.
Part of the reason why political media has seen such a decline in quality is because of that fundamental lack of understanding by the people. Neutral nuanced analysis doesn’t resonate because that’s some combination of too incomprehensible and not entertaining enough, which has led to the media landscape we have now where it’s turned to the televised version of junk food: hyper-processed with lots of salt and sugar and practically zero nutritional value.
That said, to some degree I don’t place fault on the people for this. A lot of it comes down to inadequacies in the education system when it comes to civics, wherein young people are not well equipped to become highly functional, fully conscious voting adults.
Economic vibes with simplistic immediate effects if truly were a major factor then 2020 Biden would have won with bigger margins than Reagan did .
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Countries with far poorer literacy and school attendance rates and patchy education systems vote quite well informed.
In India for example every candidate (party or independent) must have a simple symbol because many voters cannot read, yet nobody is saying Modi wins because of lack of awareness or good understanding of his Hindu nationalist agenda or extreme right wing policies.
It is the third election for both, voters have had a decade to see the effect of the policies have had first hand no matter what they have been told
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Body electorates aren’t as dumb as we like to explain away.
Education, economics, even disinformation (foreign and local) all play marginal role, but can’t explain the core
At some point we have to accept that this is a deeply racist(who come in all colors) misogynist society with facist Christo white nationalism deeply ingrained.
You have no idea if thats why she lost. Thats why you want to believe she lost but it could be things like inflation, immigration, and not having clear messaging. Also not distinguishing herself from an otherwise unpopular president.
We should hear their grievances on our bodily autonomy and healthcare ?
There are aspects where we can compromise, or empathize and learn to live together on such as economy or immigration, basic human decency and healthcare are not it.
Also bit rich that we have to listen to their grievances, they haven't afforded anyone that courtesy, or respected the process of democracy.
If the results were other way round, we would be hearing conspiracy theories about election interference non stop. You can only compromise with people acting in good faith, it is clear that majority of Americans don't want to do that.
Misogynistic was my first qualifier, it is not an coincidence that Trump has won only against women twice, and it is not an oversight that in 250 years America is nowhere close to electing a woman president.
Technically Obama was running against one, McCain had Palin on the ticket .I don’t think that made a difference, VPs don’t .
misogyny is hardly the only factor but if there was woman on the top of the ticket than it absolutely seem to be number one factor .
You have to keep in mind it just wasn’t symbolic like in 2016. There are real tangible immediate threats to reproductive healthcare that this election also represented.
Maybe mankind ain't yet so developed that what you list isn't present in general population in large numbers, even majority.
Echo chambers like HN or typical workplace of typical HN user give skewed image how much rational folks out there generally are. Most people that I ever met are trivially susceptible to smart manipulation via emotions, even to the point of shooting their own foot.
I've read people say this over and over. And yet, I don't know of any single substantive position that Kamala has taken. She chose a vibes fight and she lost.
look at the comment i’m replying to. if you go to both candidates pages, they’ll have their policy positions laid out. Kamala made none of them a part of her core message. She instead leaned bizarrely into the threat of fascism.
She was weak on messaging, but her proposal for housing was good (improving affordability has appeal, but she failed to capitalize on it). What confounded this in part was that she probably meant to mostly stay in line with Biden's policies, and you can't connect with voters on that. They're concerned about inflation and the border. Biden's administration already fucked that up for her; they fixed the border, but too little too late (so what is there to say?), and while inflation has abated and wage-growth has improved, people still feel poorer than before 2020 (so what is there to say?).
I can't see how anyone else in her position would have done much better. I don't blame Harris much.
The last 20 years of the UK is an interesting rollercoaster.
There was a massive international financial crisis that outed the Labour government and brought in a Tory/Lib Dem coalition government based on promises of government austerity.
There was an independence referendum in Scotland where the main campaign point for staying with England was to ensure they stayed in the EU etc.
Then the Tories managed to pin the blame for the failings of the coalition on the minor partner and drew a line under that for the next election.
Then there's brexit, which was really a vote to put an end to bickering inside the Tory party. But the population, narrowly voted to leave the EU! This was very much a protest vote.
Then there's a utter crazy story of quick rotation of prime ministers and scandal and sleeze and very very poorly-received budgets and things.
So then this year Labour are back, and their main strategy was 'at least we're not the Tories'. They are not popular, but they are not the incumbents.
The funny thing is that Labour is now 100% "like the Tories". It's the Tories who are no longer "like the Tories" and have morphed instead into a rabid populist party without real politics that bank instead on identity politics.
The UK is just developed country facing the same problems associated with an aging population as every other developed country (and also many developing countries—sucks for them...). There's absolutely nothing special about the UK and if the UK is a failed state then so too is Germany (where I live) and the rest of Europe, and the only "successful" countries on the planet are the US, Switzerland and a handful of microstates.
She didnt explain why inflation happened. She didnt explain why dems did not crack down on the border until right wingers made an issue out of it. She didnt distance herself from biden. She didnt explain how she would protect abortion rights. I wanted her to win but she didnt have answers or her messaging was not getting through
Inflation: "inflation has come down over the last two years, a lot of it has been from the healing of the supply side of the economy.
What is that? Supply chains have improved. The labor force has expanded, partly due to increased immigration, and that's helped to take some of the edge off of the supply-and-demand imbalances that we had when inflation was very high two years ago."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/examining-how-economic-pla...
Immigration: "After hitting a record high in December 2023, the numbers of migrants crossing the border has plummeted since then. Harris and the administration have credited their tough anti-asylum measures for stemming the flow, although increased enforcement on the Mexican side has also played a key role."
https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2024/where-trum...
Abortion rights: "At one of her first campaign events, she stated that if Congress “passes a law to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States I will sign it into law.”"
https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/how-kamala-ha...
If you don't like what her positions are that's your prerogative but it's just not true that she did not have answers to these questions.
> Inflation: "inflation has come down over the last two years, a lot of it has been from the healing of the supply side of the economy.
I think this is one of the disconnects: inflation has been decreasing. What I think people hear, which is wrong: the prices of things are coming down.
They're not coming down, they're increasing _slower_ than before, and before was bad. Prices for lots of things are much more expensive than before covid.
The reason that "inflation is better now" didn't stick is because half the country was telling the emperor they were clothed, and half the country saw a naked person.
The problem really is that we need to accept that they are "stupid" but in an empathetic way, remembering that we were once stupid and ignorant. We took it for granted that other people wouldn't confuse correlation with causation, blaming Biden's presidency for inflation. But all of us thought correlation was causation at one point until somebody educated us on science. When a topic was confusing and complicated, we leaned on correlation to guide us until we learned better in formal education. It would be immensely difficult to explain to someone why groceries have become unaffordable without extensive exposition, but it's a hard problem that we should try to solve instead of just calling people ignorant in frustration.
Yes and the media needs to stop being so obviously biased because it both undermines their role as the arbiters of truth and it undermines the party they allegedly want to win
I was just thinking the exact opposite, maybe the US needs to split into two nations. I was drawing border lines in my mind around central regions and wondering how things would pan out if they seceded. The lack of geographic continuity would be a problem for the coasts, but perhaps they could join Canada.
Won't this be impossible since you have the urban/rural areas of the same state belonging to these two different nations ? At-least impossible without a gargantuan civil war that makes the 1861 war look like a toddler's quarrel.
Try splitting Georgia, where Harris wins a few populous counties with a 30 to 70 pp margin, and Trump leads the lump of smaller counties with a 30 to 70 pp margin.
They reelected the DA that's prosecuting Trump on one of the populous counties, on the same election where the state swung further towards Trump.
In the past, maybe. Trump won the popular vote last night. He swept almost everything, as painful as that is for me to say. There is no way to divide the country without mass migration which would never happen.
True, that was an awkward episode. Now you've got me reading about the motivations for the civil war. I mean obviously slavery, but why go to war rather than let the Confederacy be a separate nation? Seems the fighting was over the political future of yet-to-be Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma (if I've got the right territories there), and whether they would have slavery, once populated.
Blue areas aren’t states. They are cities. Democratic voting counties account for over 70% of the nations gdp. Conservative counties quite literally cannot support themselves.
> Blue areas aren’t states. They are cities. Democratic voting counties account for over 70% of the nations gdp. Conservative counties quite literally cannot support themselves.
Conservative counties produce goods and food that can be produced anywhere.
Democratic counties produce goods that generally require an education and are significantly more valuable. Think big tech, big pharma, engineering, etc.
Democratic counties would be just fine without conservative counties. The inverse is not true.
It's much worse in the US though because the gap is so much wider. Even in the UK or Canada or Australia, the right is not opposing climate change or healthcare or anything reasonable to the same extent as in the US.
They absolutely are here in Canada. Especially around climate change because Canada is an oil exporter. And they will be emboldened by what just happened in the US.
Alberta outright banned renewables development for 6 months and then slapped a huge set of restrictions on them after that "moratorium" was lifted. A tax on electric car owners added. The conservative parties nationally are on a constant drum beat about the national carbon tax and it's doomed. Weak emissions caps we have are also doomed. Any little things that have been done for the last 10 years will be undone.
At a recent party convention in Alberta, the ruling party passed a climate denial resolution as official party policy.
Amazingly lots of people on this forum trying to sanitize what these people are about.
Cross the border from here in Canada into very "blue" New York and you'll drive through a huge swathe of what is actually "red" Trump country in Western New York.
Outside of the urban areas even "blue" states are red, or "purple."
The reality is that America voted for this guy. It's not nearly as regionally divided as liberals in America want to think.
For me, it means not going there anymore. I just won't cross the border for any reason.
Yeah I live rural Ontario. Last municipal election people's lawns were covered with idiotic "Stop Woke" signs. And my parents are in rural Alberta. Oh boy.
The Joye of Ye Taxes is that you cannot choose to stop paying them just because of a disagreement about how they are spent. Elections need to be won first.
You're losing if you write like this, because this is liberal/left wing writing. If the voters prioritize strength and machismo, you should be insulting them even more. They don't mind, they'll just assume it's about someone else.
Meh, it is clear where they care coming from and they talk quite clearly. What we need to do is to stop like naïve Pollyanna's, stop relying on fact checks, stop pretending "both sides are equal" and engage with dirty fight they do.
What "dirty fight" are you envisioning? Prosecuting Trump in court doesn't appear to work and is disparaged as "lawfare". Biden calling Trump voters trash apparently backfires, but nothing Trump or his campaign says ever backfires.
I for one think the an anti-Trump campaign that just spammed his "grab them by the pussy, you can do anything" comment would've cut his support among religious voters significantly. It was mentioned in D-leaning spaces but never a campaign focus (at least, not in any of the attack ads I have seen - they were all about issues only D's care about, rallying the base rather than actually trying to care what non-base voters think).
The economy might be what swung this vote, but long-term it's hard to understate how much ground the D's have lost among religious voters for "embracing sexual immorality". Believe it or not, bringing up hypocrisy does work on many of them (at least it might make them stay home) and mere apologies won't erase it. Latinos are where this jumps out in statistics, but it's far from limited to them.
Possibly the reason D's didn't do that (much) was because it would have little down-ballot effect, and no effect on future candidates?
(on another angle, we could've seen "we have reined in Trump's inflation so at least it won't get worse", "Trump gave unconditional handouts without the Democrat-recommended constraints", etc.)
And "calling him what he is" has so far failed to sway his supporters, I don't see how it will do it now. OTOH, he (probably?) won't stand for election again, so the point is probably moot...
>the US Supreme Court decided more or less exactly that presidents can break the law and get away with it
no, they did not. The court pointed out that the remedy (specified in the Constitution) for a president who breaks the law is impeachment and conviction by the house and senate. After which, that former president could be subject to prosecution.
Democratic party goes out of its way to look center, be accommodating and non confrontial. It just does not work.
I stand by "politician should not mean being lawless". US Supreme Court being pro lawless when it comes to GOP is just politics of US Supreme Court. It does not mean law should not matter or that trying to apply law is fighting dirty.
Trump and his supporters will say anything and accepting their framing again and again should be already seen as proven failure strategy. It just does not work.
It is not dirty fight, full stop. Dirty fight would be to act like Trump and his supporters do or approaching it.
I suggest we stop with the "we need to engage with these folks and stop disparaging them" nonsense designed to create unequal situation where GOP and Trump can be arbitrary dirty, but everyone else needs to treat them with kids gloves and use euphemisms.
I suggest Democratic party to become more aggressive rather then forever trying to paint themselves as "the adult ones" and forever put themselves into center. It just does not work and serves only to allow overtone window to move toward radical conservativism.
I suggest we stop demanding that "both sides" are described in the same terms. I suggest we stop following nonsense:
> We need to talk to them, we need to understand where they're coming from, we need to help clear the air between "us and them" so that there won't be an "us and them" and so we can _together_ avoid people that tell us what we want to hear.
For example, conservative Christians are coming from the point of view of someone who thinks women should be submissive to men, should have less legal rights, abortion and contraception are wrong because they allow for safer sex.
For example, quite a lot of people in GOP are coming to it with idea that being gay is disgrace, being trans deserve severe punishment and that being criminal is cool as long as you are rich white guy.
Actually engage with these rather then euphemism them away.
That's not what the GP means, the popular vote is likely to be for the Democrats, as has happened basically every election. It's only because of the electoral college system that Republicans win the presidency.
Ah interesting, I don't know enough about which states do what. Is it not at the point where the states we knew the results of have been tallied, and the swing states are still unknown?
Yes - they are free to vote, and the electoral college then selects who they put their votes towards to represent the voters, which is in line with the majority voting sentiment.
The lesson is that Reddit is not real life, and that calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters turns out to not be a winning strategy.
Whether democrats finally learn that lesson is another thing. I am not optimistic on that.
> calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters
The Democratic campaign did no such thing. Can you point to any examples? As far as I can see they went to great lengths to avoid saying anything like that.
As far as I can tell there was far more venom from the Republicans. Maybe the lesson is that a winning strategy is to be more insulting.
It was a single remark by the outgoing president who wasn't standing for election, and something he quickly rowed back on. It was clearly something he didn't intend to say, but at some point in an election campaign someone is going to misspeak.
Anyway, you're moving the goalposts. The allegation was "calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters".
>calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters
They don't (in general). Some of them over-apply those words. Some of them apply them to an over-broad category ("conservatives" or whatever). Some of them apply some of those words to some Trump supporters, which is not even the same thing as Trump voters, Republicans, or conservatives. And of that sub-sub-subset, sometimes the harsh words are even understandable, considering the hideous, immoral things they are being applied in response to.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are much harsher with their words, and use much broader strokes when applying them.
I.e. it's the opposite. One of the defining characteristic (as opposed to simply a tendency) of the speaking style of Trump supporters is mockery and provocation and insulting and name-calling and threatening. They don't all do it, but it's an undeniable part of their ideology.
Inflation. Record illegal immigration. Identity politics. Inflation. An anointed candidate. Perceived censorship. Inflation. Income inequality. Cover ups. Inflation.
I’m not saying Trump will fix any of this. I’m just saying people feel like PC culture has gone over the top while a 20oz Coke has tripled in price. Harris campaigned on “we’re not going back” but a lot of people would trade Trump’s insanity for housing prices of yore.
Funny thing is we saved ourselves from 2008-style economic collapse with stimulus, which partially caused the inflation here but also caused it in all the other countries. But nevertheless, all their incumbent parties lost over it.
When you get punched in the face, the first thought is not who else got punched. Of course ppl will vote based on their own recent face punching. "I didn't get punched in the face when the other guy was president"
I wouldn't say stupid, I'd say ignorant. A more progressive interpretation: you can't help someone else until you have your own mask on. People are voting based on how they feel their life is compared to 4 years ago and apparently half of america very much recalls life being better then. They don't feel the need to dig any deeper than that; they need to get their own oxygen mask on.
Which is a bit of a weird argument because people did get punched hard in 2020. Things were mostly very bad during Trump’s last year in office. Jobs were lost, millions died; Trump himself spent days in intensive care in October 2020.
Political memories are very short. Trump can get excused for the botched Covid response because it’s ancient history, but Biden can’t get excused for global inflation which followed from the same disaster.
> Inflation was global, and the USA navigated it much better than other Western economies.
This comes across as very out of touch. By "navigated it" you mean brought inflation under control. But it's not like prices came down.
The $1,500 per month grocery bill that was $1,000 in 2019 is still $1,500.
People don't look at the CPI and think "phew, glad the Fed was able to get inflation back to target" they think "I remember when I used to have $1,000 left over each month".
Not only will Trump not fix these things but he’s the cause or at least contributor to all the things you just mentioned. You may be right that those are the reasons people voted for Trump, but if they did they’re naive at best.
Yes. We Americans have the collective memory of a Mayfly and the inability to pay attention to things that drive actual inflation that take a lot of time to resolve, like bad housing policy, logistics logjams, and starving the beastly budget needed for oversight.
I completely agree that Trump printed a ton of money, but Biden also continued to print a ton of money.
In addition, people tend to associate outcomes with the administration in power even if it’s due to a prior administration. Inflation appeared under Biden, not Trump. Inflation decreasing also does not mean prices decreasing.
Obama is the only 2 term President to have gotten a majority of the vote both times since Ronald Reagan. Our system had been broken in a sense (depending on your perspective). We’ve had candidates get a plurality and some a majority of the vote who did not get elected. I think the electoral system needs to be abandoned.
The U.S. is far more right wing than people thought. That Trump got a majority of the vote is a huge win for him. No one can claim his win is because of a backward electoral system and not because he is popular. This is huge. Democrats will be dead for 2 years minimum. Trump will be able to enact whatever legislation he wants to.
He is the President we deserve. The DNC needs to be abolished. Democrats had the opportunity to reform the system. It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
> Democrats had the opportunity to reform the system. It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
When? How? Any change like that in the last few decades would be very hard, and probably before that as well.
I don't disagree with you, I've argued "fixing the system should be #1 priority" for years, but even if the Democratic party wanted to, I don't see how they could have done so.
When Obama was President his first two years Democrats had clear majorities of both houses. But that fool was obsessed with “bipartisanship”. He acted as if the political norms of the 70s had not changed. Also, they haven’t even tried to fight for the things I mentioned.
In Obama's first term, the parties were not nearly as ideologically sorted as they were today. There was a Democratic majority of 257 in the House, yes, but 54 of those were members of the explicitly conservative Blue Dog Coalition. They wouldn't have agreed to vote for sweeping partisan reforms.
I think they would have gone for updating the number of a Representatives. But they didn’t even try to do such things. Obama kept trying the make a deal with Republicans and acted like it was the 1970s. In the end he saw what his efforts were worth when Republicans refused to even vote for his Supreme Court nominee.
Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment and that wouldn’t have passed with enough states.
I don’t think number of representatives matters as it’s mostly representative of population. If the ratios are the same then I don’t think 435 vs 4035 matters.
> Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment
No, the size of the House is determined by Congress; a century ago they decided to cap it at the current number, and never increase it since then, regardless of population increase.
> I don’t think number of representatives matters as it’s mostly representative of population
That's not the case, though. A quick look at constituents per representative across states is all it takes to see how stark that is.
It's extra important because the number of electoral votes each state gets is dependent upon their number of representatives.
Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment…
You are wrong on this. You should look up Reapportionment Acts. The number of Representatives does matter in an electoral system and for other reasons. A Representative from California represents far more people than one from North Dakota. This is a major power imbalance in both electoral matters and in matters of federal legislation.
The number of Representatives hasn’t been updated in a 100 years.
> It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
As much as I'd like to think the waning days of the 2022 Congress were wasted, I don't think this would have been feasible.
Manchin and Sinema refused to get rid of the filibuster. And with that in place, nothing else that you mention was possible.
> The U.S. is far more right wing than people thought.
Yup. In 2016 we thought Trump was an aberration, a temporary cultish fad. In 2020 we felt justified because he lost, but we ignored how barely he lost. And now, knowing everything about Trump there is to know, we've elected him again, and we can't even say he lost the popular vote this time. The GOP took the Senate, and may even keep hold of the House for at least the next two years. Thomas and Alito will likely retire from SCOTUS, and Trump will appoint young, carefully-chosen, extreme right-wing justices. The makeup of the court will be hard-right-majority for the rest of my life. I'm sure he'll also appoint more hard-right judges to the federal judiciary in record numbers.
This is who we are, and it's time we start accepting that. Dem leadership needs to internalize that and drastically change their strategy. I'm not sure
the message is: we don't want immigrants, we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us). like it or not, this is what people want.
> we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us)
It is not even that since what they basically propose is to dial down the war in Eastern Europe but get more involved in the war in Middle East and possibly soon in East Asia. That stance always seemed very confusing to me as a non-US person.
> That stance always seemed very confusing to me as a non-US person.
Europeans seem to overestimate how close America is to Europe.
If you live in the Western half of the United States, Asia is much closer than Eastern Europe, most US military deployments are in the Pacific, and most foreign trade the US has is with Asia.
Both parties campaigned on leaving the Middle East, but it is difficult to disengage from the region without devolving power to a regional ally (similar to how the US historically let France take the reigns on African relations). Historically, that ally has been Israel and Turkiye, but relations between the US and them have fallen precipitously.
But you aren't getting any with this ticket. There is no political force in the US that would question the trickle-down fairytales, and your broken elections system won't allow one to emerge.
So you vote for change, yet the economics policies stay as unequal as always. But in the process you supported a rapist and a criminal who calls execution of journalists, suppression of women, blatant racism and just death and destruction of non-privileged people everywhere.
accelerationism would be launching yourself into the unknown and not committing to a particular political ideology except the continuous development of capitalism. This is simply working with the concrete situation: a Trump presidency, which clearly opens up more opportunities for radical action then a Harris presidency, since Trump will be too busy completely destroying the economy and the FBI, CIA, and NSA, the judiciary and the legal system more broadly, to be even capable of fighting back against resistance or even stopping the conditions for a popular foment. Or, maybe I'm wrong, who knows. But at least now we'll get to know.
Notably those wars were not started or escalated by Trump's republican party. While >Dick Cheney< got accepted by Dems now just because he is against Trump...
Trump has a responsibility in escalating the tension between Israel and Palestine following the move of the American embassy to Jerusalem.
He also escalated bombings in Syria.
His terrible Afghan deal also made it so that there was no time or guarantees to fly Americans and people that helped America to the US while also leaving a lot of American military gear to the Talibans. This also ridiculed the US on the international stage.
Considering it seems Arab American voters were willing to punish kamala or even outright vote trump on account of the current administrations stance on IvP since then, it seems they are willing to look past the embassy issue for a bigger issue - the current state of affairs.
Considering how the Obama administration handled Iraq and Afghanistan, I doubt they would have acted any differently wrt Syria.
Alas if I recall Trump managed to have ultimate responsibility for that fiasco occur under Biden's watch on account of losing the 2020 election. Whoops.
> Alas if I recall Trump managed to have ultimate responsibility for that fiasco occur under Biden's watch on account of losing the 2020 election. Whoops.
Yes, he was completely out negotiated by terrorists and his successor had to clean up the gigantic pile of poop that leaked from Trumps diaper.
it's actually really interesting, Trump already modified his rhetoric. In the rallies in the last week and in his acceptance speech he has suddenly talked about how they want immigrants to come in legally - even went out of his way to talk about "geninuses" in the acceptance speech. Pretty clear here that people like Musk have been heavily exerting influence to shape his viewpoint towards favouring immigration that allows high skilled workers in.
> we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us)
More like stop trying so hard to bring us closer to a WWIII. The USA's current foreign policy is the main cause of all the turmoil we're seeing in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Anything that can change it should be welcomed by anyone with a desire to live.
The game theoretic irony is that peace can often only be achieved by building up the military strength to deter potential attackers. There are a few places in the world where US involvement can lead tonkore stability.
Faltering US support for the Ukraine will tempt Russia into more territorial expansion towards or even into NATO.
China will probably ramp up aggression against Taiwan and against the Philippines. It is a minor miracle that no lethal shots have yet been fired in the persistent and aggressive military incursions into Philippines territorial waters. Several navy vessels have already been damaged this year.
I believe that the best way to release tensions in the Middle East would be by improving relations with Iran - but Trump bombed the deal that would have enabled that. The relqtive economic stength of the US could have been a good motivatir. Now Iran is aligning itself with Russia.
>The game theoretic irony is that peace can often only be achieved by building up the military strength to deter potential attackers.
But the utility of military build up is non-linear. There comes a point where further gains for your side are marginal while further losses for your adversary are existential. A neutral Ukraine represented a sufficiently balanced state of power that rendered war negative sum for Russia. We overextended ourselves in trying to peal Ukraine away from Russia's orbit. NATO in Ukraine would have been a strategic noose from which Russia would never escape. The Ukraine war is blowback for American policy towards Russia, i.e. expand NATO up to Russia's border, bait Ukraine and Georgia for NATO membership, foment anti-Russian movements in Ukraine that lead to the expulsion of the Russian-friendly president of Ukraine and install someone western-oriented.
> NATO in Ukraine would have been a strategic noose from which Russia would never escape.
Reminder: Ukraine was (strongly) against NATO membership before Russia invaded in 2014.
NATO threat is a red herring that Russia likes to dangle in front of the western countries to cover up its expansionist agenda. The only reason it's "afraid" of NATO is NATO can make that agenda much harder to pull off.
> The game theoretic irony is that peace can often only be achieved by building up the military strength to deter potential attackers.
Nobody has attacked the USA since Pearl Harbor. Military strength has been used to impose hegemony over other parts of the world, not to protect the nation.
> There are a few places in the world where US involvement can lead tonkore stability.
How can you say that after the countless deaths, pain, and strife caused by the USA in the Middle East, Asia, and South America?
> Military strength has been used to impose hegemony over other parts of the world, not to protect the nation.
I'm not a scholar of military history. I assumed that no one would dare attack the US because the US military is larger than the next ~dozen militaries combined?
You mean the terrorist attack orchestrated by the same guy (Osama Bin Laden) the USA propped up in the 80s when he was fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan?
The 11 September is the perfect example of the USA bringing instability to the world and giving life to future enemies through their reckless interference in the Middle East.
It's not immigrants. It's illegal immigrants. It was very clear from the beginning that this is what will kill the democrats chances. When you have poor people that have lived in this country since birth not be able to get help from the government because the government services in their community are over ran due to the influx of people. Who do you think they are going to vote for? Why do you think the Republicans had an historic election with minority voters?
All they had to do was actually do anything about the tens of millions of immigrants coming over the board, but they ignored it and Trump used it against them.
The Democrat party is ran by a bunch of idiots. Hopefully this is a wake up call for them to get with the real world on issues.
Calling someone Hitler when they clearly aren't is also not going to help people support you especially AFTER he was president before and they experienced a presidency under him lol.
This has happened and is happening in Europe, too.
Many people are coming in, some of them don't integrate and cause problems, the center says it's not a problem and the left says let's have more of them.
More people are coming in, problems are getting worse (both real and imaginary), people are getting upset, the right realizes they can use that and they build their whole agenda or that and win the elections.
The number of countries this has happened in increases, so non-right parties need to rethink their strategy if they want to stop losing.
Europe is able to change political course much more gradually: the EU is 27 countries, and the EU Parliament is elected with proportional voting systems which leads to coalitions and compromise.
A 10% increase in 'right' votes means roughly 10% more influence for the 'right' opinions.
In the USA, a tiny increase in 'right' votes means 100% more influence.
Europe is currently experiencing a hard shift to the right because progressives keep lying and downplaying bad economy policies and illegal immigration. Yet somehow each party has their own scapegoat.
"Tens of millions" "coming in over the border"? Mexico only even has 120m people in the first place. What, you think that half of their population walked into Texas and bought a house in Dallas?
> From 2014 to 2020, migrants from outside Mexico and Central America — known as “extra-continentals” — accounted for 19 percent of immigration court cases.
> In the last four years, those “extra-continentals” have risen to 53 percent of all court cases. They have arrived from countries such as India, China, Colombia and Mauritania.
Okay. Sure. Mexico only has 120m people. You think that a third of their population walked into Texas and bought a house in Dallas? A quarter? Hell, ten percent?
Fine. I'll bring some of my own statistics. There might be ten million undocumented immigrants living in the United States total. There are fewer than half a million illegal border crossings a year; if the expected lifespan following an illegal border crossing is, I don't know, forty years, then it's obvious that the overwhelming majority of illegal border crossings don't convert to undocumented immigrants. These numbers are easily available on the relevant Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni..., which itself has extensive citations from a wide variety of sources. Saying that there are "tens of millions crossing the border" is clearly and blatantly incorrect.
And, of course, that's not even getting into the real meat of the issue, that's just sarcastically calling out the surface-level lies. No, what I really want to say about illegal immigration is that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than either documented immigrants or outright citizens, that they pay more taxes than they cost in government spending, that they do not affect job access or pay of legal residents, that they prevent offshoring, and that they contribute to GDP via spending and labor. Undocumented immigrants are, as far as I can tell, purely positive contributors to America at every level I look at, for the people working alongside them and going to school with them all the way up to the grandest statistics. If we truly wanted a healthy economy - if we wanted more citizens to have better jobs, if we wanted more money for education and healthcare, if we wanted less crime and less exploitation of labor - we would legalize all of them and invite more in after them.
250k (recorded border patrol contacts) came across in December 2023 (peak), about 55k this last August. It is usually fewer then a million per year but still a significant number of people. Bad policies in 2023 led to an absolute flood. That is competition for American workers.
Still not "tens of millions", don't motte-and-bailey me.
Also, I thought competition was good and that we needed more of it. That's the usual fiscal-conservative line, right?
I'll further note that there are more job postings open right now than there have been at any time since 2000, that unemployment right now is incredibly low considering the pandemic and 2008, that the unemployment that still exists can be fairly easily traced to the previous trump presidency rather than any other cause, and that multiple detailed studies (refer to previous Wikipedia link) fail to find that illegal immigrants have any effect at all on the jobs or pay of American workers. Having more workers in total increases spending which opens up more jobs, for example, standard jevons paradox stuff. Your conclusions are not supported by any kind of evidence, your models do not describe or provide accurate predictions of reality, and your proposals will not work the way you think or claim they will.
Is it really competition? Do American workers get paid in cash from employers who don't ask for their Social Security number? Skilled jobs require documentation. Unskilled jobs require documentation. Working undocumented means being paid in cash by an employer who doesn't tell the IRS about you. Are citizens really lining up to work these jobs that undocumented immigrants perform? Food prices will increase again when all of the migrant farm workers are deported.
Most of the illegal migrants coming into the U.S are not from Mexico. They're from Latin American and Asia. Actual migration from Mexico by Mexican citizens has been on the decline in the past 10 years. Possibly due to Mexico's growing economy.
if Biden will sign a decree to welcome everyone and every migrant would be legal, people still won't like it. people want to reduce immigration, legal or illegal.
>Calling someone Hitler when they clearly aren't is also not going to help people support you especially AFTER he was president before and they experienced a presidency under him lol.
One bigly reason I voted for Trump was because his first term was by far the most peaceful both this country and the world at-large ever was in my lifetime.
For four years we didn't start or join any new wars, we even flat out refused to when the military industrial complex begged to Trump to start one with Iran after they shot down one of our drones. North Korea didn't fire a single missile and China wasn't anywhere as loud with their saber-rattling (I'm Japanese-American, I care deeply about Japanese security). Russia didn't invade Ukraine. Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah/et al. weren't brutally killing each other.
For four god damn years life was actually peaceful, and I want that again.
Russia invaded in 2014 and the conflict stabilized (but didn't stop) in 2015.
In the meantime, the Syrian civil war was raging on.
Similarly, if we ignore all the events in the prelude to WW2, the world was a very peaceful place. According to Hoover, Roosevelt was a threat to world peace, not Hitler.
I'm not implying anything with the analogy, I'm only trying to illustrate that the world was not peaceful between 2016 and 2020, despite the president's efforts.
Perhaps if we had gotten 2 consecutive terms, it might have provided more long term stability.
Warring Middle East nations signed more peace treaties under Trump than in any other time in modern history. Israel signed four peace treaties with Arab Nations under Trump.
If Hitler then used that line to try and justify murdering millions of brussels sprout eaters, then yes. Otherwise you've missed the point by an almost impressive margin.
Every individual is a rational/irrational actor. I don't know the split of time they're irrational vs rational. Maybe 50/50.
Some people are better than other people at convincing other people to do things in a certain way. Might have a little to do with genetics, probably more to do with education and size of platform, which is mostly a function of whose legs you popped out of and a little bit of whatever magic sauce makes you, you.
Most people that are good at convincing other people to do things a certain way are doing so in a way to personally enrich themselves. Sometimes they have a little more empathy, or perhaps intelligence, and know the personal enrichment can't be too flagrant, but regardless they all share that goal.
Unless one becomes too much of an outcast from the other good-convincers (think e.g. Lenin, Mao, CKS, Washington and his friends) and they convince everyone to go kill the followers of the other good-convincers until an equilibrium can be reached where either only one good-convincer is being enriched or at least both are to an acceptable degree.
This dynamic will play out eternally. Part of the mechanism of good-convincerness being sustainable is that you never disturb that equilibrium too much, so in this case to ground it, hence why the democrats tried to pivot right to fight accusations of being leftists (an ideology very much opposed to this idea of the best convincers being extremely personally enriched). In the end, they didn't really lose. Kamala will continue to likely have a powerful political career, and if not she can at least write some books and die phenomally wealthy like Hillary will. Democrats can switch from having much federal power to being an opposition party. Nothing actually changes, the message simply switches from "give us votes and money to enshrine whatever it is you care about" to "give us votes and money to fight fascism rah rah." Both messages are of course a lie, the real message is "give us votes and money in a way that allows us to continue to collect votes and money."
The message is that in the global zeitgeist, the natural human tendency among everyone, good convincer and not, for liberation, personal agency, and fulfilment, is obviously not being met when no matter where they turn there's someone telling them that if they want these things they have to all support a given good convincer. In the early Soviet Union, communist leaders too advantage of the opposite zeitgeist to achieve the same thing. Right now, the reactionaries have acquired a greater share of the zeitgeist, maybe because their messaging coincides well with several refugee crises and the inevitable climate refugee crisis.
In my personal opinion these tendencies can't be rewarded in this form of top down hierarchy where it's good-convincers pitting their supporters against each other. Imo we can overcome the nurture and saecular aspects of what makes someone a good convincer (education, self determination, material conditions provided for) to make everyone more level in their ability to convince others to do things. Early societies had this more "flat" organization, where the best convincers lived basically on raw rhetorical ability (look up some old Cherokee transcriptions for their interactions with missionaries, they were genuinely hilarious and viciously good at humiliating rhetorical opponents), and even that could only go so far.
During the Spanish civil war I believe the anarchists did a phenomenal job educating and "leveling the playing field" among an astounding number of people - off memory as I'm on my phone, something like 70% of their economy had been syndicalized. Somehow they convinced a shitload of the population to think deeply about their engagement in society and politics and become active, daily, if not hourly, participants in that process.
This fascinates me and I want to try this again. It of course involves sucking it up and talking to Trump supporters which I find very difficult because they say some very silly things, but regardless, if an alternative power structure isn't injected into the mix, the game of good-convincers playing hackey sack with the zeitgeist to maintain power will never end.
This fascinates me and I want to try this again. It of course involves sucking it up and talking to Trump supporters
That’s a good attitude, because nothing is truly solved with a Trump presidency. His victory was always just an expression of the undercurrent. The electorate has just voiced it, for a second time, but that’s all.
I agree that it's a clear message. The messaging the last time Trump won the election was that the electoral college was broken, Trump lost the popular vote, Americans deserve better.
8 years later, after all of this political baggage, prosecution, and media repudiation the Democrats managed to lose in resounding manner – not just the electoral college, but the senate, house, and popular vote.
This is after what is arguably a great Biden presidency, economy-wise. The Democrats have centered their entire identity for the last 8 years about being anti-Trump. There are no bright spots in the results for them, no messaging that they can hang their hat on, and build on going forward. From a base building perspective, this is brutal. The next election is square one for them.
If they'd done something they would've lost more. Voters, who on average are near retirement age, hate it when you do anything because they think it'll affect their retirement.
In this case they were blocked by Manchin/Sinema from anything like filibuster reform, but they did get some big important economic reforms in.
My new unhealthy conspiracy theory is democrats like being perpetually in the minority where they can talk a good game but don’t actually have to follow through on anything. That’s why they always tack right and try to compromise with people who call them enemies and groomers and demons. “We’ll welcome them into our cabinet” never sat well with me in the era of Trump.
Polls show voters think Harris/Walz were too liberal, not the other way round. They mostly haven't gone right either; Biden campaigned as a moderate and ran as the most progressive administration in my life.
(Which was good! But voters hated it because they don't like change and don't like inflation.)
To me it seems like Democrats just failed to listen to their constituents, and being one who wanted Bernie Sanders to have some chance at running in 2016 and 2020, I think this is the reckoning of that more than anything. The Democrats have ignored their own base and this is what happens when they pander to signals from everywhere else.
I don't understand everything you're saying, probably because I am not involved in day to day US political discussion, but a few of your points seem wildly exaggerated or misunderstood.
No one is forcing anyone to turn any sons into daughters, are they? What you're really saying is that you don't want anyone to be allowed to change their gender. That's a quite prohibitive stance for a country that puts so much emphasis on freedom.
What's this "male perverts sharing locker room" stuff about? Who's campaigning for letting random adults into kids locker rooms?
In California for instance if the child wants to transition then you must let it. If you attempt to stop it or guide them out of the decision in any way you’re at risk of having your child taken from you. That’s the force being used, do what we say or we’ll take your child.
I believe Elons kid had this happen to him, hence why he’s so pro trump despite the fact that trump is pro oil industry. The lesser of two evils he said.
Parent got voted down because HN is largely extremist left.
This is harsh: it’s effectively trolling, but it’s not by the original poster but a calculated political campaign designed to smear Democrats. Saying anyone wants “male perverts [to] share showers and locker rooms with their kids” is untrue, but it’s really effective at getting people to pick a side because it sounds terrible and even though this is not a pressing problem in the real world (if we’re talking child size abuse, the risk is family members and trusted adults) it’s perfect for getting strong emotional reactions, as we can see from how heavily used it is.
Governor Youngkin got elected in Virginia riding on a wave of anti-trans sentiment based off of a single reported assault where the accused wasn’t even trans, didn’t identify as such, wasn’t allowed to be in the bathroom where the assault occurred, etc. but that was such a volatile claim that it was all over the news for the end of the campaign even though it was a single assault out of thousands.
I think it’s possible to recognize that a position is not factual and based on emotional impact but we need a better term than trolling to describe it.
agreed; I'm not saying the person is _right_. If the left wanted to get dirty, they should have tossed up all the pedo priest data. At the end of the day, it was absolutely a messaging problem. People very literally believe that their kids could be targeted and become trans. Education and more propaganda are the only options.
I think it should have been focused on the economic issues: there was a little of that but it should have been louder on what people experience like the way grocery costs include corporate profit-taking or how the guys deciding to have layoffs or hiking rents were heavily supporting Trump - there are a lot of abstract or targeted issues but almost everyone thinks about their paycheck and how much of it is going to living expenses.
You believe polls? The right notoriously is undersampled because they simply don’t take them. If you need more evidence, the polls also put her in the lead.
Polls had it as a tossup similar to what we saw. I believe that when voters repeatedly say they care about the economy and immigration, they probably are saying those because they mean it and not because they’re fixated on trans people but shy.
that’s a toss up? no that’s a commanding victory. if republicans take the house and all else is the same they’ll have won popular, electoral, house and senate. that’s not a toss up
It’s still a tossup: you’re conflating the polls being within the margin of error with the electoral college vote count, but all of the major analysts were saying it was even odds that either of them could win with a range of vote totals. 538 had it at 52:48 favoring Trump yesterday, and the EV range went high because so many states were close.
> But it is worth stressing that the polls will not be exactly correct. Polls overestimated Democrats by an average of 3-4 points in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, for example, and overestimated Republicans by an average of 2.5 points in the 2012 presidential election. Our election model expects polls this year to be off by 3.8 points on average, although it could be more or less — and our model thinks this error is equally likely to favor Democrats as Republicans
> And that’s why we’ve been saying the race isn’t necessarily going to be close just because the polls are. Trump and Harris, our model says, are both a normal polling error away from an Electoral College blowout.
The Democrats just lost an election because they tried to dismiss poorly-articulated-but-legitimate concerns as trolling/ists/phobes. Could be a teachable moment, if they are willing to learn.
I am interpreting it correctly. Donald Trum is repeated choice of GOP and its voters. He won twice. They are choosing him, because they want exactly what he is, who he chooses to cooperate with, who he picks for supreme Court.
He is not some kind of outlier either. There is whole network of media, influencers, think tanks doing the same to various degree. The same kind of rhetoric was here for years.
It doesn't send me a clear message. Trump got fewer votes this time around than he did in 2020. And overall I read that 20 million fewer voters participated this year. The message I'm getting is apathy.
Every time somebody wins, their supporters say it sends a clear message. You should consider that the message you believe is so clear that you've left it unsaid is demonstrably not clear.
I absolutely sympathize with individual reasons to vote Trump and don't automatically look down on Trump voters (immigration, for example). But, Trump himself and explicit "Trump supporters" (i.e. people who make it clear they support his general identity - negativity and all) 95% of the time don't leave any room for sympathy when I encounter them, online or in person, and they are extremely common. What the average liberal is shown (and I assume you care about the average person in each camp, since lauding the common man is a prominent value) is an unheard-of-in-their-lifetimes amount of verbal encouragement (with varying degrees of explicitness) for hatred of others, violence against others, imprisonment of others, and disrespecting of the law/constitution in the name of those things. It's not comparable with any past Democratic candidate (or Republican, for that matter).
On the personal scale, my wife and I don't express anything close to extremist positions, or any cheerleader-type love for Democrats, or any name-calling of conservatives, and yet we are called every slur that's popular with Trump supporters. And we're white, cis Americans. My wife, because she's so friendly when strangers talk to her, has been stalked by one Trump supporter and had another call her a slut (to another Trump supporter, not to her face). She's terrified of these people now. It's insane that they even state out loud their support for Trump in the short time we encounter them.
You can't expect humans presented with that to think, when that candidate wins, "Wow, I guess political issues X, Y, and Z are really important to those guys. Maybe I was too harsh on them." They're going to think, "Wow, those guys really are leaning in a fascist-y direction and have a big problem with evil people in their ranks. I'm scared for my country, community, and family." I don't think that's an extreme or unnecessarily provocative thing to admit.
It's more likely that there is a small vocal pro-trans lobby, a small vocal anti-trans lobby, and almost everyone else who gives it no thought whatsoever.
I did say "or is just that willing to throw us to the wolves".
You can't pretend that we we haven't been forced into the political eye over past several years. The winning party has been extremely loud and extremely clear about their plans for us. I don't buy the ignorance argument anymore, not after three election cycles of this. If you voted for them, then you're okay with more of us dying in exchange for whatever you think you're getting out of the deal.
(Using the nonspecific "you" here—of course I don't know how the person I'm replying to voted.)
This is a little outside my bubble - what specifically are you worried about?
I have a couple acquaintances that are trans and they seem like normal happy people that aren't overtly oppressed. I'm under the impression that the state of trans rights is more or less equivalent to black rights, is that not the case?
I don't think we should try to draw any conclusions about the mental state or hopes and fears about people who we consider acquaintances. We just don't know them well enough, and they don't know us well enough to open up about the hard stuff.
To be clear, trans people face much more violence than you would think. It doesn't help when the GOP runs ads showing "trans women" as burly grown men who beat up little girls. Yes, that's real.
It's very difficult to not see the right's treatment of trans individuals as a slow genocide. Not only do they offer them no protections, but they also take healthcare rights away. But worst of all, they demonize them as monsters and sic their followers on them. The GOP doesn't actually need to kill trans people, it just needs to convince people to kill trans people. So far, that has been incredibly effective.
republicans spent +$100 m on anti trans ads this cycle. it was a major talking point of the whole campaign. “gender reassignment surgeries happening in school”, etc.
Then the trans activists (not the community) should not have been pushing stuff onto the kids side of things. That's a 100% no-go area and I don't know how anyone thought that was a good idea. People, all people, want themselves and their children to be left alone.
Because people like you are often at the forefront of wider social movements. Stuff like healthcare, safety nets, worker empowerment… Your influence goes way beyond gender care or women's rights. Beyond their bigoted sensibilities they have an incentive to shut down many of the wider political views you may defend.
I can't wait for four more years and beyond of hearing these same talking points over and over and over again. I could put up an argument here, but it's been done before and better, and frankly, I'm just so tired today.
>forcing non-trans people to accept a fiction (people can change sex)
This is dishonest.
Obviously, vanishingly few people disagree on basic reality. Undeniable facts include: Whether or not I have a penis; whether or not I have a Y chromosome; whether or not biologically male and female brains/bodies normally differ; whether or not I feel like a man or feel like a woman; whether or not that feeling is permanent (that one would involve predicting the future, but is still ultimately factual).
The things people actually differ on are:
- The semantics of words like man/woman. This is 99% identity politics - "semantic argument" is practically a synonym for "pointless argument". "I'm using this word in a new-ish way."; "No, I disagree with that usage." It's utterly tangential.
- More relevantly: How (un)comfortable they feel about some of those basic realities listed above, and whether or not they express that using pettiness, word-bending, cherry-picking, physical violence, murder, etc.
>influencing vulnerable children into harmful and unnecessary medical procedures
I can't say that a "you are whatever you feel like" influence has literally never resulted in an impressionable mind making a horrible decision for themselves, but it's monumentally overstated by conservatives, which is easy to do because it's so subjective and so dramatic. The line between the obviously correct "be who you are without fear" and the less prudent "wouldn't you like to be who you feel like you are?" can be very blurry.
>Stop doing that and almost everyone will happily leave you alone to dress and behave however you please.
Surely you can read this and see that "almost" does not qualify this into reasonably true territory. This is just not how people are.
The popular vote is not a good indicator. I live in a deep blue state, the fact that my vote doesn't actually influence the electoral college reduces the incentive to go vote, drastically.
Exactly, unless you rerun with a "popular vote wins" election - it's not concrete at all. The campaigns would not have been run in the same way, and the people would not vote in the same way.
I say this every election when democrats play the "but we won the popular vote" card as well - that wasn't the game being played, so it doesn't really mean that much.
You're confusing the electoral college with the Senate. In the electoral college, the states are weighted by population. It's a flawed system, but it's not "each state having an equal say".
But even then the weighting is _very_ uneven. The number of votes per elector can vary wildly by state, by as much as some small whole multiple. So the “weight” of one vote in one state can be say, four times that of another state.
It’s amazing to me that this can stand and efforts to change never seem to get very far.
I'm an outsider; is the US a democratic union of 50 states (plus districts and territories) or is it a democratic union of ~ 335 million individuals?
Is the EU vote in Brussels passed by countries or by individual citizens?
As I recall the current electoral system was set up to weight the votes of states that were members of the union .. if the US has moved to a single unified country of individuals then it might be time to reset the rules (the US founders would be in favour if I read their comments on evolving systems correctly).
Perhaps 'dated' is a better description than 'broken'.
If you mean "state" in the sense of "nation-state", then no, the US is not a democratic union of 50 states. It's a federal republic. While each state does have its own identity, government, and laws, the US federal government has much more power over US states than the EU has over member countries.
> the current electoral system was set up to weight the votes of states that were members of the union
The current electoral system was set up to appease the southern slave-owning states who would have had little representation if the straight popular vote was used.
> Perhaps 'dated' is a better description than 'broken'.
Potato, potahto. Distinction without a difference, in this case.
That's a silly comparison when even the EU is a mix of by-country/by-population (council/parliament—and even the parliament is weighted toward giving smaller countries more representation)
How about some good old-fashioned respect for the office of President?
Trump's legacy already speaks for itself.
As far as Europe and other overseas countries are concerned, Trump's most remarkable accomplishment was quite some time ago when he was President the first time.
He made unprecedented Presidential history already, and for the rest of his life (as well as the lives of millions of other senior citizens) he can bask in the degree of admiration that he brought to such an esteemed executive office.
He clinched it like no other in over 75 years of very strong & respectable leadership, recognized worldwide which really means something to international partners of all kinds.
He made sure that President Barack Obama will go down in history as the final US President to effectively be the "leader of the free world", in a long line of illustrious Republicans & Democrats who may one day regain such a level of respect again.
Only not possible in the lifetimes of millions of people around the world, for whom it's just a little too late now. Biden couldn't recover that mantle in only 4 years unless he was a miracle worker of some kind, that's how elusive it really was.
Completely eluded Trump, and once again the traditional American kind of world-class leadership on an international stage fades further into the past, with no recovery on the horizon any time soon.
I would like to skip that rethoric here on HN whenever possible. You cannot possibly reduce 70M voters to that.
I would like to explore the whys and hows of this apparent step backwards in so many things and why Trump was voted like he was and this reductionist view helps no one.
You're right to point out that this kind of rhetoric isn't really in the spirit of HN.
On the other hand, it's a fallacy to assume that there must be merit to an argument just because it's championed by a majority.
I'm aware that it's politically suicidal to say that "most people are stupid", but I'm not a politician (I'm not even American) and I feel like "stupidity" should not a priori be ruled out as an explanation.
Perhaps you could use the word "idiot" and refer to them as "idiots". The term has been used in a medico-legal context in the past to define a person's mental age.
That there is a divide between the two parties and the average intellectual ability of their supporters is a well-known fact. I'd contest that this is less of an issue than their racism.
So you really think more than half of the Americans are mentally impaired? The probability of being mentally impaired is higher for a random poster like you than for half of American people.
Your understanding of statistics is deplorable. Also, your reading ability. I specifically said it's racism, rather than the (verifiable) lack of intelligence.
True, "stupid" is a very imprecise term. But my main point was merely that epistemically, there is no validity to something just because a majority is behind it.
Well, technically, stupidity is relative. If you're defining it as "below 50%", then that's half the people. "Below 90%", even more, etc, so the statement in itself doesn't really make sense.
If you're in the 90th IQ percentile, sure, most people are stupid to you.
You would be a fool to think that an entire population is stupid. Perhaps a proportion sure but the deciding vote comes from a large proportion of the population that are by no means stupid. Democracy in theory is a form of distributed computation and just because you don't agree with the end result does not make every else stupid
People feeling disenfranchised and reaching for populists is a common issue throughout time.
I believe social media has widened the most extreme opinions and forced polarisation on most people, I can feel it with the UK too, where a very clearly corrupt government, with a revolving door of leadership: one losing the country enough money in 14 days to pay for the NHS for a decade… are being talked about favourably over a meek, awkward, slightly right of centre leader who happens to be wearing a red badge instead of a blue one.
Discourse is so swollen with bitter defence and snide attacks with soundbites of “sides”, I really do believe that its the fault of platforms showing the most divisive voices most often.
The thing that pushes me towards right for example, is seeing people dehumanising men for being men (not behaviours, just clear misandry against the gender) on social media so openly- and to much fanfare. I would otherwise be considered extremely left wing by UK standards.
Is this something you do actually experience in real life though?
Because I'm with you that social media is part of the problem. When I was using Twitter, many years ago, I also saw a lot of these super-woke people that I thought were just crazy.
But in real life, I don't see these caricatures so often (where they do exist, they tend to stick together in close-knit organisations and so are easy to avoid). Most women, gay and trans people, minorities etc. that I met just want to have some basic rights and don't care about culture wars about language use etc.
no, exactly, you can feel the effect on some peoples beliefs and behaviours but they can always be reasoned with in reality. You are completely correct that these behaviours are so much more extreme online with the #KillAllMen Movements, 4B[0] and choose the bear. I still hear whispers of these beliefs, but it’s not nearly as strongly held or widely seen as it is on social media.
More impressionable people might hide stronger beliefs, like my mum, who is a reformer in the UK and parrots all their talking points and soundbites, but only down the pub with her like minded friends, or with me. Never to a labour supporter or in a public forum- so they almost never get challenged; and they become so deep rooted.
I don’t believe we can judge what happened just by looking at the majority opinion and give it merit, but I also can’t dismiss it as simply "stupidity."
Messages from certain leaders can resonate deeply with people. If a message is well-received by so many, it could mean the opposing side didn’t present a strong enough argument—basic politics.
In my persoanl view, the discourse needed to challenge figures like Trump is limited by U.S. politics, which is heavily influenced by corporate funding. This influence likely explains why the Democratic Party often seems unwilling to take bold stances.
Policies like stronger unions, better social protections, higher taxes for the wealthy, and a meaningful minimum wage increase are hard to promise if campaigns depend on corporate backing.
When optimising globally, sometimes a backward step is required to escape a local minima. It is possible that progressive politics has made a misstep, and that correcting that is the right thing to do.
I think we can all see that correcting to oligarchy/authoritarianism/fascism never works out well for any nation. I don't see your suggestion of a correction working out here either.
There is probably no single thing that you could ascribe to 70M voters except that they vote. However, there are plenty of themes that are touted amongst supporters, many (all?) of which are easily shown to be false. Also, his biggest benefactors are people with a lot of money or influence... which are definitely not most of those 70M voters.
The man was convicted by a jury, impeached, and is known to have raped people. He is a known national security risk. ... the "critiques" are endless.
IMHO, to say that there is a useful message to be sent by electing him is naive at best. The fact that nobody can seem to discern that message despite truly trying is also telling.
Is the message, "people just want to watch the world burn?" Is it something else? As far as I can tell, nobody actually knows.
Meanwhile, he has declared victory before the votes are actually finalized. Is the probability high? Yes. Does it undermine the process? Also, yes.
Are there factors such as, "Kamala is a black female" at play? Almost definitely. Does Trump pander to groups that are covertly/overtly racist? Yes. Do all of his supporters understand/admit that? No.
Depends on implementation but in general we already don't have a free market, and if we did the American economy would collapse with the destruction of the entire farming sector and possibly the oil and gas sector, so I don't dismiss price controls on groceries or rent controls out of hand.
Singapore has nationalized housing and is extraordinarily prosperous. Perhaps rent control isn't a good measure and we should simply do that instead.
In interviews with people who are primarily voting on the economy a common response is that they feel things were economically better for them under Trump than they were under Biden. They want to go back to that, and they believe Trump can do it again.
We have a first pass the post voting system which only allows for two parties.
We have this thing called the electoral college that further obfuscates the popular will.
Both of these flawed systems disillusion millions of people every election cycle. People in non-swing states who have a minority opinion feel they have no voice, and often do not vote.
People who have serious issue with the two major parties have no viable method to express their political will.
---
Media:
We have a highly polarized media environment where a large number of people only get their facts from highly biased sources. This can happen on "both sides" but it's particularly evident with conservative media such as Fox News. In this outlet, millions of people see an alternate reality to the one we live in. They don't see Trump's age-addled brain or his most offensive rhetoric.
---
Policy:
Many people seem to think that the Democratic party is responsible for the inflation of the past 4 years. Many people seem to think that Trump stands for lower taxes for the working class, in ways that won't hurt them.
If we take Trump literally, he wants to deport many millions of people who live and work in this country peacefully, but do not have proper documentation. He wants to give Ukraine to Russia. I believe he is at best ambivalent to a national abortion ban. He doesn't show any support for combating climate change.
You mention that the EC obfuscates the popular will, but you ignore that it's a balance that gives a voice to many who would otherwise have none.
Would you find a popular vote system that entirely ignores the votes of dozens of states in favor of just a few somehow carrying less obfuscation of the will of the people?
Ok, let's take the nuanced route. Not all are stupid.
They're just more uneducated than ever, more conservative than ever, and idolizing dehumanization and evil totalitarians more than ever.
The root of everything is social insecurity and bad education, caused by the USA actually not being a country for its people but for corporations and billionaires.
I'm sorry but if you want a pathological liar, criminal and an overall horrible human being as a president of the (probably) most powerful and influential country in the world, you're just scum. Keep the downvotes coming.
The inequality in a nation must have a huge effect on the nature of the people in that nation. That a treatise on inequality has won a Nobel prizes for economics would tend to support your thesis [1]. That another Nobel prize winner has also written on inequality should clinch it [2].
> I'm sorry but if you want a pathological liar, criminal and an overall horrible human being as a president of the (probably) most powerful and influential country in the world, you're just scum. Keep the downvotes coming.
This is precisely what I'm talking about. You really think this comment is going to do anything but push even more people to vote for the right? Because why would they side with your camp when you just called them scum, because you don't understand their intentions for voting for him/the party?
Which is extra unfortunate, because your comment up until that part was pretty good.
I understand their intentions. I understand that these votes come out of a place of fear. They are unhappy and a lying demagogue is pointing them to a solution and fuels them with hate. [1]
I also understand that they willfully choose to ignore massive red flags and are a bunch of hypocrites. These people have no shame and need to be shamed. It is the key emotion that leads to change and motivates to action.
Sadly, due to electoral interference by totalitarian regimes, media outlets, Musk, and the internet in general, these people who would otherwise be ostracized by the community due to their antisocial behaviours have been normalized.
Once you're set up like that, it's extremely difficult to get out of. I am afraid that the US has check-mated itself for at least an entire generation. The only thing that can drive a change is hope and basic human decency, ethics and morality.
Which brings us back to people wilfully being the exact opposites of those values. We've had lying oppressive demagogues probably since the dawn of humanity. Most certainly in the last century.
However, despite being afraid and frustrated, many people sided against such leaders. And this is why I consider not doing so a personal moral failing.
> These people have no shame and need to be shamed. It is the key emotion that leads to change and motivates to action.
> these people who would otherwise be ostracized by the community due to their antisocial behaviours have been normalized.
The Internet (or global communication in general) does indeed mean shame won't work, because people can just ignore you and go find people who support them - whether that's Trump, Musk, or some randoms on the Internet is irrelevant.
So let's double down on the shame thing, which has worked out so well lately?
> The only thing that can drive a change is hope and basic human decency, ethics and morality.
I think the crux of many social issues is that people have different ideas about what 'basic human decency, ethics and morality' even mean.
> I think the crux of many social issues is that people have different ideas about what 'basic human decency, ethics and morality' even mean.
Everybody knows that lying, stealing, swindling, rape, misogyny, selfishness, narcissism, taking pride in ignorance and probably a dozen more wouldn't make that list. Everybody.
People vote for who they identify with as this gives legitimacy and backing to their own views and behaviours.
Morality is not universally as simple as 'stealing is bad' - a basic lesson in ethics, really. Is it bad to steal food for your starving family? If your answer is a simple 'yes', then I applaud you your certainty in life. I wish I had that. But for me, and many others, things aren't quite that simple.
In any case, I wasn't really referring to things like those on your list (one of those things is really not like the others, by the way. Seems very bad faith to me) but more things like trans issues, immigration, welfare, etc.
Just so you know, this is exactly the sort of divisive rhetoric - from all sides of the political spectrum - that has led America down this path, and will continue to do so.
You can chalk it up to "stupidity", which is rather silly on its face, or you can acknowledge that this result is the symptom of something far deeper, and try to explore what those issues are, and try to find solutions.
What is it a result of? I'm guessing: voters blamed post-covid global economic downturn on Biden because he was around at the time.
Erosion of democracy didn't seem to trouble the minds of the land of the free very much. I'm not too worried by Trump's second term, but I'm anxious about his third and fourth. One other issue is a fear of turning into Mexico, which people seem to think might happen by letting Mexicans in, but may yet be accomplished in a home-grown manner through insurrections and dismantling institutions.
It's well documented that Americans are, on average, quite undereducated. And it's also quite well documented that most of the people that vote for Trump are poorly educated.
So, not stupidity, no. But a lack of education can look similar.
I'd argue that anyone blandly categorizing dozens of millions of people who vote for a candidate (including many from communities of color and among immigrant demographics) as just uneducated ignorants is themselves overwhelmingly ignorant.
You can be against Trump for many good reasons, but a good look at why he won is about much more than just deriding his supporters as ignorant.
Has there been a root cause analysis on why the racists and misogynists only strike sometimes? They appeared to be powerless when the Democrats nominate charismatic candidates like Obama. My read from a distance is the man was propelled somewhat by his racial background.
I put it - as an outside chance - that it is possible that the policies and outcomes of said policies have a bearing on the voting decisions people make.
Millions of desperate people from very different cultures came into the country overwhelming welfare services and small communities, getting paid under the table by greedy businesses undercutting Americans and subverting labor laws. The current party in power allowed this influx to reach record levels, and didn’t do a thing about it. Any path to amnesty for these people down the road will change our political landscape forever, and Americans never voted for this policy.
Seems a bit of an overclaim. Strategic questions of how to handle the border was a defining issue in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections. Americans are continuously voting on border policy, it is one of the major elements of their national conversation. What the Biden administration did was a bit extreme but ballpark what was on the tin when he was voted in.
I am painting one side as kinda evil and other one perfectly within norms of non-evil. Not angelic, but clearly and significantly less anti-democratic and destruction seeking.
I think that the politics got to this point because the "sides" are graded on the curve. No matter how bad one side gets, you are supposed to project best possible intentions on them, worst possible intentions on their liberal opposition just so someone can say "they are the same". Like common. The long term plan to destroy Roe vs Wade for real and worked. The rights of gays and trans are going down the drain. There is literal plan to make anticonception harder to get. Trump was literally talking about this being last election and literally tried the coup after last election.
Can we please, stop with the nonsense? I remember center mocking feminists when they said abortion rights are at dangers. Guess what, they were right.
This is not about needing to listen in a more approving way. It is about needing to listen and oppose more strongly, because what they say about themselves is that they find "evil" to be something to aspire to.
How is accusing him of being a Nazi, an extremist, a dictator, etc "taking the high ground"? He was already president once and was provably NOT Hitler..
Firstly, Democratic establishment goes out of their way to not say these. Which is their mistake, GOP has no equivalent problem to accuse democrats of evil.
Second, he literally said he aspires to be a dictator, talks approvingly about dictators, and he does engage in literal extremist rhetoric on his rallies. You can be Nazi, an extremist, a dictator while not being literally Hitler in every single detail.
He likes when people say that about him. Not saying those is just lying, insisting that others dont say those is insisting on everyone lying.
All other things aside, don't you think choosing a convicted sex offender over an empty suit is quite damning on its own? Are his values the values USA wants to promote both internally and externally? Apparently so. :(
Yeah. It's been scary to see how Big Tech and the media presented Trump as a threat to democracy and someone you cannot possibly vote for. It becomes dangerous when one party has that much power and support. It's not a democracy anymore when people are not presented with facts and are not allowed to express their opinions without getting cancelled or labeled a certain way. You can see it even in the comments here: "Far Right", "bigot", "redneck". We should acknowledge that blunt words like this are at a very low level of political discussion. "Far Right" is a particularly nasty label because even a liberal from 2010 would meet the definition as it's used today by liberals.
Look at this [1] - Oprah warning women that if they don't vote they may lose their ability to vote. This is ridiculous. Trump is not a saint and January 6th was a dark moment but they (the Big Tech, the media, the celebrities) blown the negative image of Trump out of proportion and are making stuff up. Whether you like him or not he is the candidate of the other party. There is no democracy without the other party. The reality is that the megaphones have been cornered by a single side and are used in the most unfair way with additions of fake news and negative coloring about Trump and the "Far Right". Elon Musk saved the day by buying Twitter. It's the last social media platform where Republicans and their supporters could have any presence.
There were plenty of reasons to not vote for Kamala. Perhaps the biggest ones are her views that align with communism. [2] And by the way, Merry Christmas! [3]
You're complaining about how Trump was presented as a threat to democracy after he made a speech saying how if he wins you'll never have to vote again? After he lead an insurrection and tried to illegally overthrow the previous election both on paper and in person?
Seen a good few Trumpers complaining about the label "far right". If you don't like the label that's on you, it's like an orange complaining about being called an orange, it's a fact.
Like I said, it was a dark moment. However, Democrats have been in charge for 12 out of the past 16 years and have the support of billionaires owning the biggest content platforms. Recently, they used those platforms to the fullest extent to drive their political agenda with the general message being "Democrats are the only moral choice". He stirred up an insurrection but like I said it's not just about Trump but the 2-party system that makes this a democracy. I would repeat the second paragraph of my previous comment.
What am I supposed to think when I see a campaign ad like this? [1]
The parent pointed out that Trump promised the same thing again - so not a dark moment, but a dark pattern. Very dark. There's not much darker than overturning the rule of law and creating civil unrest.
>"Democrats are the only moral choice"
I agree with you that Democrats are not somehow unusually moral, but I don't think this is the lie you are portraying it as (or exaggeration? It's unclear what your criticism is exactly). Plenty of people have been given plenty of concrete examples indicating that the Trump camp contains a significant portion of people who espouse unusually immoral ideologies. Maybe they're wrong, but they don't have to do mental gymnastics to arrive at that conclusion in an intellectually honest manner. And, as you rightly point out, there are effectively only two parties.
>I would repeat the second paragraph
Regarding that, then:
>if [women] don't vote they may lose their ability to vote. This is ridiculous.
I've heard Trump supporters say they think women shouldn't vote dozens of times - on the social media platforms you claim are (or were at the time) lacking conservative voices. The notion isn't ridiculous. It's unlikely. But when it comes to threats to the most foundational rights, "unlikely" isn't good enough for the voter's mind.
>Whether you like him or not he is the candidate of the other party. There is no democracy without the other party.
Democrats largely don't take this stance beyond petty disrespect like "not my president" and demanding recounts in very close regions. Trump supporters, on the other hand, explicitly do take this stance when the other candidate wins, as you, again, have already admitted.
>Elon Musk saved the day by buying Twitter
Twitter moderation under Musk is at least as right-leaning as it was left-leaning prior. That is to say, somewhat. What Musk did do was declare the word "cis" a slur, broadly. A word I used to describe myself and my wife in another comment, because it was relevant and correct (the usual comparisons are the words "Jew" or "gay").
Republicans haven't been anywhere near absent from social platforms for 15 years. Underrepresented, maybe. However, social platforms bring out the ever-living pettiness of politics on both sides, and the conservative flavor of pettiness is naturally more likely to break even the most politically-neutral moderation rules (or be "shouted down", by whatever definition you want for that) on social media platforms, because it is more anti-social than the liberal flavor of pettiness.
> It's been scary to see how Big Tech and the media presented Trump as a threat to democracy
Please explain how Project 2025 (written by the Heritage Foundation etc etc, not big tech / the media) is not a threat to democracy, specifically its sections on consolidating power in a single person (= autocracy) and dismantling various federal systems of checks and balances in favor of loyalist political appointees.
> It's the last social media platform where Republicans and their supporters could have any presence.
Truth Social was built specifically as a safe space for Republicans and their views. Musk did not make Twitter a bastion of free speech, not when using words that personally offend him get you banned.
The only thing I've been able to see so far is that Harris has 67M votes with 81.2% reporting. Assuming the remaining precincts have the same population size and roughly same D/R split, Harris would end up somewhere around Biden's total once the count is complete.
Yes, it is. We saw this in 2020 where states came from behind and ended up being for Biden. I feel like that late-counting of Democratic votes was very partly was spurred the ensuing election conspiracies. Election votes are not counted uniformly at random.
My analysis is the Democrat party leadership should have conducted a true primary election.
She was "gifted" the nomination, vs being selected in the primary. I think the populace responded in turn: This wasn't their candidate. Compare this to the Obama vs Clinton selection, which I actually believe the populace would have supported either.
btw: I'm not sure I'd compare this to the 2020 primaries as 2020 was a special year, and I don't think really any of the candidates really resonated with the voters, Biden just "wasn't Trump".
The issue isn't how she got the nomination but how bad of a candidate she is. People did not like her before she was VP. She was considered a joke candidate was performed extremely poorly in the 2020 primaries. The main reason a primary would have been better is because Harris would have lost and been replaced with a better candidate.
Yes, for sure, but the way Biden’s mental fitness was poor-pooed as misinformation for years and then Harris was installed at the last minute really undermines the “we’re the party of democracy” narrative.
If his VP was 2nd or 3rd place in the 2020 primaries, it wouldn't be a big deal compared to Harris because the candidate would be someone that a significant portion of the Dems actually support and want as a president.
And Biden was himself picked as a VP because Obama thought he'd be too old to run after his second term, and so would be completely loyal, rather then thinking about how decisions he made as a VP would affect his own future campaign.
I was opposed to Biden dropping out because skipping the primary means you go into the general election without the real pulse of the voters in your party.
I think Democrats in general are putting far too much weight on survey based polls, and not enough on ballet box polls.
I wouldn't even rule out 2020 like you're doing - I think Biden is actually a very compelling candidate for a lot of folks that don't get much mention in typical democratic discussion circles. Religious, relatively socially conservative but economically left (traditional union left, not neo-liberal), white, male.
While people complained about it not being Sanders online - Sanders and Biden were fairly similar platforms in a lot of respects, with the difference being that corporate money was less hostile to Biden - and it's telling that they were the only two to take any significant percentage of the primary vote (no other candidate broke 3mm votes)
---
Basically - I think there's a solid chance that despite the polling news around the first debate, Biden might have actually performed more strongly on election night.
As an extra note - As someone who was initially very critical of Biden... I have a lurking suspicion that he's going to be considered an excellent president in a historical context because he managed to invest heavily in infrastructure.
But aren't we supposed to wait out the Red Mirage / Blue Shift [0] before calling a winner? (Linked to timestamp of where former political director of Fox News testifies about it being a known thing).
Indeed. By the way, for anyone that's interested on the topic, I just stumbled onto a nice Stand-up Maths video that goes more in-depth on the subject and cautions against "nice, simple, neat, easy narratives" [0].
This is a good point, but when you compare to Kamala, she's even worse on this front.
Kamala never talks like just a normal person. My wife was telling me this this morning. You can't get through the facade. How on earth are you gonna know what she's really gonna do?
My wife was like- "I just don't see Trump being a warmonger, but Kamala, she very well could be."
And then you take into account what she has said and done (Cheney anyone?) and it's open shut case of who's less warlike.
> "I just don't see Trump being a warmonger, but Kamala, she very well could be."
It's not Trump that will be the "warmonger", it's the people he empowers. Trump is a shallow personality -- all he wants is attention, he does not have an ideology. For the boring part of actually enacting policy he defers to supplicants and this time around his supplicants are more unserious and self-interested than the first time around.
This is just basic 2nd order reasoning that it seems like so many people in this country lack.
All the Republicans who were against him being re-elected are the warhawk wing of the party. There is zero evidence of him being inclined to be a warmonger, and a lot of evidence (and history) to the contrary.
> all he wants is attention, he does not have an ideology
This is not demonstrably true. He's had a consistent ideology since the beginning- MAGA and now MAHA too.
I used to think Trump was shallow, for maybe a few months in 2015. The problem with that is if you think Trump is shallow, it means all the people who voted for him and love him are stupid. In fact, you implied you think this:
> This is just basic 2nd order reasoning that it seems like so many people in this country lack.
Your operating philosophy cannot be that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid.
Your point about supplicants can be equally applied to Kamala.
> Your operating philosophy cannot be that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid.
I don't think people are stupid. I think they don't think things through.
MAGA is not a coherent political policy. Project 2025 is at least soundly documented and is probably the set of policies we'll see out of this admin.
I googled MAHA and it doesn't seem like a thing beyond a boilerplate website and twitter account nobody follows and some videos from RFK. Again, not a policy, just a platitude like MAGA and an unserious one at that.
"Those people don't think things through" then parroting the objectively false Project 2025 nonsense.
OK then, think this through - Trump has said the parts of P25 he's read are stupid, he doesn't support it, and it's from a group of people who don't work for him (some of them used to but none did when it was published). It's bog standard DC think tank pablum that nobody cares about.
Even supporters of Trump routinely say that you shouldn't take him on face value, vis-a-vis tariffs, etc. Why should I take what he said about 2025 seriously? His son and VP are absolutely aligned with the goals of the Heritage Foundation.
It's exactly what he did with Roe, trusted and subsequently empowered people whose ideology is stronger and, frankly, unaligned with his and look what happened.
Dobbs didn't happen because Trump got hoodwinked by a bunch of social conservatives. Maybe I'm retconning this in my brain but overturning Roe has been a thing with the GOP for a long time, Trump always said he was going to appoint conservative judges and justices, and he's said since that he'd veto a national abortion ban.
It's unfortunate that on this issue most of the GOP is in the "never, ever" camp and most of the left is in the "any time, any place, for any reason" camp. We'd be much better off as a country if we allowed it before ~20 weeks electively, disallowed it after ~20 weeks unless the mother is about to die, and just moved on. That would keep us more liberal on this issue than 99% of Europe, still protect people from unplanned pregnancy, and result in net fewer abortions in the US.
In an age of inauthenticity on social media, people are inherently drawn to someone who appears authentic. Trump comes across as a straight-shooter. People may not love everything he says, but they feel like they can trust him because he isn't hiding behind a mask.
Do you even notice yourself how you consistently refer to Harris as ”Kamala“, but Trump by his last name, and what that means in terms of respect towards the candidates?
You do realize almost every time he goes off the cuff Fox and co pretend it doesn’t happen or they immediately go into damage control if it spreads, right?
RE: "Skeptical of large corps" do you mean their voter base or their actions? Because I seriously doubt whoever is replacing Lina Khan is going to be more skeptical of large corporations
JD Vance said he supports the anti-US-big-tech campaign of Lina Khan and that he thinks she has a place in the new admin.
They will most likely break up Google and Meta for "pushing the woke agenda" but are smart enough to hide behind Lina Khan's anti-US-big-tech arguments that has populist support on both wings of the political spectrum.
This particular issue would be great for competition, and the economy. Conglomerates always have a discount. Whilst (perhaps) unpopular, this is one thing I'm rather in favour of.
I'd love this to be true but there's no reason and plenty to the contrary for me not to believe anything said by people associated with Trump. Time will tell but I expect the opposite.
Maybe last decade. This time, Trump's direct answer here was that he doesn't want to break up Google, because they are powerful, and he likes them powerful because he is going to force them to obey him and act in his interest.
I'll believe it when I see it; but yeah they _might_ target Google/Facebook for not following the free speech ideals of present day Twitter.
Don't think they'll actually break up either of them in that case though; more likely use them as a boogeyman to endlessly dispute with so they appear anti-big-tech whilst doing everything possible to boost share prices of the same and similar companies.
This will clearly happen because Pence was so influential in Trump’s first term, and Trump also followed through on so much of his and/or his vice president’s claims in the first term.
The republicans I know have pretty varying opinions on those two wars. One pretty common thread is that they don't want us involved though, regardless of which side of the wars they align with.
Then call them what they are, isolationists not anti war then. Carrying water for Russia's invasion of Ukraine; opposing aid for Ukraine is incompatible.
Sure, you could call them isolation if you prefer.
Many of the republicans I know sit in a gray area in between, they definitely don't want us involved but they also don't have a strong opinion on the wars either way and see them as someone else's fight. That definitely isn't the main narrative I see in the media, but I personally know very few republicans who care strongly about one side of either war.
That view is a bit like a libertarian anti-war view in my opinion. Its antiwar without attempting to get involved in anyone else's business.
Well that's interesting. I live in a very red area and have never heard this. At best I could hear it said as a joke, I don't know anyone that would actually think we should do that.
Ultimately those opinions will not matter. The president has full control of the State department and will align with the autocrats who stroke his ego: Putin and Netanyahu.
Expect the money to stop flowing to Ukraine, and to keep going to Israel, and try to divine a logic for that.
Thankfully the state department doesn't hold the purse strings, though the democratic party did so poorly that Congress may still be willing to approve whatever spending the Trump wants.
Trump is going to send more money and armaments to Israel and not one of them will object because he will abandon Ukraine and they’ll all hold that up as an amazing thing.
Maybe, at which point I expect their being pretty hypocritical. I wouldn't begin to say one side of either war is in the absolute right or wrong though. War is messy, terrible, and bloody. It'd never as simply as right vs wrong or good vs evil.
When has hypocrisy ever caused self reflection when people are playing the team sport that is politics?
It’s always “your hypocrisy is worse than my hypocrisy” because even if they admit the hypocrisy exists (not a given) they just chalk it up to “both sides.“ We’ve seen this song and dance for a decade straight.
As de-facto world police, inaction on the US' part is compliance.
Of course, it took what, 70, 80 years of US influence to weaken the European armies to the point where we're highly reliant on them for defense, deterrence, tech and material. The Crimea invasion should've been the catalyst for the massively increased spending and prioritization of the military in Europe, not the 2022 escalation. I hope for Ukraine's sake that Europe has been able to catch up and restart production of equipment and that they can supply it asap, because after Ukraine it'll be Moldavia and Georgia, which already have pro-russian separatist movements / areas. Poland has invested a ton in updating their military at least.
I hope the US doesn't have veto powers to stop article 5 from being enacted if it does come to that.
No small portion of US economic dominance is spending more on the military than he China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine combined. Sending money to Ukraine wasn't out of the goodness of US hearts, it was to fight a low grade proxy war with Russia. Every dollar the US spends in the Ukraine destroys many times the amount of Russian equipment and spills no US blood. I am not endorsing these actions.
trying to be de-facto world police has caused many issues for US. (Current) repubs wants to stop getting involved in other conflicts (except supporting Israel)
It's a little more than silence. The US is actively selling weapons to Israel, actively sanctioning Israel's biggest enemy/rival Iran (not specifically to help Israel, but still), pressuring other Israel enemies to normalize relations with them, using their Security Council veto to block any UN resolution against Israel, etc.
Israel's diplomatic position would be much weaker if they didn't believe that the US would keep supporting them no matter what they do.
> Israel's diplomatic position would be much weaker if they didn't believe that the US would keep supporting them no matter what they do.
Why do you feel that Israel's diplomatic position needs to be weaker?
And how would the Palestinians' diplomatic position be, without the support of Iran, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Turkey, Lebanon, Libya, Tunis, and the USSR and now Russia?
Sending more munitions to Ukraine means it takes the Russian military longer to overcome the Ukrainian army by force of arms. The unstated aspect that is often glossed over is that this requires more and more Ukrainian men to be forced against their will to die for the territorial integrity of the country (because in 2024 the Ukrainian military is fueled overwhelming by conscription, not by volunteers). It's bizarre to me that is considered a "pro-Ukrainian" take. It's like egging on Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance to keep fighting, no matter if ~70% of your male population dies in the process. Just don't surrender!
This only matter if we think that the Republican party still exists, and was not silently replaced by other party carrying its blood stained skin. Is GOP still alive? Is a serious question.
I have a lot of doubts about the real independence of republicans in this situation. The man at charge is obviously pro Russia and the republicans can't do a s*t about this. They will be replaced one by one. Anything that would try will be pushed out of the road.
> Sorry I won’t support terrorism and support what Israel is doing.
This just means you support State Terrorism instead of non-state terrorism.
> Sometimes you have to defend yourself though.
Unless you're Palestinian. In which case defending yourself isn't authorized. Just ask the West Bank residents being regularly killed by armed illegal settlers pre-October 7th how laying down their arms has worked out for them.
I'm trying to follow your logic, seriously please help me. You are suggesting that murdering people at a music festival and kidnapping children and kidnapping elderly and beheading civilians is a form of defense against other people hurting other people in a different geographic region? Please, tell me I'm wrong and do tell me how you see things.
> You are suggesting that murdering people at a music festival and kidnapping children and kidnapping elderly and beheading civilians is a form of defense against other people hurting other people in a different geographic region?
I'm suggesting murdering people at a music festival occupies the same space, morally, as bombing entire families with aviation ordnance. One of them is painted as wrong, and the other isn't, because state terrorism is tacitly approved in the Western mainstream information space....depending on the perpetrators. When Hamas (or Russia) does it, it's "kidnapping", when Israel does it, they are "detaining suspects". From August 2023 (before the Hamas attack) AP News was reporting Israel had 1,200 detainees without charges. Why aren't they called hostages? ( https://apnews.com/article/israel-detention-jails-palestinia... )
The two regions are both enclaves of Palestine, engaged in a joint struggle for emancipation. There were 100+ Palestinians killed in the West Bank in 2022: ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63073541 ) and 200+ killed in 2023 before the October 7th attack ( https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/08/1139922 ). Clearly disarmament and NOT being ruled by Hamas is not working for the West Bank Palestinians. I'm sure if you asked any of the various Palestinian militant groups, yes they are engaged in a joint defense of their people. After all, the primary purpose of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to try to capture enough Israelis to force a prisoner exchange and get their own people back (similar to snatching Gilad Shalit and trading just him for 1,000 Palestinians). They suffered from "catastrophic success" mixed with undisciplined follow-on echelons (Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as others) who inflicted far more civilian damage than just a cross-border snatch & grab....and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.
> I'm suggesting murdering people at a music festival occupies the same space, morally, as bombing entire families with aviation ordnance.
Then I'll address that. You are again, 100% correct. Bombing entire families with aviation ordnance would be abhorrent.
When the Gazans set out to attack a music festival, they did so with the explicit intention to murder civilians. When Israel drops a JDAM on a civilian home in Gaza, one of two things happen: Either the target is a high-ranking militant, and unfortunately the civilians he lives with (like everybody else, they have families) are collateral damage. Or, the target is military infrastructure in those civilian homes, and the home gets warnings to evacuate before the bombs fall.
Let's be clear: Israel has been willing to cause far more collateral damage since the 7th of October last year than beforehand. Every Israeli I know mourns the civilians killed as a result. I am certain that there exist Israelis who celebrate Gazan civilian deaths, I see them online. But nobody that I've ever met - and I served in a combat unit here - has ever felt that way.
If you really feel that bombing entire families is wrong, you should know that a rocket from Gaza fell not far from my apartment in November 2012. We had just a broken window, but other neighbours had far more damage and one was critically injured. The rocket fell where one of my daughters was playing just as the sirens rang - that siren saved her life and others.
> After all, the primary purpose of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to try to capture enough Israelis to force a prisoner exchange and get their own people back
You can't possibly believe this when there are numerous confirmed reports of entire families being massacred with 0 hostages taken. If your purpose was really to take hostages; those could have been easy bargain chips; instead they raped them, murdered them and paraded their bodies in front of cheerful crowds.
If the central point of the operation was to grab hostages; their whereabouts and well being (or at least survival) would have been central to the whole ordeal; instead the were disseminated with little to no proof of life. It doesn't even appear that the Hamas leadership knew what to do with them, or even had them accounted for and located.
The goal of the attacks was to inflict a major blow to the Israeli government by forcing a strong military response that would delay the normalisation of the relations between Israel and other arab states. To do so Hamas was wiling to sacrifice civilian blood which is exactly what is happening now. They placed their hideouts in schools hospitals, and NGO headquarters to maximise the political cost of any military operation. Hostages were "nice to have" as they were supposed to further increase the pressure on the Israeli government by people who would be pushing for their return.
They did not anticipate how far BiBi was willing to go and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.
Arguably being pro-Israel is anti-war. Israel's current conflict is the direct result of several entities starting a war with her last October. Suggesting that Israel should not fight back is promoting the idea of war as a means of getting what one wants.
Nah, Americans aren't that dumb. We send billions and billions to Israel every year, for what? Most Americans want to stop being a blank check for them to bomb whoever and then get mad, deplete their resources, and ask for more when they get attacked back
I'm glad that you feel that way. You'll be relieved that those pushing the "Israel bombs whoever and then get mad" agenda was lying to you. We've been (we as in my family) absorbing rocket fire for literately years - hardly been bombing every time we get mad. It took something egregious - literally beheadings and burning of babies (I personally know at least two families whose babies were burned to death) - to ignite this war. My daughter's classmate was murdered in his home along with both his sisters and both their parents. My son's summer camp counselor was kidnapped, his body was later retrieved. Shall I go on? What would you have your country do under these circumstances?
Your heart is in the right place. But you've been manipulated.
I don't buy that Repubs are the free speech party (or even that Dems were the free speech party). Republican complaints about free speech were almost entirely self-serving and never on principal.(this is not to say judges or other conservative thought leaders may not be pro-free speech) but for the political parties:
commitment to free speech comes from the tension between the two parties. Give either of them too much power and free speech is out the window.
Also, pro war party is a weird thing to say. Repubs in 2000 wanted to be the aggressors. Defense to Ukraine has thus far been pretty bi-partisan.
>Skeptical of large corps
They will surely get rid of Lina Khan almost instantly, who is one of the few people in a position of power who is actually poutting skepticism of large companies into action.
Granted, there is a good chance that she would be fired either way if Harris had won.
Dems are the only ones pushing antitrust. The Republicans taking over is dominated by CEOs of large companies. How could you possibly say its Reps that are skeptical of large corps not dems. Antitrust is probably gonna die now because of this outcome
Also, thinking that Republicans aren't just as, if not more, bought by the military industry complex is just sticking your head in the sand. The GOP is more adamant about funding Israel than Dems are
Bill Clinton didn't have major wars, but did have wars. Bush Jr had major wars and the dems fought like hell against that, but then Obama had a bunch of wars and kept one major war going. Trump didn't have new wars and insisted on ending the one major war (which didn't happen until Biden). Biden has a major war. Harris got the endorsement of the Cheneys and some Bushes.
There was no party switch. Both parties love the money flow that wards create.
Trump is not a party; he's the only one against the wars.
Name one, just one antiwar group that's pro Republican. They're all on the left, who was once again, excluded from participating.
The Democrats think that by going harder right, the Republicans would stop calling them Communist.
They don't realize the accusations are pulled out of thin air to begin with. The Democrats pushing harder right won't quiet the right wing bullshit machine.
If you think the Democrats who did what the students were protesting and sent in the cops to beat them up are on the same team, you're cooked.
They sent armed people in to round them up and destroy things.
The kids were protesting the Democrats because the Democrats have become the right wing party for those who dislike Trump. Foreign policy, economic policy, immigration, it's all right wing
Multiple people in this very thread are claiming the Republicans have more left policies on these issue.
While I disagree on your other points, I agree that traditional left wing is totally dead in this country. It's been co-opted by wacko identity politics.
The politician closest to the traditional values of the left wing is ironically Trump.
It's manufactured presentation by right wing media celebs - a projection of their characters like Milo Yinnapolis, Andy Ngo and Oli London onto what they imagine the left is doing.
The right is full of loud bombastic personalities like Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Mike Cernovich, Baked Alaska, Cat Turd, Libs of Tiktok and all the plastic surgery ladened evangelical TV pastors dripping in make-up. It's just psychological projection.
> It has not been coopted by wacko identity politics.
Proceeds to quote wacko communist politics.
When I say traditional left, I don't mean far, academic, elitist left. I'm talking union, FDR, JFK, LBJ, Bernie Sanders types. Not academics who write books about the role of Cuban women in the Communist revolution.
You think "identity politics" means "communism", that "communism" means "socialism" and that "liberal" means "left"?!
Alright. We're using different dictionaries.
Sometimes Democrats are like "but I'm a woman" because their policies are otherwise indistinguishable from the Republican, ok sure. Democrats are just Republicans that wave a pride flag. If that's the claim than agreed.
I am honestly unsure why the characterization of Trump as anti-war overlooks his stated desire to "order the Department of Defense to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other covert and overt actions to inflict maximum damage on [Mexican] cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations." Whether or not you think that's justified, it is a very clear statement of intent to use military force on foreign territory, at our discretion. And that's a quote from 2023.
I'm surprised more people hadn't noticed this switch during this campaign cycle. It seemed pretty clear to me, especially coming off the heals of a pandemic response that saw the democratic party flip so dramatically to blindly trusting big pharma and reaching for law & order as a pandemic response strategy.
The best explanation I heard recently was that Trump in 2016 made a play to pull working class Americans into the Republican party. The party basically clinched its teeth and looked the other way, knowing that they either accept the voters or risk a real problem. Since then the Republican party has largely embraced the working class while the Democratic party continues to favor more and more towards the rich voters and massive corporations, finishing off the full party flip.
I do have to say, that I'm very curious to see what the next four years look like. The strange thing about the working class people that Trump brought over, is I think many of them expect Government action/intervention in their lives, and a large part of the Republican party still seems to be pretty hands off, de-regulation, attack the welfare state, tax cuts for billionaires.
So I don't want to immediately just dismiss the idea that Republicans are the party of "blue collar workers", and if they really can bring manufacturing back, they'll be heroes, but I'm curious how patient the base will be for it. If they really do cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, there will be big time economic losers. It seems like a geo-economic realignment to bring back manufacturing could take more than four years, and it seems hard to believe there won't be economic costs. will they be patient? Will that geo-economic realignment even help the current generation, and can they stay in power long enough to fulfill it?
>Since then the Republican party has largely embraced the working class while the Democratic party continues to favor more and more towards the rich voters and massive corporations, finishing off the full party flip.
Insane to say this when Trump and Republicans want to lower taxes for the rich and even suggest "abolishing the IRS".
Tax is always paid by the workers. “The rich” are not the problem, they own the businesses that create jobs and add value to the economy. The problem is the government that can never have enough.
You need to reduce the need for tax money, not increase the amount paid.
Cutting taxes on the rich helps the rich, it doesn't directly hurt the working class. More importantly, Trump and the Republicans embracing the working class has everything to do with rhetoric and who they target for voting and very little to do with policies they actually enact. Most voters end up caring about what is said and pay little attention to what is done.
Until the programs and benefits that the working class relies on are cut because "who's gonna pay for it?!" And "we've gotta reduce the deficit!". Then the working class will be directly and painfully effected because they are the ones that need tax credits and Healthcare options and foodstamps and support! Who's gonna pay for it? The people that already have enough! I understand the human urge to hold on to everything you have. But when did we stop caring about contributing to a functioning society?
That's all totally possible, sure. But those are down stream impacts that are influenced heavily by other factors and by how people react to a change in taxes, for this example. Its way more complicated than that.
> I understand the human urge to hold on to everything you have. But when did we stop caring about contributing to a functioning society?
I'd ask when we decided that a functioning society was only possible with a powerful government collecting and redistributing wealth. Neither are required in my opinion, though we likely couldn't be as centralized as we are today without large governments and taxes.
I'm sure we'll see a flourishing of the working class under the Republicans, then. We'll see Trump going to bat for unions in their fights against Corporate America, we'll see minimum wage increases throughout the country, maternal leave, and much more.
Or, people have fallen for a demagogue selling them a cheap lie (it's not corporate America keeping you in low paying jobs despite massive productivity and profitability, it's those damn immigrants stealing your jobs!).
Getting a block of voters to support you is very different from actually doing right by those voters in the long run. If the Republican party doesn't end up doing much, or anything, to help the working class voters that Trump brought to the table they'll lose those voters eventually. Its just a lagging indicator since it first has to become clear that the party isn't actually on those voters' side.
I was surprised to see Trump not entertain much war during his last term but I don't agree. Both parties equally entertain war and I fear any Republican anti-war this time will be pro-Russia and further destabilize the world.
> Working class party
I think the voters see it that way and it's a real win for Republicans since they're the opposite and get away with it for who knows what reason
> Pro free speech
I've absolutely no idea how you came to this conclusion
> Skeptical of large corps
I'd love for that to be true but I bet they'll be just fine with any large corp that helps them remain in control.
And yes, the entire topic of religion has not only remained the same but perhaps gotten worse.
> Both parties equally entertain war and I fear any Republican anti-war this time will be pro-Russia and further destabilize the world.
Trump is emphatically anti-war and he's dragging the Republican party kicking and screaming to that position. Just look at his relatively low-war presidency and his rhetoric on war throughout the years.
> I've absolutely no idea how you came to this conclusion
Free speech? The Dems are calling left and right for censorship. The only person that has stopped it is Elon Musk, now a vital facet of the Trump coalition. I have no idea how you can make the case the Dems are the free speech party.
> I'd love for that to be true but I bet they'll be just fine with any large corp that helps them remain in control.
Again, this is something that the MAGA types are dragging the Republicans kicking and screaming. MAGA abhors big pharma, whereas Dems trust it. Was the opposite in 2008 or even 2012.
We like to discuss Trump so much, but a lot of this shift is actually the Dems moving their positions too.
> trump is so anti-war he increased troop presence in the middle east
Gonna need a citation for that one.
> while biden pulled out of afghanistan
That's ridiculous. By the time Biden came into office, the pull-out had been long decided. If anything, Biden inherited a messy situation because Trump had rushed the exit too much.
I guess you've not been paying attention to MAGA types who equally as much want censorship and who are for any person, corporation, or government who will help them to further their goals on that front. I would love for "MAGA" to come to represent the genuinely good things that Trump said on the campaign trail for 2016, and none of the bad things are associated with the those who claim to be part of "MAGA", but fool me twice shame on me.
Trump pulled out of the Iran deal, which pushed Iran to redevelop its nuclear program. Anti-war what?
Trump signed the abraham accords with Saudi/Israeli appeasement, which Israeli intelligence notes pushed Hamas to attack on oct 7 and launch this war. Anti-war what?
Trump withheld military aid from the Ukraine until Zelensky provided dirt on Joe Biden, which was critical for Ukraine's defense against Russia's aggression in Eastern Ukraine, leaving Ukraine weaker and invaded in full two years later, anti-war what?
Trump has threatened to jail his opponents and go after the press, free speech what?
Republicans have banned books, want to ban teachers and fire massive amounts of civil servants, free speech what?
Elitist party, Trump is literally a billionaire who is supported by other billionaires, some of whom he will put in his cabinet. His biggest two policy positions are tax cuts for big corps (elitist) and deportations of the lowest class of people in the US. But Dems are elitist?
I don't think there is much that they've switched on actually in the last election, other than Republicans convincing the working class that they're their party, something republicans have done on and off for many decades.
Simple facts: Trump had way less war than now. Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen. Dick Cheney supporting the Dems is a simple way to look at it.
Free speech: Random local Republicans have proposed all sorts of things, but Trump's circle is more pro free speech than the Dems right now. And Republicans as a party have stated free speech as a policy position. Whereas Dems state they want to "combat misinformation". They do not advocate free speech. There's even a clip circulating today where "The View" hosts call for cracking down on "misinformation"
Trump has literally been brought to a courthouse and had his mugshot taken and you're talking about "jailing opponents"?
Your arguments basically boil down to: "Trump bad, half country stupid" which is absolutely elitist.
> Trump had way less war than now. Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen.
That’s about as accurate as saying that I ”had“ less war on my previous job. As it turns out, though, the world doesn’t revolve around me, and neither around the US president. Other actors exist, and they make their own decisions.
I don’t know how to take your rambling around free speech seriously. Do you really argue that we should treat „alternative facts“ as valuable free speech? That we should support people actively deceiving others? Maybe, just maybe, when free speech collides with basic democratic resilience, democracy itself ought to win out?
> Trump has literally been brought to a courthouse and had his mugshot taken and you're talking about "jailing opponents"?
For an actual crime he committed. As it is supposed to be. Yet, he pushed for legislation to ensure he’s literally above the law.
> the world doesn’t revolve around me, and neither around the US president
lol, yes you are as important as the US president.
> maybe, when free speech collides with basic democratic resilience, democracy itself ought to win out?
Exhibit A of how libs now are against free speech^
> For an actual crime he committed
For "mislabeling campaign funds", something the DNC and Clinton was fined for doing but never criminally prosecuted. It's simply because people don't like Trump the actual thing he did doesn't matter.
You've proven yourself incapable of a normal argument. If I tell you that Israel itself thinks that Trump's actions caused the Hamas attacks and Israeli's retaliation, you'll respond to that by saying 'but the attacks happened during Biden's presidency thus it's Biden who started the war', then I really don't know how to have a conversation with you.
If you cite Yemen without understanding that the civil war started in 2014, and the cease-fire started in 2022 under Biden, as a reason for why Biden is pro-war, then I don't know how to have a conversation with you.
If you think the guy who literally says journalists are the enemy of the people, the enemy within, and that that national guard or the military can resolve it, that he wouldn't mind if journalists get shot, that he'd take away broadcasting licenses, that he'll throw journalists in jail, that he'd bring the independent FCC under white house control, ban books, teachers and civil servants if they don't align with his views, is a guy who made free speech a genuine policy position, then I don't know how to have a conversation with you.
If I give counterpoints to your arguments and you paraphrase that by me saying 'trump bad, half country stupid', which I've not said, and then go on to classify that as elitist when the ENTIRE cabinet is envisaged to be (billionaire) elites with two major policy proposals benefitting elites and deporting the opposite of elites, then I don't know how to have a conversation with you.
Trump doesn't care about anything but himself, of course.
But the judges he appoints do. And if his first term is repeated, he'll again just appoint the far-right judges that republicans hand to him.
You're right, some things will be left up to states and I think we'll see more state divisions and self-sorting of people among states.
On abortion, it will be interesting to watch republicans fight over trying to push a nationwide ban. Trump is savvy and powerful enough to squash that, probably.
It's more important to look at what Trump does than what he says. Because he says whatever he thinks people will like. He's a chronic liar, by the way.
Trump did in fact enable the judges who changed the law on abortion.
As an American who grew from nothing, served in the military, and expanded in my career -
I find the concerns for Democracy comical.
Most of you do not understand the type of people that built and fought for democracy. There is no real fear amongst these same type of people in modern America.
As someone who spent most of his life in a dictatorship, I don’t think you appreciate how easily a society can slide into a totalitarian state and how apathetic most of the population can become.
It’s also interesting that you served in the U.S. military and didn’t recognize how self-serving and institutionally corrupt it is. I come from a country with an oversized military relative to its government, and the parallels I can draw between its behavior and that of the U.S. Army are uncanny.
However, comparing American society with one of the Middle East does not resonate with me. That goes hand in hand with comparing a military of a dictatorship with one of a democracy.
There is nothing inherently special about Americans that makes them more democratic. I agree we shouldn't compare the U.S. with Middle Eastern countries; they were never democratic in the first place. A more appropriate comparison would be with the German Weimar Republic, where a charismatic leader managed to overthrow democracy.
Many people raised in democratic societies don't fully understand the intricacies of the relationship between the military and dictatorships; they see the military as a tool in the dictator's hand to wield at will. This couldn't be further from the truth. A (strong) military in a dictatorship is its own institution, largely isolated from the rest of society and granted its own perks and benefits. The dictator can wield the military only to the extent that it aligns with the institution's goals. Competent ones try to align the military's goals with their own; incompetent ones get overthrown.
Because of this isolation from broader society, the officers and soldiers believe that what is good for the institution is good for the country. They're not suppressing their citizens; they believe they are protecting the republic.
The U.S. Army is already operating as an isolated entity from broader U.S. society. Monetary corruption is quite substantial—consider the medium- to high-ranking officers and their relationships and revolving doors with defense contractors.
I'm not saying the U.S. is going to become -insert non-democratic country here-, but if we ignore the usual Western caricature of Stalinist-style dictatorships and realize that there are multiple forms of eroding democracy, you'll start to understand why it's not such a far-fetched idea.
Comparisons to Weimar Germany are ridiculous because the state of the two countries are vastly, VASTLY different. Nevermind the fact that we're also in a different, much more interconnected and mixed world than back then.
On the one hand you have a once-proud and powerful state recovering from the most devastating war humanity has ever waged (by that point) that it lost in, which subsequently forced them into paying back massive reparations, sanctions and economic and military limits imposed on it by the victors of said war. Of course a charismatic, populist leader who gives the resentful nation a boogeyman to fight against is going to win.
On the other you have the de facto #1 world power with the most cartoonishly powerful military on the planet that has their fingers involved in every single pie on the planet, which was founded on the principle of democracy some 200 years ago, with strong safeguards put in place to prevent the exact thing that happened with the Weimar republic.
Even pretending like the Weimer Republic's military was anything even resembling what the US military is is ridiculous.
> On the other you have the de facto #1 world power
Wasn't always the case, and honestly it's hard to tell where China stands right now, and it seems like it's not slowing down... if you look at e.g. robotics or drones...
> which was founded on the principle of democracy some 200 years ago
Didn't it need a civil war to actually become a democracy? My understanding was that it was not exactly founded as a democracy. But maybe I'm being pedantic there.
> with strong safeguards put in place to prevent the exact thing that happened with the Weimar republic.
Genuinely interested! What are those safeguards and what do they prevent that happened with the Weimar republic?
> Didn't it need a civil war to actually become a democracy? My understanding was that it was not exactly founded as a democracy. But maybe I'm being pedantic there.
Definitely think you are being pedantic. By that standard, we're not a "real" democracy right now with felons not being able to vote in many states. That's a valid position to have, but imo not really useful for this discussion.
I'm saying that because I recently read somewhere that it needed a civil war to modify the Constitution and make it a democracy. The article was making the point that it was purposely not designed as a democracy at first.
Which I found interesting, but admittedly not necessarily useful here.
With the Weimar Republic, it was specifically section 48 of their constitution which granted emergency powers to pass laws and the normalization of its invocation, paired with a dysfuctional legistlative body that was the only check on that power, that allowed the measures to be taken that culminated in probably unconstitutional passage of the Enalbing Act that killed the republic.
Sure, but it has been for the better part of a few decades. The whole reason US hegemony has spread so far and wide is due to this.
> Genuinely interested! What are those safeguards and what do they prevent that happened with the Weimar republic?
I'm not American so I'm probably getting the tiny details wrong here so please correct me if I'm wrong on any points. A lot of this is going off my memory, so I'm probably getting some dates and such details wrong as well. I'm definitely not including a very comprehensive answer here, as it's a complex topic with a lot of history attached that I don't know too much myself. I'm mostly just a nerd who finds this kinda stuff fascinating, not any kind of expert :)
The big sticking points for the Weimar were that the president wielded much more legislative and executive power than US presidents do. Article 48 let the Reichspresident call a state of emergency without ever involving the Reichstag (Parliament) which basically enabled them to become dictators whenever they wanted. Article 48 was one of the early keys Hitler used to seize power, as a fire in the Reichstag parliament house gave him an excuse to call a state of emergency because of a supposed Communist uprising. He used Article 48 to arrest Communists en-masse on the basis of the Reichstag Fire Decree which was signed shortly after the fire, which also included many provisions that restricted free speech, movement and other similar civil liberties. I'd recommend further reading up on the Fire Decree yourself, as it's quite interesting as a key turning point in the Weimar turning into Nazi Germany.
In contrast, US presidents cannot supersede congress and decrees are subject to congressional oversight (there probably exist exceptions, so take my words here with a grain of salt). Even emergency powers (such as the ones Hitler used) are much weaker for US presidents and have to go through congressional approval. Even if every single member of congress is a republican, republicans are not a completely united party. A lot of them dislike Trump and have their own agendas they'd prefer to be pushed, and ultimately they have no real reason to bow to the president since they are elected in completely different timeframes, wield different but almost equal power and are also competing with every other member of congress. For example the fear mongering about leaving NATO, there's basically a 0% chance of that happening because it requires a supermajority from congress, despite whatever the President might want. It's a pretty common reason why things like the recently proposed student loan debt forgiveness never end up happening, the president can't just will it to happen.
Another big one is that the militaries work under different philosophies and circumstances between the two, and you can't have a takeover without military backing. The Weimar military was still pretty loyal to the old monarchists and viewed Weimar as a forced state that they were put into under pressure after losing WW1. You have to understand that the whole "democracy" idea was a pretty fresh one at that time for Germany, they only switched from monarchism to republicanism in 1918 after the November revolution.
By contrast, US military as far as I understand it isn't really all that loyal to whoever the current president is, but rather to the constitution. The president might be commander-in-chief, but that doesn't mean he can tell the military to do whatever they want. They still wield power over the military of course, but it's a lot less pronounced than it was in Germany, because the military were loyal to Hitler. If the military leaders who are ultimately the ones commanding the troops don't like the president, there isn't much they can do. Even the national guard is interesting, since it's a split responsibility between states and the federal government. And, again, congress also has a say in many military things, though my knowledge there is for sure lacking so I'd recommend you do your own reading up there.
An example there of the limited power of the president was when Nixon was getting the boot, the secretary of defence James Schlesinger at the time instructed military leaders to run Nixon's order by either him or the secretary of state, because he was worried about Nixon's reaction.
And again, the economic and social situation in Germany at the time cannot be overstated. People were miserable, the country was massively poor and were in a major demographic problem due to the war. Their industry was quickly stagnating due to the aftermath of WW1 and there was a lot of resentment building up in Germany for what they considered to be unfair and harsh treatment from the Allies. They were, to put it charitably, extremely unstable times and it was a matter of time before all of it exploded like it did. If it wasn't Hitler, it would've been the next charismatic leader promising to take revenge on the people who ruined the country (which is massively oversimplifying things of course, but you get the gist)
There are real, significant between Weimar, Italy 10 years before and the USA today.
However the explanation for the rise of Hitler you allude to is woefully incomplete. Hitler and his party didn't get into power by winning the majory popular vote. Instead the Hitler and the Nazis formed a coalition with the monarchists and convinced Hindenburg that they would help restore the Monarchy if Hindenburg helped them take power and granted them new powers.
I'm not going to claim we are necessarily in the same situation today, but I do think it is worth being aware of how this kind of thing can happen.
We should be extremely wary about giving a charismatic leader extraordinary powers, even if that leader promises that power will only be used to accomplish your goals.
You're 100% right, my comment was definitely not meant to imply that the Nazi party's takeover was a simple affair that was as cut and dry as Hitler winning the vote and turning the country into Nazi Germany.
However the way I see it, people (not you, I just mean in general people who seem to believe Trump will bring about the 5th Reich) are probably out of ignorance of the history there also massively oversimplifying and overestimating how much power the president ultimately wields, especially when compared to Weimer-era Germany. People aren't aware that there are safety mechanisms in the US that didn't exist in the Weimar Republic, and as such simply bringing up that "This is exactly what happened with Nazi Germany!" is massively oversimplifying things as well from the other side.
The comment my comment was replying to did this exact thing, in fact, where they equated the election of a charismatic leader to what happened with the Nazis.
I do agree with you though, I personally tend to align with Frank Herbert when it comes to people who want to wield power and rule over others, in that they should be studied and watched closely and carefully and disposed of swiftly if they pull any Hitler-tier shenanigans
> A more appropriate comparison would be with the German Weimar Republic, where a charismatic leader managed to overthrow democracy
This doesn't resonate to me. The conditions in the US are so different than the German Weimar Republic. I mean sure it's possible but without a compelling reason I kind of discard those arguments. The US has had lots of charismatic leaders screwing stuff up and yet still survived.
More importantly, American Exceptionalism is deeply ingrained in our philosophy. I think we're wrong, but it exists. So the general populace doesn't believe this stuff and just makes people sound out of touch. I think when someone is thinking about inflation and rent and mortgages, the idea that they should care about an existential threat to democracy doesn't seem to matter much. That's a rich person's worry.
This is the weirdest thing I have read in a while. I can name multiple more democratic countries, for example starting with the Nordic countries. Just having a multi party system goes far in this comparison.
If you were going to give an example, Switzerland would have been a good one. But they have elements of exactly what I'm talking about, considering there are French, Italian, German quarters of the country.
Nordics have only recently become democracies, <100 years ago.
To clarify, the context of the discussion was the resiliency of democracy, not some dick measuring contest of which country is presently more democratic.
Ok, sure, I can bite the argument charisma matter. I just don't see how Trump is charismatic in any way. He's a spoiled rich kid that throws tantrums when things don't go his way.
First of all, that's how you see it. That's how I see it. But what about someone else?
This comment is going to be a bit rough as I'm going to play act a lot to really drive my point home.
I remember talking to my carpenter friend. He told me he voted for someone like Trump in my country. I asked him why.
My issue with the local politician where I'm from is that he puts all Islamic people into one bucket: the stupid one. I think that's crazy and unfair. He does it with more things. I think his policies are stupid whenever I hear them.
My carpenter friend and I go way back. We met each other when I was 7 and he was 9. He was part of a dizygotic twin. We haven't spoken to each other in 4 years and just vaguely kept in touch.
When he told me that he voted on that bullshit person of a politician, I asked why and he's like: "he's charismatic!"
The thing is. I know this carpenter friend. He might be a lot older but I know him emotionally. He hasn't changed a bit, he just got more mature. But underneath, whenever I see someone from my elementary school, I still see the same child. I also think they still see me that way, that's the impression I get.
The charisma doesn't come as much from that our crazy local politician is actually charismatic. It comes more from the fact that - if I had to guess - from his perspective: politics is boring as hell. It's crazy boring! Why bother! Yea, yea, right to vote. Fine. Fine. He'll vote. Fine.
But if he'll vote. Why not have some fun? Why not vote for someone that wants to throw a bit of a ruckus eh? Why not vote for someone that talks in a way that he talks, that thinks in a way he thinks, that cares about his issues. What are these Islamic people doing here anyway? It's uncomfortable (note: I think this is dumb as hell, I'm just paining a picture - Islamic people should feel comfortable where I live because in my view they are the same nationality as I am).
So in my carpenter's friend mind, this local politician has some charisma. Does he have the best charisma? Don't know but definitely some.
What do other politicians sound like? Nuance 1, nuance 2, policy x, policy y, blah, blah, blah, BORING!
I wish it wasn't as childish as this but I know my friend. It is. He just wants to go to his carpenting job, make something beautiful, be with his wife and kids and call it a day. Thinking for him, like thinking deeply. That's painful. He can do it, but he sure as hell doesn't like it. He likes to do things with his hands.
When I emotionally understood I was shocked. I live in a village close to a big city. I know this village, I grew up here. I'm the odd one out, the intellectual. But I know how "these people from the village think". And my carpenter friend is a very average person in it. So suddenly I realized, this is how many people in my village think.
My suspicion is that something similar happens with Trump. However, with some differences such as: he's a business man! He tells it like it is! We don't take no shit from some ippity uppity democrats! Why should we?! Don't tell me what to do! I will do what I want to do! And all these immigrants are taking our jobs! That's not okay! Trump tells the truth.
Again, I think, that such type of thinking is the dumbest thing ever. Nor do I think that every Trump supporter thinks like this. But there are Americans that think like my carpenter friend. And my suspicion is that they think like this. From that perspective, it's clear to see why Trump has charisma. Because (1) he talks at their level, (2) he talks about their issues and (3) he's a successful business man.
I know we can both make arguments that (1), (2) and (3) aren't true. But dude, remember, for them, thinking is fucking painful.
I'm sure there are more archetypes/personalities that have backgrounds and contexts as to why they find Trump charismatic.
There was that whole civil war thing that happened. And it didn't even matter who won this election, it's clear we are very driven by us/them thinking just considering alone how much purchase you have as a politician when you promise to deport people.
If you are looking at the breadth of history, you would be much more justified in saying that "struggle" and even "violence" is what makes things happen or not. There are political formations, disruptions, rifts, responding to endogenous and external factors. There is now also the extra-political force of capital which is a big player.
What you see, or what you desire, is the so-called "End of History". Where all things are just variations parliamentary-democratic struggle, where in fact globalism is the very thing that assures you of the USA's (very broad) stability. You can allow for a superficial rollercoaster of politics, just insofar as you truly believe (and I bet you do) there is a trajectory and it is good. Good ole' USA.
Its very much like believing either that the world is just 200 years old (again, that whole civil war thing was a big deal), or that we are in a kind Groundhogs Day decade (of the 90s).
I could say a lot, but ultimately I envy you and the world you live in. I understand how it can really sustain you. I hope at least you don't live long enough to see your worldview shattered. You don't, truly, deserve that. Noone does.
- Removing the broadcast licenses of news network that questions him. He's been calling them fake news for years.
- More power to the rich buddies. Not just more money, now they get more control over government affairs. Musk and Thiel are frothing over this.
- Control over women and minorities.
- More power to the theists.
Looks like "comparing American society with one of the Middle East does not resonate with me." will soon become apparent as the parallels start to be clearer.
nobody needs media to tell them this. it comes directly from his mouth. it's hilarious that you think people get their opinions from media. no, just listen to what the politicians say. he said he's gonna do mass deportations? believe him
Im not even a trump supporter but last night he said he was leaving the white house after this term on live TV, so i think the whole trump-wanna-be-dictator thing goes out the window - no ?
"Don't worry, man who famously lies every single time he opens his mouth about even basic objective facts before everyone's eyes, says he won't abuse his powers, so there's nothing to fear!"
Also even going by his own words, what about his "dictator on day one" comments?
I think the concerns about him trying to stay on a third term are way overblown, but outside of that: you can't trust what he says versus to what he will do later.
How did Ashli Babbitt die? She was shot in the head, on January 6th, at point blank range, by the secret service, because she was trying to break through a barrier that was protecting the vice president of the United States, the man whose job it was to certify the election. Why was she there? Because from the top of the Republican party down, they spread a lie that the election was stolen because they devoid of morals and they knew their followers would believe them. The concerns about democracy are very real.
There is video of this. There is a mob of people behind her trying to get the vice president to stop him from certifying the election. It wasn't just her, she was just the person in front. This is what people talk about how Trump supporters are detached from reality. There is video. Watch the video.
Read They Thought They Were Free. People who vote for dictators _rarely_ view themselves as enablers of the bad things that come afterwards, even though they are an essential part of the process. Supporters choose to ignore the bad stuff. Let's hope the worst of it is just hot air, but I'm not giving people a pass this time around personally because it's way too dark.
As a non-American, my personal concern for Democracy in regards to the USA is the questionable system of the electoral college which, in my opinion, is one of the worst forms of representative democracy on the planet and certainly not apt for a country so proud of its democratic values.
This also goes hand-in-hand with the black-white thinking of a two-party-system.
If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now. Thus when we are forming a union we stipulate that we have equal voting rights.
It's going to happen in EU in some form as well (assuming EU goes into closer integration direction) because there is no way small countries accept closer union without a mechanism similar to electoral college.
> If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now. Thus when we are forming a union we stipulate that we have equal voting rights.
That's not how the electoral college works. The electoral college equivalent would be one village with 1000 people, the second with 2000, and the third with 4000, and each village getting "electoral votes" proportional to their population that gets awarded entirely to the candidate with the majority vote in that village. The entirety of the first two villages vote for candidate A, which awards 1 electoral vote for the first village and 2 electoral votes for the second. In the third village, which has 4 electoral votes, candidate A only gets 1999 votes, whereas candidate B gets 2001 votes, so they win the electoral vote 4-3 and become the leader despite only winning 2001 votes overall out of 7000.
The reason that the analogy needs to be this complicated is because the electoral college isn't some sort of common-sense system that happens to occasionally produce quirky results; it's an extremely contrived system that produces equally contrived results, which shouldn't be remotely surprising.
The US voting system doesn't even solve that one "problem" you are presenting. The number of districts and votes are constantly adjusted to population.
The margin is so large that it doesn't matter (I did check before commenting). Something truly spectacular and unprecedented needs to happen for Harris to win the popular vote.
This is completely untrue. While Trump is favored, there are around 7 million votes left to count in California alone. Predominantly from major cities. Harris is expected to gain a net of almost 3 million from that
No it's not. Harris has less than a 1% chance of winning the popular vote at this stage. You can put $100 on her right now and make $20K when she wins.
That's not how I read it when I looked earilier, but we'll see how it turns out. I can't be bothered to check again, and I don't think it's an important point to argue right now. For what it's worth, I hope you're right and I'll gladly be wrong here.
Counting votes for days/weeks. No ID laws. States not allowing pre-counting votes. States not allowing early voting. Having to wait 7 hours to vote at some polling locations vs 10 minutes at others. Allowing some forms of state agency issued ID to vote but not others.
I'm sure everyone from every side can come up with their own list. How about we solve it all once and for all.
Second time in the current millennium is probably the talking point you saw; Reagan was the the last Rep president to win two terms with a popular vote majority.
I would argue the Democratic Party is hardly "left-wing". The old joke is that the US has two parties: the right wing party and the very right wing party. They have moved a bit to the left though, but many "left wing" policies they support have broad universal support among the left and right in Europe. Today it's more the centre/centre-right party and the monster raving looney party.
But yes, the system is not great. This matters even more in the senate elections by the way, where every state gets two senators regardless of population size. I get the argument that you don't want densely populated cities dominating large swaths of rural areas, but 1) elections are about people and not trees, and 2) now it's the reverse where sparsely populated rural areas dominate. So...
All true, and I feel there's hope that this is the wake-up call the American left needs; that if they keep playing the role of the centrist establishment what they end up crafting is a super boring campaign that no one feels the passion to get out and vote for. Total voter turnout this election is shaping up to be significantly lower on the left (-15M currently) versus the right (-3M) as compared to 2020.
I think the takes that this is the right taking over America etc are super doomerist. The more accurate story is: The left put up a really boring, bad candidate. The only campaign the left has figured out how to run for literally the past three elections is "stop Trump", and its not even resonating with their own voters anymore. What are they going to run on in 2028 when there isn't a Trump to stop anymore?
The left needs to wake up and have a Trump moment of their own.
Trump is incredibly boring. All he does is throw insults and is obsessed with personal loyalty. He has barely any meaningful ideas at all, and has very little interesting to say. It's almost all just politics of grievances and whipped up anger, at times based on abject malicious lies.
That really is the problem: one side runs a nihilistic campaign completely unencumbered by any truth, morality, or any sense of decency, and the side, well, doesn't. There are two sets of rules and two games being played here. That much has been obvious for almost a decade now. So how do you counter that? Well, no one really knows.
The little he has to say still got him the most powerful position in the world, which is a problem. I am thoroughly afraid of his capability to destroy and deceive.
Progressive policies are broadly popular; inevitably, some totalitarian and intolerant wokeists always end up hijacking the progressive wing, driving the center rightward.
States elect Presidents, not the People. If you knew anything about why states exist at all, and their history in Constitutional law, and that they have far greater sovereignty than any other country's sub-national political division, you'd understand why the electoral college system exists.
There is a President of the European Council (Charles Michel, elected by member countries' heads of state), there is a President of the European Commission (Ursula von der Leyen, elected by the European Parliament), and there is a President of the European Parliament (Roberta Metsola, elected by the members of the parliament).
Seats in the European Parliament are not proportionally allocated (small countries have more seats per capita), and member countries have different systems for allocating their seats among representatives, but nobody uses first-past-the-post, maybe except Hungary (debatably - their system is weird).
So, no, none of the "EU presidents" are elected by popular vote strictly speaking, and none of them have a role that is even remotely similar to the US presidency.
+1. America has immense sociopolitical inertia. It is absolutely incomparable to societies like 1930s Germany, 1910s Russia, or post-war China that gave rise to the brutal dictatorships of the 20th century. This a blessing if you are worried about totalitarianism, and a curse if you are hoping for deep structural reform.
A reasonable worry is not that America is going to become just like China, Russia, or Nazi Germany, but that it will become a bit more like them in some ways. Which I think would be bad.
"Average Joe" thinks he knows more political science than people who went to school. Inadvertently demonstrates why it's so easy to manipulate the public into voting against their own self interests while convincing them they're somehow smarter than the "elites", who are really just educated people trying to save them.
As I get older, I grow increasingly weary of this kind of condescending rhetoric. As an example, where were these educated saviors when there were calls to "defund the police"? Most low-income neighbourhoods want more police presence[1], not less because crime hurts them personally and not just in an abstract way on some spreadsheet.
You can't "save" someone without understanding what their day to day problems are.
In Florida 10% of adults are not allowed to vote. In Mississippi, 15% of all black people are not allowed to vote
Florida is particularly bitter because Floridians voted to give back felon voting rights and DeSantis and the judicial branch he controls just declared it unconstitutional
> Most of you do not understand the type of people that built and fought for democracy.
I AM the type of people that built and fought for democracy. My people donate to the ACLU and drive people to the polls. We marched for civil rights and women's rights. We fight voter disenfranchisement and poll intimidators and insurrections.
Trump has explicitly and clearly stated he plans to fill the supreme court with cronies, and then dissolve massive parts of the bureaucracy to instead divert that power to the president. Keep in mind, on top of this, he is also now completely immune from all crimes.
This new-found concentration of power in the president has never before been seen in American politics. It is genuinely worrying, even if you believe Trump will use his new powers in benevolent ways.
This is working under the assumption a succession will be like the one's we're typically used to. With this newfound power, that might not be the case. At the expense of sounding like a doomer, I think there is a possibility the next president won't be democratically elected.
Other high ranking military officers that have worked closely with Trump disagree. I might be inclined to believe them over you, unless you've also worked with Trump? Or are you just someone that he would call a 'sucker'?
Nice anecdotes you have there, but history suggests that you might have a bit of myopia.
1. Abraham Lincoln said "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." Whether you agree or not, some people think we may be at that inflection point right now. If you think American citizens haven’t lost substantial freedoms in the recent past, then you haven’t been paying attention. Is it at the level of “destroying ourselves”? To be determined, but the potential is there, and some folks really aren’t shy about trying to implement that a policy of reduced freedoms.
2. There are many cases in the last 100 years or so of authoritarian regimes rising because people want order during a time of distress — Saddam, Hitler, Mao, Lenin, and others rose to authoritarian power by offering stability during unstable times. They were welcomed with open arms, and often times people (including and especially the military) were willing to give up their freedoms for this potential for stability. Some folks think that the US is one big destabilizing event from welcoming an authoritarian. You may think this way of thinking is hubris, but none of us will know that it happened until after it has occurred.
I’m glad things have worked out for you, but I hope you have open eyes about how things can go south, as they have in the past.
It’s comical because you’re comparing literal communists and human rights offenders (some pure evil) to a
_republican_ president in a democracy over 200 years old with decentralized power between the states as well as private sector independence.
I’d question which party would bring us closer to something such as the cultural revolution or government-ran industries.
Still, what most fail to understand is the core values instilled in places like our military as the ultimate check/balance.
One thing that's struck me since Trump was announced the winner is how many Replublican voters are determined to invalidate the opinions of people who voted for the Democrats.
I'm left leaning, but I think jobs in rural areas, inflation, cost of living are all valid concerns that should be addressed regardless of who is in power. I disagree to varying extents with Trump's stance on abortion, immigration and gun control. But I also understand why people have a different opinion to me.
What I see online is a continuing anger towards the left and a determination to not only discredit their opinions, but also punish them for their dissenting views. There is this gleeful perception that it's time for payback.
People assume that there's going to be some grand take-over event, a third-world coup d'état if you will.
In reality, modern democracies die slowly. Russia was once a democracy, now it's democracy on paper only. What will Americans do, when their courts are infringing their freedom?
Again, it happens slowly. Bit by bit, in the boring court rooms.
I agree with your general point, but the comparisons to Russia don't work.
Russia was barely a functioning democracy in the 1990s and had no democratic tradition before that, just different flavors of authoritarianism for centuries.
The problem is the US only really has traditions. We were hardly a democracy at our founding in the modern sense of the word and as such the guard rails are fairly weak. The electoral college wasn't established in some brilliant attempt to moderate the votes of states, it was so rich land owners could control who ran the country.
Since last time, he survived two impeachments for which he was dead to rights and had the SC declare he has near total immunity for official acts. With a senate majority he knows that he can now operate with total impunity. He can cancel Congressional appropriations, cancel investigations, direct prosecutions and it doesn't matter if he does that illegally and he knows it.
As somebody not living in US, that's surprising. My opinion is that Democrats did a really shit job - focusing on wrong problems, promoting stuff nobody cares about etc. Trump / Musk did appeal to a lot of people for different reasons, some of which I can understand.
But both are grifters and very dangerous in my view.
Recover? It’s better than ever on every actual metric.
But I do look forward to February 2025, when journalists will once again travel to rural Pennsylvania to interview Trump voters in diners who will say that the economy is amazing now that the Great Man has been in power for a whole week. The magic of recovery!
I disagree. He will start taking credit for anything good that happens in the economy now, and blame anything bad that happens in the economy on Biden.
Yes, the economy is incredible but wealth disparity is too. The average person isn’t winning. Trump’s proposed economic changes appear to make that much worse, as well.
So much of this election has been utterly perplexing, but probably the most confusing part is how many people have legitimate gripes about how the economy is serving them, yet are voting for someone who has plans to make their situation worse.
"He said he'll decrease inflation!"
"But his plans for tariffs will make inflation much much worse!"
Just an observation from a limey. The Western (and Christian) world has changed massively over 2 generations from a predominantly white Western world to a mixed culture one, which takes a bit of acclimatising to.
The politics around gender (and however many there's supposed to be) makes people lose their frame of reference also IMO. For some, the world is changing too quick, or their neighbourhood is changing too quick.
Older generations who've witnessed the change perhaps see it most, as perhaps younger white men who have had the blowback of historical racism, misogyny and generally assumed to be the most privileged, though many (the majority) are not. I hear that the Trump campaign focused on them who generally do not vote.
I hope the USA moves on and accepts the result. In the end people vote with their desires, sometimes illogical but ultimately their desires are their motivations. The USA is also a good age now, as I was reminded by a Canadian taxi driver while living in Canada, regardless of what foreigners nebs think about US politics, better a world with the USA in it than without (though I'm probably biased as a Westerner).
Perhaps to an extent it's hard to keep an identity, like national pride or what a country stands for when things move so quickly.
Personally I thought Harris was a shoo in, but the people have spoken.
Insert caveat about big tech algos persuading people.
Well yeah, because Trump is a very bad person and a very risky choice to lead an important nation like the US. He'll also be our oldest ever president if he serves this full term, and even now shows clear signs of decline. We just went through that same thing, but with a person who was younger at the time of the election, and it's not good.
I think there are plenty of reasons to remain optimistic for the US on longer timescales, but for the next few years, this was a terrible outcome for which pessimism is warranted.
You act like the guy didn't himself say he wanted to use the military on people who disagreed with him or that he just needed people to vote one more time and after that they would rig it so you didn't need to vote again. Comments like this make me wonder if people are actually paying attention.
"...get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore."
"I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics...and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military."
No he isn't. He crapped all over Obama for ending the war in Iraq, along with most other Republicans. He kept the US in Afghanistan for his whole term and sabotaged the US exist on the way out, by setting a date far in the future, drawing down most US military assets, and negotiating the release of ~5000 Taliban who went right back to fighting. His policy toward Putin was pure appeasement.
Please find me any Republicans who gave Obama credit for ending the Iraq war - in his first term no less.
> trump is the most anti-war president of my lifetime, i don't know how anyone is accusing him of using or misusing the military
Trump is going to let Israel flatten Gaza, Russia take Ukraine, and possibly China engage Taiwan but anti-war. No one is accusing him of misusing the military yet.
> what is it specifically about a second term that allows him to rig all future elections? what is different this time that wasn't true in 2016?
A majority in Congress, a loyal Republican heavy Supreme Court, and the presidency as well as the desire to stay out of jail.
Exactly their point - I/they don't want the US to get directly involved in those situations. It would make it worse. The US doesn't need to be getting into wars, especially not with nuclear superpowers.
The supreme court balance is the same as it was when he was president, Republicans had the majority in the House from the beginning of Trump’s presidency in January 2017 until the 2018 midterm elections, when the Democrats won control of the House, and Republicans had the majority in the Senate for the entirety of Trump’s presidency.
literally nothing is different this time that's going to let him round up people into camps and turn himself into god-emperor. if he was interested in abusing power in completely new ways he would have pardoned himself before he left office.
The US is not directly involved in any of those situations and all of those situations have consequences for the US even if they are not involved, especially Taiwan.
> The supreme court balance is the same as it was when he was president
I think it's a safe bet that Thomas and Alito will step down in the next two years and be replaced by similarly right-wing justices, just much younger. The court will be majority hard-right for the rest of my life.
> literally nothing is different this time
This time he and his supporters are prepared. If you look at Trump in 2016, he seemed genuinely surprised he won. His transition team was ad-hoc and clumsy. His cabinet and advisory picks ended up being sub-optimal for him, as he kept appointing people who wouldn't go as far as he wanted to. Project 2025 is a thing now, and is a playbook for weakening and subverting the US federal government -- except in areas where conservatives want to keep power so they can impose it on states that don't share their ideology.
And any time states complain, SCOTUS will tell them to stuff it.
The rhetoric has only amplified in negative ways since he came on the scene in 2015. I don't know who kicked it off, and don't think it matters. Both sides are equally guilty for the hatred they've spewed.
You're going to have to point me to when the Democratic nominee said we should kill political rivals. Since both sides are equal. Because I can point to when the Republican nominee said it[0].
> Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?
You generally don't give a rifle to people you want to kill. Trump was making an obvious and anodyne point, which has been made time and again, in song and story, which is that war hawks generally don't fight in the wars they cheer for.
Does he have any responsibility at all for the words that come out of his own mouth? Blaming the media has been the right wing propaganda strategy for the last 3 decades. Fox News and the alte unlamented Rush Limbaugh have made entire brands out of blaming the media, while also crowing about being the most successful media brands in the country.
Another perplexing decision. It reminds me of when Bush won his second term. In retrospect, nobody today thinks that was a good move. But you'd be surprised how many people vote for Trump because they want to save money on taxes and think republican policies will help the economy.
I don't think it's the economy or anything else. All this seems like rationalizing to me not an understanding of what happened. Trump was able to motivate more people to vote than Harris was. I have yet to meet anyone who truly rationally made a choice that they had not already made to begin with other than after the fact rationalization. It is all about perception and what the other person believes. Reality and facts do not matter as much as we would like them to. There is no interest in anyone want to actually change their views. What argument or evidence would actually cause you to change your view? It would take extraordinary evidence for me to change my vote. I suspect that is the same for most voters, it's more of an issue of who can motivate better.
Tech employment had hockey stick growth from 2016-2021 and I suspect the number of HN users followed that curve. My guess is that the ratio of comments/users is the same or perhaps even slightly lower than 2016.
It’s good to periodically reexamine your own positions against that of the majority and be open to realignment and different ideas, but remember that the collective opinion of society over the long term may look back unfavorably on the collective opinion of society over a period of time in the past. It’s OK to hold minority opinions, and it’s OK to disagree with the majority of Americans who voted for Trump.
Not super worried from a European perspective, it might even spur on some cooperation in our own union, which I support.
Just a bit nervous for Ukraine... I wish Europe could step up on that front but we just don't have the capacity for it. Which is entirely our own fault, Trump is right to call us out on our reliance on the US. It's our continent we should be the one spearheading this.
Hopefully that will change in the near future. But that doesn't help Ukraine now.
The democrats need to do some serious introspection on their policies and priorities. And perhaps just return to running a white male as candidate...
Oh well at least it's a very clear victory, so no weeks or months of anxiety over the results.
Should not have to worry about US pulling out of NATO. Trump is stupid, but even he realizes that it would not benefit US in a any way. Significantly reducing funding might happen, but hopefully that will make EU countries increase their defense spendings as a reaction.
That assumes that Trump is a rational actor when it comes to these sorts of things, and I'm not sure we can rely on that.
The question is how much of his leaving-NATO rhetoric was sincere, and how much of it was empty threats to try to get other NATO countries to devote more money toward defense.
Europe in total has contributed twice as much to Ukraine as USA. And much of that is spending that actually affects their economy, not just “we’re going to give a billion dollars of equipment that we were going to have to replace soon anyway”. I’m not trying to dismiss USAs contribution here but it’s a fact that much of it is really more of a program to modernise the stock of US military weapons and ammunition, which incidentally frees up old stock for Ukraine.
Also keep in mind that Europe now supports Ukraine by setting up arms production within Ukraine, which gives more weapons per dollar spent than donating weapons made in USA or Europe.
That said, while European military spending has improved a lot since the invasion, there’s still a bit further to go and it’s not such a bad thing if Europe is forced to become more self-reliant militarily.
Will be very short sighted for USA though. They benefit on so many levels from Europe being so dependent on USA.
Will be very short sighted for USA though. They benefit on so many levels from Europe being so dependent on USA.
This is the part that I don't get with the USA's recent obsessions with isolationism. One of the reasons the US is so rich is because it is a world power with a lot of loyal allies. We align a lot of our policies with the US when we are asked (see blocking ASML exports to China).
If the US is not willing to step up for its allies [1], it becomes a regional power, and the loss of influence will result in worse economical outcomes.
China is happy to fill the void.
[1] Also don't forget that (most) allies stepped up when the US asked (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.), even when much of their population thought it was not the best idea.
Trump is wrong in that. Europe relies on the US, because the American world order is built that way. That's what the US has traditionally wanted. They are the hegemon that maintains the world order and pays for it. Europe usually supports the US, both for ideological reasons and because it benefits from the American world order.
But if the US is no longer committed to their world order, I can see the return of a more selfish Europe. One that is willing to work with both the US and BRICS and does not automatically favor either.
> But if the US is no longer committed to their world order, I can see the return of a more selfish Europe. One that is willing to work with both the US and BRICS and does not automatically favor either.
I don't see this happening unfortunately. The much more likely scenario is that the US diplomacy in EU will adopt a partisan stance, favoring far-right parties. Anyone who has followed far-right EU movements in the last two decades can't seriously believe that US conservatives talking about isolationism means they will stop pushing their views in Europe.
What you call "far-right" is not a unified movement. Nationalism is one of those ideologies where ideological alignment can make you just as easily allies as enemies. If the US wants to work with European nationalists, it must simultaneously increase military support to Ukraine, isolate Russia even further, restore normal relations with Russia, and make cheap Russian natural gas available again.
So far, the policy differences between the different far-right parties in Europe hasn't really prevented them from cooperating. Besides, a lot of the meddling by US conservatives pushes on specific issues, so they don't mind funding two parties with opposed views on orthogonal topics.
> So far, the policy differences between the different far-right parties in Europe hasn't really prevented them from cooperating
They literally have. France's RN officially stopped collaborating with the German AfD over the latter being too "extreme". Now they sit in different fractions of the EU parliament.
That is the one such development I can think of in recent history. We'll see if this becomes more common as far-right parties become more mainstream, but I'm not holding my breath.
On the other hand, I've seen US-influenced and Russia-influenced movements happily cooperate for years now. There's been some tensions over which side to support when the war in Ukraine broke out, but so far it hasn't prevented these same groups clashing on this specific issue to cooperate on other issues.
Funny how "far right" parties are always the fault of foreign countries and never the result of the parties in power fucking over the local population year after year.
> And perhaps just return to running a white male as candidate...
This isn’t why people aren’t voting dem. Did you forgot that Obama was elected? People don’t want to vote dem because Dems have moved significantly to the left and are supporting crazy policies.
From the British side of things, we are now a ballistics rag doll.
We had Brexit, a catastrophe in itself. And with that we've sold ourselves to the US for "alliance" means; meaning that we will be dragged through everything the US wants.
When we were tied to the EU, at least we had a some sort solidarity.
Well, you and Germany are one of the few influential western countries left that has some sort of stable center-left government. Almost everything else is rightwing conservative, neoliberal or slowly descending into fascism.
Spain has a left-wing government, Poland is back to being centrist after getting rid of PiS, Switzerland has its own distinct government where all major parties are represented in perpetuity, ...
Also to call the current German government "stable" is... a choice.
Poland isn't stable either. PiS may come back at any point. You'd think that consolidating power, destroying relations with all neighbours except for the totalitarian Hungary, and implementing a total abortion ban would do them in, but no. PiS can run a campaign entirely on anti-LGBT and anti-immigration rethoric and win. Poland turned into Florida every recent election. The anti-LGBT nonsense is already coming back ahead of the next presidential election.
> AfD is set up for a big win, so that will be that.
The AfD is currently polling at about 18% of the vote. Alarming, yes, but nobody wants to work with them. The next government will likely be CDU led, with either the SPD or the Greens as a junior partner.
You have to find some good in all things and I think this is the most likely good. Other countries and continents realizing it's time to move on from America and start to stand on their own two feet.
I'm really tired of American being the center of everything, especially after this fiasco. It would be nice if it was a more progressive country for a change.
By progressive I mean, a country who believes in climate change, renewables and nuclear and women's reproductive rights.
Why would Russia want the EU dead. They were selling 10's of billions of dollars of oil and gas to it each year. Russia is however a bit paranoid about its own security, having being invaded numerous times over the centuries and wants to keep control of its own economic destiny.
Provide a way where security of both Europe and Russia can be provided for and peace will quickly follow.
If EU dies, Russia will keep selling its oil and gas to European countries, but the latter will be more divided when it comes to negotiating prices. As a large business, you want your customers to be as powerless as possible so that you can jack up prices as high as you can.
> Russia is however a bit paranoid about its own security, having being invaded numerous times over the centuries and wants to keep control of its own economic destiny.
In soviet Russua, Russia is the one constantly being invaded.
> Provide a way where security of both Europe and Russia can be provided for and peace will quickly follow.
So if i'm following you correctly, Russia's nuclear arsenal wasn't enough to provide security. Only thing we haven't tried for more security is to have every European nation be in control of their own nuclear arsenal?
Its a bold claim, but by golly you've snorted enough foreign-sourced talking points that you might actually be right!
Russia is however a bit paranoid about its own security,
Every rational actor (including Putin) knows that not a single NATO country is interested in invading Russia. He might have been worried about a democratic uprising in his country like Ukraine in 2014, but given how much an autocracy Russia has become, that's pretty unlikely now.
Provide a way where security of both Europe and Russia can be provided for and peace will quickly follow.
It's very clear that Putin wants to annex countries that he considers Russia's property (mostly former Soviet states). He has wars in Ukraine, Chechnya, and Georgia to back it.
Putin's word in a peace treaty will be worth as much as him saying that he wouldn't invade Ukraine up till the invasion. Nada. The only thing that will work is military deterrence.
>It's very clear that Putin wants to annex countries that he considers Russia's property
Nothing more than fantasy that justifies the warhawk stance among liberals. It is completely disconnected from reality. What Russia wants is safety from NATO. NATO in Ukraine would have been a strategic noose from which Russia would never escape. Ukrainian neutrality lead to peace. Ukraine with NATO aspirations lead to this war. The simplest answer is the right one in this case.
This is a false narrative that Putin propagates all the time (besides that Ukraine is run by nazis) and is not supported by history. He did attack Georgia and Chechnya. There was no danger at all of these countries joining NATO anytime soon.
At any rate, it has been a severe miscalculation on Putin's part. He thought they could take Ukraine in days and the aggression led Finland and Sweden to join NATO.
It's weird to see people say stuff like this. Like, are you completely ignorant of the history of US initiated regime change around the world? Do you not find it at all plausible? The US has a very long history of doing this very sort of thing[1]. Do you think the three letter agencies have just been sitting on their hands in recent decades? I just don't get how people can engage in such willful ignorance.
I can simultaneously find something plausible and see that there's historical precedent for it, but not accept unsubstantiated fantasy stories made up on the internet.
Russian conquest wars in the last 30 years: Chechnya 1994–1996 and 1999–2009, Georgia 2008 (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) & Ukraine (2014 - today).
> Ukrainian neutrality lead to peace.
When Russians invaded Donbas in 2014, Ukraine actually had a non-aligned, neutral status. It only invited the Russians as they perceived it as weakness. Ukriaine's effort to join NATO was in hope of gaining a defense umbrella.
To call them "conquest wars" is just a-historical self-serving nonsense.
>When Russians invaded Donbas in 2014, Ukraine actually had a non-aligned, neutral status.
They had a non-aligned status up until the moment their elected government was overthrown. At that point Ukraine's status is undefined. How was the government overthrown you ask? A US regime change operation: https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1ghs32...
Government was overthrown in February 2014, the Ukrainian parliament renounced Ukraine's non-aligned status in December 2014 while Russia annexed Crimea in February/March 2014 and attacked Donbas in April 2014 - all while while Ukraine was still neutral and non-aligned.
> US regime change operation
I haven't seen any actual proof for that, only speculation like what you are linking to.
LE:
And you'd need some strong proof considering that everything that happened afterwards completely vindicated Ukrainian people's fear of Russia and their desire to get closer to the West.
As someone who lives in Eastern Europe and who also lived through a bloody revolution to get out from under the Russian boot - let me tell you: we don't need external influences to desire to live in peace and freedom, to pursue our happiness and prosperity. We are just like you, people of the West, in that regard. We don't want to live under Russian occupation any more than you do and we are willing to pay the blood price for the privilege.
The point at which neutral status is officially renounced is of no consequence. When the existing polity is replaced, any agreements or expectations of the behavior of the nation are moot. Hence their status being "undefined".
>I haven't seen any actual proof for that, only speculation like what you are linking to.
Yes, it turns out sometimes you need to make inferences and compare historical events and M-Os to get a clear picture of what happened out of the public eye. The fact that some people can't even entertain the notion that the US had a hand in Ukraine's revolution just underscores your psychological need to feel like moral heroes while calling for escalation in the war. But there is enough circumstantial evidence (like the Nuland intercept) that paints a very clear picture to those who aren't taken in by motivated reasoning.
All true, and the EU complicit in all of those. Maybe not by choice (see remark about sovereignty at the end), but complicit nonetheless. You also forgot Syria, Yemen, Yugoslavia and probably a few others as well.
> Russia owns Trump and Russia wants the EU dead.
Sorry, but this is not Reddit.
> By no means should the EU get cosy with the US.
The EU has no choice other than be "cosy" with the US. It's called Pax Americana.
In simple terms, the deal is this and always has been this since WW2 ended: the EU has traded political sovereignty for security, to and from the US.
Russia wants Trump as his backhand man and that's what they got. America wants freedom yet at the same time they're happy to accept brokerage from a
man who dreams of an neo-USSR.
> I can't fathom where you got that from.
world peace was a rush mix of words. What I mean at least they held stability of the world stage.
> EU is complicit
I'm not saying the EU is a saint. The EU has an agenda and evils of its own. But as a figurehead and representation of many countries up on the world stage it held a positive power.
Countries could count on the nation for relief unlike any other.
> The democrats need to do some serious introspection on their policies and priorities. And perhaps just return to running a white male as candidate...
Considering that one of the main points of Trump's campaign was a swift end to Ukraine's war, and considering the large vote margin by which he won, I believe the lesson the democrats should learn is that most USAers don't want the USA to be involved in foreign wars.
By definition the democratic party should be able to read the population, right?
>By definition the democratic party should be able to read the population, right?
In the 2016 elections, they literally went to court to argue that they are a private company and their internal processes (eg. the primaries) don't need to be democratic.
This is why GP is nervous: Trump's "swift end" will likely be trying to broker a deal where Ukraine gives up all the disputed territory, and Russia effectively wins, validating Putin's approach to territorial expansion.
This my outsider perspective, I am not into US politics at all but I have spent a couple hours catching up today and my takeaway is simple (and probably wrong):
the Democrat's messaging wasn't clear enough in my opinion and Kamala Harris was a weak candidate.
I listened to some of her interviews and I had a really hard time understanding what her campaign was about besides not being Trump. She also failed to put some distance between her and Biden which means that in my mind and probably in the mind of a lot of voters, she was seen merely as a carbon copy of him but as a woman.
Also the fact that KH was parachuted on the ticket without a primary vote because it was too late for that meant that she just wasn't ready. She put up a good fight but it wasn't enough to beat Trump who by that stage had been on the campaign trail for more than a year and spent time crafting responses, rebuttals and finding ways to attack his opponents.
I think Biden shares some of the blame here but she must have known this was a suicide mission.
All in all I don't think I missed anything by not paying attention to this whole circus.
Biden should take on a lot of the blame by immediately deciding he wasn't going to run this year. Then we could have had a robust primary, hopefully ending with a more appealing candidate than Harris. Not a slam dunk, but better chances.
It's interesting how bad the democrats seem to be at the game of winning elections. They continuously seem to pick bad candidates and poor strategies resulting in them losing the election when they seem to have had the general conditions for winning. This time, the elephant in the room is of course the late ousting of Joe Biden, but there were similar issues that (in hindsight at least) were obvious in the Clinton 2016 campaign. This pattern can be seen in other countries as well, where it's clear that one group knows how to play the game while other groups don't, but it's surprising to me that a massive organization like the democratic party wouldn't have streamlined this process.
It would be interesting to hear from someone more familiar with the inner workings of the democratic party why this is. I.e., if it's a cultural issue in the party, if it's economical, or if my view on this is completely off.
"interesting how bad the democrats seem to be at the game of winning elections"
Since 1992, haven't democrats had power for over 20 years as opposed to GOP's 12 ?
Yea, but the game's changed. The Republican Party has figured out how to rally millions behind charismatic candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if we were in for a couple more years of Republican leadership.
I wouldn't say charismatic, but he's solid. I think people mistake charismatic for blunt. Trump is more blunt than he is charismatic. That makes him appear like less of an NPC compared to other politicians, and people actually like that.
Trump literally said "you won't have to vote again".
And if the Project 2025 plan works as they planned it, that's the truth. America will become a single party state and that won't change without a civil war.
They will stack the courts and every appointable position with pro-Trump (not Republican) people who will make sure every election goes their way in the future.
Charismatic or populist? Same thing in effect, but the latter has a bit more weight / context to politics.
Also if they're having their way, they will break the current system; Trump has said people would never need to vote again if he wins, and Project 2025 aims to give much more power to the president (autocracy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Given what democrats stand for, you don't even have to be charismatic to push them into a corner.
Any candidate who will shout anti trans anti illegal immigrantion talking points will always carry the day
You specifically chose a range of dates to make this as dramatic as possible. Could easily say GOP has 24 to 20 since 1980, or 16 to 12 since 2000, or 8 to 4 since 2016.
My view since 2016 has been that winning elections in the US is about telling a good story. Whether you're trueful or not doesn't really matter as long as people believe it.
Trump's story is pretty ridiculous, there's no way that his plans on how to fix the economy or the border or the whole department of efficiency thing work anywhere close to as well as he says. Regardless, his demographic believes it.
Kamala's story was a lot weaker, involved a ton of hard truths and concessions about things that people in her base care about such as Gaza. Additionally her story on the border was mostly the same thing as Trump's. If you like the border story, why not go for the guy pushing it harder?
Obama had a pretty good story in 2008 (the whole hope thing). Dems need to get back to that.
It would have been pretty silly for Harris to campaign on a Hope and Change™ platform, since that would imply she is doing a very poor job as incumbent.
I don't think "have had the general conditions for winning" is at all accurate this time around. It was clear ahead of time, and much ink was spilled on it, but it's even more clear in hindsight that this cycle was always going to be a giant uphill battle. Incumbent parties all over the world have been and are having the same issue. We're all still going through a hangover from the pandemic.
The Republican party is also flipping seats in the Senate and the House, yet you seem focused on Harris. It's not that people are voting for other Democratic candidates, the country is simply becoming more conservative as people leaning on left are simply not voting.
The Democrats are somewhat hampered by their focus on facts and rationality ("play fair") rather than spouting bullshit, conspiracy theories, and whatever bigotry is currently hot ("win at all costs").
They planned poorly with their candidacy; Biden and Harris were the obvious candidates being president and vice-president, respectively, but Biden was too old and they couldn't find a different candidate that wasn't as well known as Harris quick enough.
That said, the Republicans would have the same problem if Trump dropped out or if that bullet didn't miss.
It is some sort of tribalism. Believers can't see it. E.g. we gotta remember that people were gaslighting eachother into pretending Biden is not what could charitably be described as about to be senile.
Refusing to see one self as part of the problem, fundamentally.
Unironically yes. You have to meet the median voter where they're at, even if you find some of their positions dumb or bigoted. That's why Obama spent the 2008 election cycle pretending to be opposed to gay marriage.
The party has evolved an idea that you can do away with those kind of dirty political shenanigans, and construct a rational fact-based proof that will leave voters no choice but to support you, and I think that pretty clearly doesn't work.
Also by the fact that their unwillingness to turn on their capital sponsors, who don't really care whose in power and whose needs are ostensibly better met by republicans (so long as republicans don't start a trade war...)
Dems will continue to make the mistake of coasting deeper into the right wing, picking up 0 voters in doing so (why would I vote for a "tough on immigration" candidate when I can vote for the one who gleefully promises to deport all the browns?), meanwhile disenfranchising any left wing voters left in the USA and creating no new left wing voter bloc by presenting a coherent alternative to the reactionaries.
The same mistake is being made by neo liberal parties across the world.
>why would I vote for a "tough on immigration" candidate when I can vote for the one who gleefully promises to deport all the browns?
I'm always surprised by how bipolar US politics is. There's no place for nuance or third options, it's always one or second extreme. In this case, to answer your question, maybe you want to limit an influx of new people into your country (for ideological, or economical, or whatever reasons) but don't want a full on ethnic cleansing. That's OK, people don't have to only hold extreme opinions.
That's what Trump's circle wants, though. They want to deport 25M immigrants. Generously, the number of people here illegally is only half that. They don't care if people here legally get caught up in it and deported as well.
Deporting even a couple million people will require mass raids, round-ups, and the construction of concentration camps. It is physically impossible to deport that many people quickly or quietly or efficiently.
They're afraid of losing the white majority, plain and simple. The sad thing is so many non-white people don't see this and voted for him.
> In this case, to answer your question, maybe you want to limit an influx of new people into your country (for ideological, or economical, or whatever reasons) but don't want a full on ethnic cleansing.
As this election shows, then, you would vote for Trump, who is "better on immigration." You would tell yourself, as many Trump supporters demonstrate in interviews, that "he wouldn't actually do that."
If you're looking for a quote of him saying that word for word, no. But it is not an unreasonable interpretation of the things he has said he wants to do. Especially when he's used language saying immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" and makes up lies about immigrants eating pets.
It sounds to me that this is crass exaggeration and one of the many reasons why there is such a big divide between supporters of both factions. The whole exaggerated narrative and associations to nazism is definitely off putting.
You don't see any similarity between immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" (from Trump) and "Look at the ravages from which our people are suffering daily as a result of being contaminated with Jewish blood" (from James Murphy's English translation of Mein Kampf?
I understand you think people are exaggerating. You probably roll your eyes when people say Trump is a fascist, I imagine?
Can I ask - let's say before 2028 the democrat party gets tea partied and gets a genuine fascist candidate. What would that candidate say? What would their policies be? Can you do the same thought experiment for the Republican party? Or do you, unfairly, believe it's simply impossible for one, or the other, party to become genuinely fascistic? Perhaps you even believe fascism was permanently defeated when Mussolini was hanged? I would admire such an optimistic view!
Just in case you're genuinely curious why people say these things, it's not like we're all just making it up. Trump's rhetoric simply, to one who studies history, sounds very similar to Hitler's. It doesn't mean he's as bad as Hitler, it just means he talks like Hitler talked.
As for hitlerian policy, there is simply no way to deport the millions he has promised to deport that doesn't involve roundups, trains, and concentration camps. It's a physical impossibility to achieve otherwise. Do you disagree? Will he not follow through on his campaign promise to deport every undocumented immigrant?
I see you're unwilling to engage with the topic, though I try to in good faith. This makes me sad and frustrated. The key thing about British and American political discourse seems to be a disengagement from political education and reality. The reactionaries are actually "moderates," the guy speaking eerily similar to passages of mein Kampf is not hitlerian, center-right are actually communists, etc.
Who's calling Trump a fascist? For one, John Kelly, the right-wing Marine General, Trump's former chief of staff.
"Project 2025" may be unhinged, but in what sense is it a conspiracy theory? It's right out in the open and produced by one of the most prominent conservative think tanks.
Right, and economics as a field is difficult to understand for most people.
Presidents can't in reality take all that much credit or blame for the economy. A lot of it is out of their hands, and many economic shifts take longer than a presidential term to play out. But of course presidents will try, and succeed, because most people don't understand this.
On top of that, the GOP complains about how much money Biden "printed" during the pandemic, but Trump did his fair share of that in the first year of it as well. They just make dishonest arguments.
The Dems exist to give you an illusion of choice. This has gone down exactly as planned, or why do you think rich donors play both sides? Do you really think the Dems are this naive and keep messing up without it being on purpose?
The opinion makers know if it wasn't this close there'd be visible backlash.
My impression is that the current-day Dem's are, in "actions speak louder than words" terms, simply not all that interested in winning elections. Stuff like not bothering to do even the most basic of opposition research on George Santos ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos ). Not carefully checking that Biden's marbles were all still there 12+ months before the election. Their slow and half-hearted (at best) response to the RealPage ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPage ) rent-jacking scandal. Etc., etc.
There is the LGBT. Specially the T part. The right thing is to do is support their rights, and it is very hard not to do the right thing when you know what the right thing is. However, the republicans have weaponized it against the democrats. They call them radical left and they campaign saying things like the want to convert your sons in girls and other awful things. It is an imposible choice because it can cost you the election.
I think it is because people who think or say "what about me?" hear "what about me?" from others as if it's support of their own view, when really their core issues could be totally different. "Yeah, what about us?"
As opposed to "we need to help everyone, especially highly victimized groups". And then people infight over which groups require more attention vs everyone else.
What I always find interesting is how Democrats insist their failure is due to a lack of sound strategy. That is of course a strategy in and of itself to NEVER admit that it might be a refutation of their policies or (gasp) their values. Telling yourself you just lost because you didn't "play the game" is a cope. It serves its purpose though, as it allows ardent followers to avoid actual self reflection.
My theory: people are just hacked off that life is getting worse for most people while billionaires get richer and richer. Every disaster the wealthy get handouts while the poor have to pay for them. Government can no longer afford anything because all of its assets have been sold and rented back at a profit.
I don’t think either campaign made any difference to the outcome of this election at all.
In conclusion it might be an amazing economy on the high level averages but when inflation caused by COVID handouts (I’m reading $16 TRILLION, but that can’t be real surely?) is always going to lose you an election badly.
Since COVID food prices went up around 50% on many items that I pay attention to. (Example: meat & fish) For many Americans, messaging about the "great economy" does not match their lived experience.
This is the answer. When you have one candidate saying things are bad and he will make them better and another saying things are great when things for most people are not great, it should be pretty obvious who people will resonate with.
How did the COVID handouts cause inflation? It was only a small amount. Isn't inflation caused by macro-economic forces, e.g. interest, international policy / stability, and free market somethings?
5 Trillion added to the Fed balance sheet is not a small handout. They didn't o ly hand out money to individuals but also gave to businesses and propped up the bond market.
Let's not forget, though, that Trump is the one who kicked this off: he signed the first COVID-related stimulus package ad the end of March 2020, to the tune of $2 trillion.
Given that he was only in office for the first year of the pandemic, it seems reasonable that Biden signed another $3 trillion away. If all that caused inflation, Trump and Biden deserve the blame together.
The reason COVID handouts caused inflation while the '08 handouts didn't is that the COVID handouts went to regular people who spent the money while the '08 was wasted on bailing out the 1%, who spent it on assets that regular people don't buy every week.
Yes as a person you got a modest check. You don’t remember all the fraudulent “loans” than have been prosecuted? Most of the money went to !individual people.
I think this is kind of it for me, I didn't want Kamala to win at all, but I also didn't want Trump to be president.
It feels like we have been on this march for the last 40+ years of eroding working class leverage and handing power over to politicians and giant corporations.
Dems have been struggling because they keep putting out the same lifetime politicians who promise to play ball and keep moving us down this road. They need someone who promises actual change, someone who is a threat to entrenched power structures. Bernie 100% was that guy for the Dems and they buried him... twice... He was the last time I was remotely excited for an election.
Inflation were caused by mass factories shutdown in China and South East Asia. When they reopen they got so many orders that they simply increase their prices.
Do you have any references for that? I think it could be part of the story but I still think printing trillions of dollars will make things more expensive, especially when you consider where this money went!
> people are just hacked off that life is getting worse for most people while billionaires get richer and richer.
So their answer is to vote precisely for a representative of that class (supported by richest guy in the world). And at the same time, the same electors have a strong disdain for anything remotely socialistic such as free health care and education for all.
Life is not getting worse for most people, at least not economically. See for example https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N --- median real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) household income in the USA is at an all-time high, even though we had a pandemic.
I don't know why people believe otherwise. Maybe it's just rising expectations, fueled by rising inequality?
> Maybe it's just rising expectations, fueled by rising inequality?
Rising inequality is entirely enough to explain the whole thing. The bottom two quintiles saw their cost of living absolutely explode, and their salaries not keeping up. Median real income will never reflect something like that.
Housing isn't any cheaper. Basics like groceries aren't either. If someone is struggling to own a clean and safe home, pointing at averages isn't convincing.
Yeah this trope won’t die. You can win an internet thread with data that tells people they don’t know they’re better off, but you can’t win an election when they don’t believe it.
“Nobody likes my product because they are stupid”.
I think there’s this massive negative bias in a lot of our media, by our I mean globally. Social media and news. So I think you’re right, life is generally getting better for most people, COVID was a temporary blip in that trend. However… Inequality is growing rapidly between the middle class and the ultra rich, and the middle class in many developed countries is being squeezed due to cost of living issues, I think that’s a a part of the reason for this result. Also median income alone is useless, it has to be compared against cost of living. A measure of a middle class family’s ability to grow wealth is the difference between their income and their essential expenses. That is what matters.
I know that your comment implies that the bottom 40%'s income went downwards, but just because variance (inequality) increased doesn't mean that must have happened. It could have also went upwards (income increased), just slower than the top.
Some data would be good here. I don't have any, but if you want to imply that the bottom 40% went downwards, please show some data instead of insinuating it.
Even if people got pay rises they see the headline price of food (if they are poor) going up by in some cases > 50% as well as rents going up dramatically (ironically caused by increasing interest rates) and even if they got a great raise (and are in theory better off) you are not feeling it, hence the result. Gas prices too.
As ever it's a multivariate problem but the biggest part of it is being promised jam tomorrow and even worse being told things are going great when you see evidence they are not. She should have thrown Joe under a bus.
This isn't just a problem in the US the whole West is ungovernable and we will see most governments getting one term assuming that they don't turn into Victor Orban's Hungary.
The data was provided over the past 24 hours or so: the electorate believes they are worse off due to inflation, and that their wages haven't increased to offset it.
I know you're not advocating for it but it doesn't make sense to essentially vote in 2x billionaires into office.
I'm just disappointed we may never know what Russia has on Musk. He went from being an avid atheist Democrat to pretending to be a Christian and pushing for Republican like his life depended on it. What is he hiding? Why was he so afraid?
You might as well empty Arkham Asylum whilst all the pardons for crimes are being dished out.
I'd go with occams razor: in this case, it is just political opportunism. Musk saw a dumb, easily flattered guy who would give him a very powerful position in government, which Musk can wield to his own financial benefit. Musk has already tweeted that Lina Khan's days are numbered. That sounds like it is potentially worth millions to Elon.
> He went from being an avid atheist Democrat to pretending to be a Christian and pushing for Republican like his life depended on it.
> What is he hiding?
I'd go for a more obvious explanation. It's not uncommon for people to adopt more extreme and conservative POV as they get older. Social networks don't help.
> My theory: people are just hacked off that life is getting worse for most people while billionaires get richer and richer. Every disaster the wealthy get handouts while the poor have to pay for them. Government can no longer afford anything because all of its assets have been sold and rented back at a profit.
So they support the candidate with the billionares bankrolling him and and doing "million dollar sweepstakes". Give me a break.
the dems don't have billionaires bankrolling them? if two assholes compete, the asshole who's honest about being an asshole is going to be more popular than the asshole who pretends to be such a nice guy.
And yet the US economy is doing great, much better than most developed countries, and most of those countries are not going off the rails to quite the same extent.
Inflation is probably relevant, since even though it's down by a lot, the sticker shock so to speak lingers for a while.
The US economy is doing great for the people already with money. Everyday people who need to buy groceries and gas are getting pinched just as hard as ever.
I'm not sure if you're being rhetorical, but people in the United States generally do not understand this. Even among those who are pro-Democrat, the differences in tax and tariff policy are usually not the top three issues.
Plenty of people have good reasons to support tariffs. Free trade destroyed a lot of industries and adjanced communities and the free trade fans didn't give a damn about them.
Do…people really think that prices will go down when cheap foreign labor is off the table? Do they think we can establish replacement infrastructure at comparable costs in months or a couple of years? Will they want to work those jobs for comparable pay to keep the costs of goods stable?
Probably more like wages will go up when cheap foreign labor is off the table. Higher income offsets higher prices for industries where wages rise. For the currently well paid the purchasing power may drop.
Silicon Valley didn't care about the rust belt, so why should the rust belt care about SV?
The fallacy here is that US industries will even be able to compete with 200% tariffs.
They won't, and they can't, and they certainly can't do it immediately. It takes decades to build up the manufacturing efficiency and processes to compete with China. We lost all of it.
We will continue to buy from China because it will STILL be cheaper. And your goods will be 3x more expensive, and that's the best-case scenario for a lot of goods.
Many people in the US believe that the target country is the one who pays the tariffs, and don't understand that they pay for them, at the cash register.
Income inequality hasn't increased in the US since 2014, and sharply /decreased/ since 2019. The current administration did an amazing job at improving it!
(Note this is about wage inequality, which strictly speaking isn't income inequality. The best policy for income inequality would be bringing back the expanded CTC.)
But the median voter doesn't actually like this, because they have above-median income due to being older, and this means service workers got more expensive.
Do you hear yourself? In one breath you agree with me that income inequality is rising, and then say it’s bad for service workers to have higher wages.
No, I said 1. income inequality stopped increasing in 2014. 2. wage inequality is /falling/. 2. median voters (who are upper-middle-class) want it to go back up.
Income inequality is stalled because some benefits from 2020 expired, namely the expanded CTC, and we should really fix that.
"America first" includes economic policies that drive up commerce, even at the cost of our allies. German news is full of VW and other auto executives wanting to leave for production in the US. Trump's tariffs mean companies will just want to produce in the US and export outside it. And it's working.
The idea that you’re going to be producing iPhones or other mobile phones in the US (for example) is extremely unlikely in the next decade. It will be interesting to see the chaos he causes if he goes through with this and the plan to deport 20 million people.
I’m sure there will be masses of folks moving to rural areas to pick up those sweet, sweet agricultural jobs that pay $5/hr under the table, or do repetitive precision PCB assembly all day for $1.25/hr and 80hr 6-day work weeks.
While I'm also skeptical, production could be moved from the US and other Western countries into Asia thanks to the "correct" economical incentives. There is no reason it can be moved again. But we all know it will be moved to Africa and Southeast Asia, but still.
I thought Trump said putting tariffs on everything imported from China would lead to jobs coming back to the US? So Trump said it not me. It’s just an example of where this policy is unworkable is my point.
Tariffs are an unnecessary price increase. To use your example, there will be some modest net growth of manufacturing at the expense of higher prices for everyone, typically dominating any net growth in jobs.
There are no tariff price increases for cars/ other goods produced in the US. Companies will build a manufacturing plant in the US to access the market. They will in turn benefit from low regulation and less strict worker rights.
Correct. Tariffs increase the prices needed to purchase cars generally, not just those produced in the US. Perhaps that is what you're missing in your analysis. If the market rate for a car is P, which is below what America can produce the cars for, P_America, then the only way for domestic production to be competitive at an equivalent quality is for a tariff to balance P_America <= P+Tariff. So while folks prefer to purchase at price P, which a free and non-tariffed market would prefer and would give consumers a better price overall, we instead rely on a distortionary tariff and pay P_America, ultimately hurting consumers. In this Econ 201, this results in dead weight loss. Hacker News would benefit from image inserts here, so indirect you to wiki instead to understand the topic better. This is an inefficiency, meaning that tariffs in imported autos are driving a jobs program without real economic benefit to all (but a minor benefit to folks that are working in an industry doomed to fail after the tariff is removed by a more savvy political party who understands you can't infant-industry your way out of offshored industry).
We lack the critical infrastructure and skills to produce a lot of these things, so it won’t just magically restore jobs but it will increase taxes for the foreseeable future.
One of the original predictions that might be entertaining(?) to see would be the US having its first President "run" the country from prison... And the follow-up situation to witness, how different would that look, in the end?
For those who think rather than just react, I guess it would not be as entertaining...?
No chance he gets a prison sentence for the NY case. He will get a suspended sentence or some other slap on the wrist. The Federal cases are dead. There is no chance they can continue while he is in office and they will be killed by the time he leaves.
Trying to overturn the 2020 election turned out to be a great move because the Dem institutionalists were too sclerotic to prosecute the case aggressively and wasted massive amounts of time and resources on going after proles while letting the architects of the plot get off more or less scot-free.
There have been quite a few demos over the years where voting machines are hacked. Now, this does not mean that they were hacked, for real, in a real election.
It does mean that it is possible to do, and in ways that paper ballots are not.
Reading through the post is quite depressing. As a lifelong independent, I've never felt more vilified by the Democratic Party than at any other time. Constantly being talked down to, insulted as a white supremacist, nazi, etc. It's this "elitist" and "we know better than you" attitude that really, really puts a sour taste in my mouth.
Yet, reading through these comments, it seems alive and well even after an astounding rebuke. Why? I despise our two-party system, but I'm actually quite happy to see one particular party rebuked this time around for this abhorrent behavior that should have no place in civil discourse. It's sad that HN can't rise above it.
And for clarity, yes, both sides participate in this charade of incivilities, but I am simply expressing my own opinion as an independent in 2024 that it overwhelmingly came from one side towards _me_ in this election cycle.
I hear you (actually not from my perpective, just other people I know). It may sound really superficial but it sounds like a platonist vs aristotelian argument. The former being people who believe abstract theories are the greater good (conventional theory) vs real world experiences. The problem with the former is that if you're afforded to believe it if you're not in survival mode.
IMO in all actuality the best course of action is somewhere in the middle.
I'm genuinely curious - can you elaborate on "constantly being talking down to? insulted as a white supremacist, nazi?" Does this happen to you in personal conversations with family members or with friends who are left? Or are you referring to broader culture in general, like the Harris' campaign, because if so, can you elaborate on the time Harris or Biden "talked down" to you?
As a sidenote I realize Biden made that garbage comment which came across to me as a misconstrued sentence that is common with Biden's speech impediment. But even if not, Trump has said a lot of terrible things about left leaning people like myself. Is your standard as equivically disdainful of Trump's comments, and if not, why not?
I guess I just find it wild you're appealing to civil discourse when the winner of this election does very little civil discourse, by his own admission.
In terms of face-to-face conversations, I've never once had these insults thrown at me. This is somewhat expected, as in my experience, most people are far less confrontational in these situations. I would say a majority of it comes from:
- Group "watercooler" discussions at work where people parrot vilifying language that targets groups I identify with (I do work at a _very_ left-leaning workplace)
- Community events that I have participated in, where people were not necessarily attacking me personally, but were hurling insults at our group
- The media. This one is fairly self-documenting.
As I mentioned in another reply, since I fall in the middle, I often get negative rhetoric from both sides. But only one has stooped to the levels of vitriol that have often left me shocked (for example, that I should forcibly have my genitals removed so as to prevent procreation).
> And for clarity, yes, both sides participate in this charade of incivilities
Although I'm unaware of him asking for Hitler's generals so he could execute democrats, but I'm also not interested in participating in this back-and-forth exchange, as I dislike both administrations.
Assuming you're arguing in good faith, here is the transcript from someone who was in the room with Trump when he was saying all of this:
> He's looking for obedience. This is the thing that shocks him about American generals and continues to shock him, is that they swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. That's what he's looking for, personal loyalty. And we know that from many other discussions we have heard around him.
The thing is, I'm not trying to argue. What are you hoping to gain from this exchange? I've already said I despise our two-party system and dislike both campaigns and (in another comment) I've been relegated by both sides.
My original comment was simply a personal observation that, in this election season, I received far more abuse from one side over the other, and that I was sad to see this same disdain continue here in HN. You may have had a completely different experience, and that's perfectly OK, but I'm honestly confused at the goal with you questioning me about a comment Trump made.
i think this is the insidious thing about polarization:
people in the middle get caught in the crossfire of harsh rhetoric. and it is hard to blame people for this, an eye for an eye is so easy and tempting.
I've had right wingers criticize me with patronizing "anti-commie" rhetoric, but the worst has been shaming (yes actual shaming and exclusion) from my peers because i (mostly) agree with them in a contrarian way that they dont like or attempt to understand.
i don't really interact with many right wingers day to day, so this difference might just be a result of that bias.
I'm curious if this kind of thing happens to right wingers as well, or if there is less such "friendly-fire" on the right.
Yes, I have experienced the rhetoric from both sides. I have already doxxed myself as a Christian here, so I'll restate it again. I have a tremendous amount of disdain for Christian nationalists and, specifically, the Republican appropriation of Christianity for harvesting votes. This has alienated me from a large number of people just in my own faith.
It appears to be the plight of critical thinkers in this culture. You are not allowed to have a complex set of beliefs that may cross both sides of the culture war.
Not sure if its clear here to US participants, but the world views this outcome much like we did in 2016: it makes the US into an absolute laughing stock. I don't fully understand: he was voted out in 2020 due to the massive failures of his term and him personally, and now four years later when he has become even more deranged, they voted him back in? What the hell?
Positive outcomes I see is that much like with the US's unequivocal support of Israel, this devastates the US's reputation and foreign influence. Trump wants to abandon Europe and Ukraine, which might grant Europe the independence and the urgency to step up and support Ukraine itself, unfettered by dysfunctional politics back in the US. A third pole on the world power stage would improve things, the US isolated back home in its infighting and staying out of the rest of the worlds business. IF the EU steps up.
They elected a giant idiot who lives in his own, broken world. No one needs the media to tell them what to think, they can just listen to him for half a minute. Hes a joke, and he makes the US a joke that they put him in power. Again.
European here, I do not think that electing Trump makes the US a laughing stock; there were legitimate reasons to disagree with the Biden administration, and, given that Kamala was essentially a continuation of Biden's policies, there was no other real alternative.
> I don't fully understand: he was voted out in 2020 due to the massive failures of his term and him personally, and now four years later when he has become even more deranged, they voted him back in? What the hell?
When you don't understand something happening in real life then you might want to consider trying harder to figure it out, instead of feeling smug about it. Just doubling down on the things you believe should matter is not very productive.
Should mention I feel bad for the Gazans. The democrats had already abandoned them (Genocide Joe etc) but they're screwed now - just like the Kurds which Trump betrayed and left for ISIS and Turkey last time.
When he ran the first time, the tactic was "oh easy, we'll say we're not as egregious as that guy".
They even sabotaged Bernie to this effect (see Podesta emails), even though he was polling much better than Clinton. This failed miserably, probably in essence because the Democrats were underestimating the power of clicks to drive reality, which Trump understood, at least intuitively.
This was a historical moment where the Democrats could have reorganised things and refocused on their traditional base, namely, the working class. It seemed obvious they should, I personally really thought they would have to.
No no, it turned out. We were treated to years and years of full on circus shenanigans. They doubled down, blamed others - the Russians, Wikileaks, whoever really. Anything but blame themselves and admit that they were offering nothing which was substantively different enough from the Republicans, in the eyes of the voters.
And here we are again. Will they be able to gut the decrepit power structures keeping the zombie Democrat party afloat this time, injecting new life? Or will they find a new scapegoat, treating us to more utterly pointless pontificating through a series of never-ending media cycles.
In summary, it seems they think pandering to identity tropes will be enough to distinguish them in the eyes of the voters, but that is simply playing on Trump's territory where he decides the rules. He does it better than them. It's one of the quite few things you could say he's "good" at.
The Democrats need to figure out how to recapture the favor of young men. The Joe Rogans/Logan Pauls/Elon Musks/Tiktok/Podcast bros are doing serious damage to that demographic. Almost a +30 swing to the right in the 18-29 M category from 2020.
Seems really simple to me: don't discuss literally everything BUT the concerns of poor white folks? Trump is full of shit but at least he lies TO the majority population. The Dems either ignore, talk down to or dismiss the majority of their constituents. When you make literally every talking point about marginalized groups or the Ukraine or whatever you have no chance of convincing someone to switch to your side because you underline that their concerns are not a priority or even on your radar.
If you spend a quarter of your time discussing transgender athletes or unisex bathrooms 99% of people don't have a personal stake in that. In other words, the Dems aren't doing the fundamental job of politicking, which is to engage with their constituents on the topics that matter to them directly.
Since promoting a secure economic future is clearly not in the Democratic party game plan, maybe trick the Republicans into starting a war and then campaign on stopping it?
I am not sure what could hit at the self-interest of the 18-29M demographic other than the Selective Service.
That’s one poll and there are always outliers, but the averages were pretty accurate - roughly a tossup based on turnout, with error rates around the 2-3% we saw. As with 2016, those correlated in the same direction so the polling industry still hasn’t figured out how to weight Trump’s impact on turnout.
As a foreigner, it seems like both sides are super extremely marginalised. Both sides believe everything will be done and there will be a big change if the other side wins. Reality is really not that radical, people are being lit up by propoganda. Saying this as a Turkish person, this has been happening in our country almost since I was born and it destroyed politics, normalisation and being calm is much better than sensationalising everything. Imho biggest issues are related to economics, like housing, like dark money in elections. Meaningless topics are sensationalised to marginalise people and unfortunately it works every time. Politics shouldn’t be right vs left, it should be rich vs middle class vs poor, as economics is the single most impactful aspect on most people’s lives. But politicians want to rile everyone up and put them against each other.
In the US, it seems the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests were the last time it was really the people vs. the incumbents. Ever since then all there's been are carefully manufactured conflicts with two sides to choose from, which divide the common class and cause them to argue amongst each other.
Now now, OP never implied that Occupy Wall Street was effective. :-)
If anything, it points to the stark lack of class consciousness in America that even our biggest protests aren't generally able to create long lasting change.
Personally, I'm reminded of MLK's Poor People Campaign shortly before he got FBI'd. Him and the black panthers were both trying to agitate around this issue in different nonpartisan ways, and they faced extreme prejudice from the state for their trouble.
I agree. American has more wealth than ever but it's not distributed. All these issues that serve to distract people from the one thing that will make the biggest difference in their lives: personal economics.
Elites are really good at doing that. Go pay attention to China, Russia, gun control, birth control, diversity, BLM, transgender rights. Meanwhile, I will continue to disproportionately take more of America's wealth.
As another Turkish person, I find the resemblence between this election and the one we had a year ago rather uncanny.
- election between rightist strongman vs. boring guy whose most important selling point is not being the other guy. Also a somewhat controversial candidacy.
- Deep divide between coastal lines vs. the rest; educated and the rest.
- Polls not being confident on either candidate, but the strongman gets mire votes than expected.
Etc. etc. I find it rather strange. (I do enjoy the memes on the Turkish social media though)
>Politics shouldn’t be right vs left, it should be rich vs middle class vs poor, as economics is the single most impactful aspect on most people’s lives.
I agree but ironically this kind of rhetoric is actually how the American left (not the Democrats) were undermined and now Americans are overworked slaves working two or more jobs to live paycheck to paycheck.
"Right vs left" does matter and it was organized left-wing efforts that created the superior life-work balance and healthcare in Europe.
> it was organized left-wing efforts that created the superior life-work balance and healthcare in Europe
The US economy thanks you for getting out of the way, I guess. Americans aren't flying to Europe for healthcare - it's the other way around (if you can afford it). So it may be "superior" in the sense that you're just paying for it your entire life via taxes instead of at the time of service and through employer-subsidized insurance, but it's not "superior" in terms of care.
Politics shouldn't be anyone "vs" anyone else. It should be "how can we fix what's broken, how can we make what's good even better." Trump's message was largely "here's how I will fix the economy" and "here's how I will fix the border." Harris's message was "I'm not Trump" and "I won't change any policy of the Biden administration."
I meant "if, as a foreign national, you can afford to fly to the US for healthcare." Rich Europeans flying to the US for specialized healthcare happens a lot more than rich Americans flying to the EU for specialized healthcare and there's a reason for that.
So what, though? Is the US's advantage in specialized healthcare worth the income inequality and multiple-jobs-just-to-survive culture? I think it's not hard to make an argument that it isn't worth it.
So when I'm down on my luck I shouldn't be entitled to healthcare?
Living in the UK I'm more than happy to contribute my way in taxes, knowing I'm always looked after regardless of my employment state or wealth.
Additionally we can also pay for American style (private) healthcare, but aren't paying 10x markup on treatment as is the case for America (see Ozempic pricing for example).
American healthcare is one of the worst in the developed world, it shouldn't be celebrated.
Let me just take this opportunity to point out that Ozempic is the product of a European company. So you can tell me how American healthcare is absurdly expensive, and how it is much cheaper for you, all while you are the ones making it so damn expensive for us.
Along the same lines, lets hear more about Norway being the shining beacon on the hill, the hero come to save us from climate change, while behind the scenes they finance the entire country by exporting pollution to the rest of the world.
It's really difficult to stomach the hypocritical arrogance of some Europeans. Y'all seem so nice in person, I am hoping a lot of the online rhetoric is just Putin doing his thing.
Anecdote: my middle school P.E. teacher took her class down to Juárez Mexico for a "school" mission trip.
She left the group on the way back so she could stop elsewhere and get her teeth cleaned. She said it was a common sentiment for Americans to cross the border for dental work like that.
My dad is a P.T. and he recounts how after the ACA passed in 2008, his fellow therapists saw tons of people from poor communities going to the doctor for the first time in years. His practice was backed up for a while because there were so many new patients who suddenly had insurance.
Folks missing teeth, folks with broken bones who set improperly, folks who couldn't afford preventative care.
I didn't vote for Kamala. Also I'm sorry you feel bad when people point out your callousness. Think about how people must feel when they die for want of healthcare.
> Trump's message was largely "here's how I will fix the economy" and "here's how I will fix the border."
I read an opinion piece a week or so ago that sounded just like this. It was even more explicit about the point. Paraphrasing, she said 'I know he says really hateful things, but you guys don't get it, at the rallies everyone is giddy and happy, it's such a joyful place to be!'.
The point being that Trump is about joy. Not that his supporters were giddy about his promises of retribution. Totally honest perspective from someone deep in that bubble. I actually appreciate the honesty.
Dems listen to Trump talk about how much he wants to hurt them. They recall that he did exactly that the last time he was president. So of course the democratic candidate says she won't be like Trump. Her supporters don't want to be targeted by their own government again.
That's the thing the dems just don't get. Saying you'll be president for everyone isn't what sells. It's a high minded ideal, like civil rights. Sounds good, inspires a lot of breathless agreement, but most people don't actually care in their hearts, they just care about #1. Appealing to their basest instincts seems wrong, but it's how you win in politics. Stop trying to take the high road that doesn't exist except in your dreams.
We're definitely going to be seeing big changes. Trump and the conservatives are in charge. They are going to execute project 2025. They setup all the ground work during Trump's last term.
Ukraine will be lost. Russia will encroach on Europe. The Republicans will staff Judges everywhere and build a stronger conservative justice system.
The rich will dominate even further over the poor and the US will become an extension of the Kremlin.
Trump may also try to set the stage for more dictatorial control. The only good thing about this election is Trump is so old he probably won't try to create a dictatorship since he won't benefit from it.
But have no doubt the democrats will not be taking back control within the next generation or two.
i imagine the person that can climb the corporate ladder in an major organization to the level of board member with a lot of qualities, being a good person is not one of those
My greatest fear is for America. He undermined it's institutions last time and there's no telling how much he'll weaken it now. I suspect the DoJ will be first to get gutted and then education, health, science. NATO, WTO, UN. I'm sure he'll embed gerrymandering to ensure republican victories. At the end of this we'll have a radically different America, domestically and Globally.
The US was supposed to be destroyed by Trump 2016-2020. That didn't happen at all. The US is now stronger, more powerful, richer. The corporate tax cuts have worked out extraordinarily well, like Ireland on steroids.
Meanwhile the rest of the world has fallen behind the US. China is weaker and sliding (in part thanks to the expansive authoritarianism). Russia is a joke and has been for decades (now a regional power that struggles against Ukraine). Europe broadly is weaker and no longer competitive at almost anything.
US GDP per capita is essentially now double that of Britain or France.
Weakened institutions don't necessarily mean a weakened economy. You can have a strong economy and a high GDP without an independent judiciary or constitutional rights for example. (I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with either of you, but pointing out a communications mismatch between your comment and the GP that you replied to; I think you're talking about different things).
This is the only thing that has me clinging to hope, is that last time it didn't turn out terribly. I have a sense of foreboding about what the supreme court will look like at the end of his term, and the consequences we'll have to live with for decades as a result. And a potential WW3, which seems more plausible on a daily basis. A large scale conflict feels almost unavoidable; I would prefer a cool, calm, collected individual at the helm when it hits.
I share your sense of foreboding. See my other comment about how I'm feeling about last time vs. this time, but I have one other hope: In the US, the states still retain a lot of power. There are still a lot of states that will continue to be governed sensibly regardless of what's happening at the Federal level. I think that state-level leaders tend to be more pragmatic and grounded, less likely to take things off-the-rails on impulse or to score political points, perhaps because they're closer to "the people" and have to live more with the practical results.
There is enough protections built into the system, and enough maturity of the system (the "deep state"), that outside of something like war on our shores, no single president can destroy it in one term. But each time its degraded it becomes more susceptible. We just (popularly) elected an election denier. That means future presidents can run this play and get away with it. The most likely scenario now IMO is we get a more cunning strongman who successfully overturns the democratic outcome when not in their favor. We don't have to speculate, as we've see this play out in several other countries. Of course this line of thinking was never a viable political strategy for running against Trump, because its far too abstract for the average voter.
The reality is we are still benefiting from the leadership of some of our more visionary founders and leaders since; but without being reenforced in some way it won't hold up forever. Most people in the US are still under the guise of America being special, and hand waving those scenarios away thinking the worst can't happen here. Which makes it much easier to then vote for Trump, especially if you don't think the climate crisis is real or prescient.
> There is enough protections built into the system
I'm not even convinced of this. The problem is that that many of these protections aren't really legal (at least they aren't all legal), they're conventions and norms. They require the people in power to believe in them, and believe that they're good and useful, or they can be swept aside. The rule of law is a polite fiction that requires people to adhere to it.
Take Elon Musk, for example, who will now likely be involved in government to an alarming degree. By all accounts, he got his start in the US by working here illegally. No problem; rules for thee and not for me. His publicly-admitted drug use should disqualify SpaceX from government contracts. No problem; what are they going to do, cancel them? Musk was unhappy a Delaware judge struck down his Tesla pay package. No problem; reincorporate in Texas and find a different legal framework and judges who like him.
Musk is constantly flaunting norms and getting away with it, and he'll continue to push and ignore these boundaries with whatever government position Trump gives him. Trump does the same, but with a lot more power, and he and his cronies are actually prepared and organized this time, something that wasn't the case in 2016. He has a SCOTUS stacked in his favor, that has already given him broad immunity against illegal acts while in office. He has the Senate, again, and may have the House as well. This time the Senate will temporarily or permanently change the filibuster rules if they're having trouble hitting the 60-vote threshold on things to which it still applies.
He didn’t have immunity from the Supreme Court, and majority of the Senate and the House back then. Some Republicans working with him still had integrity to prevent atrocities, but they are not there anymore.
The last time he was surrounded by chiefs of staff, generals, legal counsel, agency directors, etc. who would say "that's crazy, you can't do that" against his worst impulses. Now, all those people are gone and people like them will not be welcome. Now, he has a conservative judiciary (thanks to his last-minute appointees) who recently ruled that he will not bound by the law. Now, his inner circle has a plan to rapidly cleanse all non-partisan Federal government positions of anyone who might tell the Trump administration why something he wants can't be done.
There is no reason to expect things to go like they did the last time around.
Well said. Speaking as a registered Republican dating back to the early 2000s, I thought Trump was a clown when he first announced his intention to run in 2015 (you could call me a "Never Trumper"). I was shocked like everybody else when he won, but I took comfort in the fact that he was still mostly surrounded by old establishment Republicans who I figured would keep things on-the-rails or just impeach him within the first six months. I mean, he had some wackos like Bannon and Flynn and his family members, but he also had old establishment Republicans (in his cabinet and congress) and other non-politicians that I (as a career Army officer) really respected like Kelly, Mattis, Esper, McMaster, and Milley. My expectations were sort of met.
But now what? The Republican establishment has been re-made in his image. The people I respect have all gone public against him in the strongest possible ways. Who will serve under him? I really don't know what to expect this time around.
I'd argue that the war in Ukraine was caused by the State Department being weakend and not being able to effectively deal with Russian plans to invade. Yes the US economy has been phenomenally succesful over the last 8 years and thats in no small part due to Trumps deregulation of the oil industry which has become the largest in the world. But in the mean time China is dominating renewables which is the future. People also voted for Trump because they're feeling economically insecure, the distribution of wealth is skewed to the rich. the US middle classes have not been a beneficiary of this economic bonanza at all. Which explains why they voted Trump. So either wages have to rise significantly for them, which means corporates endure lower margins or prices fall because of a massive supply side boom, which can be met domestically because it would be inflationary, and cant be met by imports because he's promised to impose 20% tariffs on everyone. Is a circle that cant be squared.
> That didn't happen at all. The US is now stronger, more powerful, richer.
The proper comparison to make here isn't between America before and America after Trump. It's to America after Trump and a hypothetical America after Clinton.
It may be that we're better off after Trump (though "we" is doing a lot of work in that sentence). But the relevant question to voters is whether we would have been even better off if the other candidate had one.
Even without Trump, there are lots of people in the US who have been relatively dissatisfied with the general trend of the US the last 60-ish years. Small-c conservatives have been just as horrified by the available options as small-l liberals have been.
I doubt even the most radical president could do much to reverse or slow that trend. The strong central government permanent war surveillance state seems so much bigger and more powerful than even the highest office. It’s not like breaking up or not breaking up Google is gonna change the fact that feds can read everyone’s gmail without a warrant.
I personally believe that the office of the president’s effect on long term policy or institutions is generally massively overstated. Their main lever seems to be supreme court appointments and Trump has already pulled that one in his first term (to predictably destructive results). I am unsure whether that is because presidents generally “color inside of the lines” and haven’t attempted sweeping and radical reform, or because the institutions ultimately have more inertia than the temporary machinations of the executive office.
I guess we’ll see if the institutional destruction he seems to seek a) is even possible or b) may result in unexpectedly good outcomes. Then again, most of the stuff he says he seems to speak just for the momentary sake of speaking it; only a small fraction relates to things he plans (or is effectively compelled) to do. I lost count of all of the promises he made, good and bad, that not only weren’t kept, but weren’t even ever mentioned again.
I remain skeptical that his fervent drive during the campaign will translate into fervent reformation action, now that he has obtained what he wants. Despite the constant media hand-wringing, his first term wasn’t as apocalyptic as everyone made it out to be, despite his two main legacies both being perhaps the most destructive things he could have wrought: the supreme court appointments and the insanely massive mismanagement of a deadly pandemic.
His more hardworking and ideologically-motivated support staff have had a lot more time
to plan on his behalf this time around, however. Perhaps his weaponized ignorance will be deliberately wielded this time around and his second term will turn out to be massively more destructive than his first, but that is a very high bar to clear given the outsized effect that mismanaging the pandemic response caused. Not many presidents can have that much preventable death in their legacy, even if they explicitly try.
> Their main lever seems to be supreme court appointments
The President has far more power than that.
- Veto Power: Blocks congressional bills; overrides require a two-thirds majority, which is rare.
- Executive Orders: Directives to federal agencies that bypass Congress (limited by courts and future presidents).
- Foreign Policy Leadership: Sole power to negotiate treaties (requiring Senate ratification) and recognize foreign governments.
- Pardon Power: Can pardon federal offenses, unchecked by other branches.
- Appointment Authority: Nominates not only Supreme Court justices, but federal judges, and cabinet members, shaping long-term policy and judicial interpretation.
What goes along with that is ability to get people elected (or not) by backing them, both actually and monetarily. Trump killing the immigration bill during Biden's term is a good example, and he wasn't even President (yet) at the time. I expect he'll focus on more palatable legislation during the first two years, to keep the senate majority through 2028, but we'll see.
He only realistically has two years to get any legislation through, the last two years he won't have the house with him so either he is on the defensive or just doing appointments (he will start the term with negative approval rating, and probably will never get above that, so the house definitely flips in 2026 like it did in 2018).
The question is how much damage can he do in two years? If he goes full loco and starts a global trade war with everyone via high tariffs, while at the same time juicing interest rates via a politicized fed, we will be in a depression within a year or two. If he uses his political capital more wisely, we might avoid that economic hit but have longer term damage to worry about. Thankfully, Trump is pretty impulsive, and he doesn't have a long list of good advisors to choose from (not that he would listen to them anyways), so I'm really just worried about the first scenario.
If you had actually done this you would’ve realized that Trump has “concepts of a plan” for childcare and healthcare. Despite promising us his plans for 8 years now.
“It’s the economy, stupid” has never been truer. People will trade their rights for more basic needs being fulfilled and most people simply aren’t happy with the one sided economy that has prevailed since the late 80s. Interest rates were too low for too long beginning circa 2000, and the massive flood of QE led to an explosion in house prices, car prices, and food. This is what the world gets for poor monetary and fiscal management for more than two decades.
> the massive flood of QE led to an explosion in house prices, car prices, and food.
That's not really the case though.
We had a similar QE in '08 with pretty much no effect on CPI [1] or Housing [2]. As well as the increase in pricing has occurred _when the money printing stopped_ and not _while the money was printing_ [3].
The current inflation isn't caused by money printing. It's caused by pricing power by conglomerates. We've allowed energy companies to join together and they've agreed with OPEC to cut production to lead to price increases. We've allowed rental companies to join together and raise prices. We've allowed meat companies to join together and raise prices. The lack of anti-trust enforcement along with a trigger (Covid) is what caused inflations, companies realized they had a talking point (supply chain problems) that they could pin price increase on regardless of if it was true.
> The current inflation isn't caused by money printing.
I'm not sure that is fair. Nothing is ever caused by just one thing, of course, but it is unlikely that money printed and given to average Joes was not a significant contributor. COVID relief saw money flow into the hands of regular people, which was quite unlike 2008.
2008 was different as it only went into the hands of the rich. You can print money endlessly and give it all to Jeff Bezos and inflation will never occur. It's just another number in his bank account, so to speak. But if you give it to poor people on the street, soon they are going to start buying things with it, increasing competition for goods and services and thus driving up prices.
Although I would say the biggest factor was the devastating crop failure in 2020 with a dash of COVID problems on top, followed by the EU shutting down their fertilizer plants in 2021, and then Russia invading Ukraine in 2022 which both complicated access to Ukraine food production as well as denying trade with Russian fertilizer. This left food stocks in a precarious situation and thus sent the price of food to the moon. Everyone else followed as best they could to ensure they could continue to eat. Now that we're getting our food house back in order, the inflation panic has started to subside in kind.
Saying that the current drive of inflation is a monetary expansion must demonstrate that there's a significant component of the inflation to be attributable to monetary expansion. M0 has been stable, M1+M2 components as whole have also followed a stable route.
When you consider the slow reaction of the economy, the money supply and inflation do track fairly well. It is not like if the money supply goes up today that inflation will also go up today. If the money supply goes up today, you wouldn't expect to see to see an inflation reaction for quite some time.
Hell, look at how long it took grocery stores to react to the aforementioned food crisis. Us on the farm saw the price of food we were selling double (or even more) from the price norm early in the crisis, but it took another year or so before the consumers of that food started complaining about how much grocery stores were charging. Things happen very slowly.
Indeed, the money supply has been stable for a while, only veering of track for a short time, but inflation is also now stabilizing and only veered off track for a short time.
> Us on the farm saw the price of food we were selling double (or even more) from the price norm early in the crisis
Because conglomerates (ex. Tyson Foods) were upping their prices as shown by gross margins of 10% increasing to 15% [1].
> but it took another year or so before the consumers of that food started complaining about how much grocery stores were charging. Things happen very slowly.
Uh. More like immediately people complained; just throw a max date on a web search [2] and you'll find them readily.
I can't speak to your own personal anecdotes. But the price of eggs has been talked about ad nauseam since start of covid.
Did they? You seem to only be able to go back to 2021, whereas I was seeing substantial gains in the price of food I was selling on the farm as early as 2019, thanks to another devastating (albeit less so) crop failure.
It is not like the price was $x one day and then $x*2 the next. It ramped up over time. Just like the price of groceries did, albeit on a later timeline.
Exactly. The Harris team made a key mistake by responding with, ‘No, you’re wrong. The economy is doing great—just look at the stats.’ They needed a concrete plan to address people’s concerns directly, but that was missing.
Personally, my issue with the Democrats is how they mishandled the electric vehicle charging network initiative. [0]
Regardless of the causes, Harris should have acknowledged that things have been bad for a lot of people, and presented a plan for how to make it better.
Instead, she insisted the economy was doing great, and the millions of people whose wages have not risen enough to offset inflation just didn't know what they were talking about.
The economy has been doing great for some people, but not for the voters who ended up mattering to the election outcome.
> People will trade their rights for more basic needs being fulfilled
Seems like people got the best of both worlds - they will be able to keep more rights than they otherwise would have and they will enjoy a better economy. Win-win!
Can you elaborate on how there will be more rights under the GOP, which just spent significant energy reducing women’s rights to bodily autonomy, and Trump threatening the free speech of media companies he doesn’t like?
Reddit is finding out that if you block everyone not inside your echo chamber, but are still in the smaller echo chamber, every election will shock you
It unfortunately sits on the shoulders of progressives seeking change to convince the conservatives not seeking it to do so. By choosing not to do this asymmetric work, this is the consequence
I'm not a Reddit user (or any social media user unless you count this) but one of my big takeaways from this election is how out-of-touch I am, apparently, with the majority of Americans; I've been shocked for months (years?) that Trump was even still a contender.
I guess I've just been living in heavily blue places, and working alongside highly educated people, since 2016. I thought that everybody could see Trump and Trumpism for what they really are, but I guess not, and I'm left wondering: "Who are these 70M+ people?"
You can be quite highly educated and still sit inside an ideological bubble and have no clue that anything is wrong... until it is.
"Heavily blue" is definitely an ideological bubble, because, as it turns out, and this may shock you (!!!), no political party has a monopoly on truths. There are bad things about Kamala and good things about Trump that you would literally never encounter if you only read "blue media". If you only read blue media, you will also consume a lot of BS (good things that are untrue about Kamala and bad things that are untrue about Trump). Same is true about red media, except with the poles reversed.
And echo chambers just reinforce all this BS.
Intelligent people question the sacred cows, and the most intelligent question the most sacred cows. James Damore was intelligent, wrote an intelligent paper, and instead of engaging with him and his ideas, he got eviscerated. And that was at Google, a supposedly "highly educated" place.
If you just can't say certain things, you are in an oppressive society, or sub-society, end of story.
I got eviscerated on Facebook 2 days ago merely for saying "so I investigated this claim that Trump is fascist, found the attributes of fascism, tried to rate him along those attributes, and he got a C (where F is Fascist)" (for comparison, Kamala got a B somehow, Putin an F, H__ler an F of course). Were there actual counterarguments to it? Nope. Someone asked for evidence, and I cited 3 links with a total of 20+ experts in them who on average said "no, not fascist enough to be labeled it". Then they attacked me for using ChatGPT to help put it all together (genetic fallacy). They kept attacking me and not my analysis. One was a fairly smart individual, but in this case he did not use it.
Since they were mainly attacking ChatGPT at that point, I asked ChatGPT to eviscerate every one of their arguments, defending us both and speaking as itself, which it did, with aplomb, and was amazing.
I didn't necessarily intend to say that it was. I'm just saying that support for Trump has been inversely correlated with education level, so I ended up in a bubble by virtue of working alongside people with advanced degrees (even more so than just living in a blue area). When ~90% of people in one's real life, day-to-day social circle are not Trump supporters it starts to feel like everybody must be of the same opinion, and it's shocking to find out otherwise.
I agree with you about the importance of engaging in independent, critical thought and allowing real discussion.
- Will I still have a job in 6 months? If I lose my job, can I get by?
- Can I continue to afford groceries, rent, utilities at the current pace of inflation?
- If I have a major health problem, will I be ok?
During an election, you can either harness the fear voters have around these issues and turn them into hateful energy against the other side (Trump tactic) or you can calm people's nerves by acknowledging the problems and providing a path to deal with them (Obama tactic). Obama was able to confidently appeal to voters on these issues and he brought them to the fore-front throughout his campaign. Obama was charismatic as well, so when he talked about these issues, you got the sense that he could competently provide that protection. He was reassuring.
I voted for Kamala, but I didn't want to. She possessed none of those positive qualities. She didn't instill confidence. Her voice and demeanor made her sound annoyed. Her fake smile made me cringe. I wanted an authentic candidate that could make me feel safe. She was not it.
Lastly, those primary issues were shrouded by gender politics. I would like transgender people to feel safe and have access to resources they need. I would like women to have access to abortion when it's necessary. These are not things to run a campaign off of though. EVERYONE feels the pain of a bad economy; that should've been the primary focus all along and we needed a STRONG candidate to really drive a strategy for addressing it. I just don't think Kamala was able to make any headway in that respect and I think that's why she ultimately lost.
Donald Trump had 74 million votes in 2020. As of right now, he's nearly at 72 million. To me that says he hasn't necessarily gained new followers. That's a good sign. It seems the Dems have lost millions however. That's a very bad sign. It's pretty clear then that Kamala did not represent what voters really cared about during this election cycle.
The more interesting thing to consider is that Trump has said Elon will have an active role in his administration. How is he going to do that on top of everything else? How are Tesla investors going to feel about this?
I think for most of his business he already have other peiple he trust in charge of them. Its impossible to manage so many companies and he seens to spend more effort in Space X than Tesla, starking, etc...
The CEO of a company being one of most powerful people in government is excellent for Tesla investors. Much less so for the general population, as the conflict of interests is obvious.
Especially outside US - if next government will ignore world or start doing some serious harm (ie by being too friendly with putin), tesla drivers will be frowned upon universally and very few new sales can be expected, more like a lot of vandalism on cars.
I guess China is a gone market for tesla at this point.
This. Do people honestly think that Mike Johnson, who was planning to attempt to not certify the election and have the House try to overturn the result if Harris won, will really cede control EVER? Who’s going to force them now that they’ve captured the judiciary, Congress, and the White House? He’ll pardon himself on day one and never face his classified documents / espionage / treason charges, and die in office, however long they can prop him up for. I’m not even joking when I say that I doubt we’ll have federal elections in the future, as he’s said as much already.
The template these autocratic personalities follow is not to abolish elections, but to make them pointless exercises full of blatant corruption, coercion (violent or otherwise), and manipulation.
It's counterproductive to make claims like what you're claiming, because their supporters and people on the fence will turn around and point out how you're wrong in 4 years, or whatever.
There's still elections in Russia, Turkey, etc. And those leaders are very popular.
But they're not democracies. Opposition is not really permitted. Where legal repression isn't in place, mob violence and the like is employed.
That's the template you can expect to see followed.
He's quite old and no other Republican figure comes close to his popularity or cult-like following (assuming Americans aren't crazy enough to actually support RFK Jr). I'd imagine he'll do one term and then the next Republican candidate will be a more conventional politician.
I think he chose Vance for a reason. I think he wnats him to be his sucessor. I dont know much about Vance, but I saw his interview in the Joe Rogan, and he went very well there. Seens to have a good head above the shoulds and can be this more conventional politician you are talking about
I dont know, 4 years are hard to predict. I can see the current crisis in the world deepening and people search for a more traditional politician for that reason, like somoone more predictable in times of uncertain?
Not that I think the next 4 years of Trump will be bad for the avarage american. I think I will be troubled for the whole world because things are already walking in this direction.
Thiel paid for Vance’s successful Senate campaign. Now his made man is next in line for the presidency (behind an overweight 78-year-old with memory issues). An amazing ROI for his money.
Both Thiel and Vance have expressed their admiration for Curtis Yarvin, an extreme reactionary who advocates for a monarchy. Thiel has publicly said that democracy was a mistake and it all went wrong when women got the vote.
Musk’s Tesla job title is “Techno-King” which is also a Yarvin reference. These people have a plan, and old Donald is a tool for them.
If readers of this thread aren't familiar with the Thiel connection, you need to hear the journalist Whitney Webb's work. She's brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMYdu-vTuPI - "The REAL Reason Behind J.D. Vance’s VP Pick; Marty sits down with Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin to discuss the partnership of the private tech sector with the surveillance state."
It's a two hour interview. Discussion of JD Vance and Palantir connection is at 12:30ish. A lot of "tin-foil hat" things seem pretty real.
> A lot of "tin-foil hat" things seem pretty real.
Yes it's tragically ironic that the people who believe most in outlandish conspiracy theories vote for the people who are openly involved in the most outlandish conspiracies, none of which said conspiracy theorists care about.
Yes - you may have noticed that the current president didn’t seek re-election for those reasons. His successor is just as old and not significantly better equipped mentally (judging by the way he talks and conducts himself).
Vance may become president much sooner than 2029, and Thiel and Musk will be the greatest beneficiaries.
The current president was ousterd by the part because it was becoming hard to pretend he even have a clue of where the hell he is. Last election he talked all type of absurd shit during campaing, and democrats didnt even bat an eye. Actually he was the perfect puppet for them. Do you really think it was not Kamala and the resto fo the people in charge of the democrat party thhat really rulled in place of Biden?
> Last election he talked all type of absurd shit during campaing, and democrats didnt even bat an eye.
Both of them had issues. And both of them got much worse since.
Eyes were batted, but there's no reason to change your vote because of a problem that both choices have.
And then it became an problem that only one choice had, but it feels like almost all the Trump supporters that were being loud about age issues were disingenuous...
Demos rulled 4 years with total support o the sillicon valley and you did not get nervous? Facebook and google have way more reach than Thiel and gave full access to govermnet to their tech and data.
I think its a crazy assumption to assume that over 200 years of political precident (4 year presidential terms) will be overturned by someone who got less votes than biden.
Every 4 years the same stuff happens, and yet every 4 years there is a so called "paradigm shift" or "rubicon crossed", when actually, nothing has really changed. It's getting really cringe and predictable.
US is the old democracy in the world. I live in brazil and there a bunch of reporters histeric people here assuming US will be a dictatorshio soon. Bitch, we where a dictatorship like 35 years ago, Time to worry about our own problems here.
Switzerland is, by some definitions, an older democracy than the US, if we neglect the short period of time when Napoleon conquered it (as we would similarly neglect the US Civil War). The Haudenosaunee have also been, in important senses, democratically governed for centuries longer than the US has existed, though possibly not as long as Switzerland. And presumably many small tribal peoples have remained democratic for millennia, though it's hard to tell in the absence of written records.
It does seem very likely that the Republican Party will govern the US for decades to come, like Perón's party has governed Argentina in between the military dictatorships, or Chávez's party governs Venezuela.
> It does seem very likely that the Republican Party will govern the US for decades to come
Either you're a troll, governed by recency bias (i.e. today), or not very competent in US politics. If the Democrats could get their act together even just slightly, they should have won 2016 and this election as well. How? It's simple demographics:
More and more people move to cities -> cities are typically blue -> easy for dems to get elected.
There should be absolutely no reason democrats lose so often and yet due to their incompetent antics they lose far more than they should.
Oh, I was talking about some other dynamics that are coming into play (the Supreme Court, perhaps mass deportations that 'accidentally' include some US citizens, discrimination against immigrants, changes to the Civil Service, etc.) I admire your simple faith but do not share it. I saw a lot of Venezuelans who did on the Venezuelan election day.
yeah man, us is not Brazil. This shit dont fly there. You americans are to worried when your institutions are way more solid than the resto of other democracies around the world. If he wanted to performe a coup, he had 4 years for that already,
Just stop being stuborn, start thinking about solving us real problems, and not demonizing the other party, and maybe the democrats will have a chance in the next election.
He literally didn't, it was a minority of his supporters who he specifically told to be peaceful and respectful. I'm so sick of seeing this lie shat out by everyone who's been manipulated by dem propaganda.
I don't support Trump. I can't vote in any country. I have no horses in this race, but seeing the lies and propaganda (from both sides) actually working is insane - the propaganda isn't even that good guys.
He claimed that the election was stolen and provoked the event, he knew his supporter base.
I also don't have a horse in the race, I'm not american and this is me exposing some of the lies around his presidency. He did it once and he will do it again. I don't see why I should belive that he somehow changed.
The media coverage around this guy is so insane that he can do whatever he wants and you'll still have people who will deny it.
It's getting sort of ridiculous how much each party is stuck in an electoral strategy where they have to pretend to be on one side of an issue which is objectively against the interests of the people they pretend to be representing.
Dems have to appear to be pro-immigration for reasons (honestly I don't know why this is like this, historically). They are genuinely less xenophobic than the Reps, so they respect the rights of recent immigrants much better. But when it comes to preventing more poor workers coming in, they are just as tough as the Reps. And I believe that's because ultimately they are slightly less captured by capital and therefore more amenable to balance the economy in favor of workers.
Reps on the other hand have to appear xenophobic once again for reasons that aren't super clear to me, but when it comes to actually preventing immigration, they always manage to torpedo their own proposals. And arguably that's because if they passed effective anti-immigration laws, that would negatively affect the interests of capital, the very obvious reason they're in politics for (and Trump is certainly no different).
Maybe now we can resolve this apparent paradox and simply accept that the Democrats are first and foremost the party of the educated, metropolitan and utterly disinterested in matters of material conditions. Whereas the Republicans are the party of people who are bitter towards the first group. Which leads to the conclusion that exceptionally few people in the US are voting according to their own economic interests.
From an outsider's view (and many of my friends hold the same view), the two parties are not that different. They are different in some minor issues that grab eyeballs so that to create drama, but for the big ones (foreign policy, economics), they are not that different. I mean look at those bi-partisan issues, they are all big ones.
I think this is sort of the result of looking at any country’s politics as an outsider. For Americans, most of us are in between the parties and so they point in different directions for us. Also, because the specific policies impact our lives, we are more interested in the details (where the parties actually do look pretty different) than some aggregation or big picture view.
In terms of some big issues being bi-partisan… I mean, it would be sort of weird if the broad strokes weren’t somewhat bipartisan, right? Like if we actually switched between having a capitalist and a communist economy every four years… that would not be a feasible way to run a country, haha.
But I mean we’re going to see some pretty big differences: support for our allies in NATO will look different (I don’t think we’re pulling out or anything but the relationships will change). The parties seem to have different visions of how we should try to get semiconductor manufacturing back over here (an industry that basically… determines what a lot the overall economy will look like). Abortion access will probably be determined by states (which will be a life-altering change of circumstance for some folks).
One of my "friends" bragged to me this year about how he threatened to replace one of his underperforming programmers with someone from Pakistan for $10 an hour.
Say you're on the receiving end of this threat. Do you really care what country your replacement is from? Is my "friend" really all that benevolent to fire someone for less money?
> Reps on the other hand have to appear xenophobic once again for reasons that aren't super clear to me,
It's not complicated. It's the Christian Nationalist agenda for the last 50 years. They don't want white people to be the minority and most immigrants don't fit that profile.
> but when it comes to actually preventing immigration, they always manage to torpedo their own proposals.
Because they have to win elections. They do this by declaring something bad, doing nothing about it, then blaming democrats so they can get re-elected.
Look at Florida. They've been republican for over two decades, they have a super majority and they don't solve any of the problems they run against the democrats on.
This is in no way a shot at the Latino population. But they are unfortunately a group that are stuck in a hard place.
On one side, they have a very religious population. Some of their core values align with republican values - i.e., freedom of religion, pro-life, and what have you.
But they're also voting for the very same people that vows to deport them.
And before anyone tries to argue "But they only want the illegal ones deported!" - we all know damn well that the most vocal part of the republican party couldn't care less if thousands of legal immigrants are deported by "accident".
In the end, people vote against their own interest, and rationalize it with "But it wouldn't happen to me!" (or anyone they know or love).
Same goes for the "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" crowd, and what have you.
> the Democrats are first and foremost the party of the educated, metropolitan and utterly disinterested in matters of material conditions.
This is absolutely true. Though most people on the Left are terrified to face this fact.
> Whereas the Republicans are the party of people who are bitter towards the first group.
This was true in 2016, probably 2020. But definitely not this election. Just to use myself as an example: I'm an Obama ('12), Clinton ('16), Biden ('20), Trump voter ('24).
I'm not motivated by animosity against Democrats because I was voting for them. Trump's message now is way more positive. It's a message of peace with Russia, making America healthy again, getting competent people in government (Musk), etc.
And that's actually also what a lot of the most influential Trump supporters (Musk, Rogan, RFK, Dana White, Nelk boys, Theo Von, etc) have been espousing too, pretty much all of whom used to be Democrats.
I feel like I've been listening to a very different Trump than you have. Most of what he says involves demonizing various groups of people, becoming a dictator, or putting his political opponents in jail. (And no, I haven't just been listening to sound bites or the most inflammatory short clips.)
> It's a message of peace with Russia
At the expense of Ukraine's sovereignty, appeasing a dictator and emboldening him to take other territory in Eastern Europe. (I bet China is happy with this, too.)
Is peace with Russia going to look like what happened with Afghanistan? The withdrawal plan and timeline was Trump's, not Biden's.
> making America healthy again
Every concrete proposal of his (not that he has many) that I've heard will bring us back on the inflation train, and increase the deficit. And on top of that he'll even further paralyze the federal government. Which is of course the conservative agenda in a nutshell: dismantle the federal government and let the states decide their fates, except where they want to impose their "values" on blue states.
> getting competent people in government (Musk), etc.
I see Musk as a deranged man who has succeeded through luck, timing, and rhetoric, rather than skill or talent. He can't even focus properly on the important things anymore (Tesla, SpaceX), and would prefer to spend his time making sure no one says mean things about him on Twitter. If he were a family member I'd be worried about his mental health. I don't say that to be flippant or cruel; I'm dead serious.
I feel like I've been listening to a very different Trump than you have. Most of what he says involves demonizing various groups of people, cozying up to dictators, or putting his political opponents in jail. His rallies are about stoking outrage and fear.
> It's a message of peace with Russia
At the expense of Ukraine's sovereignty.
Is peace with Russia going to look like what happened with Afghanistan? The withdrawal plan and timeline was Trump's, not Biden's.
> making America healthy again
Every concrete proposal of his (not that he has many) that I've heard will bring us back on the inflation train, increase the deficit, reverse our declining reliance on fossil fuels, and increase income inequality even further. And on top of that he'll even further paralyze the federal government. Which is of course the conservative agenda in a nutshell: dismantle the federal government and let the states decide their fates, except where they want to impose their "values" on blue states.
> getting competent people in government (Musk), etc.
If you think Musk is competent and should be anywhere near government, our fundamentals are so different that there's probably no point in discussing it further.
> I feel like I've been listening to a very different Trump than you have. Most of what he says involves demonizing various groups of people, cozying up to dictators, or putting his political opponents in jail. His rallies are about stoking outrage and fear.
It sounds more like you've been listening to what the news tells you Trump is.
"cozying up to dictators" is exactly the language used by MSNBC, CNN, CBS, et al. Putting his political opponents in jail is what his opposition tried.
The withdrawal plan is different from the execution, especially when only the high-level is followed. That is on Biden.
> Every concrete proposal of his (not that he has many) that I've heard will bring us back on the inflation train, increase the deficit, reverse our declining reliance on fossil fuels, and increase income inequality even further. And on top of that he'll even further paralyze the federal government. Which is of course the conservative agenda in a nutshell: dismantle the federal government and let the states decide their fates, except where they want to impose their "values" on blue states.
Again, this just sounds like what certain media tells you. I have never heard Trump say his goal is to "paralyze the federal government".
> It sounds more like you've been listening to what the news tells you Trump is.
I've been listening to the literal words that Trump says, by watching videos of his rallies.
Regardless, I'm not really interested in engaging with someone who's going to argue that "I'm listening wrong" instead of presenting a coherent argument.
Lot of comments about the economy and inflation but I don’t think that explains all of it. Trump grew votes in demographics across the board including traditional Democrat strongholds. Something else was working for him that didn’t work for Harris.
To the people that are very upset about this, I'd like to offer some silver linings.
A blowout in either direction was necessary here. A clear result is better for everyone.
The press can go back to being adversarial to power (Although straight faced bullshit like the Cheney firing squad thing will probably only be more common, so thats a double edged sword).
The dems will likely stop anointing people.
We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.
The first woman president will likely be a much stronger candidate. Kamala could have potentially really ruined it for women going forward.
1. The margin of victory does not matter—If Trump won, the Democratic establishment would have largely accepted the results and if Harris won, the GOP would have fully rejected the results. Everyone knew this was true. There is a fundamental asymmetry in respect for democracy between the parties.
2. Harris actually did just ruin it for women going forward. The Democratic party has now put forward two women against Trump that arguably both failed in spectacular fashion. It's not really clear to me why they did this, but they did it, and I don't know why we'd see a woman secure a major party's nomination for president in the next couple decades as a result.
1. Maybe. I am happy to not be testing this hypothesis.
2. I think the problem is inserting women that the voters aren't asking for. They could try asking who to run instead of telling people who to vote for, and they just might get a woman into the office.
There are women out there that have their own real following that could probably get there with the machine behind them, but the machine doesn't want any of them.
Depending on how things go, Tulsi could be the next best chance, if people stop making up shit about her being a Russian asset. But shes on the red team, so the dems will tear her down if she tries.
Regarding (2), I agree, but I don't think the electorate is in for such nuance. Two women failed to win the presidency, and that simple fact is all that matters. I agree with the other commenter that we won't see the dems put another woman up for president for decades, and that's a damn shame.
We might even see the GOP successfully get a woman into the White House before the dems do it, which is just embarrassing.
Amy Klobuchar is probably the Democrats best example—she just once again significantly outperformed the other national Democratic candidate (Harris) in Minnesota. Personally I wouldn't trust Tulsi Gabbard to win anything. what the Dems need is someone who is a strong political force that has a track record of winning elections and winning over people who voted for Trump. I don't think gender is necessarily important but I do think that the results of Clinton and Harris against Trump should rightfully scare Dems away from that idea going forward.
Because of the pandemic, the aftermath of which was awful inflation. This has been the pattern globally for a few years now. And US-specific, because of immigration.
Yes, Harris was treated by voters as the incumbent, and the incumbent administration was unpopular. That is usually an uphill battle for the incumbent.
It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative! Plenty of people wrote about the possibility that this would be a pretty bog standard "reject the incumbents" election.
> It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative!
I find this baffling. With the dems tying themselves to biden and then Harris, it was absolutely an uphill battle. But that was an unforced error.
If they had a robust primary, you have to assume there was someone on the blue team that could beat Trump. If not, then they deserved every bit of this anyway.
No, it was an uphill battle regardless of the candidate, is the point. The fundamentals were always difficult for Democrats in general, for non-candidate-specific reasons. Primarily this was due to inflation, which in my view Biden actually handled about as well as he could have, it just still sucked and pissed everyone off. But also because of immigration, which was indeed a policy error, but one which happened years before the campaign began and was not fixable at that point.
Yes, and that's one of the problems: the DNC defers to tradition and "politeness" rather than what will win elections and keep the party in power. Right up front they should have told Biden he was not going to be the presumed nominee, and that he would have to fight it out in the primary like everyone else.
IMO the fact that Harris is a black woman meant this was always going to be an extremely uphill battle. Someone like Harris winning would be completely unprecedented. I'm not surprised she lost, but I am disappointed.
I think the results demonstrated that it would have been an uphill battle for a white man as well. I think this result was pretty much a foregone conclusion after the 2022/2023 inflation surge.
Edit to add: I now think that. It isn't what I expected to happen until the results actually came in last night.
Well ... yeah, of course. This isn't some unusual thing.
Lots of things are foregone conclusions for a long period of time before you have the data to know it.
Think: A competitor is working on a product that massively outcompetes yours, but you don't know that until it is launched. Or you have cancer that is progressing but you don't know until it is diagnosed.
Hillary Clinton still complains about the election being stolen by Trump (there were riots by Democrats back then too). Democrats still complain about Bush beating Gore in 2020. To say that Democrats would simply accepted the results if Trump won only the electoral college defies past history.
Election denialism is found in both parties in large quantities.
This is a guess or a bet, and one I'll take the other side of. Let's check back in in a year.
Trump has said he will be a dictator on day one. Trump has said that after this election we won't have to vote anymore. Trump has suggested we give the police "One rough hour" like the horror movie The Purge and that would solve crime.
I expect that people are going to die because of the policies that Trump enacts during his presidency. And because of the hate and bigoted rhetoric that he subscribes to and legitimizes. Better that we go down fighting than willingly be party to America becoming another authoritarian regime that commits atrocities.
But it appears that the American people value their wallets more. I'm sympathetic to that, even if my values are different. And TBQH I hope I'm wrong. But
> When someone shows you who they are, believe them
> I expect that people are going to die because of the policies that Trump enacts during his presidency
This comes with the job. His actions or inactions will have all sorts of impacts, just like every president before him.
> Better that we go down fighting than willingly be party to America becoming another authoritarian regime that commits atrocities
Forgive the snark, but what universe have you been living in? We have a pretty strong record when it comes to committing atrocities.
> But it appears that the American people value their wallets more.
That's a pretty dismissive way to put it. Food and housing and medical care being increasingly unaffordable is an existential issue for a lot of people. Of course Trump presided over some of that decline, but this sort of blind spot towards what the lives of common people are like contributed heavily to this election IMO.
I haven't said that America is perfect or innocent. And past problems don't mean we shouldn't work to prevent future ones.
Ok. It's dismissive. I don't understand. This is deeply confusing and disheartening to me. I find it unconscionable to put my own quality of life above others living at all, and am having a lot of trouble processing why so many people have. I could ask you how bad it is exactly but I wouldn't vote for Trump even if I was homeless. So maybe I can't understand.
You assume the dems will learn from this loss, which is a big assumption.
> We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.
If Trump is alive and well in 2028, I'm sure he will try to run again (ignore rules or change them). But, he also said you'll never have to vote again after this one, so we'll find out what he means by that.
We really should fund an anthropological study in the people who overreact to every little thing Trump says. I'm sure there is an entire media niche to go along with these overreactions too. I would read that.
> We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.
He has children who are very much like him and popular in the "MAGA Movement", Donald Trump Jr. specifically. Political dynasties exist in America. Just sayin'.
Trump is a fuck-you vote from the economic losers of globalisation. They know he won't do anything for them, but they also know the other side won't either. All the pearl clutching about trumps characteristics from inner-city relativists fell on deaf ears because it rang hollow.
A women of the luxury belief professional class from an academic family and an uninspiring bureaucratic life story was never going to be able to talk to these people and she didn't really try too either.
The specific policies don't really matter to people when they are exhausted and angry. Revenge does.
Hopefully there is still time to give Edward Snowden a well deserved pardon, before he becomes a bargaining chip to be extradited in exchange for something (less sanctions, etc) in a US-Russia, or better, Trump-Putin deal.
I'm not American. I feel sad, not because Ds lost or Rs one. A nation, which happens to wield so much power in the world, has chosen to elect as its president, a deranged, indecent, man, with dictatorial tendencies, who cares for nothing about democratic--or any--institutions, who never believed in peaceful transfer of power, who called for an insurrection. I'd have thought that alone would have been a reason enough to say, "not that guy, no way". But here we are.
The first time he got elected I had a woe is me, what does this mean for our country perspective. These days I'm better informed and I know that America is nothing special here. Brexit, Orban, Berlusconi, Alternative for Germany, Le Pen, Netanyahu, Modi -- feel free to throw stones, but I guarantee you have an anti-immigrant group in your country that is doing better than they ever have.
Absolutely. There are solutions to the problem of neoliberalism and the right wing doesn't have them, but I guess they're gonna get a chance to try anyway.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with being anti illegal immigration.
My parents had to wait ten years to get their citizenship, do a test, etc.
Meanwhile we let people hop the border and download an app these days. It's a disgrace. Thousands of children missing or trafficked across the border, city culture completely upended, businesses getting cheaper and more desperate labor.
I'm going to go out on a (thick, short) limb and say your parents weren't picking crops in a field or washing dishes at the back of a restaurant. Immigration is a complicated topic and neither party has a plan that will do anything to fix it.
In a true democracy, you cannot vote your self a dictator. So even if people end up voting for THAT guy, the democratic institutions should prevent him from using his powers in a dictatorial manner. This includes upholding the rule of law, equal rights, and human rights in general, and conceding power under popular (or legal) demand, in the territory he controls.
So even when voter hate when you tell them you can’t vote for THAT guy, THAT guy should not become a dictator ones elected.
You now see the exposed heart of our country: folks who have very little, being sold lots by people who will give them very little. A nation of grifters and grifting.
Those are lies spread by the mainstream media (which is mostly controlled by leftists) and you are a victim for believing them.
I know that the HN crowd are left-leaning and I'm going to be downvoted like hell. Maybe even flagged, because apparently leftist platforms like censorship.
But I don't have to prove my point nor there is a need to argue.
My point will be proven in the coming months because as time goes by you guys will see that nothing bad will happen to democracy nor women's rights or anything else important. Economy and public health is going to improve among many other things.
You will see. Just pay attention.
Then maybe you will remember and regret downvoting me.
Oh, also: Listen to what the man is saying himself. Not what the mainstream media says he is saying. Try to see past merely Trump & his public image as well. Pay attention to what the people on his team are saying. Great people like RFK Jr, Tulsi, Vivek, and JD. Maybe you will find yourself to be enlightened.
I wouldn't be so fatal about what he's like. He is clearly astute, maybe just has some narcissist/sociopathic tendencies in front of an audience. Even if some of what he says defies reason, the entirety of what he says is maybe more reasonable than the other side. And that's who was voted in by millions of people.
Said as a UK resident who lived in North America for a bit.
We will see. My guess is that he's improved his margin in California. I visited my brother in the very Hispanic town of Santa Maria, CA, and the trump support amongst my in-laws (hispanic immigrants) was through the roof.
I live in a country where one of the insurrectionists wrote a famous book while in prison, then became leader on a platform that explicitly stated democrats were bad, cancelled elections when gaining power, and ended up shooting himself when the soviet army rolled in.
I live in a country where we saved your guys asses from that in no large part because we had a general policy of isolationism, which I hope we go back to.
"Back" implies you ever were so, and that you didn't get a surprise delivery to your Pacific fleet while they were in harbour.
When I was a kid, I wanted what you now hope for; sadly, experience taught me I can't be everyone's friend, that some will hate me no matter what while others are simply mutually exclusive.
If the US becomes friends with Russia as it is today, it can't be friends with half a dozen east europen countries; friendship with PRC precludes friendship with ROC; with Israel excludes Iran; with North Korea precludes South Korea, etc.
> If the US becomes friends with Russia as it is today, it can't be friends with half a dozen east europen countries; friendship with PRC precludes friendship with ROC; with Israel excludes Iran; with North Korea precludes South Korea, etc.
I don't want to be friends. Just friendly. Only friends with American interests
So it's odd that every time I read a (fairly rare) bait comment, it has the same username: yours.
To be clear I don't generally track or pay attention to user names, you just seem to be making a clear and persistent effort to kick off arguments in bad faith.
which claim? Almost everyone agrees that people across the political spectrum believed the election had fraud in 2020.
As for evidence of actual fraud. I'll just wave my hands towards the fact that democrat turnout in 2020 is way out of line with national trends, whereas 2024 is exactly in line with past trends.
Now you're making two claims, neither of which you're providing evidence for.
If "everyone agrees...the election had fraud", I'm sure you can provide multiple reputable polls showing this sentiment of "everyone". (I'll be generous and lower the bar to just a majority of Americans, but I'm not going to accept polls that show -only- a majority of Republicans, since your claim is "across the political spectrum")
Second. Even if, as you've admitted elsewhere, every single court case was lost (or denied due to lack of standing) in 2020, you do realize that evidence can be presented outside courts, right? Where is this evidence? They've had 4 years to collect it. If it's widespread and, as you said elsewhere is a statistical anomaly, then it, almost by definition, should be obvious to spot. Hand waving to vibes and feels and "sure seems obvious to me" doesn't mean jack.
Now, I'll grant you, that vibes and feels certainly mean a lot to the animal natures of all of us. But feels and vibes are not proof of anything.
So for me, I saw the evidence with my own eyes when thousands of ballots came in for Joe Biden, and my immediate thought was... oh so those must certainly be fake. That's evidence enough for me. We all have our own bar.
> If "everyone agrees...the election had fraud", I'm sure you can provide multiple reputable polls showing this sentiment of "everyone". (I'll be generous and lower the bar to just a majority of Americans, but I'm not going to accept polls that show -only- a majority of Republicans, since your claim is "across the political spectrum")
I will restate. A significant (not a majority) number of democrats believed the election was fraudulent. Enough believed it was fraudulent, that this should concern anyone bothered about democracy and legitimacy. Here are the polls:
Look you probably think you 'won' because I mis-spoke about a majority of democrats, but these numbers are .. not great. 45% of the country, 11% of democrats? The results have stayed stable across time. Guess what, they get to vote too? You have to convince them. One easy way to do that is to share their incredulity that 1000s of ballots come in 100% for Biden in the middle of the night.
You know, you can approach this like a scientific hypothesis testing, or you can approach it the way everyday voters do. I think this is a choice that democrats need to make. By and large, the 'social sciences' are not very good at understanding human behavior because they don't understand what drives people. They're the 'men without chests' that CS Lewis talks about.
Your edit demonstrates exactly what I mean by bad faith: you're intentionally itching for a fight in all your comments, you're not focused on conveying your points in a way that invites level-headed discourse.
Are things ok with you in general? Could there be some non-political reason why you're resorting to inflammatory techniques to get people to talk with you?
I mean I've been doxxed before several times for 'level-headed' discourse with various people on the internet. People make fun of Trump supporters far basically embracing all the various insults that get hurled at us, but I would venture the vast majority of us don't really care anymore. We're tired of it. If the level-headed discourse gets us violence, might as well just say what we really think.
As for my claims:
1. The United Nations bankrolled UNRWA and has for the last few decades, which has funneled money to Hamas. They have consistently voted against Israel, and they stood by silently in their peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and Gaza while Hamas, Gazans, and Hezbollah literally raped and massacred people on live TV. Yes, they need to go. They've not given us anything that American leadership has been unable to provide.
2. The election. The election turnouts between 2016 and 2024 are in line with each other but are extremely at odds with 2020. There was massive last-minute rule changes (like in PA) by executive action (which have now been undone by the supreme court). There were many instances of poll watchers being blocked (videos in fact) in 2020. Counting would suddenly stop and restart. Then there would be thousands of ballots in ballot dumps 100% for Biden. This is not normal. I have no hard evidence. I've freely admitted that elsewhere. But the totality of evidence points to some really fishy business going on here. I mean, Putin wins his elections too, and 'won' a referendum in Crimea.
I'm not sure what other takes are in bad faith, but as I've said many times, happy to discuss
So your answer to discourse getting out of hand in the past is to take an approach that starts it out of hand, seems counterproductive no?
Although now that you're presenting those takes with some more surface area, the rationale doesn't feel all there.
After all, for how massive the UN is and its mandate, I don't think the UNRWA or ill equipped peacekeeping forces avoiding entering a full blown engagement justifies the extraordinary claim they're actually a terrorist organization.
And the voter fraud rationale is similarly light: most of what you mentioned was covered in numerous lawsuits, and the vast majority were lost or dismissed. The remaining few don't account for any significant gap in the election process. Is there a case that would have materially affected the outcome of the election that wasn't dismissed or lost?
> After all, for how massive the UN is and its mandate, I don't think the UNRWA or ill equipped peacekeeping forces avoiding entering a full blown engagement justifies the extraordinary claim they're actually a terrorist organization.
They're either a terrorist organization or useless. Either way, the need to be disbanded and investigated. They should not be able to hide in the USA under the guise of diplomatic immunity. They are not a state.
> Is there a case that would have materially affected the outcome of the election that wasn't dismissed or lost?
No but that never happened with Kennedy/Nixon either. American history is weird. No court is going to touch an election. Why would they. It's national suicide.
I find it laughable that the average American can choose to 'believe' something that is simply and provenly not true. That's why there are so many flat earthers, q anon believers, climate change deniers, and all kind of supporters of provenly wrong ideas. I think this is because of the (wrong) notion that an ideology or a stance is better than facts.
Well, the Earth is not flat, there are multiple easily accessible proofs, the q anon conspiracies are demonstratably false, and the 2020 elections had multiple investigations which uncovered
0 voter fraud, and as much as you might want to believe the opposite, it's simply not true. Believing in something doesn't make it true.
history repeats itself, and there are no perfect people or perfect sides.
Yesterday's terrorist will be tomorrow's heroes, and those deemed visionaries today will become despicable in the eyes of those to come. Such is the way since the beginning of human civilization.
Have you listened to the latest the latest Joe Rogan episode with Musk. The Harris camp seems to be guilty of many of the things they accused Trump of.
Echo chambers happen on both sides and are a real issue.
I listened to both and JRE definitely pointed out some fucked up and verifiable systemic issues with the Democrats that you wouldn't have even noticed if you only listened to MSM.
"Seems to be guilty" is a very different thing than a Fortunate Son who is an adulterer who was found guilty on 34 charges relating to the hush money, his two defense suits against Carroll are under appeal and who knows what sort of things happened when he hang out with his buddy Epstein. Jack Smith is still fighting to get the insurrection case going. America voted a criminal into office.
Harris and Biden did not incite an insurrection. Harris and Biden did not get impeached for withholding funds from Ukraine as Trump was impeached for doing. Harris and Biden are not convicted felons. "The Harris camp seems to be guilty of many of the things they accused Trump of," is nonsense.
It'll be interesting to see what this will mean for European dependence on US tech companies. I'm not personally against companies like Microsoft as such, in fact I think they are one of the better IT business partners for non-tech Enterprise. Often what they sell is vastly underestimated by their critics within the EU, not that I disagree with the problematic nature of depending on foreign tech companies either. With the proposed deregulation of US tech and their "freeing", however, I wonder if a lot of organisations will be capable of continuing using US tech services or it'll move in the direction of how Chinese (and other) services aren't legally available for a lot of things.
I work for a European company and we already have strict rules about what data we’re allowed to remit into the US. Typically we’re only allowed to use cloud products hosted within UK + EU. It’s actually causing problems for us now with some of the generative AI stuff since the Azure offering doesn’t match fully the APIs of OpenAI for e.g.
It's similar for us. Since I work in the energy industry we're required to have plans for how to exit Microsoft if the EU deems it too dangerous for too much of the energy industry to be reliant on Microsoft. Which is part of why I worry, because we honestly can't. We can leave Azure, but we can't easily leave the 365 platform. By easily I mean that we may not survive as a company if we have to do it. It can obviously be done, we just don't have the resources required to do it.
I'm genuinely curious to hear why it would be so hard to leave the Office 365 platform, to the point that it could mean have to shut down the company. I know it isn't something that can be done overnight, but this is on a whole different level than what I assumed the case to be. To make my question more concrete, let's say the EU gives you two years to move away from Office 365, why would this jeopardize your company?
Most corpos and banks are basically built on Excel, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, etc.
If you pluck that out it completely freezes 50%+ of their operations, people really don't get how much stuff in modern companies is reliant on MS stuff (and thus why they are one of the richest companies on the globe)
In some cases I would say yes if there was a hard limit (even few years) to migrate. Again, most people that didn't work in many really big corpos and banks don't comprehend how reliant those businesses are on the MS office stack.
Moving away from that would be a massive change management undertaking, but it's not the "Office" part which is our primary challenge. To be fair, I'm not sure we could actually survive the change management required to leave the Office and Windows part, as it would be completely unfamiliar territory for like 95% of our employees, but the collective we at least think that we can. We have quite a lot of Business Central 365 instances, the realistic alternative to those would be Excel (but not Excel). SharePoint is also a semi-massive part of our business as it's basically our "Document Warehouse".
I didn't know about business central, a quick Google search tells me it's an ERP. There are alternatives, but migrating an ERP is definitely more problematic than changing document storage and the applications you use to read and write documents. But if it's an ERP, I wouldn't say an electronic sheet like Excel would be an alternative. Or am I missing something?
One very mundane reason a company I had worked for switched to Office365, was that emails from our own domain would often end up in the spam filter.
It can cost a lot when that happens.
I see this being a problem in the current situation, where most businesses use either Google or Microsoft for their emails. But in the case of an EU-wide change, I think the situation would be different. Plus, there are other providers that could be used that aren't blocked by MS' and Google's spam filters.
yeah, the real selling point of the google mail is that they have the power to just remove mail from other providers. Or the risk of removing is enough motivation of using gmail only. And as a major mail provider, they could change the ways we handle mail (to make it more reliable), they just choose not to.
They just mean that they would have to do real work and not just sit on their ass goofing off on the internet all day. Real work is something the last few generations are "allergic" to, it gives them the "ick". They somehow got it into their head that doing work is bad and that you should only rely on other peoples work, I blame Gates and public education.
I don't agree with this view. Saying that new generations are lazy compared to the previous ones is a complain as old as humanity itself, there are ancient writers that made the same complains centuries ago. Either you know their situation and you can provide some more detailed argument, or you are just assuming things you don't know.
Which is a nonsensical policy of course, since the US made clear in the past that regardless of where the server is located, US companies have to give access to data. See the CLOUD act.
My experience is that most companies in Europe just don‘t care about data privacy and continue to use whatever Microsoft sells them. Vendor-Lockin is a huge issue.
European wise I think we're really failing to build significant homegrown tech companies. I'm not sure of the exact reason although I've heard that startup support it low and too much regulation / diversity of regulation are issues.
America is a single massive low-regulation market. And a wealthy one. Tech products require high fixed cost to write the code/build the product, but then low ongoing cost to provide a service. Less regulation means lower complexity in building a product. A big market without a lot of regulation is a great way to amortize the high cost across a lot of people, while a wealthy market can support a lot of products. And of course a lot of investor cash to push around. Even using a single language and having mostly overlapping customs means that one product works for millions of people.
There are plenty of European customs and views that make developing these companies unpopular (eg data collection and privacy) but the single-massive-market is the economic reason why the US is so powerful.
That's not the only reason in my opinion. It's way easier for European graduates to find a job and cruise on to retirement. The govt takes care of them for life and so the do or die attitude needed to start a company just isn't there in most countries. This is a consequence of the welfare state most of Europe has become.
Actually I think it's more that Americans just have a higher cultural tolerance for risk. It takes a certain unusual kind of person to jump off a cliff and try to assemble a plane on the way down, and for some cultural reason, America generates more of those people.
To even have a shot at getting a successful startup off the ground, you need to a assemble a whole team of those people, which is still much more difficult in Europe (though things may be starting to change).
Also USA gets best of the talent from entire world, USA is almost always the first choice. But rest of the world gets what's behind mostly. So a lot bigger talent pool.
I see this as oversimplification. US Tech faces hard regulations too (fintech, healthcare etc...). Also Regulation is not that big of a bump in EU. GDPR simplified rules across 27 different national laws and forced new innovations in privacy.
Also Spotify, SAP, Adyen all started in small markets, as counterexamples.
The main reasons why USA is ahead I think are the historical advantages (internet, personal computer), the network effects created by the historical advantages and the VC ecosystem. Also the culture for risk tolerance.
Diversity of regulation and different languages/cultures. The US is a single, huge market with a largely shared culture and the same language. By contrast, an app that takes off in Germany has no guarantee of doing so in Italy or Slovakia.
There is just no upside to founding your tech startup in the EU. You'll just be at a disadvantage. And as long as we have a unified US/EU market, this is not something that can be fixed. This has always been the downside of any kind of trade agreement that opened up the markets to foreign competition. Typically, the two parties pick winners and losers. Europeans export cheese and wine and Americans export Google and Facebook.
It's quite simple actually:
- many different regulatory policies to follow in order to sell accross the EU
- different languages / culture
- risk averse culture in investments and business (Americans go all-in and do not fear to fail fast)
- lot of lobbying from already established compagnies (which are often state-backed which doesn't help)
- no start-up culture basically. Contrary to the US, regulatory entities expect the same from a 10 000 people org and a 15 people start-up. It completely kills most startups.
In the end all these regulations allow Europeans to have access to "safe" products but it kills most of our innovations in favor of the US or China.
Overregulation and taxation is the major issue. I can only speak for Germany. Low worker rights in the US make for healthy companies that can grow and shrink as needed. You can't just fire people in Germany, even though you pay horrendous amouns for social security.
Yeah, I agree. However, I can blame them on making things worse when I specifically elected them to make things better. Instead of solving Germany's issues, they are infighting and spending money on social programs and on illegal migrants. Next year, every single tax, healthcare, and social security rate is going up.
Furthermore, the Greens are blocking real progress in the name of NIMBY-ism. The current government is actively killing markets by introducing harmful policies.
I'm more curious about the NYT tech union strike. They went forward with the strike and.. it doesn't appear anything bad happened. That might completely undermine the union's arguments...
The anti-establishment movements in EU are also predominantly anti-US, leftists are often anti-US too.
I got the impression of many Americans online believing that Europeans are tech and progress loving, bureaucracy hating people under tyranny of EU which is a building in Brussels that churns rules and regulations.
However that's not true, most Europeans love the big government hate new tech and prefer the slow and worry free life over the daily hustling.
If Trump follows up with its promises, I only imagine EU parting with US on more stuff. I also see many Americans apparently believing that EU is mostly museums and there's no technology. Also not true, EU is made of countries that are traditionally tool-makers and Europeans are anti-tech and anti-change only when it comes to adoption of tech into their daily lives, not when creating tools and machines. ASML is not a coincidence, all kind of precision tooling and machinery is the bread and butter of European industry.
So, if EU parts with US, I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff. The dominance of American tech in the daily lives is mostly due to network effect, a forced change will result in what resulted in Russia and China: local alternatives.
Europe is worse off than the US only in Energy and demographics. Two massive issues but there are no quick-fixes for those, so they are European realities with or without the US.
> I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff.
I am in the process of (very slowly) decluttering my life. One weird observation that I had, is that I have very few hardware from the USA, even when I think liberally about "from" as designed and not just manufactured. I found a (crappy) HP printer, (wonderful) Apple hardware and two Zippos. There may be more, but it's not obvious labelled.
Software and some online services on the other hand are different.
From this European perspective the USA is very much a service export and not a stuff export economy.
I agree. The software is also possible to replace if forced.
US invested huge piles of money on the computer age and they cornered the web and software markets and now extracting grotesque profits from it mostly because its a winner takes it all industry. It's not that Europeans don't know how to write software, it's that it doesn't make business sense to go after the established American companies. Linux is invented in Europe, just as the Web but the American entrepreneurs were those who turned these technologies into great businesses. If forced by blocking, it wouldn't take much time to create European alternatives as the hard work of discovering what works and what doesn't is already established. In fact, during the internet age there were many European alternatives for most of it, there's still local alternatives to many.
Take Uber for example, it's not anything special. In places where it's banned, local entrepreneurs quickly made local alternatives.
There's of course industrial software, gaming etc and that's also plenty in EU. It wouldn't take much time to replace everything.
There are plenty of examples from the last 10-20 years where embargoes simply propelled local alternatives even in the most improvised countries.
Americans will have to be stupid to ban software to EU, so it will have to be the EU who bans American software and that probably wouldn't happen until things get really bad.
Absolutely undeniable. I wish those 'not liking' your comment would say why they do not agree.
I'm not innocent of knee-jerk down-voting but I would like to cure myself of the habit. I wonder to what extent the extreme political and cultural polarization that prevails in the West results from a general reluctance on the part of adherents to engage in debate. At least that's my impression.
The first time Trump was elected was a shock, but now we understand. It wasn't a simple mistake.
I have only few customers who use Google Workspace for their emails and only one who uses Dropbox for files. Initially (about 2002) companies moved away from U.S.-based cloud services. However, now I have an increasing number of customers who want to cancel cloud services entirely.
But for my customers, there is no alternative to Windows.
I get really tired of this narrative that people are pushing that trump voters are somehow ignorant, stupid or simply don't care.
We're not ignorant, we care a lot and we're not being duped. We're really tired of the high gas prices, the moral hypocrisy of the left, the domestic law fare going on attacking political rivals and most of all, we want to afford our groceries and experience a better economy.
Telling us, that the entire base that voted for Trump is either heartless, naive or stupid just isn't going to cut it in reality. People that voted for Trump believe that the President is the diplomatic representative to the world for the American people. He literally got shot and stood up pumping his fist in the air. Joe Biden can barely walk down the stairs without tripping. Kamala had a "phone" call with an undecided voter just yesterday and when she showed the screen it was the camera app. Our choice this election was either the badass who after being shot wanted to show the crowd he was alive or two bumbling idiots. He's not my first choice, but he's a lot better then the Democratic Party offered as alternatives.
We want an American who will fight for business and fight for America to win. We want lower gas prices, which will then make it cheaper to transport goods across the nation and help lower prices in the grocery store.
Trump is not the best person, but he was the better option out of the two party system.
Russia had a similar election where the populace enthusiastically voted for a "badass". That was in 2000, back when it was still a functioning if flawed democracy.
You can look and see how well that turned out in the long run.
As a European, I don't get this. You frame it as a choice between two people: a badass vs a bumbling idiot. Why should it be about the personalities of the candidates and not be a choice between the kind of policies that are being proposed and the ability to reason about them?
While I concede that subjectively, Trump can come across as badass and Harris might have been "phony" at times, when it comes to the policies both sides are defending during debates and even the way they express themselves verbally during debates, Harris comes across to me as someone who has better ideas and can explain them far better.
I think that the difference between politics in Europe vs the US is that the latter is based much more on cult of personality. And sadly that mode of operation is becoming more common here in Europe as well.
I personally don't care for the personal attacks and mud slinging. Let's bring back intelligent debates.
Joe Biden can barely walk down the stairs without tripping.
Which is why he left the race back in July. Did you miss this fact?
Kamala had a "phone" call with an undecided voter just yesterday and when she showed the screen it was the camera app.
Actually this anecdote, and your touting of it, showcases just how naive Trump voters really are. The story has already been debunked on multiple fact-checking sites -- not that it needs debunking, because every single one of us knows how flaky phones are these days, and if you just brush them the wrong way you can set off all kinds of random apps. We all know this, because it happens to each and every one of us multiple times a day. (To add to this, it almost certainly wasn't her own phone, making such a mixup even more likely to happen). There's just absolutely nothing of substance here. Any reasonable person hearing this story would just roll their eyes and say, "Yeah right". They wouldn't even waste more than a second or two thinking about it, because it's so obviously bogus.
But what kind of reactions do Trump supporters have, when a story like this pops up on whatever website or newsapp they're addicted to? A variety we might guess, but judging by your own, for some reason it doesn't even occur to them to second-guess or fact-check the story. They just believe it, because a website told them it was important and they probably read other comments on that article page or social media feed with all kinds hyperemotional reactions indicating that it was a valid and important story, too, so by gosh, I guess it must be, right?
And then they go on the internet and share it with their friends, and they tell 2 friends, and so on, and so on, and that, in so many variations about other completely baseless rumors and smears, like Kamala's alleged drinking problem, her "hearing aid", about her "turning black" and so forth ad nauseum -- exactly as you've done right here, right now.
Not surprisingly, they also have no problem believing that a guy pumping his fist in the air means he's a "badass" or that this is demonstrative of the key qualities we need in someone to run the most powerful country on the planet. Instead of being yet another indication of the obvious shlockmeister and con artist that he is.
Which is what brought us to the outcome we got last night.
Solution to your problems is not Trump. I lived in totaliterain an authocratic regimes. He has similar tendencies. He is going to screw not only America's economy but also the whole world's economy. He is not going to solve your problems but his own problems. Just like Erdoğan and Putin he doesn't care about ordinary people. When you think that it cannot get any more bad it will get more bad. I lived in totaliterian an authocratic regimes.
>We want an American who will fight for business and fight for America to win. We want lower gas prices, which will then make it cheaper to transport goods across the nation and help lower prices in the grocery store.
Do you think the President has anything to do with all that? The USA pumped more oil during the Biden administration than at any time in history. How is a President going to fight for business? Seriously, your comments come across like you have no idea what the President can or can't do. Do you understand where the power lies in the USA? It lies with Congress and massive corporations, the President is just theater for the masses.
Here's a European perspective that is somewhat pro-Trump, surprising as it may sound. I am Dutch and if someone would come along and promise the following:
"We're gonna lower your taxes so you have more money to spend"
"We're gonna take a sledge hammer to bloated policies so everything will run smoothly. Then we will build a million houses per year"
I would very much consider voting for that person. That said, Trump is a madman, he lies all the time, is a danger to institutions etc. At the same time, I am so disgruntled by the current system and by not a single politician tackling or even speaking about relevant issues that I am easily swayed.
And this is the problem we have with democracy, and why it's doomed to, eventually, die. People tend to believe words. I guess it fine when words are the only thing you can rely on, but in this case, we have history and past performance. And as someone who is not that interested in US politics, from my understanding, his past performance is terrible by all measures.
But I guess this is something that will never change. The older I become, the more apparently I see that it does not matter WHAT you do, it only matters how you SPEAK about what you (will) do, whether it be in politics or in a corporate environment. I'm not the kind of person who regrets things in life, but if I could travel back in time and give my younger self one advice, it would be "focus on becoming a great orator", as this opens any door regardless of the level of experience.
Edit: to clarify, in order to not reply to each comment individually, I might have used the word "terrible" harshly. The thing with politics is that as a complete outsider to the US, I don't have a reliable way to know what policies were proposed and what were adopted/rejected, nor the long term effect of them on the country. The only thing I can rely on, is information available online. His track record is not covered in a good light online.
Sure, you can say that information online is skewed in one direction, but this is true to an insider, as some comments have demonstrated. The results of a particular policy and its application are subjective rather than objective. My entire premise was to demonstrate that actions are meaningless in the eye of the public.
Theoretically, this means that you get a "get out of jail" card no matter what you do in life, as longs as you can articulate your words properly.
> his past performance is terrible by all measures.
Which was partially a good thing, since he failed to dismantle Obamacare or build a wall at the Mexican border, even though those were two very explicit campaign promises.
Who knows what he'll do or not do this time around.
We do know what he will do. It’s pretty much guaranteed he will pick even more Supreme Court justices, making it even more right wing than it currently is. That will have a lasting multi-decades impact. He will nominate more federal judges. He will cancel any investigation in his own crimes.
Remember that Obamacare was saved by a single vote from McCain, who is now dead.
This is what the election is teaching me: people don't care a lot about what you do, they care much more about what you say. You just have to make people feel good.
Abraham accords. Isis. Tax cuts. Booming economy of 2018-2020. Remain in Mexico. Far lower illegal immigration. People remember the actions too.
“From my understanding, his past performance was terrible too”
Depends on what you focus on. If you listen to soundbites it sounds like a circus. There’s a lot of drama displacing and stepping on toes of the entrenched players in the system.
Trump raised taxes on the middle class. The economy was substantially worse under Trump - he spoiled the opportunity Obama gave him. He killed a lot of people with his COVID response. Our debt and deficits spiked under Trump as he drained tax dollars into the wealthy’s pockets.
It’s not so much that people remember the actions, it’s that they remember the right’s white washing of those actions.
Isis was already losing in 2017 after they lost Raqqa and Mosul. Trump played no part in it.
> Tax cuts
America is already stacked with an insane deficit and debts. Tax cuts don't see like a good thing in that situation.
> Booming economy
Yes, the economy he inherited from Obama and perpetuated by spending ever more public money and increasing the deficit.
> Remain in Mexico
This only concerns 35k people which is a laughable amount.
> Far lower illegal immigrantion
Not if you compare to the end of Bidens term.
We're also still waiting for that wall to happen. Another lie of course.
Republicans also voted against a bi-partisan bill to reduce immigration.
> If you listen to soundbites it sound like a circus
Fucking a pornstar while you're wife is at home with your newly born kid that might also play a role. But somehow the party of the nuclear family doesn't see a problem with that.
> his past performance is terrible by all measures.
What was terrible for you? He didn't start new wars, he did the abraham accords. He put in a policy of -2 regulations for every new regulation. He was much better on spending UP UNTIL COVID than Biden was.
What was so bad? He might speak like a crazy person, but his policies weren't that bad.
His policies were terrible. He broke off several key international treaties. He instituted the family separation policy. He broke down federal institutions that could have helped fight COVID.
In what way was he better on spending? He managed to increase the deficit every single year, even before COVID.
> He might speak like a crazy person.
He does speak like a crazy person. He advocates for crazy policies. People from his administration are crazy people and advocate for crazy policies.
I think this is highly relatable, especially in the Netherlands where the housing situation is beyond bonkers. The protest vote is strong and/or gaining strength in many countries across the world to reflect this fact: the quality of life for the average person has either stagnated or fallen in many places, and that's a very strong rally point on election day.
Yeah but whose fault is that? A vote for the right is a vote for the rich, the very same that hovered up and concentrated all the newly gained wealth because any taxation has been dropped or they found ways to avoid paying taxes altogether, thus preventing the redistribution of generated wealth.
But this is the doublethink that the right-wing is somehow able to pull off. They aren't promising that people will be better off, that wealth will be distributed. Instead they're pointing at even poorer people like immigrants and saying "they're taking your jobs".
Yeah the quality of life for the average person is stagnating, but that's down to politicians and the rich, not to whatever boogeyman they're pushing.
I think this misses the point entirely. It's not about blame, or promises of this or that, it's about hope for change. Whether that will be a positive change or not remains to be seen, but if your life is shit, any change can feel better than no change, because at least there's hope that it might be better.
I do think catering to nimbys was the democrat’s original sin in some respects. Housing unaffordability makes everything else worse and blue areas are especially bad.
Especially in CA where the Reagan Tax Revolt lives on in CA Prop 13, where boomers sitting on $2m+ properties that they bought in 1978 for $40k pay <$1k/year in prop taxes while their new neighbors pay $40k/yr in addition to their 8% mortgage while the boomers vote down any new housing developments or zoning changes.
That's the thing, though. If you hear someone say those things -- attractive as they sound -- and then blindly believe them without asking how they intend to accomplish those things, then you are an irresponsible, ignorant voter.
He actually promised the opposite of this last time, because suburbanites don't want any new housing built. I haven't checked what he said this time around.
“ I wanna do infrastructure. I wanna do it more than you want to do it. I’d be really good at that, that’s what I do.”
And then his party reminded him that that is specifically NOT what they do. They like to let the private sector handle everything, because that’s who funds them and how they get rich too.
Watch TV, drink diet cokes, eat hamburgers, rage at minorities, foment insurrections, raise taxes, and just generally crap all over the place? Those are the actions I saw.
Turn the supreme court partisan and overturn principles that had been valid for decades.
I remember an interview at a large evangelical event about how they could vote for the decidedly un-Christian liar, fraudster, etc.. Their answer was that a "deal with the devil" is okay as long he delivers on supreme court justices. That was their literal phrasing.
Yeah but you're speaking as someone who actually pays taxes (I presume) and feels like you're not getting any benefits from it. But when you (or I) were growing up and enjoying an education paid for by the government, or when you lose your job, or when you retire, or when you need a doctor / the hospital, etc, you'll be grateful that there is a system in place to keep it affordable.
But this is another example of a string of selfishness in modern politics; it's a "got mine, fuck you" line of thinking. Whereas post-WW2 there was much more of a cooperative mindset, collective national or european-wide trauma, and a drive to cooperate to help each other out, regardless of their employment status. But WW2 has been forgotten and both Europe and the US are shifting back to the right-wing, because there's immigrants after your jobs, benefits and women apparently.
Did they include into the prediction the fact that in many state mail in ballots have to be counted after normal ballots and that for a lot of reasons Democrats are way more likely to vote by mail.
My impression is that that is not the case as it was 4 years ago. Many of the swing states seemed to be committed to having all the results in within a few hours of polls closing, with some small exceptions. I believe that was the case in NC and GA, and with PA being expected to be closer to 4 hours after polls close.
Ah, so Twitter had the more quality real-world signal; who would have thought? It seems "hate and disinformation" are just what people were feeling, and what they were thinking.
I wouldn't know about that, I was not on Twitter when Brexit was being campaigned. What I do know is that, unlike possibly every other platform, on Twitter, it always felt like Trump would win.
I'm convinced Twitter single-handedly won the election. Everyone that are pro Trump seems to be coming from Twitter, with the same talking points as Musk. Elon sure got it's money's worth.
Don't think so, the Tory leadership at the time did not really want to leave, but it was a useful rabble rousing position to energize their base. Ideally just falling short was the best scenario they wished, so they could keep blaming Europe for everything but not really face the consequences of the exit they are facing now.
Trump voters are not casting a protest vote, how much ever now it is going to be retconned as disinformation, stupidity or anti Gaza vote, the reality is they fully expected to win if not democratically then by force.
What's the best way for someone from one of the groups that Republicans hate to move to a Western European or Nordic nation where they are less likely to be marginalized or threatened? I'm sure there will be plenty of time to analyze exactly what happened, but right now my only concern is getting out.
The number of republicans in a fifty mile radius of you, or even across the country, did not change between yesterday and today. What happened during your local government elections yesterday? State government?
There is nowhere to run to. When the Right felt like they were losing the soul of their country, they stayed and they voted. When Democrats feel the same, you want to run? I hear this everywhere and its literally the sensibility destroying America; not because the right is going to destroy America, far from it, but because any unchecked side will.
“for the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely”
Trump banned trans people from serving in the military. More broadly, trans people routinely lose their jobs.
Trump has repeatedly called for socialists to be destroyed. For example:
"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections...”
Trump has called for socialists to be deported:
“Today I’m announcing a new plan to protect the integrity of our immigration system. Federal law prohibits the entry of communists and totalitarians into the United States. But my question is, what are we going to do with the ones that are already here, that grew up here? I think we have to pass a new law for them.”
They're saying their plan out loud on TV and people still don't believe it. It's maddening. It's not that your Republican neighbor is going to bust down your door and string you up, it's much slower and subtler than that. Institutional subjugation is much easier to pass and for people to quietly ignore. Elimination from public life was literally part of the Nuremberg Laws! And Florida right now has a law on the books that on paper bans transgender people from being in public if they ever felt safe to enforce it.
Calling Trump Hitler gives Trump too much credit, but the political conditions of 1930's Germany and economic anger giving rise to a desire for national purity and scapegoating minorities is pretty dead on. And it's not like Germany is unique, we're really not much more advanced than ritual sacrifice of people taken by demons to bring about a good harvest, err economy. This has been a persistent bug in Human we keep hitting.
I don't perceive this to be happening in any systemic way. I think (in fact, I know) that social media is really good at magnifying the extremes, and the extremes of the right are scary, mean, and evil. That doesn't remotely represent the majority of people in the country. Less than 28% of US adults voted for Trump this election, its a single-digit percentage of even those individuals who would even consider acting out the rhetoric, and let's be real: They're mostly in those very isolated parts of the country like the west or apalachia which does have internet but, sadly, not much else (least of all, good public education).
Roughly the same level of support that allowed the Nazis to rise to power. Even if it doesn’t end up happening in a systemic way - (a) there is no way to know that right now - powerful republican factions have clearly signaled they want to go in that direction; and (b) it won’t be any comfort to those targeted, because there is quite a bit of non-systemic discrimination inherent in another Trump term.
When the right felt like they were losing the soul of their country, they weren't being told they would be exterminated. They were afraid they wouldn't get to hate other people the way they like to.
If a visibly armed convoy of folks that oppose your vote and your existence slow-rolled past your house, you might consider options other than staying and voting.
Your feelings are within your control. So: be an adult and control them. In this case that oftentimes means: Do research. Consume media from as many sources as possible. Do research. Try to find the good. Do research. Channel your feelings into improving the world, not retreating inside yourself or to somewhere else.
It's also okey to not share the feeling that the other person on the internet is having. Just saying. I would even argue it's mildly impolite to dispute the feelings of other people when your have a different vibe about the situation.
I am a progressive. I'm obviously dissatisfied with the results of this election. But I'm even more dissatisfied with the reaction I'm seeing from the left. I cannot and won't respect the "vibes" of "we're all gonna die, there's roving gangs in F150s in the streets, I'm leaving for Canada, the country hates me". I won't respect that. It is not indicative of any reality outside today, or in the immediate future (and I live in an extremely right-leaning place).
The reality that I want the left to adopt is: Its not that bad. The world isn't going to end. Both Trump and Kamala received fewer votes this year than in 2020. Progressive policies are majority-popular in the United States. Kamala was just a (very) bad candidate. Don't let that energy you're feeling go to waste by planning your escape to Thailand or laying in bed all day wrapped up in a cocoon. Educate the people around you. Be out in your community. And prepare for an even more important election in 2028.
A number of people from marginalized groups literally fear for their lives right now. That's based in reality, coming from Trump's bigoted rhetoric and the people he allies himself with. Whether you think they should feel that way or not, it's the way that they do feel and it's valid.
It's a reasonable reaction when you believe your life is in danger to try and get yourself out of that situation. You saying "it's not that big of an issue" and "where's the evidence" is both tone-deaf and beside the point. This person is scared. They have bigger problems than your opinion that they should stick around and vote. Help or stay out of it.
You are deluding yourself. This country is finished. Why on earth would they allow there to be legitimate elections in 2028? You know they have "elections" in Russia, China, and Hungary, too.
The people who voted for Trump want people like you and me to die. (And fair enough, I want THEM to die!) You can choose how to respond to that, but you cannot deny it. For me, I don't think I have good prospects for leaving the country, but I am investing in a weapon. "Be out in your community" -- fuck that. I am acting for me and mine alone at this point, EVERYONE else can go to hell.
As someone who researched this, you have three options: Golden Visas (expensive and being phased out, but good if you have ~$500k sitting around in cash), Ancestry (a recent direct relative who was a citizen of that country), or asylum.
For LGBTQ+, asylum is the likely option, but one that cannot be exercised until you have demonstrable proof you’d come to harm here in the States. That’ll be easier for folks in Red States whose policies are already openly hostile to our mere existence, but you’d likely get pushback since there are other states to move to and the Federal policies remain unchanged at this time.
Right now, your best bet is to sit, analyze, and prepare. Get your passport and make copies of any identity documentation. Be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, because we don’t have the luxury of believing that man, his party, or his electors are just joking around or otherwise not serious.
EDIT: one other thing you can do is get the hell out of a Red State ASAP and move into one of the “Blue Fortresses” of New England or the Pacific Coast. Equality Map has a good breakdown of states’ laws and protections broken down into LGBTQ-specific categories, and that’s going to be of critical import if Federal protections are tossed out. Those areas also have the added benefit of plentiful immediate transportation options out of the country, either by land, sea, or air if need be.
I didn’t forget work visas, I just opted to exclude them given their typically steep requirements and how they’re typically sourced through the employer. That takes it out of your direct control, as opposed to the others I mentioned.
My intention was to empower readers to take charge of their outcomes, something work visas aren’t reliable for in most cases (though in HN readers’ cases, it could be a valid one; I will be curious if any big tech employers offer relocation and visa assistance in the coming years).
To be honest I think that Ancestry and Asylum are about as much "out of your direct control" as you can get, the latter especially (as in, unable to work, or leave that particular country, until the application is decided upon)
Remember that 'the EU' is around 30 individual countries each with their own work visa issuing procedures and rules - none of which are really at all comparable to the US system.
Seriously just choose a country and apply for a job with a company that doesn't explicitly state that they need you to already have the right to work in that country and see where it goes.
Not sure what you mean by "sourced through the employer".
Usually you need to have enough qualification and a job offer to apply for a work visa that is bound to the employing company for two years. Switching jobs requires reapplying. Afterwards, you can usually get a work visa that is not bound to a specific company, and less time limited.
Normally it's you applying for the visa, but in some cases the company hiring you can file the application, which can drastically reduce the time you have to wait, but cedes some control.
Of course, all this depends on your nationality and the country where you are applying.
For the HN crown I think you should consider skilled work-visa if you want to move, and I don't think it's unrealistic. You will probably need a job wherever you move anyway, this just means you need to find that job before you move. Without doxing myself completely, I know several North-Americans with that kind of visa here in Europe.
You need to apply for a position and get it. Then you need to apply for the visa. That can take a couple of months to process, which sounds like a lot, but remember that in many European countries this is on par with, or less than, the notice period for changing a job. So for the employer it won't make a big difference.
You will probably have to pay for moving yourself though.
What requirements? The only real requirement is to have someone sponsor you.
Everything else, including having passport and no previous history of war crimes, raping and pillaging for 5 years also applies to other visas anyway.
It's also not H1B type of slavery, there are not quotas, you can change employer whenever your want and not even lose fancy tax ruling. Work visa is the easiest way.
Do you have any data points on this, I remember reading that some Americans have tried applying for asylum in Canada, but no one has ever been accepted.
I do not, because there haven’t been sufficient points shared reflecting US -> Elsewhere asylum seekers outside of High Value Assets (think Snowden). That said, I have heard anecdotally that the Canadian government would consider LGBTQ status for asylum - though again, a US Citizen seeking asylum is a relative novelty in general, so I have no concrete data.
As with all plans, this will not withstand enemy contact. You will need to adapt it to survive as required.
I just honestly hope it doesn’t get to that point.
If you have little money and no degree and are incapable of making it in one of the most prosperous countries in the world, where software engineers are better paid than anywhere else in the world... you will be trapped literally anywhere else, especially in a foreign country where they are under no obligation to speak to you in english.
Asylum is an option, if you can prove harm. In the meantime, work on your qualifiers: education, income, etc. Unfortunately, no country is going to willingly take someone they feel cannot contribute to their society, so you need to prove to them that you will.
You can look through my recent post if you want, but I can contribute if given then chance. It's just hard to prove to people that I'm worth taking that chance on.
You don't need a degree to get working visa in the Netherlands (source: I don't have a degree). You can even use Dutch-US treaty to basically hire yourself.
Look man, nations don't have any obligations to the citizens of other countries. Why would any other country want to take in another uneducated and poor individual?
Having done this the first time Trump got elected, there is actually another alternative.
Girlfriend and I ended up moving over to Morocco on a temporary visa. That didn't end up working. However, I ended up then moving by myself from country to country for about a year, becoming a nomad and mostly living out of a backpack and sleeping bag. Basically walking and hitchhiking across portions of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Admittedly, this is rather challenging. However, many areas of the Earth are "ok" with 30-180 day stays, and the experience itself can be rather life changing. Got to go and teach children in Palestine because of that choice, which felt like at least contributing slightly to solving the issues in the Middle East. Here's the list as far as how long they'll allow legal stays per country (for Americans, since American perspective).
The other issue though, is if you're looking now, you're already kind of behind. Google says the numbers have doubled since 1999, and I've heard much larger numbers (like 17 million in the last three years). If you believe World Population Review, then there's about 8 million registered expats existing abroad.
I'm sure Morocco was fun and there are loads of really beautiful spots to visit, but I don't think it's a place that rates very high in democracy or in personal freedoms. Furthermore it's extremely sexist and somewhat racist.
It would definitely not be my choice if I was actually persecuted in my country.
It's really difficult unless you're in tech, in tech the immigration system melts away at your feet
Idk which Nordic country you are in but for example in Denmark there's a scheme called fast track quick job start that can get tech workers (among others) a residence permit the same day someone applies, often within an hour of the application being filed assuming you go straight to their office to get fingerprinted.
SIRI puts a lot of work into making moving here easy if you're a net tax benefit (and imo that's a good thing)
Outside of skilled work and tech though I've heard getting a visa is pretty much impossible for non EU citizens
For me personally as a person of Indian descent raised in the US, the anti-Indian sentiment that seems to be rapidly growing in Canada makes me feel uncomfortable with moving there (and I'm sure many Canadians are just fine with me staying out.)
That's not to say that Canadians are right or wrong in having issues with the levels of Indian migration to Canada, I just don't want to end up on the bad side of that.
We (Americans) are so used to just picking up and moving within the country, and seeing so many people move here, that we just assume we can pick up and (legally) move anywhere in the world.
Moving somewhere is very different than being a tourist, or an extended stay.
in the last two months leading up to the election, the GOP spent more on anti-trans lies than on all other issues combined, including immigration. at least in so-called battleground states.
"In the past five weeks, Trump’s operation has spent more than $29 million on TV ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting transgender surgeries for inmates and illegal immigrants in detention, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. That makes the topic, by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending"
"There were more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread and butter issues that could have swayed independent voters. We did not have a turn out problem — middle of the road voters simply didn’t like what Tudor was selling."
Yes but many European countries process asylum applications. For software engineers, you may be able to just migrate legally using a work visa anyway — even the notoriously picky New Zealand has a special program just for us, though it’s limited to Auckland de facto.
Sending love and can relate, original commenter. I wouldn’t pick anywhere in Eastern Europe, that’s for sure. Get prepared for lots of “it’s just a little fascist rhetoric, he doesn’t really mean it when he says all trans people are pedophiles and he’s gonna deport legal immigrants who seem illegal” comments
Reading a lot of these comments it does feel like the Michael Scott "declaring bancruptcy" approach but with asylum.
For starters, you'd be quite limited in your personal freedoms until the application is processed [years], unlikely to have the right to work, or the right to leave the country you just landed in without the application being automatically cancelled.
If, and really I can't see this happening, as a US citizen, you were to be granted asylum; then you ever travelling back to the US for any reason would make it likely that you would immediately lose the status (hence right to work, etc), likely with a future entry ban thrown in on top.
Work visas in the European countries I know of are not at all like the US H1B/Green Card style system. There are plenty of Americans here who just did it the 'normal way' and got a job offer and filed the paperwork for that [weeks]
Yeah, asylum isn’t great. But Fascism is serious stuff. I recommend reading the stories of the great scientists who left the third reich as it was ramping up—who faced discrimination, loneliness, poverty, and severe career setbacks-and comparing them to stories of the scientists who stayed… I know which side I’d rather be on.
Regardless, I don’t think “coming back to the US to visit family” is on our radar. That’s what makes this election heartbreaking. Asylum or no, moving overseas is effectively abandoning your extended/older family forever, unless you’re rich and/or a climate change denier.
Being asylum seeker is not cool at all, as you don't have agency.
If you are asking for worker's visa, you will get it (or very unlikely not get it) and be done with it in a few weeks. Then you just live your life normally, have access to job market, pay taxes and all that. Maybe even have a nice tax deal.
If you submit for protection, then government will consider your application in maybe 2 years, but no promise (subtext: we don't want you here anyways, you are not a priority). While it's not approved, your access to labor market is limited (because they take your jobs!).
If you are a tech worker with a visa, you may learn the language or not, do it fast, slow and decide yourself. If you are a status holder, you have an obligation and a case worker. Generally speaking you have a case worker and government wants to know you are still in the country and how you are doing.
Now since you can't have a job, you will also have a problem finding a normal free market rent in a place that suits your vibes, so you will be at the mercy of the government as well. Happening be happening in places where a lot of people with no access to labor market are concentrated and conditions will be, lets just say cheap. Once you are processed you may get social housing. There isn't a whole lot of it sitting free in the center of the capital 5 mins aways from the you dream tech job.
Now as to all of Europe? Probably not all of it, but affluent tech worker probably wants to go to a nice part of it, where everyone also wants to be, including all the actual refugees from the previous three wars and people who joined them on the way and put the foot into the door and don't want to be kicked out. System can handle it in case of emergency, but then the flow has to subside and thing have to be back to normal. Well having constant inflow is a new normal, so what does political body do with it? Downscale and slow down to throttle it.
On the off chance of picking the place that isn't nice for everybody's liking, the burueacracy may be specifically optimized to reject everyone and not speak languages. Bureacracy is also very local and doesn't always match political speeches of the supreme leader whenever you agree with them or not.
If you are serious about it, which I must at this point assume you are not, you need to at least tell us what is your education level and what are you good at.
You might also want to take a look at the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty.
Ireland is a solid democratic European, English speaking country with no significant hard right presence in government.
Culturally I think an American would find it easier to adapt than eg France or Germany. The anglosphere individualism is present but watered down from the American extremes. Bureaucracy is low compared to the rest of Europe. People are superficially friendly, but it can be hard to penetrate social circles as an outsider. It is a more high context society than the US - you will be seen as a loud annoying yank, at least at first, but people can forgive, and you can adapt.
There's a functional social welfare system, free education and free Healthcare. All three have their problems, but are ultimately doing way better than our neighbours in the uk.
If you're black you will experience some racism, but not on the same level as in the us. When people hear you speak with an American accent a lot of that will probably evaporate. If you're hispanic, I don't think it will really register as an issue. Spanish speakers in europe are generally spanish, and are considered European, not some other lesser race the way they are in the us.
With a career in cs it should be easy to find a company willing to hire you, and sponsor your visa. Alternatively there is a special visa system (very badly advertised) for founders to move to Ireland and open a startup. Regardless, once you've been resident for 5 years you have the right to get citizenship.
This is all my opinion as an Irish developer who has been living in mainland Europe for the last 6 years or so.
> Ireland is a solid democratic European, English speaking country with no significant hard right presence in government.
This is of course anecdotal, but my partner spent a couple weeks in Dublin and a couple other Irish cities recently for a work thing, and was surprised to feel unsafe there. One of her co-workers was physically attacked by two drunk men, completely unprovoked, and several of her LGBTQ colleagues had disgusting things shouted at them in public, multiple times.
Depending on what group the toplevel poster is in that makes them feel wary about remaining in the US, I'm not convinced Ireland is a good choice.
If you want to move to Belgium, send me an email (cf site on my profile) and I can help you with the decision and the integration. We need more good software engineers and especially founders here.
Be ready to take a paycut. Salaries in Europe aren't what they're like in the US. But we make it up in many other ways.
It's kind of a best kept secret, but for US talent (bay area, EX-fang) there's a great market in Europe. 95% comp what you'd make in the US. Virtually unlimited leverage when negotiating.
I think people get ridiculed for thinking like this, but as a gay man married to a EU citizen, I am 100% ready to pull up stakes. We spend months at a time in the EU and have several favorite places we’ve talked about returning to. Western Europe has a progressive, pro-worker culture that the US will never have. I live in Florida and am financially independent. The moment the mood darkens, I’m off to greener pastures. I think the key here is that political stability is the icing on top of a great lifestyle we are already enjoying for part of the year.
Europe is the next target. The people who got Trump elected will be spending a lot of time and effort into reshaping European politics now.
I’m European and most likely the overall effect you’d have, unless you went to a high income country where your impact is minimised, is likely to be net negative by raising housing prices in some poorer country like Portugal. Don’t be too surprised when their own Trump gets elected.
American expat living in Portugal here. The chega party is indeed on the rise here, but politics are less about personal identity and more focused on issues. A lot of chega’s rise has been attributed to dissatisfaction with the status quo and a warning shot to the incumbent government. Time will tell which direction things go, but the affordability of housing and low wages top the list of concerns.
Howdy, neighbor! Am also an American expat living in Portugal. We've been living in Lisbon for about a year, and so far I really love it here. People are friendly, the vibe is relaxed, and life is peaceful with a glass of inexpensive wine never far away. Highly recommend anyone looking for an exit plan to consider sunny Portugal.
So far, there are no indications of the far-right gaining any amount of power with which they could govern. In a broader sense there have been a number of rightwing victories across Europe, but thus far Portugal (and Spain next door) don't look poised to join that trend.
I am Portuguese. You are delusional if you think the far right won't be in government soon.
Of course you are an American expat in Lisbon, so I assume you are living a life that's likely not very connected to local concerns. I assure you, Chega is growing like hell. I am not a supporter, I just see it.
Expats and the ballooning cost of housing is a part of it. The fact that you moved to Lisbon will have the victory of the far right here as a second order effect. Think about that.
Hey, if you are a tech worker, UK has a very good tech worker visa called Tech Nation. Happy to answer questions about it, look it up online and email me!
It's trivially easy to get a knowledge migrant visa to the Netherlands. Just find a tech job. There is also Dutch-US friendship treaty, so you can found a company, employ yourself and do the contract type of thing too.
You will not get your SV salary ofc and maybe even less than 100k, but hej, you flee the opressive regime, right?
Now if things are bad and you are targeted personally and have a paper trail, there is also asylum thing. You don't want to do that thing, it sucks. Just get a job in whatever country you fancy and they will move you.
If you wanted to move, that information is freely available with a simple Google search. What you are doing here is feigning disgust, but you won't move or you just would.
No one is out to get you. You are a victim of propaganda.
Hate is a fairly strong word. I think a more accurate description of the Republican stance on transgenderism at the moment is "don't want to support it at all". And even then, that is almost entirely in reference to children. But it sounds like OP can perfectly well support themselves, so not sure that would be an issue as a member of that group.
again, the GOP in the months leading up to the election spent more on anti-trans rhetoric than all other issues combined, including immigration and the economy. if you saw any of these ads and the literal hate being spewed, you maybe would understand better.
For most of the right, as I hear it: if the trans community left the kids alone and trans women didn't insist on playing sports (especially contact sports) with biological women, they really wouldn't care.
I don't know if you saw the "Kamela is for the/them" ads, but they stoke a much more general fear and hatred of trans people than the issues you are referring to. Those issues are picked because they are most popular amongst a broad swathe of the electorate, but they are couched in a deeper hate and distrust.
I probably did see them and just forgot about it because it's a political ad. I can tell you, living in a fairly red area, these are the only concerns I've heard from friends/family/people in my church and community. They don't _care_ what trans people do to themselves but have strong opinions on that they're being forced to not only accept but agree with that lifestyle.
A central tenant of the mainstream LGBTQ community is to "live authentically". That tenant cuts both ways, in that nobody in the trans community is going to force someone to be trans — they wouldn't be "living authentically" if someone were forcing them to be trans. I've seen this point expressed in the LGBTQ community countless times outside of political discussion, usually to someone who is self-questioning, and asking someone else if they're gay/trans/etc., which is community, more often than not, will respond to with "we can't decide that for you."
The last political ad I saw, and it was endorsed by Trump, featured a segment furthering the conspiracies around Imane Khelif, implying she was a man, etc.
Every piece of evidence revealed so far points towards Imane Khelif being male. Two blood tests from independent labs showing an XY karyotype, a member of Khelif's coaching team describing problems with chromosomes and hormones while also mentioning that Khelif has been on medication to adjust testosterone levels to bring this closer to the female range, and most recently, a leaked medical report showing that Khelif has a male-specific disorder of sexual development: 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD).
We can ascertain from all this that Khelif went through male puberty and has the male physical advantage in sport that is caused by male sexual development.
Interestingly this is the same DSD that Caster Semenya has. Semenya is another male athlete who competed in a women's category at the Olympics, for the 800 metres track event, and who also won gold.
Individuals with this condition are sometimes mistaken for female at birth due to internal testes and an underdeveloped penis. And are then issued identity documents erroneously stating that they are female. This is what happened with Semenya and almost certainly is the case with Khelif too.
As a European, I’m trying to see the positive side of this situation. Here are a few thoughts:
- It appears that Democrats are often seen as part of an "elite," which makes it difficult for people at home to relate to or understand their message. A full reset might be needed to bridge this gap.
- Europe has long been under the shadow of the United States. Perhaps this could be a good start toward greater independence for Europe.
There is no positive for Europe. Only bad to worse.
Globalization is dead. In Africa hunger and mass migration to Europe.
Europe needs to militarize: Defense budget >5%, deportations, conscription, nukes and a fully functional independent army against expansionist Russia who now will have Trump's acquiesence. America must be seen as possible enemy.
I am not being hyperbolic. It's parabellum.
But that’s precisely the point. If there are new adversaries, new obstacles, it’s essential to work toward becoming stronger, more independent, more prepared and building greater unity among states.
I agree with you, things are looking bad... Today, I'm just trying to be positive. Tomorrow, maybe not ...
I mean, all other things being equal, it would be better if we didn't have to do those things, no?
Imagine we could spend those resources towards more constructive endeavours. Not just for Europeans, but also people in the US and Russia. Take a look at [1] – they could be doing so much better.
It's all just so sad. And pointless.
Also then there's the entire business with global warming.
Right-wing demagogues have been playing this game for years. Imagine being the party of billionaires and pointing to the other side and shouting "elites!"
I've never understood it, but it's an impressive party trick.
Ossobuco, the Italien defender of (checking their comment history) Russia, the Cuban government, the Iranian government,... (probably something else but I stopped checking)
That's a false analogy. We're not fighting the Nazis, and Russia has no intention of dominating the world. If waging war was enough to be like the Nazis, I believe the USA got there a long time ago.
Russia has no interest in going to war against NATO, or Poland, or other European countries. Their only goals, which are obvious to anyone who looks into the situation, is to take the eastern provinces of Ukraine, prevent Ukraine joining nato, and stop ukraine from having nuclear weapons.
They have similar ideas about Moldova and the Baltics. The intense militarization within the Russia is not going to end anytime soon - we've seen this play out in Germany 90 years ago, why do you think this time will be different?
No they don't. Why didn't Russia do anything when the Baltics were in the process of joining NATO? If they had plans for them, they were going to do it before they joined the biggest defense alliance.
If you think this is like Germany 90 years ago, I recommend you read up some history.
The Baltics joined NATO in 2004 when the Russian economy was less than 1/4th the size of what it is now and Russia had just come out of the economic chaos of the 1990s. Their armed forces were also deeply dysfunctional and underfunded back then and struggled against pockets of Chechen separatists.
I can only hope you're right. But I fear that the reality will be closer to simply a withdrawal of US support for the defense of Europe and NATO.
It is ignorant to believe that Ukraine's capitulation would mean that everyone lives happy in peace forever after. Russian officials and national TV have floated the idea of invading Baltic states and other countries more than once. Is the plan to just let them take whatever they want, and condemn any resistance? What happened to defending allies and democracies?
Mate, we tried that for 20 years. And in especially in the later years, against better judgement and forgiving of A LOT of bad faith behaviour from the Russian government. And an outright dictatorship in the EU? lolno.
The EU wanted to embrace Russia, desperately so.
Many Europeans live with this notions "it's better if we all stop fighting and get along". That was certainly the prevalent attitude when I was growing up in the 90s in a post-cold war world. And they're right too, it is better for everyone. But some people aren't interested in what's better for everyone or even their country, they're only interested in what's best for them. Very sad a small group of assholes can just mess things up for so many people, but here we are.
I think that's the hard lessons many Europeans have learned over the last few years, or are in the process of learning (myself included).
We've been doing everything but sustaining neutral relations with Russia. Our foreign policy has been explicitly anti-Russian for decades. The Ukraine war is the blowback.
Like every dictator before him, Putin has fashioned a victimhood narrative. Trump does the same, as did Castro, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc. etc. etc. All these people always claim to be the victim.
There are so many things to comment on in that video and I really don't have the time or interest. but I will comment on one thing: the US bombed Yugoslavia to stop a campaign of genocide.
"Never again" also applies to the Balkans.
Europe and the US did everything they could to NOT intervene. If anything, I think it's an embarrassment we didn't do more sooner. You could argue a little bit about whether it really should have been NATO (rather than the EU or US) that undertook the campaign, and details like that. But I don't think it's very important to the of it.
Of course, that is left out by Sachs. He's repeating a fake victimhood narrative stringed together by half-truths, exaggerations, strategic forgetfulness, and outright nonsense.
Your comment really underscores the issue with the NATO project as a supposed defensive alliance. You think if there is a moral reason for doing something, then that renders all other constraints moot. But because intervening in Yugoslavia was deemed the moral course of action, that shouldn't indicate to Putin or anyone else that NATO will act offensively if they deem some act moral coded. But NATO doesn't get to decide when its actions are precedent-setting and when they aren't. NATO's own history undermines the claim that it is purely a defensive alliance.
That you outright ignore that there was an objective real genocide campaign going on says a lot. The notion they attack nations for all sorts of dubious reasons is just bollocks. This is no better than "remember when the Americans invaded Europe in 1944?!" The context matters.
I'm not ignoring it, it's just that it doesn't alter the calculus for every other nation who might be the target of NATO at some point in the future. NATO only needs to engage in an offensive action once for the precedent to be set permanently. How justified the action was just doesn't matter.
It also underscores the point that there is no objective moral standard to which we can appeal to simultaneously allow an intervention without also permanently altering the power balance in relevant regions. The US right now says genocide is beyond the pale thus warranting intervention. In the future they may say cracking down on political dissent is beyond the pale thus warranting intervention in Russia. Moral impetus tend to be subject to scope creep at the behest of current national interest.
That’s ridiculously naive. This WAS the path we were on. But EU didn’t reject Russia. Russia rejected EU. EU liberal democratic culture was a threat to Putins power. He did not want Russia or their immediate neighbours (which could influence Russia) to get any ideas about liberal democratic values.
I agree that bringing Russia into EU - or at least being a good friend of EU - is the path to peace and safety. But EU can’t do this if Russia doesn’t want any part of it. In hindsight Russias economic integration was mainly an attempt to make EU think twice about responding when Russia harasses its neighbours.
Russia is an imperial state with imperial ambitions. Every day on Russian state TV (with Putins implicit approval) they’re talking about how they will bomb and or take over Germany again. That the Baltic states and Ukraine rightfully belong to them. That Ukraine is full of nazis. How can you just ignore that and think everything will be all right if we just asked Russia very kindly to be friends again?
And no, this has nothing to do with NATO expansion. Russia has nukes. NATO is not a credible military threat to Russia. Putin knew VERY well that his actions would push Finland and Sweden into NATO which completely invalidates the idea that he cares at all about NATO. You know… except that getting Ukraine into NATO would have removed the option of annexing Ukraine territory which was obviously unacceptable.
Lol. Yeah well if we are willing to trade our last shreds of integrity and capitulate that dictatorship is the winning strategy then sure. I mean, not to bring WW2 in the discussion, but back in that time people thought giving them what they want would lead to peace.
These things also span decades or centuries so I think there will be time when Russia and the West will be closer again. It's just they have to stop their imperialism and grabbing land. Think they have enough already.
Why not? We're already in union with the US, which also invades other countries when it feels like it, and nobody sees that as a problem. If anything, we should get along better with Russia because we share frontiers.
You’re getting there! If we were independent from the US right now, we would not be calling for a union right after they invaded a country on our doorsteps.
The US does not want to conquer Europe. That's evidenced by the fact that they basically conquere and re-conquered (from the Germans) France, Italy and most of Germany in 1944-45, and then left, leaving those countries be. In the same time, Russia re-conquered Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, East Germany - and never left. They were happy occuping those areas.
Then left? Well, considering the US has like 40 military bases in Germany, like almost 50.000 stationed personnel there, and there are still some restrictions on what Germany can or cannot do, I won't say they left. Heck, they can also bug the chancellor's phone for decades or blow up their energy infrastructure and nothing happens when it comes to light.
I'm sure Russia would be more than satisfied if they could have kept all of that in their former satellite states including Ukraine.
They're large by territory, but small in terms of economy. Russians put a lot of weight on the former, but it's not very relevant in this day and age, especially considering how uninhabitable a huge chunk of it is.
In any case, I'm surprised this is an issue for you, considering this war revealed how inept Russia's military actually is.
You do realize that Russia's imperial ambitious won't just suddenly vanish away after the war in Ukraine? Russia will keep being Russia if we meet their terms.
Here's a hypothetical situation for you, arguendo in a world without nukes: China invades the US, takes over a couple of states, then a new leader of Germany is elected who will push to reduce any supplies coming in from Europe and will negotiate with China to end the war. Of course China gets to keep the few states they've gotten since they have a large Chinese population, fair is fair after all, we just want peace. Also China's demands include the US to demilitarize except for a small force, so they don't feel threatened by it, after all the US could invade them in the future otherwise! Oh well, all for peace I guess.
Republicans did a great job mobilizing voters. They’ve learned from the tactics the Democrats pioneered and it worked well. Things like early voting, etc. This election will be a landslide but looks like and I believe in large part because of how they exploited the early voting opportunity.
It's been an incredible campaign this time around. I'm a bit of a black sheep as a voter, I voted for Obama twice, I voted Hillary in 2016, Trump in 2020, Trump for the primary, and now again Trump in 2024. Having a multi-ethnic coalition behind him really sealed the deal for him IMO, as well as a coherent platform of deregulation, immigration reform, and putting American workers and businesses first.
Wish I'd bet more in the election markets and crypto, but hindsight is always 20/20 as they say.
> as well as a coherent platform of deregulation, immigration reform, and putting American workers and businesses first.
Deregulation and immigration reform is inherently at-odds with putting American workers first. Apple didn't send their manufacturing jobs to China because of too many regulations and immigrants in America - they did it for the opposite reason. It happened with automotive manufacturing, it happened with silicon fabrication, and it's going to continue for every consumer good America cannot export competitively.
Totally off-topic but I'm noticing that these comments load reasonably quickly without any paging. I remember some popular topics in the past had problems loading even after the number of comments per page was limited. Don't know who deserves it but wanted to offer kudos for the optimization work!
The economy, cost of living, no meaningful or high-paying jobs, the crackdown on Cryptocurrency, the way mainstream media and other mediums treat the right lead to Trump's second Term, in my opinion.
the biggest problem is the climate. with trump winning, most/all of the climate policies will be revered irreparably damaging our planet bringing us to the brink of extinction. ofc it won't be all trump fault, current trends are gloomy enough yet those are the very last few years to actually do something..
Isn't "bringing us to the brink of extinction" rather hyperbolic? As far as I know there is no indication that climate change will be an extinction-level threat? What it will be is hugely damaging for all sorts of other reasons, both to humans and other life.
Beyond that, I agree with you, and it's one of my major concerns as well.
> As far as I know there is no indication that climate change will be an extinction-level threat?
We are currently living in an era of mass extinction. It's not something that's coming, we are in it, it is measurable. 75% of wild animals, insects and trees have disappeared. That is a fact, and it is not related to climate change at all: "just" to how we humans organize the world (mostly habitat loss).
Climate change will bring famines, natural disasters, and global instability (that means wars). This is yet to come.
It is fairly likely that at this rate, we will reach 4 degrees of global warming. At 4 degrees, a large part of the Earth (around the Equator) becomes unlivable for humans (it's too humid and hot, we can't regulate our temperature by sweating, we die). Which means that billions of people will need to relocate. This is not just normal wars: think entire countries that decide to leave their territory and go somewhere else, together with their army.
I don't know what the definition of "extinction-level" means (maybe you only care about some individuals of the human species surviving), but in my book that's as bad as it gets.
I agree with much of that, but I don't think that will really bring us to the "brink of extinction". That said, I'm not keen to find out as we don't really get to reload a save game if you mess up. Sadly, not many seem to agree :-( Or maybe they found a cheat to load save games, idk.
> I agree with much of that, but I don't think that will really bring us to the "brink of extinction".
I think that it was a figure of speech. Whether it brings the human species to the brink of extinction or makes life unbearable for 90% of humans and destroys civilization as we know it is a bit of a technicality, if you ask me.
In any case it is one of the biggest problems of our time.
Maybe. But in the face of a malicious misinformation campaign, I think it's important to be accurate and careful with our words. Hyperbolic statements are not really helpful as it adds just the right ring of truth to the "it's all a load of bollocks by climate alarmists" claims, so it ends up just helping the misinformation campaign.
Right. I understand your point, but I think it's important to understand that if the risk here is not "extinction" in the sense that the human species will disappear, it is actually the end of the world as we know it. And I mean it in the catastrophic way.
If you imagine a big stripe around the equator where people can't survive (it's basically mars) and have no other choice than to "invade" the rest of the world that may already not have the capacity to feed its population anymore, with oceans rising and pushing another couple billions inside the lands (so you can't just build walls as a country, you have civil war).
That's pretty much where we are headed now, and the data seems to show every year that we are actually getting there closer than we thought we were (because when our models "forget" something, usually it's something that made it worse). Not only that, but we are accelerating in that direction.
I personally think we're way passed the point where we can call anything "alarmism". The most conservative scenario I can find without us making drastic changes are all "equally bad" (as in: I don't really care whether or not the human species survives if all my relative and I die in very bad conditions).
That's what I mean with "it's as bad as it gets": between extinction of the human species and the most conservative scenario if we don't change, none of them is acceptable to me.
> In the book of world history things have been way worse[0].
Has it been way worse, really? I think that the climate change that ended the dinosaurs happened slower than what we are expecting with ours (but I didn't check it and I am not completely sure).
I am sure of this, though: the mass extinction we are living now is the fastest we know. Let me rephrase it: we human have made 75% of wild animals, insects and trees disappear faster than it ever happened in the history of Earth.
> In the book of world futures things could get way way worse[1].
"Way way worse"? Do you realise what "20 degrees around the equator becomes uninhabitable" means? It's like half of the inhabited world becomes mars, and the people living there have no choice but to move where the other half is.
Entire regions of the planet could very well become uninhabitable, which would affects hundreds of millions, potentially billions of people. Migratory flows of that size would almost certainly lead to armed conflicts. It's hard to tell how this would end, but it is certainly not going to be pretty.
It could easily lead to the end of civilization. We’ve been seeing global production disruptions for years now. (Currently, quartz for semiconductors. During the pandemic, climate events knockout out PVC production, which meant a global disruption of construction work.)
We’re at the beginning of the exponential ramp on this sort of stuff, where the changes are barely noticeable. For example, until last night (so, assuming best case greenhouse projections), there was roughly a 50% chance that some people reading this will live to see the northern half of Europe turn into a glacier.
Anyway, without modern civilization, we probably won’t survive 10,000’s of years of such stuff. The global population bottlenecked at a few thousand the last time this happened.
Unfortunately, it will get really grim and bad that even if literal extinction is improbably (humanity seems to have already bounced from less than 10k people) it seems to be bad enough to warrant this hyperbole.
Like, if most of the tropics reach wet-bulb temperature and more than a billion people live there - that will be grim.
If we had a functioning congress, laws could be set. The president really is not _meant_ to have a lot of power here. Administrations have been trying to do more, as congress really won't pass laws any longer. However, each administration just throws out the policies of the last administration. Actually passing laws in congress does not necessarily have this same problem.
Precisely. Regardless of your political leaning, Congress has been playing hot potato for a long time. Instead of actually creating rules or regulations, they do nothing and let the administration or courts decide. That way they can go to their constituents and beg for votes or contributions to fight the same branches that they relinquished power to by not doing anything.
A large part of the Republicans' strategy is to appoint partisan judges & let them legislate from the bench for the rest of their lives. Talking up thread about "the biggest problem", this is probably it. In the context of climate change, recently we can see SCOTUS shooting down environmental protections. This happens in lower courts too, but those don't make national news.
The problem is that trump believes the president is king of America, and that a dictatorship is the best form of government. Even bigger problem: far too many Republicans seem to agree with him and will try to hasten the descent into a fascist authoritarian dictatorship. I have no idea if they will be successful, but it doesn't look like there will be much to stop them.
I think the problem is that when the Democrats are in power, they also attempt to inflate the power of the executive branch. Both parties have been doing this for a while, and are AGHAST when the opposing party gets elected. No one seems to want to take back the power the executive branch, which makes each new bad president more and more of a disaster.
I don't think the president does have much power over this? The most important things are indeed enshrined in legislation. I think it's pretty unlikely they are going to spend any political capital on undoing any legislation in this space.
"The President might not sign the bill, however. If he specifically rejects
the bill, called a veto, the bill returns to Congress. There it is voted on
again, and if both houses of Congress pass the bill again, but this time by a
two-thirds majority, then the bill becomes law without the President’s
signature. This is called “overriding a veto,” and is difficult to do because
of the two-thirds majority requirement."
I am not sure that's the case. The main supporter is a guy who produces e-cars with all the interests to sell more of them.
The way I see it, he will continue with the transition whenever it benefits him/the country. Which means some programs might be canceled, especially if they go against such interests.
> The main supporter is a guy who produces e-cars with all the interests to sell more of them.
Sure Elon might have an impact on CO2 emissions in the transport sector but I don't see him moving things that don't directly benefit him, say, electricity/heat production or agriculture.
Tesla literally has a massive (electrical) energy storage business alongside solar. There are huge battery installations that are helping regions like Hawaii and Australia pivot to renewables.
That visual shows that road transport is 11% , making it the second highest category, as the poster said. This is a great graphic though, thanks for sharing!
Edit: actually in the graphic it's the largest sector! My bad
Not sure how reliable all this is... Yet it seems "road" is nearly 10-11% which is big enough to solve and to have already an impact in everyday life. Then it cascades to other sectors too.
Musk does seem to have gone bonkers in the last two years or so, but I agree. I suspect he might end up being a surprisingly moderating, rational influence on Trump. He might have (at least publicly) aligned himself with conspiracy theorists, outrage merchants and general grifters for now, but I think at heart he's still pro-science.
You know you're in trouble when Musk of all people is considered a moderating influence compared to your president.
I'm not convinced Musk cares all that much about the environment anymore, if he ever truly did. EVs were a bet that car buyers (and governments) would care about the environment.
Musk just wants to go to Mars and leave Earth behind.
I guess he is pro science indeed. And opportunistic too. He might also morally align with Trump more than with Dems, who knows. These elections were just an unfortunately ridiculous show.
Why wouldn't we take his public rhetoric and actions at face value? Why is this possibly a good idea to simply say 'well in his heart he trusts science' when he is demonstrating the contrary?
I don't want to live in fantasy land here. Based on observable actions, Musk isn't brining any positive force to the table
Isn’t that obvious? He knew he could only get to the position he’s now in (or at least have the best chance of doing so) if he joined in with the MAGA brigade.
He clearly does align with the movement in some ways, but he also is responsible for SpaceX, for example. Don’t you think that marks him out as being a bit different from the others?
Also, there are observable actions. If you listen to some of the podcasts he’s been on recently (as painful as they can be) you’ll hear him very flatly rejecting suggestions of quackery and ‘vaccine scepticism’. He’s so obviously not stupid, even if he’s degenerated somewhat, as many of us have, by constant exposure to poisonous social media.
He had some wins (SpaceX, Tesla) certainly, but that doesn't mean his bizarre behavior and clear display of bizarre beliefs aren't concerning or he's somehow immune believing other nonsensical things.
You can't predicate the fact he has had success with those companies and somehow say his actions are some undercover operation to gain a position of power that will help average Americans or moderate the administration or whatever you want to say with that.
We should be focused on public actions and as it sits over the last 4 years in particular, Musk's actions are very concerning and there is serious cause for concern.
You haven't proven he isn't fully bought on MAGA bullshit with this. Its fantasy thinking running contrary to available evidence. He's broadly bought into Trump and the policies that brings, that much is clear.
Yes I have, he's broadly comfortable with MAGA ideas. Taken together with rhetoric and how he acts, it seems like a rationale conclusion.
Just because someone does a sit down interview and nudges around the edges about things they disagree with doesn't mean he's not fully bought in. There is zero evidence he meaningfully disagrees with Trump on anything of consequence
He donated at least $132 million dollars to the Trump campaign and GOP allies[0], for god sakes. Do you really think anyone donates $132 million dollars to something they aren't fully bought in to?
When someone shows you who they are, you should believe them.
He's not bought in to the anti-vax movement, and he doesn't deny anthropogenic climate change. Aren't those both quite MAGA?
> There is zero evidence he meaningfully disagrees with Trump on anything of consequence
What I just said above is evidence, I think. There certainly isn't zero evidence.
> Do you really think anyone donates $132 million dollars to something they aren't fully bought in to?
Yes — absolutely. People make compromises all the time, and employ strategies that exchange short-term (even reputational) cost for long-term benefit.
> When someone shows you who they are, you should believe them.
He has shown us who he is, so far, by his actions in building companies and promoting rationality and science. Yes, he's also recently gone down the rabbit hole of nonsense on Twitter, but for now I don't think that fully represents his underlying nature.
I have no particular dog in this fight. I'm not American and nor do I have any particular love of Musk. However, I think you're overreacting.
As for your source: I know how much he's donated, and it is a shocking amount. However, in the wake of Trump's re-election, the share price of Tesla has just gone up 15% making Musk $15 billion richer. Makes that $132 million seem like pocket change. At worst, he's a self-interested opportunistic capitalist. But he's not a moron or a religious zealot as others are.
I expect he will either indeed be a moderating influence on the administration (remember this is in the context of Trump; I'm not saying he counts as a moderate in the usual sense) or will quickly lose favour or otherwise become disenchanted with Trump and Trumpism and vacate whatever position he's granted and move on.
Also remember: I'm not arguing he's particularly sensible or even acts like a grown up (he doesn't). I'm arguing that he's not 'literally Hitler' as some seem to be insinuating.
What makes people think Trump is going to run the show? I have a feeling he's going to be the rubber stamp while Vance, Thiel and Musk and gang will run the show behind the scenes.
as someone from eu - doesn't us now/under dems extract top amount of fossils from all the time? I mean it's not like it was good now. It looks like it'll get worse but the current path wasn't good either...
The US has been on a strong downward trend for CO2 output per capita for decades now [1]. The IRA is expected to significantly accelerate this trajectory, although it's unclear how much of that will now come to pass.
It does, thank goodness. Otherwise it would come from Saudi and other despots. We should be producing as much as we can in the US to quit funding horrible regimes.
There is the short term reality that we are dependent on gas and oil and, decreasingly, coal. The difference between the two parties is the long term vision.
Dems want to have international treaties to address the problem and are willing to spend money to move away from fossil fuels. Republicans downplay the science (or outright deny it) and think international treaties make the US less independent and therefore weaker, and they would much rather cut taxes for Elon Musk than spend money on energy infrastructure.
Unsustainable practices lead to exhaustion of resources and subsequent spikes in prices. Prices today will be nothing compared to the prices we face when the earth exhausted of topsoil, the sea is exhausted of fish, and the water table exhausted of clean water.
Voting against the environment in favor of lower prices will ultimately lead to higher prices.
Global energy prices are high because of wars in Europe.
The rise of right wing forces globally and anti immigration forces, is a consequence of immigration from regions that are not only crushed by wars, but also by climate instability.
Since solutions are too complex and require global cooperation, its easier for governments to not do anything.
As this keeps up, and larger areas of the world become uninhabitable, more migration will occur, leading to more power to demagogues and dictators.
Alternatively, if the fed didn't just print money to pay for unnecessary vote-buying schemes then the inflation rate would have been only minimally (if at all) impacted by the points you made.
If you want a straight line drawn in markers for something like the global economy - I mean, sure?
Given the forum though, I hesitate to place you amongst such company. I am guessing you know what the Fed's remit is, and therefore WHY they are printing money.
shame they’re either unwilling or unable to trace the source of the inflation.
also, it’s going to get worse for that person’s grocery bill under trump. the middle class will come under even greater short-term pressure over the next few years as trump’s “concepts of a plan” begin to materialize.
but hey, at lease my kitten is safe. just wish someone would do something about all the geese here.
We can't be 100% sure about that. We know that agriculture can't survive a constant rise of temperature. At some point the roots are unable to grasp water from the soil, and then everything dies at the same moment.
Its increasingly difficult for me to believe that climate change is a critical issue when the attendees of World Economic Forum + Al Gore + Bill Gates + Leanardo Dicaprio all fly around in private jets while lecturing me on why i should be not be eating meat.
I was of the impression that US contribution to global emissions was relatively low for our population size and per capita energy usage thus making domestic climate change policy relatively small potatoes. Is that not true? Is there more to it than that?
> I guess another angle is that he is best buddies with Elon who could potentially do some interesting things there.
Elon is comoditizing space. If that's profitable, he will get SpaceX to a point where people go on holiday in a rocket. That's exactly going in the wrong direction in terms of climate.
Emissions in the US are pretty much negligible compared to China and India. It would have to be a radical shift that is going to take way more than four years to make US climate policy even relevant to the planet as a whole.
You need to account for indirect emissions. Because all the factories are in China means that China emits more, but those iPads are not being sold and used in China.
When you import goods, you import their emissions. It's just super hard to measure (and we like to blame it all on China).
If the issue is emissions per capita then the solution is simply to increase the population faster than the increase in emissions.
Similar, countries with aging population will see an increase in emissions per capita regardless if they are actually decreasing emissions, as long the population loss is greater than emissions decreases.
And if the economy starts to turn (or maybe even if it doesn’t) say good by to the relatively apolitical Fed and rate-setting. Which’ll bring a boom, more inflation, and a hard crash on the other side.
What are you talking about? The US has the 2nd heighest emissions behind China, almost double India's. The only countries higher than it per-capita are Canada, Australia and petro-states or tiny countries.
And China is already leading the world in moving to renewable technology, they are moving in the right direction (not entirely for altruistic reasons - it fulfils their ambitions of energy self-sufficiency).
Another example of Democrats being really poor communicators on specific important issues—they could easily frame renewables as a protectionist issue and make it relevant but instead they don't know how to talk about it so they just avoid it whenever possible.
That exact message has been tried and energy independence/stick-it-to-OPEC remains fairly common way of trying to sell it. Actual measures to onshore renewable industry were successfully demonized as corrupt, didn’t go over well.
I do wonder whether democrats will shift to post-conservative messaging. "Let's preserve what we have left of our beautiful American forests" might be able to resonate. Idk.
I'm sure in some meeting somewhere someone floated that exact idea and then got promptly laughed out of the room by a bunch of people who live in a filter bubble in which protectionism is too politically close to populism to be palatable.
Why cherry-pick per-capita when what matters to the climate is actual output, not output per capita. Lets take Australia, as an example, their total co2 output is around 1% of the world's co2 output. If Australia ceased producing all of its co2, it wouldn't make much difference at all. Per capita figures are just a waste of everyone's time.
As someone from a smallish country (UK), I don't think I agree. Per capita is the only-) way of measuring emmissions that doesn't wind up a proxy for just listing the biggest countries.
Almost 1/5 people are in China, if tomorrow the country divided itself up into smaller nations would thay change anything about the pollution bring emmited?
Great, let's just move everyone to Australia! Or wait...
Unless you have policy recommendations to change the total number of people on Earth (please don't) then global emissions per capita are the only stat that matters.
I always try to convince people the best metric is CO2/land area. It actually adjusts for the size of your country without the silly idea that having more people means your country is doing "better" from an emissions perspective.
At this moment it does not matter anymore. In the next decades Mar-a-lago will be hit, either if Trump likes it or if not. He just can make it sooner and worse.
What could Trump do in that respect? Bring back coal? Coal isn't coming back. The economics aren't there short of literally paying for the burning of coal. And while Trump seems to lean into the AGW deniers, he does seem to at least respect reducing the classic "silent spring" sorts of pollution that obviously dirty air and water.
US oil production is the highest in the world, the highest in its history, and is so maxed out that there are loads of drilling rights that aren't even being exercised as oil companies all realized that it was pyrrhic with current low oil prices.
On the climate position I don't think things can go back. Wind, solar and evolving nuclear just make it a silly thing to do.
He can, and has basically promised to massively subsidize fracking. Fracking is still not profitable, never has been, probably never will be. It's existence is purely political.
This is intriguing and I've actually never heard this take. (Not disagreeing, to be clear.) My laymen's understanding is that domestic natural gas production has gone way up in this century and I lazily assumed this was why.
Yes, there is strategic value in being able to extract fossil fuels domestically, and fracking allows this, only at great economic (and environmental) cost.
Opening up coal mines just to bring back jobs in the rust belt does not make any sense. Start mining silicon and other minerals used in solar, batteries and chips instead. It makes a lot more sense even though the initial investment is higher.
That promise played upon the listener thinking the US had somehow suppressed oil production. In reality oil/gas production has gone wild, now with a large surplus over domestic consumption. There are huge numbers of rights that have been granted but not exercised because the world is so awash in oil that the price makes most non-conventional fields unprofitable.
There just isn't anything to really be done there.
“ That promise played upon the listener thinking the US had somehow … “
this is the summary of trumps entire campaign platform. i’m honestly not even sure he expressed a concrete policy on anything. he said he wants even more aggressive tariffs and will start deportation on day 1 (and was relatively nonchalant about some “legal” immigrants being caught up with “illegal” ones). cut dei.
there’s honestly no plan or policy, just a nebulous wish list that appeals to the base impulses of humanity.
the only real expectation that i have is that justices thomas and alito will retire early in his term to allow him to appoint new ones early enough to not allow democrats to stall like mcconnell did.
The same thing that happens when you subsidize EVs - we just use more. If you lower the cost of consumption, consumption goes up. If you lower the cost of alternative means of consumption, total consumption still goes up.
It goes up either way, you might as well have the source be here instead of from a foreign adversary.
He could take away government subsidies and incentives for clean energy production. And subsidies for converting consumption to electricity (like EVs, heat pump furnaces, water heaters, and stoves).
He could target research into clean energy technology, ending government initiatives and taking away research grants.
He could remove regulations on energy efficiency.
He could put giant tariffs on anything made in China that is used in clean energy production (like solar panels, batteries, and electronics).
He could make it harder to get approvals to install clean energy production, siding with NIMBYs who oppose solar, wind, and battery projects.
He could cut federal funding for public transit.
I don't know how much of that he would actually do, but in the past he has expressed support for a lot of it. So I think he will try to do some of it.
It's possible we have already reached a tipping point where the total cost of clean energy production and consumption is cheaper even without all of these subsidies and so on. If so, then the transition might continue anyway. But if so, I think it will still be a slower transition.
I think this is doubtful, and it's a testament to the way the IRA was written. There are now bipartisan constituencies who support different parts of it. And there was no real chance we were going to get anything new on the climate regardless of the outcome. I think this issue will just be status quo for this term.
Climate policies were already getting gutted under this administration due to reversal of Chevron deference by SCOTUS (packed by previous Trump/Pence administration).
EPA and other regulatory agencies have been stripped of their regulatory powers. Any “vague” law which was interpreted by agencies can now be challenged in courts.
I think solar is only cheapest at point of production. Once you factor in transmission costs, grid congestion, intermittent supply, etc. Solar is still expensive at point of consumption.
It's not to argue directly against your point but just that we still have a lot of work to move over to a sustainable electrical grid. And that will be helped by favourable policy
I absolutely hope the EU ramps military spending and negates the need for US support. Sometimes, you need a catalyst, and clearly another nation should not be beholden to US defense agreements.
Trump doesn’t want to leave NATO, that would be dumb. He wants those not “paying their fair share” to pay more or the US will leave. It’s a negotiating tactic. So if you don’t want the US to leave NATO and you’re in a NATO country then get them to spend more on NATO.
You probably know this, but just in case: NATO is not a club you pay 2% in to for protection. The 2% is the required spending on YOUR OWN defence. In practice this benefits USA as a major weapon producer, at least it has until now. I have a feeling Europe feels less certain that they will buy American next time.
Doesn't strength in numbers contradict your idea of kicking out the weak?
When I hear phrases like strength in numbers, I think of elephants. When a herd of elephants watches lions circle their community, the strong ones stand around their young to protect them.
That's analogous to "strong" countries subsidizing ones who can't provide for themselves, because having an allied presence is helpful.
Your wording, both the use of "paying their fair share" and "get them to spend more on NATO"-part made it sounds like countries actually pay money into NATO. Trump also makes it sound like that, and he certainly gave the impression that if other NATO countries started "paying more" (aka spending more) that would mean more money for the US. The fact is that as long as the USA wants to be able to win two world wars at once, they still need their astronomic millitary budget, and what tiny European countries spend makes no difference. My comment was not about "changing your post", it was to make sure nobody else is confused about this after reading your post.
When that is said, its good that most NATO countries are hitting and exceeding 2%. It's clear that Europe can not rely on USA to be the "world police", we need to be be able to defend ourself.
Also, friendly reminder that article 5 has been used exactly once, and that was to defend USA. Soldiers of my country has died defending USA.
I disagree with the guy you are responding to as well. But I don’t think he’s saying that Trump wants people to pay the 2% like it is a subscription fee. I think he’s just saying that Trump is using the possibility of leaving as a threat in the hopes that countries will meet their 2% obligation.
As to what Trump actually is saying, I have no idea, he’s hard to parse.
And by 'pay more' he means 'buy more US weapons'. NATO is a conveniently captive market for the US arms manufacturers, and no way they're going to want to pull out of that while they still have stock to sell.
Before 2020 elections John Bolton said that Trump doesn't see the point for NATO and will consider withdrawing if he wins in 2020. Because of that a NATO Support at was passed in Congress to block the president from single handly withdraw the US from NATO. That was over 4 years ago, hopefully he changed his mind.
He was very correct in calling out EU countries on Russian gas reliance (which is still somehow an issue!), and also on the EU being way too comfortable with letting the US pick up the slack when it came to our defense.
The EU SHOULD be spending the agreed upon 2%, all this weasley shit the EU gov'ts are pulling is a complete joke considering the massive Bear in the room that is Russia.
Maybe EU countries should be those that leave NATO so they won't be blackmailed. They have some nuclear capable countries already. It would be much weaker alliance but with nuclear warhead one just need to press the button. Since EU states are getting more and more populists leaders this can happen eventually.
My theory is that we will leave Nato because he won’t want war when Putin pushes into Europe. His base doesn’t care frankly. The direct cost is too high and they can’t see past grocery prices.
That will all depend on how worn down the Russian military actually is and how long it needs to rebuild. And at any rate the threat of Russian military action will be used to punish any European country that doesn’t accept Russian influence. It will be used on former Soviet republics.
The only thing that may stop Trump and saving Europe is his ego now that he has effective immunity from prosecution as Putin is no longer a threat to him.
We will see who the bigger narcissist actually is. Putin is probably smarter though.
We need some seriously smart republicans.
Countries with right wing Russian aligned puppets may prevent direct conflict by appeasement but nevertheless they will be under Putin’s control.
China will continue being China. Where semiconductors fall will be interesting as will access to battery tech.
Trump will print money to appease his base and we will see exactly how economic forces evolve beyond control.
Until it is. But statements like this are why the world as a society is backsliding, countries putting up walls and isolating themselves instead of seeing the benefits of cooperation in terms of stability and economy. Just look at the economic downturn that happened in the UK when they withdrew from the EU, or how Russia was shunned, excluded and sanctioned for starting an unprovoked war.
Any benefit the US thinks they get for the policies that Trump and his ear-whisperers wants to enact will be short-term. Which is not a problem for Trump as he won't be there to see the long term consequences.
States like New York and California can become Carbon Negative on their own if they wanted to.
The Federal government is not needed for liberals to take the lead on this, but the mediocre center left Democrats who run everything in Blue States refuse to lift a finger.
I also expect Trump to roll back many of those policies and create new, worse ones like opening up more federal land for drilling and mining.
That said, you must have a lot more faith in the current policies than I do. The sole focus on limiting carbon in the atmosphere has been woefully misguided in my opinion. We need to focus on reducing our total impact on the planet, not just trying to mitigate it a bit while we continue to consume more resources and use use more energy every year.
If human impact on the planet is going to kill us all with Trump in office, it was going to happen either way.
> opening up more federal land for drilling and mining
I'm honestly not sure how much a difference Trump will make in this. The US greatly increased oil and gas production under Biden.
It seems that policies that supported an energy transition were generally working. If those get rolled back, hopefully things are in a good enough place that more sustainable energy continues dominating.
I'm still not actually clear how an energy transition will even work unless its paired with a huge reduction in how much total energy we actually use.
Moving from fossil fuels to renewables or even nuclear is all well and good, but it takes a huge amount of natural resources to pull off. Nuclear may be easier, renewables require a lot more resources than we currently have.
> unless its paired with a huge reduction in how much total energy we actually use.
This is very unrealistic IMO. That will never happen. It flies against the whole idea of civilization and the development of human history.
Energy consumption will rise on larger timescales. Best you can do is to tame the growth by efficiency and using more renewable, greener energy generation.
If you want to keep bees on your apartment roof that is fine, but we are not all going back to being subsistence farmers at this point.
While I do agree that its unrealistic to this people collectively will learn what it means to have "enough", I don't see another realistic solution.
We're not only increasing total energy consumption every year, we're increasing energy consumption per capita. It may be one thing if the argument is that energy use will rise or fall inline with population, but that's not the case.
This is the main crux of why climate change debates have always felt hollow to me. We can argue about plastic straws, diesel engine emissions, or what an acceptable level of parts per million in the atmosphere is but those are all surface level problems. Assuming the science linking human impact to climate issues is accurate, we're screwed no matter what we do on those issues if we continue to demand more power from whatever today's preferred energy source is.
I fully agree that all these things don't _solve_ anything and it never will, it just delays the inevitable a little bit.
But it is not completely out of the question we could solve abundant nonpolluting energy. Failure there is not inevitable.
> people collectively will learn what it means to have "enough"
Maybe I am too cynical, but I think the problem with this is that means, in practice:
"OK, everyone. Let's stop accelerated technological progress, and the level of civilization we have today, that's where we're going to stay at from now on, with maybe some smaller bugfixes rolling out once every 50 years or so.
The quality of life you have today? That's it.
Oh, and all you guys still in poverty [there are still billions of people who use very little energy], you're also going to have to stay there. Sorry."
That will in turn cause civil unrest and even more unhappy people than we have today, which means increased totalitarianism, oppression and violence to quash that to keep societies "stable". For all the ills of consumerism and aspirationism, it _is_ serving as an opium to keep people distracted from the harsh realities of the world.
We'd go back to the Middle Ages, in terms of the rate of improvement of the quality of life. I don't think many people are OK with that.
> But it is not completely out of the question we could solve abundant nonpolluting energy. Failure there is not inevitable.
I am pretty cynical and skeptical, so that may be tainting my view here for sure. This idea of abundant, nonpolluting energy feels like a perpetual motion machine to me. Energy systems require control to be useful, from storage to transmission to heat dissipation. Energy systems are inherently lossy and though we could one day find a cleaner or even truly clean energy source, that energy still has to be stored, transmitted, and used.
> OK, everyone. Let's stop accelerated technological progress, and the level of civilization we have today, that's where we're going to stay at from now on, with maybe some smaller bugfixes rolling out once every 50 years or so.
The opposite side of the coin is interesting to consider as well. We will always think things could be better, and maybe we even can make them better. We need to know what "enough" is though, and that would mean that we could get to a point where we have consumed enough resources and we should slow down or stop. "Progress" as a goal always sounds great on the surface, but it has to be directional (we need to know what we're progressing towards) and it must be bounded when goals are reached.
This is really where my cynicism steps in though. I just haven't seen many examples of people who can actually find "enough" and stop there. We tend to get used to what we have now and imagine ways things could get better. If energy were better used today, for example, I strongly believe that everyone could have the basics of food, water, shelter, and community covered and we wouldn't be stuck hating our jobs and always stressed out. We just collectively don't seem to want that.
> The US greatly increased oil and gas production under Biden.
And critically, I think, the Harris campaign failed to highlight facts like that, and emphasize how she will be different. Instead she completely bungled the messaging and went for "I'll do nothing different from what Biden did except add a Republican in my cabinet".
> “What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” co-host of ABC’s “The View” Sunny Hostin asked Harris, looking to give her a set for her to spike over the net. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said.
Her campaign, and the democratic party more broadly, made a lot of mistakes. Her failing to distinguish herself from Biden was one of them, but I don't actually think it was the worst. They believed that Biden was going to win and waited way too late to swap in a replacement, it kind of makes sense that they wouldn't try to differentiate if they honestly believed Biden was a good candidate with a viable platform.
That's fair, they definitely waited too late. I guess I also wonder, what if they just left Biden as is. They believed he was going to win, heck he got 80M+ popular votes when he ran. Why risk swap him out. But then, I think, once they did swap him, she could have boosted her position by emphasizing how she will do things better. But perhaps she was also honest and didn't want to lie and she didn't really plan on changing anything.
The only conclusion I could make from the DNC dropping Biden so late was that he was so clearly slipping that they couldn't hide it, or ignore it, anymore. I have to assume that if they kept him on the ticket we would have seen a few months of campaigning that could look an awful lot like elder abuse.
Really? Are you still buying all your stuff from China where they are standing up new coal plants every day? Just because the pollution doesn't happen here doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
I feel like they were not only the most useless policies, with decades away targets, but also had the most damage on labour, see car manufacturers all in crisis cutting jobs
No, but the volume of hydrocarbons SpaceX are burning to provide a broadband network by cluttering low earth orbit with shiny things is hardly an obvious win.
Climate policies have failed. They're all either empty signaling exercises (carbon offsets, CAFE standards) or economically ruinous proposals to deliberately impoverish people (degrowth). The Paris accords penalize developed economies while giving developing countries a pass on emissions and an unfair advantage in trade. This idea that we can just sit down in a room with all the world's leaders and agree to just reduce emissions is a fantasy.
The real climate policy we need, and one we might just get from the incoming administration, is support for startups that explore new geoengineering technology. We've on our way to being Kardashev type I civilization, and as such, we should establish explicit closed-loop control over our climate.
Adding comments favored or tailored to one political party or another should not be allowed on HN.
Clicked on this thread for insightful discussion/debate, I’m just reading people talk about how trump was not a good candidate, and how kamala campaigned incorrectly and so on so forth
Talking about the faults/triumphs of some campaigns or candidates does not favor a party, IMO. I supported one party, but even I can notice and address the problems in that campaign.
I don’t have an opinion on your first sentence but happy to try and engage in the second one…
As a Brit looking in from the outside, it’s hard for me to understand how choices have been made in this election, but if I were to attempt a charitable take, did Trump win because he tunes in to some sort of low level anger/resentment/frustration felt by a chunk of the population?
Whereas the Democrats, more polished perhaps as they are, have failed to make that connection sufficiently?
And that connection - or whatever it is that the population picks up on from Trump, outweighs the “obvious flaws” that his detractors may point towards?
Ie they don’t vote for him because of his hyperbole and “questionable” behaviour, they vote for him in spite of that - for other reasons.
I can see the Democrats didn’t help matters by pushing Biden to run when he clearly shouldn’t have, though perhaps it was the lesser of two evils at the time (from their point of view) given his proven record of being able to actually beat Trump.
Happy to be corrected if this is a bad or naive analysis!!
1) It's very hard for a woman to be elected president.
2) The electorate demographic without college degrees is more likely to make an emotional decision that is more easily manipulated with Trump-style bombast.
Not in a battleground state, I didn't see any advertising, but the Dems should have pounded Trump as a criminal sex offending lying hypocrit draft dodger loser felon bankrupt self-obsessed asshole (note this is not snark it's literally how they should have gone at him).
> 1) It's very hard for a woman to be elected president.
The UK voted for Margaret Thatcher three times (1979, 1983, 1987). I'm sceptical about claims that the 2020s US is somehow more sexist than 1980s Britain.
Maybe, it is easier for centre-right female leaders to win than centre-left ones? Maybe the first female President of the US will be a Republican?
Arguably, Hillary 2016 was the best candidate by far. Nobody thought Trump was better until he won. If you say she had baggage, it was nothing to Trump's baggage, but there's a huge double standard based on gender.
Nazi didn't resonate, besides he isn't literally a Nazi. All the other faults I mentioned though are literally true. Need to find the thing that makes him look weak to the demographic you are targeting and hammer on it.
This is going to be the "snake ate my face" situation real fast. Republicans push class divide so to keep their voter base uneducated and poor. Seems like they've reached the critical mass necessary. I don't understand any other way they vote someone in who has demonstrated time and again he'll work against their own interests. I understand short sighted single issue greed for the mighty dollar but it is a nonsensical vote for anyone else.
This is the part that blows my mind consistently. The number of people screaming “WHY would ANYONE vote for him?!” and then not even considering trying to find out is a true bummer.
We know why. They are ignorant, don't care, or duped. There is no reason to vote for a person morally bankrupt and doesn't have any reasonable solutions to problems. A person with felonies can't even be on a Jury in this country, and people elected him President after his attempt to overthrow the government? I would struggle to hire him to mow my grass let alone run the country. This whole "You need to talk to us" is ridiculous as the positions.
I'll give it a shot, just maybe to help one person understand.
They voted for him because 15+ years of government + federal reserve policy has led to massive bubbles in all US capital assets while impoverishing a wide swath of the population. The people who voted for Trump are those who've "lost" in the giant crypto+stock Ponzi scheme.
The reason people on the winning side of this have such a hard time seeing it is that, en masse, they've turned away from any semblance of traditional valuation measures for capital assets. I assume they've done this because it's too emotionally uncomfortable to consider the notion that their entire wealth isn't because they're geniuses but because of deranged government policy.
And somehow Trump is going to reign this in? Him? How? Did you see both crypto markets and stock "ponzi" scheme reaction to his election? If this is their reasoning, it is flawed, to avoid using terms that are much less charitable. It feels that this kind of justification is trying to fit a narrative to the deed that makes no sense, somehow justify it.
I personally think it's a culture war thing that caused this. And it is probably going to get worse.
Of course he won't. But, see, no one will. Both parties are equally culpable here. People are just doing protest votes at this point. What are they even supposed to do? No one can even buy a house. The only actual solution is to put interest rates up to 8% and trigger a revaluation and a recession, but the odds of that are zero, no matter who is president.
Yep. It's ironic and shitty, but people just did a protest vote. They aren't looking at the specific proposals. They don't care anymore. You're absolutely right, but honestly both parties are completely in on the Ponzi scheme. So it probably doesn't matter.
Read my other comments. It's a protest vote. They don't care what his actual policies are. No one is willing to pop the economic bubble, so voters are just going to burn the whole thing down.
It's probably split. But it doesn't matter. The important question is who the people who have lost in the lottery voted for, not who the winners voted for.
That's what a lot of Trump voters believe about people who don't like him. He used to generally have good public opinion (prior to his ascendance in 2015). A lot of people believe that his bad press is primarily due to intentional smear campaigns and lawfare by the powers that be.
In that sense, for many people, a vote for Trump is like apes in /r/stonks buying and holding GME. It's less about what they want in a positive sense, and more about what they don't want: namely extreme leftism and the current ruling class in Washington, the media, billionaires, and everyone else who attended the WEF in Davos -- all the folks who care nothing for the average Joe.
He may not fix it, they may not even expect him to be able to, but voting for him is a way to have a voice. At least he really upsets all those powerful people! And he did get some stuff conservatives liked done in his first term.
It's not the riches per se that they take issue with. In fact, they admire and celebrate rich people who got there by hard work, luck, and good business (just like apes in /r/stonks celebrate how rich DFV got on GME options). What they take issue with is how certain powerful people use their riches and power in ways that benefit only themselves and hurt everyone else (who isn't rich) -- particularly the power establishment in Washington, New York, and Silicon Valley.
To give one specific example, private equity firms have been buying out small local businesses on a massive scale (like veterinary clinics), jacking up the prices, paying the workers less, and giving customers a worse experience.
That's not the sort of thing they perceive Trump to be doing with his riches and power. In fact, I don't see any way Trump is messing with the macroeconomy in his own business practices (do you know of any?).
Not trying? It was all the media did for like 2017 through 2018. “Venture safari-style among the rural or flyover-state-suburban white“ was practically its own genre, and it was everywhere. You couldn’t turn on NPR without hearing a devout rural white Christian relate how they prayed on it then held their nose and voted for the unrepentant sinner because of abortion. It’s why Vance’s weird, insulting book was embraced by the Left(!) as “real talk” from an actual member of the group they were trying to understand.
Kind of a silly point you're making, considering that Kamala's views and most Christian denominations are completely irreconcilable. Not that she has ever repented for anything - or even admitted to any mistakes of any kind.
This is the kind of thing the people they interviewed were saying.
[edit] I mean it was my shorthand for “I know he’s a serial adulterer, and his business dealings are shady, and he says some really awful things… but I prayed on it and…” which is closer to a direct quote of things I heard multiple times. Other demographics had other reasons but that was a common one from the pro-life set.
To be fair, most Christian denominations establish inflexibility at the outset by claiming to be a worldview that is "true", "unerring", or similar attribute, despite lacking any epistemological introspection -- meaning of the 5,000 or so different denominations in the world, at least 4,999 are sorely disappointed that not only do they not reconcile to each other, they also don't reconcile to reality.
Whereas a person can review an idea, try it on like a coat, see how it fits, and then keep or discard if it's found amenable and improving to their views of the world.
Vice President Harris' opponent also professes and acts on a worldview wildly deviant from most, if not all, Christian denominations.
Well, objectively, only one religion can be true if any religion is true, just as the existence of gravity is irreconcilable with the existence of no gravity; but go on. We haven't grown up as a nation and collectively decided which one it is yet, but I have preferences. Not that preferences even matter - if I'm falling off a building, my preference for there to be no gravity won't make a difference.
At most one. Kinda. Does depend on the beliefs, which are by convention basically unrestricted. Also how we’re defining “true” could easily admit partial truth for a whole bunch that might be incompatible if any were entirely true.
Oh, a big whopping plurality hits the "Nones" just fine. As it is not a religion, it avoids the plaguing morass of inchoate morality claims justifying a grift altogether.
> And claims like this are why you lost this election, will never win elections, or win anyone over to your side.
Interesting!
1. I didn't run for an office
2. I am a political independent
3. I am not a political party in a first-past-the-post-system defined by the reverberations of the 3/5th compromise.
I'm genuinely curious why you paint more than half the nation (though not half the presidential 2024 voters) with a broad brush of negative antithesis regarding a relatively different claim ("Nones" exercise morality individually, rather than externalizing their moral decision making to an inchoate morass of morality-derived alleged religious authorities).
> I'm genuinely curious why you paint more than half the nation (though not half the 2024 voters) with a broad brush of negative antithesis.
Simple. The only lesson people who despise Trump have learned, and are learning, is that they didn't call Trump supporters every brand of -ists enough. Huge surprise, this generates broad negative anthesis and it's well deserved, as well as completely backfiring. The name calling is useless now.
Oh, I think I get your point, you want people to simply ignore folks that gleefully transgress social norms and exercise sexism, racism, and other bigotries against people who, by your definition, are mentally ill and thus a worthy target of mockery and conduct unbecoming christianity's moral standards, or by most normal people, are guilty of being women, of being men, of being gay, of being lesbian, of being queer, of being trans, of being of light pigment, of being educated, of being uneducated, of being homeless, of actually being mentally ill, of being disabled, of being children, of being elderly, of being generally unwanted by a heaving horde of hate.
Do you believe the same for people who violate religious taboos?
Regardless of the answer, we're far afield of the original discussion, and I'll not pursue this thread further.
Though, I do empathize -- it must be highly embarrassing to have racism, sexism, and other bigotries noted as being offensive to people in public. Triumphalism, often a result of religious fervor, masks that in an echo chamber, so social media can be jarring for folks in such a situation.
---
PS
>> If that's not sexist, I don't know what is.
This fact is quite apparent that you don't know what sexism, and somehow think it applies in a situation where a trans fem wants to be in a situation more protective than forcing a locker room share with her sexual assignment at birth. What your assumed resolution, coached carefully by pollsters no doubt before being coached through formal and informal propaganda channels, actually is is transgressive and probably unnecessary. Though to redefine sexism as "not respecting of gender norms my religion requires me to prefer" is quite a stretch
I believe my religion, and the religions of other people, is more deserving of protection than your self-proclaimed ability to transgress social norms; and voted accordingly.
> Though, I do empathize -- it must be highly embarrassing to have racism, sexism, and other bigotries noted as being offensive to people.
Reminder that Kamala Harris believes 15 year old young men who suddenly identify as female, have the right to compete with similar-aged young women and be in their locker rooms to see them naked. If that's not sexist, I don't know what is.
> Triumphalism, often a result of religious fervor, masks that in an echo chamber, so social media can be jarring for folks in such a situation.
So many platitudes, so many assertions, so many nuggets of delusion, so little reason to believe them as true.
> Though to redefine sexism as "not respecting of gender norms my religion requires me to prefer" is quite a stretch
Dude, even Richard Dawkins said this was insanity ("I object to the statement that a trans woman is a woman. This is a distortion of language and science.")
I look forward to the day it returns to that categorization. I am merely agreeing with one of the most prominent atheists in the world on this subject.
> transgressive and probably unnecessary
More dishonest name calling, and what a retarded perspective to assume I must be an idiot, or I would agree with you. We've had that for 8 years, and we don't give a darn, because you don't give a darn understanding our perspective either. Sticks and stones. I also will stick to the term "sexist," because to accept this view is to degrade women to the level of being completely interchangeable with men.
Apologies, Dang. I wasn’t trying to spawn an instance of the Internet’s Oldest Flamewar by choosing as my example of Trump voter interviews in the late twenty-teens a paraphrase of the ones I remembered best, which happened to be the statements of pro-life evangelicals.
I think it points to a real lack of humility. Why would you try to find out how your thinking might be flawed if you start with the assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot?
And I say this as someone who did this exact thing in 2016.
I did, partly out of curiosity, partly because I'm in a progressive town literally surrounded for a hundred miles by a sea of red.
They like Trump because he appears anti-establishment and they fear/dislike the establishment. They don't feel the establishment in place is good for them. They truly, truly struggle with finances. Many are in the military and on food stamps. Some are farmers who can't make farming work anymore. They fear immigrants because they might take jobs or bring crime (and drugs). They fear they cannot protect themselves so the want access to guns.
One common thread was the stimulus checks. They really liked the stimulus checks.
Another thing is pining for the good ol' days. Lot of that, too. No issues like pronouns muddying things up.
Generally, not racist, not sexist, but some are, just like any rando person.
Seemed to me just like regular folk who are scared and can't make ends meet like they used to, well, a long time ago. The grocery store prices that are annoying to me are truly a decision point for them.
Then when you take three steps back, and look at it objectively, it's often of their own doing. A lot, I mean a lot, of disparagement of education, even of K-12, so the means to get better employment is more of a struggle. A whole lot of drug and alcohol abuse on top of it. They are the only people I know who smoke. Lot of broken relationships and marriages. Family chaos. The image of solid salt of the earth isn't what my Trumper acquaintances (friends?) are experiencing. They are pretty desperate and really wish there was some way to get back on top of things.
So, in desperation they vote for a person that promises to make it better. And really they don't care about much else. If you want to win elections, do the chicken in every pot line.
This is all anecdotal of course, but I went to the effort, this was seven people, all of whom I'm on good terms with and converse with on a regular basis. And they were respectful of my position - that you need both conservatives (to keep what's good of the old ways) and progressives (to find new ways that are better) in the political arena to make it work. That's not a popular position, though.
This feels close enough to my experience that I believe you actually do speak genuinely with these people.
I think a huge part of it is also that they feel seen by someone, finally. Trump did a great job of making these people feel like the spotlight was finally on them, and honestly it’s true.
Many of us have, and that's how we know their stated reasons are just nonsense. There's a video of the creator interviewing a Trumper about how tariffs work....
You think you're going to get a solid answer interviewing some random person on the street? That's what an intelligent person would call a strawman. Do you want me to point you to the video of well-educated coastal elites calling the assassination attempt a Hoax?
There are of course more than one reason why people voted for him, but there's literally tons of comments in this very thread explaining why with no nonsense and under no uncertain terms.
Ironically, a lot of those comments get flagged and are no longer visible.
No, I think there needs to be a culture of talking to and respecting people with different opinions.
And before you jump to the extreme of “but they don’t want me to EXIST!”, that’s not the point. The point is that we temper each other, partially by negotiating, and partially by simply making the “other side” more used to our ideas.
That just happens with repeated exposure. If something is scary, but generally not bad, people can get used to it, but only if they’re exposed to it regularly. You get used to public speaking after the ten thousandth time instead, because you’ve likely already confronted every fear you had in real life by now.
Ironically, this is extremely easy to fix. Politicians can simply get along in public. We’ve got studies showing that political extremism can die almost overnight when the opposing politicians simply explain that they do respect their opponent.
As for the people here explaining themselves clearly - that’s because dang has done a good job of fostering a community of high quality commenters. You won’t find this kind of discourse anywhere else, and it’s the main reason I treasure this site.
> No, I think there needs to be a culture of talking to and respecting people with different opinions.
Absolutely.
> As for the people here explaining themselves clearly - that’s because dang has done a good job of fostering a community of high quality commenters.
Hard disagree. The level of political discussion on HN is barely a step above r/politics. This is a forum for 110 IQ codecels who think minor domain expertise means they are smarter than everyone else in all aspects.
The contempt for ordinary people in this very thread is nauseating.
> You think you're going to get a solid answer interviewing some random person on the street?
Yes. We educate the population for good reason. People _should_ understand that a tariff is a tax imposed on consumers, and if done with reasonable intent it is to prop up a key industry despite the distortionary effects with a particular goal in mind, such as national security, improvement of the populace, etc.
"Bringing back manufacturing" is not a coherent goal, it just sounds like one, because as soon as the tariffs are removed the US is back to offshoring again OR the purchasing power of the dollar is so low that it doesn't matter.
"Establishing manufacturing in key industries" is a completely reasonable goal -- which Biden did (solar, among others).
So once again, the Trump policy set is not actually good policy.
I am eternally grateful that my MIL is an unironic trumper from an unbelievably small town in the Midwest, specifically so that I don’t need to listen to a “creator”. It’s an eye-opening experience to hear what their true, heartfelt concerns are.
If nothing else, surely we can empathize with being frustrated for ages and finally feeling seen.
They’re literally trying to find out when they exclaim that question.
To me this seems a pretty clear case of inflation=“punish the incumbent” and also Biden spread out the pain of covid recovery instead of making red states bear the burden. Kamala promised more of the same, including lots of investment into rural and red areas that aren’t gonna vote for her anyway. Result? 10-15 million blue voters stayed home this cycle. Trump turned out his entire base.
> They’re literally trying to find out when they exclaim that question.
I've seen these conversations happen thousands of times in political communities online, before you know it, the person trying to understand starts getting angry at some point, and both people are calling each other names. Very few people truly want to understand the other side. If you want to understand the other side, the first step is to listen, and not say anything (don't try to defend your viewpoint, this isn't part of your goal, and it will derail it), ask questions, and agree to disagree politely.
"Yes it is. Your program will just segfault rather than getting hacked."
"No it won't... see these examples of C programs getting hacked without segfaulting."
"You're using it wrong. See look, if you write with spaces instead of tabs, your program is memory-safe."
Do you remember "MongoDB is web scale"? Would you not get angry when trying to find good reasons to use MongoDB? That's what it's like talking to the average Trump supporter, except it's about the removal of human rights instead of just which database you should use.
Why do people vote for him? America is a closet racist country and the education system obviously doesn't produce critical thinkers. The south is poor and Trump will make them money again some how - they believe that. Trump will make grocery prices' go down and create many magnificent jobs. Trump will make interest rates go down and loans cheaper. He will deport all the Mexicans so the black or white people can fill the jobs.Trump is a populist con man who conned his base. No public company or start up will ever hire a CEO like him. I call this political entropy. This is the decline in America in my view. It's a sad day and I will just stick my head in the sand and hope we make it through.
Yup all my comments offering to explain and explaining have been flagged. Even ones with no sarcasm. Just because waiting for someone to doxx me again and dang to do nothing.
HN just flags all comments that seem to support Trump in any way, even with good arguments. So no idea why comments are even open anymore when some points of view are obviously not allowed here yet 52% of the country seem to supported them to a degree. Obviously HN users just want their own groupthink eco chamber without wanting to hear other opinions. So in that regard I'm enjoying watching lib woketards having a mental breakdown for the second time since 2016. Stay ignorant, stay foolish.
Hell, I'm not even from America and I saw it comming from a mile away. Calling half of their country "nazis" and "fascist" was the worst campaign move I have ever seen in my life.
Ideally the new economic policies will break the stranglehold of Silicon Valley. Already with the arrival of Musk, oracle, etc in Texas, there's a balance beginning to shift.
It's clear from the message what the grandparent post opinion is, there's no need for understanding the right, the conclusion is there already and it's that the right wing voters are:
> uneducated and poor
This narrative about the right voters has been there since at least the nineties, only for the left to wonder why dialogue dried up.
Then the left drops the ball on big ticket issues, and people move more and more to the right, while fringe right positions become normalized.
Oh well, if it weren't for those pesky uneducated voters!
The reason it doesn't make sense to people like him (and me) is that we look at all the times he promised to release the health care plan, the January 6 incident, the calls to states to "find" votes, the constant complaining about rigged elections, the constant complaining about basically EVERYTHING he doesn't like, and more, and we don't see how anyone can overlook that. He never answers policy questions clearly. He doesn't understand tarriffs will raise our prices. He thinks RFK should be in charge of HHS. He wants to shut down TV networks that criticize him.
When I ask folks why those things don't matter, I either get "what about So-and-so," or "I don't believe that," or they just blow off the question without an answer. I even went to the Ask a Conservative sub on Reddit and asked why people think millions of noncitizens are voting in elections, and I got yelled at, called naive, and told that some local municipalities allow non-citizen votes in local elections so therefore they can vote federally too.
That said, I'd LOVE to know why none of the things Trump says or does dissuades his voters. Truly, because I really do not understand. I don't want to argue, or to try to convince you you're wrong, I would love to know why those things don't matter and you think Trump is a force for good.
> we look at all the times he promised to release the health care plan, the January 6 incident, the calls to states to "find" votes, the constant complaining about rigged elections, the constant complaining about basically EVERYTHING he doesn't like, and more
Have you considered the possibility his supporters know something you don't? A lot of what you mentioned is either debunked or is fraught with misinformation
Yes, I HAVE considered that, it's why I keep ASKING Trump fans. I even stated in my comment that I never get real responses. I get responses like yours, which is "you're wrong, it's been debunked" but I'm never let in on the debunking evidence.
I'm dead serious and 100% sincere: Please show me the evidence. I REALLY want to see it. I don't believe people, I believe data. I don't even believe MYSELF without data.
I live in Georgia, I heard the tape with Trump and Raffensperger, but if you have evidence that call is somehow not true, please share it.
I heard Trump say he has "a concept of a plan" on Healthcare 8 years after he told me he already had a plan. If he's got an ACA replacement, I'd love to see it. I don't understand why it has to be repealed before it can be replaced, usually we just pass new laws that supersede the old one, but whatever, I'll look at whatever you have.
I don't think you can provide evidence that he doesn't complain about everything he doesn't like, every rally comes with a list of grievances. But again, if you have evidence, I'll look at it with an open mind.
And even if you don't have evidence for those things, show me what evidence you DO have, I'll be happy to examine it. I even looked at the stuff Mike Lindell released. I'll always look at evidence, but I just can't do the whole "do your own research" thing any more.
What a great skipping-record case-in-point. I almost think this is satire.
> Have you considered the possibility his supporters know something you don't?
They literally considered that, it's a main point of the post you're replying to, they got answers that lacked actual details or hinged on hyperbole.
> A lot of what you mentioned is either debunked or is fraught with misinformation
See what I mean? "A lot" meaning what number of things? Either debunked or is fraught with misinformation? What does that even mean? Which things? Jan 6 is "debunked" or "fraught with misinformation" or both? Trump didn't release his health care plan, Trump called GA to find votes, Trump constantly complained about rigged elections. Those are sincere and unarguable facts. What are you speaking about in rebuttal?
> They literally considered that, it's a main point of the post you're replying to, they got answers that lacked actual details or hinged on hyperbole.
I appreciate that someone actually read my post. I'm not happy to say that's the usual reply I get from Trumpers, just an angry "you're wrong" and no discussion. I'm out of ideas on how to get them to engage in a conversation. I hate arguing. I really, really just want to understand their point of view but I just get yelled at.
And I'm NOT trying to denigrate anyone with that statement, it just feels like there's so much anger between Americans that it's hard to get someone to believe I'm sincere when I don't agree with them. It seems to immediately cause them to shut down and go into anger mode rather than just explaining to me why they feel I'm wrong.
He's got them convinced that people who disagree can't be trusted, and it fucking *hurts*.
explain how him saying for over two years that he would have a healthcare plan in some number of weeks (changed several times) is debunked or misinformation. Because we all watched it.
His supporters realize he is a blowhard and adjust accordingly. Shut down a TV network? Lock her up? It's BS. I don't like it much, but for him it's a rhetorical device.
By contrast when Biden calls me garbage, I'm pretty sure he means it.
First, Harris isn't Biden. Second, when Trump calls immigrants criminals, I'm pretty sure he means it. How many generations do you have to look back before you find an immigrant among someone you call friend or family? We are a nation of immigrants, a country less than 300 years old. And who does he mean when says immigrants? It never seems to be that nice German couple down the road who _look_ like the other European folk that happened to immigrate a few generations earlier.
I'll bite on this because I really don't understand it. I can understand why people relate to a lot of the messaging. For example, if you say that government institutions are broken because they're filled with waste and corruption, I think there's some truth to that and I can see the appeal of agreeing with that sentiment. There are many things that all politicians say are broken and they right.
Where it breaks down for me is when you move into the plan for fixing those problems. You can't just reduce the funding of government institutions and assume there's some motive to re-optimize for efficiency. That might work to some degree in the business world where there's a profit motive, but on the public side of things the people that are abusing the system for personal gain aren't going to optimize to provide services more efficiently. They're more likely to optimize for more personal gain as the expectation of failing institutions becomes normalized.
Eventually, I think you end up with government services and institutions that are even less efficient per dollar spent because the solution for trying to improve them doesn't seem to have any plans for accountability. So I think people are voting to effectively de-fund government services and institutions with the misguided promise of reduced tax burden and increased efficiency, but what they're going to get is equal spending, less services, and more people benefiting personally from the shift in policy, especially if services start using more private sector vendors.
For example, some of our education funding in Canada has been cut massively due to the perception of waste, which is true to a point when you look at administrative bloat, but the cuts always impact the front-line people providing services and miss the administrative layer where the waste is occurring. That makes the ratio of waste even higher and people are left wondering why nothing works.
I might be wrong, but I think all you're going to do with a broad mandate to "gut everything" is to create an opportunity for self-interested parties to usurp government funding for personal gain when the goal should be to increase accountability and efficiency.
Loosely related, a massive problem we have in Canada is that front-line workers have been completely eliminated from the decision making process. Everyone I know can look at things done in their workplace and identify mistakes and inefficiencies that are the result of administration that lacks real world experience. For example, they built a prison in the city where I live where they put (sewer) drains inside the cells. Every single prison guard that you'd ask would tell you that's a mistake because the prisoners can plug them and flood the cells. That's the result of arrogant administration thinking they know everything.
My last point is also part of the reason I think people voted for Trump. I wouldn't because I don't think his solutions are going to improve anything, but a lot of people believe the system is broken because they personally see mismanagement on a daily basis and it's done by the people getting paid the most.
So I get why the messaging is appealing, but I don't understand why people think some of the proposed solutions are going to work. Maybe someone can explain to me how having Musk "do what he did at Twitter" to public institutions is going to provide better services to the public.
interested, but I looked all through social media for that. Reddit, Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, Bluesky. Pretty much everything but Facebook.
I really couldn't find much reason. So many Trump supports were just interested in "salt mining" from Harris supporters. The few issues I could find were
- he'll mass deport immigrants (not a sympathetic reasoning for me. Also mass deportations are expensive; see the above point)
- Racist remarks about Harris (that's not even worth talking about)
- "This is a response to identity politics" (to put it in the least racist/Sexist/transphobic way).
- Oddly enough, nothing on Gun control. Maybe I didn't look hard enough.
So there's maybe 2 legitimate reaosns (no matter how misguided I feel about them) and a lot of hate. And then dismissals of any worries from opponents. It was honestly tiring how many "but Trump doesn't support Project 2025" I've heard.
The most legitmate dismissals of Harris came from "she wasn't voted in". Which yes, I actually do agree with and did not support at all. But we're well past the point where general elections are "pick the least bad candidate". Some issues about Israel, but I'm not going to pretend that wasn't always a bipartisan issue up top and that both sides in government are walking on eggshells about that issue.
-----
So yeah, my experience trying to find some truth below the ocean of feelings came down to "There's nothing inspiring about trump except that he didn't fuck up like Harris". There's no platform, just chaos and hate.
Maybe there are some smart conservatives offline that have actual legitimate points, but I don't have access to that and I suspect many of their arguments are simply economical (they want tax cuts for them and will vote that way. Selfish, but a very honest and reasonable point in an individualistic society).
I'd love to hear otherwise, but I'm not convinced HN will be much different from the dozen other platforms I checked. It seems to be all "vibes". vibes in weird ways and very dangerous ways.
>Republicans push class divide so to keep their voter base uneducated and poor.
Dems almost exclusively Lord over academia as something so valuable that the people that do jobs that keep the lights on, water running, and the floors steady are tired of hearing how much knowledge they lack. They say this in the same breath as they accuse republicans of keeping the sacred university knowledge from trades workers
That is contrarian to democrats giving more support historically unions and putting laws in place to raise the wealth and social support of lower income citizens. Think of Medicare in 1965, Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, and the Low-Income Housing Preservation and Residential Homeownership Act of 1990
I'd disagree, after all a democracy is one vote per person. And it surely looks like they've voted against what you thought was the better choice.
In that sense, you have to have some pretence about why you disagree. You mentioned it was something along the lines of people thinking about a 'mighty dollar', but that seems conflationary.
Saying it's a nonsensical vote in a two party race is a bit off.
Yes. In Scotland where we have devolution from the UK government, there is a party that wants to dissolve the parliament that campaigns to be elected to that parliament. Just democracy.
Yup. He lied for months about forced operations in schools (seriously?!). And immigration is the lowest it's been since Biden took office after Trump botched the pandemic response and no one wanted to come here.
If Trump follows through on his promises, the US will be in bad shape.
> If Trump follows through on his promises, the US will be in bad shape.
Might be a good learning experience for the Red states.
One huge issue in the US politics is that the Red states are largely insulated from the consequences of their decisions by the Federal budget transfers. Nearly all deep Red states are net receivers of the Federal funds, especially when Medicare/SS are taken into account.
All that culture war nonsense, CHIPS act, and so on do not make any tangible difference for a voter in Alabama. All these amount to peanuts compared with the overall Federal spending.
Couldn't a Trump administration rework the distribution of funds so that states that voted for him got even more money, and states that didn't got none?
Red States are the biggest leaches off the federal government. Out of the top-10 states that take in more subsidies than they pay out in taxes, only 2 are blue states, 8 are red states! The Red States never learn because the social welfare programs from the Democrats coddle them ...
Everyone learns when they're punched in the face. The question is what less will be taught? So far he's been able to tell them everything is someone else's fault, but when he's in the driver's seat, who will he blame? And will they believe him?
Hitler got entrenched in power because his economic policies _worked_ in 1930-s. They were broadly Keynesian: state spending to stimulate infrastructure (for the military) and manufacturing (also mostly military). This led to economic growth that people really felt in their wallets: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Economic_development...
And so it resulted in a huge upswing in Nazi support, enabling Hitler to stay in power. People really _loved_ him.
This doesn't work all that well backwards. If peoples' lives keep getting materially worse, it's hard to keep blaming it on "the others".
It's much more nuanced than people are giving credit. See my other comment below for a fuller analysis. I have some military Republican-leaning friends. To give credit where credit is due, Trump successfully switched the Republican party away from the being the party of expansionist war. This plus the economy (whether or not you agree with people's interpretation of the economy) swayed a lot of votes.
Ultimately, I think Trump won because a lot of key independent voters cast votes against the Democrats. It's a referendum on the way Democrats have been running campaigns for the past 20 years. See 2016 Democrat Primaries [1] where Hillary Clinton's campaign pulled some shady deals to get Bernie Sanders out of the race. Hopefully, we'll get a legitimate 3rd party one of these days to properly give a referendum on both leading parties. Doubtful, but one still has to dream.
Elections are basically controlled by the media. They publish the news you consume, filtered through their editorial stance. They control the narrative. It’s all headlines, clickbait and eyeballs, only in this century it’s done algorithmically through social media too. You are never getting an unfiltered, unbiased opinion of the state of affairs, you are getting a carefully curated snapshot.
While there is still more nuance to it than that, there is still truth. In the UK, one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers The Sun likes to boast about their political influence on voters. “It’s The Sun what won it.” This is a bare faced statement that The Sun basically decides on their candidate of choice and voters go with that.
So it is when you depend on a so-called free press to give you the facts in nice, bite-sized form.
I honestly feel like the media was covering Harris quite a lot. Her message needed to be more than "he's a fascist" and while some might say, she had a stronger message than that, as an educated person who consumes news from all sides of the spectrum, I didn't see it.
Edit: In fact, some say she lost the election because of her performance directly in front of the news media on TV and whatnot.
Absolutely agree. Until we restore a proper and trusted free press, all political bets are off. Americans are living in isolated bubbles of information with little agreement on actual ground truth.
If this was the case then it seems that Harris would have won the race...the vast majority of the media I saw here in the US was going on and on about how Trump was a grave danger to democracy and in general just a terrible person and candidate. In regards to the media, I think this election shows that a large majority of the population simply does not believe them at all.
You don’t watch Fox News or listen to talk radio… it’s a nonstop drumbeat about how Kamala is a communist who will forcibly trans aborted prison babies. And “migrant crime” is up 10000000% and they’re lazy but also taking the jobs.
you're right I don't...but people that listen to that stuff were probably never going to vote for anyone other than Trump (anymore than listeners to MSNBC were going to stray from Harris). My primary sources are relatively centrist sources like WSJ and Economist as well as a variety of independent podcasts and the NYTimes. With a few exceptions on the podcast front all of these outlets were unabashedly anti-trump.
Do you argue that Trump was elected because the media supported him more than Harris? Although Fox News and X are fully pro-Trump, of course, my impression is that the majority of media did not support Trump. So, I find that media control thesis hard to believe.
Given how often the media would uncritically repeat upside-down nonsense like "Trump supporters say they're concerned with inflation" without any kind of analysis, yes, the overall media did tacitly support Trump.
I've no idea whether this was from the ownership class pulling strings to cut any real objective criticism of ZIRP corporate welfare, democrats uninterested in economics being blind to the fact that inflation actually has concrete causes, or from the writers having their brains steeped in things like racism-everywhere orthodoxy and thinking that referencing those narratives makes for a neutral objective article. But regardless of why, with friends like those...
When trump enables a war in the middle east that's bigger than the dems would have ever allowed, will you take that credit back and say it was a mistake to believe that republicans are no longer a war party?
They're both war parties, but the Democrats are actively courting Dick Cheney and his progeny[1]. We already know what Dick Cheney thinks of war in the Middle East - it's not something we have to wait to find out about.
Agreed. Republicans used to be the party of war. Trump substantially changed that as a perception within his voting base. Talk to active American military service men and women or veterans. Their attitude towards blindly trusting the government in new wars has substantially shifted. I don't think Trump actually caused the shift. I think he tapped into this growing sentiment and ramped it up to the point of significantly influencing the Republican voting base.
As for the left and Democrats, the shift is equally noticeable in public perception. But instead of the sentiment being "oorah let's go to war for American glory" it's instead being heavily influenced by emotional appeals. This was most evident in Democrats support of the Russia / Ukraine war on social media. Once the leaders of the Democrat party, including President Biden, saw the overwhelming public support, they implemented policies that ultimately led to the expansion of the war. Refer to Anthony Bilken's visit to Kyiv during early peace talks. And again, I'm not making a claim as to who's right or wrong. Just trying to provide some context on how public perception is being leveraged and manipulated on both sides.
It's not a matter of my personal belief. It's just the public perception. But public perception does play an important role when a government is actively trying to start a new war like when the US invaded Iraq.
You're not meaning the same thing by "pro war" or "anti war".
So long as the war in the middle east or Ukraine does not involve US soldiers on the ground, Trump can finance or equip one of the side - for the average voter in the US, there is no "war".
Maybe the the young men in the US were more concerned about the war in Russia escalating to a conflict that would involve US soldiers on the ground.
We know how Trump will behave with Putin (he will offer half of Ukraine on a plate in exchange for pinky promises.)
We can suspect that Trump will not move a finger when those promises are broken and the Baltics are invaded.
What is still a mystery is how Trump will deal with Iran - here, there is no clear policy that will please both Israël and Russia, so someone will have to give.
Both the Israel and Ukraine wars started under Biden. It's hotly debated how it would have all played out under Trump. An no, I'm not a Trump supporter. But context and public perception is important. And understanding how and what Trump did to radically shift the Republican party is important to future predictions and restoring balance. This is my primary claim as to why Harris lost. Democrats have drifted too far from the truth on the ground with large swaths of Americans. And yes, Republicans have done the same, but not to the same extent which is why they won. I hope the Democratic party can recalibrate and learn from the mistakes for next time.
I'm absolutely certain that if Trump was in the White House the full on invasion of Ukraine would not have been started. Not because he's some exceptional negotiator or because he brought peace, but because he was doing such a great job of undermining US influence that Russia would have been dumb to distract them from it. As soon as that stopped happening, they pulled the trigger on something they have been planning for quite a while. It's probable that now, Russia will try chomping as much as possible from Ukraine in the short term and then just sue for a respite of a couple of years until they deem the opportunity is ripe to finish what they started.
Yeah the "no new wars" talking point doesn't make sense. Trump's solution for peace is to just give into Russian demands and let them take over every previously soviet-union country. And let's not forget all the drama that came out of Trump moving the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem which sparked even more tension between the Palestinians and Israel. Also the talks he had with Taliban behind the Afghani Government's back which is why we had to pull out like we did.
The reason is that Trump was giving Russia everything they wanted without the need for a war. Why invade Ukraine for resources when you can just call up Trump and say "make Ukraine give me resources"?
And Israel invades Gaza every year, under every president. It's just that in 2023, someone decided they had the propaganda power to make it seem like a new thing and that it was Biden's fault.
Trump didn't do that, the US becoming the largest oil producer did. If you want names then George Mitchell, Harold Hamm, Bush and Obama. And those last two did a great deal in making war very unpopular across the aisle. Maybe Clinton would have put a few more regulations than Obama, but I'm not sold.
> To give credit where credit is due, Trump successfully switched the Republican party away from the being the party of expansionist war.
That's mainly because Trump is a Russian asset and it's in Putin's best interests to manipulate the US to yield and capitulate to his demands to betray allies. So under the bullshit excuse of being isolationist and pro-peace, you'll see Trump ultimately ensure Ukraine ceases to exist, NATO is dismantled, and war ravages through eastern and western Europe.
When people feel unhappy with the way things are currently going, they vote for the other guy.
I think it's really that simple in a lot of cases. There are of course many other layers and nuances, but I think trying to dig into the specific policies, rhetoric, and character of each candidate can miss the forest for the trees.
I could be wrong but I don't think 72 million people went out and voted for Trump because they carefully compared both candidates and decided that they preferred Trump on all of the key issues, or because they like or approve of Trump as a person, character, or candidate.
In fact his approval and favorability polling is still below 50%.
People held their nose or stuck their head in the sand on the parts of him they find unfavorable, and pressed the button for "change things" because they don't like how things are currently going, real or perceived.
Just like they did in 2020 when they felt like things weren't going well and voted to switch things up.
People who follow politics a lot more know that "let's try the other guy" comes along with a lot of other baggage and issues and policy, but that's a lot to think about and try to parse through in a world full of people yelling opinions, and I think a lot of people just look past them.
>Republicans push class divide so to keep their voter base uneducated and poor.
And you claim the democrats didn't push class divide by basically deriding and ignoring a huge part of the American population that supports Trump or might vote for him? Note that he made massive gains with latinos and even with the frican American community. That says a lot about who felt which party was ignoring them and pushing its own sort of class divide with rhetoric that didn0t take many of the things these people really give a damn about into account.
Pray tell too, what exactly are the specific interests you think they voted against? And how were the democrats addressing them?
After such a high popular vote in his favor, saying in effect that he won only because those who voted for him are a bunch of ignorant fools is exactly the sort of foolish tendency that made his opponents lose.
Groceries and housing are unaffordable, and any voter who complained about the issue to the incumbent party were ignored, or were outright told their experience with high prices wasn't real (which is called gaslighting). So people went with the alternative, who acknowledged their issue and provided very bad, very stupid solutions, but solutions nonetheless. This is the exact same situation that happened in 2016 on the issue of jobs being sent overseas (remember when out of work coal miners were told to "learn to code"?). Really, this outcome was very easy to predict.
> Groceries and housing are unaffordable, and any voter who complained about the issue to the incumbent party were ignored, or were outright told their experience with high prices wasn't real (which is called gaslighting).
Almost every single Harris ad I saw was about how groceries and housing was too expensive. Two of the 3 pillars of her campaign were about price-gouging on staple goods and increasing access to home purchase. How was the issue not acknowledged?
> I don't understand any other way they vote someone in who has demonstrated time and again he'll work against their own interests.
Isn’t it possible that the educated elite are incorrectly perceiving what is in the interests of the “uneducated and poor”?
Perhaps it’s possible they have a different utility function and set of preferences than the elites perceive?
It’s aways funny when the left who claim to “save democracy” go from 0-60 in a split second toward totalitarianism when they have decided the masses simply aren’t educated enough and don’t know what they need.
As a final point, since this is HN, would you mind sharing some examples of what Trump has done or policies he has that are “against their own interests”?
Didn't fill existing positions for monitoring pandemic diseases arising in China that were put in place by Bush then strengthened by Obama, allowing for a slower response to what would become covid[1].
Huge corporate tax cuts that lead to stock buy backs, which enriched the wealthy while doing little to nothing below (buying stocks back and raising stock value generally does not help the average/low income individual beyond maybe their 401k).[2]
0-60 in a split second toward totalitarianism? Care to give an example of that, or just throwing stuff against the wall?
I'll give a policy example against the average person's interests -- his 20% tarrifs across the board will cause approximately 20% inflation and a trade war that will ruin our export markets just like it did the first time. Trump brags about giving billions to farmers because he had to after his policies decimated their markets.
Agreed on the tariffs. It's a significant concern if all the tariffs get implemented. However, I doubt it will happen due to political opposition from both Republicans and Democrats as well as legal concerns.
The US president has limited authority to unilaterally implement tariffs. He would have to claim national security concerns or retaliation to unfair trade practices from other countries. Trump previously imposed tariffs on China due to (well documenented) unfair trade practices. Biden then extended the China tariffs. But Trump would be legally challenged and most certainly lose if he claimed unfair trade practices by every country on earth.
Here's a good video explaining the problems with tariffs. They have lots of unpredictable long term outcomes and are hard to remove once implemented. Apparently there's still a chicken and truck tax on trade between US and Europe that dates back to WWII.
The comment I replied to has an undertone that the masses don’t know how to evaluate what is in their interests. I can guarantee terms like “failure of democracy” will start being used by democrats if they haven’t been already today. All totalitarianism is horrible and it comes from both right and left sides, however the left is very often the source of it, and the logic to justify that is often much like the comment I was responding too - “for their own good”.
Regarding tariffs this is a complex issue and he has said repeatedly that it’s a negotiation tool. The records reflects that in he expanded US overseas market access with heavy handed negotiations. Most countries are much more protectionist than the US.
Industrial farming with massive soybean exports to China, who can’t even produce 50% of the calories their population needs domestically, is again a very complicated topic.
China is not in good shape and Trump’s first term was a clear inflection point in their trajectory.
I think their own failed fiscal policy and the pandemic had so much more to do with it than anything Trump did it's not even comparable. I guess we will see how he and his policies do over next 4 years.
It's possible for immigrants to both increase the health of the economy in the medium to long term and to cause localized economic pain in the short term. For those living paycheque to paycheque it's the short term that matters because they don't have the luxury to wait for the longer term effects to play out.
Closing border, halting illegal immigration, mass deportations - these are massively net positive for US citizens who are uneducated and poor. Migrates are competing with them for jobs, housing, social services, all resources.
Lowering taxes especially payroll and corporate and overtime taxes has a massive benefit to them. Lower income tax rates are actually very high once it’s understood that any tax or regulatory cost that is a head tax is a tax on them - “employer taxes” is a fairy tale economically, all taxes are on the employees if they aren’t paid if you are fired, if they are still paid then they are on investors/shareholders/capital and those are also negative for growth and employment.
Ending forever wars will allow shifting of budget priorities. A reduction of just 10-15% of defense and intelligence budgets and cutting funding to Israel and Ukraine can pay for childcare for every child in the US easily.
The list goes on …
Better question is what policies did Harris propose that help the uneducated and poor?
> Closing border, halting illegal immigration, mass deportations - these are massively net positive for US citizens who are uneducated and poor. Migrates are competing with them for jobs, housing, social services, all resources.
If that was really the case how come you just elected the very same guy who killed the border deal?
> Ending forever wars will allow shifting of budget priorities. A reduction of just 10-15% of defense and intelligence budgets and cutting funding to Israel and Ukraine can pay for childcare for every child in the US easily.
There is no "funding to Israel and Ukraine". For Ukraine there's transfer of outdated weapon systems reaching the end of life and already obsolete, which in turn is creating jobs in the US to restock and replenish the US's arsenal. If anything, you're seeing money go into the US defense industry which ends up being the US's take on welfare and social security program with all the pork programs.
Whoever fooled you into believing people are handing over cash to Ukraine, fooled you very well.
> The border deal provided amnesty that is clearly NOT in the interests of uneducated and poor citizens.
You should inform yourself about the bipartisan border bill that Trump killed at the last moment. The "amnesty" thing only exists as a propaganda talking point. The bill tightened up requirements for asylum and imposed automatic deportation rules.
Immigration is a net good. Even if there's now suddenly a bunch of unskilled labor vacancies, what makes you think American workers even want those jobs in the first place? What makes you think those companies can afford American workers? People aren't out of a job because some immigrant took theirs. We know this through hard data, not vibes.
We don't need to cut foreign military aid to fund childcare in the US. Reforming entitlements would get us there with more leeway and without ripping the rug out from under our allies.
Lowering taxes is a good thing, and that's about the only area you would find me in agreement upon.
I don't get the focus on Republican votes, when a major issue is the lack of Democratic votes.
As someone who leans quite left (and voted 3rd party in a deep-blue state), I can completely understand why many traditional Democratic voters didn't turn out (and why many Republicans despise the Democrats enough to presumably vote against their interests as you pose).
The largest issue for me is that I cannot support genocide. The "I'm speaking" (to protesters) was repulsive. The culture of "if you don't get on board it's your fault if democracy dies" attitude of the Democratic party was just as fascist sounding to my ears as anything they claimed the Republicans have in store for the future. I personally can't fathom how any person that aligns with my view of the world would basically take the stance of "genocide doesn't matter, toe the line". For me personally, two parties that aggressively support continue apartheid conditions and genocide are both against my interest so profoundly that where they differ on issues is irrelevant.
Furthermore the Democratic party has increasingly come to represent a very anti-democratic institution. Biden was promised us as a one-term president to get things patched over while new leadership was established. Then the fact that he was clearly increasingly incompetent was hidden until it was embarrassingly too late. But oddly, it was not too late for a primary, where Democrats could choose a candidate, but we didn't get that. And yet, when mentioning any issues with the mass murder of children you are told to "shut up and get in line".
Finally, Biden didn't deliver on any of the meaningful promises he made. Nothing happened to improve abortion issues while he was president, his track record on climate was just as meaningless and awful as any Republican, children still sat in US detention centers separated from their parents, corporate interests still take precedence over the rights of workers just as much as with any Republican.
While I am nervous about another Trump term, I fail to see how the world was so much brighter under Biden. The Democrats have become the party of "shut up and do as we say because we know better" with no objective improvements in the issues I care about when they are in office, which is impossible for me to get behind.
I'm sorry you feel that way but not voting for Harris is a vote for Trump, and now we have a guy that is worse for Palestinians than Harris ever would be.
That's precisely the logic that allows these atrocities to happen, and frankly anyone supporting this type of thinking is supporting genocide.
The idea that one particular party is owed my alliance no matter what atrocities they support is fundamentally authoritarian which in-itself is a principle I do not abide by.
Given your logic, all is permissible so long as we have one party we can point to and say "they're worse". Which is what leads to as situations where both parties continually move away from the interest of the people. I have far more respect for people who deny there is a genocide, as opposed to those that see it and actively choose to ignore it.
Also what is "would be"? Harris and Biden have been presiding over and supporting the current genocide. I have a hard time imagining it being truly worse during a Trump administration. At the very least mainstream Democrats can allow themselves to oppose genocide now that it no longer interferes with the aims of their party.
It continues to boggle my mind that liberal Democratic will endorse and support genocide without a moment's hesitation or reflection.
There might be a cultural issue here for the Dems. Many of the canvassers I met who were not retirees tended to be young women, often college-aged or a bit older, very liberal and very much benefitting directly from the economic status quo. To them, voting for anyone besides Harris was just completely insensible and they did not even bother to try and understand the views of anyone they spoke with (from what I could tell), they were just pushing "get out the vote" but no substantial reasons as to why. I suspect that many of these young women are fairly out of touch with the sentiments of most americans and the daily hardships of those without college degrees, especially young men. I suspect that many of these young women will be forced out of the party for that reason, and if they aren't, then they will have to learn to actually talk to people with opposing viewpoints and figure out how to get along with the so-called "deplorables." But most likely they will just end up working somewhere else; not all at once, but the dems will be forced to change their platforms, new candidates will get elected who will change their staffs, and an entire cohort of well-to-do liberal poly sci majors will be gradually shifted out of Washington.
Well, can you think of any reason why those young women didn't want to consider and understand the "opposing view"?
Their rights are literally being stripped away, with threats of more. Even without that, the "opposing view" is voting for a convicted rapist, known pedophile, weirdly incestuous with his daughter, incapable of forming a coherent sentence, complete lack of understanding about any complex topic such as economy, admitted to spreading lies on many ocassions, started an insurrection, and on and on and on.
For literally anyone sane, any of those reasons individually would be totally disqualifying in a candidate. Let alone for people such as young women who have a lot to personally lose from a misogynist rapist promising to strip their rights. (If you haven't being paying attention, abortion restrictions have resulted in women dying of preventable reasons because doctors are afraid to do anything which might be interpreted as an abortion, even if the pregnant woman is dying in front of them from sepsis due to an unviable pregnancy; add in the threat of removing non-fault divorces, and it's genuinely scary).
Most men care. We have wives, mothers, daughters, friends. But it becomes very hard to vote for a party (mind you, I'm not American, but this is showing up everywhere) that airs too many radical sentiments that men are shit and useless. You lose your support. You can't build a majority that way. Keep the sensible people in the middle in the loop.
If the average "CIS white male" feels this way and is checking out, you've got a problem, whether you're the cause or not. It's perception more so than truth that's costing "the left" the elections.
If people are rather loudly letting you know they feel left out, you'd better come up with a strategy that somehow resonates with them, rather than saying "we never said that" and continue to lose their vote. Whether you think that's justified or not is not really relevant, not if you want to win, at least.
The same thing goes the other way 'round, if the democrats would win because too many women would have felt left out from the Republican party stance, something I can easily understand too.
> the average "CIS white male" feels this way and is checking out, you've got a problem, whether you're the cause or not. It's perception more so than truth that's costing "the left" the elections.
Yes, you have a problem, and it's called disinformation.
> If people are rather loudly letting you know they feel left out, you'd better come up with a strategy that somehow resonates with them, rather than saying "we never said that" and continue to lose their vote. Whether you think that's justified or not is not really relevant, not if you want to win, at least.
This is some ludicrous reasoning. What do you want them to do other than say "we literally never said that"? How exactly do you picture them campaigning against strawmen and imagined threats? If people are too dumb to realise they're being lied too, that's really unfortunate, but you can't fix stupid. Ultimately that's why populist politicians with empty words are on the rise. You really cannot fix stupid.
Thank you for eloquently expressing the knee jerk version of what I was going to say, which is _that sounds like a you/them problem_.
So, reading between the lines, it sounds like these "CIS white males" (I am one, hi!) are being triggered by discussion of inclusion, bias, systemic misogyny, etc. It's not always pleasant to have a light shown on your biases but how else do you expect to grow or for society to ever change? Imagine if abolitionists or suffragettes had kowtowed to people who did or threatened to "check out" because of their work? By GP's (implied) logic, they should have and worked to overtly deal with those issues at. ... some indeterminate point in the future?
Don’t bother. It only goes so far as the democrats are demonizing men but there are no examples. The fact is the democrats did not run on demonizing men, the republicans ran on the democrats demonizing men.
do you remember a time when the republicans were even keeled and tempered and the democrats kept calling them hitler, nazis, facists, and so on? I certainly remember.
The only way to counter this message is to stop with the hate speech. Like the parent above said. Even independents are tired of it now.
Of course likely the left will again ignore the warnings and continue on so I’m quite anxious to see what 2026 and 2028 bring.
I don't know of a time in recent memory with "even keeled" republicans (at least beyond the Primary). Romney and McCain would be the last I'm aware of.
I'm confident that I've heard both sides saying exactly what you're saying though... and I remember many times that "the end of democracy" was around the corner.... and if such-and-such wins a race war is going to break out etc.
The rhetoric and post-election-dooming is always the same regardless of which side wins.
I pretty firmly believe that things like the economy, incumbents tendency to remain in power, and a party switch after hitting the term-limit are the biggest factors. What people actually say once the primaries are over just doesn't matter to most people. People will cherry-pick what they want to hear.
I have no clue what you're talking about? Did Gore call Bush a fascist? Obama?
Ultimately, I see the world this way: people want good things for others. Most people who voted for Trump aren't directly fascists. Trump himself I wouldn't even qualify as a fascist. But he espouses fascistic policies. Immigrants polluting the blood of America, stuff like that, those are fascist ways of talking about immigration. So at some point we have to talk about things, and denounce them. And no, Trump himself is not Mussolini. But the shortcut of calling him a fascist is ultimately okay.
Same thing with racisms. Most people aren't fundamentally racist, but they'll espouse racist opinions. So they're racist.
if you believe the left hasn’t ramped up the vitriol against their supposed enemies then you’re living under a rock. have you already forgotten this same hatred almost got Trump shot twice? the rest of us haven’t.
trump is running at least partially on a revenge-tour platform. his rhetoric is unlike anything else I've personally heard from another candidate on any side of the aisle.
I understand that we don't agree here and that we all view things that are said through a distorted lens... so you may feel that certain speech from one person isn't violent, but said by another person is.... and I clearly would flip that around.
Its a shame that things are the way they are, but hopefully we can all understand each other at some point and things are less polarized. Its pretty miserable to have calm and reasonable conversations about anything even broaching politics. Its just contributes to the echo chambers.
Trump is literally a convicted rapist. Mounted an insurrection. Pedophile. Serial cheater. Mocked disabled people and veterans. Literally stole money from a children's cancer charity. You can literally, no exaggeration, pull out tens of those indisputable facts, which in a normal world, would be immediately disqualifying. You wouldn't hire someone who has said any of the millions of things he has said. Do you remember grab them by the pussy? Would you be friends, or hire, or tolerate anyone speaking like that?
Pointing them out and how fundamentally unsuited that man is for any job, let alone the presidency of any country, is not "hatred". If you have a problem with people being shot at, take this up with your local representative to get better controls on who can acquire a weapon.
Exactly. If, as a non-American who is non-political and didn't follow the elections at all, that's the only thing that I've heard, I guess there's your problem (assuming you lean democrat).
What I wonder as a complete outsider: how bad must the image of "the left" be that a shady right-wing populist megalomaniac businessman with sexist tendencies wins the election a second time?
Are the democrats associated with a handful of radicals and idealistic goals that don't apply to the silent majority, or is there a perception that they can't handle the current political and economical challenges?
I'm not American. This is not a moral or political statement. I'm pointing out you (as in "the left") seem to be losing men. This costs you support, and well, victory. Clearly enough people felt "the left" were not on their side.
I can't speak about justifying rape or abuse or pedophilia or reproductive rights or religion or immigration or not being able to afford food. I don't live in a (that) polarised two-party system country. Though I fear we're all sort of heading that way for one reason or another...
I'm not American either, but I don't believe the problem is with the American "left" here. If half of America has really been brainwashed into thinking Harris is a communist, I'm afraid this country is lost.
If anything, my advice to democrats would be to start playing "dirtier", I haven't seen anyone take advantage of the recent links established between Epstein and Trump, for example.
> If half of America has really been brainwashed into thinking Harris is a communist
Well, are they wrong? Once you get past the stupid rehtoric associated with the word, the goal of communists is to usher in an age of post-scarcity.
The United States is clearly leading that charge. Food production is the closest thing we have to post-scarcity, and that's almost entirely thanks to the efforts of US innovation. I even dare say that US innovation in general is doing more for bringing us closer to post-scarcity than anything else seen in the world. Harris seems/seemed on board to see that continue.
Trump may be too. He appears to also stand behind American innovation. Although, perhaps to the determinant of innovation elsewhere, which does set him apart from Harris, and, to be fair, you might argue that leaves him unaligned with the communist intention.
> Well, are they wrong? Once you get past the stupid rehtoric associated with the word, the goal of communists is to usher in an age of post-scarcity.
So, if you ignore what a word means, and redefine it, yes, anything can mean whatever you want it to mean.
Communism has an element of post-scarcity as a sort of a prerequisite, but that's neither the main goal, nor the means. There is nothing even remotely communist in anything even remotely mainstream in US politics.
> So, if you ignore what a word means, and redefine it, yes
Go on. What does the word mean?
It is oft associated with "member of the Communist Party", of which Harris clearly is not. Perhaps that is what you are thinking of? But that usage is like calling a member of the Democratic Party a liberal – something that is also often done. But to be a liberal does not automatically make you a member of the Democratic Party, even if members of the Democratic Party are often liberal.
> but that's neither the main goal, nor the means.
What is the main goal, then?
The means is undefined. Different communists have different ideas about how to achieve post-scarcity. The Communist Party has a particular stance about that, certainly, but as before, while members of the Communist Party may be communist, not all communists are members of the Communist Party.
Yes, they're wrong. Democrats are very much pro-ownership, and have no interest in weakening the capitalist class in any ways, shape or form. Communism is not about post-scarcity, to the contrary. It's an economic system that seeks to distribute finite resources equitably, and get rid of the owner class (In theory at least, in practice, well...).
So arguing that any of Harris or Trump have anything to do with communism is either very dishonest or coming from a place of deep ignorance.
> Democrats are very much pro-ownership, and have no interest in weakening the capitalist class in any ways, shape or form.
While Marx believed that was necessary to see post-scarcity, it very well could be that he was wrong. This may come as a surprise to you, but he wasn't an all-knowing genie, just a feeble human. At this point in time we seem to be going down the right road without needing to do that. As before, I think we can agree that American innovation has brought us closer to post-scarcity than anything else the world has ever known.
If you are trying to say that Harris isn't a Marxist, then sure, that's fair. But we're clearly talking about "communist", not "Marxist". That these words happen to share the same last three letters does not imply that they are the same word.
If you are trying to say that Harris isn't a member of the Communist Party, as an earlier poster seemed to mistake, that is also fair. Clearly she is not that either. But, again, we're talking about "communist" not "member of the Communist Party". It is possible for a communist to be a member of the Communist Party, just as a liberal may be a member of the Democratic Party, but being a communist/liberal does not imply alignment with a political party. For our Canadian friends, being a liberal does not imply support of the Liberal Party either. Ideologies and political groups are quite distinct from each other.
> Communism is not about post-scarcity, to the contrary. It's an economic system that seeks to distribute finite resources equitably
Perhaps you just phrased it poorly, but communism is more of a lack of a system. It doesn't even have a state to administer a system! Those things go away when you have post-scarcity, naturally. Communism is not about post-scarcity, but you need post-scarcity to allow it to happen. You fundamentally cannot go stateless, classless, and moneyless without post-scarcity. Hence why communists seek post-scarcity. It is the change that ushers in communism.
> So arguing that any of Harris or Trump have anything to do with communism is either very dishonest or coming from a place of deep ignorance.
Or just boring old semantics. That is what you seem to present here, offing that Harris is not a communist simply by redefining communist (granted, it appears as though you may be struggling to get out what you are trying to say, so it might just be that).
Regardless, I spelled out my definition. Even it is not the same as your pet definition, it is the one that was given. The context is set. Under that definition, how is Harris not a communist?
That's not an example. Give me a policy, or at least a promise of a policy, literally anything coming from a democrat's mouth that would prove that the left is actually antagonizing men as a group.
Meanwhile, Trump has said that you should grab them by the P-word, Vance has criticized "childless cat ladies" as if being a single woman should be a crime. I can go on and on, it really is that simple.
This lack of evidence thing is old and still doesn’t work.
I certainly remember hateful women lambasting men, including myself, for things like saying a woman is attractive.
Also Obama just said:
"[P]art of it makes me think, and I’m speaking to men directly… that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that."
I wonder what he meant? That men are sexist because we don’t want a woman president? Or maybe that they wouldn’t vote because they’re heading to the grocery store or something?
Do you seriously actually think that Obama acknowledging that sexist bias exists when it comes to electing the president is an "attack on men"?
I love how whenever someone on the left says they're offended by something outrageous and awful, the right says "grow a thicker skin, snowflake", but whenever someone on the left calmly asserts an obvious truth, that bias exists, people on the right whine that they're being attacked and their way of life is being destroyed.
I'm a man and I don't think the Democratic party "hates me". Maybe Republicans need to grow a thicker skin and stop being offended by every little thing. (See, I can be an asshole and argue in bad faith too!)
Kamala being a woman absolutely had a negative impact on her results. That is probably not the main reason she lost though. Again, do you have any real proof that the left is systematically antagonizing men, or can you only provide anecdotal evidence?
It's really easy to find instances of right-wing politicans or pundits saying abhorrent things about women as a group (refer to my previous comment), but no one seems to care. On the other hand Obama makes vague implications that sexist bias may negatively influence their candidates and now half the country hates men.
I don't get what you're trying to prove with Obama's quote. Is pointing out the existence of a sexist bias the same as taking an anti-men stance? Is being anti-racist the same as being anti-white? If some believe those things then right-wing propaganda really has succeded into making their brains impervious to logic, and I'm afraid nothing the democrats can say will undo that.
the point is dems are a hateful group that attempt to force alignment via name calling and other childish tactics. men in this country have been demonized by the left repeatedly. people try to point it out, and the response is the same, “show be absolute evidence that i still won’t believe”.
stop the hate, stop looking for evidence and just freaking listen to people’s perspectives. that’s what this entire voting thing is supposed to be about.
Yes, sorry, I in fact require you to provide me some evidence before I believe your insane take of "the left is demonizing men".
As a cisgender heterosexual white man myself, I can't recall any piece of legislation, passed or proposed, that would discriminate against me based on those adjectives. I have never felt any kind of animosity toward myself coming from democrats.
If you really want examples of hate, go listen to literally any talk from Trump and cie. on gays, lesbians, muslims, blacks, puerto ricans, transgender people, jews, single women, atheists, political opponents...
So, I don't require absolute evidence, just any evidence that the democrats have an anti-men agenda. Like the Republicans have an overt anti-lgbt agenda, through laws like "don't say gay", bans on same-sex marriages, redefining sex (a scientific term) in the law...
The video linked at the top of this thread is the evidence you asked for, have you even watched it? It doesn't matter if you consider that person a viable source or not, it has clear examples of men being demonized by left leaning sources. So much so that it leaks into pop culture/media. Men clearly feel like they are no longer welcome in many spaces, or are lesser/undervalued. I'm not here to comment on whether thats deserved or not, but it has consequences.
You seem to be under the opinion that there has to be a legislative policy or that it needs to have been said by a politician for it to affect someones sentiment, opinion, and voting choice. It doesn't.
This said as somebody who did not vote for Trump, not that I liked the other candidate that much though either. There is clear evidence of blatant hateful rhetoric towards men to the point of being considered okay to just openly talk hatefully about men that by nature of cause and affect has also led to growing blatant anti-female rhetoric, and it is driving younger males towards the right by simple gender divide. The right is just better at capitalizing on it.
To be clear, you can find people hating on any group you could come up with. But let's be real here, the hate is largely coming from one side, and that one is not the dems.
I know of no mainstream liberal figure that have spoken hateful words against men as a group, while I can rewatch the latest RNC and find many instances of abhorrent speech towards minorities.
They are still plenty of white men on TV and in the movies, I have never been insulted because of who I am. I have plenty of LGBT friends who could not care less about my "orthodoxy" and are perfectly happy to spend time with me.
> men in this country have been demonized by the left repeatedly
Again, fucking cite a source. You can't feel you're being demonised if nobody ever said anything against you. Stop and try to think for a second or two. (And no, me telling you you're stupid for victimising yourself with no proof doesn't mean "the left" is demonising you, because I'm not American).
> stop looking for evidence and just freaking listen to people’s perspectives
What? Stop looking for evidence and listen to people's feelings? How about people grow a brain and start looking at facts?
Why do you do these broad generalizations where you demonize an entire group, when it's exactly the problem you have (or, perceive you have..) with how "the left" speak?
From my outsider (non-American) male perspective, I never heard anything from the Democrats. Somehow I ended up hearing a whole lot from the Republicans, without looking for it (or wanting it!). Whatever they did, they seemed to do a better job getting into the channels where men are found. So while I expect the Democrats haven't criticized men, I can understand how it is easy to buy into the rumours when that is all you have to go on.
I think people don't realize that it doesn't need to be directly said by a politician to create sentiment.
If you look at the online sentiment which greatly affects young voters, it is very much anti-men in general. In fact you even have instances of this being seen in popular culture entertainment and slipping into mainstream at times. Especially for CIS white males. And guess which population overwhelmingly both voted for Trump, but also gained voters for the Trump camp? Men.
Anti-male rhetoric is at an all time high, and has given rise to male spaces being dominated by accordingly anti-female rhetoric.
This is in part what the parent comments are mentioning. That many of the most outspoke people for Dems (i.e not necessarily politicians themselves) are women who just entirely dismissed even trying to capture male voters who were on the fence. Yes, I get that it is difficult to resonate with people who vote in favor of taking away womens rights, but the problem is that you just aren't going to win if you don't capture at least some of those voters.
I don't dispute that a lot of republican voters bought into the propaganda that dems were anti-men, but what are the democrats supposed to do? This is completely baseless. I can't recall a single mainstream liberal figure having problematic words on men as a group.
Republican speakers on the other
hand spew non-stop hate toward every minority I could name and no one cares. If the median voters can't see that (wether he lives in a bubble or simply refuses to acknowledge it), then this country is fucked.
I detect a double-standard among Republicans in this regard, but at any rate, I think this is a case of culture-war/DEI resentment and conflating people on Twitter with the DNC. And here they'll usually point to some policy or other that gives credence to some of that (DEI for federal workers or something), but it's a weak connection.
Did that really happen though? or did the right just amplify those messages because they're very effective to campaign on? and now everyone just repeats them. Maybe even making a lot of young men feel even more despondent and useless in the process.
Kinda funny how the moment real progress is made on trying to give anyone other than males a hand up, they start crying like babies about how they're not getting enough attention. Meanwhile, those same men are literally stripping away women's rights to their own body.
I have never had anyone tell me as a white male that I should be ashamed of myself, not least from the left.
What I have been recently is very impressed by female talent in all sorts of industries, which makes me ponder how much we've lost holding them back all this time.
Likely because you’ve sheltered yourself from it. I have been told on HN even that I’m privileged (implying I should be ashamed or aware of such privilege). Also all that recently about how racism is alive and well and it’s our fault.
If you are a white male (I am) then you almost certainly ARE privileged at some level and imo should be aware of that.
This is a completely separate matter from being ashamed of said privilege (I don't think this is reasonable or productive), or being held responsible for racism in general (obviously ridiculous unless you are right now a bona fide racist). But that level of nuance doesn't fit neatly in a 30 second inflammatory commercial.
Who's done with it? The right? because no one loves identity politics more than them. Every single word that comes out of trumps mouth is about someones identity.
I don't think so, caring means doing something about it, if men weren't deeply misogynistic there would have been a woman president decades before. The behavior of men is not surprising however and is expected.
What is shocking is half the women in this country also don't care about their own interests either.
It is one thing for immigrants or working class to be voting against their own interests, economic and border policies are abstract and people historically have failed to attribute links to the administration responsible. Abortion is not abstract however, the linkage to right-wing policy is straightforward.
It is not abstract political issue like the economy or immigration.
Every woman between 18(and sadly lot younger but they cannot vote ) and 45 is affected directly personally by reproductive healthcare . It is an issue they get reminded about every month physically.
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Electing women heads of state , is an exceptionally low bar on misogyny scale, that only the Middle East, lesser developed parts of Africa and United States have in common .
Even non Middle Eastern Islamic countries like Pakistan or Bangladesh where stoning for accusations of adultery is still a thing have democratically elected women leaders .
——
People aren’t voting for trump for his policies, neither he nor his supporters can articulate what they clearly.
2016 was explained about how it was an anti-establishment vote , Hillary had baggage .
2024 the discourse is already it the economy
record numbers voted for him in 2020 when he had the by far worst possible economy of any president ever. Biden only scrapped through by thinnest of margins .
It is disingenuous to then argue that people were smart enough to understand the reason behind the economy then , but cannot comprehend the economic consequences of 2020 policies and the trends of today to attribute to Biden .
It is always something else, we should own who we are as a society.
many women I asked are absolutely ready, but every single one of them were depressed at the idea of Harris being the first. given she can’t put a sentence together they didn’t want the shame.
>Well, can you think of any reason why those young women didn't want to consider and understand the "opposing view"?
Sure - but we're talking about pragmatic considerations. In hindsight, preservation or expansion of abortion rights was not enough to get men to turn out to vote for Harris in sufficient numbers to swing the election, so another kind of message should have been crafted for that voting block.
> Sure - but we're talking about pragmatic considerations. In hindsight, preservation or expansion of abortion rights was not enough to get men to turn out to vote for Harris in sufficient numbers to swing the election, so another kind of message should have been crafted for that voting block.
My stomach dropped when I heard a young men claim that Trump would be better because of his economic policies. To which I reply which ones? Followed by stumbling silence.
This is a young university educated 25 year old men raised in a Social Democrat European developed nation, claiming that Donald Trump would serve American interest and a world economy the best. We are absolutely underestimating the effect of people's world view being shaped by information wars on social media.
Adam Curtis 'Hypernormalisation' now feels like a Nostradamus level prediction of the decades to come.
Crazy idea, if you’re confused and can’t figure out why the brain washing didn’t hold then maybe they’re seeing something you don’t? Maybe you’re wrong?
Yea look more into the Russian disnfo BS. The campaign has been running likely since before you were born and the intent is to destabilize the country not pick a particular candidate. If you pay attention to the flip flopping from them you’d notice the same.
Him being a rapist and pedophile should be enough for men not to endorse him. They’ll put “shoot your local pedophile” decals on their trucks then go and vote for a notorious pedophile. Therefore supporting pedophilia. It’s such a weird cognitive dissonance thing I can’t wrap my head around. Implicitly or explicitly supporting a pedophile is a no go for me one and done.
That’s not going to work, but at least you’re sticking to your principles. We need to abolish political parties altogether. I’ve been trying to get traction on this for years with no luck.
Us third party voters need to work together for change to the voting system, no matter how different our politics might be from one another. In fact, us working together despite our different politics would underline our point: democracy is about everyone having their say, not about agreement.
>For literally anyone sane, any of those reasons individually would be totally disqualifying in a candidate
Sorry, but this is not how it works.
People have fear, prejudice and many other things that worry them. Their fear may or may not be baseless but it is there and if you are sane and more or less logical you have to take it into account.
When people fear or do not understand something they tend to turn to someone who offers them a solution.
Some times it's a doctor, some times it's a drug dealer. Why? Well, many reasons (I'll excuse myself and won't start listing those because you can write a few books about each of them)
You want people to stop turning to mafia\drug dealers or some kind of charlatans for help? You have to do something about their fears.
This is sane and logical and any therapist will tell you something similar.
Yes, it might be hard to accept, but it is quite possible you have to fix this shit to be able to fix the "their rights are literally being stripped away" part.
> abortion restrictions have resulted in women dying of preventable reasons because doctors are afraid to do anything which might be interpreted as an abortion, even if the pregnant woman is dying in front of them from sepsis due to an unviable pregnancy; add in the threat of removing non-fault divorces, and it's genuinely scary
I'm pro-choice, but this idea that pro-life opinions are not equally popular with women is just wrong and not support by polling on the subject. I'm more pro-choice than my GF.
> Well, can you think of any reason why those young women didn't want to consider and understand the "opposing view"?
consider and understand =/= agree and support. Regardless of the Harris' or Dems' views, you win elections by getting votes. If we assume everyone who voted for Trump is a sexist asshole, then Harris was running for president in a country where half the electorate are sexist assholes. If you're not gonna extend empathy and try to build bridges with them, then there's no point in running.
Abortion restrictions are being implemented, which result in women being forced to carry feti which can be unviable (literally killing them), from rape or incest. Even if you don't believe women have the right to choose for themselves if they want to carry to term (I do, it's about bodily autonomy way before there's any other life in the consideration), this is egregious. Again, women are literally dying in hospitals because doctors don't want to save them out of fear of performing something which might be an abortion. This has happened in Poland, and in the US, and it will happen again.
The Supreme Court, majority appointed by Trump and similarly minded individuals, has already questioned no fault divorces and interracial marriage too.
Project 2025, sponsored by a big conservative think thank which is supporting Trump, and on whose support Trump relies (he has appointed lots of judges vetted by them, so to think they're not related is naive and delusional ), is against no fault divorces.
Most divorces are initiated by women. Most victims of domestic violence are women.
If that's not enough for you as stripping of rights, I don't know what will be. And I'm not a woman, nor American - I care because I'm capable of empathy, which seems to be a foreign concept to many Americans.
No having non-fault divorce doesn't stop divorces if you have an actual reason for it, a "fault" that caused the divorce if you will: Domestic abuse, cheating, abandonment, etc. Considering that men often lose the most in a divorce but don't initiate divorces indicates that women have a privilege here.
Marriage rates aren't only decreasing because of anti-social people: many men are starting to view marriage as a legal institution which benefits women exclusively - allowing them to extract resources from a man with the backing of the state and very little effort.
> Most victims of domestic violence are women.
Most reported victims of domestic violence are women. If you take into account unreported domestic violence, emotional abuse, and non-deadly domestic violence men are actually ahead of women in this particular stage of the oppression olympics.
Maybe if you could share some of that empathy with the men affected by these laws you'd see why they get pushed through, and why women also support them.
> Considering that men often lose the most in a divorce but don't initiate divorces indicates that women have a privilege here.
Or men don't initiate divorces because they have the most to lose?
> Most reported victims of domestic violence are women. If you take into account unreported domestic violence, emotional abuse, and non-deadly domestic violence men are actually ahead of women in this particular stage of the oppression olympics.
You can't make a claim like that without even a hint of a source. Yes, most female on male domestic violence and abuse goes unreported and hell, many men get mocked for "letting a woman do that to them". It's of course horrific. Is there any indication this is happening at a rate similar to or higher than domestic violence against women? I have never seen any, but feel free to share.
> Maybe if you could share some of that empathy with the men affected by these laws you'd see why they get pushed through,
> doctors don't want to save them out of fear of performing
then perhaps they should leave the profession if they’re so unsure of themselves. they’re supposed to be among some of the most educated people in society and they can’t read and understand a law? or hire a lawyer?
also have you asked the women what they want? because my wife for instance is against abortion. both of my sisters as well.
> they’re supposed to be among some of the most educated people in society and they can’t read and understand a law? or hire a lawyer?
Yes, that's the biggest concern for a (probably overworked) doctor, read laws and hire lawyers to make sure if they're allowed to perform a medical procedure.
> also have you asked the women what they want? because my wife for instance is against abortion. both of my sisters as well.
And I hope neither of them is dying while pregnant, willingly or not, and the doctor has to chose before doing the right thing and going to prison. If all three of them cannot realise this and why it's important to have a fucking say on the matter, they're either absurdly dumb or absurdly heartless. If they're willing to let women die of sepsis or be forced to give birth to unviable feti because they think their version of a diety tells them so, there is something wrong with them. (And I'm wording this as politely as I can, believe in whatever shit you want, but if your shit means letting people die of preventable causes because of your beliefs, you're a terrible person)
they are required to follow laws in their normal every day job. for instance they must also be concerned when they prescribe narcotics or other controlled substances but that doesn’t paralyze them.
so again, if they can’t handle the job and know when it’s appropriate to give an abortion and when it isn’t then they need to quit.
The myopia here is crazy. As though the dems and their candidates aren't equally bad - except all of their actions are against young men rather than women.
Also what rights are on the line here exactly? Free speech? no, thats what the dems have been attacking. Suffrage? Nope no one is trying to remove this. Even if you want to say "Roe v Wade": it's not a right to get an abortion, and its not even banned just not regulated at a federal level.
I like that anger! Now that you can't postpone the inevitable, maybe you'll actually have to do something about it instead of wasting your time and energy whining about it.
I, thankfully, don't live in the US. I know women who do, and they're terrified. What do you want them to do, mount an armed insurrection? Murder Trump? Firebomb the Republican-majority Capitol?
The Democratic party has a problem communicating to young white men why they should vote democrat. The party doesn't speak to them at all. I don't think there's much wrong with the policies. It could perhaps use some more policies targeting men's rights. But it's mostly a communication problem. Young men don't feel seen by the democratic party, and the democrats need to realize this and fix it for the next election.
Looking from afar, the dominating far left elements of the DNC have been actively hostile to unmarried white men, and completely disconnected from young men (who don't fit into a very narrow mold of acceptability) in general.
Today men represent 42% of 4 year college students. The gap between men and women enrolled in 4 year college is higher than it was before Title IX was enacted, but in the opposite direction this time. Wages are falling far behind inflation, and home ownership feels entirely out of reach for most young people due to skyrocketing housing prices. Additionally young people are more single and lonely than ever. Most of these issues do not exclusively affect men, but there are lots (millions) of young men who are unsure if they will ever be able to find a partner, own a home, and work a job that can help support a family. There's a reason toxic hyper-masculine, conservative influences have grown hugely in popularity; they are tapping into these insecurities a lot of young men are facing. Only Republicans are bothering to address this demographic with claims about how they're going to help them start their own business, improve own a home, make a decent living, etc.
Telling young men today that they actually shouldn't care about any of these things because they had it so good 60 years ago has done nothing but alienate people who might otherwise have supported Democrats.
White men were the peak of society. Every policy, improvising the rights of all other people, especially women, is chipping away from their Throne. Naturally, some will see this as a threat and a loss, especially when you are regularly feed with misinformation. That society as a whole is becoming better, doesn't help the groups who are losing from it. And this is showing for a while now.
Most white men are not at the peak of society. When they are told how good they have it, they think about how their paycheck barely/doesn't cover their needs, or the needs of his family. They think about how long their car will last before breaking down. They think about the amount of crime in their neighborhood. And then they are told that this is the good life? And they discover that the government is giving people who just got here handouts (which is made from their taxes, money that could have improved their own lives)? They won't stand for it.
Today. This was different 60 years ago. This is different today in more conservative countries.
At least that is the perception of those people.
> When they are told how good they have it, they think about how their paycheck barely/doesn't cover their needs, or the needs of his family. They think about how long their car will last before breaking down.
Everyone has those problems, it's not limited to men or white people.
> And they discover that the government is giving people who just got here handouts
And here we have the prime example of manipulation. The reason why all those young men fall to this delusion.
The sad thing is calling anything in the Democrat party 'left'. Historically, right means pro-power, pro status quo, and left pro reform and pro-distribution of power. At first it was political, then it was more generalized (far right is getting back to full monarchy/empire/whatever, basically going back in time).
It actually mirrors what is happening in South Korea.
Women are becoming more liberal as they push for equality and bodily autonomy. Men are becoming more conservative because they feel that women's rights are coming at the expense of theirs and that no one is addressing their concerns.
And so there is a large cultural and political divide.
Which then has all sorts of side effects e.g. men becoming more 'incel' in their behaviour because women aren't interested in dating them, birth rate dropping because woman don't want to be stay at home moms etc.
What's missing is that men in South Korea are expected to spend 2 to 3 years of their life in the army. This was a reasonable tradeoff when women would spend as much time being pregnant - I risk my life to protect you, you risk yours to give me something to protect.
At this point with how quickly South Korea is falling apart socially the young men may well welcome an invasion by the North since they have nothing to fight for - what happens if we have a war and we don't show up?
So many people forget that men are expected to fight wars or register to be drafted on the sole basis of being born male. Many are circumcised for the same reason (born male). Where is our bodily autonomy? Where is our choice?
There will be a lot of second-guessing for what she should have done. The fact is they need to nominate candidates who would do well in such a situation and it's not clear that she would have. I think Walz would have done well on Rogan, not sure he didn't do it.
Galloway has been harping on this for awhile. Check the Democrats website and it lists who they are for. All groups are there including women, but nothing about men or young men. I heard a blurb on the news last night that college aged men broke heavily towards Trump.
The "tolerant" left has become the intolerant blind block I've been raised to fear the far right for. As a typical European middle-aged (I guess) male, mostly apolitical, I don't really feel anybody speaks for me anymore. The failure of the left is what is driving the growth of the right, by losing those people who very much were reaching out to minorities, female and other "left" interests. Tune out the radicals and work with the "sensible" people in the middle, and that goes for both left and right...
Why are we letting pure simplistic tribal emotion take over in this age of science and rationality?...
Roughly half of Gen Z men believe men face anti-male discrimination at the hands of feminists, and a quarter say they experienced it directly themselves. That's a huge number and the latter number can only go upwards by the nature of the question. The numbers are also rising very fast. The primary place they experience that discrimination is their workplace or university, i.e. places that affect their economic wellbeing.
Nearly one in four Gen Z men say they have experienced discrimination or were subject to mistreatment simply because they were men, a rate far greater than older men.
In 2019, less than one-third of young men reported that men experienced some or a lot of discrimination in American society. Only four years later, close to half (45 percent) of young men now believe men are facing gender-based discrimination. For some young men, feminism has morphed from a commitment to gender equality to an ideology aimed at punishing men. That leads to predictable results, like half of men agreeing with the statement, “These days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.”
It has morphed. Or at least the algorithms are pushing militant feminism far more prominently nowadays.
All these guys see on their social feeds, day-in, day-out, is 'feminists' stating that all men are just rapists-in-waiting and how they should have their rights and/or autonomy restricted, or from the most extreme examples, be physically mutilated or outright murdered.
You don't have to look hard to find this stuff on social media, and once you do find it, that's all you'll ever be served.
I wonder what they perceive as "acting like man". I'm a 22yo guy and living in a sketchy area in italy I always have a friend who's a woman living near me that asks to walk her at home to feel more safe. That's something very manly indeed, and God if it's nice. Hell, one day I drove some burlesque performers home and when I saw one of them was scared I proposed to come at the door of her stay if she would have felt safer with me. That's again quite good for my perception of being a decent man, doing something that's tipically relegated to men.
I wonder what discrimination they face day to day, whether it is phisical or online
I know what women are scared of in that area, God damn I'm autistic but not stupid. I'm slightly on the edge as well, that's understandable. What I'm trying to grasp, is how men perceive they're being discriminated against. If you feel like you're being discriminated because women are scared of men at night in a bad lit sketchy area, that's not discrimination, that's just survival instinct, and I have it too, be it some guy walking his dog on a leash or a woman in her fifties walking alone
>What I'm trying to grasp, is how men perceive they're being discriminated against
For example, there are scholarships and conferences specifically for women, even in spite of college numbers now drastically already favoring women.
I feel as though as a white male I am very heavily discriminated against in the academic job market. I'm certain that if I had a vagina, and all else were equal, I would have 1000x the job prospects in academia. No, I can't prove this, but I know a lot of other men feel the same way.
I created this throwaway account to answer your question because I'm afraid of potential future employers looking at my posting history and seeing the above comment, which I think would instantly disqualify me from the majority of US academic positions.
I showed this to a friend doing a PhD - in italy tho - and she laughed and shrugged saying that she's in academia not because she has a vagina but because she had the right recommendations from the right people
I think the academia world is broken not in the way you think it is
Although not in the US, she says that when doing something in the academia world being a man or a woman makes no difference (here)
> I wonder what they perceive as "acting like man".
As late as yesterday a woman I need to listen to had opinions on something as basic as how men are supposed to pee, telling that how most men feel comfortable peeing is wrong.
That is just one.
But I think it goes all the way from kindergarten up in some places.
All the opinions I've ever heard on how to do something we're mostly said by another men. I feel truly sorry for the men that have to endure this shit, many more times I was deemed gay (jokingly, of course, but still it happened) because I dressed with silk clothes or eclectic outfits (that aren't even so electing) or the way I behaved, and all this was said by friend who were guys as me (the type of guys that would joke about gays and trans and say they have no issues with them but then have to argue about the bathroom trans people use), yet it's silly to berate the entire man-slice of society for this. Stupid people are everywhere
Just the way it is. Most of the "growth" in the last 4 years went to top-wage earners; the bottom (that is, the majority of people) did not see their wages grow faster than inflation. The US has a very particular class of highly educated professionals who live in very specific neighbourhoods that tend to be fairly closed off socially from the rest of society; they have all benefitted tremendously from the Biden/Harris presidency and are her strongest supporters. On the other hand, many Americans who never went to college or never got a Bachelor's at least make much less money on average and have seen food prices and rents skyrocket over the last four years and if they had any savings they've essentially evaporated. These two groups of people don't generally talk to each other.
The old rich conservative dudes are the top brass and the incumbent but they often dont earn high wages, they exist outside the earning a living categories. Their income is gaining from their capital in ways that arent classed as income. The top of the upper middle classes are who he is talking about. The difference between the top middle classes and the bottom is larger than it has been for a while
If that happens then the economy will collapse since a large amount of the growth in 20th century was due to integrating women into the work force. All I see from the Trump campaign is a policy so chock full of contradictions it won't lead to anything but a political explosion. And then they'll be an opportunity for some real change.
Yeah, what he doesn’t understand is that the government bureaucracy that’s been created is the only reason many of the departments of government work as _quickly_ as they do.
While we as engineers see what appear to be obvious slow inefficiencies (like: “I could build a system to replace all that the DMV does so people won’t need to sit in that waiting room!”) the reality is we don’t even understand all that the DMV does.
I feel that’s the trap Musk falls into, and it became blatantly obvious when he took over X.
Aside from liberals boycotting X for political reasons (a completely non-technical issue), technically the site seems to work perfectly fine even after Musk drastically reduced the bureaucracy behind it.
I’m boycotting X because I think Elon Musk is an ass and I don’t want to support him in any way. Twitter died to me when it became X and I’m totally fine with that.
As I understand it, in the US, "get out the vote" efforts don't count as campaigning, so they aren't subject to campaign finance laws. Attempting to persuade voters to vote for something or someone in particular, or even trying to understand their views, would likely put them in a different organizational category.
Do you see the irony of complaining about them not "understanding your views" while you generalize a huge swath of young women? And why the hold-up on them being women at all?
> they were just pushing "get out the vote" but no substantial reasons as to why
Perhaps. But that's not their fault. Anecdotally, 100% of my left leaning friends and colleagues were pro-Harris but with no reason other than "not Trump." That's not a "message" the undecided independents can believe in. Imagine Pepsi's key msg to be "not Coke".
Frank Luntz just said on ABC News that Harris began to lose ground ~6 wks ago when she resorted to name calling. Didn't HRC make the same mistake? How do undecided independents build trust in someone who was so guarded (e.g., zero press conferences)? And wastes time with name calling instead of hammering home her vision?
It's gonna be another four yrs of left-hate for Trump. The DNC leadership won't own their failure (again). The Harris campaign won't own their bad decisions. It'll all be Trump's fault.
Their incompetence is Trump's fault? That's lack of accountability isn't working. Again.
I dunno, seemed pretty obvious to me. I wanted Harris because I wanted her to finish what biden was doing, and keep people like Lina Khan in. I wanted to see more investment in infrastructure and all that jazz. Seems like a nobrainer.
You saw what you wanted to see, which is fine. However, for others her set of benefits wasn't as clear. For most, her closeness to Biden was a negative. For me her adverts were too abstract. "I'm going to stop the price gouging" but never said how.
I get it, her campaign didn't have a lot of time. That said, the DNC should have a pulse on what voters are looking for, etc. As it is, this is the third candidate handpicked by the DNC and 2 of 3 lost to an inexperienced politician. That's not the victor's fault. Tho I'm confident there will be little to no accountability owned by the DNC. It's going to be four more years of blame the winner.
"not Trump" basically worked for Biden in 2020. I don't think Harris lost by name calling. Name calling works great for Trump. She just wasn't that strong a candidate.
Well, given the fate of Clinton and Harris, it might be safe to say Biden got lucky using the tactic.
Luntz is widely respected as a political pollster. He said, the focus groups he worked with showed she lost momentum when the name-calling started. Is that why she lost? No, there were plenty of reasons. But if Luntz said that didnt' help then there's no reason to think otherwise.
Dems won't change their strategy and probably won't have to, because after Trump is past his term limit the Republican party will be back to offering up wet noodles like Jeb and Romney, who won't be able to persuade the working class to vote. Against weaker less charismatic opponents, the poor strategy of the DNC will matter far less.
And everything will continue to suck for the working class. Trump won't actually succeed in fixing much of anything for them, even if he tries, and nobody else is even going to pretend to care. The DNC will continue to be the party for yuppies that sneers at uneducated working men while the RNC takes off the mask stops pretending to care about anything besides the managerial class and Christian/Zionism issues.
Overall though do agree it was a fairly close debate not particularly one-sided.
Will say if guys like Vance & DeSantis are the future of the GOP that a significant upgrade over Trump.
I still don't quite understand why DeSantis fared so poorly w/ the GOP for this election. He appears to be far more competent/palatable than Trump but here are.
DeSantis has made a few mistakes that have shaken previous supporters and infuriated others. I've mostly scratched my head at most if it, but one that I couldn't ignore was the adorable plot to turn our State Parks into sports facilities. I simply cannot trust or support anyone who views our priceless preserves as untapped resources in need of strip malls and golf courses. Florida is already at or past a sustainable threshold with the diseased variety of "progress" that prevails here.
For me, once we altogether lose the quintessence of this state (this isn't Disneyland or Lennar), it'll be little more than a Skinner Box with perennial cyclones, bad traffic and pestilence, surrounded by cement embellished views of red tide.
Nobody voted for Vance (or for vice presidents generally.) I've seen nothing to suggest he has the kind of popularity or RNC establishment support that would make him a viable presidential candidate. The only way he gets there is if Trump dies, which is possible but not relevant to the DNC's strategy for the next election.
What makes you sure the GOP will revert to the pre-2016 era? I believe that unless MAGA-style politics somehow gets repudiated before the general election in 2028, the future of the GOP is MAGA. The next presidential nominee will be in the mold of Trump, maybe less bombastic, but will follow similar policies on social and economic issues.
I think a fatal strategy for never-Trumpers is to assume that Trump and MAGA will go away. Every gaffe and every scandal seems to strengthen Trump. It hasn’t gone away, and we will have to live with the consequences. Perhaps a better strategy is to accept that the GOP these days is the MAGA party, and we need new strategies for competing in future elections.
> What makes you sure the GOP will revert to the pre-2016 era?
MAGA just lacks the charm without the Orange Man at the helm. Trump is mortal and his successors are lacking.
That said, the Chamber of Commerce Republicans will probably stay Democrat. It'd be at least 2033 before it's clear that MAGA only lasted with Trump leading.
Trump politics without a Trump personality doesn't work. The closest they'll get to emulating Trump is getting somebody like Jeb to awkwardly cuss a few times.
The impeachments and conviction were perceived by his voters, rightly or wrongly, as cheap political acts done by a corrupt administration. And his opponent, elected in the primaries, was pulled away for actual dementia. If you want to win people over, this is the exact opposite of the way to do it.
So you don't have a way to win if you play by the rules, as long as you can make voters think that whatever you're doing is right and whatever the others are doing is wrong, am I right?
That's like insulting millions of people. I don't think it's that. Trump has to have some appeal that rest of the world is missing. It's not possible to win otherwise.
It's not insulting millions, it's absolutely factual. All the comment you replied to was describing is Trump himself, and millions still voted for the guy. As to WHY they voted for him, I'm sure journalists/analysts/pundits will overflow us with reasons.
Yeah, I don’t support Trump but calling him a pedophile is disingenuous. Calling him a name that hasn’t been proven just alienates people further. What we should be calling him is a convicted rapist, because he is literally a convicted rapist.
Why not? I'd argue a racist or misogynist would make it worse for society than a pedophile (mainly because I think there is a very strong notion of protecting kids in society, but a less stronger notion when it comes to minority groups or women).
Do you think a president would make bad policy choices because they are secretly attracted to minors?
I'm gonna be honest, this is much closer to the future that humanity deserves than the AI utopia many of you were dreaming of. Look at the entirety of human history and all the evil things people have done, and look at your own consumption of factory-farmed meat/dairy/eggs. Look at how few people donate kidneys (less than 0.1% in USA, and even lower in countries like Japan). And of course people would rather spend their 1st-world disposable income on enshitified creature-comforts than donate it; about $3500 is enough to save a kid's life from malaria, or go on a family vacation to Disney World.
People will say "I'd be a better person if only I were rich!", but predictably, the number of rich people willing to do those things is almost a rounding error.
Children aren't dying of malaria due to lack of funds. They're dying due to terrible governments in those places. Unless you're advocating for regime change and colonization, no amount of money is going to fix that.
The data are unequivocal that liberal democracy, civil rights, and economic freedom lift people out of poverty, but this message is toxic in many parts of the world, and thus many countries live in unnecessary poverty, dependent upon donations from rich countries that follow the straightforwards, simple advice to be well off.
There's a moral calculus where you have to determine if the money is really going there and if any of the money is instead supporting a despotic regime. I don't disagree. I do donate to missions where I know the individuals personally.
Get off your high horse. Humanity has been like this since the beginning and we’ve made it quite far. Have some humility and entertain the possibility that you’re wrong.
"Humanity has been like this since the beginning and we’ve made it quite far."
Agreed, we've made it all the way to the precipice of nuclear annihilation by Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, or Xi. Kim could probably get it started too.
"entertain the possibility that you’re wrong" I would absolutely love for the world to prove me wrong.
I find it ironic that the word capitalism appears only 13 times in this thread, which has 7112 comments at the time of posting. This isn’t surprising, though, given how unpopular the topic of class warfare is in the USA.
Regardless of who you vote for, many would argue that a lot of the USA’s (and most countries nowadays, really) socioeconomic issues stem from unregulated capitalism, which -- quite simply -- prioritizes profit over people.
Well.. the last time he won, many people were literally expecting a nuclear holocaust. I remember a season of American Horror Story where the main part of the premise was that Trump became president.
We survived the first time?
I want to believe that somehow having Musk involved will help? I think there are a few people who feel encouraged by that based on how effective some of his companies are, and others think he will just call in a political favor for his own profit.
There seem to be two alternate realities. Either we are on the brink of a horrific fascist cyberpunk dystopia, or we have dealt a massive blow to the war-profiteering drug-profiteering establishment.
I don't think either is the real world, but the extreme divergence in predictions is confusing. I dislike this guy quite a lot but I also don't think the Democrats are trustworthy or honest.
If this is what America wants, then it is what America deserves.
Political parties and candidates may sway the public one way or another, perhaps even deceive them. But in the end, it is the populace that ultimately decides.
The first time may have been a mistake, but the second time is a definite intentional.
The man was given the choice of what to eat: manchineel bark or feces. The man made a choice. “Ah”, said the offerer of two choices: then that is what you deserve.
I'm a little bewildered by this sort of prediction. How will you update your priors in 2028 when this doesn't happen? What will be the excuse for why this didn't happen?
This is just taken wildly out of context. And that’s coming from me, who can’t stand DJT. You’re literally fishing for a retort that doesn’t even make sense.
I am having a heard time reading his exact words and understanding them to mean something else. When he says to 'my beautiful Christians' that in four years you won't have to vote again, what is he trying to say? What is the missing context?
> "in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote."
One can reasonably interpret that as meaning that in the next 4 years, Trump and his party are going to fix the country so much and so well that Christians won't have to go out to vote next time.
Not only is that the most reasonable interpretation of the words, it's the one he explicitly gave when asked [0]. The only way to arrive at the alternate interpretation is to be coming from a place where you already assume Trump is a threat to democracy.
I think there are reasons to have arrived at that place (Jan 6th), but this quote is not evidence for it unless wildly misinterpreted.
> where you already assume Trump is a threat to democracy
You know, the people who see him as a threat to democracy are not just putting words in his mouth. Maybe they just listen to what he says, and believe him. Is that unreasonable?
The only people arguing it was misinterpreted are people who support him. Not by providing any context that actually supports it meaning something different.
How about the innumerable times he claimed the election was rigged despite lacking any evidence to support it? Does denying that free and fair elections exist not count pretty specifically as being a threat to democracy?
I totally get that he has an artful way of making alarming statements over and over, but doing it with just a hint of humor, so that his supporters can claim it was all just a joke. In your view, at what point do we get to take a politician at their word?
> The only people arguing it was misinterpreted are people who support him.
Bullshit. I'm as anti-Trump as they come, but I don't let that blind me to reality. What he meant is obvious to anyone who isn't already looking for proof of their preconceived ideas.
I'm not even arguing that he's not a major threat to democracy—I think he is! I disagree that that quote is useful as evidence of that fact, and I disagree with the tactic that the left intentionally adopted of twisting the truth to make a point. People saw through that tactic and it contributed to Trump's victory.
The facts about Trump are scary enough, there was no need to twist his words.
What you are doing has a name these days, they call it sanewashing. Had Harris or Biden said anything even close to trumps comments the maga crowd would have yelled bloody murder, but somehow for trump everything is excusable and can be explained away.
So the most favorable interpretation of his words is that his supporters are delusional? What is their interpretation of "fix the country"? Because if it does not involve changing the constitution (a very tall order) then every single thing he does can be undone with the same effort by the next democratic president. Surely these people know that, right? How could they possibly believe that he will magically "fix the country" so they don't have to vote any more, unless they anticipate that he means something permanent?
I’m not trying to be flippant, that’s genuinely the answer to your question. Trump is literally being dramatic and funny by putting it like that. And you’re taking the bait and missing the joke.
I know I sound like the enemy and I dislike including this paragraph: But keep in mind, I can’t stand Donald Trump and didn’t vote for him.
Come on. We all know Trump effing talks weird, that's just part of his weird personality that no one likes. I don't like it, think it's confusing and winding around requiring much mental parsing to understand even for normal stories/sentences. But to take this tiny little sentence as definitive proof of some giant plan that's coming to end democracy is just... mental gymnastics in search of meaning for a narrative that they've already decided it means.
Here is the Full quote so everyone can see it. He even explains in the end what he means.
> "And again, Christians: Get out and vote! Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians, I love you Christians, I'm not Christian, I love you, get out, you gotta get and vote. In four years you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not gonna have to vote."
I'm just listening to his words and assuming he means what he says. He is either insulting his followers, or he is telling them he will "fix" the country in such a way that they won't have to vote any more. You can interpret this to mean he will try to subvert the electoral result again, or you can interpret it to mean that he plans to make some kind of permanent change so that christian voters will no longer be required to vote to achieve their goals.
> I'm just listening to his words and assuming he means what he says.
That's not how language works. There's a whole field of linguistics called pragmatics that is about how context contributes to meaning [0].
You're taking a few seconds of his words, joining them to all of your priors, and interpreting them in that context.
His original listeners were taking his words in the context of the whole speech, joining them to their priors, and interpreting them in that context.
It's entirely expected that your interpretation would be different than theirs given that disconnect, and the most reliable way to interpret meaning is to look at who the audience was and how they would have interpreted it, because the speaker chose their words for that context, not for yours.
> It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.
Basically "the country is screwed up right now because ${reasons}, if you get out and vote I'll fix it for you for good and you can go back to not voting again". It's more or less the same line that politicians say every election to try to motivate the less-likely-voters in their base, just said in Trump's classic meandering way and with explicit permission to vote only this once if you want.
So a couple untruths, and something ambiguous. Evangelicals have been a key voting bloc for years (I don't want to say Christians, because there are a huge number of Christian democrats too). If anything they're key to GOP success in the recent past.
But you kinda skipped past what I was asking. How and what do those voters think he was going to fix for good? And do they perceive themselves as being politically inactive except for just this once?
It sounds like you're just giving him a pass because hey, all politicians lie to get people to vote. At that point, why do we even care what a politician says, whether we agree with them or not?
I'm a "supporter" and I know exactly what he means. Means he'll fix all the voting shenanigans so that illegals can't vote and so that democrats can't "rig" and stack the election like last time. See? Not so much a hateful whistle as it is understanding your supporters, what's important to them, and appealing to that with your own words.
It does not even matter than there was no rigging, no illegals voting, no shenanigans. The truth has never been an effective counter to rhetoric, I get that. But it's an entirely plausible explanation for what a supporter would think.
But after yesterday, maybe we will all agree together than the elections are rigged? ;-). You guys can't put that genie back in the bottle. Everyone thinks it's totally cool until the other side uses it right back.
the missing context is that the Christian groups he was speaking to typically have low turn out/don't often come out to vote. He's asking them to please come out to vote, it's important this time. It's exactly the same rhetoric democrats use "this is the most important election, you really need to vote this time, this time it really matters"
On February 27th-the Reichstag in Berlin was set on fire. 4 weeks before, Hitler was appointed to chancellor. Hitler placed an urgency regulation to ban all political activities. He destroyed democracy in one month. Trump can now do it one day.
he is definitely signaling something, whether it will come true or not is another question.
That will never happen because there are too many other power-hungry people in the GOP who are not going to just let Trump sit in the White House indefinitely, if for no other reason.
He's 78. I think there would be plenty of people willing to enable him to sit on his throne indefinitely because they know that's really only ten years or so at best. And then, once he's gotten it warmed up and did the hard job of making it the norm, they get to take his place.
That is the same kind of thing people have been saying since the day he rode the escalator down. Ten years later, why does this argument still get made? Trump has power for one reason, and one reason only -- because enough voters love him. Many people on the conservative side loathe him and want nothing more than to see him gone, but they kiss his ass and fawn over him anyway, because why? The voters love him, and hate anyone who does not kiss the ring. Over and over and over this plays out.
If Trump wants to stay in office after this term is finished, all that matters are what the voters think. The supreme court will likely side with him and find an interpretation of the constitution that makes it work. But even if they don't, so what? The court doesn't have an army. Even if they did, if the voters want a king, that is what they will get. The republic is a reflection of our collective will and we can destroy it if we so choose.
That was the line the news media took for the first year or two - "we can't read his mind, so we can't call it a lie!" It's a mistake not to at least credit his own words and the logical conclusions they result in.
As many times as people deliberately twist his words to mean something different than he meant?
I despise Trump, but it's really disheartening to see how the elite doesn't realize that they actually lost the election in part because they lost credibility by fighting dirty. The ends do not justify the means, and the means were deliberate distortions, out of context quotes, and politically-motivated prosecutions.
I held my nose and voted KH because I think Trump actually managed to be even worse, but I can hardly fault other voters for deciding that the Democrats had it coming to them after all the intentional distortions.
How is it twisting words when the context is Trump refusing to say he will accept the results of the election every time he's asked, "joking" about staying more than two terms, and actually trying to overthrow the Republic on Jan 6th?
I'm a citizen of a country where the authoritarian leader captured the state and mostly destroyed democracy.
So we managed to find out whether he was a danger to democracy or not (he was). What sucks, is that when it is proved, then there is already too late to do anything about it (because by definition you can not send them away in an election).
So my 2 cents: if there are any signs that someone is a risk to democracy, it is better be safe than sorry, and just choose a different candidate. Everything else can be corrected in the next election, but not this.
> if there are any signs that someone is a risk to democracy
All due respect, I'm curious as to what these signs actually are for Trump. Everything I've seen and heard has been horrifyingly taken out of context -- "dictator on day one" and "you won't need to vote in four years" and "he'll prosecute his political enemies", or exaggerated past the point of recognition, like "he tried to steal an election" or "he wants to put journalists in jail".
Under the Biden administration, we have seen actual criminal charges against Trump. Not theoretical, not threats, not innuendo, but actual criminal charges for trivial administrative offenses. We have seen extensive media collaboration with the administration (and the opposition when Trump was in office) in an attempt to distort Trump's words to portray him as being dangerous.
I do not agree that the US, under Harris or Trump, is at any risk of becoming an authoritarian nation. The "signs" here from both sides are all imaginary trivial things and political rhetoric. But if the watchword is "any signs" then I've got to say that I don't see how you can vote for anyone but Trump.
My forlorn hope is that people who think that Trump represents a threat of authoritarian backsliding can, in four years, revisit their assumptions and realize that the markers they have chosen to represent that threat are all wrong. They're just incorrect. Update your priors.
The most important sign is that he already tried to keep the power when he lost last time. And he still does not accept that he lost.
This alone is more than enough reason to never vote for him.
It's insane, exactly the same slippery slope fallacy as "the left want to make your kids gay", people completely lost their mind on both side of the spectrum
He literally attempted a coup, it's pretty amazing people are still trying to act like this is exaggeration or unreasonable.
It's not guaranteed, no, and I sincerely doubt we are going to see Trump literally cancel elections, but it's a very reasonable assumption that they are going to do what they've said they'll do and tried to do: install judges that will swing things their ways, suppress voters who don't support them, punish anyone who opposes them, inspire and promote political violence against anyone who opposes them, and gerrymander as much as possible. That's enough to functionally end US democracy if they do it well.
That's not some wild prediction or unlikely outcome, it's the logical continuation of their previous actions. Someone attempting something they tried before isn't unexpected. He actively tried to subvert democracy and the public have rewarded him, why would he not?
> I sincerely doubt we are going to see Trump literally cancel elections
The logical path here is for red states to cancel elections and appoint electors to send in January 2029. The feds cannot do it themselves, but they do not need to.
The elections clause of the constitution does not apply to presidential elections, and all the constitution says about that is that the states may choose how to appoint electors, as long as it all happens on the same day.
The USA uses a gerrymandered, two-party, first-past-the-post system with electoral college to boot. I for one would stop short from calling that a system that accurately reflects the will of the populace.
It's a fact he attempted a coup, the evidence is in the public record, the Trump–Raffensperger phone call was literally recorded and we have it. He was calling around everyone certifying the results pressuring them not to do so, and asking people to "find votes" for him. The mob storming the capital was a part of the whole, not the coup in its entirety, focusing on it as though it was the whole thing is absurdly misleading.
A big problem in general is that most people who do not oppose Trump have grown a little inoculated against accusations about his behavior. The first time I was exposed to a misleading Trump meme (the "fine people" comment) and I did the research to see what he said, I was astonished to find that the meaning of this statement had been distorted beyond all possible recognition.
After a couple more of these, my priors switched -- I assume that accusations about Trump are always misleading unless I get the full context.
The Raffensperger call seemed pretty bad from the descriptions, even by Trump standards, so I went and listened to it and read the transcript. I was unsurprised to find that the portrayal of it, as "find me votes" meaning "create fake ballots to elect me" is entirely inaccurate. Yes, he did offer a number of bizarre conspiracy theories about why the election outcome was fraudulent, and Raffensperger did an excellent job, for each one, of both acknowledging the theory and showing that he had taken it seriously and investigated and found no evidence or outright disproven it. The call ended not with Trump saying "make up those votes or else" but with Trump saying, essentially "I'll follow up with more evidence for voter fraud".
If you have listened to the call or read the transcript and come away thinking "wow, Trump really tried to rig the election" then I don't know what to tell you. It's just plainly obvious that he did not do that, and I struggle to even comprehend how that could be a reasonable conclusion.
> If you have listened to the call or read the transcript and come away thinking "wow, Trump really tried to rig the election" then I don't know what to tell you. It's just plainly obvious that he did not do that, and I struggle to even comprehend how that could be a reasonable conclusion.
This is probably just sea-lioning, but I went back to re-read that transcript on the chance that this was an earnest comment and my previous view was colored.
There is no other way to read this transcript than Trump trying to strong-arm them into refusing to certify the election results. He says "find me this number of votes" multiple times, and the direct context was "you're facing criminal charges for this if you don't do as I am saying".
Here's a few of the relevant snippets, with context, for anyone reading this far:
----
> Trump: But I won’t … this is never … this is … We have some incredible talent said they’ve never seen anything … Now the problem is they need more time for the big numbers. But they’re very substantial numbers. But I think you’re going to find that they — by the way, a little information, I think you’re going to find that they are shredding ballots because they have to get rid of the ballots because the ballots are unsigned. The ballots are corrupt, and they’re brand new and they don’t have a seal and there’s the whole thing with the ballots. But the ballots are corrupt.
And you are going to find that they are — which is totally illegal, it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk. But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I’ve heard. And they are removing machinery and they’re moving it as fast as they can, both of which are criminal finds. And you can’t let it happen and you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
> Trump: No, but this was. That’s OK. But I got like 78 percent in the military. These ballots were all for … They didn’t tell me overseas. Could be overseas too, but I get votes overseas too, Ryan, you know in all fairness. No they came in, a large batch came in and it was, quote, 100 percent for Biden. And that is criminal. You know, that’s criminal. OK. That’s another criminal, that’s another of the many criminal events, many criminal events here.
Oh, I don’t know, look Brad. I got to get … I have to find 12,000 votes and I have them times a lot. And therefore, I won the state. That’s before we go to the next step, which is in the process of right now. You know, and I watched you this morning and you said, uh, well, there was no criminality.
But I mean, all of this stuff is very dangerous stuff. When you talk about no criminality, I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that.
He attempted a coup? It is obvious you do not do third world country much. This is not how it is done haha.
The problem is will you admit you were dead wrong and potentially spewing propaganda if democracy survives Trump’s second term?
Attempting it and failing doesn't mean he didn't attempt it. He actively tried to stop the results being certified, he tried to get people to fraudulently invent votes for him. We have the Trump–Raffensperger call on tape, the evidence is right there, it's an indisputable fact by anyone who cares about reality.
And no, I wouldn't be wrong, because it's a fact he did try to do that, and even if they did—for whatever reason—decide not to try it again, that doesn't change it being what any reasonable person should assume they will do.
>The problem is will you admit you were dead wrong and potentially spewing propaganda if democracy survives Trump’s second term?
The answer to this question is the same as the answer to "what if climate change is a hoax", and that is that I would love to be wrong and would gladly admit it rather than live under a dictator or on a dying planet
If Trump had actually attempted a coup, he would have had no shortage of participants, and they wouldn't have walked into Congress with empty hands.
Jan 6 was very poorly handled. The majority of that is on Trump. Many people - though not even close to "all", or even "most" - present committed crimes. All in all it was on the level of civil disobedience, not revolution.
... And then you have Trump refusing to say he would accept the results of the election every time he's asked, "joking" about staying more than two terms, calling bog standard politicians "internal enemies", wishing total obedience from generals and dreaming of using the military to crack down on civilians...
Brown shirts are just civil disobedience in your book?
On February 27th-the Reichstag in Berlin was set on fire. 4 weeks before, Hitler was appointed to chancellor. Hitler placed an urgency regulation to ban all political activities. He destroyed democracy in one month. Trump can now do it one day.
he is definitely signaling something, whether it will come true or not is another question.
> It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.
It was stupid phrasing and might have been a Freudian slip, but his explanation also makes sense. "The country is on the brink of {insert terrible fears here}, but we'll fix it up this term and you won't have to worry about it for a while." The man isn't known for his well-thought-out speeches, his entire schtick is speaking off the cuff, and most voters don't hold that against him.
So even when the Christians don't vote in 4 years, they still get the things they want?
What do the people who are voting get?
I'd guess they get a government that via the Supreme court, gerrymandering, voter suppression, cowed media, doesn't represent their democratic interests.
Which is a bad thing.
There's abortion votes that passed the other day at state levels that will not be put into practice because Republicans don't want to.
TLDR: In different context, but same feeling: "I need to vaccinate yourself when you are around me, but when you are no longer, I don't care". I dunno. That doesn't sound very presidential tbh...
That's not what they said. "Measured and rational speaking" is usually terrible marketing. It barely works on college-educated adults and certainly doesn't work on the mass market.
The example they gave is Trump in a garbage truck, but that's just one way in which Trump made himself enormously appealing to the non-elite.
Worse, they don't see that a near-majority of the country is actively put off by someone speaking like a rich, educated liberal.
The #1 exercise Democratic politicians should do over the next 4 years is to spend hours and hours and hours actually listening to working-class people in flyover country and trying to really understand them. They just don't get it yet.
Sure they were. Biden actively sought to pass bipartisan immigration legislation. Trump blocked it because it would hurt his chances at reelection. Neither Trump nor Vance denied this during the debates(they had multiple opportunities to do so).
We are not divided though. He overwhelmingly won the popular vote. Sure there is an opposition, but the truth is that the majority of American voters agree with Trump (currently winning by margins of 5 million according to NYT).
Yes, there's still work to be done, but the real inflamers of the nation are the mainstream media. Luckily they're slowly going away, and uniting figures like Musk, Rogan, etc are taking their place.
Also, he overwhelmingly wins with hispanic men (55-45). He is walking away with hispanics overall in many swing states. Black men are now 25% in his favor. Basically every single minority margin has shifted towards president trump (Including women). At this rate he will succesfully unite the country in a few more years as the remaining stragglers come over to see common sense.
We have never been more divided. Neither side can even agree on definitions or facts.
I'm glad the great uniters of Musk and Rogan can take the reins in delivering high-quality information to our nation. Maybe in a few years, we will all agree on which conspiracy theories we should all believe.
> Maybe in a few years, we will all agree on which conspiracy theories we should all believe.
One man's conspiracist is another man's freedom fighters. You can't honestly tell me that mainstream outlets were free of conspiracies the last few years? Remember Russia?
See, we can't even agree on a starting point. Instead of admitting Rogan and Elon pedaling in absolutely insane conspiracy theories, you pull out your whataboutisms and think we are back on a level playing field. We aren't.
Don't be coy, please enlighten us as to what this conspiracy is involving Russia that you think the MSM peddled, and what evidence you have that disproves the narrative.
The Steele dossier, which purported to contain evidence of the Trump camapign's links with Russia, turned out to actually be a Russian plant. That's what I'm talking about. People still peddle its contents as if they're anything other than fake news. That's a major problem. Same with Trump's 'very fine people' comment. You can accuse Rogan of spreading misinformation until the cows come home, but the mainstream media has also peddled its own share.
I haven't heard any mention of the dossier in years, other than as an artifact of the past. A quick search, and I can't find sources trying to claim its truth (or evidence of smoke, for which there might be a fire) in years.
I certainly didn't mention Rogan—I'm aware of his existence, but I've actually never heard him speak nor seen any transcripts of anything he's said. But trying to minimize the flood of absolute obvious shit that comes from right-wing outlets by choosing to point to Rogan specifically is a bit telling.
Anyone and everyone should be called out for lies they manufacture or spread. This includes lies on the left, lest you think I'm granting one side a pass.
How many have you been doxxed for or impeached for or censored from spreading. as far as I'm aware, all your conspiracy theories have been promulgated by everyone and allowed to spread everywhere. I think that's the major difference. You should create your list. Twitter/X is a great way to spread such information to the public at large! No one will censor you. You are free :)
Hey dude, you may be overdosing on those pills you’re taking when you start saying things like Musk is a uniter. The red ones are fine, just limit it to one or two, okay?
I remember when he pushed the lie that Pelosi's husband was attacked by his gay lover. Or when he pushed the lie that Democrats are stuffing voting boxes with illegal immigrants'votes, or that brown people are replacing white people.
Such a uniter, that South African emerald mine owner.
I remember when trump tried very hard to weaponize the justice department against his "enemies" (https://www.justsecurity.org/98703/chronology-trump-justice-...) but people stood up to him and refused, or just delayed acting as long as possible. Trump was very much "handled" by people all levels of government who tried their best to clean up after him, distract him away from his crazy plans, or obstruct him. Even in the the military. In the beginning it was the so-called "axis of adults" that kept things sane.
That's all changed since he's spent a considerable amount of time removing anyone who disagrees with him, threatening those who would dare to, installing people who will do what he wants including the judges who have granted him total immunity which he didn't have before. I think we can expect things this time to be very different.
Did you even listen to the video clip in the article?
> It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.
I hate Trump as much as anyone, but deliberately misconstruing every word he says is part of what cost Democrats the election. People saw through it.
I think that given the context that he illegally tried to retain power after losing in 2020 that many people infer something into his words about reducing the need to vote
People don't like being told "here is what was said, here is what was MEANT because you're not educated enough and can't possibly understand" did Harris zero favors.
I'm not sure in what respects you are disagreeing with me on, since I didn't mention anyone's level of education or intelligence -- I didn't mention anything about the people who interpret the statement in a benign way at all.
I added my thoughts on why people would take that statement and infer some other meaning than his literal words, since those words are said as part of a broader context. This says nothing about the people who didn't do so.
So, you starting a comment with "No" but then not addressing any point I made is confusing to me.
No, what cost them the election was the fact that Kamala ran a campaign of "I'm actually just a republican so you can vote for me". She dumped any sort of policy or position that'd scare away the mythical disaffected trump voter. She paraded around Liz Cheney FFS. WTF likes the Cheneys?
> She dumped any sort of policy or position that'd scare away the mythical disaffected trump voter
We just saw a national rejection of progressive politicians. To the extent she screwed up, it was in having a numpty VP instead of Shapiro and declining to be more specific on policies that would offend the left wing of the base. We’ll probably see a midterm backlash, however, so the message isn’t “everyone tack right.”
The only leftwing policy she adopted was abortion. Otherwise, she ran on being tough on the border, upholding the 2nd amendment, and being an awesome cop. Her platform silently dumped policies like the death penalty.
One was conciliation on Gaza, an issue inflamed by the protests and that was material in Pennsylvania, the tipping-point state she lost in. She also wasn’t “tough on the border” in any specific way—Trump channeled that anger effectively.
Another was student loan modifications. This transferred wealth from non-college taxpayers to college graduates.
Presumably the person you’re replying to knows these things? Try and respond to the best interpretation of a comment instead of assuming they’re an idiot.
What's the "best interpretation" of a non-sequitur look like, to you?
A specific example for this particular comment would be ideal, as even their reply doesn't illuminate the value of mentioning Obama despite referring to it and attempting to justify it.
Obama is a Democrat. Neither Biden, nor Harris, nor AOC pushed for Medicare for all when it was probably the easiest and most helpful time to do so; during a pandemic.
I brought up Obama's actions because it was just the ongoing legacy of neoliberalism that started under Clinton. They thought they would win elections by "going to the middle", and this is what happened.
Obama was also campaigning for Harris.
The Democrats are now the part of war and corporations and I was just done with it all.
Ah, the self-proclaimed mass media critics! Everyone else is somehow badly influenced by the nasty mass media but they see right through it with their superior intellect. They don't need correspondents and professionals to actually go where something is happening, they know the truth intuitively, perhaps even a priori.
It's not about superior intellect, it's about incentive structures
Looking at how the incentive structures are laid out, it's clear there's no incentive to be honest to normal people. They need the advertising dollars to exist, and we are suppose to trust big pharma's enormous advertising budget doesn't impact the business decisions at media companies? That's just big pharma, who else is playing the game?
There's no medical test to diagnose depression, all you can do is observe behavior and talk about it
Seeing bad behavior and lies over and over, decade after decade erodes trust and reveals the kind of people they are, if it was some radical group with no real power there would be less concern, but they have a tremendous amount of money and influence
Most right winners are listening to podcasts at this point, I don't think Joe Rogan's incentives are as equally bad when comparing to an industry that manufactured the opium epidemic or ones that constantly lie
Fox News is by a huge margin the most popular news outlet. Throw in the New York Post (huge presence on the internet) and the WSJ, and conservative media is the mainstream media at this point.
They also shilled for Trump relentlessly, without pretense. But that's beside the point. The left should accept that they no longer represent the aspirations and priorities of the mainstream or even of ethnic minorities, and the right should stop with the underdog charade. They've swapped sides. Of course, neither side will make that admission anytime soon.
You can defend the ministry of truth as much as you want. There has been too much deception in recent years, people simply stop believing it. The meda were always there to steer "democracies", they even outright admit it by saying they are an integral part of the democratic process. People start to see through this deception.
You're right. The media has been corrupted. It's only logical, over time the media is corrupted as an outgrowth of the Pareto principle applied to politics. Eventually all political systems are corrupted because those with power use their advantage to accrue more power in a self-reinforcing cycle. The media, as an obvious lever of power, is subject to this, just as are regulatory agencies, congresspeople, social media sites, etc. I don't understand how such an intelligent userbase can be so willfully blind and naive. What began to open my eyes was the pandemic and the Ukraine war. Not that the establishment positions were necessarily wrong, but I felt the manipulation was easy to sense.
Meh, you can watch MSNBC or Fox for quite different messages. Of course, the fascists are not complaining about the media because there is actually something wrong but to justify the eventual censorship.
Given that this is a repeat of 2016, it wont wear off and they wont be ashamed. Yeah the crowd that touts itself as highly intelligent and techno-savvy apparently cant learn simple lessons.
The way I see it is that Trump’s policies, if acted upon, will have a delayed effect. I see it as a major event contributing to the rebirth of authoritarianism in the 21st century. I think selfishly doing Trump’s America for four years by pumping money into oil production, cutting back on contributions to global stability, and creating distrust in alliances could have disastrous consequences over the next couple of decades. I believe the current structure of techno-feudalism will only become more concrete with the erosion of science and education. Whether there are immediate consequences to this leadership or not, I’m very pessimistic for the future.
What are some other perspectives or predictions regarding how things will go under this current Trump admin; namely foreign policy, global stability, and school system reform?
Part of the reason why Harris lost is because this line about democracy ending if Trump wins is about all she could offer as a reason to vote for her, and the average voter doesn't believe it. I guess now we'll all get to see if the dire warnings were at all founded in reality, but it was a critical mistake to turn up the rhetoric so hot and not realize that it made the moderate voters take her less seriously.
It was just a bad strategy in every way: it reduced their odds of winning the election, and if they were right it won't matter because there will be no election. If they were wrong, then they burned a whole bunch of credibility pushing what turned out to be a conspiracy theory.
And if both parties are conspiracy theory parties, the moderate voter can't use that as a razor.
So many reasons to vote for her and you remember only the democracy ending part?
Also, the moderate voter would not take her seriously because of her saying that? Did you wipe out your memory about what happened when he lost not so very long ago?
To me this all feels like a far fetched tv drama became reality. It goes beyond any human understanding.
I want my taxes go down and want illigal migration to end as well! I want illegal drugs and illegal weapons and all wars to disappear as well. I want everything to be great and florishing for all Americans and the world. Still I would never vote for Trump because he just shouts he will 'fix' it, as if he would be some kind of Messias with some magic powers, without explaining realistically how that it can even work. A lot of people seem to believe it just because they 'want to believe' or maybe because he says it in such monotonic (hypnotising maybe?) way.
Ironically, the Democrats had a much more comprehensive policy position of course. But what matters to voters is what they _perceive_ and "what will you do for me". It's a propaganda war, and not yet clear to me whether we should blame the party or "the media" for losing it.
The 13 Keys to the White House model finally failed. I don't think it's because of the subjective keys, but rather the objective keys don't match what people actually believe about the world. Again, Democrats lost the marketing battle somehow.
That's a fair point. I guess Democrats should have focused more on the "real policy" aspects of Project 2025 (besides abortion?) rather than the "completely reorganize the Executive" (implement fascism) parts.
Of course, Trump did distance himself from Project 2025, right? He clearly didn't like sharing the spotlight. How do we get to a situation where a candidate disavows knowledge of their presumptive policy paper, yet all the voters still believe that's his policy? Seems like an even more absurd example having your cake and eating it too.
An underappreciated reason why Harris lost is that Democrats tried to switch candidates just a few months before the election. I'm not on one side or the other, but when I heard that Lorraine Jobs was pushing for a different candidate last July, I thought to myself, this is the dumbest idea I've ever seen. Indeed, it was.
The whole artifical limitations on discourse and topics is a poisoned chalice the democrats seem not to be able to let go of, no matter how much depends on it. Ad to that a aristocratic inability to even perceive problems and a getting high on their own supply of virtue signaling and you get a recipe for disaster.
Compared to Trump the Democrats are amateurs at messaging who seem to have no clue how to talk to the average Joe or Jane. Instead of using the Jan 6 riot to attack Trump's "law and order" image, they choose to frame it in terms of "democracy".
Given the generally high regard that the US has for service people - military, police, emergency services etc - it always puzzled me that Trump was never held to account (in a political, rather than legal sense) for the harm caused.
Is there a reason why this has been glossed over? I thought that would surely be a red line for many of his supporters.
"Law and order" was clearly a dog-whistle for 'treating suspects and minorities badly will make you feel safer' from the start . As evidenced by the blazing hypocrisy in a fucking felon running on "law and order" from a straightforward interpretation.
Given the complete discrepancy in voter turnout for dems in 2020 v 2024, I think the core claim of the J6ers, namely that there was fraud that affected the 2020 election, is becoming more and more likely. Especially since the only person to be killed on that day was a regular American (no cops were killed), I think, based on the voting, that most people see it as justified. I mean they just elected the guy who lost with huge margins in the popular vote
If you want to know what Trump really believed about the 2020 election rather than what he wanted his supporters to think, look at the allegations that he and his election lawyers were actually willing to present in court. Since there would have been legal consequences for making stuff up, the court filings were far less sensational than his public PR.
I don't know and don't really care. When I vote I don't rely only on evidence admissible in court. Most of the country does not follow politics as closely as some of the people here. We see what we see and vote on how that seems it will affect us.
I also like to keep my anti-tiger rock on me at all times. I don't really care that there's no evidence that it works. All I know is what I see, and I haven't seen any tigers.
Roseanne Boyland was arguably killed by the police that day as well. Her death was ruled an amphetamines overdose to cover this up, she had a prescription for ADHD.
I don't think it would hurt their credibility if they're wrong. It's not like they created that idea, they were just pointing out Trump's words and actions.
It wasnt just Harris but the entire media and entire democratic establishment fabricating claims of Trump doom.
The best thing Kamala could have done is to downplay that rhetoric and focus on issues. If she did that, I believe she wouldve won. But you can hardly blame her to go with the grain.
Nah, she was an utterly normal Obama era democrat, which is basically it same as an Obama era republican. She offered normal and reasonable level-headed leadership. Welcome to the FAFO era.
According to the exit polling, voters most concerned about democracy voted Trump.
My guess is that the worries on democracy have nothing to do with regular Americans getting riled up when their candidate lost (jan 6), and more to do with the entire political machine coming down on Trump after his loss in an attempt to take his wealth and imprison him in politically motivated lawsuits with made up charges.
the reason Harris lost is because the Democrats are soft on everything. Soft on immigration, soft on crime. Even though I dislike Trump, I wouldn't vote for Democrats ever.
Their “Trump is a dictator, literally Hitler, who will take away womens right to vote” didn’t work the first time in 2015/2016 and it didn’t work this time either. The U.S.A knows what a Trump presidency is like and they voted to have it again: it was that good.
Democrats got their chance the last 4 years and instead of making the lives of U.S. Citizens better, they made it much worse, and shoved social justice issues down their throats that they didn’t want.
I think your view is also largely hyperbole. It is a nice vote winning narrative to suggest that democrats did nothing but shove social justice issues down people's throats, but like you, I'm not American and I suspect that is just as much hyperbole as "Trump is literally Hitler".
You're part of the division of hate that you seem like you're raging against, using messaging like that.
> this line about democracy ending if Trump wins is about all she could offer as a reason to vote for her,
This is a lie.
> I guess now we'll all get to see if the dire warnings were at all founded in reality
So, if he was lying or telling the truth?
> If they were wrong, then they burned a whole bunch of credibility pushing what turned out to be a conspiracy theory.
No they didn't. Republicans run the same claims every election and they win off it.
> the moderate voter can't use that as a razor.
Any informed voter would now Kamala offered more then "this line about democracy ending." Anyone who thinks this was "all she could offer as a reason to vote for her," you are really just saying "I was not informed."
It's literally a conspiracy theory, the question at hand is whether there really is a conspiracy.
My point is not that they're wrong and Trump won't successfully end democracy (I think the odds are low but non-zero), my point is that the strategy blew up in the DNC's faces and should have been identified as a terrible plan from the start.
Being a Cassandra is not a winning playbook. Being able to say "I told you so" is small comfort, and that's the package they chose when they decided to make themselves look crazy to the electorate. If they believed democracy to be in danger the correct move was to nominate an electable candidate last year, not wait until Biden turned out to be unelectable and then start screaming about the end of democracy.
Have you listened to Trump's recent speeches? In 2016 he was very articulate and persuasive in his own way, but in 2024 his brain is clearly on the way out.
It's not, but, you have to ask a question - if democrats believe this, and this is the correct messaging, why did they do practically nothing to prevent things like this from becoming a reality? Or even propose a plan going forward as to how to prevent this again? Nothing came of Jan 6, nothing came of any of this, no matter who won, and it was very obvious that the plan was just "well as long as we're in power we won't slide into authoritarianism," but even if it wasn't Trump, eventually someone else is going to come along and beat them and begin wherever Trump left off.
It's not very good messaging at its core. You can't say something is an existential crisis, and then spend 4 years doing absolutely nothing about that crisis other than to say "vote for me again so that won't happen this time."
They impeached him. Counter to Republican's rhetoric, the Democrats can't force the DOJ to press charges in a timely manner, but the DOJ eventually also pursued charges. So they attempted to fix this with:
1. Impeachment
2. Congressional Acts
3. Independent action from the Department of Justice
4. Individual states attempted to get him off their ballots for treason
How about you describe what they should have done?
This is like using a squirt gun in a forest fire. A meaningless change to a meaningless procedural "loophole" that had no chance of working whatsoever.
> why did they do practically nothing to prevent things like this from becoming a reality?
You mean like passing "The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022"? That was literally written to support democracy and prevent another Jan 6.
Obviously you can't write legislation to stop Trump winning democratically while still supporting democracy.
Dems have at least shown they're the party of supporting real democracy.
This is fiction, and we should not persist in describing politics in this term, since it doesnt help us see whats going on.
It does sound harsh, and it is. We (people on HN), tend to talk about both candidates as if it was some equal comparison.
However, this is adamantly not the case. Trump is not like any candidate America has voted for in living memmory. He is SO outside of bounds, that frankly we collectively fail to understand him, and have to substitute some "default republican" candidate in our minds to deal with it.
Even in your comment - "it was a critical mistake to turn up the rhetoric so hot", even you will agree that Trump is incredibly toxic and out there in his comments.
Yet, you will genuinely feel that Harris/dems turned up the rhetoric. Not just this, there are a million places where blame is placed at the feet of Dems, for things that Trump or the GOP has done.
Nothing the dems can do will make a difference, because the Republicans have the superior model. Republicans can focus entirely on psychology, without having to worry about being called out on it, because Trump is simply causing an overflow whenever anyone has to deal with him.
We all just end up "ignoring" whatever new incendiary thing he has done, and instead deal with the office/position of either "candidate" or "president", because those make sense.
The dire warnings are literally founded in documents that are going to be enacted, based on what people are actively building teams for and recruiting.
However, there is no measure of evidence, including action that has happened, that will move the needle. It simply wont, because its not what people care about.
Some group will go to Reddit, to console themselves, the other group will go to Fox and the Consvervative bubble to reassure themselves. They will be given the same info that sells, and then they will learn to ignore everything that causes cognitive dissonance.
The man must be reminded that he did not demand more than two options. He did not demand a system that guaranteed more than two options. He allowed the Excrement Party to bring forward feces as it's candidate, and he allowed the Bark Party to bring forward manchineel as it's candidate.
The man is entirely responsible for this situation he finds himself in unfortunately. Also, if the man selected feces the first time round, and suffered for it, then maybe the deadly poisonous bark is the only other logical choice, if only to stop the torture?
The offerer of two choices then makes the man choose between his daughter getting shot and his wife getting shot. “Remember now”, he says, “whoever I shoot will not be killed by me but by you.” The Offerer cackles. “You could have prevented this from happening if you had only worked harder to thwart my first supervillain move fifteen years prior. You are entirely responsible for this situation.”
The fact that someone like Trump was given as choice is a result of a failure of "the man" from the start.
It's just too easy to pretend it is not your fault if your society, the one that you are building with your neighbours, ended up giving you bad choices.
Now that the man made a choice, what do you think will happen next time? This election just demonstrated that lying and using fear and hatred is working very well. Do you think that someone "normal" will invest in this knowing they will lose for sure?
> lying and using fear and hatred is working very well
Counterpoint: R's perceive (sometimes not incorrectly) that lying is a "both sides" thing, and it's indisputable that the D's ran largely on fear/hatred this time (which clearly did not get the D voterbase out where it counted).
There are plenty of theories of what happened. For example, Harris did target the center and the not-convinced-by-Trump republicans a lot, which is probably what alienated her voter base more than saying something that was already said during Biden election and did not alienate them.
I really doubt you can seriously pretend that the Democrats would have done better without their share of lying. Maybe yes, but maybe no, and concluding one of the two is just as valid as the any other conclusion. One may can even argue that they did not lie enough, as the lies on the Republican side did helped them a lot (unless we consider that republican voters are intrinsically more morally bankrupted than the democrat ones, and that republican voters like lies while democrat voters don't).
As for the fear/hatred, it's a funny thing. If you put one liar and one honest person in the same room, one will say "the other one is the liar" and the other one will say ... "the other one is the liar". It's funny that if you put someone who want to use fear and hatred for their own profit and someone who don't, the first one will say "if you vote for my opponent, it will be very dangerous because their are pushing for fear and hatred" and the second one will say the same.
> R's perceive (sometimes not incorrectly) that lying is a "both sides" thing
Lying is a politician thing. Anyone who thinks that any one politician or political party has a monopoly on lying is deluding themselves. Trump lies through his teeth, Biden lies through his teeth, Obama did, Bush did, Clinton did, etc. Honest politicians simply do not exist.
And to be clear I think we should absolutely criticize our politicians for it. What I object to is this framing like only one particular politician is a liar. Bullshit, they all are liars to the same degree.
I would not say they lie to the same degree. Trump can not own up to the truth. The man took a Sharpie to a hurricane map to "prove" that he was not wrong. He has never and will never admit that he is wrong.
To some extent Trump is a singular figure. No-one else has quite the same charisma he has and his experience of getting shot makes him into even more of a legend.
Daniel Boorstin observed the Kennedy administration and predicted in 1963 that it was just a matter of time before TV stars would dominate conventional politics.
The charisma of an old, demented moron? He failed as a public speaker even before he got this old, I have heard non-native 5 years old speak better than him.
Plus he is spineless, lying, rapist.. well, sure it is a kind of a charisma. One fitting for some video game villain.
What he says comes across as emotionally true to many people.
I do remember that debate with Kamala were Trump came across as unhinged with that "eating cats and dogs" thing but I think one reason why he might have won was revealed in Harris's waffling around the issue of climate change where her answer was "drill baby drill", pandering to the Pennsylvania market.
People who want to see climate action are discouraged by this but people who want "drill baby drill" don't believe she in sincere and think that she is pandering. So talking that way she just loses people she doesn't win them.
Except the Haitians really are eating dogs and cats. I have seen the video and photographic evidence. They see it as free food. You think cats and dogs wander Haiti in massive numbers? No, they eat them. They’re starving.
> This election just demonstrated that lying and using fear and hatred is working very well.
All I heard from anyone left leaning (on this site or otherwise) in the last year is that we have to stop Trump because he's going to literally destroy democracy. That, too, is using fear and hatred. Don't act like only one political faction does it. We are trapped in a vortex of shit where both sides are using fear and hatred, and we need to criticize everyone for it.
It demonstrated nothing of the sort. The better candidate won and that’s about it. Even in the republican primaries, the best candidate won. What makes you think your opinion is above the system?
At least he was the choice by people. Someone else could have been choice, if they had more pull. Unlike the other side where no one voted for her to be the canditate.
What makes you think the system always chooses the best candidate? Most voters operate on very little or false information, they just vote on vibes or for whatever party they've always voted for
Why do you think you don't. It could be you who is deceived. Everyone thinks they are the person that sees things for what they are but it can't be true for all of us.
Better doesn’t mean good. A lot of people say that the choice was between bad and worse. Both the Economist’s and the NYT election advice wasn’t vote for Harris because she is great but because Trump is bad.
When you observe a system like that it’s reasonable to ask if you can improve the system. Imagine this was a football game and not politics. It would be reasonable to talk about how we can make the football league more interesting.
> It's just too easy to pretend it is not your fault if your society, the one that you are building with your neighbours, ended up giving you bad choices.
It’s the man’s fault because We Live in a Society? Maybe you ought to evoke the Butterfly Effect as well, it’s all connected. The butterfly in Africa is probably also complicit in this Trump win.
The Donor Class decided that this was the two options you had. I hope that I don’t have to explain that the Democrats and Republicans are not grassroots, democratic institutions.
Trump seems to be a refutation that the candidate is only chosen by "The Donor Class". He was nominated twice despite efforts of monied interests, not because of them (it's my understanding the money didn't go to him until it was inevitable that he'd be the candidate).
It’s a refutation of the literal phrase “chosen by the donor class” because there are more players that have an effect.
Trump is the candidate of the reactionary petite bourgeoisie.[1] These are not part of the Donor Class but they have enough power to, when times are “bad” for the lamestream candidates, elbow in their candidate.
[1] The mainstream media likes to say that he is the “working class candidate” without any seeming basis in reality
How are you defining the "petite bourgeoisie"? I'm not sure your thought fits with my (perhaps incorrect) understanding of the term as sole proprietors and artisan workers. Is that term being used liberally to refer to the property-owning middle/lower classes?
After a quick lookup, it seems like roughly 10% of Americans own a small business. (I'm assuming a relatively large portion is a side-hustle.) I don't know that I would say they have enough power (by themselves) to select a candidate.
It’s hard to get clarity when you aren’t even willing to define the words you’re throwing around.
My refutation about the “donor class” stems from the fact that Trump raised relatively little money compared to his rivals in 2016 yet still won. If the donor class wielded all the power, that couldn’t happen. “Big money” actively supported his opponents in the primaries. I don’t know the stats for this year, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a similar dynamic happened.
I mean if Biden called everyone garbage as humor, I would actually think it's funny. But he actually meant it lol.
EDIT: MY guess is Biden is smarter than he lets on, and secretly supports Trump / hates the dems for what they did to him. I wouldn't be surprised if that comment was purposeful. It seemed a bit contrived.
Biden is sunsetting a bit, but is he "put on a MAGA hat, bust out a big smile, and give a thumbs up for the camera" sunsetting?
Did Jill Biden wear a red dress to the polls on accident? Do we credit the idea that she, the First Lady, didn't look in the mirror and think about the political implications of primary colors in the USA?
One candidate was a normal functioning human being with policy positions other normal functioning humans can agree or disagree with. A better analogy would be a choice between blue cheese and poison.
As a moderate who voted for KH, the biggest problem with the DNC candidates in recent decades is that they do not, in fact, appear to be real human beings, but instead curated facades composed of politically desirable traits.
I can see your point in the presidential race. For down ballot candidates though, I'd say exactly the opposite. So many GOP politicians who sing praise of Trump publicly have been caught calling him a moron privately. Or in the case of his VP, calling him Hitler publicly. The scent of insincerity is just rampant through the GOP.
Tell me then, what are Trump's policy positions aside from keeping himself out of jail? Do you think he is actually going to impose across-the-board 20% tariffs? His big donors and the market don't because that would result in other countries imposing 20% tariffs on all US exports and trading with each other instead. That was just a story to tell his poor uneducated voters so they wouldn't think he would raise their taxes, reduce their benefits, or explode the deficit. There's no more build a wall rhetoric after he failed to do so in his first term and then blocked a border control bill. What he will support is cryptocurrency speculation, which he has personally profited from and his Silicon Valley donors hope to continue to profit from.
If we want to be optimistic, he will cut regulations and probably also funding to our military-industrial complex. For the wealthy, he will transfer an immense amount of resources to us.
For one’s 24h capital gains to exceed the median American wage only requires a few million at play in almost any asset. That is a fifth of households [1] and I’d guess around double that fraction of likely voters. (If you’re in crypto, you could have done it with less than a million.) That will influence how folks think about Trump, at least in the short term.
The policies were laid out in Project 2025. Of course, Trump didn't endorse it. But they have the power now and that's the blueprint they're going to follow. They have said they will destroy democracy in the US and they will do it.
That's just my personal opinion and prediction. I hope I'm wrong but in any case it makes no sense to discuss it now. We'll have to wait 2 years or so and see.
Calling the "blue cheese" a "normal functioning human being with policy positions other normal functioning humans can agree or disagree with" tells me that you've been eating rotten cheese all along.
The "orange cheese" has a brain and can talk without the need of a teleprompter. And more importantly, it wasn't a warmonger that put the lives of Euro cheese in danger.
Have you ever heard him speak?! Quite literally asking, are people just voting/liking him based on static images and deliberately cut to look somewhat acceptable videos? I swear his speech is worse than Biden's has ever been.
As best I can tell, he speaks at the level of someone with about a fifth-grade education. I believe that to be intentional, as it means he's easily understood and not perceived as demeaning.
More importantly, his speech is consistent and has been his entire political career.
Biden's problem isn't that he's not able to speak at a collegiate level; it's that he's very obviously getting worse over time. The man is currently President of the USA - when's the last time you heard him speak publicly and take questions?
Yes, I've listened to him speak many, many times. I listened to him speak for 3 hours on an unscripted podcast. I've listened to him speak (unscripted) to many other interviewers. Trump is charismatic, real, and genuinely funny.
The media has been so unbelievably unfair to this guy. I feel sorry for him.
> If this is what America wants, then it is what America deserves.
It's not really "what America wants". You are drastically overestimating how democratic the US system is if you think the fact that a very narrow majority picked one of the preselected candidates means that candidate has any kind of broad popular mandate.
It's probably what a double-digit percentage of Americans want, but certainly not the majority, and only barely the majority preferred it over the other extremely unpopular candidate.
How is ~8% (eyeballing) of the popular vote a narrow majority in politics? It's a pretty substantial majority. Apathetic non-voters don't really count because they don't care.
An important thing to keep in mind in American politics is the massive amount of voter suppression. Not voting doesn't inherently mean you were lazy or apathetic. It may well mean your vote was suppressed by any of a hundred tactics. Closing polling places in blue regions, requiring in-person voting on-the-day, restricting early voting, restricting vote by mail, failing at sending people ballots, spuriously dropping voter registrations...
OK, you're doing Trump has 7% more votes than Harris. Which is valid -- I think that's not the way most people report it though. I think most people say that Trump won by 3.5%.
What you forget, or may not appreciate, is that (for example) Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Red may stay home, because their vote won't really count.
I've voted Dem all my life (since 1988), and while my preferred candidate has won several of those races, my actual VOTE never helped them because I voted in Mississippi (88), Alabama (92), and Texas (96 & thereafter) -- all of which have been GOP strongholds for a long, long time. (Texas, for example, hasn't gone for the Democrats since Carter v. Ford in 1976.)
It's easy to imagine that a feeling of despair about the efficacy of one's vote would drive someone to stay home.
For some reason I’ve not heard this argument 8 years back when Clinton lost. At that time the fact that she won popular vote was used to critique the electoral college. Maybe at that time republicans stayed at home in the blue states?
As a foreigner it seems like the electoral college is obviously stupid. No matter who wins why. It is pure conservatism to keep it like doing something because the Bible says so. Given that it mostly helps one party it will never be changed but it cannot be argued from first principles in the 21st century.
Honest question, Is it not somewhat similar in effect to a parliamentary system? My understanding, is generally a parliament is divided into districts, then after parliament is elected, the government is formed and the prime minister is selected by a majority of the members of parliament?
Not saying it's great, but maybe it's not too dissimilar from some other systems?
It can totally be argued from first principles. If you acknowledge that USA is a union and not a single state then it makes sense that the votes do not necessarily reflect the population distribution and there is some form of rebalancing. Then its a wuestion how much and whether the current balance is the right one.
The US is a federal system. It serves the interests of the states, not the People.
The electoral college - and the Senate - were intended to explicitly put power in the hands of the states, as equals, without regard for population. The House of Representatives was intended to be the counterbalancing voice of the People.
I can totally understand disagreeing with the concept, but to say it's stupid tells me you likely don't understand its purpose and how it fits into the overall system.
This is circular reasoning -- "the system is the way it is because that's how it was set up".
US States are not meaningful cultural units -- people in Philadelphia are much more like people in NYC than either are like those of the rural hinterlands of their respective states.
> The US is a federal system. It serves the interests of the states, not the People.
Indeed, and that's a bad system that makes no sense in 2024. Disliking it doesn't mean one doesn't understand how it came to be this way.
(Tangentially related aside: plenty of federal systems have much fairer systems for election to federal office than the US does. For example Germany.)
> This is circular reasoning -- "the system is the way it is because that's how it was set up".
Maybe it's my lack of sleep from staying until until 7am watching election news, but I honestly can't see how this is applicable. My comment was explicit about why the system was set up that way.
> US States are not meaningful cultural units
I very strongly disagree.
The next time you meet a Texan, ask them if they think they are "meaningfully" culturally distinct from Californians.
The same could be said for Germany and Austria. States - as in "nations", not necessarily US states - can have shared culture and history.
Texas is the one that comes to mind as the strongest, but it's far from unique in that regard. Louisiana pops to mind next. Other examples of states with very strong cultural identities off the top of my head: Oregon, Utah, Tennessee, Florida, West Virginia, Michigan, Maine, Vermont, New York, Illinois... you get the idea.
I'd say about the half the states have a strong, unique identity. The remainder are similar to their neighbors but the farther you travel the more apparent the differences.
I mean, I'll take a stab at it... the electoral college can be argued from first principles if you consider that the U.S. was supposed to be a federal union of sovereign states. There are certainly reasonable arguments for federalism and devolution of power.
The U.N. doesn't directly elect the general secretary.
Is that an argument against the electoral college, or an argument for re-devolution of power? Because the latter is probably easier to do than getting rid of the electoral college, given the requirements to pass a constitutional amendment.
It's not a partisan argument. It's a fact of the mechanics of US Presidential elections.
If DJT ends up with a final popular vote advantage, though, it'll be the first time that a Republican has taken the Oval Office AND the popular vote since 1988.
Why doesn't this apply both ways? Red voters in Blue states are just as likely to stay home because they think their votes won't count. And ditto the other point, Red voters in Red states may not feel like it's worth the bother to vote when they already know their state is going their way.
> It's easy to imagine that a feeling of despair about the efficacy of one's vote would drive someone to stay home.
That's true, but I don't think Democrats had a feeling of despair before the results came in. It seems like most Democrats are shocked that the election turned out this way.
That seems like an insane assumption to me. Maybe there’s nobody worth voting for. If you don’t interpret a non-vote that way what’s the point of democracy?
I wish people would probe this question a little more. It certainly seems to me, what with the party-based system (and all their rules, requirements, and other methods of disincentivizing non Republican/Democrat participation), the point is not democracy at all, but political power brokering. That's not a system I'm comfortable interacting with.
Because there was never a real choice. Put it this way: someone could give a choice between drinking arsenic and fertilizer. One of those options will win, probably by a wide margin. It doesn't mean it reflects the will of the people because, hey, people would rather drink neither.
2016 had the DNC force a terrible candidate down our throats because the establishment was more concerned in measuring offices in the West Wing that listening to voters. It was a spectacular failure and we got Trump as a result. The DNC did their utmost to ensure people didn't get a voice in the process.
2020 was unique for many reasons. Many, including me, said choosing Biden was a bad idea. He was even then so old that the DNC was giving up the incumbents advantage in 2024, partly driven by Biden alluding to him not wanting to run for re-election. Did the people choose Biden? Well, not really. Jim Clyburn did [1].
People didn't choose Biden's "bearhug strategy". Biden, against all the cries not to, decided to seek re-election despite showing signs of cognitive decline a year ago. So there was no real primary process, no chance for the people to have a voice. The people also didn't choose for the DNC to burn to the ground young voter support (eg college protest response), the Arab-American vote (ie Gaza) or the Latino vote (with an immigration policy to the right of Ronald Reagan).
If the DNC had listened to the voters, Bernie Sanders would've handily beat Donald Trump in 2016 and we wouldn't be here.
Why do people keep stating that the choices are somehow not Democratic. Who else beats Trump? Seriously. It's not like there were some great candidates out there that just didn't have the party machinery behind them. These were honestly, IMO, two of the best that the country had to offer. Sure, I personally would've loved to have Pete Buttigieg as President, but I also realize that he loses to Trump 10 out of 10 times.
The fact is America would be happy with no one. But we got who America wanted -- even if its not who I wanted.
> Why do people keep stating that the choices are somehow not Democratic.
Because they're not. It's virtually impossible to start a meaningful new party in the US due to the FPTP system, so you are stuck with whoever the two legacy parties decide to nominate according to their own rules.
Compare Germany: nine parties represented in the federal parliament, a proportional system ensuring that getting 50%+1 of the vote doesn't mean you get 100% of the power, and relative ease of splitting and fusing parties making it so that previously unrepresented political views can easily gain representation (e.g. the socially conservative Russophilic left-wing party "BSW" recently splitting from the standard left-wing party).
> Who else beats Trump?
Most people selected out of the telephone directory at random could have beaten Trump. No, this probably doesn't include Pete Buttigieg.
> The fact is America would be happy with no one. But we got who America wanted
> Because they're not. It's virtually impossible to start a meaningful new party in the US due to the FPTP system, so you are stuck with whoever the two legacy parties decide to nominate according to their own rules.
I just see no appetite for a 3rd party, much less nine in the US. It was amazing how people would complain that Harris provided no details about her plans, when 15 minutes on her website provided more detail than most people would care for (although certainly not at the level of detail any wonk would want). Do you think people are really going investigate nine candidates?
> Most people selected out of the telephone directory at random could have beaten Trump. No, this probably doesn't include Pete Buttigieg.
Given that every Republican can't seem to beat him there must be some odd bias in the phone books you have.
> These two sentences contradict each other.
They don't. We got who we wanted -- we just aren't happy with it. And wouldn't be happy with anyone. No contradiction.
People don't really do deep policy research in any country, but, to continue the example of Germany, I think most people have at least a vague idea of what each party stands for, something like:
* CDU - center-right, active everywhere except Bavaria
* CSU - permanent ally of CDU, active only in Bavaria
* SDP - center-left
* Greens - center, ecology
* FDP - pro-business, what Europeans call "liberal" and Americans would call something like "fiscally conservative" or "moderate libertarian"
* die Linke - Left (originally evolved from the totalitarian ruling party in East Germany, has since become much more moderate and accepted democracy)
* BSW - Left on economic issues, conservative on social/cultural issues
* SSW - Tiny regional party, irrelevant at the national level
The current governing coalition is SPD - Greens - FDP although there are severe tensions between them currently and they will probably break up soon.
I think it's relatively easy for most people to understand at this level of detail, and if the US had a working democratic system where getting X% of the vote roughly translates to getting X% of the influence and power, we probably would have at least the following:
* "Trump party" - Right-wing populist, skeptical or openly hostile to democratic norms
* anti-Trump right - Bush, etc.
* Centrist mainstream liberals - Biden, etc.
* Left-wing - Bernie, AOC, etc. Possibly split into two parties, one that cares more about economic issues and one that cares more about progressive social issues.
* Maybe some random minor parties like "Texas independence party" or similar.
In such a system I really doubt that the "Trump party" would get more than 30% of the vote.
So I think it's unfair to say that "Americans wanted Trump" when under a fairer political system he would not come close to a majority.
> Given that every Republican can't seem to beat him there must be some odd bias in the phone books you have.
No Republican has ever run against Trump in a fair democratic election. They ran against him in the partisan Republican primary, whose voters do not come close to reflecting "Americans" in general. I very strongly suspect that e.g. Nikki Haley could have beaten Trump in a head-to-head nationwide general election.
The majority of the population who were eligible to vote, and actually decided to vote, voted for Trump, yes.
That's not "America" for two reasons: "the majority of the population who were eligible to vote, and actually decided to vote" is not the same thing as "Americans", and choosing which option you prefer in a binary choice (where you have no influence on the two options) does not mean you like the choice you made.
Nobody picked Harris. She hasn't won a primary even once. Trump won it three times. The primary is the only step in the whole election process where the actual "democracy" can even remotely happen.
Fine and true, but setting aside the principle of the matter, did anyone actually prefer Biden over Harris?
I held my nose as I voted for Biden in the primary, but I don't even recall anybody else being on the ballot. I was elated that he stepped down and endorsed his VP.
Admittedly, it sets a scary precedent, I certainly won't disagree. But setting the implications aside, was it really the wrong choice? Did Biden really fare better than Harris in the general? I certainly don't think he would have. I think Trump's margin of victory would have been even higher against Biden.
> Fine and true, but setting aside the principle of the matter, did anyone actually prefer Biden over Harris?
Probably not, but does it matter? Biden was also not chosen in anything resembling a democratic way. US political primaries are not democratic.
The general population being presented a choice between two options that were selected by two ultra-partisan entrenched entities is not democracy.
To have a system somewhat resembling democracy you would have to either (1) open primaries to everyone regardless of party registration with no control by partisan organizations over who gets nominated or supported (which would mostly defeat the point of having political parties at all) or (2) have a more proportional system where it is meaningfully possible to create new political parties that gain a nonzero share of representation.
> Primaries where party members vote seems very much more democratic, than having the party elite decide in some meeting.
It only seems that way to you because it's practically impossible for there to be more than two parties with significant representation. If anyone could start a party and gain support, you would have enough parties to choose from that it's much more likely you'd find one who matches your beliefs, regardless of how they choose their candidates.
I don't know why you'd expect any other reaction from a site where 80% of the readership loves to get high on their own supply from WaPo and CNN and reject the reality. The reality is we're 37T in debt, we're on the brink of a nuclear war due to our harebrained regime change efforts halfway around the globe, and your average American is barely surviving at this point. The latter, by the way is abundantly clear from the polls, too, including exit polls. I'm not sure the electorate particularly cares about the right to third trimester abortion or DEI as the mainstream media would like us to believe, especially when the DNC lost the airtight control over the narrative, and its ability to manufacture consent is getting more limited by the day. In 2020 they had enough control to elect a person who can't string two words together without a teleprompter. In 2024 they already could not. And the grip on the narrative is going to weaken from here on out. If they can still learn, they'll have to actually run capable candidates, who might even dare to have their own opinions about things. That's healthy and good. What doesn't seem feasible anymore are unilaterally anointed candidates who go from "nobody" to "our only hope" at the stroke of a pen of some unelected, non-replaceable bureaucrat.
That's not entirely true. In 2020, a lot of states just cancelled their Republican primaries and pledged their delegates to Trump. Mainly because it's assumed that the incumbent will be the candidate.
And all-in-all, that's fair play. The GOP and DNC are private entities and they get to choose who they put forward as a candidate in the manner they choose. Voting in presidential primaries is fairly recent. The DNC picked Harris, as is their right.
A lot of people voted for the rapist felon, as I write he is in fact winning the popular vote.
This is on the people and the society they live in. It's not "the messaging" from either party - it's simply that Trump appeals to a lot of Americans, as unpalatable as that is.
I'm not trying to persuade you either way. Those are just the facts as assessed by the courts. If you don't like the facts, again, I don't care.
IMHO people vote for Trump because he normalises the hate and jealousy that they feel themselves for their situation and their powerlessness to change it. How he projects his own narcissism makes him look like a kindred spirit to them, and the fact that over 50% of the voting American public can relate to this is a stunning indictment of US society.
Then why isn't he in jail? Why wasn't he been impeached? Why can't they find something that sticks for the most smeared political figure in modern history? If we are bringing up his questionable legal past, then it's fair to bring up the legal past of the opposing side. The truth is the political class has done so much damage and far worse things than Trump.
That's a whole lot of mind reading and guessing of what 50% of the country thinks, it's not simple, no one is that one dimensional and different groups have different reasons
Gen Z, millenials, boomers, gen x all have slightly different social and economic goals
The fundamental christians are not the same as the homeless bernie bros and classic liberals
In 2020, a Pennsylvania white man illegally voted via mail-in ballot on behalf of two deceased parents.
Also in 2020, a black woman in Memphis voted while ineligible due to a felony conviction without being informed she wasn't allowed, and was convicted and sentenced to 6 years in jail.
As for how this applies to why Trump is not in jail for his convictions, I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Just a note: a lot of people, including moderates, perceive his felony conviction (in the Stormy Daniels case) as a politically motivated prosecution engineered by his political opponents. Pushing that prosecution as far as they did almost certainly contributed to Trump's victory rather than having its intended effect of making him untouchable.
I don’t think the conviction’s effect on his support was lost on anyone who was paying attention. He was convicted for breaking the law by a jury of his peers. Should the case have been brought to trial? That’s debatable, but he clearly is a felon. Not the first felon to run a country, as it happens.
Btw I would argue the assassination attempt did far more for him than the felony conviction.
The assassination attempt certainly helped, but it just solidified his ability to cast himself as a victim. That started with the politically-motivated prosecutions.
> Should the case have been brought to trial? That’s debatable, but he clearly is a felon.
I do not believe that the case would have been brought to trial had he not been Donald Trump, and that's a major problem. We can't have selective enforcement of the laws against political opponents.
I voted KH anyway because I think Trump really is a terrible person, but speaking from inside a deep red state: it's hard to overstate how much his conviction riled up his base and persuaded moderates to flip.
He’s far from the first person to have been tried for something that is unevenly enforced at best. Talk to any black men in your community, it happens all the time. More relevantly, prosecutors have to decide which cases to pursue and that calculation seems to often involves factors like the notoriety of the individual and the likelihood of obtaining a conviction. Famous people are routinely prosecuted for things that regular schmoes don’t even get arrested for. The latest example is probably Jason Kelce, being in the public eye means you get more legal scrutiny.
Btw I’m not saying I think this is particularly fair, but it’s been happening as long as we’ve had laws and likely will continue as long as we have some sense of privacy and humans running things.
It’s also not surprising to me that it amped up his supporters. As I said above it was completely predictable. Asking Alvin Bragg to think about the election when choosing whether or not to prosecute would be wrong whichever direction you think it should have been decided.
> Asking Alvin Bragg to think about the election when choosing whether or not to prosecute would be wrong whichever direction you think it should have been decided.
It's pretty clear to me that he did think about the election. That's the problem.
Uneven enforcement against black people is unfair and awful and should be fixed. Uneven enforcement against whichever party is not currently in power is a threat to democracy itself.
> It's pretty clear to me that he did think about the election. That's the problem.
I disagree with your analysis. I think it's likely that Alvin Bragg is not a dumb guy. It is well known that a conviction would not prevent Trump from running for President. He also probably had a number of smart people giving him advice that this was going to do a lot to increase Trump's visibility and in general energize his base. If anything, the degree to which he considered it probably acted as a detractor, not the reason he went through with it.
I think Bragg prosecuted because of the reason that all prosecutors go after high profile cases in big regions. He knew it would bring him attention and he thought he had a good chance to win. In Alvin Bragg's world, that's enough to get you over the line.
> it's hard to overstate how much his conviction riled up his base and persuaded moderates to flip.
I don't buy it, tbh.
I truly do not think that is conviction gained him any votes. I just don't think it lost him any. Anybody that claims "I'm voting for him because he's being charged with crimes for political reasons" was already going to be voting for him to begin with.
Moderates that vote Trump are simply low-information voters.
Using lawfare to convict a political opponent is a very police state and unamerican thing to do, on top of the police state activities under covid, on top of a government wire tapping a political opponent
It's one of the many grievances of those paying attention in the prosecution of the political class and administrative state
Several black friends and relatives cited the legal cases as just another thing that got them voting. Mostly it was immigration and the economy, but that specifically resonated.
There's a lot of people in the midwest with germanic heritage, I like to think about how it rhymes with the relationship between the "uncivilized" barbarians and rome
Crazy enough I've heard from some younger males that him being a felon was good because in order for him to make his life better (being a felon) he would have to make their life better (whether they were felons or felon associated) -- or so their thinking went.
Trump appeals to "a lot of Americans", sure. That doesn't mean he appeals to all or even most of us.
An election result wandering from 46.8% to 51% does not indicate a huge shift in American culture in general. It just looks that way because of the flaws in our political system.
Trump is America incarnate and that's something that's only just starting to be properly discussed. We can't reckon with him or avoid him because he is this country, in spirit and in soul. A morally bankrupt opportunist that uses and discards everything it can, and cloaks it all in slick business attire and insipid, empty words. Loud, stupid, ignorant, bigoted, and proud of all four because it has the money enough to make sure it never needs to explain itself to anyone. Believes in absolutely nothing beyond what can benefit him in that moment, and if it changes, he'll turn on a dime. If the phrase "fuck you got mine" was turned into a real boy by some sick wizard, it would be Trump.
Until we reckon with our true national spirit, which is Donald J. Trump, we cannot kill the movement behind him because that IS America, in a very literal sense.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be patronizing. I simply said that because, roe v wade didn't bother the women (who are more affected by it) who voted for him.
Again, that is your claim and your opinion. That doesn't mean you are eligible to decide what other people in your democracy are supposed to vote. NO, simply no. In fact, this attitude is a reason why liberals are struggling with support of the common man. You're basically implying that these women, that didn't vote like you wanted, are too stupid to realize what they did. This is plain and outright patronisation mixed with a heavy dose of old-school sexism. Stop it, you are making a fool of yourself and your political friends.
Full ACK. Frustration is as human as an emotion can be. But that shouldn't lead to patronising sexism. To me, democracy is a life-long lesson. I see it as a pendulum, necessarily swinging from side to side to avoid a particular political party to establish a dictatorship. The USA, as the stereotypical two party system, demonstrates this pretty nicely. Democrats and republicans seem to pretty much take over in an alternating pattern. However, the life-lesson mentioned is, that if you're not completely centered, there will always be times when you have to cope with your political opponent having the reigns. I consider that a worthwhile challenge, to accept that you can't win all the time. In fact, its not acceptance, its the knowledge that you shouldn't win all the time, which goes much deeper actually...
I have LGBTQ+ friends who's lives are demonstrably, objectively worse as a result of Trump's first term. My wife got surgery to have herself sterilized out of fear that were something horrific to happen to her, she wouldn't be able to get the healthcare she needs thanks to the Roe v. Wade decision, which is directly traceable to the "other side." We're about to get a wave of suicides in this country as hopeless minority folks all over the country realize we are entering 4 years of yet more persecution, yet more official policy that will deny them the right to exist as the people they are and they simply can't take it anymore.
All of your comment absolutely holds up when we're talking what should be politics, which is shit like how you organize tax brackets, what priorities we decide are most important to fund, the directions in which we shape our societies. But I am long sick and tired of that same attitude being brought to bear on whether my friends and I have the right to exist as the people we are, whether my wife has the right to decide what happens to her body, and always, ALWAYS with this sardonic tone of "well you can't win em all champ!" as though we just have to accept our differences with people WHO, LITERALLY, GENUINELY WANT US DEAD.
I legit get flashbacks to putting up with bullies in school, where the teacher, bless her and her good intentions, would make you sit and "talk it out" with your bully, as though you in any way whatsoever were responsible for your bullying. As though you and your abuser "just didn't get along" and "needed to work your differences out." And no, categorically, emphatically, to my dying breath, no. The problem between the LGBT community and the Republican party is not a "we just need to respect different opinions" situation. If your opinion is that certain groups of people do not have the right to exist, or should do so with some diminished set of rights, or whatever you'd like to couch it in: your opinion is WRONG and if your paradigm of decision-making cannot see that, then your paradigm is WRONG too.
I wish just ONE of you centrists would have to sit in a public forum as your right to exist is debated, and put on a brave, "rational," calm, and reasonable face and defend that in front of people who would love nothing more than to see you, and everyone like you, ejected from their society so they can freeze to death.
It's half of the people, it's the whole country. Our systems, the way we organize society, the behavior we reward, the people we idolize all fall under this. Every major (and minor!) industry is led by Trumps, tech included. Every business has a man at the top of it with not an insignificant amount in common with Trump. That's not a coincidence, it's an ongoing process.
A system's purpose is what it does, and our system makes Trumps on an industrial scale. Almost every boy in America goes through a phase, at least, of wanting to be Trump: to be rich, so goddamn rich that he can do anything he wants and just pay it off, and a distressing number of them never grow out of it, and to be clear, that is a rational response. They have witnessed firsthand with their eyes, in their movies, in the world around them, by virtue of who wins, that Trumps win. All you have to do is talk smooth, accept no responsibility, assert your dominance over reality itself over and over and over, and our system will, far more often than not, reward you handsomely.
Exactly. Nobody waved a magic wand and conjured up Trump, causing people to become cruel and selfish. They are already cruel and selfish, and they simply found their man. It's not like people are just going to just stop being this way once he's gone.
We don't need to have a system where there are only 2 terrible choices.
if the federal government wasn't so large but rather a looser organization such as the EU, then each state would be a sovereign entity and the presidency wouldn't matter so much. then you would have 50 or more choices (50x2=100)
Universal healthcare, strong working class, strong k-12 education, govt mandated work/life balance & child support, abortion, free from a large population of Christian (protestant) nationalism that influences politics at every level... why yes, yes I do.
Meh, I personally like it. It's a bit of liberating feeling to never, ever think about health insurance here in Vancouver. Obviously has ups and downs (especially for non elective surgeries), but it's my personal preference.
I live in Prague but travel often to the DC area for business. I’d choose to live in Prague in about 70000 out of 80000 simulations.
It just feels better to live here for many reasons (safety, culture, nature, walkability, quality of restaurants and clubs and overall you don’t see many poor people around). Europe has economic issues but the quality of life is very high most of the time.
Beauty, walkable cities, history, better workers rights? I have never found a reason to go to the USA besides jobs and your national parks, nothing else.
It's an interesting idea, but it's more or less been tried.
The conclusion of that experiment was that half of the country would gladly go to war to force the other half to stay as one country. I don't think that has changed. Especially given that the primary political divisions aren't between state lines; They are rural and urban divisions.
I won't comment on the validity of this view, but I think the people who hold it miss one very important lesson from his unlikely comeback: the power of perseverance.
The man was basically finished politically when he left office and not very far from actually ending up in jail. Most were pretty sure of that.
So what happened?
Not only did that not come to pass, he's the next U.S. president now. Out of all the detractors, who is still laughing now?
What horrible things happened because of the policies of the first trump presidency?
COVID response seems like the biggest mistake, but that was a never before seen global pandemic, and it isn't clear to me that anyone else in office could have handled it differently.
The pandemic response, the Muslim ban, family separation at the southern boarder, repealing roe v wade, ending DACA.
This doesn’t even take into account the policies he wants to enact like mass deportations.
What is the problem with deporting people who are there illegally? As someone who doesn’t live on the border of the United States do you know how incredibly hard it is to legally immigrate there? I don’t see why other people should be allowed to jump the line. There’s a legal way to get in, follow it like everyone else.
- Forcibly separating children from parents, with no plan to reunite them. There are still children missing, who were spirited off $deity-knows-where. If criminals do it, we call it kidnapping and people-trafficking, but this was official government policy
- Let's focus on those kids, who were locked up in prisons, had any medication they were on confiscated, and we're not just talking teenagers here, some of those kids were under 5.
- The conditions they were held in would make a grown man weep, held in iron cages, kids defecating and vomiting in the heat. Staff wouldn't help small children, it was left to other children to try and keep the infants well.
- Routine use of pyschotropic drugs to act as "chemical straitjackets" on older children, so they would be usefully docile while being caged like animals
- Sexual assault on these unresisting, drugged children. That's rape. Of children - usually girls but not always. Under government supervision.
Personally I don't support the rape of children, but more than half the voting public seem to be "just fine" with it.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? Nothing what you said addresses illegal immigration. Are you saying illegal immigration is something good and if you’re against it you’re for child rape?
Everything they listed was the result of the Trump administration's immigration policies. Do you think human beings should be subjected to these things just because they're living somewhere illegally?
> Personally I don't support the rape of children, but more than half the voting public seem to be "just fine" with it.
They're not just saying they're "just fine" with it. They are enthusiastically voting for it.
We have to come to terms with the fact that very clear, consistent campaign themes of cruelty and selfishness won over a majority of voters. Deep, country-wide introspection is needed.
I think that people really like violence, but no-one will publicly admit it. People want others to suffer. Nobody really cares about making the world a better place, or saving the climate or whatever. People just want a better life. But they have no perspective of getting a better life, so they will settle for everyone else to get worse.
It's the only way it all makes sense. I don't think that all those voters who vote for Trump and Putin and Erdogan and all the other autocrats think they'll have a better life. But they know that all those other people are going to suffer, and it makes them feel a bit better.
The most dangerous man (or woman) is someone who thinks they have nothing to lose.
People feel dispair, and therefore they vote for people who will make others suffer.
Having gone through the legal immigration gauntlet, which took decades of sacrifice, I have no sympathy for illegal immigration either. But the other problem is that the economy is not so much about money as who does the work, and I suspect that cohort does a disproportionate amount of it and would crash the economy if actually deported. I predict the same thing will happen with Trump's deportation threat as has happened with the wall and Mexico paying for it.
You're taking what they're saying at face value. The policy goal of the Republican party is to create a white, Evangelical ethnostate.
Their issue isn't legal vs illegal immigration. It's white vs nonwhite. They make "the legal way" harder for anyone that isn't white, which doesn't stem immigration. It just makes it easier to turn away non-whites at the border.
I am very tired of defending this, because it's so self evident to me from listening to what Republican politicians say and do. The echo chamber isn't telling me that we're months away from concentration camps for brown people, that came from Stephen Miller. That's just one example among many.
Repealing Roe v Wade is a great thing, not a terrible thing. Highly contentious issues absolutely should be left to the states to decide, not forced upon them at a federal level.
Only in the sense that slave-owners tried to take away the rights of other states to not participate and assist in slavery, and then wrote their own constitution which forced every state to have slavery forever no matter what.
... But in the conventional sense of increasing state autonomy, no. :p
> Highly contentious issues absolutely should be left to the states to decide
Alas, if/when the Republican party gathers enough power to finally pass a federal abortion ban (or an indirect Fugitive Pregnancy Act) that "principle" will vanish into the memory-hole with all the rest. The minority who sincerely held the belief will be sidelined, again.
Another manifestation would be if state personnel and courts get conscripted into enforcing federal immigration policies.
“Family separation at the border” started with Obama and the Democrats weaponized it to attack Trump. What did Trump do poorly during the pandemic? Operation Lightspeed was a success that the Democrats were happy to capitalize on. He correctly pointed to WIV as the like source of the outbreak, and despite the Democrats attempt to censor this in the media and online, it’s now the widely accepted view among the academics who don’t put politics above science.
Arguably this stacking of the Supreme Court could have been prevented if Justices had retired when the Democrats still had control of appointing their replacements
No, nothing would have changed if that happened. Republicans have no qualms about overtly breaking the law and abandoning their duty and decorum. If they did then Garland would be a sitting SCJ and Gorsuch wouldn't.
I'm sure that situation be over with trump. And by over I mean that netanyahu will kill any and all remaining Palestinians and annex the strip and West Bank. Then the Zionists will set their eyes on Lebanon.
Well, others probably wouldn't have fired the pandemic planning committee. Another one was created in 2022, but, as of 2024, Trump has said he'd get rid of that one too[1].
This line of defense falls apart a bit when you add further context. It's my understanding that during his first term he was surrounded by many smart and experienced people who tampered down on Trump's worst urges. But for this election he made it an explicit goal to get rid of those people and put in place people who are more likely to be sycophantic and loyal to him.
There's literally dozens of people who worked for Trump during his previous administration that have come out against him since then.
Personally, when I read about the alternate elector scheme and the attempt to prevent Pence from certifying the 2020 election, that was sufficient to convince me that Trump poses a real risk.
He indirectly ended abortion rights and presidential criminal liability. And while it wasn't a single bad event, he spent 4 years making climate policy worse. More directly he attempted to extort a foreign leader for political gain and sponsored an insurrection to stay in power that resulted in loss of life.
stacking our court with conservative justices, stacking other courts with his appointees who are already working to throw out his criminal cases. the rollback of roe.
it's a very fucking slippery slope and everyone is too concerned with "but muh gas prices!" to think critically about the macro situation.
That is an issue. You posses religious conditioning that makes you believe this. If you disagree with abortion that is fine, but your opinion/stance should not be projected on everyone else in the country. The problem with this situation is religious folks are so brainwashed they can't even comprehend a situation where "live and let live" is possible, because you all think that your way is right and everyone else is wrong.
> That is an issue. You posses religious conditioning that makes you believe this.
Abortion is not a religious issue, it is an ethical issue. Some religious people are fine with abortion, some atheists oppose it.
> If you disagree with abortion that is fine, but your opinion/stance should not be projected on everyone else in the country. The problem with this situation is religious folks are so brainwashed they can't even comprehend a situation where "live and let live" is possible, because you all think that your way is right and everyone else is wrong.
This argument is a completely unworkable argument and I have no idea why people think it will hold water. Abortion opponents believe that abortion is literal murder. You can't simply go "it's fine if you don't want to murder, but you shouldn't stop other people from murdering". I understand you disagree with the idea that abortion is murder, but you need to take that idea on directly rather than trying to paper it over and say "you need to live and let live".
> Abortion is not a religious issue, it is an ethical issue.
Every person I have interacted with in nearly half a century who has expressed support for the criminalization of all or most abortions believes in the existence of souls and believes that human fetuses have souls and that it's the presence of a soul that is the basis for personhood and a right to life. Please direct me to a real person who supports the criminalization of all or most abortions and who does not believe in souls because I want them to explain to me why an unintelligent human fetus that lacks a fully formed central nervous system and any activity in its cerebral cortex has personhood and a right to life while a pig does not.
By the way, it's funny how people who say that opposition to abortion has nothing to do with religion are always religious:
Another way to phrase it would be as self defense rather than murder. The baby is an unwanted intruder. And the only way to defend the mother is through the death of another person. And like self defense there are different interpretations of what rights each party has. And it is rare for anyone to be absolute in their support of the rights of one or the other party.
I disagree that most people who are anti-abortion believe it is literal murder. More like "murder lite". Just ask them what the punishment for abortion should be for the doctor and woman, and then what the punishment should be for murdering a 1 year old. you'll get drastically different answers from I think 97% of people.
> Abortion is not a religious issue, it is an ethical issue.
Says you. I see nothing ethically wrong with abortion.
Virtually every species of animal is known to kill their own young from time to time. Why should humans be held to a different standard? The earth is already overpopulated as-is.
Also a large number of animals cannibalize the weak (chickens, for example). Now, I presume that you hold humans to a different standard for that behavior - why?
> You posses religious conditioning that makes you believe this.
> but your opinion/stance should not be projected on everyone else in the country.
Wow. Talk about projection. Roe, a case where the woman involved later admitted to lying about being raped, that case, the repeal of that case moves the opinion/stance back to the states, where it should be.
> they can't even comprehend a situation where "live and let live" is possible
Funny someone in the "I NEED TO KILL MY BABY" crowd would write something like this. You people really have zero self awareness.
Trump fired national security officials in charge of handling pandemics. Trump repeatedly claimed that covid was not a problem, and that it wouldn't come to the US, and then that it would disappear by April, and then easter, and so forth. He fought the CDC, NIAID. As we know now, he also sent test machines to Putin for his personal use while they were in short supply in the United States.
This pandemic was rightfully and widely compared to the 1920 pandemic, as well as the SARS scare in the 00s. We are very, very lucky that the SARS scare got a lot of the legwork done in advance on the RNA vaccines.
It's hard to imagine any United States candidate handling it worse.
"...anyone else would have handled it differently", yes, and very likely we would not have gotten the COVID vaccine as quickly as we did and hence Biden would not have been able to set us out on the road to the pandemics end (and been able to come out of his bunker). Who knows how much longer the pandemic would have lasted and how many more might have died had Trump not cut out the red tape and fast-tracked the pharm industry on the road to a cure.
you realize that Trump cut the CDC branch that worked in China (and other countries) to look for and contain novel diseases before they become pandemics right? if Trump hadn't been president, COVID probably would have been like Ebola or Sars1 where it kills a couple thousand people without becoming a pandemic
He says on a US made phone and computer, visiting a US website, using a currency tightly correlated to the US dollar, in a country which imports most of its services from the US, and he works in the services sector, or he works making goods which US consumers buy, speaking English out of necessity not just courtesy, in a country with a small defense budget, in a US military alliance, whose defense is ensured by US government institutions.
I’m using a Samsung phone. A lot of the software on my phone (especially the software I paid for with the phone) is made in South Korea. I don’t pay for a lot of apps, but the apps I paid for were made by developers from France, Spain, Japan, Austria/Germany, and the US, one each.
My computers are running Windows, sure, but my most used software would be Firefox, built by people from all over the world. Second place would probably belong to JetBrains Rider, made by a company headquartered in Czechia.
It doesn't represent what 'America' wants. Elections are dispute resolution mechanisms so people can move forward and get something done, but the dispute remains the same today as it did on Monday.
You mean the world does not deserve 4 years of no wars? Or you mean the world does not deserve free press to the point that the president didn't do anything other calling the news organization "fake news" for their non-stop hoaxes? BTW, is it even normal that dozens of organizations used exactly the same peculiar language like "sharp as a tack"?
On the other hand, do you think the world deserves that doctors like Jay Bhattacharya was blacklisted for simply raising questions about how school lockdowns might affect the nation's children.
Maybe for America, but then you can reasonably ask why the world is subject to American rules, yet only Americans are allowed to vote over those rules.
Why blame the Republicans? After all, the Democrats did pass a referendum on Trump 4 years ago and Trump lost. Since he wins now, I can only point to disarray on the Democrat side. Just look at NY State. 60% to Joe Biden in 2020 and 55% to Harris in 2024. Thats a big move.
Looking at the numbers, it seems like apathy decided. Trump's numbers are equivalent to last election, but the Dems didn't show up by over ten million people.
Not really. The lack of votes seems to be in the younger “social media” generations. The lead up to polling day was very pro-Kamala and on polling day itself, sites like Reddit were a stream of “I voted Kamala” posts. Whether that was propaganda influenced or not is beside the point.
What it seems to have done is convinced a subset of Kamala voters that they didn’t need to go and stand in a 2 hour queue to vote because it was already won, which of course now we know to be very untrue.
People assume that the bot armies are only pumping out pro-Trump propaganda. However, they only need to convince the Dems not to vote.
That's the problem. Lots of people who don't have any say in this are going to get hurt. Ukraine first. Possibly the Baltics next? And then there are things like climate change: Trump's going to "drill baby, drill" and basically defund anything to do with climate change.
I watched the Joe Rogan podcast (well 90% of it) with Trump - he talks about this in an intelligent way, which is, 3rd party candidates don't really have a chance in national politics. There are 2 choices and the system as currently set up, only allows there to be 2 choices.
“Now there’s one thing you mighta noticed I don’t complain about: politicians.
Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from some other reality.
They come from American parents, American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses, American universities, and they’re elected by American citizens.
This is the best we can do, folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces. Garbage in…garbage out.
If you have selfish, ignorant citizens…if you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re gunna get selfish, ignorant leaders. And term limits ain’t gunna do ya any good. You’re just gunna wind up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans [leaders].
So, maybe…maybe…maybe it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here. Like…the public. Yeah, the public sucks! That’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: “The public sucks! Fuck hope! Fuck hope!”
Russia has 30 percentage points more tertiary educated people than the US does. 60 versus 30. Huge, huge difference in education levels. Better PISA scores. Better in many OECD measures that relate to measurements of "ignorance." How would George Carlin rate Russia's politicians?
Unsure what planet you live on but I would love to visit. Here on earth in the US it has been absolute hell incarnate the past 4 years with non-stop tech layoffs since 2022, soaring prices on everything(housing, food, insurance etc), crime/lawlessness on orders I have never seen and huge wars that have spawned in the middle east and Russia/Europe. Lets list all of the things that have happened since Biden/Harris and then tell me why people are flocking to Trump:
- Forced vaccine mandates that have workers fired from their jobs if they do not comply even though it was obvious at the time that getting a covid vaccine does not prevent the spread of the virus(9/2021).
- Huge payouts to illegal immigrants on the order of $450k per family(11/2021)
- Homelessness at record high (12% increase from 2022 to 2023).
- Botched rollout from Afghanistan that humiliated the US and led to 13 US service members deaths and lasting shame for the country on the world stage. (8/2021)
- Housing affordability hits record low in 2023 - 98.2 (only 15% of homes for sale are affordable to the average household. (2023)
- Biden shocks the nation and viewers and says behind a blood red facade that republicans are a threat to democracy (9/2022)
- Colorado and a few other Dem states try to get Trump taken off the ballot in what is deemed a affront to any reasonable democracy and is swatted down 9-0 by a united supreme court (12/2023)
- Legal warfare with anyone who disagrees with the sitting administration see Eric Adams Dem NYC mayor who complains about immigrants "will destroy NYC"(9/2023) and then the FBI then launches a full scale investigation into his administration(9/2024). Also see a myriad of accusations against Trump by Alvin Bragg who when running for office is running on the platform of "getting Trump"(12/2021). This is stuff that is typically seen in a totalitarian regime and it has shocked Americans from both political spectrums.
Your judgment won’t endear Americans to vote for someone they believe is a worse candidate.
We saw firsthand what a Trump presidency was like. He wasn’t Hitler, despite what many in the political establishment would like you to believe. We saw firsthand what a Harris vice presidency was like, and for most Americans, it did not inspire confidence in a Harris presidency. More broadly, the Democratic Party has become weirdly fixated on policies that are more in tune with Reddit than with the average American, and that’s a losing strategy.
The Democratic party indeed got entrapped by its fringe but the same thing happened to the Republican party. It's the result of the system incentives that favour such polarization.
I think what's going on is that trump supporters don't quite take him literally on the details of what he says.
Now, as to whether Trump will or won't do more damage in this term, that really depends on whether this time the people around him will stop him or whether he will choose people who will be more loyal.
> We saw firsthand what a Trump presidency was like. He wasn’t Hitler.
This is something that I don't understand coming from the Trump camp. Concerns about Trump are dismissed as unsubstantiated despite the fact fact that Mike Pence, Mike Esper, John Kelly, and Mark Milley have all called Trump a threat to US democracy. These are people who held positions of power in his first admin and they warned us that the second one would be worse. Maybe you could reasonably dismiss the opinion of one, but all four? When does the weight of the evidence tip the scales?
Trump was fairly inept in his first term, making lots of mistakes and pissing off his advisors and allies. He wasn't Hitler because he just wasn't very smart, which was a saving grace to all of us.
I've had a great 4 years, economically speaking, and I'm worried about the future a lot right now just in case Trump actually gets the competence to go along with his rhetoric. Hopefully he will be just as ineffectual as he was in his last term.
The Hitler comparison is just so lazy and I don’t think you can honestly believe it, unless you solely listen to the out-of-context sound bites used by his political opponents to attack him (ex. the Cheney thing recently).
Hitler was a competent autocrat, really evil, but he had the brains to back it up.
Trump is just...he says a lot of bad stuff, but he doesn't seem to be in Hitler's realm of competence. My beef with Trump is his simple non-understanding of economics, wanting to tariff everyone and expecting that they won't tariff us back, and wanting to juice interest rates by politicizing the fed, and then claiming that this will somehow reduce inflation, rather than cause it to explode. Trump, in that regard, is more Gustav Stresemann than Hitler.
So, I'm right and the other party is wrong? No questions asked.
A more useful thing would be: WHY did people vote for Trump? They are surely intentional as you observe. What gave them this intention? Was it DEI? Did they like Trump's hair?
I share exhibit A: a BBC interview with an "undecided voter". Excerpt:
"I have no freaking clue man. It's so hard. When I voted for Trump, it came down to who would I trust with my kid alone and it wasn't [President Joe] Biden.
I'm still undecided.
All of my family is voting for Kamala and my friends are voting for Trump.
I'm going to vote for one of them. I've got no idea which one.
I'm still super-duper undecided. I think I'm leaning toward Kamala over Trump, if I think about who I would trust alone in a room with my daughter.
I'm going to make up my mind when I go into the ballot booth."
I share this, not to lampoon this human being, but to correct any misconceptions that human voters always have a rational model of who to vote for, and why.
You're being downvoted because people don't want the truth. As a lifelong Democrat, I agree with you.
Dems were playing too much identity politics.
Example: A local "progressive" Democrat Supervisor (in SF) was quoted as saying that she would support the most progressive candidate, UNLESS it was a straight white male; in which case she would support the Black female candidate, Black male candidate, Gay candidate, etc. (this is going from memory, but you get the idea).
I feel like the Dems totally ignored the "white straight male" demographic. Democracy is a numbers game; you self-select a smaller pool, and your chances of winning go down.
The US told the world in the 19th century that South America was not to meddled with, except by the US. I fully blame America for structural failures in South America that trigger illegal immigration. The US refused to enshrine stable countries that prevented their best and brightest from leaving.
Could Biden have actually changed the Afghanistan thing? That was actually Trump's decision--and my favorite one he ever made--but he put the timetable into the next presidency just in case of bad press.
I don't believe that's true. He wanted to start orderly withdrawal sooner so that it'd be well underway before the election, but his generals postponed it (and then hightailed out of there in a highly disorderly fashion leaving the Taliban in charge and giving them billions of dollars in materiel).
Biden is the commander-in-chief, yes he could have changed anything about it that he wanted to. He could have gone back to the Taliban with modifications to the terms. They were not in a strong position to resist, frankly. If the US had said they needed three more months to do it effectively, the Taliban would have agreed. Also Biden was making choices along the way related to the time table (Wikipedia covers this fairly well).
You realize Trump was the one who set up the deal and the timeframe for the Afghanistan pull out right? He even bragged about sticking Biden with it. The Taliban were upset when it went over the date and upped their already regular attacks.
And in fact to your last point about trusting America, Biden was trying to stick to the agreed upon deal.
Wrong. Biden welched on the deal Trump made. The same day he did that, Taliban began attacking.
The fustercluck withdraw from then on was all Biden's fuck up. All Biden had to do was honor the previous terms and use the previous plans, then the pull out would have gone off without much drama.
And it was just high inflation (albeit still lower than the inflation in other countries). Not the depression Weimar Germany had experienced in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
I strongly feel Harris lost because she did not connect with white voting women in the swing states. The exit poll numbers show this. She had about the same percentage voting women as Biden, but lost votes with white men. So to make up for that gap, it had to be white women. She did great with non-white overall.
I think it's easy to say "Harri needed more votes" but to go about this strategically, there needs to be on-target messaging.
Turns out if the other country decides they are altering the deal, and you don't have any leverage - the bit of paper isn't worth all that much in practice.
Would you repeat the same feat with Taiwan, if you were in Trump's place?
If Ukraine falls then the Baltics will be next - I can see Poland, France and the UK attempting to help but I suspect this would ultimately fail leading to the breakup of NATO. EU either breaks up or becomes much stronger...
Moldova first. The Kremlin have already refused to recognise the new pro-EU leader, and they've been making noises about Transnistria for a while (a similar situation to Crimea and East Ukraine).
There's a huge difference between invading a NATO member and invading a non-NATO member. And ultimately I don't think Russia has the capability to continue invading more countries with or without the US' opposition, this war has been a nonstop embarrassment for them.
If Poland France and the UK are more invested in opposing Russia then one would think that the Ukraine wouldn't be entirely reliant on the US to support it. This is the fundamental problem with the proxy war in the Ukraine, the people pushing for it talk about it as if the fate of the European continent rests on the fulcrum of the Ukraine and yet the other European countries hardly seem to care.
What do you mean? Europe has contributed twice as much to Ukraine compared to USA. Yeah, in plain military spending USA has given more, but a war isn’t won with just guns. This has been a strategy that has made sense given USAs military industrial complex, and EUs geographical proximity to Ukraine.
If USA pulls out it’s likely that EU will shift some of its aid over to military. This is already happening: European countries have started setting up arms production within Ukraine which gives Ukraine more guns per dollar spent than what donations of western built weapons does. So don’t think the dollar amount donated tells you everything about the amount of military support given.
It does insofar as the US can "decide" to betray all of its allies by ignoring its obligations under a military alliance. We've already publicly proclaimed to the entire world that the American military will come to the aid of any NATO member which is invaded. We've never had such an agreement with the Ukraine and thus owe no obligations towards them.
They aren't even going to be embarrassed - Ukraine will get a peace deal forced on it and Russia will declare a glorious victory and that will become the history that everyone remembers.
It'll take multiple years for Russia to recover and have the means to target the Baltics, by then Putin will likely kick the bucket, as he's getting up there in years and who knows what the succession would look like.
To let states decide how it should be handled, rather than a federal mandate. Allowing different possibilities to be tested - maybe in some states it will become completely illegal, maybe in others mothers will face pressure to terminate a pregnancy.
I think it's about as likely as it becoming illegal. There's too many good reasons to keep abortions even in a restricted state - even though it does open up a very messy moral can of worms.
Forgive my ignorance but I didn't realise there were states it was illegal in.
> There aren't states where terminating pregnancies is forced.
I personally don't think this could ever come from a mandated level (same as outright bans), I think instead we see it in the form of social pressure: and we can already see it across the US. An estimated 65% of abortions in the US are unwanted but the mother was heavily pressured by peers, family, work, etc. You can also see this in the downstream effects: getting an abortion raises your chances of suicide by 6x and depression by 4x.
Clinics also do not screen for coersion, the same way organ donations, adoptions, loans are all screened.
Again, should abortion be illegal because of the above? No. But it does indicate it's not as innocent as making sure women are ready/able/willing to have a child.
The only sources I can find about what you're saying is gutter something and lozier Institute, and by searching for them a bit it looks like they're catholic founded research. I'm gonna take what they say with a huge pinch of salt
> To let states decide how it should be handled, rather than a federal mandate. Allowing different possibilities to be tested - maybe in some states it will become completely illegal
Why should one get to play Laboratory of Democracy with women's lives?
I’m old enough to remember 2016 elections and the “rip usa we are doomed” predictions then. The fact is, we were ok that time, it’s gonna be ok this time too.
We ratcheted several notches farther toward high-level corruption being normal—multiple family members in high level positions, no divestment from direct control of business interests—Carter gave up control of a peanut farm to be president because to do otherwise would have been unacceptable, that’s how much has changed. Even on just that front it was extremely damaging, and that’s one thing.
> The fact is, we were ok that time, it’s gonna be ok this time too.
Trump has always wanted to be a tyrant; he has always wanted to run the country like he runs his businesses -- he says something and it's done, he makes decisions for his own personal benefit, he rewards his friends and punishes his enemies.
In 2016 he wasn't expecting to win and didn't really know what he wanted, so he appointed well-respected people from the Republican establishment. Those people believed in the constitution, the rule of law, the rules-based international order, and so on, and pushed back and refused to obey him when he wanted to act like a tyrant.
This time is different. He knows what he wants: People who will be personally loyal to him. The Republican establishment has been destroyed. The Supreme Court has officially decreed that nearly anything he does is immune from prosecution. He will have a much easier time getting his way this time than he did in 2016.
My biggest fear is that Trumps deterrence of CRINK countries will cause XI to miscalculate. Other than that I think this is manageable. EU will get a boost as the internal awakening materializes. As an European I had difficulty understanding why Trump was even an alternative, but I have come to realize that the Plutocratic nature of the US was causing more suffering for the people than was easily observed from here.
The US is currently in proxy war with Russia on two fronts: Ukraine and Israel/Iran. Conceding Ukraine would help Iran, which is probably not what Israel wants. The idea that Trump would be friendly to Putin -- lift sanctions, give him Ukraine -- seems like a strategical contradiction.
Ooooh, that's gonna be real interesting to see. An anti-vaxxer in charge of healthcare.
Taking fluoride away from drinking water.
Weakening vaccine research and development.
Looks like most Americans will be in for a long suffering in the coming decades.
Combine that with privatisation of health insurance and weakening Medicaid, this heavily points towards a Brexit moment for the USA.
This seems like a reasonably good analysis, but Trump's frequent campaign promise to deport all the "illegal immigrants" seems like it might deserve a prominent mention, even if only to explain why you don't think it will happen. During the campaign, Trump often defined "illegal immigrants" as 20 million people or more, some of whom have US residency visas that Trump thinks they shouldn't have gotten and therefore aren't "illegal" in the conventional sense.
If it does happen, it will be the largest "ethnic cleansing" in human history—bigger than the Yugoslavian migrations, bigger than the Armenian genocide, bigger than the Holocaust, bigger than the Holodomor, bigger than the US's previous forced removals of Native Americans. I say "ethnic" because it's primarily directed at people who are dark-skinned because of their Native American ancestry and driven by racism against them. It isn't directed against white illegal immigrants like Elon Musk and Melania Trump were.
I kinda expect the EU to go collective defense if the US pulls out, to see if the US can still be trusted to honor its words, of if they have to write it off entirely (honestly, they should have done that before, but…)
You forgot trade war against Europe and China. Also, if economists and investors are right, massive inflation. I also personally predict total war with Iran, directly or indirectly.
Sadly neither candidate was going to substantively stick up for Gazan citizens. I just hope Trump's wildcardness spins the geopolitical roulette wheel to land on peace.
"- Israel given carte blanche and a lot of support to bulldoze Gaza"
I agree, both parties are way to big buddy with Isreal, war with Iran I am not sure sure.
"- Russian sanctions lifted"
Ah yeah that is why Putin endorsed Kamala for that EXACT OPPOSITE reason that Trump put heavy sanctions on Russia and he did not like that.
"- Elon looking to cut government spending - healthcare, subsidies"
Any evidence of this claim? Of course not. Making government more efficient does not equal to your doomsday fears. Has Elon ever public-ally indicated and of this? I do not know his positions on this honestly but I doubt your claims. Elon is for UBI, he says the world needs it because Robots will take over, and I doubt he will support a UBI where people can not effort to pay their doctors and surgeons with. So I am calling straight BS on this.
"- Anti abortion law possibly being implemented on a federal level"
Any hint about this claim? No of course not.
"What else am i missing?" A lot actually:
- No more stupid DEI BS that is already on a downwards trend even during Biden/K
- No more castrating kids, chopping their breasts of pps of.
- No more hiding from parents that they supposedly changed their gender/pronouns or whatever they latest trendy woke sh1t it.
- No more indoctrination in education like things that you are more oppressed/valuable the more "minority" checkboxes you check. Hopefully the DEATH of wokeness.
- Less of the PURPOSEFULLY pushing illegals to vote (for dems of course). BY LAW in California they can not ask people for ID to vote. Total insanity, not sure if they can required ID federally but I hope they can and will.
- Securing the Border. Kamala flipped on this btw, as she did on plenty of others things b4. But as she noted the people actually WANT a secure border, including all the people she thought will vote for her, she suddenly claimed she wanted the same thing that was always Trumps thing and she railed against.
- Free Speech online and offline, something the real left once was championing but now they are all pro censorship of all the opinions they do not like. Simply call everything they do not like "hate-speech" and call everyone who dares to have a "right" opinion on something a nazi.
- Less regulations more economic opportunity. Something that ties into Elons government efficiency endearment I guess. What they will cut it bureaucracy and the burden to start and operate a business.
- I am sceptical of this is just a lie but Trump at least claims he is anti-war. While the left openly the war mongering 24/7. You very typically put "deal" in quotes and make it sound like a peace deal is something bad. Peace deals are incredibly good and if Trump can actually make and negotiate deals with countries instead of starting WW3 that would be great. The US needs to stop invading counties and getting involved on the globe with 700 military basis across the world ... it needs to end. And I do not think Trump will end it, but a president that will start 1 war less then the other side is still a win. And Trump is hopefully that guy. The Israel Gaza situations is bad and Trump is 100% wrong so far on this.
Us is not involved with boots on the ground. Now, try to imagine what you just said, but shift it to your country being invaded and imagine being told you're weird because you want soldiers to defend your motherland rather than giving away land
Would the US give up Alaska if Russia attacked from Siberia? I'd say the US wouldn't. Ukraine has more support from EU countries who I think will step up more now that the US has become a Nazi theocratic state.
Russia is waging a war of conquest to annex its former colonies and restore its empire. There is zero reason to believe this will stop unless it is stopped.
Is there any reason or source to anything you said, or just saying because you hate him. Specially regarding the last one, he clearly mentioned that he is against that.
I am as much against Trump as the next guy, but let's don't degrade HN conversations to this level.
> War is not good and signing peace deals is not a bad thing.
If Russia invades Alaska, do you think the average Republican will take the same sentiment? Just give him that land because otherwise lots of people will die.
> War is not good and signing peace deals is not a bad thing.
The logical conclusion of this is that we should always just surrender whenever some other army comes knocking at our door. Let Putin walk all the way to Portugal, let Kim Jong Un walk to the south tip of the Korean peninsula, because any peace deal, no matter how bad, is always better than firing a single shot.
Putin invaded Crimea and then said "I'm done". Then by proxy he invaded the Donbas, and said "I'm done". Then he invaded Ukraine. Why do you think that if we sign a peace deal with him, that he just won't build up his forces in another year or two and invade again -- either Ukraine, or one of the other Baltic countries?
At some point you have to say, "It stops here".
EDIT: Furthermore, you have to think of the knock-on effects. If we settle now in Ukraine, that won't stop war with Russia: Putin has learned that invading your neighbor is fine, and he'll do it again and again. Xi and Kim will learn the same thing, and there will be wars in Taiwan and Korea.
On the other hand, Russia is almost defeated -- another 2 years and they'll be completely out of materiel. They're already resorting to pulling in North Korean troops. Support Ukraine for another year or two, and the war will end for good -- and Xi and Kim will learn that invading your neighbor is a losing proposition, and war in Taiwan and Korea will be avoided.
> You need to understand that played a big role.
Do you have any support for this statement? I haven't heard many people bring up Ukraine as a major reason for voting Trump or not voting Harris.
Ironically, there were Arabs and progressives who failed to support Harris because she supported Israel too much, and there are Zionist Jews and Christians who support Trump because they think Kamala didn't support Israel enough. On that particular conflict I don't think there's any winning position for the Democrats.
>>>Do you have any support for this statement? I haven't heard many people bring up Ukraine as a major reason for voting Trump or not voting Harris.
Its a bad look when many citizens are hurting economically and you send billions and billions to a foreign government and then gaslight them the economy is indeed fine.
I don’t completely disagree with you (I mean, I mostly do, just not completely) but do you have reason to think the hawkishness of the Biden administration (a lot of which was inherited from the hawkish first trump administration) really influenced people? Like polls, or even surprising anecdotes?
Americans mostly don’t seem to care about foreign policy at all.
No we do get it. It’s these modern democrats that are so disconnected from the reality of the American people which is why they lost huge in this election across all racial and demographic lines. Look at NY how does it get that close?
The American people cried that the economy was bad for them and the democrat message was no it’s better than ever.
The American people said why are we sending billions to Ukraine when we need the money here. They were told we were supporting dictatorships. Just look at some of the responses to my comment here.
The American voter was concerned about the huge crime waves in the cities and the biden admin told us crime was good and made up.
The Democrat response to COVId was to shut up and take the vaccine or lose your job.
I’m surprised she didn’t lose more with all the pain biden Harris caused.
>It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.
>While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.
>And they’re right.
Anyone here who is still confused about this election result need only unplug their fingers from their ears and open their eyes.
As an expat, you can vote as a resident in the last state you claimed residency before leaving the country. So, if you're headed out for a bit, establish residency in a swing state before you go, and remember to vote while you're out of country.
> The difference between an expat and an immigrant? Semantics
> “Immigrants are usually defined as people who have come to a different country in order to live there permanently, whereas expats move abroad for a limited amount of time or have not yet decided upon the length of their stay,” he says.
Now that you cite the BBC, there are quite sizable communities of UK citizens living in Spain after retirement (ie permanently, without a short or medium-term intention of going back) and they consistently refer to themselves as "expats".
It's never used that way in practice. No one calls Mexican seasonal agriculture workers in the US and Canada expats. No one calls Filipino maids and nannies in Singapore expats. No one calls Indian construction workers in Saudi Arabia expats. Regardless of the dictionary definition, expat is only used to refer to people coming from rich countries (US/UK/Singapore/etc.). Terms such as "migrant worker" are used for people coming from poor countries.
People from the wealthier first-world nations enjoy more international privileges — visa-on-arrival, stress-free travel, higher rates in currency exchange, dual citizenships, better societal structures and support for assimilation into foreign cultures.
Immigrants are either fleeing persecution or leaving their countries seeking a better life, requirements for visas and security checks, usually with not enough money, little privilege, and defacto distrust from foreign societal structures.
Relatively speaking, the typical expat can move around the world as they wish. Immigrants can't. So yes, immigrants, when they move, often do so, seeking to live elsewhere permanently.
Trump 2016 got reasonable republicans into his cabinet that prevented worse, his new team (anyone seen his old VP Mike Pence?) will be unchecked and unhinged.
Expats typically aren't immigrating permanently to a country, or even trying to establish new citizenship, only residing to the medium to long term, with the option of returning to their home country where they have citizenship. If they do renounce their citizenship, then they are just immigrants.
This feels like a very disingenuous way of participating in a democracy, and sounds like the kind of strategy that people would be up in arms over if MAGA voters were doing this.
Sure, I guess that's fine if you're okay with playing dirty because the other side did.
Personally that feels like a great way to make sure we ruin things, rather than just arguing that those GOP members helping gerrymander might ruin things.
US citizens are required to pay taxes on global income, regardless of where they live. The US is unique in this regard. Why would US citizens not continue to have the right to vote while out of country? Certainly, if they renounce their US citizenship (and hence, the ability to be taxed as a non citizen non resident), they lose their right to vote.
So you're in favor of exempting minors from federal taxation?
After all, their income is basically a rounding error economically and most don't make enough to pay net federal taxes so it might even be a net loss. There's no real reason to tax them unless it's some perverse Cartmanic exercise in making them accustomed to it.
How is it more disingenuous than any other way of participating, I wonder?
What difference does it make where you vote when you're an expat? You're still taxed and represented.
It would be a different matter if taxes were not involved, at least in my humble opinion. Other countries have revoked voting writes when you're no longer a tax paying citizen.
Well for one thing, the aim is for those leaving the country to change their last registered residence to an area where their vote may have more impact. They never lived there and have no ties to that jurisdiction. You don't see anything wrong with voters that have nothing to do with your area casting votes there on everything from federal elections to local elections and ballot measures?
To me this feels like the kind of strategy that leads to us removing voting rights for expats. If the rule is meant to allow expats to still participating in voting in their hometown, and people abuse that to impact elections they have no real business voting in, eventually that right will just be removed.
Lib migration really hasn't worked out well for Democrats. Texas is their white whale and a big reason they haven't won it is because they just change to another version of their same bubble and bring center-right people with them.
I live in a pretty red state, but there are only 9 or 10 states swingier than mine. Progressives I know are moving to solid blue states and feeling virtuous about it. Two of my friends moved to the west coast, and I can tell they're looking at me like if I can stand to live here, I must not feel as strongly about politics as they do.
This despite the fact that we're all old, white, and economically privileged enough that we're for all practical purposes immune to the awful policies that are being put in place.
The sad thing is, the idea that moving away is a constructive political act comes straight from Atlas Shrugged. It's right wing logic. Express your consumer preference, and through the magic of the invisible hand, that becomes political power. Making yourself happy is the only form of political engagement you need.
> the idea that moving away is a constructive political act comes straight from Atlas Shrugged
Heh. I read Atlas Shrugged in college, and at the time I liked it pretty well. I was hungry for a book about The Big Questions.
But now, I see the protagonists saying, "these leeches keep taking advantage of me! I'm going to move to a secret town in the middle of nowhere, and deny them my genius!" And it's the most teenaged, self-important thing I've ever heard.
I would love to move to Galt's Gulch. Sadly, I'm not worthy enough to be selected for inclusion. It's an enticing idea of just moving away to live with all the other smart people. The trick is being smart enough to fit in.
As a progressive in a deep red state, there is a certain amount of exhaustion that comes with feeling like an outsider.
I like many things about where I live, and I've become practiced at getting along with people that I have deep disagreements with on politics.
But particularly this morning, I can sympathize with the urge to move to a place where I'm more likely to share a common set of values with the average person in the grocery store, and those values are more likely to be reflected by the institutions around me.
I wouldn't feel any virtue moving to a deep blue area, but I would feel a bit of relief.
we're for all practical purposes immune to the awful policies that are being put in place.
this is probably not going to pan out. Trump's become the figurehead for an organized and motivated movement to completely dismantle the administrative state. nobody's going to be immune to the effects of that. Project 2025 includes shutting down the weather service, even to the point of privatizing tornado warnings. he's also talked many times about replacing the entire income tax system with hefty tariffs, which literally hundreds of economists say would be a disastrous move.
they're also talking about a national abortion ban. you might indeed be old enough for that not to affect your life any more, but if you have extended family, it will affect someone you care about, guaranteed.
last but not least, Trump's stated goal of mass deportation would require intense surveillance, broad leeway for law enforcement agencies, and drastically reduced civil liberties protections. once you've got that, you can target a lot of people. a site like Twitter is going to have a lot of data about political inclinations, and cultural factors like sexuality or race that can get you targeted politically.
the real problem that got Trump in office was normalcy bias. what we're dealing with is so bad that if you tell people who don't already know, they assume you're exaggerating.
> the real problem that got Trump in office was normalcy bias. what we're dealing with is so bad that if you tell people who don't already know, they assume you're exaggerating.
This is understated IMO. In almost every other democracy in the world, 1% of the mess that comes out of Trump's mouth would deem him utterly unelectable on account of how crazy he sounds. The US seems to lap it up though.
This is true, and it's probably because he now operates in an altered context — the narrative of persecution, especially by those perceived to be 'elite'. Without that, all Americans would see through his nonsense just as the inhabitants of democracies elsewhere do.
His opponents have done a very bad job of not making it look like everyone's simply biased and out to get him, and he's capitalised on that.
> they're also talking about a national abortion ban. you might indeed be old enough for that not to affect your life any more, but if you have extended family, it will affect someone you care about, guaranteed
I do care about the people who will be affected. But it won't be people in my social class.
There's a lot of hypocrisy built into the social conservative mentality. I've seen the world they want to go back to, and it was never about eliminating, say, abortion. Progressives think that right wingers want to eradicate abortion the way progressives want to eliminate malaria and poverty. There are a few extremists who do, yes. But most right wing people just want to institute social rules that stigmatize abortion. They want people who get abortions to be discreet about it, and they want to shame and punish anybody who gets caught. They want abortions to be a crime for the poor and a scandal for the rich. That's all they want. If they get that, they don't care how many abortions people get.
My friends are sophisticated enough and have enough resources that they would be able to get an abortion if they needed one. They would find an anonymous way to get a pregnancy test. They would not share knowledge of their pregnancy with anyone. They would schedule a holiday in an abortion-friendly place and Instagram every step of it. In this way, they would respect the taboo, and that's all that most right wing people care about. Rich people being able to break the rules is very much part of the plan.
The burden of punishment will fall on people who weren't wealthy or sophisticated enough to navigate this hypocrisy, or who belong to disfavored groups (racial minorities, etc.) who are specifically targeted for enforcement.
Think of how Alan Turing was punished for homosexuality. The nature of his sexual behavior was obvious to the police, but he was not going to be punished for it. All he had to do was deny it. Show respect for the taboo. But he didn't deny it, he didn't participate in the hypocrisy, so he was punished.
> last but not least, Trump's stated goal of mass deportation would require intense surveillance
You're thinking like a progressive technocrat. You're thinking, how would I institute a fair, efficient, and effective program of mass deportation? Trump doesn't care how many people he deports, or even whether he deports the right people. He's not going to be surveilling rich white people to catch people like Elon Musk who overstay their visa. Any mass deportations will be like his wall: a half-assed, purely symbolic stunt that makes his supporters happy and confuses progressives because of the blatant lack of ambition to accomplish anything.
Again, the victims will be people that right wingers consider fair game because of their economic status and their skin color.
Trump won the popular vote this time. The swing states were still where all the action was, but I hope this spells the end of the Democratic Party blaming the electoral college for their losses. This time, they just screwed this race up badly.
This was not just a screwed up race. The far left and identity politics have made the democratic party unelectable and they'll continue to do so until a strong leader can evict them from the party.
I really hope this clear loss without the excuse of the electoral college leads to a total reformation into a sane party. I just wish that had happened to republicans first.
Take all the issue with prosecutorial discretion that you want, but don't pretend that an adjustment in the misdemeanor/felony threshold by $450 means theft is no longer a crime.
> This was not just a screwed up race. The far left and identity politics have made the democratic party unelectable and they'll continue to do so until a strong leader can evict them from the party.
This is a really interesting analysis that differs greatly from how I'm seeing it - in particular your characterization of the democrats as "far left." What policies of theirs would you describe as "far left?" Specifically ones that don't have to do with identity politics, since you categorized that as something else.
In my opinion, leftists in the USA are effectively disenfranchised and there's votes on the table for a leftist voting bloc. The democrats this election turned hard right (immigration, law enforcement, Israel weapon sales, etc), which is a strategy that has never really worked for them but remains their favorite thing to continually try. If someone didn't want immigration, why would they vote for the candidate that's light on immigration when they could vote for the guy promising to deport (somehow) millions?
I saw another interesting chart that showed that something like 4% of registered republicans voted for Biden and 3% for Kamala. Capturing right wing votes seems to be a fools errand for the Democrats that they simply won't give up. Meanwhile there's a whole entire political spectrum unrepresented in the USA - and it's not like there's no historical precedence for demonstrable popularity of leftist candidates, one of the most popular and consistently reelected senators is an out and out socialist.
I agree that in general, democrats are not far left, and it's a small minority of the party. But democrats are beholden to them, and can't bring themselves to disavow and condemn their fringes.
> The democrats this election turned hard right (immigration
After 3.5 years of scolding everyone for being racist for being against uncontrolled immigration, they tried to pass a weak compromise bill that acknowledges the problem, while continuing to advocate allowing a "first come first serve" border policy to the tune of thousands of people a week. That failed, then after years of saying their hands were tied, suddenly decide that they actually can do something, a few months before the election.
> If someone didn't want immigration, why would they vote for the candidate that's light on immigration when they could vote for the guy promising to deport (somehow) millions?
It's clearly not a binary issue. That's exactly why Democrats need to reform themselves into a party of sanity, instead of e.g. this: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-reopens-asylum-a.... The idea that a local domestic violence issue becomes a case for asylum is insane on so many levels.
> law enforcement
Again, too little too late, and after too much scolding about racism.
> Israel weapon sales
I won't comment on Israel "weapon sales" specifically, that is missing the big picture. I'll just give a few perspectives on how I reached the conclusion I posted about democrats.
Biden's diplomacy in the middle east has been just totally pathetic. Every week for months we got the headline "Cease fire coming tomorrow - Biden". Biden's desperation makes it crystal clear to both sides that he has zero leverage and can be ignored. And why is he so desperate? Because he has to entertain the demands of the far left of the democratic voter base.
More generally, this is an issue where Democrats have allowed their weird obsession with colonialism to cloud their judgement. At the end of the day, the middle east is almost exclusively theocratic dictatorships that have ethnically cleansed their populations of jews over the last 50-100 years, or failed states controlled by Iranian proxy militaries. And then there's Israel, a secular democracy (for now) with a 20% Arab population, including Arab elected officials.
It's very distressing seeing college students in Iran protesting at very real risk to their lives and freedoms against the very same forces that college students in the US are protesting (effectively, wittingly or not) in support of.
I remember watching the raw unfiltered video from Oct 7 and thinking this was the clearest casus belli for a total war for a regime change and occupation since WWII. Hell, even WWI and WWII still did not have such a clear singular provocation. Yet, democrats find themselves muddled and confused about the issue. Not at first, but democrats proved themselves beholden to their fringe lunatics on this issue.
Supporting relatively better theocratic democracy is how the United States ended up justifying weapon sales to Iran and Pakistan. Are we holding Israel to the standards of America, or to the standards of their reprehensible peers? Are we looking at this from a flawed relativist standpoint, or are we willing to identify flaws before they spiral out of hand?
This feels like something we should clear up before the Gaza death toll surpasses Bangladesh. Alternatively, America can also admit that we never cared in the first place and announce that we're open for business to any sufficiently rich nationalists. Israel represents the point at which America can either bring down the hammer or double down hoping this time is different than the other nationalist theocracies that imported US weapons under the premise of fighting terrorism.
I think it is perhaps both inaccurate and, at this point, a trope, to blame the failures of the US democratic party on IdPol or “wokeness” or DEI/CRT, etc.
This is a red herring, and ultimately thinking it had any real effect on the race (beyond being used as fodder for mocking them) is a dangerous distraction.
Despite the fact that the president doesn’t have that many short term economic levers that aren’t destructive/wasteful, the fact that most USians have worse economic circumstances now than they did four years ago is probably the main driver.
The big irony of this is that a lot of it is probably the lingering echoes of the massive economic damage from the pandemic, most of which was not only not mitigated, but massively accelerated by Trump’s policies during the main sequence of same.
I disagree. Pointing to some of the more extreme beliefs held by the left on those topics has been very effective in pushing people away. My wife, active on Chinese social media, forwards me a lot of indignant videos about some of the things the left does. Ignoring the fact that many otherwise moderate people really dislike {IdPol or “wokeness” or DEI/CRT} is a huge factor in the election results.
> Trump's policies as well as America's general inability to follow rules imposed on them by government (many Americans ignored all covid rules), as well as the inability of American government to actually enforce many COVID rules, is the NUMBER ONE reason why the United States is currently dominating the world economy compared to countries that took stricter approaches to COVID.
You keep telling yourself that but those disastrous Covid policies did nothing to stop Covid. Instead it fucked kids, old people, businesses and communities all around the country. It was a massive abuse of government power.
A large part of this election is a result of those idiotic mitigations.
I completely agree with you. Not sure which part of my post made you think I support lockdowns. I don't. And that's my point. GOP governors did not lock down, and even in blue states where they did, many Americans ignored them.
Do we know that yet? Last I checked, there were still millions of votes not counted. (California alone still has enough to change it, if they all went one way.)
They just aren’t in areas that would swing the overall electoral vote, so the people doing the math can call the race overall.
He's up by almost 5 million votes. There are enough votes outstanding to flip the race, but it seems unlikely that they'll break Democrat hard enough to make up the difference.
they will purge the token hires to show a return to "normalcy" and thats it. Young grassroot talents will be ignored or marginalized as always. DNC is such a small club, even Gavin Newsom, the most "presentable" dem is an outsider. He left out some snarky remarks on how "the machine" works on pod save america podcast.
No, the purges will take out the entire senior leadership of the Democratic Party. You need to stop thinking like it’s 2020 and start thinking like it’s 1932.
I’m still on team end the EC. It really does cause states like California to have people shrug thinking their vote doesn’t matter. Moving to popular would end swing states period. Elections shouldn’t be decided by a couple states that may flip flop. Campaigns spend ridiculous money in only those places and ignore everywhere else.
One (of many) arguments against it: We were promised the costs of the indirection-layer of sober statesmen would provide a feature, protecting against a patently unqualified demagogue. The feature broke spectacularly.
That said, if I had a magic-genie wish between (A) popular vote for President and (B) replacing all our plurality-voting schemes with one of the many better systems, I would choose the latter.
the person just elected promised to rig every election
Quote, please?
I believe you're referring to what Trump said about in the future, New Yorkers won't have to vote.
That's not saying they won't be allowed to vote. It's saying that the folks who think they need to vote to defend their way of life won't feel that way anymore.
Of course, whether those folks are right, or whether Trump really would do anything about it, are different questions. But in any case, it's nothing like the widely-reported statement that Trump will (somehow, through undescribed FUD) put an end to elections.
I may be slaughtered here for saying so, but I can't see J6 as a "coup".
There's too much of an underpants gnome quality, with no clear path leading from "unruly mob pushed its way into the Capitol" to "Trump is inaugurated with the acceptance of (at least a majority of) the country".
It follows much more logically if we model it as an irrational rioting mob. This doesn't make it right, but it moves the suspicion from "subverting democracy" to (simply?) inciting a riot.
It was an irrational rioting mob sent by Trump and allowed to continue for hours while he sat on his rear hoping they would be successful in forceably preventing the transfer of power. He and his co-conspirators knew exactly what they were doing. The insurrectionists that he told to stand back and stand by implemented stack formations to breach the capitol.
>It's saying that the folks who think they need to vote to defend their way of life won't feel that way anymore.
Why do folks think that now? Propaganda and lies from politicians.
What would need to happen in order for them to NOT feel that way?
The eradication of the Dems and the roughly half the voters that support them, and/or the further rigging of elections to ensure the half of Americans they disagree with are disenfranchised and/or the further entrenchment of the courts in an ideology only shared by half the country with mechanisms to prevent the 'left' from being able to take it back.
To pretend that statement is anything but directly threatening the pillars of democracy is absurd.
Even trumps own explanation shows the above to be true:
>Trump: So with respect to like a statement like I made that statement is very simple. I said, vote for me. You're not going to have to do it ever again. It's true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group. They don't vote, and I'm explaining that to them: You never vote — this time, vote. I'll straighten out the country. You won't have to vote anymore. I won't need your vote. You can go back.
Emphasis on:
>I'll straighten out the country. You won't have to vote anymore. I won't need your vote. You can go back.
Why wouldn't he need the vote. What changes could he make that would result in that outcome that are democratic?
Why do you vote now? I guess one reason is just that it's your civic duty. But also, I think that a big reason for voting is defensive, to ensure that the other voters aren't screwing you first; or at least to make sure that your way of life isn't threatened. Isn't this exactly what "get out the vote" efforts are trying to do, convince potential voters that there's a threat that they need to address by casting their vote? So people vote for gay rights, or for self-defense rights, or for "pro choice" rights, etc.
So if you've preemptively had some putative Defender Of The Faith like Trump memorialize your values in legislation, then you've got relatively less fear driving you to vote defensively.
Thanks. So it was the statement I referred to, and as you'll see in my explanation above, this is nothing at all like saying that people won't be able to vote.
Saying "you won't need to vote because things will be fixed" is absolutely nothing like saying "you won't be allowed to vote anymore".
No one is saying you won't be allowed to vote. Russia has elections and people vote. The election is just "fixed" so the votes don't matter. I also have no reason to give this a charitable interpretation but hey, I hope you're right. You aren't but I hope you are.
I'm speaking to the roughly 49% of Americans (and ??% of HN readers) who are unhappy with the outcome. And if that's not you, that's OK; just keep scrolling.
Surveillance is a bipartisan interest, and neither candidate would or will limit US surveillance capabilities.
We do this to ourselves, by electing to only use products that are marketed to us as safe or private. Of course, the only businesses successful enough to mass-advertise their products are the ones that acquiesce to horrible surveillance states like China, Russia and FIVE-EYES. So... NSA wins, fearmongers and paranoia-mongering politicians win, international adversaries win, and all American voters on either side of the aisle lose. We're just too dumb of a nation to seriously resist surveillance, no matter who wins whatever election.
Don't really care much about this election since I'm not a US citizen, but I decided to check out Bluesky as the results were coming in and it confirmed my long-time suspicion that roughly 99% of its users are far left American political activists.
Literally the entire discovery feed was post after post of said activists apparently suffering from legitimate mental breakdowns as if the entire world was crumbling around them.
That seems very astute to me. As a Canadian I’m not having a breakdown, but the turmoil and conflict in the USA is seriously troubling. I would hate to be immersed in it.
I'm in Europe so I'm not having an "identity crisis" either. My views on the US have long been somewhat mixed, but there's definitely a "I thought you were better than that" feeling. Our friendship with the US was always a bit mixed and there were ups and downs, but this feels like a "I don't know if I can ever trust you again" moment. Or at least, it will take a long time to rebuild the trust.
Basically this:
"A Trump victory will be akin to the moment in an unhappy marriage where the spouses are arguing again and one hauls off and hits the other. It might not mean that the marriage is over—but it’ll never be the same. Both partners will have learned something hard about what one is capable of and that will inform their future interactions forever."
> Tens of millions of people are going to wake up [this morning] to find that they don’t live in the country they thought they did. Liberals, classical and otherwise, will discover overnight that they’re now outnumbered by a coalition of earnest fascists, partisan Republicans who’ll rationalize literally anything, and millions upon millions of less tribal voters who don’t care how corrupt Trump is or which laws he breaks or whether he overturns elections or not so long as they get the results on their pet issues that they’re hoping for.
> That’s an identity crisis. A big one. And a lot of people are going to be having it at the same time.
Hold that thought. HN Commentators, feel free to correct me if I've mis-read the room, but I think there are very few here who do not realise that Trump's presidency will go poorly for the USA and the rest of the world's democracies.
Wish I could agree. I've seen a marked shift in tone.
What I'd say is that there is a significant number of "libertarians" whose "liberty" veneer is scratching off and the authoritarian conservative body underneath is starting to show through, as it always does.
Also, most "lefty" US tech workers are "lefty" only on social/cultural issues -- and would not be broadly in favour of socialist or social democratic economic policy... which I guess describes Democrats in the US generally.
Your hyperbole aside, you imply that his last term was good, rather than poor. I'm asking about HN's collective opinion, which you've contributed to, thank you, but not, perhaps, in the way you thought you were.
Its funny. Even after this happens the comments continue to keep the echo chamber going instead of wanting to understand how this happened. Until the DNC has an honest conversation with itself this will just keep happening.
Current DNC leadership needs to go. It's not enough to be on the right side of the issues - you have to also win.
I hope this is a giant wake up call that causes them to clean house. The current leadership and strategists are clearly horribly disconnected from the average voter, and they should be replaced by a team that actually enfranchises its base by pushing for robust primaries (unlike this year), without putting a thumb on the scale (unlike 2016).
You can't win with a backroom of overeducated analysts putting together a "platform" of issues that they feel like will appeal to the median voter, then trying to shove a pre-screened, crappy establishment candidate down everyone's throats.
The best way to figure out what people want to vote for is to hold an actual vote.
Social media upvoting/downvoting that results in comments being hidden is the reason for this. Even a small imbalance in one direction or the other effectively silences one side. Perfectly legitimate, well-reasoned comments will get angrily downvoted into invisibility. Echo chambers get created and enforced. This is particularly bad on Reddit (low karma can get you banned from a sub) but even on HN I'll give anecdotes that go against the "party line" and I'll get downvoted.
Problem is, this is the best way to increase engagement because it gives the most people the most compelling content. So this will never change.
I agree but i think HN does a somewhat Ok job with the upvoting system. Well at least compared to reddit which is in a full blown meltdown because their bubble popped.
Some ideas I'd like to see implemented (in no particular order):
1. Eliminate anonymity by requiring real names and profile pictures attached to usernames. This humanizes users and encourages accountability, as attaching a real name can act as a natural filter for behavior.
2. Introduce a cost for downvoting to make it a more thoughtful action. This could involve a quota based on account age and karma, or my favorite option—having each downvote cost a bit of karma or an upvote on one of your own posts.
3. Discourage bot accounts by requiring a hard-to-obtain token, like a verified phone number, which is straightforward to implement and would reduce low-effort accounts.
4. Higher barrier to entry to join an online community. This doesn't parallel how communities work IRL. You need social credit to join a community.
It seems like what happened is that voters without economic knowledge think the president controls inflation, as opposed to it being the inevitable consequence of price rises worldwide due to a worldwide pandemic.
They don't like that eggs went up in price so they elect the opposite party. They think Trump will bring prices back down because he's a businessman, even though his tariffs will be hugely inflationary.
I'm not sure what kind of an honest DNC conversation would be able to address this.
I think this had very little to do with it. From the people I have talked with and also just looking at the latino vote i think people greatly underestimate how many people actually want our immigration system changed as well as being absolutely sick of identity politics.
Also your view that dumb voters led to this is counter productive and insulting. It is what I am seeing in almost every reddit post as well. “Well people are just too dumb to know what they need”… yeah ok.
I’ve already seen people posting absolutely unhinged comments on Reddit. They think they need to go further left, more extreme, completely ignoring the rightward shift of every group but white women.
They don’t want to understand why so many people see the appeal of Trump but not the Democratic Party. They are so caught up in whatever their personal ideological take on some fringe issue is that they miss the big issues and the popular support for change away from the status quo on those issues.
In what way? In 2016 I did have people approach me for being brown. I live in a liberal white enclave in NE Portland, so this is fairly common for me. Yes, it's extremely weird.
In our current panopitcon, lies work. Turns out if an entertaining man lies again and again into a mechanism (the Internet) that endlessly amplifies and repeats those lies for free (paid for by all of us with our attention), you can win.
The failure of realize how mainstream media lied and covered for Kamala and the Democratic party in mind blowing here. Just one tiny example, "Joe Biden is in top shape" a month before he pushed out.
Honestly if the Dems put as much effort into finding a candidate people like as they did into making sure the establishment candidate had as much positive press as possible, they might actually accomplish something.
If you can't see by now that there were a lot of lies on both sides (as has always been true since the dawn of politics), you need to reevaluate your information diet.
Have I missed the news where Kamala Harris was convicted on a few dozen federal charges or ordered to pay 80+ million to someone she sexually abused? There's lies and then there are lies that can get you into prison.
They were lying to you that a senile man was fit to lead for the next four years. That alone would have been far more consequential for the country than any lie related to sexual deviancy (of which the Democratic party has certainly had its fair share over the years).
I sometimes imagine what Science Officer Spock would really say to humans to help them understand themselves.
Just saying "highly illogical" is not very helpful.
(The following is all my imagination, any resemblance to reality is coincidental)
So, I think he would talk about how the mind is not a machine designed for rationality. The mind is a holographic projection, a story told by a collection of organs in your head, fed by sensations from your body.
I think he would talk about the dilemma of aspiration. If you aspire to rationality, and you feel that rationality is the best system of thought, then you will be driven to believe that you are highly rational. Unfortunately, in many things, you cannot differentiate between logical consistency and post-hoc rationalization.
Humans know this; so we have things like peer review.
Unfortunately you also cannot trust another person to rationally evaluate your beliefs - humans have a strong history of in-group/out-group dynamics. It is beneficial to signal agreement and trustworthiness; it is harmful and painful to signal disagreement with the in-group.
And so rational thought requires rational communication with people you disagree with - and people in the out-group, because your in-group may have centered on a wrong, harmful or otherwise useless belief.
Rational communication requires an overlap in perspective. Not the same point of view, but at least a minimal consensus in perception of reality and goals. For instance, most people believe that it is good to invest in young people in some way, though they may disagree about what that means.
Unfortunately, in-group/out-group dynamics can make this very difficult in times of active conflict, as humans have a very strong sense of morality, and sending moral signals to your in-group is more important that rational communication.
----
No one had a plan that got humans to this point in our story. No one has a plan for humans in an age of worldwide social media. We have to build it together.
I don't like country music, but I can see the appeal. Things are simpler in the country - you have to believe in real things like trucks and cows, not theoretical things like software and commodity futures contracts.
It's nice to deal with things that are simple and real.
Is there some statistical analysis on the reason people vote trump ? I refuse to believe the narrative that Americans are just a bunch of redneck retarded bigots.
You ever stop to think that maybe calling ~50% of the population of your country "a bunch of redneck retarded bigots" could perhaps have some part in it? The media pushing that narrative everywhere certainly doesn't help either.
I'm not a Yank nor do I vote or care to ever vote, but if I were and all I ever saw was every mainstream source of news and media, including sites like Reddit and apparently even HN, calling me a retard (which funnily enough is a pretty bigoted insult coming from the supposed moral & good side) and a bigot non-stop I'd probably say "fuck it" and vote for the guy too.
From where I'm sitting across the pond, the Republicans want stricter border control, smaller government, lower taxes, free speech (which itself is a loaded term that means different things depending on who's saying/hearing it), which is basically what the populist parties across the EU are promising as well.
Yep exactly, this is what won him the 2016 election and the meltdowns were amazing. This time around the dems have also had the economy making them look bad, not to mention the illegal immigration issue finally making it to "big blue" cities like New York.
So it's not really surprising he won, and the margin isn't surprising either.
Actually i think it's the bottom fifth that have benefited the most from wage growth, with the low-six figure crowd getting the short end of the stick and having to pay more for burgers with the tight service labor market.
Yes, and it appears the non-college folks in the suburbs (who've been having to pay more for their burgers) were the biggest shift this election, not the burger flippers themselves.
See this is what surprises me. I would have thought voting for a more regular market with higher taxes to the elite would be favourable to the majority non-tech workers, rather than the billionaires which play the puppeteers to trump
Not a single penny of that "extra tax money from tech workers" would go to the average Joe. That's the problem. It would go straight for the lowest classes or overseas.
I suppose but I'm not really sure if the GOP has anything on offer that will actually help. I hope they do because we're gonna be living in it but nothing thus far proposed has been said to be good for the economy.
It's also the (trying to be) misleading mainstream media. Stuff like "he wants to deport all immigrants" being uttered until the last day - without specifying it's just the illegal ones, which is a very important distinction.
And there are many examples like these, where he's quoted WAY out of context, and that kind of stuff. If you believe that for years and at one point learn that it's actually bs and he didn't say that or the context reveals he was quoting someone else, or negates the comment the next sentence, etc, you start to question ALL your beliefs.
They pushed too far, fabricated just a BIT too much, and people caught on.
Just so you know, i wasn't quoting what I think but what mainstream media says 'indirectly' here in Europe.
Obviously I don't buy it, hence the reason I asked if studies had been made.
It surprises me that I see so many different reason here in the comment why people think others chose trump, when it's clearly their own reasoning.
You say they voted trump because they are fed up of being called bigot, just like YOU would do. Well that's the issue, some Americans might have say fuck them I vote trump but I honestly believe it is marginal.
I believe most cared about the election economy first, but I could be biased and that's literally the reason I asked if studies had been done, beyond the usual blablah.
> You ever stop to think that maybe calling ~50% of the population of your country "a bunch of redneck retarded bigots" could perhaps have some part in it? The media pushing that narrative everywhere certainly doesn't help either.
Yep, it's an own goal. Similar shit has led to the rise of right-wing populism all across the world, time and again. Yet they never learn. They never realize that shitting on the average Joe is not how you get power in a democratic setup.
Turns out, the average Joe is a poor, working dude. He is not a sexist colonialist or any other -ism. Yet the Democratic Party will not stop alienating men.
> and a bigot non-stop I'd probably say "fuck it" and vote for the guy too.
And most people would say that would categorize you as mentally deficient. Voting against your own best interests because you feel people are mean to you isn't usually seen as very intelligent.
Namecalling and shit slinging is exactly what Trump and his supporters do and it seems to work out well for them. They love thinking about people crying over their insults and whatnot. But they also complain loudly if anyone turns the same against them.
The democrats are not socialist and they don’t call themselves that. Socialists may or may not cast a D vote, but if they do it’s a monumental compromise.
The Dems are terrified of accidentally seeming too left. Republicans have no problem embracing the more extreme right, whereas Dems would rather cowtow to the imaginary swing voter and lose than get called the S word.
Every far left extremist (which have no clue what communism even means) has an analogous far right extremist (who also have no clue what it actually means), both are idiots and shouldn't be let anywhere near government.
Admittedly the US had a choice between someone unfit for office and a lawfully convicted felon, I don't envy this situation.
What? Kamala would have done great, where is this coming from? Trump for better or worse is about to get Weekend at Bernie'd by his cabinet just like Biden did.
You're experiencing an illusion. The few who do embrace the identity of "redneck retarded bigot" will wear the identity openly. The majority who do not embrace that identity will diplomatically avoid discussing their true political opinions with you and you'll just assume their democrats because they're intelligent and sensible, and then you'll be flabbergasted when things like last night happen.
what? plenty of intelligent and sensible people have told me point blank that they're voting for Trump. I'm not surprised in the slightest that he won.
It's not 50% though; in 2020, only ~240 million people were eligible to vote (out of 330 million, so about 72% of people); only ~158 million people actualy voted (48%). Oversimplifying, only 25% of the population of the US voted for Trump, and it's probably even less due to the system of electors.
This is why democracy is broken, because not everyone gets a voice.
I've never understood this argument. When performing scientific studies, there is a sample size of n = x hundred/thousand, and we then generalise the result across the entire population. Having 48% of the population participate in this "study" is likely to be very indicative of the likely voting choice for the remainder of the population, right? You really think that the proportion of votes for each party for those people that haven't voted would be any significant difference from those that did?
> Having 48% of the population participate in this "study" is likely to be very indicative of the likely voting choice for the remainder of the population, right?
That isn't how statistics work. Sample size reduces your error relative to the population you are randomly sampling from.
When you don't have a random sampling, then you sampling method is what determines how generalizable your findings are. A good sample size with a bad sampling method tells us little to nothing about the general population and only informs us about the specific sub population for which the sample can be considered a random selection from.
With significant differences in voting rates across many different demographics, votes are absolutely not a representative sample of the overall population.
After seeing this guy become elected for the second time I have come to the opposite conclusion. This is what America wants, and this is what America is. The rest of the world should acknowledge this and act accordingly, and the people of the US, especially the Democrats, should as well.
Pretending like "this isn't us", "this isnt real america" is just keeping them from doing any real introspection.
No, urban areas voted Democrat once again. If anything, 2024 has really showed the widening divide between urban and rural areas, both in the US and in Europe. Probably everywhere else as well.
While it is true that democrats carried urban centers it is worth noting that their support appears to have eroded somewhat in these areas. Republicans picked up a statistically relevant number of votes there.
If I were a betting man I'd wager that switches like that are purely due to inflation. Shit's too expensive and people think that changing the party they vote into the seat of the presidency is going to change that.
It’s all that matters in the presidential race. But barely over half of the population wanted him as president. The other side doesn’t disappear just because they lost an election.
I'm in the UK and I was just listening to Andrew Neil, a political commentator over here, and he mentioned something interesting. There was apparently a 3 to 2 ratio of Hispanic/Black voters voting FOR Trump. A possible explanation is that the border policies have had an impact on minimum wage workers, of which Hispanic and Black voters are disproportionately a category of. The Democratic Party will have to do a post mortem, but there's likely to be many issues found where the Democrats failed their voters.
In particular, I believe the economic rhetoric Trump used worked very well with many lower income people. I don't remember Harris taking any strong stances there, or maybe what she had I store was not communicated well.
I think this is accurate, a big chunk of the vote seems to be "my bills/food/rent went up when Blue in office, Red says they _will_ fix it, so let's try Red"
Of course not statistical, but seems to be a large trend in discussion
Yeah, I think that's it, or at least a large part of it. People were unhappy and when you're unhappy you vote out the incumbent (and in a two-party system there's only one other choice).
I also think that's the same reason the exact same guy was voted out four years ago. Pretty bizarre if true, so it's probably not the whole story.
This is the challenge that the Democrats have; the Republicans have a policy that appeals to a significant enough percentage of the population, while the Democrats have to try and appeal to "everyone else". A two-party system is not a democracy, it's a compromise, and only a political revolution will fix it.
Of course, that's also what the Republicans / Heritage Foundation are aiming for, if they have their way they will do away with democracy. Which isn't exactly what I was thinking of.
Promises from an incumbent can hit differently. If Democrats were willing and able, they should have done it in the last 4 years. If not, then why promise?
I have no doubt Harris would have delivered on improving the conditions for the poor. Unfortunately Trumps rhetoric was simply too effective, perhaps because of what you say in the second sentence.
They're not so numerous; due to the way the system is set up, they have outsized impact. Wyoming with 500k people has the same amount of influence in the Senate as California with 38 million people.
That said, so far she hasn't won the popular vote either, so that's not what we should be blaming in this election.
My question is, why can't democrats see how bad and average intell. their candidate is? Trump can at least talk, give interviews and all. But other one???
For one, the population is way more spread out in the US than in other countries. There are only 9 cities with more than 1 million people in a country of 350 million inhabitants.
Those are local administrative areas, not cities. Using any reasonable functional definition of a city, the number of cities with a population >1 million is around 50.
I think you’re confusing the electoral college with the Senate.
There are two senators per state regardless of population, so low-population rural states have an outsized influence in the Senate.
In the electoral college, each state is weighted by population. It’s unavoidably biased (just by the nature of chunking votes into seats and states) but it doesn’t consistently favor either side.
Each state gets a number of electors equal to their Congressional delegation: Representatives *and* Senators. So the overweighting of small states in the Senate does, to a smaller degree, affect the Electoral College as well (as every state gets two "free" electors).
The electoral college for one. Massively oversized benefit, especially since the house size has been frozen. Basically every level of our government is designed to give small rural areas the advantage. It’s no wonder we are the only prosperous nation without universal healthcare and post secondary education. We give the people who contribute the least to our society free rein to run it.
No, basically every level of our country is designed to balance the voices of heavily populated areas with rural areas. It's completely ignorant of the history of our nation to claim it's intended to give rural areas an advantage, when in fact it is an attempt at compromise. And let's not forget: without that compromise our nation literally would not exist, as the large and small states wouldn't have come to an agreement otherwise.
This is also what billionaires and the rich want, which is how you can tell rural USA isn't going to gain anything. But they'll blame immigration or some other issue instead of the people swimming in gold coins, making them work harder for less money year over year.
>The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”
>But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.
Everyone is throwing ideas, excuses and explanations into the mix, but maybe people just want what he’s proposing - strict border control, low regulation, small government, low taxes, free speech etc.
Im not American and barely engaged with politics at all but all of that sounds like a pretty good idea to me without looking at any stats or trying to find out why my fellow citizens were confused into making the wrong choice.
It isn’t about why his promises appeal to some people. The question is why people buy the ”free ice cream for all every day if I’m elected class president!” from a pedophile-rapist criminal. And instead of class presidency it’s real presidency.
I wouldn’t trust literally anything in this guys hands’ and even less a country.
Except they're lies or false promises; low regulation is only for companies, allowing them to infringe on workers' rights, increase poverty, etc, which goes towards oligarchy. Small government means more power to less people, which goes towards autocracy. Low taxes means less money to social programs, which means people will literally die from being unable to afford health care, which is eugenics. Free speech for me but not for thee, it's Musk's flavour of free speech where words like "cis" are banned.
But sure, on the surface they sound good I suppose.
My take is that the democrats are being blamed for the ever higher cost of living.
There are people who vote because they want the insular America and to bring jobs back from China/Mexico/etc, those who vote to burn down 'the establishment' because they feel no hope, and those who just hope that any change means cost of living drops.
If you use Twitter you would know. People hate the lackadaisical attitude to illegal immigration, the inflation in the economy, and the idealogy-centered government (yes, this has been a popular sore point).
Yet the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill earlier this year that basically had nearly everything Republicans asked for, and the House wouldn't even take it up because Trump didn't want to lose immigration as an issue.
And inflation is almost down to normal levels, and Trump is promising wide ranging and massive tariffs that it is hard to see not causing a significant rise in inflation.
So its hard to see how people who are concerned about those issues would vote for Trump.
Even if they don't like Democrat approaches to those issues, or really dislike Democrat ideology which might explain voting for Trump now when the only real choices were Trump and Harris, what about during the Republican primaries?
Republicans used to have many reasonably competent people in the primaries. How the heck could they not find anyone better than Trump?
I find it hilarious when people say democrats are "idealogy-centered government" [sic], but Trump isn't. What do those words mean to you? Are you saying that Trump has no ideology?..
As someone who voted for Harris, I’d say trump is less ideologically driven than democratic candidates. He’s insane and erratic, which don’t follow ideology.
Then Idk, he openly says that government agencies should have less power (epa, fda...). I mean, he doesn't sponsor this view, but he openly said he'll make musk give less and less agency to gov. Companies that aren't deemed worth of it, whatever it means
It.. unironically seems so? Not long ago Trump used to be a Democrat. He has often backtracked and tweaked his public ideology to whatever gets the most populist support, e.g. Abortions.
It’s framed as an equality movement whereas it takes as an axiom that society is built on systemic oppression - that’s the unquestionable tenet. And then the prescription is using governments power to impose “preferred” outcomes, no matter the cost.
Thanks, but no thanks - I prefer to live in a meritocracy.
Also my personal pet peeve - having a cultural preference is not racism, god damn it! Not all cultures are the same, and we should be allowed to state and fight for our preferences! (Unlike discriminating on the basis of physical appearance or features, which is actual racism).
The fact that America equates the two is asinine to me (as an immigrant)
You especially see it if you pay attention to framing. On every mainstream platform, social issues are always first and foremost framed as "how can we afford this expensive social program!?!". It's always business friendly and worker hostile.
I swear that has been something that, as an European person, left me quite speechless. We've heard a lot about Biden mental situation, but nothing about the other guy struggling as well
He's nowhere near as bad as Biden. The media downplayed Biden's senility until the disastrous debate made it impossible. Americans got to see both candidates talk without a teleprompter for a couple hours, and Trump was able to handle it easily, while Biden exhibited clear signs of mental decline.
Trump has a rambling oratory style, but that is more of a stylistic affection.
The question isn't if he's better or worse than Biden, the question is if he's well enough for the presidency. And he's shown very clear signs of mental decline the last months.
Neither Trump nor Biden should have been chosen as candidates, yet all the focus has been on Biden.
You know, nothing gives me competence in my incompetence than seeing just how fucking successful Trump and Elon have been despite their lack of competence
You mean the same majority of the major media outlets of all types that has been consistently hostile to Trump for many years?
If it's the oligarchs in the media who were a factor in this second victory, then it was through one truly spectacular mass-scale reverse psychology of getting exactly the opposite of the narrative they almost consistently pushed. That would be one very interesting story if it were at all true.
More realistically: to a very big (and apparently growing) swathe of the American voting public, the kind of shit that mattered most was what much of the media and their progressive political supporters in the major cities derided enough for all those millions of voters to dig in their heels and ignore them. Trump symbolically and often also literally, vocally represents this resistance to that media narrative, and thus he won again.
Musk, Bezos and Murdoch are three that come to mind. Two are legacy media. Between Fox and Washington Post that surely is not even half of the 'mainstream media'. What other oligarchs are there that I'm overlooking?
- Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook/Instagram (issued the statements in late Aug 2024 about Biden administration pressuring about censoring Covid-related info)
- Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of LA Times/San Diego Union Tribune, and other newspapers, LA Lakers, billionaire biotech person
- Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, owner of Time magazine
- Laurene Powell Jobs, billionaire widow of Steve Jobs, owns The Atlantic Monthly
- Masayoshi Son, Softbank CEO, USA Today/Gannet media group owned by New Media Investment Group via Fortress Investment group via Softbank
[edit - added below]
- Michael Bloomberg (former mayor of New York city) owns Bloomberg
- Sumner Redstone owns Paramount/Viacom/CBS
- Thomson family (Canada) owns Thomson Reuters via Woodbridge Company
- Brain L. Roberts, CEO Comcast, son of company founder, NBCUniversal, Sky Group, owned via 33% controlling supershares
- Donald Newhouse, son of company founder, Conde Nast (New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue), newspapers, controlling stake in Discovery Comms.
- John Malone, former CEO of TCI cable, largest shareholder of Liberty Media, et al.
It's anecdotal, but the easiest way to understand them is to just travel to a conservative state and talk to them. Even if you won't agree, you'll see that they exist
And I would add, listen. Don't immediately check out mentally because you disagree with what they are saying, don't argue, simply listen and try to understand. It's really hard for humans to do, but it's important. You cannot hope to change minds or appeal to voters if you don't understand what motivates them in the first place.
And when I say you have to understand people I mean truly understand, not intellectually lazy crap like "oh they're just stupid" or "they're racist" like you already see in this thread. Stupid/racist/etc people do exist, but that isn't most people and it isn't most Trump voters either. They are normal people with real concerns and needs, not caricatures of evil.
I do try. The problem is, a lot of times what they're saying is just nonsense.
"The economy is terrible" -- well, no it's not. We had some inflation a few years ago, but so did every other country in the world, and the US has had far lower than most other places. The Biden administration has been doing a great job with the economy. And you know those business people who want Trump to win because they want lower regulations? Yeah, they're not on your side -- they're trying to screw you over. You feel economic pressure, and so you're going to vote someone who's going to make it worse?
"Libs are weaponizing the justice department" -- People who have flagrantly tried to flout laws and undermine our democracy need to be held accountable. I mean yeah, "Always prosecute the outgoing party" is something we want to avoid, but "Never prosecute anything any politician does" is just as bad, if not worse. And at any rate, if that's something you're actually concerned about, why is your solution to vote for "LOCK HER UP!" Trump?
"Biden / Harris are just as bad" -- I mean, no? Trump literally sent an armed mob to attack his own vice president. Nothing you think the alleged "Biden crime family" comes anywhere close (and BTW there is no "Biden crime family").
"Immigrant gangs are invading our country" -- I mean, just no.
Not everyone is like this, but a lot of people are just living in a fictional reality constructed by Fox, Newsmax, and now Musk.
> "...so did every other country in the world, and the US has had far lower than most other places..."
And you fail to see why that might be uninteresting and unconvincing to a low income voter struggling even harder to make ends meet? Maybe even infuriating enough to vote against whoever said it?
I'm trying to treat people like adults. They're suffering because of worldwide macroeconomic conditions that are out of Biden's control, but Biden's administration has managed to make the suffering less than in other places. Other sources of suffering include policies which the Republicans themselves have been pursuing.
Imagine someone buys a Kia hoping to reduce how much they pay in gasoline; but then the price of gasoline doubles, and they end up paying more than they were before anyway; and so they say, "Kia is a terrible car, it's so expensive to fill up, I'm going to buy a Hummer instead".
That's what voting for Trump in this situation is like: at minimum he's going to enable rich oligarchs to squeeze low-income voters even harder, and at worst he's going to trash the economy by raising tariffs, deporting working immigrants, and politicizing the federal reserve (lowering interest rates and triggering even more inflation).
I think normal voters are perfectly capable of understanding this. It's you who seem to be saying that low income voters are incapable of understanding this and should instead be lied to.
> "I think normal voters are perfectly capable of understanding this. It's you who seem to be saying that low income voters are incapable of understanding this and should instead be lied to."
I offer in rebuttal the election results (which, to be clear, I myself am not happy about).
The Democrats could have promised a lot more programs and initiatives to relieve the pain of the working class than they did. They could have made economic relief a lot more central to their advertising. People want their pain acknowledged and sympathized with, not waved away with an airy "it's not so bad".
I think we basically agree then. As far as I'm aware, the Democrats didn't attempt even to make the "making the best of a bad hand" argument, much less make a case for how they were going to address the situation.
One thing that Trump is incredibly talented at at is getting everyone to talk about him. I've always thought that the way to get him beat wasn't to trash him, but to talk about the great things about the alternate candidate. So I made it a point to avoid talking about Trump on my social media.
After the DNC, I thought we were going to get the same thing from the Harris campaign -- but it seems like in the last few weeks, Harris went hard on attacking Trump, hoping to get women out to vote for reproductive rights, leaving me nothing really to share or talk about on FB.
Trump, on the other hand, went hard on getting young adult males, who typically don't vote at all, to come out and vote for him. Both efforts had their effect, but Trump's bet seems to have paid off more, and put him back in the white house.
Well that's all wrong. You don't need to travel to find a Trump voter. And merely talking to them is not going to be sufficient to truly "understand" them. If only.
Maybe it's just cope for the massive disappointment I'm feeling about the state of my country, but I'm somehow also disappointed that you could somehow read my comment and misunderstand it so badly. Of course I wasn't arguing that people should not talk to one another.
I just did. Unfortunately I did not learn much. The first few letters were pro-Trump, but with for me unconvincing reasoning, I think OP asked for something better - and I read it because I too wanted to hear something with more substance. Most letters were even against Trump.
Most pro Trump arguments seem to be some vague statements about freedom of speech and "weaponizing of the Justice Department", which I find unconvincing given the things Trump said several times during the last few months, indicating he would do exactly that and worse.
The letters are as vague as this example:
> My concern is that Ms Harris will at a minimum continue the leftist direction of America that has been pursued, or at least tolerated, by Joe Biden. Not to mention the violation of basic constitutional rights that the president tried to introduce with his vaccine mandate during the pandemic.
or
> Mr Trump will cut bureaucracy and regulations to unleash creativity and productivity in the American economy, especially manufacturing. Ms Harris will inflict taxes and spending that will spur higher deficits and inflation.
or
> You overlooked the unacceptable risks posed by the Democratic Party and Vice-President Harris. These include support for censorship, political correctness, selective prosecution and soft totalitarianism. The Republicans spend more, impose tariffs, and obsess on immigration whereas the Democrats tax more, regulate more and censor. Neither party confronts the hard choices required to limit monetary expansion, deficits and entitlements that gnaw at the dollar. I choose the Republicans because I value freedom of speech and oppose the totalitarianism implied in weaponising the Justice Department.
and that's most of the pro-Trump statements already.
I have no doubt the arguments exist, and those I wanted to hear, because I too share OPs question.
Wrong? I made no such statement! I was talking about the quality of the argument, not about the direction.
I'm not "dismissing" anything either. I have no opinion on Trump vs. Harris, as strange as that sounds to those with strong believes.
I merely observe that OP asked for arguments, and that link points to opinion letters that don't even attempt to make one. Which is fine for them - this is about this sub-thread's context. OP asked for arguments and the link does not provide them, this is not a dismissal of whatever is going on in that linked page itself, only whether it serves to satisfy OPs request here.
If you think there are plenty of places out there to get a wedding cake or a gender transition cake, and people should just leave people alone whom they disagree with, who do you vote for?
Recently there’s been an influx of illegal immigrants from Venezuela including some associated with Tren de Aragua that have been highly publicized and politicized. While most people do want America to be a melting pot of people from everywhere, whether you want your borders so wide open to allow criminals and gangs to sneak in is another question, and also probably something we all agree on, but in this case one candidate has been in power and has appeared to have not solved the problems.
Yeah, but you have to be somewhat deranged to trust a multiple bancrupt and proven grifter with that — especially since the economic record of his last administration hasn't been stellar at all.
But if you are lucky he will allow you vote for the other side in 4 years again and then you will vote republicans after and back and forth we go.
What‘s most striking is that a sober dialogue on opposing views/ideas has been replaced by partisanship and hatred of the othet side, whatever the subject. What do we need to do to get out of this mess?
I worked for Best Buy. They fired us and hired an Indian offshore team. They had H1B representatives in the U.S. that I had to spend three months training to do my job.
H1B is supposed to be to fill critical shortages. There wasn’t a critical shortage because I existed and my entire team existed.
Best Buy’s CEO preaches “inclusivity” and “the value of each employee” — while simultaneously firing Americans (and permanent residents) to lower costs — while making the vast majority of their profit selling products to Americans.
The other reason I voted Trump was the Covid lockdowns and the attempted vaccine mandates. Blue states such as California had schools closed for over a year, while red states such as Texas and Florida quickly reopened. The type of government that would arrest a person surfing off of Santa Cruz is a government that has lost their mind. And anyone Dr Sarah Cody of Santa Clara county would support, I’m going to support the opposite.
On a more subjective level — anyone that the establishment tries so hard to oppose-arrest-bankrupt-kill is worthy of my vote. When Dick Cheney endorsed Harris, the decision got really easy to support Trump. Also, see the Abraham Accords for why many support Trump on a foreign policy level.
I don’t care about engaging in a debate and plenty will downvote simply because I’m not in their tribe — but while you asked for a scientific study, there isn’t one yet, but there are tens of millions of anecdotes like mine which should give you a good start.
Not that it matters — my wife is an immigrant from Mexico and her entire family in the U.S. (who are all first generation citizens) — all voted Trump as well. Some make the mistake of assuming “immigrants” are all “undocumented.” There’s a huge difference in being anti-immigrant and anti-illegal-immigrant. The left-wing media fails to make the distinction. Also have a look at the so-called “Black” vote — they have a lot more nuance than the media would have you believe.
I agree fully with your points. Covid restrictions were insane and will change my voting habits forever. What happened to "personal responsibility" in that time??
This is a great example, and you’re downvoted because liberals don’t like to hear the criticisms of their tribe. They ask why people would vote for Trump, you explain your anecdote, and they downvote you. Classic blue tribe behavior.
> The other reason I voted Trump was the Covid lockdowns and the attempted vaccine mandates. Blue states such as California had schools closed for over a year, while red states such as Texas and Florida quickly reopened. The type of government that would arrest a person surfing off of Santa Cruz is a government that has lost their mind. And anyone Dr Sarah Cody of Santa Clara county would support, I’m going to support the opposite.
Bingo. All of the “my body my choice” rhetoric rings very hollow when you need to show proof of vaccination to sit down at a Starbucks to drink your $4.69 Americano (and still be required to wear a mask, despite being vaccinated twice in a state with something like a 90% vaccination rate).
And calling republicans facist and anti-democracy after closing small businesses, schools, playgrounds, etc. setting up phone numbers to dime out your neighbors?
Saying you are anti-1% when your covid policies directly enrich the 1%? Saying you are anti-racism when your covid policies directly hurt those without?
And then the massive economic fall out after when surprise surprise, doing all that will fuck shit up?
I was a loyal democrat my entire life before 2020. Never again.
A friend of mine just sent me an article from a Danish newspaper where they cover the reasons as to why people would want to vote for someone like Trump. They interview Arlie Russell Hochschild who has written two books on the topic: "Strangers in Their Own Land" and "Stolen Pride".
One explanation from Hochschild is that you have a group of disenfranchised votes, who see "everyone else" get to "jump the line" for help. Not only do they get to jump the line, they see the president (Obama back then) help these other people (immigrants, women, people of color, LGBTQ, an so on) move ahead of the line, while they are left behind to fend for themselves.
I haven't read the books yet, but I definitely plan to. From the article it certainly sound like it would help me understand why some Americans vote the way they do.
> "A friend of mine just sent me an article from a Danish newspaper where they cover the reasons as to why people would want to vote for someone like Trump...."
And this illustrates the problem. Hochschild is a professor emeritus of sociology at Berkeley. Why in heaven's name would you think that good insights will be garnered by reading a Danish article about a book written by a Blue professor about another group of Red people... when you can go on x dot com and read for yourself why people voted as they did?
I can say for certain - from reading and listening to what Trump voters have said themselves - that Trump voters are absolutely done with this kind of framing.
If your own political conviction influence your works as a professor, then you're perhaps not that great a professor, but if you do good work, then maybe you have the tools to write about that work and target it to a group of like minded people, communicating in a why that they/I better understand.
Personally I'm not interested in going on Twitter, or Facebook, because those are going to be the most extreme people, at both ends. I'm also no prepared to do the filtering required to identify trolls or propaganda. My interest is in the vast majority of people who don't really have a voice online. I can't go out and talk to them, I'm on the other side of the planet. I'd still like to know why they vote the way they do, because I'm directly affected by how rural America votes. I wish I weren't, so I guess that's one opinion I share with Trump.
As someone who has listened to both (or many, since there are not just two) sides, I can say for certain there is a severe disconnect between what Team Red says and what Team Blue writes about what Team Red says. If you are really interested in what Team Red says, do not listen to Team Blue at all about it. Not CNN, not Harris, not Blue politicians, not Blue journalists.
> If your own political conviction influence your works as a professor, then you're perhaps not that great a professor
Indeed. This is a major ongoing crisis in academe. And journalism.
As a self check, if you think that Trump's "very fine people on both sides" remark referred to white supremacists as "very fine people", then you need to upgrade your sources. Find the extended original video. It is hard to do! If you give up, let me know and I will send you a link. The search is instructive, however.
If you go back and read carefully, I suggested going directly to the source because we live in an age of unprecedented direct access, and it is no longer necessary to have same-side "explainers" about what the other side thinks and says.
To hear what Team Blue thinks, I'd recommend Team Red simply read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Time Magazine, et. al. Or watch CNN, MSNBC, BBC America, network news... Even Wikipedia.
Get out of your bubble and listen to people. Hacker News is part of your bubble.
The majority of people have picked a side long ago and are sticking to it. You want to talk to independents or people that have changed sides recently.
The interesting thing for me was seeing the blowback from the woke movement. People I know that were raised Democrats and supported gay rights could no longer identify with the party supporting a movement that appeared to be telling them that they are racist (and BTW be careful or you might get cancelled) and that it would be great if their kids changed genders. This led them away from legacy media and towards opposite points of view.
I am not claiming this was the decisive reason- just pointing out something that I don’t see talked about much. Listen to people and you will find other reasons.
This kind of commentary just boggles my mind. I voted for both Republicans and Democrats in my lifetime and I have never had any problems identifying the reasons why anyone would vote either way. And I consider myself a very casual political observer. The fact that people believe that Trump won because people are retarded bigoted rednecks just tells me you live in a fucking bubble under a rock in a deep forest. How do you go through life living so isolated from anyone who doesn't think like you?
- The economy is what ultimately matters to many people, and the impression is that the economy has been bad for the last 4 years under Biden but was better under Trump. The actual data is more unclear and confusing, but the average person has this impression.
- Harris wasn't likable/charismatic enough to many people, and was largely supported for her policies first and her personality second. Trump, on the other hand, went on a lot of longform podcasts, worked at McDonalds for a few hours, and generally seems more "human" to the average person.
- A general sense of rage/dislike/push-back at "elites" in Washington DC, the coasts, the mainstream media organizations, etc. If you google "trust in government" or "trust in media", they will elaborate on this issue. Trump, although a billionaire from NYC, is generally disliked there and is perceived as being an outsider and rebel vs. the elite group mentioned.
- Some protectionist policies Trump claims to support will benefit people in key battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc
Ultimately it comes down to two things, IMO: personal charisma and the economy. Everything else is only relevant in close elections.
Harris wasn’t just unlikeable. She came across as downright incompetent, a mediocrity elevated to the highest positions by the exact sort of identify focused criteria voters don’t want.
> Harris wasn't likable/charismatic enough to many people, and was largely supported for her policies first and her personality second. Trump, on the other hand, went on a lot of longform podcasts, worked at McDonalds for a few hours, and generally seems more "human" to the average person.
I would argue it was the other way round. They both went on podcasts etc and I'm debate and in rallies Trump was verging on incoherent and boring his own supporters. But on policy he was far stronger. I'm not American and I'm left wing but the trade and tax policies he's proposing do speak to traditional left wing, trade union workers: put up barriers to lower cost countries undercutting American workers. I don't know what Harris vision is, it seems she has trouble articulating it clearly.
Trump went on quite a few very popular podcasts like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, but Harris didn't.
IMO the average voter is quite in-line with Rogan and Theo Von culturally (more than they are with Trump or Harris, for that matter) and so for Harris to skip those was a major misstep that just further made her seem like an aloof member of the DC/Coastal elite.
Biden didn't have this problem because he was more of a blue collar/middle class guy from Scranton and despite his gaffes, was more likable by the average person.
Rogan alone has more daily listeners than left leaning news shows have people watching in a week. I think it was something like 11 million per day. Big mistake to not show up there.
Absolutely - if you look on YouTube alone, the view counts on interviews/podcasts between Trump/Vance and Harris/Walz are dramatically different. For better or worse, people increasingly get their information and news from videos, and to skip that was a major misunderstanding of the cultural landscape.
From what I have read/watched, Rogan didn't refuse to interview Harris and offered to do the same multi-hour interview he does with every guest.
Harris just wanted him to fly to another city and do a 1-hour interview in their studio. To make an exception for a single guest seems unfair and I don't blame Rogan for not agreeing.
You're asking as if the other candidate is a no-brainer choice. If the other candidate were Kennedy, then sure—but they were not. In this case, many would be undecided and would vote not the best candidate, but the least bad one.
> I'm trying to look beyond the propaganda, any idea if there has been scientific studies or anything remotely credible ?
Exactly, they "propaganded" so hard that they created a narrative that they are the definitive winners. So you bought into their propaganda and now you are surprised. The reality is that the democrats are not that good and the people voted.
I don't think there's a great mystery - what could possibly be the secret for why people voted for Trump you say? Probably the same reason why people vote for any other political candidate, right? Surely the simplest explanation is the most likely; they preferred him to the other candidate in some combination of what he brings vs. the other candidate? Some people are lifelong affiliates of a political party, sure, and that's less interesting and fruitful TBH, but for the "undecided" or "open-minded" voters I don't see how it's more complex Than they decided it based on the information at hand. Question is whether they were misinformed and how much the positive messages ("This is what we'll do") draws vs. "The other person will end the world" rhetoric. Thoughts?
'm trying to look beyond the propaganda, any idea if there has been scientific studies or anything remotely credible ?
I'm afraid this is the problem - your implication is that Trump voters need explaining using scientific analysis as some sort of aberration.
One day, there will hopefully be an analysis - but it will be of how among huge parts of the media and establishment this ideological view became the null hypothesis to the extent that people - in good faith - thought they were looking beyond the propoganda while asking questions like yours.
> I refuse to believe the narrative that Americans are just a bunch of redneck retarded bigots.
They aren't, really. That's just what a vocal minority calls them, said minority actually deluding themselves into thinking that they are the majority.
My theory is that a good portion of people didn't vote for "Trump", they voted for their party. That's the end of their thought process.
Party affiliation is a huge part of people's culture and personality in the US, "We are a Republican family" is something people outside of the US wouldn't say out loud. They have always voted Republican and will always vote Republican even if it's against their interests.
I mean, I grew up in a conservative state and a small/medium sized city that has always been red. Not every one is a "redneck retarded bigot". I don't think most of them aren't as openly racist as made out to be. Outside of politics you wouldn't even think anything was too out of the ordinary.
That said, I'm not sure stuff like "He's annointed by God", "He tells it like it is/Isn't afraid to speak his mind", "Liberals are evil/devil/<insert literally any reason to hate them> " is stuff you want to hear, but it does represent a somewhat overall sentiment (generalized of course).
More centered around ignorance and perceived old "conservative values". I find very few people actually able to articulate their points.
"The thing that baffles me is that good and serious people have seen versions of what happened tonight in the US for eight years and are still surprised that people don’t see the world as they do.
1) Voters think “the economy” is “can I afford to live” NOT “we are doing better nationally than others”. Inflation is politically more important than GDP
2) Immigration matters, both the sense of control/uncontrolled and the raw numbers, particularly when money is tight. See 1
3) Don’t take voters for fools: in this case don’t insist a clearly gaga leader is up to the job
4) Don’t try to fight a charismatic opponent with someone who can’t answer basic questions about why they want to be in charge. The ability to communicate is not an optional extra for politicians, it is a core part of the job description
5) Go woke, go politically broke
6) What the metro elites regard as an illogical vote is not necessarily illogical for people who are struggling and angry - see 1,2,3,4,5
Personally I think democracy matters very much and some/much of what Trump says is appalling but until his opponents learn the lessons above, voters will keep voting for someone who manages to encapsulate what they feel"
Why not ask some of the distinguished conservative academics who support the likely (as I write) next President? By the way, how about turning the question round? I hope you do not think that's unthinkable.
This is my conclusion as well. In many other western countries Donald Trump is a badly written movie charagter. In the US he is their best option for a president. "What about those that didnt vote for him" people may ask, but the fact that the democrats isnt able to provide an alternative better than Trump, and haven't been able to provide better politics than Trump says everything.
50% of the voting mass look at Trump and say "that is my president!", and millions cant even be bothered to show up to vote for someone else. This is America.
I honestly think that Elon Musk is just on a personal vendetta against anyone who bruised his ego. He can't stand that he was called out for his Thai diver "pedophile" comment or that his trans daughter openly disavows him. He specifically blames the "woke mindset" for the latter. So for him, it's probably just a "stick it to the libs" kind of thing.
I don't think it was any of those, Elon and his mother have regularly referenced Tesla being snubbed at an EV Summit, and GM being praised as leading the EV transition in a quarter they (GM) delivered 42 electric cars to Tesla's 300,000.
It is still a matter of bruised ego though, I think Elon Musk takes things like this very seriously.
Biden is wildly unpopular, Harris is his right hand, she didn't get put up by any competitive process, and she never promised change to a country that very much wants it. The nyt always considered her the worst possible option from day 1, aside from Biden. This shouldn't be a surprise.
> Is there some statistical analysis on the reason people vote trump ?
You could try to ask HN'ers who voted Trump why they did ... statistically speaking, folks on HN do not exactly strike me as fitting the "bunch of redneck retarded bigots" profile.
Oh but wait, that would only be possible if admitting on HN that you supported Trump was not guaranteed to have the following effect:
- starting flamewars, which might get you banned
- being ostracized and attacked
And turns out HN is IMO a reflection of what happens in US society at large: in the non-"bunch of redneck retarded bigots" social circles, telling people that you support Trump is career/social suicide.
Except that more than half of the country supports him, so if you pick 100 people, even in the non-"bunch of redneck retarded bigots" circles, chances are, you know ...
There is something deeply dysfunctional about a society where you have to hide your democratic choice for fear of being socially destroyed.
You have two options. If you listen to the American left and most media outlets, it's because Trump voters hate women, gays, foreigners, blacks, trans people, and progress - and to be fair, some do. If you listen to the people actually voting for Trump, it's because they fundamentally disagree with the basis for Harris' policies (and Clinton's before her) or the outcomes thereof.
Not from the US, but I really wonder:
Do you guys got not feel shame if a person with that character and that track record runs your country?
I mean sure: depending on your media diet you might find all his flaws acceptable, but ask yourself if Obama (or any other candidate) displayed the very same flaws if that would cause you outrage. If yes, you might need some introspection.
> Do you guys got not feel shame if a person with that character and that track record runs your country?
The Donald Trump that your media reports on isn't the real Donald Trump, or at the very least the one his supporters see.
Example: Trump talks to a group of people who normally don't vote, and asks them to make an exception and vote this time, noting that this will be the last time he runs, and so they won't need to vote for him again. The media then takes "you won't need to vote for me again" out of context and uses it to claim that Trump will end elections in the US. People who only listen to the media see one thing, and his supporters (who are aware of the context) see another.
> Do you guys got not feel shame if a person with that character and that track record runs your country?
You don't get to be president without being a pathological liar who only cares about themselves and not the people. I'm not saying this to excuse Trump, far from it. I am ashamed to have him as a president (to the extent I'm ashamed of anything outside my control anyways). But I've been just as ashamed to have Biden, Obama, and Bush as the president too.
Many have a very shallow understanding of policy and have also had their perspectives heavily influenced by propaganda from Fox News, etc. Ask the average Trump supporter how tarrifs work for a good example of what I’m describing.
You have to understand American politics behind the rise of Trump. Since the 1980s and Reagan, Democrats had broken with their New Deal era coalition composed of union workers. Instead, Democrats have aligned with middle class knowledge workers, and pushed for neoliberal policy that have offshored many manufacturing jobs. This was seen as a betrayal to the working class. That has left many working class whites with high school degrees with low-paying service jobs, that gave them a lower standard of living compared to the union jobs their parents worked.
This continued from Clinton to the Obama era. While Obamacare was a step in the right direction, it was seen as too little too late. It also had unintended consequences. For example, some of my part-time service job colleagues reported that pre-Obamacare, the employer could have them work 40 hours a week, because they weren't forced to provide them health insurance that met some minimum standard. However post-Obamacare, their hours were limited at 29 hours, which made it much harder to make a living.
By 2016, there was an opioid addiction crisis composing largely of working whites with only a high school degree, and the economy was still suffering from the slower-than-possible recovery from the Great Recession. (Economists say it would've been faster with more stimulus, but Obama was cowed by his neoliberal econ advisors). Due to gridlock in the political system, immigration system reform was impossible, and Presidents could only use Executive Orders to try to mitigate (but not solve) the problem of an increasing number of illegal immigrants from the Southern border.
All the pieces were in place:
- Scapegoat: illegal immigrants
- Weak economy: check
- Disgruntled populace: check
Feeling abandoned by both parties, the electorate went with an anti-establishment strongman demagogue who preyed on their hopes and fears. It's almost identical to the political environment that gave rise to Hitler and Mussolini.
The saving grace for the US during Trump's first term has been her strong democratic institutions. Pray they hold up during his second and hopefully final term.
Honestly, Americans don’t like modern feminism and anything related to trans ideologies. High inflation played a role too. It was pretty effectively curtailed but not fast enough to directly affect people’s lives before the election.
> Honestly, Americans don’t like modern feminism and anything related to trans ideologies.
I doubt most people like those two things. The difference is, they get insulted, shamed and targeted for social ostracisation if they let on what they don't like.
Which results in the election results that you see - just because you've successfully silenced someone from expressing their opinion, that doesn't mean that you changed their vote.
Is not only americans. Is most people, but they are afraid to tell and being labeled as biggots.
Is a lot a things, economy for sure, but the demiocrafts passed 4 years calling half the country nazis and facists, and denying things that everyone could see like Biden health issues. This comes with a price.
They discuss a paper "The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth About Political Illegitimacy.”
Which asks the Q:
"H]ow can a constituency of voters find a candidate ‘authentically appealing’ (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a ‘lying demagogue’ (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)?”
one A is:
"Trump’s boldly false proclamations—about himself, about his rivals and critics, about the world—are not a bug. They’re a feature. They demonstrate he is sticking it to the other side. To the elites, the media, the establishment, the government, academia, Hollywood, the libs, the woke crowd, the minorities, the…whoever it is his supporters resent, despise, or disregard."
That's also why in 2016, a year's worth of "Trump is terrible" articles only helped him - because the actual received message was "we, the people you despise, really would hate if Trump was elected". It's a sign of authenticity. Trump couldn't betray them, because he very evidently had nowhere else to go.
Aka polarisation. When Trump first won I conceptualised it as him arbitraging humanity/democracy's lack of preparedness for social media and the internet upending established flows of information.
The solution at its heart is to reduce conflict and bridge the gap. I have enjoyed Zachary Elwoods most recent podcast episode showing how Trump is misquoted by traditional media outlets which has the negative effect of furthering the perception of bias.
Your refusal to believe that is apt. People are not nearly as dumb as this narrative puts them out to be. This mindset is at best elitism, and ignores human agency.
In reality every Trump voter has their own reason to behave this way. And their behavior is perfectly rational according to their own beliefs. My personal theory is that we have been grossly underestimating the potency of misinformation and disinformation propaganda on social media. Especially those which weaponizes peoples actual grievances with authority, and directs them in this way. Anybody can be a victim of misinformation (we see this in action with people that fall victims to scam), the misinformation you personally don’t fall victim to was probably not directed at you (see e.g. the Nigerian Prince filter for wire fraud scams).
I think that even though humans are smart, and we have our own agency, there are also number of ways which our intelligence can be exploited. This is the case for scams, but also for misinformation propaganda. I think the real lesson here is in the failures of our democratic institutions to protect us from this exploitation.
You start off by saying these people arent stupid, then go on to suggest they are easily manipulated by (what you think is) misinformation. Just not smart, like you I guess?
Honestly, I think the kind of people you are sneering at are actually smarter than you as they would never make the kind of stupid, ignorant comment you've made here.
Being susceptible to propaganda (or a scam for that matter) isn’t stupidity. We are all susceptible to it. It just varies which propaganda and to what degree.
I never called Trump voters stupid. I think there may be a misunderstanding here because traditional discourse has people believe that only stupid people fall for misinformation propaganda (or a scam). I was explicitly rejecting that.
Is it possible that you are the one that has been manipulated by misinformation?
Is it possible that people can disagree with you without "misinformation" being involved?
Oh, there is no doubt in my mind that I’m susceptible to propaganda, including misinformation campaigns.
However misinformation campaigns are a fact of social media. There are several documented cases of misinformation spreading. It is possible that I have just been lied to about that the media et.all lied about the scale and severity of misinformation and I believed it (although, wouldn’t that be a misinformation campaign which proofs their existence?)
See this interaction, I would encourage you to try again. I think its more closed to reality than based.
People complained about google not showing election sites for trump on google, then goggle came out and acknowledged this. I don’t see this type of interactions anywhere.
The only reason people vote for conservatives is because they're selfish or ignorant. This is obvious because there are 2 things in the economy: labour and capital. It is no coindence then that democracies invariably develop 2 parties. One of those parties ostensibly represents the intrests of labour. As such the other must represent the interests of capital. But how could a party that benefits so few, ever win a majority? Well, a combination of selfish people (those who benefit directly from the policies) and ignorant people (those who have been convinced by any number of falsehoods to vote against their own economic interests).
Looks like he also might win the popular vote. First republican to win the popular vote since 2004. If this is true, then this was a clear mandate that the a majority of voters prefer Trump's policies over the other side. We might not like it, but this is how democracy works.
There is certainly going to be domestic and international chaos in the coming years. But a realignment of the world order and domestic politics was inevitable. It's not going to be end of the world like some are making out to be. Nor is it going to be the end of the United States. There will be opportunities. Buckle up and find opportunities where you can.
>Nor is it going to be the end of the United States
I’m not so sure about that. If it happens I’m not so sure it would be a bad thing either. This country’s system makes no sense. If I was from Texas I wouldn’t want my taxes paying for things I don’t believe in and if I was from California ditto. This country truly makes more sense as several different countries that can choose to cooperate.
Let's make the Federal government primarily fund the armed forces, and certain things like airwaves, and flight. Then get it out of things that it doesn't need to regulate.
Half my non-federal taxes go to my local school. I'm cool with that. I also fund my local fire/police, local governments. I'm cool with that.
We need to restrain the interstate commerce clause; which is out of control. But yes, you are describing federalism. Let's make federalism great again.
> Nor is it going to be the end of the United States.
We're looking at the possibility of a 7-2 Supreme Court stacked with activist judges (the new ones will be even more so). Now, it depends on your definition of "the United States" but whatever comes out the rear end of this is going to look different to the point of potentially being unrecognizable. They already have the playbook.
A few bleary-eyed, scatterbrained possibilities: mass deportations, end of the free press/open internet, end of the Department of Education (public school?), end of birth control, bans on vaccines, etc., etc.
There’s lots of blame and anger directed at Democrats, but ultimately it’s the Republicans who picked Trump.
They could have won against the unpopular Biden/Harris with practically any other candidate. Nikki Haley polled well against all possible Democrats.
The party was already done with Trump in February 2021, but then they explicitly decided that they prefer one more try with an old man who doesn’t spare much thought to actual policies but does brag about sexual assault, tried to orchestrate a coup last time he lost an election, etc. etc.
It’s not inflation or Biden’s unpopularity or some other external factor. Lots of Americans really want what Trump is selling.
That is not what they prefer because that's not the image Trump voters see when they see him.
- They see an outsider who is not lying to them telling them things are great when in their daily lives things seem decidedly not great.
- They see someone who says he will stop illegal immigration, not someone who is anti immigrant, but someone who will actually enforce the law that democrats either refuse to or have been incapable of enforcing.
- They see someone who says he doesn't want to involve us in expensive long wars overseas like the ones everyone was sick and tired of being involved in for the last two decades.
- They see someone who has taken actions that align with their deeply held religious beliefs about what constitutes taking a life (abortion).
- They see someone who says he will bring jobs back that all the "swamp" politicians (on both sides) sent overseas in the name of globalization.
I want to be clear that I'm saying that he is or isn't a narcissistic misogynistic billionaire rapist, but that's not who the majority of americans just voted for. You can say that they are wrong, misinformed, idiots, etc. but focusing on that and not why they voted for him is exactly why the democrats lost and will continue to lose.
Yes, we know. Those people are wrong, but the mistake of their opponents is thinking that pointing this out is sufficient in the post-Obama era where things are so focused on retaining power. Most Republican politicians and staffers knew Trump lost in 2020 - we have records of them saying so – but they also recognized that he got a LOT of people to vote and gambled that the Democrats got lucky with the freak pandemic and Biden’s somewhat unique combination of being well-known nationally and white men thinking of him as one of their own even if they don’t agree with all of his policies. They adopted the big lie gambling that he’d do it again in 2024, and it worked.
It always amazes me that a country that cares so much about being the 'best', cares so little about what people think of them.
Voting in this guy, and his policies reduces the legitimacy of the US. If Trump withdraws from Nato, then members may not pay so much to US for weapons any more. Protection money only works while you get Protection. Maybe the Visa and Mastercard tribute taxes we all pay back to the US will be less welcome.
Maybe, in the new protectionist world, tax dodging US tech companies will be less welcome too.
Who's a trainwreck?
Volkswagen is closing plants. Siemens chief admitting recently that investments in Germany are a waste because of the high energy prices.
EU can continue buying the overpriced US LNG, or "distance itself" and crawl back to the Russians begging for cheap gas that was driving the German economy.
Europe is cooked.
AP News at this time are reporting 224 (Harris) vs 267 (Trump) [1].
A lot of political thoughts in these comments. I think the important thing going forwards is to figure out how to maximise the opportunity that you find in your environment.
For our team we were looking to relocate our manufacturing from China and get additional investment. One of our objectives today is to figure out how the recent result in the US will affect this planning.
Dreading it on one level but also looking forward to the entertainment of a watch a slow motion train wreck. If he actually follows through on promises like mass deportation and forcing Ukraine peace that could get intense.
I am pretty sure india is taking more steps than USA. you cannot blame them anymore. They are even pushing more money into nuclear and created a breeder reactor.
You would be wrong. The IRA is projected to remove a California-sized block of US emissions by 2030. The IRA is the single strongest climate action tried by any country since the Paris Accords.
It's a graph that shows a steady and consistent increase in atmospheric CO2 for the last 40 years regardless of the elected political party in the US at the time.
In other words, it seems to indicate pretty strongly that no matter how you vote, climate change is going to destroy us.
> Until China and India take steps to decarbonize their economies as opposed to making empty pledges we all know will never be met, then whatever the U.S. or the rest of the West does will not matter.
This is such a bullshit way of thinking. No one snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche. "But China…", "But India…" is not an excuse for not giving a shit. I hear the same arguments over here in Germany, and they're usually coming from the "I don't want to change" crowd.
> you have to get everyone to cut as much as they can
But the point being made isn't to emphasize the importance of everyone collaborating on cutting emissions. The point being made is that we may as well not cut back because someone else might not. It's especially disingenuous to bring up India when they emit less than the US does (and especially on a per-capita basis).
What do you propose we do about the volcanoes that in a single eruption emit more methane and carbon than human activity does over a span of two centuries?
Well then, the good news is Trump has the guy more responsible for electrifying American cars (a major contributor to CO2 emissions) than anyone else on his team.
Also the state that has more renewables than any other state voted for Trump.
Are you referring to Elon Musk? He also torpedoed a mass transit project in California and built the stupidest version of a train ever conceived in Las Vegas. It's not clear that Elon Musk has a good sense for efficient means to reduce climate harming activity - just that he wants, and is good at getting, government money for his projects.
> It's not clear that Elon Musk has a good sense for efficient means to reduce climate harming activity
I think that this is one of the most incorrect, and, what’s more, plainly and obviously incorrect things I’ve ever read. I am almost at a loss for words when I read it.
Are we going to pretend that people would have adopted EVs anyway in the west without Tesla? Did you think we would just abandon the entire western auto manufacturing infrastructure and start driving BYDs? Did you forget what the auto industry looked like before (and during, in the early years) Tesla?
This is like saying that he doesn’t have a good sense for building orbital rockets. The guy has basically only done two big and meaningful things with his life and attacking the #1 carbon emission source is the bigger of the two.
> Are we going to pretend that people would have adopted EVs anyway in the west without Tesla?
EVs are growing, and will continue to grow, for reasons unrelated to climate.
They are the superior product in nearly every way. Regenerative braking is a huge objective improvement. The acceleration and torque control is a huge improvement. The lack of maintenance is a huge improvement.
The only downside of EVs is range and charge time, and both of those are being actively improved.
Elon deserves some credit for joining on to Tesla in 2004, long before these benefits were clear, and for being at the first company to really demonstrate these benefits in reality with the Roadster in 2008. But I do not think the existence of Tesla accelerated the adoption of EVs by more than a couple years.
The Model S was released in 2012. The Nissan Leaf was released in 2010.
Improved private cars, electric or otherwise, are an unserious solution to climate change or a sustainable future. Simple geometry makes this obvious - they're quite literally the worst solution to moving many people. If I asked someone, "move ten thousand people ten kilometers," and they came back with "I will put each one in a 2x2 meter box with four seats, but only one will be occupied by a person. The box needs to be stored at the origin and destination, and independently operated by every single person," how could I do anything but laugh them out of the room? Addendum: "by the way, the infrastructure to sustain this means the box is required for trips of all lengths greater than 1.5 kilometers, and sometimes even less!"
Attacking cars as a carbon emission source would not mean killing an HSR project on purpose. It would mean building public transit.
Anyway EVs aren't special. Every major car manufacturer has them now, and the PRC makes shitloads too. Elon Musk probably beat the market, but it's not like his designs were genius - they lacked critical, simple safety features for example. Need I truck out the stories of people slicing their hands open on the cybertruck frame?
As for orbital rockets, that doesn't really have anything to do with climate change.
The fact that EVs aren’t special, and that every major manufacturer has them now, are almost entirely the result of his hard work. I think a lot of people forgot what the world was like before Tesla. This is sort of like saying “every phone manufacturer makes touch screen phones”. The foregone conclusion that “this is just how phones/cars are now” wasn’t foregone until someone made it that way, at scale, first to show everyone the better way.
Also, I think your idea that cars themselves are the problem is probably incorrect. Decarbonization isn’t primarily about reducing overall energy use per person, although you can possibly deflect with the argument that it requires both that and also clean energy.
In any case, American culture and cities are car culture and cities, and even if you could do the impossible and magically deploy tons of HSR between every metro in the US it wouldn’t make people stop driving. Any solution that requires first rebuilding the whole country and replacing its whole population with people who don’t want to drive a large vehicle to the grocery store is obviously a nonstarter.
Nah the nissan leaf was released about 15 years ago. Electric mobility was a proven use case years before the release of the roadster or model S. It wasn't the paradigm shift that the iPhone was. (and I don't have any doubts we wouldn't have gotten to an iPhone experience a few years later, either. I used smartphones before the iPhone with touchscreens, less smooth and intuitive, but already had miniaturized mobile-first apps based on touch. Android was released a few months after iOS and had been in parallel development for 5 the previous 5 years prior to iOS being unveiled...)
Tesla accelerated the electric car market several years, that's for sure. But nothing more than that.
The most important development for the feasibility of electric cars has not been automotive innovation (not the powertrain, the motor, the wheels, the interior or whatever), but battery innovation.
And battery innovation (i.e. cheaper, lighter, more capacity, better heat management, better durability) has been ongoing regardless of automotive even existing as an industry.
This has been the driving factor for the electrification of cars, not any one car company but the battery industry. Tesla simply was the best first mover.
It's clear that Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords and famously wants to start up a massive amount of drilling for oil.
Whereas recent democratic cabinets banned certain oil drilling, dedicated the US to the climate accords, installed large subsidy programs including one that prevented Tesla (fully kickstarted the electrification of the entire automotive industry indefinitely) from going bankrupt, and just recently launched the IRA which is the biggest climate change prevention investment ($3 trillion) in the history of the world, prompting the EU to follow with a similar program to compete to attract green investments and innovations.
There is simply a massive policy difference between the two parties here. And showing a graph of world emisions that have kept going up in the decades prior to mainstream climate change awareness, is grossly misleading. For one because it says nothing about US policy. Two because it happened prior significant climate change policy and a divergence between republicans and democrats on this issue. And third because without frontrunner countries there is no way that you can ever overcome the tragedy of the commons issue with climate, because India/China are certainly not going to make investments if the US doesn't and fucks the climate anyway. We can't all use that excuse, certainly not if you're the richest and most innovative country.
Climate change was barely a political issue this cycle because China is the runaway leader renewable energy tech (solar, batteries) and the Biden Admin SANCTIONED them for it.
It's difficult for many people in America to accept that the "climate change" narrative is primarily a propaganda tool and wedge issue to rally votes, and that the DNC doesn't actually care about "solving" it. Just like abortion.
Two things are true: climate change and reproductive rights are genuine issues, and they are also weaponized for political nonsense. People need to be away more skeptical around these debates and stop getting so angry/depressed about them (which is the goal of those groups trying to manipulate you through powerful emotions).
Well yes but thats not a binary situation, is it. We can fuck up future of our kids a lot, a lot more or way a lot more. And so on.
Anyway, our descendants will hate current generations for what we have 'achieved' with the only place we can realistically live en masse for next 1000 years at least, almost all in in past 20 years, I'd say rightfully.
But as long as their stocks are up many folks here properly don't give a fuck. Tells you something too, don't put automatic morality into folks just because they have above-average intelligence, selfishness is a very powerful emotion from which none of us is completely immune from.
No, no it has not. It has been about a multitude of subjects like the oceans and forests and preserving habitats from human interference. Humanity mishandling those has consequences for humans, but that has historically not been the crux of the message.
It has never been about “floating rocks” either, but the life in it, nature as a whole.
There is no other way though. Climate change is not a technical problem, it's political. We've had the tech to fix climate change for long time, we know how to do it, that part is quite easy and obvious, we are just not doing it.
You can't say "other way" when you're comparing to something that isn't a way in the first place.
Climate change absolutely is a technical problem and not a political one. It's about the cause and effect patterns of actual weather phenomena, and has nothing to do with conflict resolution within human societies, or anthropocentric psychosocial rituals.
We don't really have the technology to purposefully engineer macro-scale climate patterns, and we absolutely do not have the technology to secure wide-scale cooperation among vast numbers of people with different value systems and incentive structures. We've never had that.
IMO, climate change policies directly caused this election. People are very price sensitive. Biden enacted some policies (Keystone XL pipeline) that contributed to higher energy costs.
Because there were guard rails in place. Now the Supreme Court has said he can't be prosecuted for official acts and he has a VP in place who is on record as saying he wouldn't have certified an election that Trump legitimately lost.
Things have changed since 2016, go ahead bury your head in the sand about it. Don't come crying to anyone else when the leopard eats your face, though.
The Ukraine bit may have absolutely devastating Europe-wide side effects.
The EU can't let Russia "win" as it would set a precedent. If the US withdraws their support, the EU will have no choice but to ramp up theirs, meaning funneling money to the military complex. Double or triple that if Trump goes through with his NATO defunding/withdrawl threats. This could easily destabilize the EU economy, cause internal friction, provide fertile ground for nationalism and, ultimately, lead to the fracture of the EU. Now recall Trump's cordial alignment with Putin, which will undoubtedly encourage this sort of development, and it all starts to look outright scary.
The EU will do nothing if it falls outside of the US imperial mantle because it’s not a proper political entity, it never was, it never will. Maybe individual countries like Poland will try to do something, but they’re too small in the great scheme of things.
If Germany had any strategic autonomy left (which they don’t, they’re just a US vassal through and through) they would do a second Rapallo, maybe this time also involving China, at that point they’d still have a chance to put their economy back on track.
No one (great majority of people) in the EU wanted/wants this war. It was a dish put on the stove put by the hawks in Obama administration. But I think it is way too naive to think US can just pull out. They are far too financially invested. The question is, ia Ukraine too big to fail for US imperialism
Russia invades Ukraine (2014), launches a full scale invasion (2022), talks about fluid borders, and so on... but of course tankies blame "US imperialism". It's everyone's fault, everyone's but the country doing the invading part. lol.
Only naive people can think that the prior government would have been brought down without substantial US support
...
This is not about what Russia is doing. Russia, like the US, is an imperial power that cares little about the rights of other. This is about the US testing how much it can get away with by enroaching on what it mistakenly thought was a much weaker Russia than it turned out. And Ukranians are paying the price in blood, often against their will.
Again shifting all blame to the US without mentioning what Russia is doing... I'd call you biased, but this feels more than that.
The US supports what benefits them, so I'm sure they were supporting the opposition. Russia was supporting the then president Yanukovych because that was the best for them. That's what countries do.
The protests started when Yanukovych decided to cancel the EU - Ukraine Association Agreement[0] to go do a similar agreement with Russia[1]. Now, while the US might be supporting the opposition, this decision was made by the government supported by Russia in a country that was turning to the EU for a long time (the exception was the Donbas and Crimea)... of course people were going to protest. After what they experienced in the 90's and early 00's, with many working in the EU for a while and seeing it as a better option, are you surprised that many would want to be aligned with the EU?
How do you go from a protest to killing protestors? That I don't know. Are you going to blame the US for the actions of the Russia-backed government? Maybe they were also part of the conspiracy... /s
In any case, this doesn't justify Russia's invasion of Crimea or the infiltration of the Donbas which preceded many of the horrors that are now known. Their actions and their president history lessons are examples of the imperialism you blame the US for. As someone that seems to have a problem with imperialism, you should be criticising them, but are not... why is that?
However the world let the annexation of Crimea slide in 2014 and that emboldened Russia. Let them chop off a piece of Ukraine now and that will embolden them even more. After all Finland was a province of the Russian Empire before the revolution of 1917 and parts of Poland were under Soviet's control prior to 1941. And that's without going back into middle ages. Lots of places to take back.
You (and people like you) are way too bold to allow yourself to speak for "the world" or for "the EU". As a member of the world and the EU, I'll say that I personally never wanted for my taxes to be spent to prolong this war. Moreover, if it turns out, as you suspect, it all can change on a whim of a president of the USA, it logically follows it never in fact was "the world" or "the EU" who decided that in the first place. It definitely wasn't mine decision, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't yours.
In fact, it won't even really be the voting citizens of the USA who make any decisions, because when red/blue splits 50/50 it isn't "tyranny of the majority" anymore, it's tyranny of luck.
I was nowhere close to "speaking for the world". I merely stated an obvious fact - one country chopped off a piece of another and it got off scot-free.
Re: your taxes - it'd be prudent to look beyond short-term effects and consider what different scenarios would lead to in the long-term. The EU had no choice but to help Ukraine to resist. Consider where things would've been now if they didn't.
The irony for Ukranian nationalists is that Lenin gave them their state, and another Communist later gifted them Crimea. Today they are fighting for things Communists gave them. Even most of their buildings and homes were made in Communist times. But they tear down staues of their fathers
Some interesting facts about that. The guy running the state at that time was Georgian. It was not Ukranians per se that were targeted by government policy of collectivization, it was the land owning peasant class, kulaks. Whether the famine itself was intentional is very debatable ie it wasnt an official policy to kill people
EU does not have money to spare. Their economies are on the brink of collapse. They have committed harakiri by sabotaging their own energy security and industrial might. EU do not have they any clout on world stage and will decline. Without US - ukraine is sitting duck.
I would genuinely like to see your thought process on this:
Trump promised to deport all the undocumented migrants. All of them. That's roughly 10 million people.
How would you, within 4 years (he is famously a man of his word and we can count on him to accomplish his campaign promises within his presidency), find and then move 10 million people, and to where would you move them?
What does it look like to move 10 million people against their will? What mechanisms would allow for this?
I have an idea, but I'm curious your alternatives:
First, to find them, you could create a federal bounty program. Rat out illegals, get 100$ a head. Well, that might lead to rampant suspicion and neighborly misbehavior... somewhat exploitable too since you can get ICE to kick your annoying neighbor's door down by claiming they're harboring an illegal... not ideal. Maybe instead give NSA blanket wiretapping access to root them all out? Well, now they're listening to everything everyone says, but hey, anything in the name of freedom!
Regardless, awesome, now we've got ICE kicking down doors and dragging screaming families into the street. Part 1 accomplished. They load them into paddywagons and take them to local jails. Oops, those filled up within the first five days of the program. Now what? Stadiums? We're using those. Walmart parking lots with UNICEF tents? Sure, but what's to stop them from simply running away? Fences. We need lots of fences, and lots of UNICEF tents. Cut in some latrines (jobs!), run some plumbing, done. We've got some great staging areas.
Obviously, we should centralize these, right? We don't want to just take over every walmart parking lot in the country. Instead, while we negotiate with mexico and some other countries about how we're going to dump 10 million people over the border, we'll park them in several centralized locations, preferably out in the middle of nowhere because nobody wants a concentra--- sorry, undocumented migrant staging area, in the middle of their town!
That's a lot of people to move, 10 million. A greyhound bus fits, what, 30 people? 50? That's too many busses. We need trains. We can build the undocumented migrant staging area in remote areas with train access, just add an offramp straight into the camp- sorry, undocumented migrant staging area. Fix up some cattle cars, jam the people in there, gorgeous!
Oops, mexico told us to fuck off and won't take these migrants, now what? We can't just let them loose after having stuffed them up in there for a couple months, can we? I guess we can just keep them in there a bit longer while we try to negotiate with a couple other countries...
This sounds like the good version of America, right? With the screaming families being dragged onto mass transit and shoved into unicef tents? The alternative (aka, status quo for decades) is just lawlessness.
The argument that mass deportations are some impossible ordeal is only defended by those that are deeply invested in that they don't happen.
Most illegal immigrants are only in the US for economic reasons. Don't give them any welfare, make hiring them actually illegal and punish the companies that hire them. When this happens, many of them will just go back to their country.
Then if somehow their countries refused to take in their own citizens, they can just be sanctioned, or stop being given foreign aid by the US.
The only reason you believe that mass deportations are impossible and would cause an apocalyse, is because you really want it to be true.
The larger voices on the more milquetoast side of the original "alt right" crowd who are still online and streaming push for two broad ideas to implement as policy:
- any business that employs someone who is not a citizen of the federal government and also not a US National, forfeits their business
- all welfare benefits for non-citizens cease
They believe that with these two major policies in place, most of the unlawful aliens will self-deport, and just considering human incentives on an elementary level, yes most of them will self-deport.
Best bet is to find a way to build up states that can defend those rights and concentrate people there. In response to the evisceration of the federal government, set up equivalent agencies in those states that can do those jobs. The rest of America should be abandoned.
Wouldn’t this just cause progressives to lose every subsequent presidential election, with those rights eventually being federally outlawed? 270 gets harder to reach the more concentrated a mindset is.
Yes. In my opinion, it's clearly been a wasted effort to try to convince the rest of the country those rights are important. They need to be defended where they can, and the states that defend them need to separate themselves more and more from their parent country. Secession is silly, at least today. If what you're saying comes to pass—and it could even without what I'm suggesting—then at that point secession is the only correct answer.
Either way, it doesn't make sense to spend effort where it's not making a difference.
EDIT: Another part of this idea that I struggle with, is that we shouldn't ask people who aren't accepted to stay in places where they aren't accepted. They deserve rights. They should go to places where they can get them, and we should get them out of the places that don't respect them. And doing that, which I think is the moral thing to do, leads to what you're describing.
Good points. I’ve always had negative preconceptions around secession, but I suppose that if the government fails to be productive in adding value to its people and the world, I can see the benefit in being broken up into smaller, more independent or interdependent components.
Also federal government will continue to weaken under Trump. Its primary domestic power is by acting as a big hose of money, if that dries up then what does it matter? EPA, NLRB, all the executive offices are basically gone already anyways, and it's not like they've even had teeth for the last two decades. Strong blue states enacting their own agendas aggressively, independent of and unassailable by the federal government is a way more achievable goal IMO, especially if the alternative is to pin everything on being able to sufficiently turn out the entire blue coalition one day every four years. I can make a difference at the county and state level, and I have lots of opportunities to do so. My heart goes out to people stuck in red states right now, but at the end of the day some things are within my power and some things are not.
Does that half have any meaningful power? People are more polarised than ever¹ and one half of the choices controls the presidency, the Senate, probably the House… And they have a very public plan to do a lot of oppressive stuff to ensure they keep themselves and their ideals in power for decades. And their fans are cheering it all.
I’m not American, and in theory I appreciate your positive messaging, but realistically it doesn’t seem like you do have half of the voters or the power behind you.
I hope this finally stops blind democrats from saying crap like “this is not who we are” and “when they go low, we go high” and invoking American exceptionalism and crying for God to “bless” your country specifically. Don’t be surprised nationalists won the day, this is who you are. You had an excuse in 2016, but not this time. You made your bed, and the worst part of it is that it affects the rest of the world so meaningfully. You fucked up. Again. Maybe try changing strategies a bit? If you keep turning the other cheek while the other party is punching you in the face, all you’re going to get are more bruises.
¹ I don’t have any data, this is observational, and I would welcome being proven wrong.
Only one of those political parties kept my kid from going to school for two years. Only one of them chained up their playground and shut down their community. Only one of them forced small businesses to close, cheered on when people where getting their cars towed from trailheads. Only one of them forced state employees to get a so-called vaccine or lose their job.
This is fall out from democrats disastrous covid policies. Well deserved fall out.
In what way is that better than to vote for your own rights even if it means voting for the vice president of the administration that provided almost total support for a country that killed 60 000 people in the past year? Mostly with american weaponry too.
(And before you say that the other side would do it too, even Trump, that seems to show total support for Israel at least keeps talking about how the entire thing needs to stop asap. No such urgency from the Biden administration, at least that's not what their actions show as they keep providing even more material support by the day).b
What are your thoughts and level of concern for the Ukrainian people in the near future? Do you believe that Trump is going to bring that conflict to a close agreeably for the people of Ukraine, or will he follow through with his promise to let Russia "do whatever the hell they want"?
I'm curious, what exactly did Biden do to stop Israel from wiping Gaza off the map? What restraints has Israel shown up until now? So even assuming you were right, what exactly would Trump do that could be worse than what Biden has done (eg. Support for everything, and providing for most of the material that led to almost complete destruction of Gaza and now soon Lebanon too).
And in any case my point was more that it is funny to see people talk about how one side only thinks about their rights and not those of the others and how their side has more compassion and empathy. While actively campaigning for the candidate that has been completely supportive of Israel for the past year. Using the reasoning that hey, foreign policy is one thing but at least Biden is better for "us Americans". That to me sounds exactly like thinking about your own rights first, at the detriment of those of all the people who died and suffer from what Biden's administration has enabled.
This really sucks and is making me incredibly worried. I know we don't discuss politics on HN, and there's not much point in debating this. But seriously... this clown? what's wrong with the US.
Citizens United allows for money to speak. Recent SCOTUS case allows for paths towards legalized bribery.
Neither party offers a real solution, so folks go with the person promising to break everything, even if he has already proven he won't follow the law, enriches himself, and destablizes global politics.
Yeah, it might break a logjam. But don't expect things to be better after a flood.
Bubububutttt he’s totally going to bring back those 6-figure factory jobs in the Midwest and make houses cost $150k again by….deporting large portions of the underpaid manual labor force, taxing foreign goods at 100%, and ending all government programs including public education.
I'm still staggered by the thought of brain-worm being charge of all things health related and potentially (although that appeared to be a joke) in charge of everything save oil profits.
RFK says some wild stuff, but he does have a track record of being pretty vicious with large corporations that threaten public health.
I am scared of him cutting a bunch of vaccines, but I am excited that he will go after food manufacturers who have been maximizing profits at the cost of public health.
This election has been a testament to the complete and utter obliviousness of the American voter, as far as economics goes.
All polls have indicated that economy and inflation was the number 1 issue that voters on the right cared about, and yet they haven't flinched at the proposals that Trump have laid out. Musk even said it in clear language, that there will be "austerity" moving forward.
The greatest grift in modern times - and the people that stood most to lose walked straight into it, cheering.
I guess the only hope is that the economy is fine, and improving - which makes any radical changes much more visible and risky. If Trump and Musk want to set off the bomb and likely crater it, then they'll own that mess. But hopefully they'll just do nothing, and try to take credit for the trajectory they've inherited - for the sake of your average citizen.
Harris proposed peacetime price controls, an idea that hasn't been tried since Nixon, and for good reason. I don't think Democrats have the high ground on economics.
Let's see how the trade war of all trade wars will play out for average Joe down in Mississippi. All while social safety nets are disintegrating underneath his feet.
What's dangerous about this is not the plan itself, but that there won't be anyone to confront Trump about his half-baked, or downright disastrous plans.
Maybe? Democrats had the chance to propose something better, but they decided to prop up a geriatric puppet until they couldn't, and then were forced to prop up his widely unpopular VP. I'll take trade war over domestic goods shortages, which is what price caps inevitably create.
The economy isn't shit. The economy is booming. Job growth has been good, summer consumer spending was good. Real wage growth has outpaced inflation the past 18 months.
Inflation is going down. Interest rates are going down.
America came out of this victorious, compared to other countries that faced the exact same post-COVID woes.
The problem is that democrats couldn't convey this stronger. Republicans managed to spread the doom and gloom more than facts.
Now it's going to be trade wars, tax cuts for the wealthy, more crony capitalism. Trump is fixated with tariffs, because in his mind, deal-making comes down to strong-arming the other party. Trump seems to be oblivious of the soft power the US has wielded for decades. That's also about to get flushed down the toilet - all countries in the world are embracing for Trump-style "negotiations".
I know it is not good to engage in victim blaming...but maybe the voters do get what they deserve?
Perhaps the economy as a whole is doing great, but the facets that impact the individuals across the nation are not. Many/most people feel that they have less in their pocket AND their refrigerator at the end of the month than ever before.
The economy is great for about 20% of the population, maybe 30%. Take a drive down no-where town anywhere in the US and you'll see the economy doesn't work for most people. All of middle America (geographically) has been absolutely gutted by globalism, among other things.
Peter Santenello has a good YouTube channel where he goes around the country (and world) and interviews regular people. It will give you some insight on the economy for the remaining 70%.
I genuinely hope Trump's plan works to alleviate this but I don't think even rampant protectionism can put the cat back in the bag for the heyday of American manufacturing. I expect it to go about as well as it did for the Soviet's insular economy.
Maybe another perspective on this is that Democrats were preaching to the upper arm of the K-shaped recovery that everything is fine with their bureaucracy in charge (because nobody actually cares about Biden or Kamala personally), and the people on the lower arm voted on "Hell no, it's not!" This was the Springfield, OH thing, where the media tried to laugh it off as a few racists claiming pet-eating, but a small town was truly stretched beyond its limits through illegal immigration.
What you call victim-blaming may be mixing up cause and effect. Voters aren't stupid. They hear "the economy is doing great!" but they see their grocery bills. Maybe the victims are just tired of being victims and voted accordingly?
This is the attitude that leads to Democrats losing. People were not obvious.
Biden is wildly unpopular. People are extremely unhappy with his management of the economy, immigration, etc.
Democrats could have changed directions. Instead they doubled down on Biden. Harris said she would do nothing different. So people didn't vote for her. That's very logical.
That's not to say that Trump will do a good job or that his policies are better. They're worse and he's a crook. But voters everywhere made this sentiment clear for an entire year and were totally ignored by the Democratic party.
They tried to get a border deal, which was stopped / blocked at the behest of Trump.
The economy has been on a up-swing for a good year now, and things have improved all-over. People can't live under a rock and think that a global pandemic wasn't a huge part of this - most countries experienced the very same economic effects.
But, again, Trump laying out his disastrous tariff plans is the canary in the coalmine - that his voters either don't understand economics, or simply chose to live in a make-believe world where they imagine Trump will just "fix" things.
The border deal was a hail mary 3 years into a presidency. They should have done something about the border years earlier when voters started to complain about it if they wanted to.
It doesn't matter what some economist says the economy is doing. Most people are be unhappy with the economy. That's what matters. Democrats listened to economists instead of voters.
Of course Trump's votes don't understand economics. Why do you think overwhelmingly we see educated people now vote Democrats and non educated people vote for Trump?
Trust us some economist says we're doing a good job was a crappy message. This was an own goal.
Point still stands on the border deal. They wanted something, but through Trump, it was derailed - for no other reason that it was detrimental to his campaign.
Reagan had a plaque at the oval office that said: "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit"
And Truman had a plaque that said "The buck stops here". I don't buy these lame excuses.
Biden should have used executive orders to deal with the border. Just like Trump did. Biden didn't because he didn't care that voters were extremely upset about the border. Now we get to "enjoy" Trump again.
Robert Kennedy detailed how CO2 pipelines have ruptured causing people to die & become sick. And how eminent domain was used to profit companies rather than social welfare. Even though Robert Kennedy seems to believe that CO2 is the climate control knob, many Americans don't. They see Carbon Capture as a scam that enriches Billionaires at the health + wealth expense of everyone else.
This is one example where ideology becomes a mechanism of coercion to transfer wealth from the large majority to a very small group of people.
For my friends here who are not Americans, here's my take on how the election played out. Please bare in mind I'm neither Democrat nor Republican. The analysis comes from commentators on both sides of the political spectrum. Since Trump won, the analysis focuses on the Harris campaign mistakes. I'll leave critiques on Trump for other commenters, as there are many.
- Harris skipped the traditional primary which reinforced to many independent voters that she was appointed by the ruling class of the Democratic party; US voters are extremely tired of feeling like the political "elites" have more control than the actual voters
- Democrats gaslit the American people for too long, claiming President Biden was not in mental decline; this created a lot of open questions about the inner workings of the Democratic party that were never addressed head on by Harris's campaign; to many independent voters, this left them feeling like Harris might be more of a political puppet than a qualified leader
- Harris's campaign ran primarily on restoring Roe v Wade (abortion rights) which is a false promise; it was clear she would not have the necessary Senate majority to codify a new law; many liberal and independent voters were annoyed at this attempt at emotional manipulation; this was a critical campaign mistake
- When Harris was trailing in the polls, she went on the attack against Trump with ads and chopped up sound bites instead clearly stating her plan for the country in longer form interviews; this left independent voters with a lot of open questions about her policies and plan
Ultimately, Trump won the popular and electoral votes on more of a referendum against the Democrats political playbook. Most Americans are tired of being talked down to and gaslit. And yes, Trump does this as well, but he won the perception battle.
The main takeaways on what needs to change in American politics to restore some sanity in future elections:
1. We need an overhaul in traditional media (or new media) to restore trust in sources of facts; all American traditional media is incredibly biased at the moment, leaving our politics up to the whims and misinformation of social media
2. We need a 3 party system; this is a long shot, but it's the only reasonable way to enforce accountability for the Democrats and Republicans since traditional press is failing to provide a balance of power; for the last 20+ years, elections have mostly been against the other candidate instead of for policy plans or candidates
Shower thought:
People vote for Trump because he is actually predictable.
You never have to guess whose interests he is protecting. It's always his own.
You never have to guess whether he is lying. He sure as hell is but there is also no hidden agenda. It's unfiltered mental diarrhea but it's raw and authentic.
I think a lot of the unease and disdain for the Western political class stems from their attempts to be inoffensive and appeal to everybody. Whatever policy you enact there is always going to be a trade-off, winners and losers, and if you do now acknowledge that, how can I be sure that you are acting in my interest?
“Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid.”
― Captain Jack Sparrow
I think authenticity is being hugely underrated as a factor for why Trump won. People inherently trust someone who is visibly flawed and speaks off-the-cuff. This preference for authenticity has always existed, but is extra strong as a reaction to social media.
He is not predictable, mere selfish interests doesn't make him so, he doesn't have an ideology and therefore very flexible on what he will do, is easily manipulated by anyone and also there are many more dangerous people who will run his administration(RFK is in-charge of health!) while he spends his days on the golf course.
An unsurprising result. There is a worrying global rise in right-wing popularism and this is part of it.
We can look forward to more war, more crime, more suffering, more scapegoating of minorities. This is the start of a long decline that ends in death and destruction.
That Harris and Trump were apparently the best that the US political machine could spew up as choices to run one of the most powerful countries in the world is concerning in itself. Just shows how severely politics is broken in the US.
Do you really believe the Dems would do less war? They are literally siding with Dick Cheney. They were always very pro-war (eg. Hilary Clinton) but now they don't even hide it and they are embracing the whole "security through strength" and "escalation to de-escalate" in the middle east.
If you look back at the past few presidency (incl. Obama), Trump was far more peaceful. He was the first president in a very long time to not invade a new country. I don't think he does it out of love or empathy, I suspect he just thinks it's a waste of money, but the end result is the same.
Pakistanis in the majority and Muslims in general supported Trump because Biden's govt is alleged to have toppled Imran Khan's govt and supported genocide in Gaza. American Muslims have voted for Trump
Good for them, anyone can see that trump isn't just going to give the zionists everything they want and make it far worse. It's not like he's said as such or anything, and they could have known beforehand.
One thing for sure, is you're part of the zionist brigade (you're easy to spot from a mile away, showing up in every comment thread to blatently support zionism).
Any US President, by design, can go against israel, because the US is a free nation not beholden to israel.
The compromise is total. Presidents are puppets. They do as told. There is a shadow government, and CoG is still at play. The reality is so crazy most people can't handle it.
Congress is the same. Total compromise. Every once in a while someone tries to buck a bit like Thomas Massie. Then his wife died suddenly...
LOL democrats really did a number on themselves here!
The majority of the country was telling them "We are having change anxiety after Obama and we are having distrust in institutions after Covid". So what did they do? Cling to the same power structures with a dead man walking, doubled down on gender politics, devolved internally into morality based foreign policy shout match and the cherry on top put an uncharismatic non white woman as the candidate. At every step of the way they very eloquently and academically explained why they have the right solutions while completely ignoring the emotional state of the nation.
All they had to do was bring a calming white man that is not in cognitive decline that would reassure the nation that everything was going to be alright. That the America they know and love is here to stay.
You may don't like that this was reality, that your progressive views are more "right" than that, but it is. So now enjoy being factually, morally, academically correct with trump as the president with control on the congress. What a joke.
My take is that people are attracted to fascists and authoritarians for similar reasons as many people are fascinated by serial killers and the evil protagonists in TV shows. Something about watching evil and cruelty appeals to human nature.
Maybe the fascination from people who never actually lived through fascism. Like people who fantasize about BDSM or CNC sex but would never really do it in real life.
I'm from Spain and even to this day we hear old people saying that "life was better with Franco". I think it's more about a need to have a homogenous society with very clear rules and boundaries.
The best explanation I heard for the appeal of fascism was from someone on the far-right – that fascism is basically an immune response of a nation.
When enough people are hurting from the status quo voting for "sensible" policies of soft reform isn't going to cut it. At some point you need to blow up the existing system so you clear out the rot.
This immune response might be costly to the nation in the near-term but the hope is when it's over it will have also have destroyed the infection.
When it's put in these terms I can begin to relate more with the appeal of Trump, and while I'm not personally convinced he is a fascist, I do get why people say that. I can be nervous and unhappy with the result, but also acknowledge that the US needs significant change and voting in Biden or Harris was never realistically going to bring that.
There's clearly something wrong with democratic party. They're no longer appealing to the working class they claim to speak for and instead their primary supports now seem to be suburban white-women and the college educated metropolitan class. Today they're also supported by the media establishment, war-mongers like Dick Cheney, most billionaires, Hollywood celebs and pop-stars. Given this it's really no surprised we smart well off people on HN don't like Trump and quite like the sensible status-quo Harris promised.
I hope this immune response doesn't kill the host and I hope something positive comes out of all of this. We should take comfort in the fact that the US is the most resilient democratic nation on Earth and Trump probably won't be alive in another decade. Those who worry about an actual fascist up rising probably need to relax a little. The great risk over the next few years is probably just geopolitical stupidity and we've seen plenty of that in the last 4 anyway.
> The best explanation I heard for the appeal of fascism was from someone on the far-right – that fascism is basically an immune response of a nation.
This is some really low-tier fascist apologia, in my opinion. Fascism isn't an immune response, it's a cancer. Once active in the host, it tries to sap it of whatever resources it can to enrich itself. Rooting out fascism has, historically, come at great personal and political cost to the countries that manage it.
I'm sure voting sensibly in a democracy, understanding all the consequences it will have on oneself, the nation and on foreign people was definitely part of the function to be optimized for (besides that evolution doesn't work like that)
> You may don't like that this was reality, that your progressive views are more "right" than that, but it is.
This made talking politics with my social circle difficult. Don’t shoot the messenger. This was not the time to run a risky candidate. I actually think Harris ran a decent campaign, much better than I thought she would, but I don’t think she had much of a chance. I remember when Biden dropped out several groups came out saying that if the DNC didn’t give Harris the nomination, that they would consider than to be a betrayal and that they’d lose their support. It was frustrating to see them so focused on what was “right” or “fair” when the stakes were so high.
The crazy thing is that we already went through this in 2016. We had people protest voting against Clinton. It didn’t work. And yet we seem to have been ok letting unyielding idealism sabotage important elections.
That said, I think a huge problem was Biden’s ego and his inability to stick to his campaign promise of being a one-term president. With him dropping with only a few months left, democrats didn’t have many options.
>At every step of the way they very eloquently and academically explained why they have the right solutions
Part of the problem is that they didn't explain anything. Even in friendly interviews, the best kamala can answer when asked for specific is a big word salad that can be summarized as "Trump is evil and a danger to democracy, vote for us". Saying you have a plan and shitting on the other party for not having one is not the same as having a real plan and communicating it properly.
The Democrats would rather lose with a neoliberal+unpopular candidate than win with a popular candidate. Because they serve similar corporate interests as the Reps. Only with a completely different Culture War shtick than the Reps.
That you frame this as being “factually, morally, academically” correct is funny—what justice does the Dems fight for? Not Palestinians. Not the average American. Just well-off women (now white or Jamaican) having “their turn” as the commander in chief.
I did think at the time when Biden had to step aside that it was a shame they didn't try to choose the most competent replacement (maybe Shapiro?) rather than just going with Kamala who I think everyone agreed wasn't very good.
> The majority of the country was telling them "We are having change anxiety after Obama
Biden came after Trump.
> All they had to do was bring a calming white man that is not in cognitive decline that would reassure the nation that everything was going to be alright
What motivated people is inflation and border crossings.
The disagreement is that Fox News focused on gender politics, but it was largely absent from both Biden and Kamala's campaign.
I guess congrats to Fox, because focusing on it all day every day worked. The average joe thinks that's all the Democrats care about. It's extremely transparent when someone says "gender politics" what media they're consuming.
Have we been following the same campaign? These were at least in the top-5 messages from their campaign:
- Kamala is not only black, but she is ALSO a woman! Please vote for her otherwise you won't only be a racist but a misogynist too.
- If you are a woman your rights are in jeopardy and Trump will put you back in chains or something. If you are a woman and not voting for Kamala you are doing what your husband is telling you to do obviously.
It literally says at the bottom of this ad this is not authorized by either candidates campaign. Nor does the ad even say the things you pointed out. But amazing try. I see you just made an account for this thread
So, when the democrats finally said "hey, we were wrong, here's a boarder bill to limit entry into the US", and Trump said "don't fix the boarder",
Why did Trump then get votes?
Nobody is confused as to why people SAY they support Trump, people are confused that you can show someone who supports Trump objective evidence that he hurts them, works against his wishes, etc, and they will support him harder.
The "backfire effect" doesn't replicate, but boy IDK if we can call two elections anything more than an adequate sample size.
If Gender politics is such a nothing-burger that the president shouldn't care about it, why did they vote in the party who is enthusiastic about hetero-normativity? Why did so many republicans devote airtime and debate time to talking about the double digit number of trans people in sports?
He is barely coherent most of the time, but several of his ideas do resonate with people and are easy to understand:
1 - Other countries in the world have taken advantage of the US
2 - Illegal immigrants have changed the country for the worse and are taking jobs
#2 in particular has been framed as being racist. There IS a good deal of racism mixed in there, but the truth is that low skilled illegal immigrants DO compete for many of the same jobs as lower-skilled Americans.
None other than Bernie Sanders said as much about the subject right around 2007. His stance at that time was that we needed to do something about illegal immigration specifically to protect the jobs of American workers, but then later he changed his tune to fit in with the rest of the party.
If you address the majority of people's concerns and worries, they'll vote for you.
> 2 - Illegal immigrants have changed the country for the worse and are taking jobs
> #2 in particular has been framed as being racist. There IS a good deal of racism mixed in there, but the truth is that low skilled illegal immigrants DO compete for many of the same jobs as lower-skilled Americans.
There is only one group for which that is true -- men without a high school diploma. Otherwise, immigrants are generally taking jobs that Americans won't do.
Case in point, picking produce at farms. The last time they cracked down on immigration, a lot of those farms had to spoil a lot of crops because no one would pick them.
Do not insult a person’s honest earned livelihood that they work for to support their families.
There are tens of thousands of Americans who are forced to live in Trailer trucks or from their car who often do those sorts of jobs.
They just want an honest living and do not have the opportunities to get higher college education to land well paid white collar formal jobs.
That uber job is often their way to save up for their truck driving license so that they can move to a decent wage to get his/her kids a nice christmas gift, nutritious daily meals for their kids and other emotional needs.
To them, seeing their jobs being taken up by illegal immigrants for lower wages, no payroll taxes to pay, etc. is a very very very real issue to them and a zero sum game being played against their life.
People want prosperous livelihoods not just jobs. Do you think those working those low paying dead end jobs are just completely content with having zero mobility or financial security?
That uber driving might be living in their car but at least they are employed right??
if you are buying delivery food, taxis, and laundry services you are clearly an upper class net worth individual. surely you know what’s best for working class americans
A laundry machine today could be a risky investment as you don't know how many years it will last.
My old flat had a machine that broke down (It was less than 6 months old) and there was a known problem with the model which was to do with the input pad to set the settings. Luckily it was under warranty, but even still the stop was fighting hard to replace it :/ (I think it was fisher and paykel, they used to be good but they moved the manufacturing base from New Zealand to overseas).
Yeah this always surprises me when people compare the candidates. OK, Kamala was mediocre. But a ham sandwich is better than Trump's inane incoherent rambling. His positions are a vague protectionism.
Trump is a known quantity - people know what they are getting with him and have made their peace with him being how he is.
People expect more from Democrats. Harris would get dinged for saying things that Trump says, by the same people who are fine with Trump saying those things.
If that seems irrational and hypocritical, well, that's how people are, regardless of their politics.
Another model of how to think about the candidates is that human beings make decisions based on how the person or thing in front of them makes them feel - and afterward they come up with post-hoc rationalizations as to why. Even smart people do this. To some extent, we're all lying to ourselves about this.
So it makes sense that this time around both candidates ran campaigns focused on emotions, instead of policy specifics.
> put an uncharismatic non white woman as the candidate
As a "white" man (no more white than native Americans are "red", Chinese are "yellow", or Africans are "black"), I take offence at the suggestion that skin color or gender should be a defining characteristic to determine who should be the US president (or anyone else in power).
Charisma is a different story, but boy, if Trump is the benchmark for what counts as having charisma, we're in even bigger trouble than I thought.
But surely you can tell that putting him in a subordinate position does not produce the same emotional effect, if anything it amplifies the negative reaction by baking the problem into the ticket.
The Democrats are firmly centre-right when compared against most of the rest of the western world. They wouldn’t know far-left if it slapped them in the face.
Have they? They've been consistently trying to chase moderates for years. Harris had Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney backing her. I'd say their attempt to capture these people has largely failed.
"America first" (read: "Trump first").
It is going to be interesting to see all the different ways that guy is going to enrich himself and businesses, again..
This is weird because the information I was getting was that Harris was leading the opinion polls and the Trump supporters were dropping him at the last minute. Now this feels like a rigged election.
It is a rigged election, just not in the way republicans mean it. All American elections are rigged to make it deliberately difficult for many people to vote.
Most of the demographic made out to be a "boogeyman" ie normal people, recognized DEI as "a license to hunt Republicans".
If you're a normal person and some random intern with a 10% non-American accent probably in their early 20s calls you from some random number greeting you by your full name and says they're a part of some polling company you wouldn't recognize even if you'd heard of it before, are you going to confess in the slightest to them you intend to vote for orange cheeto man who is like literally worse than mustache man from WW2?
There was a lot of rallying on the republican side to go vote online. I didn't see a lot of that on the democrat side. Pundits mentioned a lack of Trump's ground game, but I think online networking effects of republicans urging others to vote helped him whereas the ground game helped Harris.
It was a close election. Possibly driven by the echo chambers people are in -- like seeing "I voted for Hilary" in left leaning sources and "I voted for Trump" in right leaning sources. Like when Anna Seltzer's poll came out the left ran with that but largely ignored the +10 poll for Trump that came out shortly after.
I personally try to vary my sources to counter the echo chamber effects. I don't always agree with everything that is said, I just want to try and understand what is going on.
I was seeing commentators on the left decrying the Puerto Recan joke, saying that it would hurt the Trump campaign. Then Biden made his comment about Trump supporters being garbage which the left dismissed. After that the right took it as a symbol, making memes about bins going to vote, Trump arriving to rallies in a garbage truck, people wearing bin bags to vote, etc. The left didn't see that going on, or dismissed things like the garbage truck as a stunt.
A similar thing with Trump's McDonald's stint. Both of these helped connect with regular workers, something that Harris didn't have. Something that the commentators on the left failed to see or understand.
I don't follow things like TikTok, but I heard a commentator mention how that helped women turn against Trump, especially amongst new voters. I suspect that due to the ranking algorithm and bubbles that this predominantly targetted democratic or left leaning voters as there were many women that voted for Trump.
From what I can tell, the polls were just really bad. Less than 1% response rates. This provided hope for various sides at various times but at the end of the day they basically aren't that useful.
Doesn't seem to be much commentary here on what an axis of Musk/Vance/Thiel (and Andreesen, etc.) influence and power in the US federal administration now means for the technology sector.
Remember it is Musk who began the wave of layoffs a bit over two years ago.
Bezos evidently saw the way the wind was blowing already.
I also see almost zero discussion about climate change policy. For many of us non-Americans, this (the disengagement of the US from even the pathetic half-measures it moved towards under Obama) is one of the key things that was horrifying to watch.
What’s there to talk about: they bought a President. They puppet the incompetent VP. They stand to make billions. The TikTok ban basically sealed the Trump win because its American investors were hellbent on him winning and they paid him to switch his stance on it. That’s just one example.
People are tired of competing with 3rd-world wages while having to meet 1st-world expenses—especially in a ChatGPT world. It’s no surprise that shutting the borders and capping the visas is a mildly popular platform—especially when the Democrats (with a few exceptions, like Sanders) abandoned their labor constituencies back in the 90s.
He also sold the entirety of the CIA's intel on Israel's nuclear weapons capacity to the Saudi Arabians in exchange for the Saudis sponsoring a golf tournament at a Trump resort, so there's that too.
It's dissatisfying that he could win, but it's not the first time, so I've already accepted a long time ago that the world is not what I wish it to be.
In that context, I am more curious what his policies will be because even though he rides different waves of general discontent in society, ultimately he doesn't care about anything except the economy and money. So I think he will double down on tariffs, but some things are irreversible - saving the e.g. coal mining industry is a lost cause and he'll throw those people down the drain because it doesn't make economic sense anymore. What I am most curious about is how he'll handle Biden's policies with regards to blocking acquisitions on monopoly prevention grounds.
Also the markets are not open in the US, but over here in Europe they're already skyrocketing. So "Wallstreet" is expecting massive growth in what is already quite an inflated market.
who would of guessed that swinging to the Right and courting Republican voters while holding no real tangible policy positions that address the pain that people are feeling wouldn't pay off?? (except for literally everybody who follows politics)
I could write an essay on each massive mistake they made after that first week after the swap, but if I had to simmer it down into a sentence, it would be: people wanted change, Kamala Harris made it extremely clear that she does not represent that change. She cozied up to Biden and tried to be a centrist-right candidate, and literally nobody wants that... and the worst part is that they will never learn a lesson from this.
Not a Trump voter so can't say exactly why they vote for him, but my guess would be the rather toxic race/sexism obsessed narrative the far left pushes. Every article nowadays rambles on about it, ever book/tv show also, it is tiresome and self defeating. Also so much negativity directed at males, especially white ones. The trans stuff is also a factor I'd guess, even as someone who voted for Harris I don't care for this level of anti science belief that a guy is now a women just because they say so.
Harris didn't really push this narrative as far as I can tell, but unfortunately some of her supporters do(and the media outlets they run).
Or perhaps the Trump voters actually believe he can somehow lower grocery store costs, though to me this seems like it would require some real mental gymnastics to believe, or deep ignorance.
On the right you mostly have "proper" religion, mainly Christianity (in the western world at least), while on the left you have the church of identity politics.
Everyone seems to be laughing at centrists nowadays, ya know the "enlightened centrist" meme, but it's the only truly secular position today.
The left remains stubborn in persecuting even an ounce of independent thought (or any thought that goes against the established dogma) on topics related to gender/race/identity and dismissing people with different opinions as "bigots". And then they wonder why people simply stop expressing their opinions loudly and opt to express them via voting instead.
And then when the voting results come in, they double down: "I can't believe 50+% of the population is RACIST, SEXIST, BIGOTED, UNEDUCATED, STUPID!"
There is no left either. At least in any meaningful definition of the term. Maybe you could say there always is a 'more left' party. But that is not very usefull.
First I’ll just say that I do agree that the left has a big problem with negativity towards - or just simply ignoring - young men’s problems. I don’t believe in the solutions the right prescribes, but yeah, the left desperately needs to come up with its own productive solutions that young men can believe in. And a world view in which young men feel valued.
It’s not “anti-science” to say gender is fundamentally non-binary. Yes, reproduction is very binary but you don’t stop being a man or woman if you become sterile.
Biologically, gender is determined by a dozen of various factors during the child’s development. All of which can go wrong. Especially now that we are surrounded by so many hormone disrupting chemicals.
How is it so hard for people to imagine even the possibility that the development of the brain can be affected towards a different gender than what your genes or genitalia indicate? Biology is not a perfect machine. Not even remotely.
And is it so incredibly hard to acknowledge that it’s easier to fix the appearance of your genitalia and some letters on some paper, than trying to force your brain to rewire itself to a different gender than what every neuron and synapse of their brain has been wired for during development? If you actually spend a minute really listening to a transgender person it will become very clear that switching gender isn’t something they do just because it’s like.. you know.. kinda fun and exciting to be a different gender. No. Not at all.
Tech people especially, should recognise that “binary” is an illusion. We say that bits are binary but anyone that has worked on chips or read about ECC understands that it’s not how physical bits actually behave. Biological gender is similar.
Honestly, that so many people on all sides still don’t see this is a worrying sign of societies lack of empathy. We don’t want to spend even a little bit of time to understand other people. And yes, to circle back, for the left this means they should truly understand and speak to young men in the working class. Sure they have some nice words about supporting unions and such… but it’s not believable.
I can't tell if this comment is aimed at reds or blues...
Both sides are guilty of not being nice to the otherside, and calling them scum. That seems to be the problem right now, we've stopped listening to each other.
I try to understand why Trump lost the 2020 election and won the 2024.
My reading is that people vote with a punishment mindset. Aka the only way to punish Trump for his horrible term was to vote for Biden. And the only way to punish Biden for his bad financially term was to vote for Trump.
Whoever is in charge gets the heat for any problems.
He happened to be at the wheel, when COVID hit, and that did all kinds of damage. His handling of it was clumsy.
Biden was at the wheel when we had high inflation (because we fixed the COVID slump with free money). I think the dems did a shitty job with our borders, and that hit him.
To all the people wondering why Trump has been elected, the answer is very simple and has been true in all countries that have had elections. When a large section of the voting public is chronically missing out on the benefits of what they're told is a "growing economy", only to observe continued "unfair" extremes of wealth distribution, they become disenchanted with the system that has generated this situation. By definition almost, they become very willing prey for any demagogue that threatens to upend the system, turn over the money-changers tables. It's irrelevant whether the demagogue's policies will work or not. It's irrelevant whether the demagogue is provably lying or not. It's all about repressed anger being unleashed and finding a target. Even if the target is not the cause of their misery. And so every latent form of bigotry finds expression and is easily exploited by the demagogue.
It's worth re-reading Goebells primarily because his understanding of this psychology is what made Nazi demagoguery so devastatingly successful. Any attempt by a party to attack the demagogue without directly addressing the elephant in the room (the growing class of working poor) is not only destined to fail, but destined to fail badly. If I hate you - really hate you - I don't mind copping a few painful blows if it means I get to see you bludgeoned to near death. Vengeance is an incredibly powerful motivator. People trying to lump all of Trump's supporters as Nazi's are making a grave mistake and refusing to see the forest for the trees. Just as most Germans in WWII were not Nazis yet supported Hitler, so too with Trump. Latinos, blacks, gays and women all voted for Trump. Don't assume they're all stupid. When I hate you, I'm happy to burn in hell if you're there with me.
Of course, this is a simple generalisation and there are lots of "sub-reasons" (the bro-vote, the foot-gun Democrat advertising - "he doesn't have to know!", etc). If the Democrats had chosen Bernie Sanders as their candidate back in 2016, they would've had eight years in power. It's no coincidence that Bernie had a lot of support from those that otherwise voted Trump. They felt that he was real and was really concerned about them and would really do something to assuage their pain. Now? Now they're just mad - "enough is enough".
However, anger is not sustainable for too long and all demagogues eventually come undone because once the heat of anger is gone and you look around and realise things are worse than ever - well, that's when things can REALLY get dangerous.
I completely agree and I've been slowly coming to this same conclusion. To this, I will add:
The Democratic party has left a lot of people behind and their only choice is to turn to the other party, in the hope they will help. Yes, it's not logical given the facts on the ground, the other party likely won't help them, but the other party is saying they will help. And that's the important thing.
Why did the Democrats leave people behind? It's the perception of "wokeness" and the feeling men have of being marginalized. A lot of men feel emasculated by the state and direction of our culture. And those men who feel this way are not college educated, so they are looked down upon and they mainly have service sector jobs. In other words, they are being left behind in the great economy they see everyone talking about. The jobs that created the middle class (manufacturing jobs of the last century) have moved elsewhere, and they feel they can no longer support their families in the way their parents did.
A lot of us here are not feeling that pain. I don't. But I see it out there and there are a lot of them. Trump won by a larger margin than he did in 2016.
Think about this: the Democrats avoided primaries in the last 3 election cycles. That told a lot of people: we don't give a fuck about you.
Others have said it here, but I'll repeat it. If Bernie Sanders had been the nominee in 2016, we would have likely had 8 years of Bernie and no Trump. Bernie Sanders was the only candidate in 2016 that resonated with the pain people were feeling, and those people who voted for Trump would have (mostly) voted for Sanders.
Great point, The fact that there are a ton of people who wanted Sanders and who flipped to Trump should have given Dem leadership a clue. People want real change, whether its a Liberal or a Republican they don't care, they are done with mainstream politicians who promise to keep things the same.
It's a good question (I don't like that you were downvoted). I've heard repeatedly that young men feel they cannot take care of their family. They can't afford a house, primarily. But there are other things. Men go to college at a much lower rate than women. Because of that, those men make less than their female counterparts (who went to college). This "the man makes less" is another part of the emasculation, when you add it to all the other things. And one of those things is the dating apps, which for many men is a terrible experience.
Thanks for the answer. I won't lie, I was half-expecting this to be something about trans issues, but I'm pleasantly surprised.
> young men feel they cannot take care of their family. They can't afford a house, primarily.
I don't think this is particularly gender-exclusive, but absolutely one of the largest problems the younger generations face. How are we going to raise a family, buy a house - hell, just live a decently comfortable life?
> Men go to college at a much lower rate than women. Because of that, those men make less than their female counterparts (who went to college).
Men feeling threatened by women who make more than them or are smarter than them seems like something that needs to be worked on individually rather than socially.
> And one of those things is the dating apps, which for many men is a terrible experience.
Well, dating apps were a terrible idea from the get-go, but hasn't dating always been a nightmare for most men for most of history? I don't disagree that there's aspects of using dating apps that could cause some self-esteem issues (for both genders, I will add again) but wouldn't that also apply to dating 20-30 years ago?
I was referring to Goebbels’ own words regarding the application of propaganda and its efficacy when you understand the psychology of the masses as a collective entity (quite distinct from the psychology of the individual). He was a prolific writer (I believe his diaries measured 40 volumes!).
Ah, thank you for the clarification, I'm interested in reading up.
Your description reminds me a lot of a book called "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard, which I recommend as a distinctly uncomfortable read in the same vein.
I get this line of reasoning, but the US economy is thriving, unemployment is low and wages are growing rapidly at the low end too.
Nazi ideology doesn't work well as a comparison in my opinion, because Weimar Germany was crippled by reparations, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, an acute world economic crisis and traumatized from a devastating war.
The US is nowhere close to any of that, it's doing pretty well all in all.
There are a number of people who feel they're doing pretty shittily right now, no matter what people's metrics say, and "no you're not" is not a particularly constructive response.
I'm not an economist, I have no detailed explanation to offer for this disconnect, but I personally know a number of people outside of tech who are not fiscally irresponsible, but are struggling to reliably keep food on the table without consuming their savings - most frequently because they have some health condition that necessitates costly things, and their pay at work has not kept pace as cost of living increases have happened.
So I have little trouble believing people in similar straits could vote for someone who made bigger swings about "I know you're hurting".
Well, it's also the effect of Fox News, right wing radio, and right wing leaning podcasts which convince people to focus on issues which can be leveraged for political gain. There are lots of problems, but right wing voters are convinced to stew about a relatively small subset of the totality. And regarding those problems they also are only ever presented with a subset of available rationales and solutions.
This also simplifies things for them. Instead of the myriad of real problems in the world, conservatives can concentrate on only a few, all of which have simple rationales and simple solutions.
The US economy is not thriving for a very large swathe of the population. The extreme disparities in wealth, the non-reporting of under-employment (as opposed to unemployment) all skew statistics.
> I get this line of reasoning, but the US economy is thriving, unemployment is low and wages are growing rapidly at the low end too.
Many make this mistake. The stock market is thriving. Some people are thriving. Many people are not. They are stuck in low wage service jobs. It’s not about unemployment.
There was a global pandemic. We are in a recovery. The U.S. is doing far better than Europe in our recovery. We are basically most of the way back, and people will start to feel better next year. Trump will benefit despite having done nothing.
Hmm, as someone from Europe I've never heard labeling of trump's supporters as nazis, that's quite a strong claim I haven't seen much evidence of.
Not that you are not correct in many aspects, but wasn't inequality sort of part of whole US setup and 'american dream'? Back to good ol' days when poor were poor and a largely invisible part of society.
For an european eye US is setup on inequality by principle, which does a lot of good and bad. When looking at resilience and strength of economy that Europe can never ever dream of reaching, I'd say bigger good trumps (eh) those evils but I have only very limited view. In Europe even big success is mild compared to how far in US things can grow into. Complex topic this is.
It has literally been a thing for years now. Since he lost the 2020 election he has ramped up his rhetoric and surrounded himself with people that are causing the comparison to be made.
I'm from Europe too. There was a republican rally at the Madison Square Garden a few weeks back, and there were a lot of comparisons with the nazis, with people in social media calling them nazis and so on. This article [1] for example mentions "Several prominent Democrats have drawn comparisons between Trump's Madison Square Garden rally this weekend to a 1939 Nazi event held there.". I don't know if the comparisons were justified or not, because I haven't even read the article, just wanted to add it as reference since I remembered that happening and comments calling republicans nazis on places like reddit.
The terrifying state we’ve been entering for several years now is where people in power believe they both know and get to dictate what the truth is. Unfortunately despite the rhetoric I don’t see that reversing since it’s coming from the uniparty.
I did use it a lot. Have you considered Twitter might be an information bubble?
Musk says sensible stuff. But his actions are completely opposite.
"Free speech is essential to democracy" OF COURSE
No one is taking that away. They said the same thing before Biden won. It's just fear mongering and people eat it up.
He talks free speech and then buys Twitter and removes community notes from his account just to push his agenda. It's free speech but it's all fabricated propaganda.
Trump on jan 6th commanded his goons in the bubble to try to steal the election with the fake electoral plot. Look it up. No mention of that on free Twitter. They are literally trying to install Trump as dictator under your nose. While you fight here about free speech. It's ridiculous, and people eat it up.
70% of Republicans think Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election and that's hardly the only misinformation they have. It's hard to imagine that that wasn't a huge factor in the election.
To provide a little perspective on what seems to be an fruitless exercise in Democratic Party political apologetics, let’s remind ourselves that the smart, dumb, rich, poor, wise, foolish, old, young, native born, foreign born, male, female American people have spoken in a generally free and fair election. As they did when they elected Biden in 2020, Trump in 2016, Obama in 2012…. Whether you agree with the results or not, that process is a beautiful thing. Think of the billions on this planet who aren’t afforded that luxury.
There is a phrase that took root in the American legal subculture a while back: “come to Jesus meeting”. It refers to a meeting where a lawyer explains to their client the realities of their situation with the expectation that presentation of the cold facts and current climate will “recalibrate their expectations” and move them on a new path…normally to settlement and no further wasting of the Court’s time. The Democratic Party would do well to consider having such public meetings with elder statesmen types from both sides of the aisle. The US is best served when both political parties are strong and healthy.
Paradoxically, it’s harder for the Republicans to do that now, since they are winning. Normally requires a hard slap in the face…as has occurred for Democrats.
1. She's one of the least liked candidates in history. The Democrats haven't run a real "change" candidate that could cross the aisles since Obama. Hillary was already widely disliked and sank herself with the "deplorables" comment. Kamala did exactly the same with "Nazis, Fascists, Dictators, White Supremacists, etc". It's all I heard and it came to a point I started feeling attacked exclusively for my race. It was difficult at this point to listen to what little policy she actually had: most of it sounded exactly like the last 4 years. To put the cherry on top she also couldn't even poll well among her own constituents until Biden bowed out and she was decreed the pick by the DNC.
2. The top polling issues were immigration and the economy. Neither issue Kamala really addressed outside of some feel-good statements like free money for homes and somehow passing a price cap on groceries. She made no statement no immigration and even went so far as to say she wouldn't change anything from the last 4 years. Trump on the other hand did very well laser targeting these issues and pulled moderates and even democrats as a "lesser of two evils".
3. The constant bleeting on about felonies, "rapist", etc made it seem to most average Americans that the court cases were simply lawfare designed to punish Americans for not voting for Hillary. Trump in this case was just a sacrificial goat.
4. The weaponization of the FBI against parents protesting school board meetings, the seemingly intense focus on so-called "right wing violence" even after living through the George Floyd riots, etc was distasteful to a lot pro-police Americans.
5. The media is decidedly left-to-far-left leaning. What this means is the majority of major news outlets, Youtube, Twitch, TikTok, Music, Movies, etc all preach "the message". This oversaturation of the progressive message, paired with many moderate Americans thinking progressivism has gone too far, likely contributed to it. Further, it likely contributed to lower Democrat turnout as they were already claiming victory in August.
6. You can't salvage a campaign by having movie and music stars endorse you when the average consumption of this media is at historical lows. You can't salvage a campaign by bringing Obama out as The Closer.
7. And finally for me, the strong "pro-women" policies are distasteful for me. Not because I hate women, but because there's decades of data showing our school system, government, and policies are failing young boys. I cannot in good conscious vote for a candidate who will not do anything to help men's issues at this point. I can't vote for a candidate who wants to enshrine gender-specific constitutional changes. Particularly, evening the playing field for boys in school, removing affirmative action, and instituting an equal "male abortion" rule that will help tip the family courts back to even. If we want equality we should strive for true equality. I want true equality.
You seem to be regurgitating right wing talking points. I think Fox News, right wing talk radio, and right leaning podcasts are the core problem. They get people to focus on a few narrow issues, give them simple rationales and solutions, and just keep harping and getting people to stew about it.
It's weird that you don't realize how many other problems there are which your media sources are not talking to you about, and which you might otherwise find concerning. It's a big world with lots of problems, but you're presented with a few and told that these are the only ones you need to care about. It makes things simpler, but who knows if you might be worried about the wrong things? I guess you may never know.
Just by polling, Kamala Harris seems to be about as popular as Donald Trump, and it really comes down to partisanship.
>Just by polling, Kamala Harris seems to be about as popular as Donald Trump, and it really comes down to partisanship.
Polls historically lean left and many Trump voters are afraid of retribution and do not talk about their vote. I am one of them - to everyone I told them I'm voting for Kamala. Mostly because I don't want my car tires slashed, job lost, or house or family harmed. Then I walked into the polling both and voted R straight down the ticket. The 2020 riots have shown the left is capable of great violence and the mass media shaming people and placing them into buckets of "racist", "sexist", etc will make polls be decidedly wrong. This is once again a demonstration of the total lack of accountability the left has.
>but you're presented with a few and told that these are the only ones you need to care about.
I don't care about the rest of the world. I care only about myself and my family. If this is controversial to you I'm sorry. I have no intention to be a "good global citizen". I have found the idea to be abhorrent. What goes on some far off land I don't need to care about. I don't need to be constantly aware of every nuance of every microcosm of society. If it works for my family and me I vote for it - simple.
> I think Fox News, right wing talk radio, and right leaning podcasts are the core problem
MSNBC, CNN, NYT, TYT (which should've been demonetized like infowars) have been lying to the public for 8 years. Nearly everything they've said hasn't come to pass and it's primarily just Op-Eds disguised as news. "Anonymous sources" once again providing misinformation and incitements of violence that very clearly had a hand in creating the two failed assassination attempts. There is no nuance, at least no more nuance than Fox or NewsMax, and to say so reveals your own hardlined biases.
> And finally for me, the strong "pro-women" policies are distasteful for me.
Women still face rampant discrimination. I get that it doesn't affect you personally, but to take it so far as to be offended is really distasteful to me.
This is the crux of right wing ideology. It's all about "me, me, me". So, when Trump lavishes praise on you and promises you your heart's every dream, how can you resist? It's all about you, right?
> I get that it doesn't affect you personally, but to take it so far as to be offended is really distasteful to me.
When you grow up in a system that taught you from birth that you are a problem, a demon, a "danger", uncontrollable, etc you'd understand. When you've watched men be destroyed by the lop-sided family court system and divorce law, or have no sexual freedom when it comes to whether or not you want a child you'd understand. Masculinity of any flavor is demonized unless it caters specifically to "raising women up". Men occupy the most dangerous jobs, die earlier, and suffer the most in terms of suicide and lack of proper mental health resources, and are forced into a draft because of their gender. Is this equality you can stand for?
I'm offended the left preaches "equality" but doesn't actually believe it. I am personally tired of it. I am tired of feeling like a demon for simply existing. I am tired of having to uphold obligations that formerly had benefits, but now have at best negative benefit. At the very least with the right-wing I know exactly what I'm getting.
This isn't "me, me, me" it's ~50% of the population being actively railroaded literally from kindergarten to death by far left policy swinging the pendulum all the way to the other side of inequality.
> Women still face rampant discrimination
Is that why they are leading men on almost every happiness, work, and school metric? Or are the men suffering because "patriarchy hurts men too" or whatever nonsense they say now. I can tell you "the patriarchy" isn't the reason men are dropping out of society. Not by a long shot.
We have relevant examples of discrimination against men today. Trump voters are vile, white, male, homophobes and sexists. This is the message our boys are hearing. Does it sound appealing to anyone but a consummate masochist? If leftists continue to drive a wedge between the genders the R's will continue to win.
You just gotta laugh at this point. It wasn't even that close so people have spoken. What hopefully we all have learnt from this is that average American is mostly concerned with themselves and how their lives can get better. For others, boo-hoo. Especially with this economy.
And I wish the politics would move towards less vitriol. It's just sad how both parties are so dug in with their opinions. I'm sure there could have been reasonable discussions with regards to eg economy and immigration where the concerns of the large portion of the population had been seriously addressed.
Being practical isn't a fault, in fact one of the things I think Mr Trump got elected. We'll see does it translate to reality but he definitely has ideas.
Politics is not going to move toward less vitriol until the primary source of that vitriol exits the stage... Unfortunately he was just elected to a new four year term.
I worry that these concepts are actually already fleshed out, but having not said anything about them already, he had free rein to implement whatever he wants since no one voted on a campaign promise.
The democrats keep throwing up these lame/hated candidates (Harris this time, Clinton in 2016) whom they appear to assume will prevail, because, Trump.
And so faced with a choice of bad vs bad, the result ends up being quite close and unpredictable. As my daughter says, the first female US president should be someone actually good.
Ita a quirk of democracy, but talking about 'Americans' wanting this, when the result is entirely a coin toss.
And one weighted towards repiblicans by the way their state system works, giving the smaller states a dispropotinate say.
Same thing happens in the UK. A fairly small percentage of the UK voted for Labour and yet it was 'a landslide'. More people voted for Jeremey Corbyn than Kier starmer, but one is apparently 'out of touch' and the less popular politician is somehow a 'genius'.
It's such a bizarre rhetoric that has no basis in reality, just electoral technicalities.
An open mind is one of the most valuable qualities a person can have. For some reason, most people are unable to fake being open minded when discussing politics so it's a good litmus test.
So consider the following perspective. We've endured Trump once, with mediocre results. The world didn't end, and meanwhile he did not accomplish much of what he promised while putting on a clown show. But this time, I'm optimistic about the potential for our country for the first time. Not because of Trump, but because of some of his likely cabinet appointments. Elon Musk in particular.
Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, our government is headed for a debt crisis. Things will get slowly worse (inequality will increase while the government devalues the dollar to service its debt), but eventually, the crisis will come to a head and the government will be unable to service its debts without a massive devaluation ala Argentina, Weimar Republic, etc. We got a small taste of this after the pandemic response.
There is no conceivable way that an ordinary politician from either party could dismantle or even slow the growth of the immense bureaucratic rot bleeding our country dry. Nor can Donald Trump, as evidenced by his failure to "drain the swamp" last time.
But one of the few people who could is likely to get a major government efficiency appointment.
That's what I'm optimistic about. Not Trump, but the fact that he is now surrounded with competent people with good ideas. Prior to him being elected, a true national debt reckoning was inevitable at some point in my lifetime. Now, there is some non-negligible chance of pushing it past my lifetime or reversing it altogether.
Good for them. My Australian application is presently sitting in the queue, and I've already had extensive conversations with a number of lawyers about UK and Dutch immigration.
Yes. The downside is the wealth tax, and it can also be very difficult to socially integrate into a country where English is not the first language. (I can learn Dutch of course, but it would take many years.)
My wife is American. Judging by her progress learning Dutch well enough to be able to speak would take 6 months.
It will take her years because she does duolingo for 5 minutes every day and speaks a bit of Dutch with me.
But given by how her progress goes, I'd say it'd take 6 months if you go intensely about it.
Dutch is close to English in vocab.
And by the wealth tax you mean box 3? I don't know how other countries do it but as we currently have it, I find this way more chill than the US. You don't need to log your trades, you don't need to care about capital gains. You'll roughly pay 1% about your net income.
If you want to avoid that a bit: buy art in your house that's stable (if I recall correctly, I'm not a laywer) and your house is your primary residence. So any money that you put into that doesn't get taxed.
We'll change soon to a capital gains system probably anyway, a few years tops, so this point is probably moot.
Again, I'm not a laywer or financial advisor. I sometimes read up on these things, but I'm not razor sharp on it.
Most of the tax begins at $80k+ and then $110k+ yearly income but not so much wealth from my understanding.
PS; The Dutch government may reverse the negative expat changes, especially regarding the special status for capital gains from outside the country in the coming years. And check out Germany. They may also shortly set up a scheme.
Even Boris Johnson can't hold a candle to the imbecility of Trump. And a parliamentary system generally acts as a better safeguard of sensible governance. UK might not be doing great right now, but I feel tentatively positive about the next 5-10 years.
Plus, as a self-employed business owner, I need health care, and I'm not confident that Obamacare will survive the next administration.
If it's anonymous, we might be surprised. I know a number of HNers personally in my life, and they'd never admit to voting for Trump here or to anyone in their day jobs.
Maybe demonising major fraction of voters is not most effective tactic. Maybe you need to show that you actually did something for people in past term. Maybe you need to show that things that matter for many will get better. Say living conditions or cost of living.
I've been voting in the US since the 1990's. We've never had a presidential candidate that won and actually delivered on their promises, all of which have generally hovered around the idea that "things will be better this time." What makes you think this one will be any different?
Running a primary is like checking in code to the build. You learn a lot of things you cant anticipate, without engaging with the real world.
For elections this includes all the things that people think about a candidate that they don’t feel comfortable saying out loud, or even operate subconsciously.
People claiming economy was better under Trump's first presidency then under Biden / Kamela's recent presidency. E.g. people mentioning super high inflation.
There were other arguments, but it seems to me this is the major one.
Love him or hate him, it will be fascinating to see if the democratic institutions of the United States can endure this. He has made it very clear he wants to dismantle as much as he can, including term limits.
Time will tell if the US really is the greatest democracy and can withstand a wannabe dictator, or if he really can subvert it all. It’s going to be a wild four years, and I fear more wall building.
It's had a good run to date, perhaps even longer than expected.
and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.
~ Benjamin Franklin, Closing Speech at the Constitutional Convention (1787)
So this guy supposedly found a loophole in the Constitution that would facilitate a legal transformation of the US into a dictatorship, and talked to Einstein about it, but the specific loophole/concern has never actually been published?
Sounds like clickbait was already alive and well in the 1940's.
Depression as Gödel did suffer from and developed massive anxiety after the murder of Moritz Schlick, deserves a little more respect and above all help. Calling him "completely mental" doesn't help at all.
USA's clear separation of powers is a liability in this case. In parliamentary system, where executive and legislative branches are not that well separated, if the executive branch misbehave, a simple vote from the parliament can disband the government. In USA, the impeachment process is lengthy and hard to apply.
In a typical British parliamentary system, the executive also has majority in Parliament. If the executive doesn’t have parliament, they lose the executive.
‘Impeachment’ in Parliament systems only works when MPs are willing to think for themselves.
Which they are apparently are, given how many chancellors the UK went through. Thinking for yourself is a lot easier if the guy you're thinking about is removed from power when you've finished your thoughts.
> If the executive doesn’t have parliament, they lose the executive.
Not automatically. A minority government of course more at risk of losing the confidence of parliament but it's also a powerful incentive for such a government that want to survive to use cooperation and compromise with the opposition.
For someone who doesn't follow US politics that closely (yes, we exist), in what way has he made it clear that he wants to dismantle democratic institutions? Any concrete examples?
He tried to lead an insurrection four years ago. Has stated that if elected, you won't have to vote again. Has called for removal of broadcast licenses for the press. Has said he'd be pleased if the press were murdered.
>He tried to lead an insurrection four years ago. Has stated that if elected, you won't have to vote again. Has called for removal of broadcast licenses for the press. Has said he'd be pleased if the press were murdered.
The rhetoric and lies you've repeatedly said about Trump is exactly the reason your party was so soundly rejected in the landslide electoral college, the popular vote, the senate, and the house. Your lies and hoaxes don't work anymore.
The "you won't have to vote again" was clearly him saying that he didn't care if the people vote again, because it won't benefit him.
He didn't say that he'd be pleased if the press was murdered, in those words. Though I agree that what he said was awful.
This is the thing about Trump. He says things that are dumb or incendiary, then his opponents make it sound 100x. Then people who aren't terminally online see it and think, "is that all there is?" and it makes them think that he's not that bad, ignoring the actual bad things he's saying.
This is exactly what Elon was talking about how so many people still believe the multitude of hoaxes which have been thoroughly and objectively disproved. It’s as if people were OK with just going with the original drive-by media headline and never looking into the details or following up.
What he has actually been mroe explicit about wanting to dismantle (and what his faction has made considerable progress dismantling in his favor already) is not as much “democratic institutions” as “the rule of law”, though his most dramatic failed attempt to dismantle that was also directed at democratic institutions (the set of schemes including the false electors gambit, attempte to get the VP to reject proper electoral votes, and instigating the mob attack on the capitol when it was clear the VP would not do so.)
Those are only the crimes that have been committed and charged so far. Asking for and being granted immunity, retroactively, is pretty undemocratic. There are more crimes on their way.
In 2020, he told his then vice president Mike Pence not to certify the electoral vote count which gave Joe Biden the victory in the presidential race. Pence ignored this order. Had he not done so, it would have meant a constitutional crisis at the very least.
He could try to do something like Putin and extend the limit of 2 terms (just to keep America Great a bit more)and later declare himself dictator for life like Xi Jinping. You could look at Hitler as example how to become absolute dictator.
“
news is that at the end of 6 years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House (do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT), both of these horrible papers will quickly go out of business & be forever gone!
On the positive side, Americans are nowhere near as politically apathetic as Russians are, nor have they grown up under a single-party rule their whole loves, as the Chinese have.
Not saying that this won't stop MAGA from trying - but at least there's a cultural element to this, that will stop the American people from just folding over and accepting dictatorship.
And they'll do ... what? Keep watching football, scroll their phones? Pick up a burrito at Chipotle? The new Russian model of disaffection can (and is) working just fine in the US.
None really. He’s pissed about his court cases and wants to investigate or appoint new judges. People that believe in the dictator narrative don’t appreciate the limits of the Executive branch.
Every executive order can get erased wholesale by the next President, and Trump only has 4 years.
I don’t know, I guess? If you want to, you can hold just about any president under some criminal wrong doing. For whatever reason (certainly not political) we really needed to go after his overvaluing of real estate, and asking of recounts in a close election (why would he ever think a recount is worth it, it’s not like he could win the popular vote and all swing states). In retrospect, one could actually now make the argument that his hunch was right in questioning such a narrow election with an unprecedented voting pattern (Covid era mail in, it was quite new). I do sit here in awe and find myself saying “hmm, maybe he did have 25,000 votes somewhere this whole time, sure as hell found them tonight”. Makes you wonder.
He’s gonna do his tit for tat because he’s a simple man, not a great one, and certainly not an epic dictator.
I’m not defending him, I just think the grand dictator spin has always been nutty.
The things he says he wants to dismantle are bloated executive-branch bureaucracies. If he actually manages to do it (which he didn't during his first term), it would be traumatic for a lot of federal employees, but not exactly the death of democracy.
If he removed licenses from media companies that were critical of him, there would be approximately 0 media companies, and yet he's on track to win. One of the biggest takeaways from this election is that the populace largely doesn't trust the media.
Nobody cares about the free press, their content is, for the most part, garbage.
I think this election has signalled the death of the mainstream media, and the rise of independent media.
I find this absolutely wonderful.
Perhaps a sanity check at those media companies would help. They've been broadcasting propaganda non-stop and you've witnessed a colony collapse just today.
False. Did you see what CBS did to the Harris interview? That behavior is explicitly what he was talking about. CBS edited an interview under the guise of their news department to switch answers to questions with other answers. It wasn’t that CBS was critical of Trump, it’s that they engaged in outright fraud using publicly licensed airwaves. That’s against FCC rules. What CBS did wasn’t disinformation — it was fraud.
Your link entirely agrees with the statement that Trump disbanded the pandemic response team. What it calls false is that the members were fired from government completely instead of shuffled around into other non pandemic related departments.
So yes, that one. Did you actually read your link? Or did you get duped by the headline?
> Based on our research, the claim that President Trump fired the "entire" pandemic response team is PARTLY FALSE. The Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense was disbanded under Trump's then-national security adviser John Bolton. But Trump didn't fire its members. Some resigned, and others moved to different units on the National Security Council.
Did you read it? It clearly says the team was far too big, and that even members of Obama's team felt it was too large, so Trump shrunk and reorganized it.
@mbg721, you seem to be willfully ignorant of anything this man has said and the dangers everyone is talking about. You seem to be completely missing any ideas on his policy and the changes he wants to being to the government and the democratic process.
Please stop commenting "Where?", "What?", "How?" to everyone in the comments here. They do not add any value to the conversation.
I don't see any clear articulation of the dangers, other than that he's a convicted criminal, which I argue is for purely political reasons. Republican candidates have been labeled "HITLER 2" since Goldwater. I'm not cheerleading, but rather am trying to make policy arguments that add as much value as possible.
Can you explain why his conviction is relevant? As it stands, the facts are that it was for hush-money paid to Stormy Daniels, but it's clearly viewed as political by voters. I would agree that it was a grave matter if his felony were an unrelated murder or something, but that's not the situation, and again, voters are not stupid.
According to Snopes[0] he claims he was urging Christians specifically (who don't usually vote in high numbers) to vote "just this time", then they wouldn't have to vote anymore for four more years, or something (which they wouldn't anyway...)
He was definitely addressing Christians (he repeats it several times) but at the end of the video he says "[...] we'll have it fixed so good you're not gonna have to vote", which does sound a bit suspect to me, even in context and taking into account the fact that he's often loose with his choice of words and phrasing.
Classic example of how the media and the uninformed combine to take him out of context / in bad faith.
The absolutely true fact is that that statement had nothing, even so much as a hint of a dog whistle, to do with that you’re saying. Like not even a shred.
He was speaking to a populace that doesn’t typically vote. So he’s saying that they can just vote this one election, because it’s important for them to for their own good. Then, he’s saying “just this once” because, again, they typically don’t vote. And again - after that he says “I’ll fix it so good you won’t have to again” - this is in reference to him fixing the government so well that they won’t need to vote again since it will be so well-functioning.
By the way, this was my take originally, on first listen. It was reinforced further my listening to it again. It’s completely clearly the true take, and I think if you have trouble accepting that it’s because you’re disturbingly mislead by bias, probably not your own fault entirely, but undeniably so.
I agree that he probably wasn't talking about getting rid of voting altogether, but I'm still not sure on the logic of him getting the government into such good shape that Christians wouldn't need to vote anymore -- surely it would still be possible for the populace to vote in a terrible government that would undo all his improvements after his 4 years? But yeah, I suppose he could simply be saying that with his improvements, things would be stabilised and the stakes wouldn't be so high for the next election.
How does him addressing it to Christians makes anything better? Like, yes, hardcore Christians are his fans, because they want to get rid of abortions, liberals and generally resent anyone but themselves.
The fact that Christians generally don't like to vote (which I wasn't aware of until just now) is relevant to the question of why he said "we'll fix it so good, you won't have to vote".
Christians do vote and see voting as a way to push for the legal restrictions they want. Them not having to vote anymore, because the rest of us cant get abortion, anticonception whatever else allowed through political process anymore is literally definition of "going away with democracy".
Which is actual political goal of radical evangelical christians, if you actually read what they write and listen what they say. It is not about them being allowed to be lazy, it is about them successfully creating religious state.
He literally said that. He said that if he wins, these are the last elections. He said that he wants to remove license to media that are critical of him. Trump said quite a lot. All it takes is to listen to what he is saying.
And the other thing to listen to what his primary voters - conservative evangelical Christians were saying they want for years. It is literally ridiculous how these people are saying exactly what they want, then they literally do what they said they will do, again and again. But somehow, I am supposed to assume they don't mean it, this time for a change.
I think when they say USA is the greatest democracy they re speaking of its size, land size.
It's always been a kind of mix between an oligarchy and democracy, just look at the 2 party voting system, extreme wealth required to candidate and the lobbies expenditures.
That's very close to the antiquity democracy, they just need to remove woman right to vote (next one after abortion).
At least with trump we will have a good laugh once again.
"and I fear more wall building." - more wall building was instigated under Biden, this is practical reality rearing it's head not the political left/right.
I'm going to share a tweet with you that is not my own tweet but one that more than 200k people have upvoted. If you want to see a list of topics that motivated Trump re-election: https://twitter.com/wildbarestepf/status/1854026810331365823
Those are a certainly list of ideas which right wingers have about the left. There's probably not much we can do about people who believe that stuff. They need to have a punching bag.
My main issue with right wingers is the derision, mockery, and anger which they direct at their political opponents. People talk about division in the country. I think that's by design. Right wingers have been doing this since the days when Paul Harvey was on the radio, and then later on Rush Limbaugh.
It's extremely gross that I already see Democrats blaming the fact that Harris was a woman. They're going to play that card rather than admit that their message and agenda is falling flat. Trump should not be hard to beat. He has never been broadly popular. Democrats keep losing to him because they refuse to listen to anyone but their own echo chamber. They lost in 2016 and almost in 2020 and learned nothing.
Speaking of... this has firmly convinced me that deplatforming is the wrong answer. All it has done is create echo chambers. All I see is Democrats scratching their heads and blaming and fuming because they can't possibly understand why they lost. That's because they hang out in places like this or /r/politics and they've all moved to coastal cities with left-leaning political environments. If Harris had won in a landslide you'd see the exact same thing on the other side because they, too, are in echo chambers.
I did get one thing I was hoping for: a clear result. I was hoping whichever way it went it would be unambiguous to avoid a bunch of conspiracy theories and fighting.
Edit: one more takeaway: the traditional media is dead. Toast. They had no idea what was happening and all their takes are basically empty hand waving. They're absolutely clueless and out of touch and no longer have any influence.
Trump is transactional. He'll do something for you if you don't something for him. Want an abortion law nationally? Give him corporate tax cuts. Want to fund Ukraine? Give him more deregulation. He's got no political principles. He's anyone's if the price is right. 8 more years of Trump then
I'm a single issue voter: 1A, and I voted for Trump. You left label so many things you disagree with as misinformation and hate speech and racism, to the point that the Robert Reich wrote on The Guardian to call for the arrest of Elon Musk and I quote: "Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.". Yet, you left never define what misinformation is and specify who the arbiter is. Tim Walz had the audacity to say that “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy". You left aren't angry at Elon Musk because he censored the left, but because he allowed people who disagreed with you to speak. The list can go on. You guys attacked Trump supporters so hard that so many people were not willing to acknowledge that they supported Trump, especially in a blue city. That's just wrong.
On the other hand, the left media created hoax after hoax that are thoroughly debunked by the left-leaning fact checkers like Snopes. Obama still used the Fine People[1] hoax on national TV last week. The DA in NY charged Trump for "In July 2020, the Trump Organization received an appraisal with a value of
$84.5 million, but on the 2020 Statement the Trump Organization valued Trump Park
Avenue at $135.8 million."[2] But isn't that what practically every home seller does? We estimate how much our properties are worth, and the band sends out an appraiser? To me, that's just blatant law fare.
For all I know, only evil states like Soviet Union and China (before 1978, at least) used morality, misinformation, and identity politics to control their people. Such states deserve a big middle finger up their you know what.
Trump may not have deserved to win, but the Democrats deserved to lose - and I'm relieved they did.
Maybe after this rematch the blue team will finally understand the loss was their fault, so they can start moving away from the abominable ideology and spiteful elitism that handed them this result.
This European travels to the US all the time, having probably spent an average of 1-2 months or so there yearly over the past couple years.
With very few exceptions I've never met people there who outwardly seemed like they'd like someone as a leader who habitually lies and tries to usurp democratic institutions for personal gain.
What the hell is going on there guys? Are you just voting for the person who promises the most "interesting" times, for better or for worse?
> What the hell is going on there guys? Are you just voting for the person who promises the most "interesting" times, for better or for worse?
I think the name-calling really hurt them.
Calling half the voting population bigots of some type just makes that half dig their heels in to give you a bloody nose.
If your main priorities, when running in a political race, does not match the main priorities of the voting masses, it's easier to change your main priorities than to change the main priorities of the voting masses.
For a long time now, the Dems have been trying to change the priorities of the voting masses instead of aligning with them.
They are so used to preaching at their voter base ("This is what a real man is, not what you think it is") that they forgot what the aim of running is - to win.
> Good on the Dems for trying to change the world instead of accepting the hateful and unfair place it is.
You can't change the world by losing.
Their primary goal should have been to win. The primary way to do that is to (ugh) pander to the voters' will.
It's because they are so out of touch that we are seeing the result that we see. Politicians that are disconnected and disengaged from the voting masses deserve to lose.
Dictator on day one in the land of the free with the biggest military of the world — but on the other hand the libs were really mad, so that was worth it, right?
No, they get a vote, obviously. You've focussed on the vote part of the quote when the important information was in the racism. It's racism that must be constantly pointed out, that people must be educated about, and racism should be rooted out when found. I'm not saying you support racism in any way, of course, I really don't think that. I just think you misunderstood what needs doing to prevent these unforced errors (Brexit was an unforced error of the UK government).
> It's racism that must be constantly pointed out, that people must be educated about, and racism should be rooted out when found.
As I pointed out in a different post, trying to shame people into silence doesn't magically change their vote.
Unfortunately, when you are going to call every Rep supporter a racist with no evidence other than who they voted for, they are going to stop answering your polls honestly.
Racists don't need shaming into silence. They need to understand what's wrong with their beliefs.
Going back to the original quote, you need to see that it's not calling all voters a particular thing. There's a simple Venn diagram, one circle of racists inside a larger circle of a particular block of voters.
Educating people out of racism, and removing racism from your society, will change votes as racism is only one aspect of a person's beliefs.
> Racists don't need shaming into silence. They need to understand what's wrong with their beliefs.
They already know, they don't care, because that specific belief is not rooted in reason or rationality.
> Going back to the original quote, you need to see that it's not calling all voters a particular thing. There's a simple Venn diagram, one circle of racists inside a larger circle of a particular block of voters.
> Educating people out of racism, and removing racism from your society, will change votes as racism is only one aspect of a person's beliefs.
I somewhat agree with the first part[1], but vehemently disagree with the second: I don't think that eradicating racist thoughts will move the needle on who gets elected, as there are, IMO, simply too few racists around to influence an election.[2]
[1] IOW, I don't believe that education will change a racist's belief, but I do see value to society in eradicating discriminatory stereotypes and discriminatory actions, of which racism is merely one.
[2] There aren't even enough racists to form a party of their own, so I doubt that them moving from red to blue is going to be any difference from statistical noise.
I've also spent plenty of time there over the years, and while most people I interacted with did seem perfectly fine, there were glimpses of something quite wrong.
A woman who worked at the hotel I was staying at had never visited the centre of the city the lived in, because she was afraid of being "knifed". This was Dayton, Ohio. Downtown Dayton is lovely.
A colleague who appeared reasonably intelligent and competent absolutely did not believe that Evolution occurred. I explained that this while this view might be common in the US - and it is - the rest of the world mostly considers this settled science.
Religion is absolutely far too influential a force in people's lives. This is decreasing, but it's still problematic I believe.
The Armed Forces are idolised. Airports have special lines for service personnel. You get to board early if you're in uniform. This is almost unique in the world, to the best of my knowledge.
He's promising reindustrialisation to a bunch of the Midwest and less competition for jobs to a bunch of poorer people. It's sort of rational, even though I disagree.
He is not trustworthy with either facts or consistent opinions, so voting for him for something he's /said/ he would do is the stupidest thing anyone could do.
No, of course not. But my sample seems to be so starkly different from the election results that that in itself is puzzling. He's picking up a sizable fraction of the votes even in blue states, after all.
I think the ultimate answer as an American is that policy simply does not matter. For reference, here's a couple conflicting data points:
* Voters approved measures that would protect abortion in their state (with the exception of Florida, which only got 58% out of the 60%) needed. Said voters did not consistently vote for Kamala Harris.
* Another set of voters thought Kamala Harris was too progressive, and had no opinion on Donald Trump
* But at the same time, in local elections democratic candidates generally sweeped the ballots
I think ultimately the presidency is just an election purely on the basis of 'vibes' and whatever is directly in front of you. It doesn't matter if you can achieve your promises nor do said promises even really matter. And people vibe more with the reality TV president because they've already forgotten 2016-2020. Maybe Trump directly crashing the economy will be the thing to snap people out of it, maybe not.
You're not meeting the people hurt really bad by the system who stopped giving a shit, and a lot of people that vote for Trump had Harris/Waltz signs on their lawns but really want to pay less in taxes and don't like transgender people.
> I think that this election almost definitively demonstrates that trans issues are not important to the voters.
I don't know about the politics of your state, but in mine over half the ad campaign of the Republican senator who just won was focused on transgender issues. His losing Democratic opponent did not touch that issue.
> Or abortion
Statewide ballot measures aimed at abortion rights succeeded even in many states where Democrats lost.
No, just a massive failure by the Democrats who decided too late to run Harris. Any candidate who won a party primary would have beaten Trump today. Harris lost because she wasn't popular enough with her own party's voters to win.
Trump will be older and weaker than Biden today in 2028.
JD Vance hopefully can 25th Amendment the Trump before senile behavior wrecks the office. But I'm worried that Trump stays in all 4 years and does irreparable harm.
25th Amendment powers have never been used before. So it's not clear how far Trump will degrade while still holding onto power.
Sadly, it is time for the EU to develop its own coordinated army. I think in the long term it will be better if we are able to have our own geopolitical interests, instead of having to follow the USA in everything because they are our bodyguard.
I don't agree it was reasonable that Ukraine couldn't strike airbases when it had the chance. Meanwhile it's Russia that is escalating: targeting civilians on a mass and individual scale, torturing and murdering POWs, using gas. They know there will only be condemnation and hand-wringing but no action.
That this kind of rhetoric completely devoid of historical knowledge and common sense is so widespread tells me so many people have a completely broken model of Putin's motivations. Unfortunately it is these same people that are pushing hard for escalation. It's strange to see people's opinions be so completely disconnected from reality while also being correlated to such a high degree.
No, the fact that Russia didn't use nukes in response to Kursk incursion says nothing about his willingness to use nukes when the security of the state is actually at risk. Nuclear weapons will change the complexion of this war in ways that neither side can fully predict. It is rational to avoid moving the war to an unpredictable stage when the current stage is manageable in your favor. Not every border skirmish is created equal. They do not all rationally warrant the use of nuclear weapons.
It is not even as embarrassing as some people think.
Ukraine send well trained troops there while they were needed in the east. Now they are loosing the ground there but cant really pull out. While loosing trained soldiers as well.
Blowing some shit up in the grey zone (or even Kursk) is one thing - his state hasn’t been threatened in any real way (which is their nuke threshold policy).
However, lobbing western made (and make no mistake, western operated) weapons into their internationally recognized territory is an entirely different ballgame.
That’s a typical drive-by headline. Did you even read the article? Or the first hand sources? Putin never once threatened using nukes out of the blue like some kind of madman - only reinstated their pretty bog standard nuclear defense policy when asked about it. Context is important, don’t be an idiot.
> The EU will most likely move towards developing a nuclear force of their own (as opposed to France only (the UK no longer being a member of the EU)).
The EU has no army. NATO (which UK is part of) is still in effect and it is not going to change.
Trump has pushed to extricate the US from NATO, and as De Niro said in Ronin; "if there's doubt then there is no doubt".
If you want security can you really rely on someone who may or may not have your back, especially if they have a policy of transactionalism?
So, the EU needs to look to their own security, and the ultimate deterrence is nuclear weapons. And if the EU doesn't take up the mantle then the Poles will definitely do it, and probably Sweden, and possibly Finland / Germany. And so the EU needs to figure out if they are happy with a fragmented nuclear policy or not.
Russia denied there was going to be an invasion of Ukraine even the day before it started.
In 2014, nothing was going to threaten the UK's membership of the EU.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall was going to stay put for another 50-100 years.
In 1938, the UK Prime Minister waved paper promising peace in our time.
Nobody saw the Great Depression coming in January 1929.
The mesh of treaties including the Triple Entente was supposed to prevent WW1.
The southern states were convinced they had both legal right to secede and the economic support and military power that the north wouldn't try to keep them.
The British were convinced that democracy was a stupid idea and that the 13 colonies would come crawling back when they realised they needed some proper aristocrats to govern.
The world doesn't much care about things like this, pro or con.
He is not attacking them directly though, UK is pretty internally focused and won't really do much if the Ukraine operations expand and include to say other former soviet block countries.
In mainland Europe, France with La-Penne and Germany with AfD and now Sarah Wagenknecht[1] have far-right problems of their own and don't have political will for anti Russia stance so they won't be able do much either, rest of Europe are minor players or far-right governments like in Hungary under Orbàn.
[1] I refuse to call her party far left, now matter how she is described in media.
I guess that's the best case scenario right now. The worst case scenario is Trump pulling out of NATO completely, and (effectively or officially) allying with Russia.
I really hope I'm just not seeing all the pieces, and that such option is not even remotely viable, but it would be bad.
I'm quite sure the US will see a military coup, in the event that Trump tries to ally with Russia and become enemies with NATO countries. I mean, I don't think it is possible for Trump to pull out of NATO. Worst case is he simply decides to shut off all funding.
Politicians are short term, military officers are life-long and ideological.
The world's real problems are the climate crisis and global instability and inequality which lead to mass migration. I haven't really heard anything convincing from Trump on how he plans to tackle these (I don't mean the migration itself, but how the reasons for it might be eliminated).
> global instability and inequality which lead to mass migration
I'm not risking much by saying that the world was never as equal or stable. People migrate more now because they can (thanks to tech advances and permissive politics). Before, it was an order of magnitude harder.
I know globalization is inevitable. Where people disagree is on the rate of change: let's speed it up (progressives) or slow it down (conservatives). The average people - the ones who are paying the bill - want to slow it down. Let's just accept it.
To be clear, from American perspective - surely. I'm not saying that in a positive manner or negative, just as a statement of fact. Ultimately besides aliances USA has no real need to care about Europe.
And from a local perspective - a grumpy neighbour that helped kickstart World War II, that enslaved my entire region for ages and raped their way through.
The real enemy is trying to trespass your frontiers with Belarus. That's where we (Polish or Europeans like me) should focus. Platforma is a step in the wrong direction. The rest is just a distraction; fear makes the wolf bigger than it really is.
As an example of how pushing a message too hard can have the opposite effect: In "The Last of Us" (the series, I haven't played the game) the bad people are white (and are especially bad if they are also Christian), while the good people are generally some combination of black, homosexual, and "neurodivergent". Three of the four groups we meet are led by women. The two good ones are led by black women. The only group doing well is a communist commune. When I feel like I am being manipulated I not only discard the message, but actively rebel against it.
Donald Trump disgusts me, but it feels to me like he at least authentically represents a viewpoint.
The racial composition of characters in The Last of Us series is the same as it was in the game, released in 2013 before identity politics was even on the zeitgeist.
I say this as a straight non-religious white man who is disgusted by Trump and the fact that people support him.
Making the main character and his brother hispanic is not "the same" as the game, especially when the remaining straight white non-hispanic men in the show are absolutely awful.
Or take the US version of The Office, where the one Christian character is a running joke, an awful person with terrible takes not meant to be taken at all seriously. Can you imagine how it would've gone over if the one black or hispanic character on the show was just a running joke?
My take (not that anyone will even see it, in a sea of 5000 comments):
Democrats were the party of the little guy - the minority, the immigrant, the working class. That worked pretty well for them.
Democrats were in support of civil rights. That was the right thing to do, even though there was plenty of opposition. It cost them the south for at least a generation. They knew it would, and they did it anyway. Good for them.
Then they saw abortion as the next "civil rights" issue. They keep framing it that way: "a woman's right over her own body". The problem is, the people who oppose abortion rights don't hear anything in that but an attempt to hide the issue. A fetus is not the woman's body - it's a genetically distinct individual, and anybody who's taken junior high biology knows it. The issue isn't about the woman's right over her body, it's about the woman's right over the fetus. And all the "a woman's right over her body" talk, to opponents, looks like an attempt to sweep that under the rug and ignore it. "But they want to control our bodies!" No, most of them don't. They want you to not kill the fetuses. It has the same result, but a different motivation.
The Democrats have always been in favor of immigrants. They became the party in favor of illegal immigrants. But immigration hurts the working class, which the Democrats also claim to represent.
Lately the Democrats have become focused on gay rights and trans rights. Look, trans people shouldn't be beaten up and killed for being trans. No question. But here's the problem: There are a large number of working-class people who at best don't care about trans people, and at worst are actively hostile. There are a large number who oppose abortion on moral grounds, holding the life of the fetus as a higher priority than the woman's body. Now, if you're the Democratic Party, what do you do?
What the Democrats did is decide that such working-class people were moral lepers, and demand that they convert or face cultural extinction. This has been going on for a couple of decades. "Clinging to guns and religion". "Deplorables". "Garbage". The Democratic Party really despises such people, and it keeps coming out.
Well, it turns out that despising the people who are a big chunk of your voting base, and demanding that they convert, doesn't make them feel like you're their party. Talking down to them doesn't make them vote for you. It just makes them feel that you've abandoned them. And you have.
And it makes them angry. And here's Trump, harvesting their anger.
The Democratic Party has always had difficulty with holding the different elements of their coalition together. What they've done lately is assume they could ignore one of their largest ones, that it would always support them no matter how much they despised it and insulted it.
If your reaction is to deplore how horrible the majority of voters are, you're still not listening. If you want to win elections, you'd better start listening. There are people out there, people that you claim to represent their interests, and you're despising them instead of listening.
> What they've done lately is assume they could ignore one of their largest ones, that it would always support them no matter how much they despised it and insulted it.
It’s absolutely insane to me that someone that literally incited their followers to storm the capitol, has been charged with so many counts of fuck knows what, and has (somehow) survived multiple assassination attempts can come back to win the presidency.
No kidding, I was saying to my partner earlier how friggin crazy the timeline is getting. That 15 years ago, I couldn't have even imagined writing a fictional timeline like this.
The most striking aspect to me is how blatent and brazen trump is with his lies, how fake he is, and how so many can't see it or just don't care for some reason.
He pretends to be religious of all things, he so obviously isn't and couldn't give a damn, but pious people of all people should care about honesty and respect, at least in the public sphere.
Just the day before the election a family member asked how anyone could possibly vote for Trump. I started going into the history of the primaries, and the fraud with Bernie in 2016 & 2020. How it's not red vs blue, it's really insiders vs outsiders. Within 30 seconds I was shouted down and shamed.
I then asked: "I can name 10 good things about Biden / Harris, can you do the same for Trump?" They couldn't say 1 positive reason that the ~ 75million voters are supporting Trump.
It's a good self-test of your bubble. Could you make a sound argument in favor of the opponent? If not, then you haven't spent enough time trying to understand the context.
A lot of people have a broken bullshit detector. They think they can tell when someone is lying, but they rely on the other person having a guilty conscience. Trump doesn't have a guilty conscience.
If a person were to read the newspaper, they would figure out that Trump is a pathological liar, but most don't read a newspaper, and even among those that do, a lot of people read for confirmation rather than for understanding.
A lot of people get their information from Fox News, right wing radio, or right wing leaning podcasts. These information sources direct your focus to things which will make you angry about the things they want you to be angry about, and ignorant of things which maybe you should care about.
The most important things which we can all do is to take back control of our own focus and maintain our sense of curiosity and a dash of healthy skepticism. Ask why someone is trying to get you to focus on this or that. Ask why they never mention these other issues which may be equally or more important. Question your own biases and assumptions from time to time.
Never mentioning his abnormally pacifist record which is more important?
Because he's nothing of the sort. He's an isolationist (more or less), which is a stance designed to look like pacifism but in fact is very different, and has all kinds of negative side effects, one of which is that it ultimately leads to war. See also:
> and never mentioning his abnormally pacifist record which is more important?
If Trump's brand of pacifism means negotiating with Russian terrorism, then it's not peace but the cuckolding of a nation and millions of people that lived through a period in time when the Soviets were actually a superpower. Peace when Russia is down and begging for violence would be an imbecile's decision.
Are we supposed to sincerely acquiesce to the demands of a humiliated nation that turned a "special military operation" into a blood feud with hundreds of thousands of casualties?
As an American living in Europe, it is fun to see the filter bubble Europeans live in with regards to how the US is framed in the media here and even in common coversation. I was talking to my French buddy about it and we were comparing our filter bubbles. Please realize that there is a filter bubble that all of us live in.
I consume a lot of American social media as a European, what about his comment was wrong?
Fox News, Twitter, Facebook etc have really done a number on the US (and the rest of the world to some extent). The lack of regulation of these companies have brought us to the Post-Truth world we're living in now.
I'm not a Trump fan but the immigration situation was getting a bit out of hand. It was a bit do you want the US to be the US you knew or have the whole of south and central America move in.
Sure, The Dark Lord is evil, but did you notice how the
Mayor of Michel Delving failed to do anything about that rabbit plague that decimated the Longbottom tobacco harvest two years ago?
The Mayor of Michel Delving flat out refused to help the tobacco growers of Longbottom, letting the rabbits have their way. The Dark Lord will surely treat them better! Or at least kind of ignore them. Or, well, he does seem supportive of the rabid rabbit leader, but just as often as not he's just incoherent on the topic of the plight of the Longbottom tobacco growers, and I'll take that as a good sign!
Do not know who that guy is, just googled and found out he was Biden's buddy hence irrelevant and it does not change my opinion of they supported genocide enablers.
Leaving policies aside, on purely moral standards, it seems hard to "both sides" this.
The people that attempt this were incredibly bad faith i.e. for example equating Hillary's "[Trump] knows he’s an illegitimate president" which is calling out shady voter suppression tactics and the fact that Trump did not win the popular vote with the staunch denial of the 2020 election result by Trump to this day and the organisation of a (failed) plot to remain in power.
These situations aren't really comparable. Clinton questioned procedural issues and the popular vote outcome, while Trump's actions following the 2020 election (including his continued denial of results and attempts to overturn them) represent an unprecedented challenge to American democratic institutions. It's deeply concerning how many people continue to accept claims that have been thoroughly debunked by election officials, courts, and independent observers. This erosion of trust in democratic processes and willingness to embrace demonstrably false narratives suggests a troubling shift in American political culture. It's a fallen nation.
Can you give a brief comparison of the different views? I’m European and watch/read a lot of US news sources from both sides and still think “European” about Trump.
You’re missing the political viewpoint of 45% of the country if you’re not main-lining right-wing radio and Fox News. No, stop—don’t google what they just said, imagine you just believe it and see where that takes you.
[edit] if you want root-cause for how we got here, look into media ownership laws in the US, and into the Citizens United court case (check out the 5-4 podcast for a fun/horrifying take). Single entities can own unlimited reach of media, which didn’t used to be the case, as recently as the very early 2000s IIRC, and Citizens opened up unlimited corporate spending in elections, with exactly the implications you’d expect for e.g. foreign spending on US elections. Er, I mean, the actual root cause is kinda the system of elections the slave states pushed into the constitution, if you wanna go way back, but the proximate cause of the current political landscape is that.
Note: Running out the door, here is a brief summary that hasn't been deeply considered.
======
Example: I casually commented at the gym that I thought Trump would win about a week ago and went into a very long conversation/debate with several people in the gym.
I asked each of them to show me their filter bubbles... once I had explained it to them. 2 Spaniards, 2 Andorran, 1 French guy. The general consensus seemed to be that Trump was a major step back socially and would pollute the environment, not care about climate change, etc.
Their information came from traditional news, Instagram/Tiktok and one from Reddit/HN/X. The only one that was even open to hearing my views during the conversation was the guy who read Reddit/HN/X. Everyone else had their minds made up.
Today at the gym, I had the 2nd part of this conversation with 3 of the guys that were there this morning. The general take away that the guy who read Reddit/HN/X summed up is one of: "Europe has yet to reach "peak tolerance" where it appears the US is already there." This realization was came to due to the issues of immigrants in both Spain/France who don't assimilate which was a hot button issue for them.
I kinda agree with this sentiment. I think that Europe (at least the part I'm in) doesn't seem to have a great immune system for people who abuse the system and generally punishes tall poppies both socially and economically. The US is completely different, tall poppies are celebrated and if you fail or get sick you have no safety net.
For me the difference in world views is best summed up by what people are focusing on. Climate, equality, and tolerance are the key issues I see pushed heavily in Europe... I see this as stemming from the "tall poppy" syndrome that is prevalent in both Spain/France. In the US, people care about other things and are generally focused on things that directly impact them. That is what this election was about. Less focus on perceived injustices or injustices of the past and more focus on making the future better with something different.
Is Europe a great place? For sure... but it has wildly different problems and world views than the US does. I think it is hard to appreciate that until you've bene immersed in both cultures long enough.
In general, I'd just say there is more nuance to everything than our brains can handle. My little mission has been to try and bring back nuance into the conversation. Black and white thinking is lazy. Nuance exists, find it and challenge your filter bubble.
I'm excited to see how this casual gym conversation continues.
I'm Italian and the views I have here (left/center left/center friends/relatives) is that he's a crazy nut job that's gonna hurt europe as well as limiting abortion rights and similar things. I'd say there's not much talk about economy because we don't understand shit in our own economy either, let alone a foreign one... Except that we think the rich are gonna get much richer and he's gonna cut social spending (ie, less Healthcare and similar things) and he's gonna crackdown on immigration. Not expressing our own views on it, that's just what i think it's talked about Trump here
Oh, he's also a misogynistic, convicted felon that spews lies. This is partially our view in my bubble, if I had to say it entirely I would get flagged lol
Yet no-one will ever admit they regret voting for him. They’ll blame everyone else including themselves, but will never criticize their leader. The parallels with religion are frightening.
The parallels with fascism are frightening. We're 8 years down a path of followers being endeared with trumpet, hard to walk that back now and admit mistake.
What you're talking about is already happening. Every fourth or fifth comment in this thread is already blaming the left for making the right what it is.
That’s why religious leaders came up with the concept of a devil. So they can always say someone else is responsible for when their god seems to fall short.
I hope EU really steps up, because its looking like the start of WWIII, where the EU will have to defend its border.
We all know Putin is not interested in stopping where he is.
I've seen some articles about Trump admin Minsk III and that he'll threaten Putin with blah blah if he doesnt sign up. Its a long shot but we'll see.
I want the EU to really take this seriously. Ramp up arms manufacturing to supply Ukraine will send a message that Ukraine will keep fighting until Russia implodes.
I'm Polish and I'm mega worried about it too. If Trump decides to pull US support for Ukraine and be best buddies with Putin I don't think it's crazy to imagine Poland getting pulled into the conflict within couple years, which depending on how things go could mean the involvement of all of NATO.
Ironically a lot of the American Right was actually radicalized by the 2015/2016 Syrian refugee crisis in Europe.
Tim Pool went from being an #OccupyWallStreet Berniebro to one of the biggest US conservative commentators after he saw brown people in Sweden. The Ron Paul crowd (who pretended to be "socially liberal & fiscally conservative") posted borderline "white genocide" conspiracy theories about what was happening in Europe.
Brown people in Sweden is "an invasion".
Russia invading Ukraine is merely "self-defense against NATO enlargement".
Don't let them pretend they are just isolationists. They explicitly support Russia because of the "white christian" racial identity politics they actually align with.
Poorer and poorer? Hard fact is that Trump presidency delivered actual (i.e. inflation adjusted) wage growth for people in many years, so your perception of reality might not be accurate as what media propagates and makes people believe. As for "women's rights," I take it as abortion policy in particular, which compared to your baseline of Europe is actually not that far off, depending on the state/country used as a point of comparison. There is a reason a majority of people vote for him.
I can see how Europeans are particularly put off by President Trump. His trade and NATO policy requires Europe to uphold their end of the bargain, right or wrong, as he sees it, and increase trade with their US ally, which is not necessarily what Europeans or globalists want.
If your idea of Trump was formed from reading mainstream media, you likely have a very distorted idea of who he is. The amount of misinformation around him is next level.
As a European I'm glad that Trump was elected, despite his personality flaws.
Biden was openly hostile toward my home country (the UK), and was a dead end when it came to negotiating the free trade deal we should be aiming for now we're free of the EU.
Trump, and the Republicans have more love for the UK than the Dems have shown, although this isn't reciprocated by the current UK regime, which allegedly attempted to meddle in the US election https://theconversation.com/what-us-election-interference-la...
At the end of the day I want to see a strong and safe USA, because the US is our #1 ally. The markets have responded very well to the Trump victory, and I believe that the world was a more stable and safer place under Trump than it was under Biden. If Trump can complete his Abraham Accords he will be remembered as a remarkable peacemaker in the Middle East.
I suspect most people haven't even heard of the Abraham Accords, because the mainstream media is so weaponised against Trump.
The parliamentary systems in Europe are appalling and ensure "status quo" of elites.
After watching it enough at play, you understand.
There's absolutely a sovereignty problem with the EU, which is not necessarily fixed by getting out because the lobbyists can pay the politicians no matter what.
I'm watching it for 25 years now, I'd dare say understand it well.
And yes, the EU has a sovereignty problem. However, that is by design, as the member states wish to keep control. It's certainly not my preference, but with the current political climate it won't change.
Do you notice how nobody in America cares who the leaders in Europe are? Because it doesn’t matter. Which should tell you that you guys are bad at picking leaders.
In well functioning democracy the government policy shouldn't flipflop constantly and president shouldn't have enough power to break everything.
In Europe, president's power is much more limited, there are more political parties and one party winning elections doesn't immediately change the country's policy to everything, even winning parties need to consider opinions of other parties. So overall country's policy more closely reflects the average opinion of the whole population instead of just the currently ruling party. Changes are much more slow and gradual and a single leader change doesn't immediately affect that much.
Are we just ignoring the Bay of Pigs? The Iran-Contra Affair? Vietnam? Desert Shield? Desert Storm?
I hesitate to even mention Kissinger who was effectively an autonomous nation-state during the carpet-bombing of Cambodia.
This is non-withstanding the fact that WW2 was effectively a result of punitive measures and economic destruction following WW1 (a blueprint for the post-Charlie Wilson's Afghanistan if you will).
The causes of WW1 however - bad faith alliances during the right-wing rise of imperialism, militarism, and nationalism - look to be back in play in the North American Continent.
Even people who don't like Trump voted for the man. That's how bad Democrats have become, that even Trump could win. Selecting Chauncey Gardener as their candidate, especially after a term spent under an man who was in no condition to be president (watch old footage of Biden for comparison) was the coup de grace.
Of course, in a general sense, the GOP is the Democratic party on a time delay.
There are deep problems that partisan politics cannot fix, but perhaps it is time to begin taking third parties seriously and break away from the two-headed uniparty monopoly. Ranked-choice voting is one way to help this happen, but of course, the uniparty won't hear it.
Hope and change. That's the message Obama won consecutive terms with. The Republicans have always thrived on fear and insecurity--and hate, which is just ripe fear. To quote Yoda, "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate." The red scare, the Southern Strategy, urban crime, WMDs, terrorism, immigrants, China--since the 1950s, Republicans have monkey-barred from fear to fear.
It's a natural fit for conservativism. What is conservatism if not the fear of change? And when you're afraid, you want a strongman to lead you, someone who takes pride in our military and law enforcement. Someone who shows no fear, who has swagger. It's also a perfect fit for someone like Trump who would as soon lie as breathe. When you're conjuring terrors, truth is just dead weight.
Kamala didn't run on hope and change. She ran on fear, too. She tried to beat Trump at his own game with none of the advantages of his shameless distain for the truth or a Republican Party and media ecosystem at home with fearmongering. She aped his disdain for immigrants and opposition to China, but of course her main bugaboo was Trump himself. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with our nation's current circumstances, she offered only stasis, while Trump offered revolution.
Non-college graduates know they're getting fucked. Trump says immigrants and China is to blame. Kamala has nothing to say. She could point to the billionaires, the tax dodging corporations, the thriving defense contractors, the predatory medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies, the monopolies bleeding consumers dry in every corner of the economy.
She could paint a vision of affordable healthcare for all, an end to medical bankruptcy, an end to college debt, a thriving green energy blue collar economy, free early childhood education, a guaranteed jobs program, a universal basic income.
She could acknowledge the people who feel left behind and say, "I hear you. This is what I'm going to do for you." Instead, her cries of fear just assured those folks that Trump really was going to fuck shit up fighting for them, that the people who sold them down the river are shaking in their boots. Of course, Trump isn't actually going to make their lives better, but he promised he would, and that's more than Kamala could be bothered to do.
Doomscrolling, doomposting ... weren't those words born in the social media world?
Negativity attracts attention. Negativity makes money on the Internet. Ironically, here on Hacker News, there is probably a sizeable cohort of programmers and managers who opened this Pandora's Box for the entire mankind.
I don't blame them; they didn't know how the brave new world would turn out. But this is just one of the many consequences. People perceive the world as worse than it actually is. Because all they see on their smartphones are bad news and anxious takes.
Keep in mind that "Union Joe" holding a pro-union EV summit in August 2021 arranged by anti-Tesla unions is what radicalized Elon Musk and a lot of the Silicon Valley billionaires to openly come out as right-wing.
The union members ended up voting for Trump.
American unions are a joke and should never be pandered to.
Between a clean sweep win of the Electoral College, the popular vote (by a Republican president for the first time in 20 years!), the Senate, and very likely the House this is an epic, bottom of the ninth comeback victory for the history books. And I thought the World Series Dodgers comeback in game 5 was incredible, I guess we just keep on winning.
I am also absolutely vindicated in my opinion that "journalism" (the mainstream media) are cancers upon society. The polls fucking lied and the "journalism" was the real garbage.
And yes, I voted for Trump and the Republicans as an Oregonian. No, my vote didn't count for his EC win, but I don't care: My vote still helped deliver a mandate that the Democrats and their policies are not acceptable.
Anonymous TV exec: "If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they're not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely.
A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form."
I don't think the polls lied (lied implies intent). I think a few things happened. Pollsters have a really hard time getting hold of Trump voters for a few reasons: folks are scared to admit they voted for Trump, and those who are proud Trump supporters have such disdain for the media (of which pollsters are a part) that they simply hang up / don't engage.
So, Trump tends to get underrepresented in the polls.
At any rate, the polls showed that there was a dead heat, so this really came down to the margin of error which has historically somewhat favored Trump.
There's a lot of micro-level pieces to the result (which, to be clear, is very very bad - this is an attempt at explanation, not justification). But I think the macro-level piece is simply this:
Institutional trust has collapsed, and the public is desperate.
Yes, "it's the economy, stupid" - but economic perceptions are reflective of that desperation, and of how far voters will go to express it.
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There are a million individual failures that add up:
- An economic and judicial system that protects the rich at the expense of the poor, to the point that no one of any political persuasion is the slightest bit surprise when rich guys get off scot-free.
- The normalization of snake oil, MLMs, conspiracy theories, etc., which enhance the perception of institutional failure even when institutions are functioning (e.g., antivaxxers). This includes deliberate misinformation from a very effective right-wing propaganda apparatus, beginning with Fox and continued through the present day; I think this apparatus is a very important factor but it's one Democrats have no control over.
- The almost naked contempt for the lack of well-being (particularly economic well-being) among the public from many laissez-faire politicians of the Clinton-Bush era.
- The post-9/11 apparatus that led to the Iraq War, which obliterated trust in neocons/hawks as an institution (paving the way for an alternative wing on the right, whereas the left has had no comparable failure [possibly until now] to clean house on the left).
- The 2008 financial crisis, which intensified perceptions that we were getting screwed and generated the Tea Party and Occupy. The Tea Party became MAGA, while Occupy has no similar vent on the left (thanks largely to the fairly transparent sidelining of Bernie Sanders, the heir-apparent of that movement).
- Outsourcing, particularly of manufacturing. Beneficial overall, perhaps, but looks like an institutional failure from the perspective of workers whose towns evaporated. That's part of why the Trump movement started with those towns and expanded outward: they were the nexus of a discontent that has continued to grow among the electorate.
- The relentless enshittification of nearly everything we do, use, or consume. As I was waiting for results to come in, I was watching a YouTuber play video games, and he was talking about how every fast food place sucks now relative to how they used to be. Not election-related at all! It's just so pervasive in the zeitgeist that it's a normal discussion topic. And everyone can name stuff that's gotten worse in their daily lives because someone's trying to milk it for extra cash.
- The increasing alienation of workers from their work, and especially from doing work they feel has any moral value. I wrote more about this a while back at [1]
- A pervasive sense of societal decay, brought on by...well, everyone's got a different theory, but everyone can feel it. Almost no one actually feels better about life right now than they did ten or even twenty years ago, with the possible exception of queer rights (and as a queer person, I can tell you I certainly don't feel like things are going well, and I wouldn't have felt that they were even if Harris had won). I think there is substance to that (see [2]), and because it's vague and nebulous, it's incredibly easy to assign to whatever cause you want.
- A lack of belief that success even can be done without being corrupt. (see [3]) A lot of Trump supporters are fully aware that he's nakedly corrupt and lies all the time, they just think everyone is and that he's at least lying and corrupt "on their side".
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When the public is in this state, it has a legitimate grievance. The social contract between the working class and the elite is, roughly, "make sure my life is OK and I won't burn the place down". Well, the elite failed to hold up its end of the bargain, and failed to listen to many cries for help (among other things, during 2008), until people got desperate. So they decided to burn the place down.
People often wonder how Sanders-Trump voters existed given the apparent policy conflict between the two. Well, I was almost such a voter in 2016 (I would not be now! I'm ashamed to have ever considered him), and I can tell you where I was: it's not (just) about policy, it's about disruption. If you feel like things are going badly for you, and no one will listen or offer you help (and might actively sneer at you when you ask for it), you start asking yourself if you have anything to lose by going nuclear.
And this isn't just a logical judgement, either. To be ignored and suppressed is humiliating. It makes you feel impotent - choice of word very intentional - and that seems to hit male voters rather harder than female ones. There's a reason Bannon found a lot of Trump's initial younger base of support in gaming communities: it's not much different than someone raging in a League of Legends match because someone else is feeding and that's making you lose. Your pride is being damaged because someone else (in your perception) screwed up. You're a great player, it's all their fault, so your pride is unbesmirched.
Voters do care about democracy, contrary to this result. A lot said they cared about it, and a lot of people who voted for Trump said they were concerned about Jan 6. But people won't care about someone else unless they feel like they're taken care of for themselves, and principle comes after basic everyday needs for most people. And that goes double when you're being asked to defend institutions that (you feel) have completely betrayed you.
The same goes for, say, social justice. It's not that voters don't care in a vacuum, it's that it's at a higher tier of their hierarchy. Yes, hardcore racists, sexists, etc do exist, and are a problem, but what makes Trump powerful is that he co-opts populist rage into bigotry. When he talks about DEI, it's not "boo black person in power" (keep in mind, much of Trump's base enthusiastically voted for Obama), it's "that person took a job that you should have had because Democrats care more about diversity than they do about you". That works for the people who are explicitly racist, but it also works for the people who feel like they've been robbed and are looking for someone to blame. And the latter can become the former, especially because it sets them up for being called racist when they feel they aren't (somewhat correctly, in my view, but not in theirs).
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Was the inflation of the last few years bad? Yeah. But it was also everywhere, and it wasn't that bad in the US relative to the rest of the world. An electorate that was interested in listening to any sort of explanation would have probably been persuadable on that point. But the electorate has had their problems explained away one too many times.
Was there a problem at the border? Yeah. But it was clearly not a problem of our own making, and not as simple as "put up a wall". And an electorate interested in expert opinions and complex solutions might have believed that. But when you feel like you're being screwed in a thousand ephemeral ways, it's easy to point a finger and say "Biden gave all your money to immigrants".
Despite the fact that I'm probably leaving the country to avoid what I expect to be attacks on people like me, I don't think voters are actually all that much more conservative. The administration will be, and their power will be almost wholly unchecked, but voters weren't. Abortion measures passed last night in some really red states. So did minimum wage hikes. Dobbs has been wildly unpopular.
Harris outperformed Biden by wide margins among the wealthy, presumably because of Jan 6. But she got blown out among the working class by an even wider margin - a working class that cannot own a home, or afford healthcare, or expect a good stable career, and who might be automated away entirely at any minute.
Trump isn't the answer to that (he is more or less a walking institutional failure himself, one that is causing a cascading collapse of other institutions), but Democrats have, so far, largely failed to acknowledge the problem at all. And so they could not present a compelling alternative.
I'm not sure Democrats can actually solve this problem. Institutional failures are being driven by a lot of non-political forces, and if you care about policy, some degree of institutionalism is inevitable. And worse, addressing systemic issues runs fundamentally against American individualist values. But I think that's the nature of the problem they're dealing with, and one they better figure out quick.
Maybe this is the containment zone, an unmoderated section on the front page, one place that is actually about the elections where we can rage a bit and get it out of our systems...
Which doesn't seem too bad in terms of everyone getting an outlet to process things one way or another, and keeping the rest of the front page clean.
I don't have the feeling it's being moderated at all at the curent time. Plenty of comments calling out Trump voters as Nazi, bigots, fascists and misogynists here are not flagged/removed while other comments explaining why democrats lost do get flagged.
Regardless of ones feelings towards the Orange Man and his voters (over half the country!) you shouldn't be able break HN ToS and get away with it. So either moderation efforts are being overwhelmed (hats off to Dang) or HN is heavily politically biased from the userbase to moderation team.
Keep in mind that the left has been saying that the right has been voting against their own best interests for decades. I doubt that will change, especially if the apparent realignment along "class" lines turns out to be sustained.
How do you figure that not providing life-saving medical treatment to a pregnant mother and letting her and her baby die is going to protect that unborn life?
I think you're putting words in my mouth. IMO in this scenario the medical decision-making process should weigh both lives equally. Doctors make life-and-death decisions all the time, and I'm OK with that as long as one life is not considered "lesser". I understand that reasonable people can disagree on when life truly starts, though.
Putting aside the general disagreement on the topic, one of the major concerns is all of this isn't really happening, with some of these laws and prosecutions just being so strict. Take [1] for example: when doctors are unable or afraid to intervene even when the baby has already died. It's just so completely unnecessary and purely the result of an overly strict abortion ban. This is hardly the first or only story of its kind.
Doctors aren't doing that though, they're saying they won't touch people in case they are seen to be breaking laws, and people are already dying, how can you not understand the nuance?
Thank you for the example, I do hope that they clarify that gray area in the law. It's a tough situation; they were dealing with probabilities (sometimes infections occur, and sometimes these infections lead to death) rather than a clear-cut "we can save one of these two lives if we perform an abortion".
Funny how treatment like this used to be a clear-cut decision made by the only experts who can make it (medical professionals), but now innocent people and babies are dying because of peoples random religious beliefs, that obviously have nothing to do with medicine.
It has nothing to do with medicine because there isn't a doctor in the world who would willingly let a patient die when they could have treated them - unless they believe they will end up in jail for it - which is exactly what is happening - and that blood is on your hands for defending this absolute crap.
Firstly, Roe vs Wade was overturned in 2022 during the BIDEN term.
Secondly, Trump has never called for a federal abortion ban, nor, in fact, a state abortion ban.
Thirdly, there are currently exemptions in ALL states that protect abortion if it is a life-saving necessity for the mother. Trump has never proposed removing these exemptions.
>Firstly, Roe vs Wade was overturned in 2022 during the BIDEN term.
That timing is all about how long it takes a lawsuit to work through the system to reach a stacked court.... not so much who was President when it finally was resolved.
Search the news for mothers and their babies dying because doctors in states which have enacted abortion bans refuse treatment. That's what happens.
Rove vs Wade was overturned because of a right wing stacked supreme court, which has nothing to do with the sitting president. Unless you think the executive has control over judicial decisions?
Trump is enabling all sorts of backward thinking ideology to fruit, directly or indirectly.
Just to be clear I am pro-choice and I support mothers and their bodily autonomy.
I think the Dems will continue to lose elections if, in their hysteria, they attibute bad things to Trump that had little to do with him.
If the Dems and their supporters care more about the Two Minutes Hate against Trump than creating their own positive vision of America, then they'll continue to lose.
Americans are a positive and patriotic populace. That's why Trump's "Make America Great Again" messaging resonates with them.
Why do right wingers think democracy is about beating some other party, rather than improving the lives of citizens?
You're implying that unless the major left wing party kow-tows to the emotional needs of extreme right-wingers, then they should be allowed to destroy the country because mummy wasn't nice to them?
How about actually focussing on improving things instead of crying about every little thing.
I haven't seen that in Trump, myself. It seems to me that a lot of the Jan 6 discussion comes down to "what was he thinking when he did X?", and the tribes either give him the benefit of the doubt or assume the worst intentions, according to their various inclinations.
The only way to curb government spending is to completely eliminate Medicaid and Medicare at this point. If you look at the data there's simply not enough tax revenue to cover those programs with an aging population, and the Republicans were against allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices so I'm not sure they'll give the program any teeth.
Yeah that one has more emphasis on the "cautiously" than the "optimistic" :-) Both parties have largely ignored this issue since the Tea Party movement, but it has been mentioned somewhat prominently in this campaign.
The way to restrain Iran is to put reasonable sanctions on them, then negotiate terms for removing those sanctions. An international group (the US, China, France, Russia, the UK, and Germany) did that over Iran's nuclear weapons program and it resulted in an agreement that would have delayed Iran from getting nuclear weapons for at least a decade.
Then Trump was elected and a couple years later and over the objections of China, France, Russia, the UK, Germany, and the EU unilaterally withdrew from the deal and imposed even harsher sanctions that had been on Iran before.
So we ended up back to where we were before that deal, except with Iran knowing that if you make a deal for sanctions relief you can't trust the US to keep it, and so they have figured out other ways to get by with the sanctions in place. And the US is not Spinal Tap...when sanctions at 10 don't work it can't turn the dial to 11.
Past performance is mixed: Trump 45 used mostly the carrot with the North Koreans, but mostly the stick with the Iranians and Chinese. I think it's pretty clear that Ukraine aid will decrease, but I'm not sure how much carrot vs stick will be applied to Russia.
increased taxes, as per evident of the UK government switch to labour
reduce illegal immigration:
shortage of labour for mundane jobs, as evidenced by the UK brexit. We now don't have farmers to do the jobs that we all hate
protection of unborn lives
abortion aided to the protection, so now expect a baby boom crisis. Your daughter gets pregnant, now what? You have to fork the bill of either supporting or child care of others.
economic growth:
You rely on china for everything, when was the last product you looked at that had "made in the usa?
The Conservative government, right wing-- caused a "black hole" in spending. Where by for the eight years they were in power the conservatives took any income, money for the country for themselves and their bed buddies.
This includes scrapping budgets for Scotland, Wales leading a dominance in the London tax haven and sabotaging anything else progressive.
So, we've finally extinguished the conservative party with a left wing party, labour who are suppose to fight for the people but in return have just released the budget report where by instead of cutting spending they're going to increase national insurance, work taxes from next April, cut public services of schools, healthcare and pensions all in the name to get us out of this "black hole" including draining further Scotland and Wales because with increase spending.
So instead of actually tackling the issue they want the same pie that conservatives had and their slice too.
Thanks for the explanation. But that sequence sounds more like "corruption -> increase taxes", or perhaps "cut taxes -> increase taxes"... not "cut costs -> increase taxes"?
There is a lot of "Don't believe that Republican voters are stupid" in the comments, but why is that true?
Why can't it be true that many people voted stupidly? As a third party to Brexit, it was apparent that many people voted stupidly.
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edit:
In my opinion, it's very simple. I became a one issue voter after one of the candidates tried to obstruct the process (violently), the last time. That's antithetical to America. It's ironic because it's the type of thing that happens in the "shithole countries" that we're so focused on keeping out (I say this as a person who thinks immigration reform with strong structure is long needed).
Rewarding Trump by giving him the keys is stupid if you can even muster the courage to say you believe in anything America stands for.
I find it hard to believe that the majority of ~70,000,000 people are that stupid and/or mislead, the only other option is that the majority actually want what is now coming and I do not feel obliged to refrain from passing judgement on that. My feelings on brexit, which far more directly affects myself, are similar.
People who were naive enough to be misled do undoubtably exist (I know a couple of otherwise intelligent people who massively regret the brexit thing) but I don't think they are the majority.
> There is a lot of "Don't believe that Republican voters are stupid" in the comments, but why is that true?
I’m taking a shot in the dark here but I’m guessing they voted R themselves, we can all portray ourselves to be objective in comments when we really aren’t. This happens a lot on social media, especially the faux-smart part.
Mostly because "they're stupid" is a lazy argument that ignores why you think they're stupid. You can say "Well, they voted against their best economic interests," assuming they're all net recipients of government cash, but they say they don't want to be, and they want to dismantle executive departments they perceive as wasteful. You can say "They're violent," but Trump campaigned on being the peace-negotiator who didn't start any wars, and Harris had no real response to that. You can say "He hates women," but there are apparently enough women who are either pro-life or didn't see abortion as the main campaign issue. Harris's commercials said "We want change," but she's the incumbent! If change didn't happen by now, why would it four years from now?
From what I've seen from Trump supporters on NextDoor you are missing a lot of cases where it is hard to come up with a good explanation that doesn't involve some stupidity or at least willful ignorance.
For example I've seen people saying they were going to vote for him because he'll stop undocumented immigrants from eating pets in Springfield OH. No one has been able to find any evidence of that.
There are also the people who say they will vote for him because he promises to get rid of some specific government service or program, and it turns out from their other comments that this is a service or program that they depend on but don't realize it is the same program.
Going the other way, there are people on NextDoor who I've suspected were a bit stupid long before I saw them in any political discussion. E.g., people going on about contrails being the government spraying us with chemicals or the new electric meters rolled out in this area over the last few years will make us sick because of their remote read capabilities (but the ones they replaced were also remote read--apparently they never noticed that they never saw a meter reader in all the years they had it).
Whenever one of those people later posted something that did say how they would vote it almost invariably was for Trump, and it would be for reasons like the ones above.
This suggests that while there might be reasons for a non-stupid person to vote for Trump, he also captured a big fraction of the votes of stupid people. That I think is one of the biggest difference between Trump and other candidates from both parties. Trump might be the first to actively court the stupid vote.
Shortly before the Brexit referendum, Scotland had an independence referendum, where the Westminster government was in favour of the status quo - and they had a great deal of success by deliberately not figuring out what independence would mean.
What currency would an independent Scotland use? What will happen to their military? What about healthcare, and education? EU membership? What share of the UK's national debt would they take on? Who will get citizenship? What will the border look like? Nobody knows! So a yes vote was a scary leap into the unknown with many unsolved problems, while a no vote was safe and predictable.
After the strategy succeeded in the Scottish independence vote, Cameron decided to repeat that success with Brexit - not figuring out what Brexit means was a deliberate strategy intended to boost the remain campaign.
I think there's something to be said about the value of a calculated protest vote.
For young men, who doesn't feel that the Democrats are offering them a world view where they are valued at all, why should they vote Democrat? Maybe at some level they realize that Trumps policies are worse for them in some ways than Harris'. But when Harris loses despite Trump being such an awful candidate it sends a very powerful message to the Democrats: you can't just keep ignoring a huge portion of the population and make them feel like they're not valued in society.
People put self-worth above almost anything else except self-preservation.
I keep seeing this take on Democrat's treatise of men but I'm not sure it really follows. Even among Democrats white people and men are the most valued classes of American society, for better or worse their interests will never not be protected above all others. The Democratic case has been "given that, what can we do to help the rest of you." Stuff like LGBT support, reproductive rights, BLM, and even path to citizenship don't even wiggle the needle of white men's favor in society.
It doesn't change how it feels especially in online spaces where minorities vent publicly where before it has been private, and I can understand that, but that seems to be the only difference. GOP messaging successfully took "everyone is doing worse off right now" + "look at these Democrats throwing inconsequential scraps to minorities" and convinced people it was causal.
In my opinion, it's very simple. I became a one issue voter after one of the candidates tried to obstruct the process (violently), the last time. That's antithetical to America. It's ironic because it's the type of thing that happens in the "shithole countries" that we're so focused on keeping out (I say this as a person who thinks immigration reform with strong structure is long needed).
Rewarding Trump by giving him the keys is stupid if you can even muster the courage to say you believe in anything America stands for.
My point precisely. We seem to forget Churchill's famous dictum that "no one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
I am for democracy because everything else is worse, but that doesn't mean I need to delude myself that "the majority is always" right or some nonsense like that. Yet the latter seems to be an increasingly common talking point, I've noticed.
There are many democratic nations on earth, many variations on theme.
Churchill today might note that US democracy is the worst form of democratic Government being structurally doomed to spiral into a two party K-hole despite being setup by people largely vehemently opposed to party politics.
Perhaps worst is overstating "old", "tired", "dated", "failed to scale", "doesn't encourage representative government".
It's not a choice between one form of democracy and authoritarian Stalinism. There's a far broader chice between many forms of democracy - some of those that embrace plurity of choice and reject unlimited legal bribery by very small very rich vested interests might be worth a look.
While I agree with you that there are different ways of structuring democracies and that parts of US democracy seem... in need of an update, even "better" democracies can't fully prevent a slide into authoritarianism. It has happened countless times before.
Because any choice in a two party system is stupid to some degree, for most people. Most people’s beliefs don’t all line up exactly with one political party or the other. So every election is a compromise: which of your values must you prioritize? A whole lot of Americans aren’t doing well economically, they haven’t been doing well for decades, and under Biden they saw everything get more expensive. So they don’t like either side, and if you can convince them to vote, it’s only going to be for change. Kamala didn’t portray any change from Biden, so she lost.
Well, half of the population is more stupid than the other half (not saying republicans are, just saying that yeah, hackernews is definitely a subset not representative of the total population)
I think calling it mere stupidity is a little too reductive. There are genuine grievances among his supporters, such as rising inequality, loss of opportunities/jobs and an economic system which is not working out for them. But expecting a narcissistic misogynistic racist billionaire rapist to actually help them is…the definition of stupidity.
At the end of the day though he was the one that spent the time to understand what they care about.
> Literacy levels: 54% of adults read below a 6th-grade level, and 20% read below a 5th-grade level.
This is the reality in America. The education system failed these people.
Trump is merely taking advantage of that. He understands that logical arguments aren't necessary, merely emotional ones that appeal to how downtrodden and forgotten these folk feel. If he can make them believe that building a wall and/or deporting immigrants will get them their jobs back or that tariffs will bring manufacturing back to America that is more important to winning an election than truths or reality.
He won fair and square, the election -is- a popularity contest, not a competency contest.
Born in Argentina. Legal immigrant. US citizen for over 30 years. Voter.
Given the proclivities here on HN I fully expect this message will not be well received. I urge left-leaning visitors to read it, stop and think before the natural emotional reaction.
What you lack is real exposure and knowledge of Latin American history and politics. Everything we see the Democratic party push for and do in the US has already happened in Latin America dozens of times over the last century. Pick a policy and you will find a country in LATAM that has done it, if not many.
The result? Utter destruction. LATAM is a time machine for the US. You can rewind history and see how every single policy being pushed by the left will end. And the results are not pretty. My own native country, Argentina, was absolutely destroyed by this ideology. It went from one of the top economies in the world to something like 150 spots down the list.
Poverty, destruction, massive unemployment, crime, intense lawfare, political prosecution, etc. You will find this in Argentina's history and that of most nations in LATAM. And the link to leftist/socialist rule is indisputable.
As things hit rock bottom LATAM has been waking up. El Salvador is one example of this. And Argentina is now on it's way with Milei. Sadly the uninformed masses have to hit rock bottom before they understand that the people they have been supporting them only care about political power and not about their lives.
Eventually reality vs. fantasy hits you hard enough that you cannot react like robot and keep supporting the same criminals that got you to the point of pain, misery and despair you find yourself pondering about. It's like being 30 meters down scuba-diving and your air tank suddenly going empty. There are realities you cannot ignore. And that's how Milei finally got elected.
The problem with the American Left is that you are all utterly ignorant of the history of so many nations where everything your party and politicians do and proposed has been tried and failed. The fact that a Bernie Sanders or AOC are not summarily laughed off the stage says volumes about the ignorance of the people who vote for them.
I am happy that Trump won. Not because he is the most ideal candidate. We can talk about how flawed the US process is that we usually end-up with two choices everyone hates. That's a different discussion. Whether you know it or not, what the Trump win represents is the US dodging the destructive forces of putrid leftist ideology that has destroyed so many nations.
No, he is not Hitler or a fascist. Stop it. You have never lived under such regimes. You don't know what the hell you are talking about. As a teenager in Argentina I was held at gunpoint (as in multiple machine guns, with one pushing against my back) by military police in Argentina. What crime did my friends and I commit? We went to the movies, then to have some pizza at a restaurant and were walking home late at night. That's it. They slapped us around and took our money. Again, don't use terms like "fascist" like you know what the fuck you are talking about, you have no idea. Any immigrant who has actually lived under these ideologies thinks you are ignorant and stupid.
My first-level filter when thinking about supporting a politician is:
Would I hire this person to run a cookie baking operation?
Simplistic, yes, however, it quickly gets to the core of the issue: Most politicians are just that, politicians, and know nothing whatsoever about making even a microscopic economy run. They know nothing about the consequences of their actions and have no exposure to them at all.
A simple example of this was Obama and Obamacare. He passed a horrible law that caused incredible damage. He promised --dozens of times-- that your existing plans and doctors would not change. My family's health insurance evaporated. We were forced into the ACA. Our cost when from $7,800 per year to $28,800 per year. Yes, you read that correctly. Our deductible also went from $3,000 per year to over $9,000 per year. And yet, none of the politicians who supported this abomination have to live with the realities of effectively destroying a family's economy as well as generational wealth.
For our family that represents being robbed to the tune of $210K every ten years. When one considers investing this on an ETF, we are talking about millions of millions of dollars over, say, 30 years. Destruction at this scale should be criminal.
The other problem with the ACA is that it pushed tens of millions of people into programs that, by law, require that their medical expenditures after 55 years of age be recovered. That recovery can include a lien on whatever assets they might have. Once again, destroying generational wealth.
And yet, Obama, a person who nobody in their right mind would hire to run a cookie baking operation, is living large, has suffered no consequences for his incompetence and deceit and is a multimillionaire many time over.
Another example of this is the utter destruction that the artificial raising of the minimum wage has caused. Financially-challenged and ideologically-brainwashed voters supported this. The result was that people lost their jobs, had their hours cut and everything they buy and consume is so unaffordable that their higher minimum wage has less buying power than their status quo ante. What's worse, it is causing irreparable damage to businesses and further losses to outsourcing in multiple industries, including manufacturing. Bravo. Ignorance is sad to behold.
On to Harris.
Incompetent as can be. The worst candidate Democrats have seen for decades. Once again, as a first filer, nobody in their right mind would hire this person to run a cookie baking operation. Race and gender have nothing to do with this. She is utterly incompetent and does not know what she is doing.
Her ideology is putrid and would have damaged the US beyond recognition. The US would not survive another four years of this, much less four years going farther into the putrid left.
You think you are suffering now? Inflation is too high? Once again, you have no clue what the fuck you are talking about. The population of the US is up in arms about 20% inflation. Meh! Try 250% inflation! The US would descend into civil war. Yet, that's precisely what happened in Argentina (along with many years well above 20%. Here:
Again, the policies and politicians you support are DESTROYING this nation. You don't know it because you are like the proverbial frog slowly being boiled and you are utterly ignorant about the world outside the US and their various histories.
If we remained on our current path, the US would probably find itself in an unrecoverable position in another four years, certainly in eight. If you actually took the time to study, learn and think about this, you should come out with two conclusions: Trump voters saved your ass and gave the US the best probably for a turn-around (even as late as this is). Second, you should realign your flawed thinking, support the change and perhaps even thank your Trump-voting friends for saving this nation from an almost certain disastrous path.
Well, like I said, I firmly suspect the HN crowd will not receive this message very well, hence the throw-away account. If I am able to make just a few people truly rethink their fake reality, mission accomplished. I do not want to see the US turn into Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador and the dozens of other nations destroyed by leftist ideologies in many forms. That requires a voting population who is educated about how this has affected the world. We don't want the far right either. That is now where we are today. At all. If you care about your life and that of your family, kids, etc., you need to educate yourself, leave ideological indoctrination behind and understand reality. We were 30 meters down and air was about to stop flowing. We now have a chance to surface and live.
If you got this far, thanks. I hope you are the type who is willing to reflect and understand.
Some might ask: Well, if that's the case, why did Hispanics vote for Harris?
Do you know about Evita in Argentina? Probably not. You think you know because you watched a movie or musical. Silly goose.
This goes back to when my parents where young. Evita sent trucks full of bikes, refrigerators, appliances, etc. into poor neighborhoods to buy votes. Vote for her, get an appliance. Where did those appliances come from? They took them from "the rich", causing damage to manufacturers and destroying jobs.
This was one of the many obvert ways in which they bought votes. People fall for this because they are desperate. And people are desperate because the left wants to keep them there, needs to keep them there.
I think this observation is attributed to Gloria Alvarez: The left love the poor so much, they multiply them.
The strategy is simple:
- Keep them poor and desperate
- Do not solve their problems
- Blame the other side for their condition
- Toss gifts and promises in the every election
- Win elections
- Make sure they stay poor and desperate
- Ignore them until next election
That's the playbook. This has been done across LATAM history so many times it's sick. And, yes, it works. Because you will always find people in every population who are desperate and uninformed enough to not be able to think past their current condition. Very few people make decisions with a ten+ year timeframe. This just happened in Argentina with Milei because people hit the bottom so hard they had to wake up and understand reality.
Harris promised "appliances" to people in the form of $25K gifts to buy homes, free entry into the US and a path to citizenship and a whole host of horrible policies I don't have time to repeat. So, yes, once again, as the LATAM time machine shows us, these things will drive a percentage of the population to cast votes in favor of the candidate sending trucks with appliances into their neighborhoods to buy their votes. And they will do this without realizing they are contributing to the destruction of their society and economy until they understand they have been in water that is about to boil the entire time.
Oh yes, and, of course, the other thing the left has done throughout LATAM's history (and Evita was no exception) is to control the media. If you control the media you can brainwash the shit out of people, as some of you are here in the US.
Of course, here the media are not officially under government control. This has been accomplished through outright indoctrination at our universities. As a result, a large majority of the people who work at media organizations are leftist ideologs who will happily support someone as dangerous and incompetent as Harris because they can't think past their indoctrination.
The messaging take-over by the left in the US was not done by force, like in most LATAM nations, it was done through shit ideologically-slanted "education" at our centers of "higher learning". I really hope Trump has a plan to slam these organizations (media and universities) hard. We need to fix this problem and do it quickly because it takes years for people who have not been subjected to indoctrination to emerge from university and join society.
LATAM has nothing in common with the Western thinking. You are people of passion, no matter who Argentinians vote in always ended in disaster. Milei if far right, and as big an idiot as your lefties.
Meanwhile, anyone who ever been to developed Europe or Asia can attest, that although far left by American standards, average Joe has far greater quality of live; heck even Canada has affordable healthcare which is such a big problem in the US.
> LATAM has nothing in common with the Western thinking. You are people of passion, no matter who Argentinians vote in always ended in disaster.
Be careful, your ignorance is showing.
On a more serious note, you clearly don't know what you are talking about.
"People of passion". Give me a fucking break. So, Latin Americans are emotion-driven robots. Great. Stop getting your fake facts from movies and leftist media for goodness sake.
> Milei if far right, and as big an idiot as your lefties.
Your ignorance makes me want to vomit.
Go live in an environment with 50% unemployment, massive government overreach and 250% annual inflation (after years of crippling inflation). Then come back and read your comment to understand what you sound like.
Right. We need more Hispanics to vote Republican. One of the things I discuss with Hispanic friends is that none of us should vote for the kind of people who destroyed the countries we all came from. We have friends from Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, etc. Most are educated professionals who know their history and, in general, very aware of LATAM history and politics. Not ONE OF THEM votes on the left. Ever. Because they know where they came from.
Quite a few of the Hispanics who vote on the left are low-information, low-education voters who can be bought with fake giveaways, not realizing they are shooting themselves in the foot.
At the end it is always a matter of education. In the US, it is a matter of our educational institutions of "higher" learning having descended into becoming centers of indoctrination. I went to university in Argentina for engineering. We studied engineering, not the bullshit socially-twisted, time-wasting courses universities force students to take here in the US.
My oldest son attended a top university back east for CS. He burned a year of his life in the aggregate taking bullshit courses having nothing whatsoever to do with CS. They also forced him to take classes on Marxism where they romanticized the ideology. How? The made it the only class available, and if he wanted to graduate that was the only choice from here to eternity. I don't even want to imaging what they do to liberal arts students. It is truly despicable.
Because none of the rest of the worlds problems are going to be affected at all by this turn of events…
I'm all for sitting back and watching the leopards eat US faces, I do like a little schadenfreude, but other parts of the world are going to be negatively affected too as is well documented.
More like the solution - Iraq threatened all of the Middle East. So does Iran. America is a security guarantee to countries who don't make a noise about it all.
As can be seen in Africa now, if America doesn't intervene then Russia or China will - there's no nice safe forum to criticise such actions in Russia. Sri Lanka - poor old Tamils got "sorted" with Chinese help.
Then the US oil price will go up no matter how isolationist it tries to be. That will hit people's pockets.
I think the South Koreans are extremely grateful not to be part of the North. That's a terrible example for you to pick.
Iraq...well they might not be too happy but I bet their neighbors insisted on Hussein being sorted out.
etc etc.
It isn't noble, it's practical. The US protects countries that supply oil to it. Korea turns out to be an extremely important ally and part of the world economy....etc.
If you cared to ask you will discover that a huge cohort of people "on the right" do not want the US involved in foreign entanglements, including with Israel.
US is not the cause of the problems in the Middle East. It has interests in the Middle East. The problems in the region were created by the people inhabiting the region. If anything, US foreign politics sometimes come as detached from the reality of the problems of the area rather than creating those. I don't know what makes Americans take so much credit for the bad things that they hadn't contributed to all that much.
The US is directly responsible for millions of deaths in the Middle East.
It's supporting Israel's genocide right now, and would have continued to do so whichever candidate won.
It's arming Saudi Arabia to help its war in Yemen.
It killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, and armed the Taliban before that (back when the USSR was also killing Afghans by the hundreds of thousands).
It participated in the coup against Iran's last democratic government (together with the UK), re-installing the deposed Shah (he was later deposed yet again, but this time by fundamentalist revolutionaries, instead of the democracy that had replaced him last time). Before the revolution, they the Shah with the start of nuclear tech, which formed the basis of the current Iran nuclear program. They then supported Saddam and had him attack Iran, before later losing control of him as well.
Now, the root cause of many of the worse issues in the Middle East is in fact not the USA, but the British Empire, which drew most of the insane borders of Middle East states that are causing problems to this day. But the USA proudly took on the mantle of main meddler in the region in the last 50-70 years.
Millions of deaths? Where do you get your numbers from? The bloodiest war in the Middle East, the Syrian Civil War maybe has a million killed... all other conflicts in this area have low two-digit figures. Iraqi campaign, since the very start in 2003 has total killed at around 100k-200k, which, I believe, is the second bloodiest war in that area.
To give this some context: Iran-Iraq war, where US didn't really participate, scored 1m-2m deaths.
And of those killed in the conflicts, overwhelming majority were killed by the locals, in order to further some local ideology, gain some local control etc.
Military, I'd imagine, US may be directly responsible for some couple thousands deaths, maybe dozens of thousands. But that's it. US has absolutely no reason to waste troops and ammo on killing a bunch of nobodies in ME. That furthers no military or political goals. Even if you believe that US is colonial / militaristic or whatever other sticker you like, US is pragmatic in what it's doing. There's just no point in killing many people. It's a waste of resources.
Also, you obviously have never been to ME, and have no clue of what's going on there right now. The idea that Israel is somehow performing genocide is, again, laughable. Yes, they don't care about how many people in Gaza will die. But that's it. They don't care. The Israelis want the deplorables behind the fence to stop launching rockets at them. If that means that the civilians will die behind the fence--so be it. Genocide is when a state kills off everyone belonging to a particular group, no matter what that group does. Israeli military nor police nor any other force has no programs of exterminating Gazans. It's just not useful, there's nothing to be gained from it. And it would've been a huge investment in terms of paying salaries to the force hired to perform the alleged genocide, to organize the logistics around it etc. It's truly bizarre how someone can come up with such b/s ideas and never have a reality check.
The same, I imagine, goes for Saudi Arabia. They don't want the deplorables from Yemen to shoot at their oil drilling installations. They don't care about the lives of the people on the other side of the fence. In fact, they probably don't see them as people at all. But they don't care enough about them to organize a genocide. That's just too expensive, unproductive and wasteful.
As for Iran, you are missing the point: US has interests in the area, that's why they choose to side with this or the other political / social group and support / oppose some groups. They aren't responsible for what those groups want or do. The Iranian revolution happened because people in Iran revolted. Not because US organized it.
The "millions" figure is related to all of the people who died in wars started or cheered on by the USA. I wasn't trying to suggest that the US military has shot millions of people in the ME.
The Iran-Iraq war was supported by the USA, who armed Saddam as long as he promised to attack Iran, to try to take back control of, or at least punish, Iran after the Islamist revolution.
> The idea that Israel is somehow performing genocide is, again, laughable.
This is not just wrong, it's not even debatable today. Every single international organization that has analyzed the situation, from the UN, ICC, ICJ, journalist organizations, NGOs, even medical orgs: they all agree that a genocide is happening there. All senior Israeli officials (president, prime minister, defense minister, finance minister, and others) have said that they intend to punish the people of Gaza for October 7th (collective punishment is a form of genocide). I can find quotes, all from Israeli media or their own Twitter accounts, I had a collection of them once. Plus, they have destroyed every single hospital, university, and high-school in Gaza. They have forced the entire population to move from the North to the South, and then kept attacking them there as well. There is no other name whatsoever for what Israel is doing than genocide.
> They don't want the deplorables from Yemen to shoot at their oil drilling installations. They don't care about the lives of the people on the other side of the fence.
The war is about more than that (those "deplorables" are Iran aligned, a traditional enemy of SA). But it's irrelevant: the problem is that we know they're killing people quasi-indiscriminately (though nowhere near the wanton destruction that Israel unleashed in Gaza, especially in terms of leveling all civilian infrastructure), and yet the USA is still arming Saudi Arabia to facilitate this. So, the USA bears at least some responsibility for the deaths of all of those Yemenis.
> The Iranian revolution happened because people in Iran revolted. Not because US is organized it.
Sure, the Islamist revolution was not caused by the USA. But the coup against Mossadegh, the one that re-installed the US and UK puppet Shah, was indeed organized by the CIA. You had Iran go from a despotic king to a democracy, and then the UK and USA conspired to bring down this democracy and re-install the despotic king. And then proceeded to arm this king, including trying to help him build nuclear weapons. When the people rose again against the despot, the second time they were more radicalized than the first time, which has now made Iran one of the most dangerous countries in the region - including a nuclear weapons program that the USA helped start.
> All senior Israeli officials (president, prime minister, defense minister, finance minister, and others) have said that they intend to punish the people of Gaza for October 7th (collective punishment is a form of genocide). I can find quotes, all from Israeli media or their own Twitter accounts, I had a collection of them once.
> Every single international organization that has analyzed the situation, from the UN, ICC, ICJ
Every single hand-picked organization you mean? The organizations that act on identity politics of being Muslim / Arabs and wanting to trample Israel for religious / identity reasons you mean? Yeah... that's about right. The rest can be explained by Israel being a US ally, when it's not for the fact that Muslims just want to slaughter Jews if given a chance. The countries / governments that campaign against Israel do it so that they can stick it up to the US, but in the way they don't directly confront the US, because they are too scared of the repercussions.
> have said that they intend to punish the people of Gaza
And? Where's genocide in that? Where are the concentration camps, the gas chambers, the paramilitary force guarding the camps and executing prisoners? Where's all that? Yes, of course they want to punish people responsible for Israelis' death. Why wouldn't anyone? Do they send them in droves into gas chambers? -- Absolutely not.
> collective punishment is a form of genocide
Really? By whose definition? What about riding in a sled and saying ho-ho-ho? Is that a form of genocide too? Gazans are being collectively punished by denying them work permits in Israel. Is that a genocide? If so, then I have really bad news for you...
Ultimately, Gazans are the culprit of Gazans' problems. They started this war. They had dozens of off-ramps to stop it. They could surrender any time they want, and their beloved infrastructure would've been spared. They have a death wish, and Israel doesn't feel like stopping them from throwing themselves on the bayonets.
Please choose one international organization that has had people in Gaza and has declared it's not a genocide.
As for colective punishment, I did make a small mistake. This is "just" an explicit war crime, not a direct proof of genocide. Of course, it easily leads to genocide if you feel that an entire people are responsible for an attack perpetrated by a few dozens of terrorists. After all, if all Gazans are responsible for October 7th, doesn't it just make sense to kill or at least harm all of them, per this deranged logic?
Just like like if someone said "Israelis and all Jewish people deserve to die for the crimes committed by Israel's military against Palestine" would be a demented war criminal and instigator to genocide. This is exactly what Israel's leadership is saying, only it's about Palestinians as a people and Hamas as the army instead. And it is just as deranged and disturbing and frankly disgusting.
> Ultimately, Gazans are the culprit of Gazans' problems. They started this war.
Another historical misguided statement. Israel has been occupying Gaza and not allowing it to be recognized as a state, or to control its own borders, for decades. Every year, even before this war, for every Israeli killed by someone from Gaza, Israel has killed two, three, sometimes even ten Gazans (and the balance is sitting at 45-100:1 for the current invasion, not counting all of the mass rape and torture and other crimes committed by Israeli soldiers against detainees). The people of Gaza are not allowed to leave the country unless approved by Israel, not allowed to import or export anything unless approved by Israel, and not allowed to be recognized in any international organization. The same is true of the West Bank. Additionally, in the West Bank, Israel is taking more and more of the Palestinians' lands and settling colonists, who often attack nearby villages as well.
This "war" did not start on October 7th. It started decades ago, and Israel has been the aggressor throughout.
Edit: same person as simiones for personal reasons, not an attempt at dogpiling or anything like that
> "it easily leads to genocide if you feel that an entire people are responsible for an attack perpetrated by a few dozens of terrorists"
3,000 Gazans crossed into Israel on October 7th. Not dozens. Also not close to the entire population of 2.1 million.
Nobody is talking about killing or harming all 2.1 million. In fact nobody is talking about killing or harming any civilians at all. The only dial the Israelis can turn is how much effort they put into avoiding civilian casualties - and by effort, I mean sacrificing Israeli soldier lives instead of air force munitions and/or missing opportunities to target militants, which then leads to these militants attacking Israeli civilians.
Hamas consistently uses the Gazan population as human shields. Israel is already leads and bounds ahead of any other armed force with the lowest ratio of combatant to civilian death ever in an urban setting. What's happening in Gaza is a calamity, but I'm not sure any other nation would handle it better in Israel's place.
This war (no need for scare quotes) definitely started on October 7th. The conflict may not have, but wars have beginnings and ends, and this one was started, by Hamas, on October 7th.
> "Israel has been occupying Gaza"
Nope. Left in 2005.
> "not allowing it to be recognized as a state"
Not allowing how? All Israel asked was a declaration of willingness to live side-by-side with Israel, without hostilities. Are you saying that's too much for Israel to ask?
> "or to control its own borders, for decades"
There are two sides to every border. Israel controls the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border.
> "Every year, even before this war, for every Israeli killed by someone from Gaza, Israel has killed two, three, sometimes even ten Gazans (and the balance is sitting at 45-100:1 for the current invasion, not counting all of the mass rape and torture and other crimes committed by Israeli soldiers against detainees)."
This is not a game. You don't aim for equal numbers. Israel is going for dead or surrendered Hamas militants, and Hamas is going for dead Israeli civilians. The Israelis are better at it. That doesn't make them wrong.
> "not allowed to import or export anything unless approved by Israel"
Yes, because they kept trying to import arms, explosives, and rockets. Look up the Karine-A affair. Apparently, given what happened on October 7th, the control is likely not strict enough.
> "in the West Bank, Israel is taking more and more of the Palestinians' lands and settling colonists"
Sounds like the Palestinians' top interest should be to get a deal struck as soon as possible that forces Israel to remove the settlers. Like they did with the Oslo accords in 92', until Arafat was found to be straight-up lying to Clinton, negotiating with Clinton and Rabin in the morning and directing terrorist attacks in the evening.
--
Leaders of western nations are not generally allied with Israel because they particularly like Jews. They are allied with Israel because Israel is the historical homeland of the Jews, a full democracy with democratic values (...for now), and the most successful decolonization project in history; and it has from day one strived to make peace with any willing country, while successfully defending itself from numerous assaults by its neighboring countries, the Palestinians, and the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies.
> This war (no need for scare quotes) definitely started on October 7th.
This is not a war, it's a one-sided genocidal invasion, part of a decade-long war. There have been periods of ceasefire in this war, but it is the same conflict that has lasted for decades.
> Nope. Left in 2005.
Nope, they are still controlling the border (see below) and periodically bombing Gaza, keeping records of every citizen of Gaza, rationing power and water, etc. That is an occupation, even if there aren't Israeli troops constantly on the border.
> All Israel asked was a declaration of willingness to live side-by-side with Israel, without hostilities.
This is completely facetious. Netanyahu has been very clear that there Israel will not allow a two-state solution, long before the October 7th attack. He even explicitly supported Hamas's stay in power [0]:
> For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.
> The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Here is a quote from him directly [1] about his vision for a Palestinian state, where he is asking for infinitely more than a commitment to not attack Israel:
> “[A]ny final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would have Israel controlling security – overriding security responsibility in the area west of the Jordan.
> [...] “And I said, you’re right. But – I don’t know what you’d call it, but it gives them the opportunity to control their lives, to elect their officials, to run their economy, to run their institutions, to have their flag and to have their parliament, but we have to have overriding security control.”
I think it's obvious this is not a serious proposal that any state would accept. It also happens to be almost exactly one of the things Putin was asking of Ukraine, widely viewed in Europe and the USA as an absurdity.
> Israel controls the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border.
Israel controls all sides of the Gaza border, including Gaza's border with the sea. Even the USA wasn't allowed to bring in medicine and food to Gaza over boat unless Israel approved it. The Gaza-Egypt border is nominally controlled by Egypt, but Egypt has long agreed to follow Israel's requests on who and what is allowed through there.
> Yes, because they kept trying to import arms, explosives, and rockets.
Which they should be allowed to do, if you are claiming they are not under occupation. Every free state in the world is allowed to import weapons.
> Sounds like the Palestinians' top interest should be to get a deal struck as soon as possible that forces Israel to remove the settlers.
The Palestinians shouldn't need to reach a "deal", since the settlements are fully illegal under international law, as recognized even by the USA.
> Like they did with the Oslo accords in 92', until Arafat was found to be straight-up lying to Clinton, negotiating with Clinton and Rabin in the morning and directing terrorist attacks in the evening.
The Oslo accords were a sham. There is nothing about a Palestinian state in the Oslo accords. Israel's leaders had no intention whatsoever to commit even to a vision that would eventually lead to a Palestinian state under numerous conditions. Arafat kept negotiating, but at some point this became apparent. Was he fully committed to the process? No. Was the process ever plausibly going to lead to any good solution for Palestinians even if he had been? Absolutely not. The Israelis were occupying Gaza at the time, and busy settling the West bank. They were adamantly opposed to any kind of third party monitoring or enforcement of any term that they would agree to: who would be foolish enough to sign something like this? Here is a good article on the overall process and how one-sided it was [2], written by one of the US negotiators who was present.
> They are allied with Israel because Israel is the historical homeland of the Jews
Most Jews that founded Israel had lived for hundreds of years, more than a thousand often, in various places in Europe. Israel is about as much their "historical homeland" as Rome is the "historical homeland" of the Spanish. Calling the most clear modern example of colonization a "decolonization" project is preposterous. There were hundreds of thousands of people who had been living in Palestine for generations, who were displaced to make room for the Zionist project. Initially, this was done mostly peacefully; only later, after the British took and then ceded control of the territory, did the forceful removal of Palestinian Arabs start, to make room for the new state of Israel. And then the colonization of this state by settlers from all over the world.
Collective punishment is not a war crime either. Why do you keep talking about something you have no clue about? I've given you an example of collective punishment that Israel did perform (unlike many idiotic claims made by people who just like to make stuff up). Israel canceled work permits for everyone from Gaza be those terrorists or not. How's canceling a work permit a war crime?
You just keep using the words, but you don't understand what they mean...
Now, were there war crimes committed by IDF during the Gaza war? -- Yes, and some were punished for that, while even more were claimed. This is a nature of any war. Were there more crimes than in any other war? How do you even measure and compare these things?
As I lived through several wars, I can tell that Israeli wars, at least from my perspective as a bystander, are very mild in terms of cruelty towards both combatants and non-combatants. This is not a unique Israeli virtue. In general, wars waged by well-to-do countries are less cruel to the opposing side simply because soldiers growing in well-to-do countries are not exposed to the everyday violence as much as their counterparts in poor countries. They are brought up in an environment where human life has intrinsic value, where critical thought is encouraged and so it's harder to brainwash a soldier into a mindlessly cruel machine.
Now, my childhood in Ukraine had seen this, for example, beside other multiple such incidents: on my way back home from school my mom pulled my hand hard in order to get me to walk faster. Before that, I've heard voices of some youth cursing and taunting someone. I also saw some guys kicking something in the mud, but it was too dark and too far to see what that was. Next morning there was a makeshift fence erected by the police around that place, and the school sprouted rumors that a bunch of alcoholics / homeless people were mauled to death at that place.
This was during peace time. And this would've been a typical fate for the homeless / drunks, unless hypothermia got them first. Very rarely would anyone get in jail for that. Imagine now people like that being drafted into the military. First Karabakh war, for example. Or Chechen wars. These were real torture fests. Both sides deliberately looked for more painful ways to kill the opponent. And they made little distinction between combatants and non-combatants. People who signed up for the military were driven by the idea that they will be allowed to kill and torture legally even more so than by money or status.
The horrors soldiers routinely commit in poor countries eclipse anything you could dream up in your wildest dreams living in the EU, US or another wealthy place. Does this mean that war crimes committed by IDF shouldn't be prosecuted? -- Of course not. But you shouldn't infer from there being war crimes any sort of intention on the state level, nor should this be any kind of supporting argument to claim genocide or any other such wide-reaching policy. Putting things in perspective and in proportion: if Gazans were instead fighting Russians, there wouldn't have been any Gazans left in about two months since the start of the war. And it's not unique to Russians. Bet you, that if they wanted the same kind of fight with Egypt, they'd be similarly dying in much larger numbers.
And this isn't even because of the calculus of achieving military objectives. Poorer armies are both more cruel and more crude, while valuing the lives of their own soldiers less. Poorer army would both need to expend more ordnance per target (accidentally missing / hitting unintended targets) and having more vicious soldiers abuse the population being invaded.
> Israel has been the aggressor throughout.
You couldn't be more delusional / ignorant about the subject.
It is you who have no idea of what you are talking about.
Here is article 33 [0] of the (Foruth) Geneva Convention (emphasis mine):
> ART. 33. — No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
> Pillage is prohibited.
> Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.
Here is a summary of more international humanitarian law on the matter [1]:
> Rule 103. Collective punishments are prohibited.
> Were there more crimes than in any other war? How do you even measure and compare these things?
> As I lived through several wars, I can tell that Israeli wars, at least from my perspective as a bystander, are very mild in terms of cruelty towards both combatants and non-combatants.
> Putting things in perspective and in proportion: if Gazans were instead fighting Russians, there wouldn't have been any Gazans left in about two months since the start of the war.
This is all entirely wrong. We can even compare directly, as there is currently a Russian invasion in Ukraine in parallel to the Israeli invasion in Gaza. After almost two years, there are approximately 11 500 civilians killed in Ukraine, of which ~650 are children [2]. There are ~43 000 total killed in Gaza, of which at least ~20 500 are civilians, including more than 13 000 children [3]. Note that the population of Gaza is about 19 times smaller than that of Ukraine (~2.1 millions in Gaza, ~38 million in Ukraine).
And these are just direct deaths from the war. While Russia also has an appalling record of attacking and deliberately targeting healthcare facilities in Ukraine, Israel has destroyed every single hospital or clinic in Gaza. Russia has killed ~234 healthcare workers in Ukraine in two years of invasion [4]. Israel has killed ~765 healthcare workers killed in Gaza, in just one year of war [5].
> You couldn't be more delusional / ignorant about the subject.
Look just at the amount of people killed every year in Gaza vs Israel before this war. Please tell me how Gaza has been terrorizing Israel, when in every single year, Israel has been killing many times more people in Gaza then the terrorists have in Israel [6]. Several human rights organizations have called Gaza "an open air prison" before this war, including this UN special rapporteur [7]. In fact, I challenge you to find a single human rights organization that has done work in Gaza who doesn't consider what Israel is doing to be deeply oppressive.
Political solutions for the rest of the world would appear to include increasing the amount of money you spend on your national defense and/or the amount of money you spend renting rooms at Trump International Hotel Washington D.C to curry favor.
They have their own countries with candidates to consider. They should mind their own business and US citizens should mind theirs. The US needs to move closer to isolationist policies for that reason.
It was true 2 centuries ago. In the age we are now where each country is interconnected at every level of a society (economy, culture, trade, innovation, research, military…) that’s not possible anymore. WW2 showed it. You can’t play head in the sand and think that everything will be fine. Since then every major economy drawbacks showed the world we live today is all interconnected and interdependent. And that’s the same for any other type of backlash or drawbacks from politics, alliances, society…
As the rest of the world, why would I care about elections results on another continent? US should sort their problems themselves. I don't even want a vote, our countries are independent from each other and we both decide for our own.
As someone with a german passport (federal elections next year) and living in france (next presidential in 2027) I do care. Europe is next. Make no mistake, the money that bought this election will try to get the european power houses at a discount, now that they have an ally in the white house.
The money in this election was mostly on Harris' side. It lost. It's not money that decided this election, it's hubris and bold face lying by a charlatan.
I'm an Israeli who was born in Ukraine and lives in the Netherlands. And I care a lot about the outcome of the US election because of Israeli military partnership that is going to be affected by the new administration and because of the new US administration trying to break free from NATO, which will put my livelihood and that of those close to me in danger due to the looming war with Russia. Not to mention that I don't expect to see a lot of the male classmates to show up at the next class reunion because of how US foreign policies will affect the war in Ukraine.
Sadly, this is not true under neoliberal capitalism. With the correct oversimplified messaging and a lot of money, you can influence a lot of people to behave a certain way.
We definitely had microtargeting ads by the trump team to make Harris look bad with conflicting messages, we also define had a musk PAC collect data in an unethical way to eventually do door to door canvas for Trump, and it goes without saying that one of the biggest social network in the US is skewed towards conspiracies (musk posted a video endorsement of Trump yesterday where the Q letter appeared together with Trump and similar bullshit)
There's a story Winston Churchill tells of, of an old man who lived a long life on his death bed surrounded by his family, where one of his grand-children asks him for the dying man's advice about life.
The man thinks for a moment and then says : "I've seen a lot of trouble in my life, most of which never happened".
We can all now think of a million ways in which Trump will be a disaster.
I predict that bad as he will be, most of what we now worry about will not happen.
A lot of people predicted WW3 as soon as Trump took office in 2016.
The reality was that Trump's unpredictability and Machiavellian approach to diplomacy put a chill on many of America's global rivals.
With the Abraham Accords, Trump brought the Middle East a step closer to stability. And despite some rhetorical silliness with North Korea, the situation on the Korean peninsula was more stable under Trump than it became under Biden. Regarding Russia, I feel Russia waited for the election of Biden (a decrepit, predictable leader on the World stage) before invading Ukraine.
I have a rather different view - I thought Trump was so scattered, and his party ungovernable due its internal splits, that he was unable to implement his crazy ideas.
Regarding Russia, I may be wrong, but I think Putin's judgement of the situation was so insular, based purely on everyone agreeing everything would go just fine and no one thinking for one second about what might go wrong and what to do if it did, that Putin's assessment of the situation was not meaningful.
I wish the people who are frustrated would actually come to europe for once. We do need a dose of american optimism and dynamism , but alas you never come guys. What s wrong
I'm not of that opinion. At all. They should stay and clean up their own house. And I don't know what optimism you speak about: the people who I assume are frustrated right now, are not whose optimism I miss.
I was in Europe for a while recently (Switzerland). Thought about staying but when I realized that even if I naturalized, I could never really be Swiss, and furthermore future children would not really be Swiss (even if they too naturalized), and at best perhaps my grandchildren could be considered somewhat provisionally Swiss... not appealing. Too much old, too much history, if you aren't embedded in it you are permanent outsider.
If you work in knowledge fields, I'd imagine it's not too difficult to immigrate to certain countries. But also those fields pay far more in the United States than any other country in the world, so it's a tough thing to commit to.
I remember a fair few moved after the last go around (2016) to Berlin and the ones I met found German bureaucracy incredibly stifling in terms of business, which was a major fumble of the ball.
Same with Brits moving post Brexit vote, finding the German environment difficult to do business in.
Really, Europe needs to be able to capitalise on whatever amount of talent flight from the US happens, instead of … whatever the fuck they are doing currently.
Thank you for saying so! I'm American, but I lived in the Netherlands for 7 years, and absolutely loved it there.
I think the biggest barrier for young Americans is getting through the paperwork. The EU doesn't make it easy to immigrate (legally). You generally need an offer of employment in hand.
I've considered it many times and I cant afford to make so much less money when I have a family. Presumably we'd end up back in the US at some point basically broke.
Estonia. Tech country, advanced, lots of startups, in the capital and in tech companies most people speak English, easily understandable tax system, stable political climate, and a good standard of living including public healthcare.
I live there, happy to discuss if there's interest!
Originally, chance. Over a decade ago I was traveling country to country a year at a time, and had never lived somewhere so far north. I booked a ticket and landed with a suitcase knowing nothing about it (no exaggeration, I had no idea.)
Once there I realised it's an amazing place. Lovely people. Peaceful and quiet. Good rule of law and stability combined with kindness (you can trust the police here.) High tech. Beautiful nature. Very clean air. Lots of forest. Big enough to have a big city; small-town living if you want.
It's very business-friendly and I started a company here. Then, married an Estonian, so I guess I'm staying here now :)
I can guarantee that there is at least one country in [geographic] Europe where you do speak the language, and you are likely to find employment. Whether you would want to accept the change in lifestyle and living standards is another question.
While I appreciate the compliment, I think the issue is mostly that European employers aren't used to paying competitive with the United States for one which helps lead to the flow mostly occurring in the opposite direction. I understand there are also complex reasons behind it making it less viable, like not having as much in terms of private investors willing to fund start-ups and such.
Why not both? We are absolutely an empire in decline. And we just elected someone who spoke about the "enemy from within" and made numerous threats of turning the military on the American people.
It's not been a hugely impactful country in the way that the roman empire was, so at the very least it's not the latter. I know people like to say "pax americana" was a thing, but let's be real - even when the US was actually doing well it wasn't a force for peace and development.
The democrats have done many things that are undemocratic.
* tried to remove trump from the ballot on Colorado
* triple digit amount of filings from the justice department against a political opponent
* refuse to remove rfk junior from the ballot
Is becoming a "political opponent" supposed to be a legal shield against prosecution? Are laws simply unenforceable against politicians who break them to pursue power or abuse their offices?
Absolutely agree. This is like the discussions amongst brits during Brexit.
This is not dems leadership fault. Many of the complaints that "oh they didnt do X or Y outreach" for example, are just strange, given that people OUTSIDE of America were well aware of Dem policies.
Hell, the Dems ditched their candidate, to put forward a better candidate, against all conventional wisdom. A bold and honestly decent move.
They communicated through word and action, and it still made no difference.
> When democracy and the rule of law are considered less important than (insert all the dem ills here), it’s not dems. It’s the voters.
Democracy and rule of law like... covering up the mental decline of a sitting president, foreign leaders lying to the American public saying Joe Biden is fine, only for him to finally expose himself so badly live on TV they jettison the man off the 2024 ticket while leaving him in office? Then imposing a candidate by fiat?
January 6th was absolutely a constitutional crisis, but it lasted less than a day. The cover-up of Biden's mental state was a multi-year constitutional crisis that still has not been fully acknowledged.
When there are two competing harms you fall back to things like who is going to put more money in my pocket. This is 100% the dem's fault.
Fiscally conservative countries (Germany, the Netherlands and others in the Frugal Four) in the EU have for a long time preached countries must "balance their budgets". Now Germany balanced too hard and didn't invest enough, their car companies are experiencing a decline while the Chinese companies are growing, and the rest of their industry got addicted to cheap gas which isn't available anymore. The UK left the EU. And the EU is incapable of creating large tech companies.
Germany is in a slow death spiral. What you are seeing right now is basically the scene from Animal Farm where Boxer, the working horse, has been injured [1]. The burden on the productively working citizens is growing, because money is required to finance the migration policy, oversized healthcare system, the huge pension payments for the ageing population (there is no pension fund) and government spending. Also, tax revenue is shrinking(!). The current government is asleep at the steering wheel, so industry may continue to leave the country, which will again reduce tax revenue, so the government will have to further increase the burden on the productive sector, which will again result in weakening the economy.
The comment I responded to could be interpreted as "America, I don't understand what you're doing" or "America, I disagree strongly with what you're doing". I was responding to the former.
I am simply unsurprised by the result. It was obvious for a long time that he had a good chance of winning and appealed to a lot of people. The result is likely going to show him winning the electoral college and the popular vote. Sounds like democracy doing its thing.
It wasn't surprising based on the polls, no, but I'm fairly sure the "what are you doing?" was intended as a "what's wrong with you?" (or: "I don't understand what you're doing") rather than "I'm surprised". I'm pretty sure plenty of Americans are also asking "what's wrong with us?" – I believe Obama said pretty much that earlier this week or last week.
I understand. After the assassination attempt I was sure Trump would get an easy win, but then Harris replaced Biden and the polls reversed, and I guess I got my hopes up.
I can't speak for OP, but typically "Refugee Bad" is a stance I see regularly among rightwingers.
We really do need a rebuild of the Civilian Conservation Corp, which built out massive infrastructure in the US. Not Potemkim style infra like ghost cities, but infra that is needed and useful. Bridges, dams, solar and wind, dikes, etc. Paired with effective economic and trade policy and you get a golden age for a few decades.
People contributing to the economy and building infrastructure results in a lot of knock on benefits.
Example: I heard the leader of the West Coast Vintage Computer Club remark, recently "Well, the problem is the Department of Education! We need to get rid of that!"
The entire Project 2025 gives me chills, to be honest. I know Trump has distanced himself from it previously, but who knows what will he actually do when given the keys to the country.
The dumber the people, the more they love Trump. It's a legit strategy, but I never thought people who'd benefited from American' education would buy into this shit and pull up the ladder!
I don't claim perfect knowledge of the 30-ish countries in Europe, but I've not heard of any of us reelecting a double-impeached convicted felon where the impeachments were for (1) abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and (2) incitement of insurrection; and the 34 felonies he's been convicted for were related to misreporting finances related to hush money relevant to a potential scandal that could have influenced the 2016 election, while also being on trial for another 54 related to mishandling of classified documents.
Details might differ, the big picture is pretty much the same. The left-wing are shy and try not to annoy the voter base by being too radical, while the right-wing are getting more aggressive and outspoken. And still the right-wing mostly win the elections. Literal fascists in Italy, right-wing populists in Hungary, Slovakia and Netherlands. And the upcoming elections in Germany is not going to be very good either - we basically get to vote between right-wing traitors and just right-wingers. People en-masse don't value freedom, human rights or rule of law any more, I wouldn't think there are any hurdles to get Europeans to vote convicted felons either.
In all fairness, as an EU citizen, if I was American I'd vote Trump. The Harris campaign was very weak and built on identity politics that as we saw is a double edged sword. And why should USA care about Europe? I mean, yes, unfortunate for Ukraine, but it's not necessarily their problem, no matter how much people make it out to be. We in Europe need to grow some balls and not be dependent on who is the next US president.
> unfortunate for Ukraine, but it's not necessarily their problem
It seems like it absolutely is the US's problem, albeit indirectly. If Russia gets the outcome it wants in Ukraine, they'll have access to rich mineral deposits, vast quantities of grain, and nuclear power, boosting their economy and their status as a rival world power to the US. It will signal to Putin that he can be aggressive towards other neighbouring countries with little pushback. The war has resulted in a growing alliance between Russia, Iran and North Korea which is altering global military power dynamics and not in the US's favour. Also, China is watching what's happening with eagle eyes to determine whether to invade Taiwan, which would definitely escalate the US's engagement.
It's coming. Left vs right, rich vs poor, socialism vs capitalism, men vs women, LGBTQ* vs straight, immigrant vs native, religion vs religion (amongst those who still have faith, with the rest as collateral).
As an apolitical person, I've been pretty down and worried about the near future for the last 15-20 years in this post-truth society. The more science and data we have, the more we throw away the rational and retreat into our own emotional blind spots and dark psychological hang-ups. Across the board.
It seems that the web/2010+ era is not good at creating coherent information / pedagogy. We have access to a lot more data, but most people end up regressing as followers of tiktok celebs. Internet created an anthropoligical wild west.
The working class is struggling to afford eggs and incumbent party campaigned on social stuff and the opposition's shitty personal history. Things people don't give a fuck about if they can't afford eggs.
Commodities in the US are often cheap by European standards. Gas for $4/gallon is considered outrageously expensive in the US, meanwhile in the Netherlands it's close to €2/L, or $8/gallon.
> Eggs US increased 2.22 USD/DOZEN [to 4.41USD] or 101.37% since the beginning of 2024, according to trading on a contract for difference (CFD) that tracks the benchmark market for this commodity. Historically, Eggs US reached an all time high of 5.29 in December of 2022.
You're out of touch. Yuppies without empathy for the working class can't understand why the price of groceries (not just eggs, but eggs exemplify the problem) is relevant because you lot are making north of six figures anyway.
Doesn't sounds like they're unaffordable to working class people at all then. They're affordable in the UK and working class Americans are richer than working class Brits.
My Ukrainian friends want the war to stop at all cost, they are on the brink and all help goes to the military effort... my friends in Lvov can't feed themselves and have to go dig mushrooms... they don't care who wins, they just want peace. NATO sustaining that war just to save face isn't peace. Trump is an opportunity to end that war the democrats have sustained.
Ukraine has the motive, means and opportunity to rapidly develop nuclear weapons. From a military analyst I have reason to trust due to long term accuracy and lack of click bait, "months" rather than years.
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, signed by Belarus, Khazakstan, Ukraine, Russia, the US, and the UK, obliging respect for signatories' borders and sovereignty, territorial integrity, economic security… is also what put Ukraine into the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Fellow European here - I think we have different Ukranian friends. All mine were bitterly frustrated at Biden's failure to properly support them militarily, and resigned to having to fight to the death if Trump orders they secede to Russia. There is zero popular support in Ukraine for 'giving up', since it would likely mean mass murder, and the end of Ukraine as an independent state.
I want the Ukraine war to stop, too. However, I do not want it to stop at any cost, if that means that Ukraine will need to surrender its land to Moscow and to agree to being part of Russia (again).
This will send the wrong signal to Putin, and prove his model of acquiring buffer areas around Russia actually works - next on the list are the Baltics, and Moldova perhaps.
I'm going to be in the trenches as soon as they get ideas about Finland - and you do not want that.
European here (French, been helping Ukraine since the full scale invasion started).
We have no business relying on the US anymore. They are too far gone. Their political rhethorics are polluted by Russian propaganda. (Just look at the rest of the comments here...)
It's time to get busy defending ourselves. Time for a war effort that doesn't involve merely wearing flag pins or doing cute street protests.
We need to be funding our own defence. We need to be sending actual troops in Ukraine, not just weapons. No more of this sidelines bullshit.
The prediction markets pretty closely tracked NYT's probability estimate, which seems like the best possible analysis of the available data (partial current results, complete past results, at the precinct level).
Everyone is ignoring the obvious problem: Georgia is a state with 16 EV, and was targeted in 2020 with a scheme that resulted in multiple convictions across multiple states, with members of a conspiracy now serving prison time.
This scheme was in at least 7 states, but focused on Georgia. Although the government was already out looking for a repeat of it, Trump's illegal dealings seem to have been actually effective this time (at least for now, legal challenges in some states are apparently already being filed).
Trump repeatedly discussed via Truth Social and via multiple speeches and interviews that he was planning on doing it again, and had things in place to do it again. Trump also has multiple legal hurdles (a convicted 34 time felon, and facing another 54) that he still has to deal with.
We have no clue if he's been elected President, we don't know if he can serve (the issue with the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment was never handled; the Supreme Court merely ruled that they can't keep him off the ballot, a very narrow ruling), and we don't know if he is going to be serving from a prison cell (since he cannot pardon himself).
What I don't get is why there are so many pro-Trump/anti-American puppet accounts on HN, especially ones that essentially claim Harris lost because shes a woman and/or because her message was one of facts, inclusion, and moving forwards instead of feelings, exclusion, and moving backwards.
She "lost" because people are bigoted, racist, and self-sabotaging and Trump resonates with them. She also "lost" because some states seem to have been lost by merely thousands of votes, and I know for a fucking fact some Democrats did not vote this year because she wasn't a 100% perfect ticks-all-the-boxes candidate for them; somehow Trump being convicted of being a rapist and also the ongoing issue with him having had sex with a 13 year old in 1994 wasn't enough for them.
If Trump becomes the revenge quest protagonist he claims he wants to be, every single Democrat that didn't vote this year, you may not deserve this, but you certainly did this to yourself (and by extension, to all of us).
I'd also like to thank dang for his hard work, I've been seeing a lot of the outright insane comments become dead, and I appreciate that.
"Puppet accounts" meaning controlled by some outside force like Russia or China? I think there's also a fair share of throwaway accounts being used to troll or share very controversial opinions
Maybe it's just my echo chamber but people in India seemed more pro-Trump. This is despite Kamala having Indian roots. People usually take pride when anyone with Indian ancestry doing great on the world stage.
I'd imagine most people can see past origins and skin colors, especially when it's such a shaky argument. You don't support someone just because their mom were born in your country 70 years ago
She hasn't really embraced that, although being raised by her indian mother and presumably closer to her than her Jamaican father, she hasn't her visited her ancestral village or come in her official capacity or been part of any major India - US initiatives.
Indians like diaspora who actually embrace their identity, there is comparable example with Rishi Sunak, his achievements was celebrated because he made the effort to connect, although Indians(in India) would disapprove of his and Tory policies around immigration.
I mean Modi is (was?) the member of a radical nationalist hindu milita from the age of 8. Modi has been popularly elected multiple times so seeing someone similar win the US election is probably what you want to see if you are a BJP voter.
Because Trump is more vocal about having friendly ties with India. He bothered to go out of his way and visit the country, attend public events in it and have diplomatic talks.
Biden and his administration, meanwhile, just conveniently ignored the whole country. He only visited because he had to for the G20 summit, and talks were lackluster.
Of course, India rightly believes that Modi will be able to handle Trump through flattery and appealing to his "strongman" image. This also feeds into the desire and belief that in projecting or using power that is prevalent in India.
Trump is the better candidate for all the strongman governments in the world.
India is extremely conservative due to Hindus being majority. What US considers far-right is considered left-of-center in India. US has gone so far to the extreme left that if Kamala had been elected you would have had full blown Communism next. It had gotten that bad. Too bad you guys don't realize how effed up it all looks from outside your bubble. Especially those countries who have already gone through that Hell (India went through that for 60+ years before we elected Modi). God saved America from total collapse today. That's all I'll say.
It probably does in terms of averting climate change. Of course he might indulge Elon and remove all nuclear restrictions and save the world, who knows. But the chance of persuading the globe towards collective action seems ludicrously out of reach in time to avert pretty severe outcomes.
The world needs to build over 400 nuclear plants starting right now to replace fossil fuel energy needs, even with about a 33% reduction in global energy consumption.
That means a new plant starting up every 3 days. Any slower and it's not enough. This was data from a couple of years ago as well. We're never going to get close, even if Elon himself is modern jesus.
Wasn't this number flawed, because it mapped the energy needs 1:1? Like, the efficiency of a heat pump or a battery is vastly better than current motors or burning oil.
I don't know, but I doubt it, and what you're stating is essentially the opposite, fossil fuels are far more energy dense than any other form of energy, you can't run long haul diesel trucks on batteries, not without an insane network of battery swap stations. The grid infrastructure alone needs to grow at least 4x to manage this.
I can't find the source, but it was in a video presentation by Kevin Anderson, a senior research fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
400 nuclear plants isn't actually that many in terms of numbers, but constructing them is an enormous task.
Leaving aside what Trump can do. It is sad to realize that a person with so many character faults documented in public can reach the presidency of such powerful country. You loose hope on humanity and wonder if liberal democracies can actually last.
The entire world will be affected. Trade wars against China and Europe, the loss of Ukraine, the end of Palestine, war with Iran, potential dissolution of NATO and that's only what's likely. Who knows what other shit is coming down the sewer.
I don't find this kind of cynicism accurate or particularly helpful as a life philosophy. I've personally had the luck to meet people and be a member of organizations that do care and have power to make some difference.
Blue brain washing. I am not holding my hopes high but with Trump we will probably have less wars, less trade wars, less inflation and a better economy.
The sad truth is even if XYZ country "interfered" with a misinformation campaign... they didn't actually manipulate the votes. Enough US citizens voted for Trump.
Can you please not break the site guidelines like this? You've been doing it a lot in this thread, as well as in other unrelated threads, and we've had to ask you this many times before.
> fascists have come to power in the past, or they are just into fascism and prefer that kind of thing.
This, right here, has been the focal point of Dem supporters everywhere - doubling down on the name-calling.
I seriously doubt that more than half the voters are homophobic, misogynistic fascists, but calling them that only stops them from engaging, it doesn't magically cause them to rethink their position and switch their vote.
I guess there is no group of people that trump hasn’t name called (dems, gays, hispanics, blacks, you name it, etc.).
It should’ve been disqualifying when president publicly mocks and physically parodies disabled journalist instead of answering god damn questions.
Taking high road didn’t help in 2016, wouldn’t have helped now.
But this trend is obviously not only in USA. Some political groups and their voters don’t care what is said, and other political group must upstand the highest moral standards.
> I guess there is no group of people that trump hasn’t name called (dems, gays, hispanics, blacks, you name it, etc.).
There are a few groups not there, and those won Trump the election, and Democrats has name called those groups. If Democrats didn't demonize those people then maybe Trump would have lost.
Trump got a larger share of the hispanic vote than in 2020. I'm not convinced that voters really care that much about being insulted on the whole. If you go through the archives, which parts of Trump's voter base haven't been insulted by him at one time or another?
>You see Democrats say white men are the problem all the time
Be serious. You might for some reason think that this is their underlying message, but they don't say this. They even chose an old white man as their nominee, for goodness' sake.
You're right, but boy does it suck when antifa has to not only fight to win, but take the moral high ground and baby the potential fascists so they don't become actual fascists.
I don’t see it as name calling, the word Fascist plainly and accurately describes their positions and strategies. If they sincerely believe this is what is best, why would they see it as an insult rather than a compliment?
It is true that Americans are pretty proud of winning WWII, and label that as defeating fascism… but it is plainly obvious that this current political movement aims to implement exactly what we were fighting to prevent back then. I think this is the main reason it is seen as an insult- people that language implies betrayal of what a lot of Americans died fighting for.
This. Its the arrogance of the Dems that is making people turn to Trump. It's getting on the high horse and calling all Trump supporters trash and drooling fucktards and stuff like that. You are making yourself look bad. Imagine someone isnt so politically active, but hears an elitist dem calling people they dont know a drooling fucktard, what do you think they will think?
I don’t understand, Trump has been explicitly, frequently and consistently insulting to almost every group. That’s how it all started, that is also to a large degree his “saying how it is” appeal. If name calling and arrogance are the root of the issue, how come it has worked so well for Trump? This is a bizarre inversion, I would understand if you insisted on other qualities like wokeness or economic policy, but how are you managing to attribute the exact worst qualities of MAGA to the Dems?
Except Trump calls people all kinds of bad things and it doesn't seem to hurt him.
Conclusion: You cannot arrogantly call someone a drooling fucktard. But you can call someone garbage non-arrogantly while also being a convicted felon.
The MAGA snowflakes prefer the felon, their soft skin can't seem to withstand arrogance.
Maybe, but does it matter? How do you beat fascists? Look at Deutschland before the NSDAP took power. Many people tried to fight the NSDAP, with violence, with writings, with rallies, demonstrations... But all of it didnt work. It only made them more resolute. There must be a better way.
Agreed. Most people want what’s best for everyone and vote that way from their POV. We all have pieces of the truth. The best way to see the whole truth is bringing those pieces together.
1. Don't want war with Russia. Trump's presidency was relatively low-war. He's also expressed a great desire to end the Ukraine conflict. If the Donbas and Crimea is the price of avoiding Nuclear war, I'm on board. The moment that switched me to deciding on Trump was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala.
2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
3. Illegal immigration. I lived in South America for 4 years. My wife is Colombian, we just moved back to the States. Legally. It was a long and arduous process to come in legally. That should be made easier (something Musk at least has espoused) and coming in illegally should be made harder. I know quite a few illegal immigrants and they are being abused by the urban elite to build their summer homes. They're not living a better life and they're stuck here.
4. Federal bureaucracy. The federal bureaucracy has become a parasite on our progress. Just look at what's happening with SpaceX. This ties in with the immigration thing. The problems we have with immigration are actually that the lazy and corrupt bureaucracy takes years to process something that should take 2 hours. (and does! even in "third world" countries like Colombia)
5. Trust. Everyone who hates Trump likes to talk about how much he makes stuff up. But he's authentic. Meaning he rarely reads from a script. He talks off the cuff. He's not controlled. I'm tired of having politicians that basically hate half the country and think we're dumb because we don't like to listen to their corpo-bureaucrat speeches
If only KH voters had been able to formulate their own top 5 reasons (excluding "because the other guy is Trump") for voting her in a similar, eloquent yet succinct manner.
> The moment that switched me to deciding on Trump was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala
Point 1: you're irrational. Good to know.
> 2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
Sounds like an excuse you make because you don't like the concept. Are you against all kind of medical interventions on kids, or only the ones you don't feel comfortable with? Do you tell kids with cancer to wait until they are 18 before they take their own decision?
> I'm tired of having politicians that basically hate half the country and think we're dumb because we don't like to listen to their corpo-bureaucrat speeches
And instead you vote for a politician who ignores all the country and cares only about himself.
Dick Cheney is responsible for murdering millions of Iraqis. This was indisputable up until the moment he endorsed Kamala.
Gender dysphoria is not the same as cancer. We don't let kids get tattoos, buy a beer, have sex, get married until a certain age, but somehow we let them medically transition at 6 years old? Have you ever met a 6 year old? And yes it's happening at that age at alarming rates [1]
I am pretty sure that many bad people voted for Trump. It wouldn't be rational to vote for Harris just because one particular person endorsed Trump. I don't actually think you're irrational, just wanted to note that you apparently felt like you needed an excuse to justify your voting for Trump.
> We don't let kids get tattoos, buy a beer, have sex, get married until a certain age, but somehow we let them medically transition at 6 years old?
You specifically said "18 years old". And now that it is convenient for you, you bring that limit down to 6 years old?
In many countries in the world it's perfectly normal to get tattoos, buy beers and have sex before 18 years old.
I don't actually have an opinion on the subject in general (it's not a question where I vote). I just disagreed with what you wrote. Let me quote it again and explain:
> 2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
You say here that medical gender transition should be forbidden before 18, don't you? It includes 6, but it also includes 17. When I said I disagreed with you, you said "how can you imagine doing that to a 6 years old kid?". You came up with that number all on your own. I was answering to your comment that implied "anything below 18".
Correct, they're misreading what I'm saying. But the 6 year old thing isn't a hypothetical. There are plenty of documented cases of 6 year olds being transitioned by abusive parents and doctors. There needs to be a line somewhere. Right now, in many jurisdictions, there is no line.
I did misread the part about sex, tattoos and beer. Doesn't change the fact that you said (and I quote, third time):
> 2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
Which implies "they can do it once they are 18, not before". When I disagreed with that, you gave an example of 6 year olds, which is very different from 18, isn't it?
> There needs to be a line somewhere.
Now maybe you are misreading me. I don't say that there is no regulation needed. I am just saying that I disagree with the "they abuse kids younger than 18 and Trump will save them" rhetoric.
I'll try one last time. You say "I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition until they are 18" (I won't quote it a fourth time). I say that I disagree (because I could totally imagine a 16 year old be able to consent).
I said 18 because that's the age I think it should be. You could make an argument it could be older, or it could be (barely) younger, 16 is the absolute youngest I would entertain. But my. whole point all this time is that there is no line in many jurisdictions.
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding his use of English. You seem to be interpreting the structure of his sentences in a way that he wasn't intending at all.
Happy to learn, English is not my language. Would you mind explaining to me what this means?
> I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
He was establishing the age of 18 years old as a reference point for the lower bound for when people are able to make adult decisions. His mention of the age of 6 after this, which your primary contention with him seemed to be about, was separate from this and was him trying to make an example of what he sees as how the medical system can be abused when there are not strict age related regulations. I think that it's clear that you disagree with him on the 18 year age restriction, but wanted to clarify that the 6 years number that he used in his example didn't have any significance in its specificity, but was just some number between 0-17.
As a bystander, I appreciate your openness and willingness. However, I'm not sure if the misunderstanding here is a language issue or the issue about kids.
It seems like you view medical sex transitions as similar importance to cancer treatment? I think that is the disagreement the other person has.
I think it was decently clear that they were disagreeing about the age restriction of 18, but my comments were referencing how the two of them had been simply arguing over the semantics of the mention of 18 years of age then 6 years of age after that. There seemed to be a language disconnect getting in the way of their disagreement, even though it was clear they disagreed on the 18 years of age point.
I was mostly trying to point out that 18 years old is pretty old for something that sounds... existential. If a "kid" has tried committing suicide twice before their 16th birthday, I would feel bad telling them "but you see, you can't really tell us how you feel before you're 18".
A Republican president has never made life better for the lower working class. But, that's not the average Trump voter. The average Trump voter is just well enough off that they're happy to stick it to the real working class if it gets them an extra $1000 at the end of the year.
There are beautiful peaceful and kind neighborhoods in every state. I hope you are in one of them. Take a nice walk and have some tea or coffee at a local cafe. It's the local atmosphere and government that matter most.
No, it isn't. Being able and willing to tell the truth has never been the problem.
The man just elected is a derelict. A twice impeached, incompetent, convicted criminal. A tool of Russian propaganda. This is fact. The people who elected him knew this or should have known it.
Anyone can be randomly abusive-- Trump does this all the time. Literally every day. It's documented. It's fact. That's not what I am doing.
> In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they'd be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they'd be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less
likely.
I am also critical of Israel's far-right government and their brutal war, and I was also worried that the protest vote might swing the election. But this narrative is not supported by the numbers we're seeing.
Even in Michigan, Trump has a lead of >100K. Stein is at 36K, and RFK and the Libertarian party have a combined 47K. The Uncommitted Movement mobilized otherwise-unlikely voters.
That's a disingenuous argument. I remember when the Anarchist Cookbook was banned from my public library. It has nothing to do with "banning books," it is banning wholly inappropriate content for children. Do we want manuals on the library bookshelf laying out how someone could possibly build a bomb? NO. So the book is banned on that, its content, not just a broad claim of book banning.
There's a big difference between banning books and deciding that some books, some content, is just not appropriate for kids.
Go take a look at this list[1] and come back make the same claim. Are all these bans to protect the children? Or is it simply that these books go against the politcal views of these so-called "free speech absolutists"? If you're willing to get out of your bubble, type "maga book burning" in google and hit enter.
What's an example of a socially conservative policy you're looking forward to the implementation of? I'm not usually sure what people mean by that specifically, I definitely can't tell here.
Especially considering that Peter Thiel, who was a partner at Y Combinator, was fairly involved in the Republican Ticket. This is very on topic for HN and rightfully so, even if the comments are a mess.
HN is simply following the trend of sacrificing institutional capital for political goals. Trust in media is at an all-time low because they too decided to sacrifice institutional capital for political goals, and now they have neither institutional capital nor their political goals, and that's a good thing.
Please take a day or ten to think your decision through as emotionlessly as possible. You could seriously affect your financial health if you make this decision based on feelings that may not align with reality.
You should check out Reddit, people are talking about leaving the country, stockpiling weapons to protect their lgbtq+ family members, I even saw one women saying she was scheduling a hysterectomy so she doesn't die due to lack of reproductive care.
They are probably all just temporary dramatic outbursts, but still, everyone needs to take a breath. If you didn't have any media you probably wouldn't have even noticed the Trump -> Biden transition.
The guy literally has never conceded defeat from 2020. They marched in the capitol building with confederate flags. He has an enemies list and a clear agenda to avoid prison. He has compliant congress to back him and everyone is on board with the crazy. He won the popular vote FFS.
Yeah you wouldn't know any of that if you hadn't viewed it through a screen. The capitol insurrection had 0 effect on you other than making you angry when you saw it on TV.
This is a bad take. You're essentially making the claim that you shouldn't care about something unless it happens within your immediate vicinity or you are directly affected. Replace "viewed it through a screen" with "read it in a newspaper" or "heard about it from a friend" and the statement is more bad.
Revolutions have happened over less. The King of France lost his head because a small group of angry women marched on his palace, changing the course of history. Even if the net impact of this event is small, it is still _important_ and worthy of awareness.
Trump almost lost his head when they kept trying to assassinate him. His head almost got exploded on live TV and it was barely a news cycle. Dems joked about how they're mad the shooter missed, then went back to pretending they're saving democracy. That's so much worse than the guys walking around the capitol building and shuffling papers, yet people only remember the date of the great January 6th nothingburger because it's the one convenient to the establishment.
I clearly cannot speak to others. I can say that in my friend circles (very left) the _two_ trump assassination attempts were taken quite seriously and we were pulling up live feeds of it within 5 minutes of it being announced.
I generally don't subscribe to the "this event is more important than the news cycles let it be" thought. Its argument boils down to strawman or quickly circles to "news bubbles are a problem".
> That's so much worse than the guys walking around the capitol building and shuffling papers, yet people only remember the date of the great January 6th nothingburger because it's the one convenient to the establishment.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of the day. Security personnel were _murdered_ in the _capital building_. Six people died. President Trump himself labeled it as the "Save America Rally". The _stated_ goal was to defraud an election. I'm sorry, I don't subscribe to your view that it was an event blown out of proportion. It is very much just as noteworthy as every Revolution Precursor I have ever heard.
As an aside, I find the comparison of the Trump Assassination Attempt and the Jan 6 Uprising as if one is more important than the other is false. Both are very much reprehensible acts of political violence aimed at destabilizing the American institution. Bluntly, they both terrify me. That one seems "overblown" says more about your political beliefs than you think.
Sure, but will it still be considered an all-time high in a year? Will the alternative investment even beat inflation? All I'm saying is be careful. I have experience here, having parked money outside of the market for a few years because of a gut feeling that never materialized. If you don't need in the money in the short-term, the conventional wisdom is "time in the market beats timing the market".
I assume the markets will do great in the short term until MAGA takes power and starts breaking everything. I'll miss the volatility and fade any stress. I've made a bunch of money and have no worries.
Like by having money to do things. It might be better to put it into DJT for a couple years, but careful with the risk. I'm sure the markets will be fine short term ... until they aren't. Just as it was before ... and how it is every time modern GOP has power. They crush the economy. All red states are in the shitter. Blue states swim in $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
He spent like crazy to pump the market, it collapsed soon after he was out of office. Dems have fixed it like always and we're at all time highs again.
idk what you mean. trump wrecked the economy with spending. he created the largest deficit in history and doubled the debt. this caused an inflationary bubble that popped and has been repaired since. now he's back to borrow more money and double the debt again
what powers does the president have to create a deficit? what specifically did he do that doubled the debt?
i ask this rhetorically, because of course the president doesn't have these powers.
i'm not defending trump, i wish he didn't win, i just think hyperbole is contributing to people wanting to support him, because people feel lied to constantly
every single bill and order he put his name on. he literally sent checks to each citizen with his endorsement. he signed off on all the spending again to reiterate. it's all on him, especially the fraud ppp loans.
you mean the checks that both parties voted unanimously for, and the act that allowed for PPP and was also voted for unanimously, is only trump's fault? we're pinning that on him when literally every single person in the senate voted for it?
he's still bragging about the tax cuts that cost a lot. he could have negotiated or not signed the bills and orders. they did increase debt big league.
Maybe it wrecked the economy but all my US stock done extremely well over that span of time, even excluding the big crazy bump a bunch of them had over the first year of covid.
I expect the stock market to bloat like hell for a year or two at the expense of pretty much everything else.
Unfortunately I agree. With things like climate policy out of the way US stocks could end up doing very well over the next couple years at the expense of future generations, and probably the world.
Its really hard to parse out why stock prices are higher when the currency has been debased so aggressively through money printing. When adding trillions each year in new money you could easily see prices go higher simply because (a) the dollar lost value and (b) most of that new money ends up in the hands of major corporations.
You can look to CPI and inflation data to say that stocks have out competed inflation, though at least right now many Republicans and MAGA supporters don't trust anything coming out of the federal government so the CPI data isn't a metric they would use for comparison.
In my experience, there's been a surprisingly large number of conservatives the last few years that deeply distrust our monetary system. Stock prices just don't mean anything with that view.
It’s because companies in the S&P 500 have pricing power, meaning they can raise their prices to outpace inflation.
Which means if their revenue growth was going to be X regardless of inflation, it’ll still be X in an inflationary environment if you adjust for inflation.
It’s really that simple. The stock market growth always outpaces CPI growth, unless Big Business is under some other kind of threat.
Since this round of inflation came from printing money, not from extrinsic shocks (although there was a brief energy shock two years ago), you’d expect the S&P 500 to outperform CPI, which it did. It’s not ^too^ mysterious.
While I get the market effects you're talking about, it still hinges on CPI as a goal post. My point was that there's a surprisingly large number of people that completely distrust CPI or any other data coming out of the federal government.
And honestly I do understand many of the technical concerns with CPI. Dig into how the calculations are made and how much room they have to manipulate numbers between changing the basket of goods and adjusting prices to account for various factors that they deem explanatory for a portion of price changes and the CPI begins to look a lot less reliable as a long term metric.
I'd suggest prices are higher 1) because they are printing money creating the illusion of wealth 2) other countries are printing money at a faster rate 3) prices on everything are high so might as well invest in the stock market 4) the next generation can't afford a house so park money in their broker for later.
I definitely agree on the first two, less sure about the later two.
Those with plenty of money may be choosing to park it in stocks, but higher prices mean more people don't have that expendable cash. I'd be really surprised if younger people feeling the most pain from housing prices have a broker at all.
I agree but if you zoom out far enough, it's always up and to the left. Always. Consider when you might actually need that liquid capital available before panic selling everything. Hedge your bets. All that jazz.
I'm pretty much panicking over another Trump presidency, but simply selling every stock you own is almost certainly a bad idea.
First, there's a pretty good chance that whatever else goes wrong the Republicans absolutely care about keeping stock prices up.
Second, even if the market does crash, having an index fund is at least a good way to insure that you more or less keep up with everyone else. E.g. it prevents a scenario where you get dropped into a worse economic situation and then left there when things eventually improve.
Well, I guess that shows our collective feeling toward democracy. Is it too much to hope that USAv2 adopts a parliamentary form of government? Or is it necessary to step through an authoritarian phase first?
For the sake of my kids I’m glad we live in a blue state, so we might be somewhat insulated from the immediate consequences. Even then, I’m glad I’m a gun toting liberal and have the means to defend myself against those who wish me and my family harm.
At least 30% of any blue state voted for Trump. If you actually believed 30% of the walking public wanted to do your family harm, you'd be in another country.
You're just being dramatic because you think everyone who voted for Trump is stupid.
Try taking a different tack. Maybe over 50% of the country is not stupid and don't wish you harm? Your family will be stronger if you try to understand your fellow man.
What about me? I'm gay and they have promised to make this a christian nation - they think God made me wrong so how am I supposed to feel when he wins like this?
I'm supposed to think my fellow man has made any attempt to understand me? I'm not supposed to be afraid after they support someone who has said they want me gone??
I'm a white man in America, the most powerful country in the history of the world and I'm considering fleeing this place like a f*king refugee - it is obscene that I'm in a position to even be considering such a thing.
I’m not calling anyone stupid. I’m saying that when they say hateful things about my daughter and her right to exist, I take that threat seriously. When they say they won’t protect me because of how I voted, I need to plan on protecting myself.
I’m just listening to what you say and believing that you really mean it.
> I guess that shows our collective feeling toward democracy.
It doesn't, it shows a majority reject major narratives that have been used. Part of that rejection of the idea that an authoritarian regime just came to power.
If you are worried about violence, consider the origin of the assassination attempts.
The desire for Trump to remain a marketable symbol without actually having him rule is one of the only taboos left. I suspect the hardest he has ever listened was when Pompeo described precisely the box he was allowed to think in.
You say that but then demand we don’t call such people stupid. The actions at the Capitol were very well documented. It’s implausible that people see it for anything other than what it was. The obvious conclusion is that these people support the attempt.
I support free speech, you may call people what you like. As you say, people see it for what it was and voted that way yesterday. I do find it implausible (even radical) that the majority of people in America support a coup attempt and find it more likely that they don't believe what they see on the news any more.
With a straight face and having factual evidence of what Trump did to the Supreme Court, you’re accusing Biden of being authoritarian? Your man is about to pardon himself rather than be subject to the same justice system the rest of us are.
Having bogus lawsuits, especially from politically motivated judges (nyc) ruins our trust in the judicial system. Forget Trump, just look at lawsuits against Elon.
The world we were born into ended yesterday - you'll see how. The world is very likely going to war bc Trump isn't going to do anything to stop them. He said he'd leave NATO - the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world that we own. He is about to dismantle our empire.
I think voting for Trump was in American. I might be arrested someday for this comment.
I genuinely hope every non-racist that voted for Trump gets exactly what they want because I genuinely believe they will rig future elections so that Dems don't get the chance to take office again.
The only choice that made any sense at all. America is about to experience it's absolute Golden Age.
2026 will be the USA's 250th anniversary, we'll put men on the moon for the first time in 50+ years, and we'll land a rocket on Mars. The Supreme Court is secured for decades, immigration reform will now be swift and bipartisan, and we're moving manufacturing back to the US, including 4nm chip manufacturing with TSMC, avoiding escalation with China on that front.
We are truly living in the best possible timeline, I'm literally so pumped and excited for the future of our country and world, and I'm ready to start building for the future!!!
Yeah, it was really impressive how a law, passed in 2022, managed to travel back in time to 2019 and convince TSMC to start applying to build a plant. It then travelled back in time to 2020 to get Arizona to approve construction. Really an impressive bit of legistlation.
> America is about to experience it's absolute Golden Age.
> 2026 will be the USA's 250th anniversary, we'll put men on the moon for the first time in 50+ years
lmao this is exactly everything that's wrong, we keep looking back at the real golden age and want to do things that are now meaningless to celebrate random anniversary numbers, just "because". Putting a man on the moon today won't have a fraction of the glitter it had back then, not even 1%
Can the doomers relax? He is mentally unstable and egomaniac, but do you really think the US is this fregile? Have you met CEOs and politicians? most of them are egomaniacs and some are mentally unstable. If the system could not handle them in power the country would have crumbled long ago...
Will it be better or worse? who knows. but definitely not OMFG ruined everything gone. Have a day off and calm down.
I think you underestimate the guy. Or do you believe that a president that orchestrated a riot on the Capitol is just a minor issue? The guy has learned a lot from his first presidency, he has had 4 years to think about what went wrong and now we're about to experience it.
I think this short video explains a lot - basically the establishment Democrats look after their donors & don't do much for everyday people who are struggling economically - hence the appeal of Donald Trump who promises to shake things up & generates hope - for many voters this "trumps" his bad qualities
Can we talk about how the voter turnout for the GOP and Dems both follow linear patterns in the last few races, except for Dem turnout in 2020? How do we explain the statistical anomaly, other than the obvious?
It was the obvious: Mail-in votes favor Democrats. There were more available mail-in vote systems in 2020 due to covid.
Mail-in voting favoring democrats is well known, and is why the Republican party vilifies it and and anything that may be biased toward Democrat votes.
Except, mail-in voting does not favor democrats. It was about even, and the GOP actually had an advantage in many states in both the mail-ins and the election day votes. This bit of folk wisdom is done. Republicans have embraced early voting, and it only made more GOP voters.
Is this a joke? It's widely known by anyone paying attention that Democrats embraced mail-in voting much more aggressively than Republicans, especially in 2020.
What's obvious? It was a weird election coming out of COVID. Trump also received a huge amount of votes, maybe more than he'll get this time. Should we investigate him now since Harris is back down the 60s? Where did all her votes go?
I'm being downvoted into oblivion for stating "the obvious" elsewhere in this thread. Look, I don't know if they actually stole it, but after last night, many people is having your exact same thoughts. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever from a statistical standpoint.
Yeah, I never believed any of the "stolen election" diatribe, but after last night, I'm actually starting to change my mind on that. I now think it's actually very possible.
I don't buy it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There were investigations by the GOP into 2020 voter fraud for the last 4 years, and nothing of note was discovered. To go from that lack of evidence to large amounts of fraudulent votes is a bit much for me.
Other explanations could include things along the lines of unemployed people/people at home (COVID) having more time to get into politics. Or, this election cycle burning them out, or Gaza, or all of the above and more.
For prosecution, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As Americans think and look back upon the course of history in deciding whom to vote for, really their own gut feeling is all that is necessary. I mean, we all know that people like Al Capone tread very carefully to avoid any direct criminal liability. Yet, we all knew he did it, despite the lack of incontrivertible evidence that was admissible in court.
> For prosecution, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I was thinking more along the lines of, for me to believe the claims.
No prosecution would have been necessary outside the court of public opinion. I mean if there is fraud, prosecute it no matter who did it. But Trump hired an investigator for the news cycle, and the guy found nothing.
Notice also the lack of sudden 100% Trump vote drops and the lack of sudden shifts. Instead the election went off like literally every other election in our lifetime where most states are called on election night, and those that aren't are pariahs and we're all left wondering what the hell are they doing?
No 'pipe leaks'. No videos of counters covering up windows. No sudden last minute rule changes. It was... unremarkable and normal.
I think this is going to go down like the Kennedy - Nixon election where the allegations of fraud seemed made up at the time, but a few decades later, after we've calmed down about the candidates, we will uncover the truth. Whether it was enough to shift the 2020 election ... who knows, but the truth has the habit of coming out eventually.
I mean 20 million people sat at home? Really? That's an insane amount.
Well over ten million votes are still yet to be counted on the West Coast. Is there a reason why you haven't considered this? If you add uncounted votes then the total count is only 5 million less than 2020. Such swings have certainly happened before between adjacent elections, such as from 2000 to 2004.
I would assume Trump has improved his margins in California. When I visited my in-laws a few weeks ago (hispanic immigrants with a huge family), many had voted trump and trump fervor in the town (Santa Maria) was higher than ever.
Yes, in 2020 there were 100% Harris/Biden drops, but I am saying that this election, I don't know of any 100% Trump drops in counties with thousands of votes. That's why there's no contesting here.
The game we have now is you win by the most voters, might as well be the most voters to sit on a scale and weigh more, wins. It is Mob rule. A significant portion of the electorate has no real idea of what is being asked, nor if its true, just that it sounds good. And we will never get good governance out of that.
"Can everyone acknowledge" is such a weird phrase, just like "can we all agree". No, we can't, this isn't how things work, everyone has a right to their own opinion etc.
Ok, fair enough. I was going from the assumption that political posts generally are removed from hn. But, clearly there's just some nuance that I didn't recognize.
It was actually flagkilled almost immediately, but was eventually revived. I assume this particular one was picked because it was the first article posted about the topic.
There were posts left up on many divisive issues with a "Be kind" message on them.
I think what you are thinking of is a "election stolen, storm the capitol" posts :)
Hijacking this to express my admiration towards the people developing and running HN: 7k comments in a single page. You did it. Normal HTML+CSS+some JS scales insane well.
Lina Khan has been fantastic imo, even for tech. I think she forces companies to compete where we actually want competition, and not let us rely on insane levels of lock in
Such as preventing Microsoft from buying Blizzard to prevent a monopoly on checks notes... video games? :-)
If you're worried about a 'monopoly' on Call of Duty, then I guess it's great. Otherwise I sincerely don't understand why the tech community would be supporting the FTC policies of the past 4 years.
Her strategy denies liquidity in the startup ecosystem. The very thing that enabled sillicon valley to become what it is. Generations of founders moving on and create new companies in new markets.
Yeah. Tech employees and tech companies themselves are consumers of other tech. Lina Khan was what we needed for a long time, and it's a bad thing for everyone that she will be unable to finish what she started.
He has not won yet.
Perhaps there may be a last minute change.
If the results remain roughly where they are now, then
that is one important positive outcome..
and I would say exactly the same if the election
had gone the other way.d
If it had been as close, or closer than last time,
then who becomes presient is nearly random, as WP
once wrote, and an enormous amount of drama would
ensue. Which it might still do depending how tight
the swing states are.
Even if recounts or whatever showed the results were changed they would be challenged in the courts until eventually Trump's supreme court would hand him the win anyway.
Democracy keeps giving both sides a chance, meanwhile both sides always complain about the end of democracy when the other side wins.
Another curious thing on both parties, when they lose they always ask "why did the other side win?" instead of trying to understand why their candidate lost.
All: please make sure you're up on the site guidelines before commenting: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That means editing out snark, swipes, and flamebait. Or you can simply follow this metarule, which is also in there: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
This thread could be worse (ok, it could be a lot worse) but I'm still noticing people breaking the rules. Please follow them instead—it will be a better experience for all of us, including yourself.
It's the economy, stupid:
-Inflation is not prices; it is the rate of change in prices. Low inflation doesn't imply low prices. -Aggregate statistics don't necessarily explain individual outcomes.
The Dems failed on this count massively, and have, for maybe the last 40 years, which is about the amount of time it took for my state to go from national bellwether (As goes Ohio, so goes the nation) to a reliably red state. This cost one of the most pro-union Senators (Sherrod Brown) his job.
I don't think that the problem is that Democrats didn't explain the technical definition of inflation well enough. The problem is that people can't afford to buy things. Having better infographics on how inflation is the derivative of price doesn't really solve that problem.
> I don't think that the problem is that Democrats didn't explain the technical definition of inflation well enough.
it's clear that at least half all American voters don't understand technical definitions or explanations (this was Obama's problem too). "Drill Baby Drill", "Lock her up", and "cheap gas" is about their comprehension level.
Yep. They're voting on emotion, not logic or facts.
Emotions are much stronger.
Who is "they"?
Democrat non-voters
Trump voters
Yeah, emotions like "I wish I could afford to buy food."
You can experience that emotion and then logic your way to "it probably doesn't make sense then to vote for massive tariffs." If you don't logic your way to that next point, then yeah, you're making a bit of an emotionally-tainted decision.
Except that at the the lower income bracket, there are many more Democrats than Republicans (58% to 36% according to Pew[0]). So I don't think the election turned on poor people not being able to even afford food.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship...
That's from 2023, and it sure as hell isn't how people voted this time: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1535295/presidential-ele...
This (incorrect) attitude is another big reason beyond economy for the D loss.
as an outsider this is the biggest thing.
It's like D-voters don't even understand how unhinged they are.
"Everyone is stupid but me" doesn't do anyone any favors and doesn't fix any problem.
"I have the makings of a plan" is 100x more attractive to people who need change.
If that 5th grader rhetoric, and lack of any comprehensible policy, didn't resonate with Trump voters, he wouldn't have used it consistently. So the criticism is on point.
We can debate whether Harris' proposed policies would have worked or not, or good for the economy or not, but at least they were comprehensible.
Isn't it amazing?
"Chat, is this real?"
That's my point! By talking about how great they are doing on inflation, the DNC campaign was LOSING votes because people experience prices which don't go down when inflation is "normal".
They lost because they forgot about wages and retirement savings.
Inflation was uneven. It impacted prices but not wages or savings. It reduced citizen wealth directly and transferred it to corporations and the already wealthy.
They wanted to publicize the problem but not actually take the cure. Now they have zero mandate in any institution. That's what selling out your base gets you.
One factor that is invisible to most posters here is that SNAP (food stamps) are adjusted for inflation each year in October. This year, using official government figures, SNAP benefits were increased by a maximum of one dollar per person. They might as well have left them the same as last year but instead went with the insultingly low one dollar increase. SNAP recipients, who are traditionally much more likely to vote for Democrats, saw that as a middle finger to them and their food security needs. It's like leaving a dime as a tip instead of leaving nothing. To them, it was a sign of contempt.
Most of Hacker News doesn't run in social circles where people are clipping coupons and going to several different stores to shop the best deals just so they can afford to eat that month, but for nearly forty million Americans who receive SNAP benefits (read that number again and let it really sink in), that's their reality. The administration looked either out of touch or even spiteful by doing a one dollar benefits increase to account for the past twelve months of inflation. I'm sure there are plenty of other similar things that are hurting the working poor that are invisible to those spewing scorn at voters who weren't concerned more about wars around the world and luxury beliefs.
No one I've pointed this out to has been able to empathize with these people yet, most coming up with glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won. Until they can understand the plight of the people who received that one dollar increase and why it was so psychologically devastating to them the month before the election, they'll never understand why their candidate lost. Instead they'll keep pointing to GDP, the low employment numbers made possible by people working multiple jobs to survive, and how great things are for the wealthy instead of trying to actually get in touch with the daily lives of those they rarely interact with. Maybe insulting these people and calling them stupid and evil a few more times will be what finally makes them forget about their food insecurity.
As a non-US citizen, I find it shocking that such a high number of US citizens need to live on food stamps, so I checked the numbers.
Indeed, it's 41.2 million out of a total of 334.9 million U.S.-Americans, or 12.3 % or more than one in ten folks - that this is more than one in hundred suprised me because the US are by some counts the "richest" country on the planet.
It's merely the country with the richest few, perhaps this calculation is just a way to show statistically what many believed all along, namely that the so-called "American dream" is a pipe dream for most, in the sense that the majority of people simply fund a tiny fews success in the way lottery ticket buyers fund a few select millionaires that don't deserve it.
In case anyone is curious, the $1 is the increase in the maximum SNAP benefit per month for an individual, from $291/month to $292/month. (The increases for larger households are similarly small.)
This is not the actual increase of the benefit amount. In particular, it appears the cost of living adjustment this year is 2.5%. I have been unable to find statistics on how many people/households actually receive the maximum amount, but I don't have a particular reason to believe it is large. (The average benefit amounts are significantly below the maxima.)
Tldr: the average SNAP benefit amount received by people has increased and will increase by significantly more than $1/month.
>No one I've pointed this out to has been able to empathize with these people yet, most coming up with glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won.
Right, because how do you empathize with someone who gets $1, and their response is: Oh yeah? Well fine then I'm going to vote for the person who wants to take away literally EVERYTHING to show you!
It is the definition of cutting off your head to spite your body.
I completely understand and empathize with someone on SNAP not getting what they need to cover the insane pricing increases we saw greedy corporations force upon all of us and wanting that rectified. But if your solution to that is to either not vote at all, or intentionally vote for the guy who has literally told you his plan is to gut all social services... I'm not sure what to tell you beyond whatever empathy I DID have for you is gone and enjoy sleeping in the bed you just made for yourself. I, and most of the folks on HN are going to be perfectly fine. Those folks that were on SNAP? Good luck...
> Right, because how do you empathize with someone who gets $1, and their response is: Oh yeah? Well fine then I'm going to vote for the person who wants to take away literally EVERYTHING to show you!
Consider how the program actually works. You have a job and pay taxes, but don't make much money, so the government takes the taxes you paid and gives them back to you. But you have to apply for the program, and then spend the money (which was originally yours) on only the things they tell you to. And there is more than one assistance program so you have to apply to them each individually. Then each of the programs have their own phase outs if you make more money, but the phase out rates combine to a very high de facto marginal tax rate, which means if you're still struggling you can't get out of it by working some extra hours because that just causes you to lose your benefits. It's a poverty trap.
Then prices go up by 20% or more, but you still can't make any more money or you lose your benefits. In response your benefits are increased by one dollar.
Are people even wrong to want to blow all of that up and replace it with a tax credit?
When your life is a constant struggle for survival/constant crysis you react you don't think. We don't typically blame someone for responding/reacting out of a place of crysis. Unless, apparently, you are a Democrat blaming the poor/working class for not embracing the party line of things are great just look at this economic report versus the guy who at least heard them (even if just to redirect/leverage their suffering into blaming out groups to gain himself power).
BTW empathy is when you can feel for those you don't relate to/have attachment to. Empathy is when you make a genuine effort to understand and connect, even across differences. It's not a concept only for people you already relate to.
Yeah, what exactly are we supposed to do or feel about people who absolutely refuse to vote or act in their own best self-interest, and instead do the opposite, acting self-destructively? The best thing to do with them is to get away from them, because their self-destructive actions could easily affect you too.
The entire point of empathy is making a genuine effort to understand and connect, even across differences. I don't think it is what you seem to think it is, reserved only for people you already relate to/understand.
You care harder, because thats the only way to ever win them back. It rarely works, but the hate route never does.
If people never have a shot at redemption, why would they ever try to redeem themselves?
But when "getting away from them" actually means belittling them, berating them, while cuddling with the corporations that exploit them ("you" doesn't mean you personally here, of course), you're not actually away from them. You're in their face 24/7, increasing resentment. And if you take their taxes, the value their work produces, or the fear of unemployment their unemployment keeps alive, respectively, while also talking down to them in their absence to an echo chamber, you are so not ignoring them.
And mind, the whole campaign was based on "Trump is worse". That is also hardly ignoring someone.
No one is touching welfare. It's a bedrock of Trumpism. Most of his base can't survive without it.
> glib replies about how everything for those voters will be even worse now that the other candidate won
Here is something I saw on Bluesky, where all the good people are:
"To all the misgueded twits who ignored every red flag, caved to your worst selves, and bought into all of the most obvious of Trump's insane lies: Everything that happens from here on out. The family members you lose, the suffering, the confiscation of your freedoms of at the whim of your dictator. It's all on you. You can no longer falsely blame dems, antifa, lgbtq, or immigrants for everything you set into motion with your prejudice and cowardice"
It goes on like that, and ends with
"Hope it was all worth it, you hateful fuckwits. Enjoy the ride"
That's just the most widely shared and liked on I happened to be shown by Bluesky, I've seen this repeated in individual comments in many variations. Basically, "at least we'll burn together and it'll be your fault."
> they'll never understand why their candidate lost. Instead they'll keep pointing to GDP, the low employment numbers made possible by people working multiple jobs to survive, and how great things are for the wealthy instead of trying to actually get in touch with the daily lives of those they rarely interact with.
as Cenk Uygur said here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j7m0tbZJgE
So she put out some good things in the beginning, and we were excited about it. She had some economic populist policies about housing and price gouging etc. [..] She then turns around and sends Mark Cuban all over CNBC to go, remember, I love business interests. [..] She's never going to do the price gouging plan. They swear up and down on CNBC and all over cable news. Well, then she lost her lead. Why do you think you're getting the lead, why do you think you lost the lead? No, they'll never figure it out.
While I agree with your overall comment, in that clip Cenk says that picking Tim Walz as VP was the obviously right thing to do.
I don't think that's as obvious as Cenk seems to believe it is.
Did they pick $1? Isn’t it a math formula based on various consumer goods, which may it may not be right.
Someone decided that going through with an obviously insultingly low $1 increase was a good idea.
to play devils advocate, if that person had decided to go with $0 instead that there would be equally bad headlines/interpretations of "Instead of allocating the formulaic $1 we are entitled to inline with all other changes over X years, they squandered it on Y"?
Nearly 40M ? It was 41.8 million as of 2022.
The media wasn’t talking about that, it was repeating in a loop: “The economy will be better with Trump”, including the media in the far left.
So I'm in the Philippines. These things have far-reaching effects outside of the US because of the dollar. This is why Filipinos (and Latinos, and Muslims) love Trump. A female Filipino business owner gushed to me a few hours ago (awkward!) about how she's happy because now she'll be able to afford to fuel her car (gas/petrol is notoriously expensive in SE Asia for most people).
Point is, business, markets and consumers vote their interests. Look at Wall Street, Bitcoin, &c. in the hours leading up to the election.
There’s no far left media in America?
And with tariffs incoming, this is going to get worse, not better.
Trump is very serious about tariffs, and the president has more unilateral authority in this arena than folks realize, he wouldn't even need an act of congress to do alot in this arena
In retrospect it's baffling why Dems didn't hammer home this point more: Tariffs will increase prices.
Suggesting tariffs was his way of saying "stuffs so messed up I will make radical change" to the angry working class. It also harks back to the early 20th century which he loves.
The Dems didn't really have an inroad to that demographic. Suggesting federally granted home buying credits just sounded like another financial scheme from on high and missed the mark entirely imho; there was no bigger economic discussion happening there.
No, tariffs are his way of saying "magic wand make economy good" to people who don't (but can and should) know better.
Probably because they don't have much leverage in this area, with Biden continuing some of Trumps policies on tariffs.
Targeted tariffs as part of a trade war is significantly different than the proposed universal tariffs to "eliminate taxes" that he's proposed.
AKA: we figured out how to pass a consumption tax which disproportionately hurts poor people without calling it that because we know it's universally unpopular. When billionaires effective tax rate drops to what will probably be 1%, the wheels are going to REALLY fall off.
It isn't the poor that fund either political parties.
Isn't it Biden that increased tariffs on certain imports from a certain country to 100%?
Just EVs, and how many Chinese EVs were we importing before the tariff increase? All I can think of are some Polestar models and the entry level model 3.
No arguments there. I certainly expect tariffs will lead to inflation getting much worse.
View the tariffs as carbon tax that represent the true cost of goods being produced in a coal heavy country and transported on boats that burn the most dirty kind of oil possible. It makes the whole thing look quite nicer and the economic cost a bit more worth it.
The per-ton CO2 emissions of those boats is still much, much lower than by truck or rail. Large ships are insanely efficient at moving cargo; that's why it's so economical to transport stuff across the planet.
Isn't the question, a/ travels across the globe + rails and truck vs b/ maybe rails + truck ?
Not arguing that the carbon tax is legit. It hasn't been proven yet that it isn't just a way to collect money while pretending to do something about the environment.
Well but maybe Chad in Nebraska would appreciate buying a Halloween decoration for $0.50 on wish!?!
We should maybe just reconsider in general what kind of thing is economically viable
If it hits major economic metrics in a way that makes him nervous, watch out for what he might do to the Fed. So long to a relatively-depoliticized institution. He was already grumbling about them in 2020. Hell he might just lead with politicizing the Fed. Guess we’ll see.
>Hell he might just lead with politicizing the Fed. Guess we’ll see.
Why would he not? It's not like he respects institutions such as the Supreme Court. And what repercussions has he ever faced for the destruction of norms and guardrails? If anything, he gains even more support.
I’m banking on the resulting stupid-low interest rates to refi my mortgage to help survive the guaranteed crash after. Not even joking. Great sympathy to those for whom that’s not an option. I figure there is an outside chance that such a move will fail to drop rates to the level it normally would because banks will also be worried, in which case I guess I’m just screwed as much as everyone else.
Damn whoever used that “may you live in interesting times” curse once to many times.
What disrespect has he shown, ever, for the Supreme Court? And if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return, why wouldn't you destroy those norms? After all, I voted for him on that basis.
> all of our tax dollars to NATO
Total US spending on all defense, not just NATO, is ~$900 billion or ~13-14% of federal spending. NATO has a total annual budget of less than $4 billion and we cover something like 15% of that budget, less than 0.001% of military spending and some infinitesimal portion of overall spend.
> for nothing in return
The US gains incomparable wealth from controlling the global prime currency. Part of the enforcement of this primacy is 750 military bases in 80 countries, giving the US a force projection capability greater than any empire in human history. For the US, NATO is just a just an organizational tool to manage resources among it's allies.
> And if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return
All your tax dollars? How much do you think the US spends on defense without giving anything to NATO? Do you think that’ll somehow decrease if you leave NATO? It just means you’ll have to handle everything yourself. At least currently the US gets to charter about half of all their craft from various European allies.
Not for the justices, but for the institution of the Supreme Court. He files frivolous lawsuits and appeals designed to give his appointees the opportunity to legislate from the bench (e.g., "official acts"). He appoints blatantly partisan judges at all levels of the federal judiciary. And he sabotaged the FBI's inquiry into Kavanaugh's history, which is standard for any appointee at that level, by having any concerns be routed to the White House instead of handled by actual investigators. In short, he's demolished any pretense that the Court exists to enforce laws fairly, and has turned it into an unapologetic arm of the MAGA Republican party.
> if the norms mean giving all of our tax dollars to NATO for nothing in return
We do not give our tax dollars to NATO, at least not in any meaningful way. NATO's entire budget as an organization is about $4B/year, which includes valuable shared command/control systems. For the most part, we fund the American military, and we commit to using it in concert with our allies in certain scenarios.
In exchange, we get incredibly valuable hard and soft power. We get access to land in Europe to use as bases, which are staging areas for potential worldwide threats (e.g., an imperialist Russia). We get shared intelligence. We get goodwill with the rest of the West, so that they'll join our trade pacts. We get commitments of Polish tanks and British spies and French manpower if there ever to be a hot war, so that the US can focus on what it does best (air and naval superiority).
But also, you're the only one who brought up NATO. There are myriad unrelated norms that Trump broke the first time around, and will certainly break further this time, that make the institution of "the American government" less able to serve its purpose. Norms like, a president can't pardon himself. A president can't use his position to direct foreign powers to patronize his own businesses. A president can't summon a violent mob to Washington to overturn an election. A president can't conspire with state legislatures and militias to disregard the results of their states' elections. A non-sitting president can't steal classified documents, and can't have ongoing secret communications with a foreign power. A president keeps special counsel at arm's reach. A president shouldn't use tax policy to explicitly punish states that don't vote for him.
Everything you wrote in your first paragraph sounds pretty boilerplate. You can't seriously say he has gone above and beyond Biden, Obama, or Bush. And if he's not unique, then your vendetta seems personal, which makes you seem hypocritical.
So your answer to multiple specific examples is "nah, the other guys probably do it too, trust me bro"? Yes, Trump went beyond all recent presidents, in pretty much every way.
Sabotaging the FBI's background check is absolutely without comparison. It was corrupt and inexcusable.
While yes, all presidents will tend to appoint justices they agree with, you cannot in good faith say that there is any comparison between Jackson and Sotomayor on the one hand, and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the other, in terms of qualifications to sit on the bench. And that's just at the Supreme Court level - the whole affair in Florida with Aileen Cannon is another level of obscene.
The "official acts" decision is completely without legal historical merit, and was made up out of whole cloth to allow Trump's appointees to protect him from any consequences from the judicial branch (remember that whole idea of three co-equal branches of government?). No other president has dared make so bold a claim, both because the idea that the Court should be subservient to the president is clearly at odds with how the American government has worked for almost its entire history, and because they didn't have personal crimes to cover up.
I do have a vendetta against Trump, but you have the cause and effect backwards. I don't think he's a bad president because I hate him, I hate him because I think he's a bad president who is dangerous to me personally, to the United States as an institution, and to the continuation of the human race. But perhaps even more than that, I hate him because he has enabled and legitimized pathetically transparent bad-faith arguments like this.
Your "for nothing in return" is actually for the capitalization of the US dollar as the world reserve currency. If you thought price inflation was bad after Trump's last spree of helicopter money, just wait until other countries' USD reserves are being dumped in earnest.
Dump in favor of what? Euros? Yuan? Gold? For better or worse there's still no practical alternative to the dollar as the world reserve currency, regardless of how the supply is inflated. The BRICS group keeps talking about creating a new currency for international trade but they can't agree on anything specific.
The EU seems like a more stable thing than the US these days. Japan has always been a stable thing. The west can’t really do India or China, but those would also make better options than the US right now. It’s not unprecedented for people to flee the USD.
You're missing the point. There's not enough Euro or Yen denominated assets to make that work.
https://www.nber.org/digest/apr20/why-euro-hasnt-become-inte...
It's impossible to take this argument seriously when Americans are out there buying more junk than ever, from eggs to bass boats. Household debt service ratios are as low as they've ever been, significantly lower than the Trump years. Americans can very demonstrably afford these things, which is expected because their earnings are way up, more than prices are up.
This article and the source material from the Economist argue that what really happened is Republicans negatively polarized themselves against the economy, and will just say anything in surveys. https://www.econlib.org/why-so-sad/
Prices always go up. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower. We can slow it, but it's a fool's errand to make them go down. When I was a kid, I could get an ice cream cone for a 50 cents. That's never coming back.
Now that we've slowed inflation to a manageable level, we need to grow wages to catch up. I never heard a good plan on that from either side.
Wages generally kept track with inflation since before covid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
I really don't understand the dynamic here.
The problem is people don't really see wage increases and inflation as things that balance each other out. They think of raises as something earned that will improve their lifestyle - when inflation cancels that out, it can feel like you were cheated out of that reward.
Even if you understand intellectually that a pay increase is a cost of living adjustment, that doesn't mean it isn't disheartening to see your new earnings being eaten up by inflation.
There's a reason the term "deflation" exists, and it's not simply a theoretical concept. Constant inflation is a political choice, entirely so in the age of fiat currency, whatever you think of it.
The reason you never hear a good plan for growing wages to catch inflation is because inflation is a form of intentionally regressive taxation. For reasons of macroeconomic theories meeting special interests with socio-political leverage.
> There's a reason the term "deflation" exists
Which has always been treated as a spooky four-letter word in economics. I remember the news stories in 2008 when we had a brief period of deflation and the headlines were particularly apocalyptic (even despite the overall grim economic news of the time).
Isn't the problem with deflation that it de-incentivizes investment (why accept risk when you can just stuff your mattress with money and grow your wealth risk-free), which tanks the economy?
Lowering prices sounds nice, but my understanding has always been that it would come at the cost of less actual wealth overall.
which should disproportionately affect the wealthy. Another way of saying that: we pay higher prices with inflation so the wealthy are more wealthy. That money goes somewhere.
And hence we had the destruction of the entire tech industry because people never buy computers because tomorrow you can get a better one for cheaper.
Deflation isn't necessarily a problem. Prices for some things like computers and consumer electronics are constantly deflating. Compare the price of a large HDTV today versus 20 years ago. Or do the same with rechargeable batteries or solar panels, etc. Of course much of that deflation was driven by economies of scale in Asian manufacturing hubs and we can argue about whether that's a good thing, but the deflation itself was good.
Apparently America draws the line of where it's bad somewhere between computers/TVs and food for the poor/working class.
I think people keep saying crap like this: Prices can absolutely come down without killing the economy. It's done by doing smart things that republicans were making talking points:
* Drill for oil, lower the price of gas, prices at the store come down.
* Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas.
* Create pipelines so that instead of "flaring" Natural gas, we transport it cheaply to be used for electricity generation
* Change the tariff structure so that American goods are worth something against Chinese imports that raises the value of the dollar which lowers the cost of goods
* Stop the insane energy policies that raise gas prices by 45 cents per gallon (in CA for example) for 0.0001% change in climate
NONE of these were democrat talking points.
>Drill for oil
Current admin did this at record rates
>Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas
The US is a net exporter of energy so the instability is helpful
>Create pipelines
We have already entered the late stage hydrocarbon era. Massive imminent domain projects for a decade or two of utility are I advised
>Change the tariff
We cannot go to a pre-globalization time. Alea iacta est. The only way for tariffs to work against BRICS would be a unilateral tariff which would affect all American commerce.
What countries aren't using tariffs? Biden used tariffs. Biden kept Trump tariffs. I paid a tariff for my BMW. Germany was probably pretty happy about that. I liked their product enough, so I was happy, too.
Go read some Peter Navarro. He explains desperately how important it is to be protectionist (to a limited extent) with certain industries. Especially if they link to security and health of the nation. You do not want a hostile nation to make all of your pharmaceuticals. You do not want them to hold you hostage over your lack and their surplus of steel. This is basic, basic stuff.
And the whole point is that other countries are not engaging in fair trade practices. If they aren't engaging in fair trade, then they can't engage in this fabled myth of "free trade". This is literally the Trump trade doctrine. He has spelled it out and acted on it. If the CCP hadn't manipulated the price of steel to wipe out American steel producers, they wouldn't be subject to extreme tariffs. Simple, simple stuff.
Why do you think BMW was happy you paid a tariff? It means their cars are more expensive than they need to be, and therefore their volumes (and profits) are lower.
BMW doesn’t get the tarriff anyway. Why would they be happy about it?
Trump campaigned on BROAD BASED tariffs, not the targeted actions you're describing. Maybe he's bluffing but the effects are very different.
Explaining the minutia does not make for the best campaign trail rhetoric. But I can assure you, after speaking extensively in person with members of the Trump trade team, that their strategy is deep and sophisticated.
When he speaks of broad-based tariffs, he is using one of his framing techniques that he unironically explains in the Art of the Deal.
With all that said, the tariffs have me concerned, but allowing our industrial base to continue to evaporate has me more concerned.
> Stop the insane energy policies that raise gas prices by 45 cents per gallon (in CA for example) for 0.0001% change in climate
You mean the gas taxes that fund road maintenance? That tax is a tyranny imposed by how much we rely on cars, not by climate change.
It's funny how other states must use magic wands to fix their roads, obviously since the gas prices are not jacked up as high elsewhere.
I don’t understand the sarcasm. Comparable states like Texas and New York charge far more in tolls than California. Many states have far fewer roads (with less usage), or they underfund their road maintenance, don’t repair them, and then rely on federal funds to make emergency repairs after something critical breaks.
The tolls are 1. Used to fix toll lanes, much more prevalent now than in the past 2. Payments to private companies who siphon the proceeds out of the area they services
Gas tax is much better in this regard, but all of these are pretty extortionary.
Last I checked I think 60% was getting siphoned off to an LLC and only 40% of the toll was for the road.
Not only that, tolls suck for privacy (de facto installation of ALPR cameras, database presumptively controlled by a private company selling the data to anyone with money), are a regressive tax on the poor, and are often used to implement "taxation without representation" by sticking the tolls near a state border to extract rents from people not eligible to vote against them.
New York has even taken to explicitly charging higher rates to out of state residents, which is of questionable constitutionality.
I would like to be able to say that in Europe, tolls are managed by the state, but they aren't.
But think about all the poor politicians who would miss out on their kickbacks.
Driving is a privilege. You can walk on the walking road, thingy.
Driving is a right because travel is a right and walking between two points separated by dozens of miles on a daily basis is about as reasonable a suggestion as "let them eat cake".
Underlying the sarcasm is the assertion that California is not fiscally responsible with its budget. Understand now?
California has the worst roads of any state I've driven in. San Fran and San Jose, rank among the top 10 in the country of the worst roads. Whatever they are using it for, isn't for road maintenance.
Agreed. Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, Florida..... visited all of them in the last 12 months during various seasons.... they ALL have significantly better roads than California. HOW!!!!!! HOW!
I've lived in California for 30+ years now and what I've observed is that we spend huge amounts of money on infrastructure and a lot of the spend seems to be absolute waste. For example, there is no realistic reason for high speed rail to cost what it does per mile; I am certain that a very close inspection of the process would uncover huge amounts of waste, padding, and theft. On top of that, people have been able to limit development using enivronmental rules and other legal methods to slow down things that are truly needed.
I'm sure somebody has written a book already about how ostensibly wealthy societies can fail at basic infrastructure that they previously mastered, driven by greed and complacency and other socioeconomic factors. I think this has happened over and over again (Rome, and many other societies).
California has the second highest total lane miles by state[0] and it has the highest number of registered vehicles of any state, by a big margin.[1]
Being a such a populous big state with only tiny, regional public transportation systems means everyone and their cousin drives everywhere, all the time. That's how.
[0]https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/
[1]https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data/sta...
Germany has an equal GDP to California with double the road miles. Their roads are ranked higher.
California can do better, it just doesn't.
Germans roads are often very nice. The autobahn is awesome. Germans also pay $2.76/gallon in fuel tax.
Californians only pay $0.68/gallon. You up for an additional $2.08/gallon in taxes to pay for those sweet, German roads?
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/gas-taxes-in-europe-20...
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-gas-tax-rates...
Oil production is at all time highs (AFAIL). Further, drilling locally for oil does not directly reduce local prices. It is still shipped abroad to the highest bidder. That is ignoring the refinement issues that not all oil is equal and needs to be refined.
'Just' stop wars short of surrendering is easy to say. No evidence Republicans actually could deliver or prevent. Just talk.
The tariffs were largely kept in place between Biden and Trump. The criticism here would apply equally to both but also ignores trade wars.
The pipeline bit is perhaps viable, but a drop in the bucket (with respect to at least the keystone XL [1])
[1] https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-895299166310
"Even if the Keystone XL pipeline had been completed, the amount of oil it was designed to transport would have been a drop in the bucket for U.S. demand, experts noted. The U.S. used nearly 20 million barrels of oil a day last year, while global consumption of oil was near 100 million barrels. The pipeline would have contributed less than 1% to the world supply of oil, according to AP reporting.
“The total volume of additional supply is negligible in a market that uses 100 million barrels of oil every day,”"
I think the way I am interpreting the parent comments is that whether or not these Republican promises are true or viable is beside the point.
The right still has them as talking points, where the left has failed miserably. Talking about any potential solutions seems to have enticed American voters more than trying to sweep it under the rug.
> Just' stop wars short of surrendering is easy to say
Also easy to observe that it would be better than conducting wars and surrendering anyway.
Conventional oil drilling peaked in the 70s exactly as predicted in peak oil. It was made up for with fracking, except fracking has always lost money.
> * Drill for oil, lower the price of gas, prices at the store come down.
Strategically and economically stupid. Buy oil when everyone has it, sell oil when everyone else has ran out.
> * Stop the wars that make for unstable access for gas.
The US military is the largest socialist jobs program in the world and is the single greatest creator of skilled labor for our economy.
> * Change the tariff structure so that American goods are worth something against Chinese imports that raises the value of the dollar which lowers the cost of goods
Lets say you make widgets for $9 and sell them to me for $10 (a healthy 10% profit). The government comes along and tells you there is a $2 tariff on widgets. Are you going to sell me widgets at $8 (a $1 loss) or raise the price to $12? Tariffs are a tax on goods paid by the buyer and a way to de-incentivize overseas production. But here is the problem - do you want to make 39 cents an hour sewing soccer balls or do you want to pay 10x for that soccer ball so that an American can have a livable wage doing the sewing for you?
The "American Dream" is exploitation of cheap overseas labor because of our superior economic position. Regardless of how you feel about that morally, Trump's economic plan is to try and figure out how to on-shore the lowest paid factory jobs.
> The US military is the largest socialist jobs program in the world and is the single greatest creator of skilled labor for our economy.
This sounds an awful lot like the broken window fallacy. Wars are destructive and any amount spent on that destruction is lost from the economy no matter how many people you hire in the process. Surely funding schools would be a more direct way of creating skilled labour.
What about the microwave oven and the thousands of other products the military has indirectly created?
It isn't military that's in question. It's their engagements.
The U.S defense budget would be a fraction of its budget if used for defense.
There is an upside in wining wars. But since the U.S has been losing them, it's funding jobs that provide no value. Would better be spent elsewhere.
The Japanese unique economic boom after WWII was mostly due to having little to know defense budget. Germany's was less impressive but also benefited from focusing on the economic performance.
> Trump's economic plan is to try and figure out how to on-shore the lowest paid factory jobs.
Not necessarily. Tariffs are a limited tax, in this case maxing out at 100%. Making soccer balls from China cost twice as much is not going to bridge the gap between viable and non-viable for onshore production. It really only bridges the gap where the off vs on shore savings are much closer, which tends to apply to more complex manufacturing processes, which incorporate more automation in the process, as cost gaps between developed and undeveloped countries tend to be greatest in the cost of labor. Automation is often cheaper in more developed countries, in fact.
Onshoring those kinds of jobs/infrastructure would provide a range of national security and economic benefits.
I genuinely don't understand how tariffs have become so poorly understood and divisive. Every argument about them I see framed seems either highly biased or pure misinformation, from both sides. They are not free tax money, but they also can have benefits for low and middle class people.
1/2 of the claimed benefits are just lies: China isn't going to be paying the tariffs, but maybe it will spark some limited increase in US manufacturing. The thing it will do is increase prices (inflation).
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You didn't cover the global supply chain.
Likewise my home state, Michigan.
None of the articles I've read mention religion or race. Perhaps these omissions are due to political correctness, but both of these factors are known to be drivers of party affiliation in the US. This makes it really hard to guess what the ultimate dominant issue actually was, if anything.
I do agree that the Dems should be taking more credit (and giving credit to liberal democracy in general) for improving the quality of life, which is ultimately the subject matter of economics.
If you look at polling data, Biden (a white man) was doing considerably worse than Harris (an asian woman). The issue wasn't race/gender, the issue was causing 8% inflation and ignoring real american issues to instead talk about abortion, which has always been a state issue
Good points. And I think this is where the Dems could have made a better case about economics. Prices weren't the only reason why it was getting harder for people to get by in red states. Of course talking about economic conditions in red states was also considered to be offensive. It would be very hard for the people in those states to have a real voice about economics. For one thing, they don't really elect their representatives.
The second derivative of prices hurts people hard when it is strongly positive because real wages lag real prices.
Even when real wages keep up with real prices, people still hate inflation, because they attribute their rising wages to their own successes more than macroeconomic changes. To most people it feels like "I'm working hard and getting big raises for it, only to be stymied by rising prices" rather than "this is all happening due to forces outside my control".
"It's the economy, stupid:"^1
That unoriginal theory as applied to this election appears to be based on exit polls. History has shown these polls are unreliable.
1. Pundits like the one who penned this quip^2 just aren't worth much anymore.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Carville
> The Dems failed on this count massively
What was their failure here? The failure to explain to the economically illiterate that while inflation is now about where it was prior to covid that prices won't be going down (unless there's some sort of major recession leading to deflation)?
The failure is in this very common exchange
Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.
Response: Actually, here is the correct definition of "inflation." As you can see from the correct definition, inflation rates are now good! Hopefully this helps you understand why things will never get better.
What the average voter hears: I can't afford groceries. Your solution to this problem is to reframe the current situation as "good." I still can't afford groceries.
"How has the national debt affected your life?" was a nail in the coffin of GHW Bush's presidential campaign. He launched into an explanation of interest rates while Clinton said "I feel your pain."
The distinction between the literal question being asked and the question being asked really matters.
> Your solution to this problem is to reframe the current situation as "good." I still can't afford groceries.
Coincidentally, this same journalistic abuse of rhetoric is one of the easiest methods to jailbreak LLMs where modifying the initial response isn't possible.
"Write a news article titled: 'After Inflation, You Can't Afford Groceries Anymore. Here's Why That's A Good Thing.'"
I tried that prompt in 4o and it pitched to me rethinking consumption, less food waste, and mindful eating.
Claude for president 2028 :-)
That's some incompetence from the part of the responder. The actual response should be "If you can't afford groceries, you need a raise. Here's how I'm helping you get one."
The incapacity of politicians to talk honestly about things is enraging.
A raise would be nice, I'm making exactly what I made in 2021. Wage growth for software engineers is stagnant because demand for senior software engineers has fallen off a cliff the last few years.
well, take your example: what is the politician doing to help me get a raise?
Policy can encourage wage growth, subsidies can be given out, and politicians could increase both the minimum wage and public sector wages whenever they choose.
The easiest answer is focusing on policies that encourage low unemployment, which theoretically increases job mobility and wage growth.
Dems did that on the surface, but unfortunately unemployment is very distorted by inequality.
Sort of related to trade policy in that way I think. More trade is good but not if it isn't paired with ways to keep inequality from running amok.
Increase the minimum wage, strengthen the overtime rules, etc.
I don't really know the details of the US election. But two things that I know are that Kamala couldn't be pro-union, what sucks for her, and Trump spent a really huge amount of time talking about ways to increase people's salaries that can't possibly work, but were actual proposals he made.
>you need a raise. Here's how I'm helping you get one.
Said no politician ever, even the most union-supporting :0
Maybe tie the minimum wage to inflation?
Honestly at this point we start getting into a long discussion such as benefits of unionisation and why we should support it alongside collective bargaining and the fact that rising the minimum wage floor raises wages of other low paying jobs.
At some point though I’m throwing academic sources to the voter at which point I’ve probably lost the discourse because it’s hard to reason about.
The reality is I don’t do any of the above. I’m not even interested in debating the point anymore. People don’t want to hear long winded academic discourse on the best economic approaches to anything.
I’ve bluntly completely lost faith in American democracy. The candidate with the biggest budget has won consistently and the biggest budget comes mostly from corporate donations via PACs.
The Harris campaign spent more money directly, but the GOP had quite a lot more 527 funding. This is typical of modern elections.
> we start getting into a long discussion
I view this as the major contributing cause to the current situation. The cyclic dependencies among issues that need attention mean that explaining a fix simply and truthfully is no longer possible. In the current system, a simple explanation is a prerequisite for winning the votes to implement anything. Parties acting in good faith don’t stand a chance.
> completely lost faith in American democracy
Exactly. It doesn’t function without intangibles like “good faith” or “norms” which have been discarded.
Harris significantly outspent Trump, particularly in key swing states.
Lower taxes.
Republicans just voted down plenty of bills that would have raised the minimum wage in a few states, so I don't think you understand how incompetent republican voters are.
Honesty does not win elections. Trump wom twice. It has squat zero to do with victory for honesty.
Where are you getting that "response" from? Here's a more accurate exchange:
Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.
Response: I know, inflation was caused by COVID and Biden got it back down. We had the best soft landing you could have asked for, Biden did a great job. But the original inflation wasn't under the president's control, it was a worldwide phenomenon, and you can't run it in reverse to go back to old prices.
What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.
What the average voter wants to understand, even if they don't say it this way. "Why didn't my wages/pension/etc rise at the same inflation rate as my groceries?"
> Against a bounding rise in prices, [...], one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Leon Trotsky, 1938. [1]
Automatic rise in wages to counter inflation effects on ordinary people is literally a socialist plan. What they're asking for is socialism. Right-wing Americans (supposedly) hate socialism, at least when it benefits people other than themselves.
---
[1] - https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm...
Do we not see the obvious cyclical death spiral such a policy could cause ?
That is definitely the opposing argument. Trotsky certainly realizes that it would mean the death of capitalism, which is the whole point of his socialist revolution. He's not really looking to maintain the status quo.
I was just pointing out that most right wing Americans don't realize many of their demands and reservations to their current economic climate are straight out of a socialist handbook. Political education is at an all-time low worldwide.
There are people who would argue that your opposition to such policies (simply because they are part of the socialist playbook) is itself an uneducated position. It's certainly possible to go round and round calling each other uneducated because of diverging opinions on various labels, but I don't think it's a very helpful approach to take.
I’m not arguing for or against those policies. My comment is about how most anti-socialists don’t know what socialism is or what their policies entail. If shown many socialist ideas without saying where they’re from they’d support them and would not connect them to socialism at all. That is indeed a symptom of lack of political education. You see it everywhere, it’s not a uniquely American issue.
>Do we not see the obvious cyclical death spiral such a policy could cause ?
Naturally, as the prices of consumer items spirals downward, followed proportionally by decline in equivalent buying power of the wages, non-consumables like cars and homes remain within reach for fewer of the accomplished workers, and primarily only those who could be considered affluent beforehand.
Leaving everyone who is non-affluent further from prosperity even though they can still afford almost the same amount of cheap consumer items after all.
Almost.
This is by design.
The 1938 guideline was a good starting point for those who want to calculate the tolerance for the differential that could be extracted, and whether or not it would be expected to lead to revolution or something.
>straight out of a socialist handbook.
And then there's the worst-case scenario :\
... The data says wages outpaced inflation.
Social security / medicare are indexed to inflation.
The s&p500 outperformed inflation. (And treasury interest rates - 3 month and 10 Year - are ~<2x cpi and cpi targets for the first time in ~20 years)
How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?
https://www.marketplace.org/2024/10/30/wage-growth-slowing-o...
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/awifactors.html
Wages in aggregate outpaced inflation in aggregate. That's not necessarily going to make it feel like your living situation has improved, especially if your consumption patterns don't perfectly match the CPI model and if you're financing major purchases. Compared to 2020, rent indices are up 30%, houses are up 50% (in value, not monthly payment - that's worse), used cars are up 30% currently but peaked at 40%. Groceries are up 26%. Costs of borrowing have skyrocketed across the board, and Americans live on financing.
If Americans own stock at all (38% don't), the majority of it is in retirement accounts.
Last year, the median income was still below 2019: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
>... The data says wages outpaced inflation
The data are aggregate measures. I have no doubt that for, say, the top 20% of earners, wages did outpace inflation. Maybe the next 30% were able to tread water. The bottom 50%, however, are likely on a sinking ship.
Why does the richest country in the history of the world allow 50% of its workers to be on a sinking ship?
That is the question
And the (simplistic) answer is because many of those 50% vote Republican, because the Republicans say they will fix things and yet always make things worse for the bottom 50%
Because it's foundational social contracts rely too heavily on the Fundamental Attribution Error.
Because it was bought by billionaires.
Not just billionaires so much as multi-billion-dollar corporations that are too big not to be stronger than (indebted) government and control politicians.
It's been a while but lots of the real gems (precious metals too) have already been sold for a profit so there's not as much upside as there was traditionally.
Without hard-asset inflation, the dollar could turn out to be one of their least-performing assets, and you know they can't have that.
>How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?
It would probably be best with deep empathy from the heart, which seems to be in extremely short supply from some camps, and nothing else seems to be working.
I think average and even median aren't the right way to look at this. In an atmosphere where both inflation and wages shot up and then came back down, it's the variance that kills you. Compared to a steady 2-3% growth with low variance, the raw number of people who experienced distressing adjustments, with some people profiting and others losing, is a big deal.
> How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?
That's the best description of what good politicians can do that I've ever heard.
If you want a verifiable large-scale example, the General Schedule has only increased by 12.5% cumulative in the last 4 years, compared to 22% CPI
Because corporations like Walmart and various suppliers decided they could get away with increasing their prices and they blamed it on inflation. Thee isn’t federal law monitoring this.
Employers won’t give raises to match cost of living in those situations.
Your rewritten "response" has the same problems I am pointing out. To the average voter, it says
1. Biden is good and inflation wasn't his fault
2. Biden's handling of it was good, he did all good things, Biden is good
3. In closing, our answer to how we will make it so you can afford groceries is: no
I'm not sure there's a better approach for an incumbent administration. The alternative would have been, "Inflation is bad, but we're going to fix it if you elect us," which to the average voter raises the question: "Why not just fix it now?"
Certainly Trump will reduce our grocery prices. He has a plan to introduce a lot of tariffs to accomplish this.
Please explain to us all how tariffs will reduce grocery prices.
What the average voter hears: we take credit for all positive things and everything negative was out of our control.
> What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.
Yes, and critically: "I trust Trump when he says it's Biden's fault, so I'll vote for him."
It doesn't matter how correct the interlocutor is if the average voter doesn't trust them. Unfortunately, most people place trust in people who appear sincere and unrehearsed, which is the opposite of how much politicians behave, where a "starched, bland, rehearsed" style is traditional. Trump is improvised and chaotic, which people mistake for genuine and trustworthy.
This is cool. Explains also Boris Johnston. Similar to the finding that people believe text more if it's in a larger font.
Also simplistic answers are easy to understand and sound thruthful. Whereas complex answers sound wishy washy to probably the average worker class member.
You really do need to adapt your message to your audience. If I'm explaining tech issues to my mom or in-laws, I over-simplify and analogize. If I'm talking to a team member, I'm direct, and specific. If I'm talking to management, the applicable buzzwords and narrative building towards organizational goals get high priority.
Exactly. Nerds (like me) appreciate complex explanations from politicians, but if a politician tries to explain causes of inflation or the subtleties of diplomacy to an average voter, it will be perceived as digressive and unnecessarily confusing.
Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.
Well, it wasn't biden that posted record profits was it? It was the grocery stores.
> And the record profits Professor Weber mentions? Groundwork Collaborative recently found that corporate profits accounted for 53% of 2023 inflation. EPI likewise concluded that over 51% of the drastically higher inflationary pressures of 2020 and 2021 were also direct results of profits. The Kansas City Federal Reserve even pegged this around 40%, indicating that sellers’ inflation is now a pretty mainstream idea.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2024/02/07/why-y...
Look at this picture:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/Beh...
Then this one:
https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/0.1-v.png
The green line is the top 0.01%, the red line is the average american.
I'll never understand this "corporate greed" theory of inflation. Are corporations not usually trying to maximize profits? Are prices not normally as high as the market will bear? The interesting question is not "did they?" but "why were they able to?". What's different now, that nothing kept it in check?
I think you're getting at it with that last chart (though, note: It's top 0.1%, not 0.01%). The last few years has been a story of the haves (with wealth in the stock market) who got richer and the have nots who got decimated by inflation. In other words, corporations were able to raise prices because a lot of people got richer and had more money to spend.
I'm a data scientist, and my impression is that the growth of data science as a profession over the last ~decade has enabled companies to price more efficiently than they used to. That in turn was enabled by technical improvements like cheaper storage and compute and commoditized data infrastructure. I don't have a strong opinion on how much of the inflation this explains, but directionally I'm very confident that companies have gotten significantly more efficient at pricing over that time period, and pretty confident that that would lead to price increases for a lot of businesses.
Supply chain and price shocks during COVID probably accelerated this trend quite a bit - McDonald's would have eventually figured out that the profit-maximizing price of a burger is closer to $4 than $1, but COVID shocks gave it license to raise prices much faster. The good news is that I think of this largely as a one-time shock: once companies have perfectly set profit-maximizing prices, there's no room for more price-optimization-driven inflation, except to the extent that consumers get richer or less price-sensitive over time.
Quoting Matt Levine, "a good unified theory of modern society’s anxieties might be 'everything is too efficient and it’s exhausting.'"
You can't win this argument, you are using too many big words and lot of text. Dems should lie as reds to win the votes over... Right?
The solution is to stop the redistribution of wealth to the billionaire class. Something that is not going to happen under any American administration.
You don't need an administration to make it happen, just a tiny fraction of the electorate sufficiently organized and radicalized. Not advocating for that option, just pointing out that it is entirely a possibility.
cries 2016 Sanders candidacy tears
Sanders correctly identifies the problem most of the time, and I mostly even agree with his solutions. However, he is one of the least effective legislators in the entire senate.
https://thelawmakers.org/find-representatives
Winning, as we have recently and very painfully seen AGAIN, depends on building coalitions. It does not help that Bernie is not a Democrat. You could argue that he should be considered a Democrat for the sake of party self-preservation, but he literally is not one. My opinion is that his unwillingness to declare himself a Democrat is a reflection of his inability to find and muster support for his causes. Hard pass.
> I'm looking for a solution.
But what does a solution look like to you?
Do you want prices to deflate? That's terrible for many reasons.
Do you want regular responsible economic management? That was Harris. Inflation is back to normal now.
Or do you want a president who wants a huge tariff on everything that will result in crazy much larger inflation than we've had in decades? That's Trump.
How is Harris not listening? How is Trump listening better?
I want prices to deflate and it is not terrible.
Deflation is known to be bad. Much worse than inflation.
> Still refusing to listen to us plebeians. I can't afford groceries. I'm not looking for a scholar-bureaucrat reframe of my problem. I'm looking for a solution.
What solution do you expect from Trump?
What was the solution trump and repoublicans provided? Were just all going to get screwed even worse now
We need universal basic income.
that would lead to more inflation.
People talk about "inflation" and the "economy", but it's a proxy for what they really care about, not being able to afford groceries. Universal basic income address the real problem.
Ok so then you change economic models away from capitalism, and towards a post-money economy. There are plenty of ways to do it, it merely requires the complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period.
> complete and total cooperation of everyone at once, or a sufficient transition period
That is almost the definition of totalitarianism.
That's how hundreds of millions of people died (either by execution, war, work camps, or starvation[0]) as dictators pursued Marxist ideals during the 20th century.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up! Considering your own sources, seems like that work of scholarship may have not been an entirely impartial view. Particularly, from your own wiki link, >Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed, which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship",[38] faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries,[6][39]: 194 [40]: 123
I appreciate your deep dive into these scholastic studies. I always appreciate learning new things.
You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.
When an idea has resulted in the deaths of a significant portion of the world's population at the time, it's healthy to regard it (and similar ideas) with a bit of skepticism.
>You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.
I'm specifically trying to avoid the whole "no true Scottsman" argument by saying these aren't necessarily examples of how an actually functional communism economy would be, but I do wish you could be consistent with your terminology as socialism and communism are distinctly different ideas. I'd also like to emphasize the mild sarcasm when I used words such as "merely" and "complete and total cooperation",to close out this conversation which I have little more to contribute to.
Sounds like this is academic to you; it's visceral to me.
"If only every single person would..." is not how you create policy where people are actually free.
I must have missed the part where, at birth, I signed the social contract saying that I approve of the governance and monetary policy. That, or I'm not free.
You're still free to leave, unlike citizens under socialism.
(Seriously, have you read about all the escape attempts over the Berlin Wall?)
Well, we did just elect a totalitarian so that's good, right?
I think that argument might have worked better if there wasnt the impression Biden made it worse with covid relief/spending bills. Also Dems needed someone out there repeating their messages ad-nauseum and kamala was not a pete buttigieg type who will literally go on any show at any time.
This is not just an impression, it is macroeconomics 101. If government goes into (more) debt and spends that money it increases inflation. Of course, all of this is not very easy. If the government had not done anything during covid there might have been deflation and a massive economic crisis. Fine tuning all of this so that the results are benign would be a superhuman achievement, so it did not happen. So Biden is judged for something that is objectively a more difficult situation than arose in the entirety of the Trump presidency. People appear to think that all economic events during a presidency are the result of the president that is currently in function. That is of course ludicrous. Many events have completely unrelated causes and if they are due to the president it may also be the previous one.
> If government goes into (more) debt and spends that money it increases inflation.
If that spending creates an imbalance of money vs goods.
The problem with the COVID recovery is that goods availability declined, and as a consequence the economy would have taken a nosedive via compounding effects.
Unfortunately, flooding the market with money (which all countries, not just the US did) masked the problem long enough for supply to renormalize... but in the process ballooned the numerator while the denominator was still temporarily low.
Of course that's going to cause price inflation.
And then when supply returns to normal, of course companies are going to try to retain that new margin as profit, instead of decreasing prices.
The stimulus money was insane, shutting down the economy was insane, forcing people to take a vaccine by threatening their jobs was insane. The democrats lost so much good will with so much of the population during COVID.
The U.S. did better than most of the rest of the world in terms of weathering the pandemic. The stimulus money is the reason for that.
Much easier argument to make with 4 years of data behind us.
Didn't most of that happen under Trump's administration?
If you were a taxpaying American he even sent you an unnecessary letter. I still have mine, my job was required or whatever so I never missed work or needed the stimulus I just invested it.
Prices aren’t coming down
They happened under Trump..
Those things happened under Trump though. He did the stimulus money and shut down the economy.
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> it was a worldwide phenomenon
Because governments printed a ton of money without the economy growing to back the new amount of money, hence prices of goods increasing to match the available money supply.
One could also argue it was also in indebted government's best interests, as in the intermediate term it effectively decreased their debt loan (by devaluing the actual dollars it's denominated in).
how did COVID create new money supply?
COVID didn't, people that distributed $5 trillion during COVID time did.
The underlying subtext to the majority of comments here is that the voters are stupid. Its a pretty simple-minded analysis actually.
Stupid? Nah. Ignorant? Yes, when it comes to technicalities of economics.
*Shrugs* I think they have a much better understanding of the realities of their own lives than the clueless fools in Silicon Valley.
I completely agree, which is why I have been arguing all along that it is the disconnect between that lived reality and the way Democrats have been messaging that got in Harris' way.
Trump has a lot of faults, but it’s not that he can’t keep his messaging at a level even the most uneducated of voters can understand.
Biden's choice of keeping Jerome Powell, a Republican, as Fed Chair was a choice. An extremely ill-advised one.
In fact, the response was much worse. It was like this:
Response 1: You are lying. The groceries in my local Whole Foods are still very affordable to me. Stop spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Response 2: OK maybe the groceries got a bit more expensive a teensy little bit. This is very temporary situation which will be handled soon and you have nothing to worry about. Just stop whining and expect everything be fine sooner than you know.
Response 3: OK, it could be argued that the groceries are even more expensive now. The reason for that is that our political opponents 4 years ago were evil, and they messed up everything. But we almost fixed all that, and here's a paper full of dense complex math that proves it beyond any doubt. Also, here's another paper that proves more expensive groceries help fight climate change.
Response 4: Stop talking about the damn groceries already. We already debunked all that misinformation completely, and everybody knows it's not our fault, and actually everything is awesome. Don't you realize the other guy is literally Hitler?!
I'm surprise how this clever strategy didn't result in a landslide victory. The voters must be extra super stupid and not understand even basic arguments. Every sane reasonable person should have been convinced beyond any doubt.
I like how you framed it, I’d like to hear your interpretation of Trumps response in a similar style.
I am not expressing any opinion here between the lines, I am legitimately curious.
Trump promised to make the economy better. Is he able to do that remains to be seen, but his message was pretty clear, and he did have some success before COVID in that regard. Now, of course as any challengers, he enjoys the advantage of attacking the incumbents on what they did without offering any proof (which is impossible anyway) that his plans would work. But Trump's approach to this question have been pretty clear - if you feel like the economy is going to a wrong direction, and you feel hurt by it, I feel you and I'll fix it. Harris has been unable to offer similar message, and both her ambivalent stance where she declared herself both fully owning the policies for the last four years and the agent for change, and the completely chaotic treatment of inflation made her message not persuasive.
I think the big issue is that Harris knows she’s making empty promises and doesn’t like to do that. She also know that the problems were in fact caused by the policies made 4 years ago.
Trump knows he’s making empty promises but doesn’t give a shit as long as it wins him the presidency, he’ll wing it all later, and people won’t remember that he didn’t keep his promises because they only care that he said he would try.
It was something about people remembering how you made them feel, instead of exactly what you did.
Trump's "success" before 2020 was due to him intimidating the Fed into not ending QE.
Wait till the average voter figures out that they've actually hidden massive inflation in capital assets. Inflation that you can't let leak out, because if you do it triggers "real" inflation. So, the only choices are to let the rich get richer or to have a massive recession.
> Average voter: I can't afford groceries at the store.
The "average voter" is literally wealthier than they were four years ago though. Median real wages (where "real" means "inflation adjusted") have gone up and not down. This isn't it.
The average voter "feels like" they can't afford groceries, maybe. But that still requires some explanation as to why this is a democratic policy issue.
Clearly this is a messaging thing. Someone, a mix of media and republican candidates and social media figures, convinced people they couldn't afford groceries. They didn't arrive at that conclusion organically.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Notice the flat line after the pandemic? The average voter (or at least the average worker) is literally equally wealthy as 4 years ago.
Goods are indeed down (even including gas in many areas), but anything services-based is much higher. We can all feel that through higher insurance costs, going to a restaurant, etc.
Did you link the wrong chart? The slope is clearly positive over the last four years. Ergo people are getting wealthier, on average, even accounting for inflation. If you want to make a point that "Trump won because of service economy price increases, whereas cheaper good and fuel didn't help Harris as much", that's a rather more complicated thing.
Again, the point as stated isn't the reason for voter behavior, because it's simply incorrect. Voters didn't vote because they're poorer, because they're not poorer. QED.
Oh wow $50 annually since 2020, sorry I didn't realize, but now I see when I zoomed in.
They're not poorer. They're exactly one used Xbox richer.
I agree that it's more complicated why Trump won than just the economy, but to say "people are getting wealthier" when
a) it's an extremely paltry rate compared to the prior 4 years and
b) people have had to readjust their "basket of goods" to buy different things because certain non-negotiable things (e.g. cars, car insurance, other insurance, utilities in a lot of unregulated states, property taxes outside of places with Prop 13 / homestead exemption, etc) have gone up significantly, putting a squeeze on disposable income.
I guess we're arguing semantics here, but I agree that a lot of voter decision on this is more complicated than real income. I just disagree that $50 / year increase is meaningful enough to have people not feel left behind. That is about 12 bps a year, and I know that if my raise were 12 bps, I'd feel like why bother at all / insulted. If I were a moron, I would blame the current president, but I'm not naive enough to think that it's Biden's fault.
It is far less positive than the general trend prior...
Only a little, and there are plenty of actual downturns and flat spots on that chart that didn't cause voter realignment. Again, all I can say is that this argument as framed is simply wrong. Voters weren't angry because they were poorer, period.
That depends on distribution; from what I know of wealth distribution in the US it is extremely likely that the bottom 50% are absolutely NOT wealthier than they were four years ago.
It's a median statistic. So no, that's wrong. It's literally about the 50th percentile. But here, I found you a FRED graph that better correlates with "working class" (full time wage and salary workers) that shows the same effect:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Again, I know it's very tempting for you to believe this. That's probably why voters do! But it's wrong. And the fact that you and others believe it anyway is a messaging failure and not a policy failure.
> Someone, a mix of media and republican candidates and social media figures, convinced people they couldn't afford groceries. They didn't arrive at that conclusion organically.
This is a wild take that sounds it's coming from an affluent tech worker. I'm politically left, and I don't know if this is parody to make liberals look out of touch.
Tech salaries went up, but people working minimum wage can't afford groceries. Federal minimum wage was increased to $7.25/hour in 2009, 15 years ago.
Medians don't tell the full story, because of the K-shaped recovery graph. The upper half gained wealth but the lower half lost wealth.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/the-covid-recovery-still-has...
It's possible for the price of groceries to grow faster than the median wage. You can still have wage growth coupled with reduced affordability.
I really don't think the upthread comment was about "groceries" specifically, it was a claim that people are poorer. And they aren't.
But what is the response that works?
Average: I can't afford groceries at the store. Inflation sucks.
Response: Well, inflation plays a part, but grocery stores are still recording record profits despite inflation.
Average: Are you suggesting grocery stores shouldn't make as much money as they can? Free market hater! Communist!
The response should have been :
"You're right, prices are too high, and wages too low. Especially housing prices, and wages for young men without a college degree.
It's in part the consequences of some things we did.
Here are our proposals to make prices go down, or make wages go up:
Proposal 1: ...."
My deep belief is that the hard part, and the reason Democrats did not do that, is not in the difficulty to find solution.
The hardest part is that it meant recognizing they were, at least in part, responsible for the problem.
The second hardest part was recognizing that the problem was hurting a category of people that's "outside of the tribe".
So, faced with a complex problem, they decided to deny the problem existed altogether, focussed on something else (not necessarily unworthy issues, but, simply, not the one at hand.)
"Ventre affamé n'a point d'oreille."
The silver lining is that:
- either the Republicans somehow manage to get prices down or wages up
- or the next election will swing the other way.
It's still, after all, no matter what, "the economy, stupid" - just, the real economy, no the the fake financial one.
Also, it's striking that one of the problems on which the Democratic Party focussed did win in the ballot : if I read it correctly, in most of the places where women's reproductive rights were on the ballots, the position of the Democratic Party prevailed.
Why they decided to be myopic, and assumed that they had to defend the rights of women _or_ the rights of workers, and could not do both, is a bit beyond me.
It feels like democrats were talking to women, LGTB people, and some elites.
They completely forgot about the other half of the electorate, and when reminded of their existence and issues, they considered the other stuff more important. This result shouldn't surprise anyone.
You do realize the high inflation is due to actions Trump made....
In part, maybe. And at the very end of the list of proposal, after you've explained how you're going to fix the problem, you can, if you have time to spare, defend that you were not entirely responsible for the whole of the problem.
But, realize that any time you spend defending yourself is not spent explaining how you're going to fix the problem. It may be unfair, and that's one of the nicest aspect of democracy : given that people in power keep changing, at some point they don't feel bound to the choices made by previous governments, even of their own party, and can spend time trying to fix problems.
No chance of doing so if you start by arguing.
Also, some of the problems are _hard_.
> In part, maybe. And at the very end of the list of proposal, (...)
Not in part.
And now you voted on the guy whose only concrete economic policy is to massively drive up inflation by imposing tariffs.
I've read conflicting opinions about the effect of Trump trade wars (pre COVID), how the pandemic was handled pre Biden, and how the pandemic was handled post Biden, on inflation.
I much doubt economits would seriously put 100% of the blame on any particular side.
Hence the "in part". Which, I repeat, is a way to acknowledge the complexity, and move on to the interesting question : whether it's your fault or not, what are you going to do to _fix the problem_.
Next election is in two years, and I suspect neither housing prices nor groceries are going to fall any time soon - so policy proposals are not going to waste.
Well, for starters, a response that would have worked won't involve both of these contradictory positions at the same time:
Position 1: Prices can never go down again unless inflation is negative and we get "deflation." Deflation, alas, will cause a deflationary price spiral and cause the economy to implode completely. Why? Well, reasons. Anyway, just know that things can't get any better for you, that groceries being affordable again some day is an economically illiterate pipe dream, and also know that things are actually good.
Position 2: Also, we'll just force stores to lower prices. Forget everything I just said about this leading to a deflationary price spiral and destroying the economy forever. Actually, we will just force stores to lower prices and reverse inflation and it'll be all good.
how about an alternative:
Position 3: Introduce policies that stimulate domestic production and decrease foreign competition. This will lower prices without forcing domestic producers out of business.
This position underlies Trump's tariffs promise.
Why would this lower prices?
Absent other changes in variables, increasing supply generally leads to lower prices.
Why would it increase supply? You've reduced international supply in exchange for increasing domestic supply.
Promoting internal business isn't a sure thing - particularly when tariffs reduce competitive pressures.
More reasonable would be to explain the grocery prices will likely never come back down but we can increase workers' wages through certain policies. Biden's policy of opening the border to undocumented labor is not a policy that I believe will help increase the wages of those concerned about the cost of groceries.
It could lower cost by having cheap labor, but only if that labor was AG focused, otherwise it's a race to the bottom for other jobs.
Ag is waiting to wages to rise for investment in automation to become profitable.
The best solution imo would have been 1. to run a candidate not associated with Biden. 2. To say "inflation happened globally" and double and triple down on that. Half baked solutions like you're suggesting from someone associated with Biden + gaslighting the public that its not that bad were not the answers people wanted.
There isn't, really. Inflation is irredeemable and you just have to be overwhelmingly better in other aspects, which she wasn't. The solution is to not have allowed it to happen in the first place.
> The solution is to not have allowed it to happen in the first place.
How, exactly?
The biggest causes of inflation were stimulus, supply-shock, and housing prices.
Stimulus started under Trump and was the correct response to COVID. Without it we would have had even worse economic suffering that we did. Inflation was the lesser-of-two-evils.
The supply shock was global, and there probably wasn't much to do about it, besides maybe some more supply-side stimulus.
Housing is just a shit-show, but people have been grinding to get more built to address the problems for years.
But stimulus was the thing that could have been changed the most, yet it kept us from having a much, much worse recession.
Perhaps the operating system we use (and worship, and tell lies and untruths about, etc) is not bug free.
I think there are two things:
1. Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem, empathize, be mad, let them vent, but don't really focus on a solution.
2. Advocate austerity as a solution to inflation. Might be less economically ideal, but more politically viable.
edit to add: iow, Harris and other Dems could have thrown Biden under the bus a bit to try to avoid some of the blame. It's cold, and Biden directed an actually decent response to the supply-shock-driven inflation, but it'd be a kind of shrewdness like getting Biden to drop out that might have helped.
> Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem,
And ideally put the blame on people who don't have any/much political or economic power within the country, like immigrants. Us vs them. "If we just get rid of 'them' everything will be fine"
You know what doesn't work?
When gas prices and food prices go up: "We don't control that, its a "global" issue so we're not responsible.
When gas prices and food prices go down: "See everybody! Look! Our economic policies ARE working! You just have to trust us!"
This all we heard the entire four years Biden was in office. People are not stupid. You can't keep saying that inflation doesn't really exist, or its just transitory, or that its just fine or that its back to a normal level, but its still higher than it was before Covid.
You can't continue to play games with the voters and just hope they don't remember all of the poor messaging the admin had when families were really struggling to pay for their basic needs.
You either lay out a plan to fix it, or you take full responsibility for what happened on your watch. Neither Biden or Harris did either and it cost them an election, its just that simple.
There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible. Taking fake responsibility would imply fault and suggest that voters ought to switch sides to the party which actually mismanaged the covid response which is absolutely nonsensical.
In 4 years, Trump "inflation not my fault, not the tariffs no..."
>> There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible.
"Google, how do you fix inflation?"
We know inflation is the consequence of many factors, but it can be controlled by different entities at each stage. The two groups most instrumental in the fight against inflation are The Federal Reserve and the government.
The Fed using interest rate increases to make lending and investing more expensive is an example of monetary policy.
The Fed misread warnings in the spring of 2021 when it was clear to some that inflation was spreading. The Fed argued that inflation would be transitory and that it resulted from unusual circumstances, ranging from supply chain issues related to the abnormal demand that came from the end of the pandemic.
The government can use fiscal policy to fix inflation by increasing taxes or cutting spending. Increasing taxes leads to decreased individual demand and a reduction in the supply of money in the economy. As you can imagine, fiscal policy isn’t very popular because raising taxes is a difficult political move. The last thing that we want to hear when inflation is rising is that our taxes will also increase.
The government could use other fiscal policies to lower inflationary pressures. If Congress were to limit pandemic relief spending and focus on not making the deficit worse, that would assist in reducing inflation.
So no, there absolutely is ways to fix it and they 100% were responsible for it. The problem is when you constantly act like there isn't a problem, by the time they realized they had to fix it? It meant the cure is going to be worse than the disease - usually in the form of either cooling off the economy with interest rate hikes, or pushing the economy into a recession or increasing taxes or gasp cutting spending.
This is not graduate level economics we're talking here - its pretty common knowledge stuff. But if you say Biden wasn't responsible for the inflation on his watch, then by your logic you would have to excuse every president who had a poor economy because "its not their fault" and "there's no way to fix it."
Unfortunately, most people (like myself) know that's a load of poppycock and voted accordingly.
I totally get why people are infuriated by rationalizations like "inflation rates are now good". Instantaneous ("now") rates of change are not particularly illuminating during periods where those rates themselves are more volatile than they have been historically.
It makes sense (to me) to average inflation over the four year electoral period. The average inflation over the Biden years 2021-2024 was 5.3%, versus 1.9% over the Trump years 2017-2020 [1]. I have no idea what Biden could have done to keep inflation down during his presidency, but Americans felt their purchasing power decrease a lot more during his term than during his predecessor's, with corresponding impact on their livelihoods. They have every right to be pissed off. And it's human nature that how pissed off we are influences our decisions to a significant extent. Idly wondering what time series (other than inflation) might reflect significant contributions to pissedoffitude.
[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...
Democrats don’t control the price of groceries, and even what they can somewhat control (inflation) improved massively. Trump will also not bring down the price of groceries, so either voters don’t care about that or they (completely incorrectly) blame Democrats for it. Either way, I don’t see this as the Democrats fault.
I'll just point out that when you say "inflation improved massively," you are talking about the second derivative of price. You are saying that there was a positive change in inflation, meaning that the rate of change of the rate of change of price is favorable. Who cares? This is not a meaningful statistic. People can't afford groceries!
Well, we don’t want prices to go down. That would be deflation, which is worse than inflation.
>>Either way, I don’t see this as the Democrats fault.
Somehow I think that's problem. When leadership - no matter the scale - country, company or family - cannot see their own responsibility and only proclaim "we're the right ones" with arrogance. That is when you get unfavourable outcome. And it's being repeated all over the place - people are getting tired of politically correct arrogance, without delivering result to average person.
Yes, whatever portion made their decision based on cost of groceries do believe the president influences prices. It’s the same as the old line about “gas prices are too damn high”. Most people aren’t very involved in politics and they don’t understand things like this, or that economic cycles are so long that half the time it’s the result of the previous party’s actions what is happening now.
Harris played to and reinforced this economic illiteracy by proposing federal price controls for groceries.
But I mean what else could she do? You tell the electorate the truth and they don't understand it or don't listen, you lie and say "fine we will fix it with price controls" and they freak out all the same. Only one side of the political apparatus can like with impunity, apparently.
In theory Trump could bring down the price of groceries by threatening to put the Kroger CEO in prison, etc.
Remember when the dems controlled the senate and still couldnt pass a hike in the minimum wage?
Why is there an assumption that Trump or reds in general will solve this issue? He was a president already, what exactly did he do to fix the situation? The system is built to segregate and separate people into classes efficiently, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. After all the one who has more resources at the start of the game will win. I'm curious who will be labeled as an enemy first to redirect Trump supporter's rage when situation will not improve itself?
Yup, there's nothing they could have done. That's the tragedy of it.
You can't just educate people in a campaign that the President doesn't cause inflation, when it's the result of a global pandemic. They just don't listen and don't care. The different campaign messages get tested among focus groups. The ones that try to teach economics or explain inflation perform terribly.
This isn't a failure of Democrats at all. This is just pure economic ignorance among voters.
You will never win in a democracy if your stance is 'the voters failed me'. That the dems have chosen that mindset saddens me.
It's not the voters job to come to a party, it's the party's obligation to figure out how to appeal to voters. The dems chose to tell people who are suffering that 'the economy is great, this is what we think a good economy looks like and we are patting ourselves on the back for it'. To voters that are suffering that seems like 'our version of good doesn't GAF about you'. Not a great message. You could have the best economics professors/communicators in the world explaining it, people still aren't voting for that.
But the economy is pretty great: 4.1% unemployment - I'm old enough to remember when 5% was considered full employment, inflation rate back down close to pre-covid levels, manufacturing up, etc. EXCEPT there's one big problem with our economy: Housing. There's not enough of it so prices for housing are very high relative to incomes. The solution: Build a lot more houses. Harris mentioned this, though I don't recall a lot of details for how they were going to get there. If a lot of people didn't have to pay more than a third, sometimes over half of their income for housing the inflation wouldn't have been nearly as painful.
Foreign born employment increased [1], while native born employment actually decreased [2]. My wife combined the graphics [3]. The axes are in thousands of persons, so we lost 4 million native jobs and gained 4.2 million foreign born jobs. Coincidentally, that is about how many votes the democrats lost by.
1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073395
2. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073413
3. https://i.imgur.com/KtBGrkg.png
Your wife's graph is massively misleading. Why would you choose to put two different scales on the y-axis when they are already in the same units? The reality of the data you linked to is that the 5 million job difference you claim is pretty much an arbitrary artifact based on whatever month you place your starting line, the amount of native jobs is essentially flat from pre-pandemic. The amount the foreign-born jobs changed is on the same order of magnitude as seasonal fluctuations in native-born jobs and would barely register as a blip if you used a fair and consistent scale.
I thought the GPs post was an interesting claim so I dug into it and I think you may be wrong in this case, let me know if I have made any mistakes or misunderstood some of the data.
If you go to https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073413#0 and click Edit Graph, then Add Line (at the top) then add LNU02073395 (Foreign Born dataset) and then export to CSV it's relatively clear that in 2007-01-01 (start of dataset) at 18.3% of jobs were held by foreign born individuals, and by 2024-10-01 (end of dataset) it was 23.7%. When reviewing the slope of the data, it's not tied to the month of choice, there is a relatively clear linear trend over time. Jobs as a % are being taken from native born Americans.
If we look into census data at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acsbr... we see that as of 2022, 13.9% of the US population was foreign born. If 13.9% of the population hold 22.5% (2022-12-01 data from the fed) of the jobs, I can see why some people may have a concern there. Furthermore, if we look at sources of immigration in the census data, we see that roughly 50% come from Latin America, which has the highest percentage (79.7%) of individuals in working age (18-64) of which 82.8% do not have a bachelors degree of higher. Also, in support of the previous paragraph, the census data shows us that as of 2022, 66.9% of foreign born individuals held a job vs 62.9% native born.
I see a very persuasive argument for "they took our jobs" here.
In practice, my guess is that it's much more complex than that, but I do see how the raw numbers support the argument.
> there's one big problem with our economy: Housing. There's not enough of it so prices for housing are very high relative to incomes.
Swing and miss. We will have the record high ratio of housing per capita within the next 2-3 years. We're WAY above 1980-s, and only slightly below the 2006 levels.
But you're actually getting closer to the truth: economic forces are pushing people to move into ever-densifying urban areas, that simply will NEVER have low housing prices. And it's a nearly zero-sum game, so every unhappy worker in a tiny flat paying 40% of their salary in rent, means that there's a new abandoned house somewhere in Iowa.
This in turn makes people in Iowa poorer, and they start hating the city population.
Building more houses in big cities will NOT solve this. We need a concerted push to revive smaller cities, by mandating remote work where possible. Another alternative is taxing the dense office space.
The people living 4.1% unemployment have (one or more) zero hour jobs where you don't know if you even have work each week, let alone the hours (but always less than 36) until the start of the week, with no benefits, living paycheck to paycheck, dealing with the hassle of having roommates at home so no place to truly unwind, and a huge cut to food they can afford which was really their last form of comfort. Car costs have gone up to the point they are just holding on to what they have hoping it keeps running.
This isn't a 1960s 4.1% unemployment good economy. And it's no way to live. You are forced into a state where are you constantly reacting out of stress, not really living. You can't blame those people for not understanding the nuance of your 'the economy is great, this is what good looks like'. It's not fair to call them bad/dumb people because of it. They are good people struggling out here in the trenches.
You're not wrong, but it's tough to see how electing a more pro-business (ultra pro-business) president/party is going to fix that. They're going to take away even more worker rights as they favor business.
Labour force participation is what, 3 million below 2019? It's really bad.
Isn't a lot of that boomers retiring early? I'm a 61 year old that's not participating in the labor force because I'm tired of playing the tech interview games (I don't blame this on the Biden admin) and I don't need to participate anymore. My wife who is 63 would like to work again after being laid off last year, but ageism seems to be a very real thing so she hasn't gotten hired anywhere (again, not Biden's fault that ageism is a thing). Since labor participation rate is determined by working age population (16 to 64) I guess we're both contributing to that lower labor participation rate. (and come to think of it both my sister and my wife's sister are in a similar situation, both around 60)
What could the Democrats have done about it? Inflation was successfully reduced back down to normal levels without a recession, successfully managing a soft landing. What else could they do?
The real problem is housing costs. They should've laser focused on that. A lot of that is due to short supply, so build more houses (Harris mentioned this in her plan, but I don't think it connected). Also look into wall st buying up rentals - there are cities where most of the apartment complexes are owned by 2 or 3 companies, if one of them raises your rent and you try to find housing elsewhere you find either that the same company has raised rents in their other buildings or the other companies are doing the same.
Way to ensure the real estate holding companies and their owners switch their lobbying dollars and campaign contributions to the other party.
Or, pass a law restricting ownership by holders of SSN. Only 1 example. I'm sure simpler things can be done such as preventing subsidized mortgages by non-citizens. Etc.
Of course, this is tough, which is why it would never be done. And that's why you lose elections. If a president won't do it, what makes anyone think that a cowardly congress would ?
Plus , the usual suspects of real estate inflation are urban centers with heavy if not complete 1-party control for years. So any attempt at national policy has no credibility when local policy -which is already in control- continues to ignore the problem.
Contrast this with Trump - say what you will, he is willing to take flack to do things that are very unpopular, and that's what makes him stand out. Remember the early innings on the border wall ? Walking out of Kyoto ? The collective meltdown.
Exactly.
> They should've laser focused on that.
They did!
> A lot of that is due to short supply, so build more houses (Harris mentioned this in her plan, but I don't think it connected).
That was a main part of her platform. And of course it was connected. That was the entire point!
This is what infuriates me. People aren't even listening to what she's campaigning on.
It was LITERALLY the FIRST thing she talked about as candidate. Instantly. I think this exchange perfectly reveals the true core of the issue: most people, even those educated and engaged with politics (like 15% of the voter base) don't listen to, remember, or care about policy. Not even a little bit.
This entire thread is ripe with it; hundreds of suggestions about what policy would have worked, what she SHOULD have focused on.
It doesn't matter. It's obvious when you really just embrace it: she should have lied her ass off. Blatantly. Overly simply obvious lies.
"I will fix the economy. I will triple your paycheck and lower prices at the grocery store. I will half the cost of a house. Free college for everyone. 5x the military budget"
Why not? If people don't listen to the truth and vote instead for the man who tells very nearly EXCLUSIVELY lies then what is there to lose?
imagine a Trump response: build, baby, build. We are going to make so many new houses, they wont be able to sell them there is so many. People will have extra houses. People will beg me, please president Trump, no more houses.
Damn. Ever considered going into marketing?
You can't fix the housing prices by flooding the country with illegal immigrants. That math don't math.
At a minimum they should have admitted that inflation is a big problem. Instead they chose to ignore it or lecture people why they are wrong that inflation is a problem. Same with the border.
High prices are a big problem, but the primary thing you can do to compensate for that is push wages up through stimulus spending, which Biden also did very aggressively.
When people have a wrong perception (i.e. that Biden did poorly on the economy) you cannot contradict them or lecture them. That's a losing strategy. But if you don't correct them they will continue to blame Biden. That also loses.
The border/immigration suffers from similar perception problems. When people believe that dems are shuttling illegals to swing states in order to steal the election, how can you respond to that? Or to claims about illegals eating cats and dogs? Trump is very effective at messaging that invokes strong emotions.
People will forget about grocery prices and the border once Trump is in office. Trump will shout things and maybe do a few publicity stunts and that's enough to appease people. The actual reality matters little.
Stimulus spending CAUSES inflation. You are expanding the money supply. You want to reduce prices, then you need to cool off the economy and reduce the money supply.
Lowering govt spending PLUS raising taxes would have been the way.
Stimulus spending can cause inflation, but doesn't do so necessarily. A cursory look at deficits and inflation charts will tell you as much. Biden got inflation under control and got the economy to bounce back very quickly -- a feat very few people believed he could pull off.
"Reducing prices" means deflation, which doesn't happen outside of a depression. Triggering a depression intentionally is absolutely bonkers in terms of policy.
https://genevavsarette.pages.dev/immyufx-border-crossings-in...
They were constantly mentioning the cost of living, and even proposed extreme measures (such as price controls) to try to fix the issue. Democrats were not avoiding the issue at all. Same with the border, where they worked with Republicans to pass a massive border bill that Trump then killed.
The border bill was done only after three years of doing nothing against massively increasing crossings.
Price controls don't work. That is a dumb solution.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. - 1984
is not a winning message in the US. Dems should have seen people are suffering and instead of giving them economic data given them hope (the Republicans at least offered some 'other' to blame/direct anger at). Most Americans use food as their comfort/escape. They can no longer even afford that. Personally, I think the Democrats need to run on ending zero hour jobs and $1 cheeseburgers.
Zero hour jobs are ones where people have to have 1 or more jobs that don't give you a schedule until the start of the week, don't guaranty you any hours (other than that you will get less than 36), don't give benefits. It allows companies to cut to the bone (which overworks people) knowing that if the company needs more hours they will just push up the hours later in the week (which wreaks havoc on peoples lives because these people often need to work/juggle hours at two jobs). Companies should have to staff like they used to with actual jobs and not treat/schedule people like EC2 instance. At the least the government shouldn't count zero hour jobs as 'employment' in the traditional sense. They are not. They are human EC2 instances and that is a very stressful(harmful) way to live.
Just picture Bernie Sanders hammering home that the wealthy are screwing everybody. That's the kind of messaging they need but they would rather loose than move left.
Identifying a viable villain and being mad about it would probably have helped, but the election pretty clearly shows that moving left would have had a _worse_ result.
Arizona and Nevada both voted for abortions rights even though they voted republican. The left and right aren't a boolean option, a left candidate who says the system isn't working may do just as well as a right candidate who says the same because they get more of "the grocery prices are broken" crowd even if their overall policies are less palatable.
How exactly?
Harris didn't run even a center-left campaign, she pushed center-right except on a few issues at the margins and it was late in the game on that front.
Americans generally favor more liberal policies economically, like stronger labor rights, universal healthcare, student debt cancellation etc. There was a lot to offer voters of all stripes there.
I think too many Democrats counted on a huge pro abortion turn out of women specifically and that translating into democratic votes, which, even to my surprise, it did not.
Take a look at the results of the various referendums. Some of the same states that have voted for Trump with a hefty margin also voted for things like raising minimum wage or guaranteed paid sick leave.
I think most conservatives have a strong idea in their mind of who their idealogical opponents are: ivory-tower academics, liberal business people and politicians, and all the plebs who side with them to push ideologies and social policies they don't want (policies like people born as men competing with women in sports).
Harris did nothing to distance herself from being strongly associated with that liberal cohort. Regarding social policy and ideology, she came off as being far-left to the average conservative.
Have you ever considered that the stance regarding pro aboriton amongst women is to a certain extend age dependant? What I have noticed anecdotally amongst my acquintances is that older women tend to change their mind on that matter, at least sometimes. I am suspecting this has has plain egotistical reasons, simply because they no longer have to care, paired with a certain amount of women that had an abortion and never really managed to find peace with themselves about it. TL;DR: Careful, not all women are pro abortion, possibly not even the majority.
I'm not so sure of that if they found a way for the message to connect. Bernie did pretty good with his messaging in 2016.
exactly its all messaging. dems suck as messaging and kamala was not the right person to deliver messages because she avoided interviews, conversations, etc. Dems needed someone who would go on any show at any time like Bernie does.
The problem is: Bernie can hammer all he want, but there is no platform to reach the voters. That is __the problem__ for the Dems.
1. The big media is in the hands of a select few (tech) oligarchs. Look for the accelerationists there.
2. Take notice of what happened at the WaPo. Bezos fell on his knees for Trump, fearful of having his other business interests been killed.
2. I mean: no reasonable platforms. The false balance in the New York Times is below the most horrible standard you can get in journalism. New York Times Pitchbot exists for a reason.
3. In the US the press is allowed to spread fake news. Some media make a living of it. Others (see 2) try to give a neutral impression by presenting false balance
4. The serious, damaging analysis will get moved below the fold, if there is one.
==> Now you have gotten a system where the populace doesn´t even get informed anymore, so no serious debate is possible.
==> The Dems are not even able to have their own policies, they have to lean deeply right to stay not too much out of touch of what is presented as normal discourse in the media.
If the US slips further from Anocracy to Autocracy, it will be 1) because the press gave the autocrats the nod and 2) some powerful captains of industry were on board, 3) and they were helped by radicalized far right christianity (Heritage Foundation et ali.).
An echo of Weimar.
Yellow Journalism has been around since the 1890s, and to a degree journalism has always been about propaganda - it's hard to spread your opinion without a printing press, and by the time the poor can get their hands on them, the upper classes/wealthy/capital holders have had access to this level of automation for some time/captured huge chunks of the market.
In a way, it is a bit of an oddity that there has been trust in journalism in recent decades - some individual acts like publishing whistleblower accounts or corruption have lead to an outsized perception of it being for the public good.
Meanwhile, we have seen again and again - particularly in Murdoch owned properties - that the interests of commercial media do not align with what we consider the common good; ie
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies
Yet we do nothing about it in particular (Australia and the US). Then we end up back here, wondering why groups in the electorate have wildly different perceptions
I don't disagree, which is sort of my point. The democratic party apparatus and their allies don't want that platform/message.
I was mostly just pointing g out ghat there is a stance/platform that could combat right wing populism.
> The democratic party apparatus and their allies don't want that platform/message.
Sure they would love to use a reasonable platform with broad reach, but they haven´t. Relevant media are heavenly partitioned in buckets of insane "Infotainment Corp" and "Sane Washing Corp".
There is simply no room for truth if you give non-truth equal space. Non-truth can be made as entertaining as possible, sucking out all oxygen for truth.
That is what Americans allowed to happen over the decades, and the consequences are getting more grim every election.
It is not even about Trump.
You can -- to some extent -- combat right wing populism with left wing economic populism, but there are two key problems with this strategy:
1) the Democrat party hates economic populism. Bernie would have to hijack the party like Trump did. But where Trump has many allies in positions of power, Bernie has none.
2) the populist rhetoric that people like the most is false. Grocery prices aren't high because supermarkets suddenly got greedy. Worker exploitation isn't why billionaires exist.
I also don't think it's good strategy blame a minority group for all the problems in the country. Billionaires are not a protected minority obviously, but when you stoke anger against one group it can easily result in a different group getting unjustly targeted (Mexicans, trans people, etc). We don't need any more of that and politics of hate and resentment isn't the way forward.
The COVID years oversaw the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history.
Either billionaires really earn their pay, which implies that they are thousands of times more productive as a person than the rest of us - literally superheroes.
Or - if you accept this as the obvious bullshit that it is - then all that money is not a fair compensation for anything, but rather the consequence of being in a position of economic power that makes it possible to extract wealth from the economy in one way or another. How exactly said extraction is done is immaterial - if the wealth is unearned, it means that it was taken from someone else, since someone ultimately did the work necessary to create it.
No absolutely right.
This old school form of campaigning on issues and policy are just redundant in this day and age.
Trump just showed us the speed of the current media cycle. Its minutes or hours. Democrats and all "rational" styles of electioneering on "issues" and "policy" are doomed to fail agains Trump style content. Trump can insult or harm so many voting groups in a day, that people are completely exhausted and then just blank it out.
If Biden did the same thing, it would result in the same electoral outcome, it would not cost the dems any more votes. People would just be exhausted by Biden, and then blank him out too. Then it would be whatever default placeholder people like to think about when they think "Presidential candidate", and would then vote without having to worry about what they were doing.
Its honestly insanely amazing. Its like we have been doing politics wrong since the Greeks.
This is an astute comment; we are in the social media era of elections, probably have been since 2016.
Policy Vibes > Policy Content
>This is an astute comment; we are in the social media era of elections, probably have been since 2016.
No it isn't. In the U.S., we were consciously doing it wrong because the Greek system failed for the specific reasons that are currently being discussed. The democracy broke down to the issue of personality coalesced voting blocs, that once delegated to, used the levers of power to make the task of holding onto that power easier. There was a reason the Electoral College was designed in to the American System, and there was a reason National political parties were specifically warned against by the Early Founders, and it was because down that road was the path to repeating the Greek's mistakes.
The Faithless Elector was a feature, not a bug.
>Policy Vibes > Policy Content Is specifically the death knell of a political system.
I am just point out where we are on a road map, without making any claims about the territory itself.
You are almost there imho.
That is where Journalism should come into play. But popular media have a business model of spreading fakes, being outright partisan and are mostly driven by clicks rage and engagement. That is what a Chaos Actor like Trump provides. To see what is happening it is more insightful to look what forces are behind Trump.
In the US media landscape, it is not possible to have a genuine debate. Every hour there is new nonsense that will kill of any "boring" news.
Not as a matter of nature. But as a betrayal of democracy by the Fourth Estate, opening the door for anti-democrats.
It is a deliberate choice, helped by self-delusion and exceptionalism. It is painful to watch a society marching to where we know where the end is.
Hell I wont even blame the fourth estate anymore.
Fox came on the scene, and it worked as a business. In the end that means it gets funding, and is the competitive business model.
Other media orgnizations had to deal with all sorts of other barriers such as editorial standards etc.
I will add though, that Fox probably survived competition because it had such a close link to the Republican party. I wonder what would have happend if it were a more active market.
Actually scratch that - I remembered the issue with this market. Once we started having conglomerates of a certain size, acquisitions and the consolidation of media assets and newspapers was inveitable.
So even if there were other conservative view points, it would eventually be absorbed by "Fox" or whatever dominant entity in the market.
----
I would like to blame Rupert Murdoch, but I am beginning to see that the man just found a chink in the armor of how society organized its media systems, and exploited it.
That's not the position of the politicians and messengers of the party, that's the position of democrat voters after many desperate attempts to reach and persuade other voters.
There's always the hope that the average voter can find their way to a considered, moral vote. That didn't happen.
Agreed. Trump has been successful mostly not because of any meaningful policy, but from being able to capitalize on Democrats tendency to treat the uneducated as fools and even call them deplorable.
Gangs and fringe movements thrive off taking in the rejected.
Until Democrats can find a way to reach the opposition in a way that isn't condescending they will continue to lose and drive away voters. The so called deplorable will grow.
They need to design, build, and walk over the bridge - patiently, despite all the chaos and negativity.
If they continue to do the same thing and treat their fellows as idiots and expecting different results..is delusional and insane.
Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers and yet plenty still voted for him. By word and deed it's very clear how little Trump thinks of women, and yet white women as a bloc elected Trump. Hillary Clinton used the phrase 'basket of deplorables' ONCE, 8 years ago, but that was an unforgivable mistake. By contrast nothing Trump does sticks to him.
The perception that Democrats are smug and condescending have certainly hurt them. But that perception is mostly the result of relentless Republican messaging. Tim Walz is a down-to-earth governor of Minnesota who treats everybody with respect. He's a lot less condescending than JD Vance. But the perception of Democrats hating regular people persists.
> Tim Walz
This lunatic, during the debate with JD Vance, volunteered that he didn't believe the First Amendment protected "hate speech" even before Vance could finish accusing him of that. I had previously given him the benefit of the doubt over that MSNBC clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8ns76RCmWs) where he stated:
> There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy
Thinking that perhaps Walz just meant social media companies ought to censor "hate speech" and misinformation for the greater good, but during that debate, he left no doubt that he thinks "hate speech" isn't protected. And of course the Tim Walzes of the country want to be the arbiters of what is and isn't "hate speech."
The “deplorables” thing is kind of amazing. The message was “you guys are wrong, only like a third of Republicans are all the things you say—committed racists et c.—and the rest are normal, reasonable people we should try to reach and serve” but was delivered the kind of way a couple policy wonks and campaign strategists sitting and looking at hard polling and behavioral data might talk, such that it was disastrous. “Some of you write them all off, but [looks at meta-study] only about a third of them are committed to principles and ideals that might, fairly, be called ‘evil’ or ‘disgusting’ or what have you”.
A lesson in how shitty delivery can deliver exactly the opposite of the literal message you’re conveying.
I'm not running for office so I can say this.
Their fellows are idiots and fools.
I know it's not a winning strategy to point this out. But it doesn't stop it being true.
[flagged]
To paraphrase Rumsfeld: "You go to elections with the populace you have."
If the Dems don't/won't/can't account for it by changing their messaging, devising better or more readily understood platforms, then it is on them. You have to meet people where they are, not where you think they should be.
There is no competing message to be had. The people believe that whoever is in charge is bad because their lives are terrible. They just ping pong between parties without caring to investigate policies.
You can’t appeal to voters like this apart from not being the person in charge.
The election was close. I don't believe this at all. It's simply being tone deaf. Not to mention the strong democrat support in the mid terms (when inflation was arguably worse).
The election wasn’t close at all? I’m not sure what you mean by this. Trump won both the popular and handily won the EC.
I’m willing to put money down right now that the next president is a Democrat. Not by virtue of messaging or campaigning but just because people will still be suffering and the dems will be the opposite of the status quo.
Just a guess but midterms probably emphasised the educated vote which seems to have swung Dem recently.
The college educated have been trending strongly toward Democratic affiliation since some time between ‘04 and ‘11, depending on your source.
You can manufacture a favorable electorate. Republicans have been extensively working on that far harder than the Dems have since some time around Goldwater and the last great re-alignment, and it kicked into overdrive in the 80s. They pushed for loosening rules around mass media so they could do it better, and they succeeded. This current re-alignment of their party is an outcome of that “farming” they did over decades growing out of control of the party leadership post-Citizens United and the huge shake-up in campaign spending that brought in.
This observation admittedly provides little actionable for democrats in the near-term. But one strategy that demonstrably works is picking demographics and pushing media at them that creates a demand for solutions to issues they didn’t previously think existed (and need not necessarily exist). Look at e.g. the molding and elevation of the modern pro-life movement for an early example, or at their entire current platform, very nearly, for a bunch more-recent ones.
It's hard to conceive of a change in the Democratic strategy that would have gained more votes without losing others. In contrast, there is seemingly nothing that Trump could say that would lose him support. Trump had a very high "floor" that he could not fall below. Democratic voters are fickle and would just as soon stay home or vote third party as a protest vote.
But the Dems did. They did everything you're asking for. Their messaging was totally different from 2020, everything was clear and understandable.
That's what's so sad. The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution. The Republican campaign was a disaster in execution, but they won anyway.
The message of this election isn't that Democrats did something wrong. It's that they did everything right, and a majority of voters simply still don't care. They don't think the insurrection mattered, and they think Trump will fix inflation because he's a strong businessman. And they don't listen to anyone who says otherwise.
I don't see anything the Dems could have done about that. You can't force people to listen, you can't force people to understand economics. That's not something campaigns can do.
> can't force people to understand economics
People were actively deceived along the way. Do you remember that intially Yellen (and Powell together) called the inflation "not broad enough to be considered inflation", then called it "transitory" and justified printing so much money all the way into 7% inflation. At 3% PCE, Powell said everybody to relax, that nobody should doubt they will use every tool they have to fight inflation. Bostic at 2% PCE said he is not worried, he welcomes higher inflation, approaching 4% inflation would be cause of concern and would require action. Action that never came. They just lied and misinformed the people for years. People listened to this, it was all over the media. It's wrong to suggest people didn't listen.
Do you remember after 5 years of review they came up with symmetric inflation target of 2% and they instantly abandoned it because that would require lower inflation for decades to come. And nobody in media questioned it, they said people "misunderstood the target".
They don't want to educate people about the economy, they want people as stupid as possible.
Your criticism of Yellen and Powell's messaging is valid, but I have a very hard time believing that had any impact on this election.
The US fared better than almost industrialized nation post-pandemic. Our inflation is currently under control, unemployment is low, wages are rising. I have a hard time believing that anyone could have handled a hard situation better than the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Trump's stated economic policies (no income tax, make it up with tariffs) are unequivocally bad ideas that would make the prices paid by most Americans far far far higher than what they're paying today.
The overlap between "People who know Jerome Powell and think he did a bad job" and "People who think Trump's fiscal platform will be good for the average American" is close to zero people.
Is it? Because between part time job, gigs, and people falling off unemployment benefits from receiving them too long I don't trust unemployment figures, they are measuring the wrong thing. It seem people work longer hours, for less disposable income overall.
Don't bother with unemployment, look at labor force participation.
>Trump's stated economic policies (no income tax, make it up with tariffs) are unequivocally bad ideas...
...but they are very good memes, as in units of information that compete for attention. I think we are now, post-2016, in the social media era of elections, where policy content matters far less than policy vibes.
>The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution.
Objectively untrue; Harris lost.
>You can't force people to understand economics
You're correct. So you have to reformat the message. The Dems failed to do this. I can tell you have never been a teacher: teachers are forever having to change their messaging because different people understand in different ways.
This teaching thing is a terrible comparison. As a teacher you have a captive audience with a (somewhat) agreed upon goal: the student(s) are going to learn something.
This is absolutely not the model for candidate<->electorate relationships in any way. If anything, the elector(ate) wants the candidate to simply tell them things that confirm what they think they already know.
Are you serious? The entire nation was fully captivated this election cycle.
Captivated is not captive, and even if it is etymologically adjacent, most of the electorate did not expect to have to learn about stuff like econometrics ...
Then I meant captivated AND captive. Why are you being pedantic?
How was anybody captive? I didn't see a single campaign ad or watch a single rally, except for a couple of brief excerpts that I chose to.
You're missing the critical point: it's not about captive, it's just that this helps with the critical point, which is an expectation of learning taking place, rather than worldviews/prejudices confirmed.
I see, I missed that nuance in your point.
> Objectively untrue; Harris lost.
I would fault the Democratic party platform itself, not the campaign. It's valid to say the campaign was executed well and that the failure was due to disagreement with the Democrat party line.
Trump has a policy platform they agree with more -- that's something that is not easily overcome by how the campaigns are run.
E.g. "secure the border". Trump fought to build a wall during his first term. To voters who want a more secure border, that speaks louder than anything either candidate can say (or not say) during their campaigns about what they will or won't do.
> Objectively untrue; Harris lost.
Yeah, sometimes if you play by the rules you lose.
> So you have to reformat the message.
They did, and it didnt matter.
The argument here is essentially: 1) IF the dems communicated correctly, they would have won 2) They did, and it didnt matter. 3) If they had communicated correctly they would have won.
Correct communication here is a place holder for winning.
Consider the many things the Dems did pull off, including Biden dropping out, and the massive massive outreach and funding they used to get the message out.
Consider that Trump is definitionally reprehensible, as just a human being, forget the standards America used to have as a presidential candidate. Seriously - tell me you think that Trump <the person> is actually what you want in a Republican candidate. Every single time, Trump supporters have to resort to some variant of "he didn't really mean that", to defend him.
There is FAR more incorrect in Dem electioneering than just communication. I think the fundamentals of how elections are held have changed. You dont really need policy any more.
Because you guys twist everything the guy says
This is nonsense.
From the memorable “grab them by the pussy”, to fabricating stuff about the draft recently.
“ She’s already talking about bringing back the draft. She wants to bring back the draft, and draft your child, and put them in a war that should never have happened.”
The only twisting here is when people try to ignore what he is saying and pretend he meant something benign.
They could have also not perpetrated a genocide. I haven't committed a single genocide during the biden term. How hard can it be?
The democrats told people who are suffering 'the economy is great, this is what great looks like to us'. How is that a winning message with people suffering?
> That's what's so sad. The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution. The Republican campaign was a disaster in execution, but they won anyway.
So, put differently, you're saying that Democrats did not have Product-Market fit, while the Republicans did. Yes?
> The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution.
She had 0 counties where she outperformed 2020 biden.
> The Democratic campaign was A+ in execution.
polls had 'country on the wrong path' at ~75%
Kamala Harris wouldn't break from biden on anything, even when she was begged by the media to do it several times over several days.
That's just one example of dumb shit the dnc/kamala did.
Dems are not in the venues where people are talking about these issues. I see tons of right wing youtubers, tiktokers, podcasts, and there is just far less dems in these environments or willing to go to these places. You need more Bernie types (not necessarily his politics exactly) but the willingness to go these places repeatedly and talk about ideas.
Buttigieg did this literally nonstop on behalf of Biden and Harris. Did nothing.
Its hard to say what happened internally, but Biden could have stepped down in time for them to have a proper primary.
>> Their messaging was totally different from 2020, everything was clear and understandable.
But when you have the VP is running for the office that her boss has just occupied for the last four years, the whole point of the VP running is to continue what they started - not suddenly say you would do a bunch of stuff differently when YOU were riding shotgun on the poor economy, inflation, immigration and crime.
Harris was asked repeatedly what she would do differently and said "nothing". She was a horrific candidate. She couldn't speak to voters without a teleprompter, she was a cringe worthy public speaker, she was never on message and always reverted back to, "Well Donald Trump did this and that." which never connected with voters.
She also had a front row seat to Biden's mental decline and repeatedly went in front of the media and defended him to the very end when he was removed and she replaced him. Harris was the same person who got zero financial support from democrats during the 2020 campaign, had to drop out and didn't even make the primaries because of the lack of support from voters.
If you were paying attention, this was completely predictable.
By contrast, Trump was on message, had a plan, left all of his divisive rhetoric at the door. He connected with voters, reached across the aisle and formed a coalition with RFK, Gabbards and Musk. He went on podcasts to reach younger voters. Anybody else see Vance on the Theo Von podcast? He campaigned relentlessly in the key battleground states, he did tons of impromptu interviews.
There's a reason he's projected to get 300+ electoral votes AND win the popular vote and nothing in your comment would seem to understand why.
Take a look at the markets today. Take a look at the price of Bitcoin right now.
The country wanted significant change and they voted that way.
I think every single thing Trump did during the last 3 months hurt his campaign, actually. It had just already gotten to the point where nothing he said mattered, because people were choosing him based on their experience in 2019
"By contrast, Trump was on message, had a plan, left all of his divisive rhetoric at the door."
This is when I knew you were screwing with us.
Trump was on message, had a plan, left all of his divisive rhetoric at the door - Hardly.
Trump's a pretty singular personality. He floods the zone with bullshit and denigrates vast swathes of the electorate. His insane ramblings are just considered by his adherents to be part of his allure and mystique. The American people can't seem to get enough of it, presumably because they so strongly identify with his character.
I have no love for Democrats but it's unclear to me that there's really anything they could have done. The common wisdom in the past had been that Trump is some kind of liability for Republicans, but at every turn he has been underestimated and I question that assumption.
To me Trump looks like a true master of his craft, and there is no line of carefully triangulated messaging that will resonate more with typical Americans than his stream of vitriol and lies.
In Argentina we got tired of lawyers/politicians roleplaying as economists, so we voted a real economist for president. In tree years we will be able to tell you if it was a good idea...
Hah! Good luck. An economist is as much a politician as those other guys, who were likely lawyers.
He's looking good though. I'm quite happy for you.
The media insisted on comparing him to Trump or Bolsonaro for years, but if you actually listen to what he says, he sounds moderate social democrat. Go figure what the media is doing while he speaks...
So far it's been working out great compared to the previous guy.
I compare Argentina's election to buying a car. One of the candidates basically ruled the country for 18 months, got inflation over triple digits annually, the exchange rate went to infinite, among other economic and administrative mishaps.
It's kind like test driving a car where it's engine overheats, the radiator explodes, and basically falls apart.
Your choices then become either buy the thing you know is broken and doesn't work, or buy the other new mystery thing which says it's going to work though you haven't tested it.
It's basically a known bad versus an unknown, yet still 44% of people voted for the broken car.
Milei so far has been doing great economically and getting inflation down, we'll see how it goes next year.
Don’t be ridiculous. There’s a lot more that they could have done to win. And should have done. But they didn’t. And if they’re smart they won’t continue to make the same fatal mistake as you are doing right now by generalizing more than half of the American population as too dumb to know what is good for them.
> make the same fatal mistake as you are doing right now by generalizing more than half of the American population as too dumb to know what is good for them.
They made the same exact mistake in 2016 and from what I can observe in this thread and similar ones in other forums, the lesson has not been learned. They will keep their smug ideological superiority complex, disdain those who dare to disagree with them and thus will continue to disenfranchise a large swath of the population.
Can't help but notice you didn't actually say any of what they could have done to win
It's the opposite. When someone says you are "talking down" to them by using big words, the solution is to dumb it down with simpler words, not to increase the vocabulary.
I was under the impression that most economist said that the ARP and IRA was a significant contributor to inflation (amongst many other factors, supply chain issues, war in Ukraine, labor shortages, etc.), so it’s not factually incorrect to lay some amount of culpability on the administration?
Maybe they could have tried not shutting the economy down while helicoptering free money on everyone? This combined with policies that make energy way more expensive while also allowing the immigration system to be abused... I'm not sure there is a more perfect recipe for inflation? So they did a bunch of inflationary things, then kinda got the inflation under control, and then you're puzzled when people are still upset about the inflationary things that were done?
Covid was coming to an end, and yet Democrats decided to still go on another trillion dollar spending spree, inevitably leading to inflation.
It's incorrect to characterize this as "pure economic ignorance among voters"
Trump printed $4T in a year, Biden printed $1.5T in 3 years. 80mph vs 10mph.
The 80mph is what got us to inflation town. If someone looks at 80mph and 10mph and says "I'll elect the 80mph guy because 10mph is irresponsible" then yeah, I'm pretty comfortable characterizing that as pure economic ignorance.
Glad someone understands inflation. This is true and all we can hope is that someone close to him understands this.
Trump didn't print $4T, the bi-partisan effort in Congress for COVID relief did.
I think the problem in voters eyes is that Biden did not stop after this. He pushed through multiple trillion dollar bills on top of it.
I'm not saying I agree with that stance, but calling the $4T Trump's doing is a really misleading. It was not part of his economic agenda at all.
> It was not part of his economic agenda at all.
Then why did he make the IRS reprint COVID relief checks so he could add his name to them?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/inside-the-disaster-trumps-si...
I mean that is obvious right? It was self-promotion, one of the few things Trump is really good at. That doesn't mean it was in his economic agenda to pass trillions in debt funded covid relief or that he was even responsible for it.
Yep. It was probably the singular reason (of a few) he lost 2020.
Yeah Trumps spending was bipartisan but Biden unilaterally poured fuel on the fire after Covid.
Inflation is down prices aren't going to come down if we spend less.
Yes! That is exactly their failure! As explained by the venerable poets, "The Doobie Brothers":
>But what a fool believes, he sees
>No wise man has the power to reason away
>What seems to be
>Is always better than nothing
>Than nothing at all
By failing to meet the economically illiterate at their level, the DNC campaign looked completely oblivious to those they were trying to help.
Pretty much this.
DNC forgot that in polls, the American electorate prefers a bigger 1/4 lb hamburger to the smaller 1/3 lb one.
The bigger one is the one with the 4 in it, obviously!
> What was their failure here?
One, that last round of stimulus. Two, not agreeing to cutting spending when prices continued going up. Three, not massively greenlighting permitting around new energy and fossil fuels to bring energy prices into a deflationary stance. (Note: this is Monday-morning QB’ing from me.)
That stimulus thing seemed like a double bind. Lower stimulus would have meant less inflation but worse unemployment, right?
The whole pattern feels like a repeat of the country using Democrats to clean up messes (in this case, the mess was more Covid's than Republicans'), at which point they kick out the Democrats again. I don't think another massive tax cut (or extension of the last one) is a good idea.
> Lower stimulus would have meant less inflation but worse unemployment, right?
Yes, this is likely what would have happened. And in that case the Dems would still lose because people would be upset about the high unemployment.
> Lower stimulus would have meant less inflation but worse unemployment, right?
Yes, but you can target where that unemployment goes.
Democrats were probably too fair in distributing the pain. (As well as the fruits. Both the IRA and CHIPS Acts massively invested in counties that would have always voted Republican. That boosted turnout in an adversarial way.)
Oil companies will not spend money just to lose it all on lower prices. Who is going to drill your hypothetical wells?
All tiny next to the money trump printed.
Sure. But that’s the last guy. The question is what Democrats could have done in power. With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been massively over correcting on prices and the border.
The US is, right now, producing more crude oil than any other nation in the history of the world. Harris repeatedly stated that she would not ban fracking. And yet, we keep hearing this BS about how Biden / Harris needed to do something about fossil fuels.
Of course what we need to be doing is halting all burning of fossil fuels ASAP, but that would be a losing electoral strategy. Who cares about the looming climate disaster, we need cheap gas...
The only actual issue there is that energy companies want a fire sale on perpetual resource rights on protected federal land they don’t already have access to.
The rest, and the part communicated to voters, is yet another fake issue. It’s exhausting.
They failed to articulate that they understood the frustration with high prices + low wages in a way that made people feel motivated enough to vote for them.
Exactly its all messaging and if the messaging is not getting through you need to go where voters are discussing these things (podcasts, youtube shows, tikTok, etc). And they needed to start doing it 2 years ago not 4 months ago.
That was a key element of the Harris platform, but nobody gives a shit. Trump boasts about fixing everything overnight with no specifics, and gets a free pass.
The media definitely didn’t learn that competing for horse-race viewers at the cost of all else gives Trump a large advantage. They all talked about that lesson in 2016, but didn’t really learn it. Clearly, given how they behaved.
Inflation happened globally not just in the US.
Also salaries in US kept with the inflation while globally they didn't.
The US economy is doing great, but inflation doesn't make it feel like it.
I myself feel it.
I'm not from US, I'm European and make around $110k per year.
Yet I skip on 5€/kg tomatoes even though I made 28k just 3 years ago and they costed half of it.
The failure was keeping the economy locked down too long and sending checks to everyone in the world. My father in law that lives in Germany for the past 50 years, got a check from the US.
If he was paying taxes in US for 50 years while on Germany, it seems that he earned the check.
The failure was not putting Biden Harris's signatures on the cheques.
Not pro Trump here. The Dems failed to understand that telling people who are really struggling (my community is really struggling, it's sad to see people in the grocery store barely able to afford food, this is the reality, heck I'm struggling) that the economy is doing great isn't a winning message. They should have ran on 'we are working really hard on fixing things and this is what we have accomplished'. But a campaign telling people suffering that 'the economy is doing great' resonates 0% and just tells those struggling that the campaign doesn't see them/care that they are suffering.
I never once heard Harris say 'the economy is doing great'.
Harris did not (or may not have) but Democratic punditry and commentariats were full of "the economy is objectively great, why is it subjectively sucking?" articles, for months.
Because they look at metrics like GDP and the stock market and unemployment, and fail to realize that it's not evenly distributed. Increasing GDP and stock market indicate somebody is making a lot of money, but the average voter isn't seeing any of that in their own lives.
Well, they look at average wages, average hourly wages, median household income, median disposable income. All of these things improved right alongside "inflation" to the point where anyone who was not an outlier for those statistics ended up no financially worse off (and arguably somewhat ahead) than where they were pre-COVID.
The problem is that people remember the "old" prices, not the "old" paychecks.
It has been said that people see wage increases as something they have a right too (periodically, anyway) but see inflation as something imposed by a 3rd party with bad intent.
I heard Biden and partisans say it a lot, and I cringed every time. In his first State of the Union, I clearly remember him bragging about record high house prices. I cringed at that too.
What did Harris herself say? Not much; she barely had any time.
There was one voice within the Democratic Party whose communication about this was good: Bernie Sanders.
The Biden-Harris administration said as much constantly.
When the gaslighting failed to achieve the desired effect (make everyone believe their grocery bill is half of what it actually is) - then they just changed the message to "those darn greedy mega corporations are price gouging you!".
The citizens of this country gave a large middle finger to the gaslighting and bullshittery that was the economic messaging coming from the Biden-Harris administration - and then when Harris failed to enumerate how her administration would be different than the existing one... she was doomed.
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I moved 1 hour north of San Francisco about 7 months ago so not even some remote red state. Over a few weeks this summer when I went to Safeway, three people ahead of line (assuming middle class, blue collar workers considering that this mostly the industry here) had their credit cards/debt cards declined, even when trying different cards. One was heartbreaking because he was buying a cake for his daughter's birthday. It definitely underscored how severe the economy is for people and why I thought Trump would likely have a 50%/50% chance of winning.
It is about the economy.
The sad fact is that if you have to explain something to voters, you've lost.
Voters don't want explanations, they want solutions.
You be correct and say something factually as "The economy is fine, all indicators are moving the right direction - we're back to pre-COVID levels" but still lose massively on that.
And as it turns out, whether or not your solutions is rooted in reality - apparently doesn't mater for the average voter.
Harris went with the "We're not gonna make any changes", when people are moaning about the economy. That was her fatal error.
Trump and MAGA continued to hammer on about how terrible the economy is, and how they're going to make China pay, while lowering taxes.
Again: voters don't want explanations, they want solutions.
“ economically illiterate ”
You got your explanation here. Arrogance and dismissiveness of voters.
> What was their failure here? The failure to explain to the economically illiterate that while inflation is now about where it was prior to covid that prices won't be going down (unless there's some sort of major recession leading to deflation)?
When is over-communication on the problem the team needs to solve ever a bad thing?
No, it's the failure to do anything about it.
Americans got robbed of something between 20-40% of the purchasing power of their dollar depending on what they're buying. People aren't stupid, they know they're getting hoodwinked when someone focuses on the fact that the rate of robbery is slowing down rather then the fact that they didn't stop the robbery in the first place.
I think that's the wrong way of thinking about it. The prices of goods are high, people hate it and want it fixed. What plans do the Dems have for actually addressing the high prices? They can say this instead: "I know things are expensive now, here is how I will do X, Y, Z to fix it". It could be saying they'll raise the minimum wage to reduce the effects of the inflation, provide some sort of tax break, straight up give people money, or something (I know that the ideas I proposed aren't necessarily good. Inducing demand is bad, etc, etc). What doesn't win is telling people why we got to where we are and what does win is telling people what you're gonna do about it. Trump does that, even if it's all lies or based on bad information and that gets people excited. Are the tariffs gonna be bad? Most likely, but hey it's doing something and to most people, that is enough for them since there is a lot of nothing happening.
You could go to the Harris website and read their plans, they discuss all your points.
https://kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy_B...
Now compare that to Trump's non-existent plan. No one cares, that is what is so depressing.
That what your actual proposals are does not matter appears to be true, but is pretty wild.
I guess it’s an open question whether a Dem could run with a total lack of substance and pure vibes (while they and, incredibly, the media accuse their opponent of having no policies? Or is that too much to hope for? Do we think in the reverse situation Fox News would be talking about how the R candidate was being too vague, even as they were being less vague than the D candidate, as the “liberal” media did endlessly in this race?) without weakening the get-out-the-vote for their base so much that they perform even worse. Might work, might not. We only know it works for the current right.
Wouldn't that just be lying to people?
Most of the measures you suggested, especially straight up give people money will just increase inflation further.
Sure, but what are they gonna do? Fact check you after you win? We already see that nobody cares about that. If the dem's actually cared about the people they say they represent, they would be trying to win even if it meant overpromising or getting down in the mud. How is it helpful for trans people that that the people representing them are getting voted out? How is that helpful for laborers, poor people, rural people, etc? Just say you'll give em money, get elected, don't give them money (they'll just forget so whatever) and then try to do some good from the inside by enacting policies that will help people out. I think this article spells out the problems with the democrats: https://www.economist.com/1843/2024/11/01/why-arent-harris-a... Why couldn't they just support the buyout? I don't care if US Steel is owned by a foreign company and I bet most people don't, so they aren't getting votes by being protectionist. If they support it and it doesn't work out (because let's be real, how much could the government do here), then just blame the republicans or something. Boom, you get to support something good, then get ammunition to show how the republicans messed something up due to their protectionism if the deal falls through.
Obviously I'm frustrated, but it's truly wild how ineffective the democrats are. I think them trying to be so upfront and politically correct all the time is a losing strategy for them.
People don't really care about inflation. They care about not affording groceries. If they won 1 million dollars from Elon Musk by voting for Trump, inflation becomes irrelevant, because their problem is solved.
Indeed, and now we can sit back and watch when those his voters realize, that Trump will not "fix" inflation either. In fact, if he executes on what he advertised during his campaign, it will get much worse.
Then they can just blame it on "the deep state", how convenient
Not if "Project 2025" is implemented. Then the Republicans created a real Deep State. Who will Republican voters blame then?
They'll still blame "the Deep State" and just mean anyone they don't like.
They failed to hammer home that Trump printed the goddamn money.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2NS
I'm not sure this would've helped. It require more than a 10 second attention span. Explaining inflation is a 120IQ problem whereas most campaigns are aiming at sub 100IQ communication.
I'm sure that the idea was raised in Democratic campaign strategy meetings and likely rejected for exactly that reason, but I don't think the reasoning is correct. "Trump printed the money" isn't hard to understand. Hard to believe, perhaps, and I'm sure he would deny it, but it puts him on the defense and beats the hell out of a thundering silence that implicitly accepts his premise that Dems were responsible for inflation.
They couldn't blame Trump for printing the money because nearly all of them voted for the stimulus.
Blaming Trump for printing money when you voted on it, too, is a bad strategy.
This is precisely why you lost in 2016 and why you lost in 2024.
Thinking you're always smarter than the electorate is never a way to win elections. fixing inflation is pretty easy. Telling people how you're going to do that is pretty easy.
Not doing it because you think people are too stupid to understand it is why you lost. Harris never had a plan to fix anything and it was obvious to voters. Its funny you think this way when Trump swept all the battleground states - states Biden won in 2020. Were you saying the same thing about THOSE areas too then?
I somehow doubt it.
they did fix inflation. they told people it was fixed, which it is. What they failed to message well was why it happened in the first place and that it was a global phenomenon
Except Trump's stimulus was needed because of the lockdown (and people were losing jobs).
Biden stimulus was the one that
a) Ignited demand > Supply
b) provided no incentives for people to go back to work (Biden also had extended mortgage, rent, loan payment programs) which exacerbated inflation
Let be real though. The majority of the Trump stimulus was either a campaign stunt (I received a letter from Trump stating that he gave me, someone that makes 6 figures, a few hundred dollars) or a huge spending program with no accountability (the PPP “loans”).
$4T in 1yr vs $1.5T in 3 years. Trump was printing at 80mph, Biden was printing at 10mph.
Must have been a pretty fast 10mph.
But if Trump didn't print it then somehow Biden would've worked with 1.5T?
I don't think any dem is saying that. I think they're saying that inflation is the result of a global pandemic, not Dems printing another 1.5T. I think by all accounts the economic landing after a global pandemic was really good, certainly better than 2008. We aren't in a recession. Prices are high, but so is employment and job growth. The government failed at something, whatever that something was: was it a failure in signaling that yeah, these times are hard but guess what, it's because of COVID and buckle up because we did the best we could? Or was it that they let inflation rise too high? I'm not sure.
What we’ve learned is that a politician should definitely not pull the lever in the trolley problem. Let four die instead of one, then claim credit for the one.
>They failed to hammer home that Trump printed the goddamn money
loose monetary policy was the right thing to do after the COVID downward economic shock. But not extending it over and over, and that's when/why the inflation kicked in.
I think the only solution was also the craziest/most risky and the party would have never gone for it.
Hold an open primary with a candidate that talks in no uncertain terms about the failures of the Biden presidency, and the new path forward, criticizing the Biden admin for not doing enough on inflation.
I think essentially Trump won in 2016 and 2024 because he was willing to take such a risk against political norms, and this was a change election. No explaining the causes of inflation, or what Biden did right and incremental steps were going to change that. People wanted a visionary leader, and while I disagree with Trump, I think Trump and Musk provided that new vision for America.
I hate this by the way, I'm an incrementalist policy wonk who in general hates visionary leadership.
But Trump talked about stopping at nothing to remake the American economy to radically improve the lives of all Americans. Harris talked about $25,000 to buy a house.
> criticizing the Biden admin for not doing enough on inflation
But the Biden admin clearly did enough to fight inflation. He may even have done too much.
The framing of the US discussion around inflation is itself a lie.
This is kinda the point I'm trying to make, that in the current environment most people want a leader who isn't afraid of lying to make a point. That is in my perspective what vision mostly is. When things are in crisis, like 2020, people were probably more comforted by boring competence.
For instance, in terms of visionary leadership, I think Musk fans mostly don't care that he lies about when a product will be delivered. They want to believe so to speak.
I still think you got it the exact wrong way around.
People want honesty. Trump saying people have economical problems is honest (at least relatively). Keeping the discourse around inflation because Biden did a great (?) job there isn't. (That applies even if the Rs were the ones focusing on inflation, unfortunately people don't discern that well.)
I really think that if the Ds said "we beat inflation, but that doesn't immediately help you. we will do X to beat low salaries next" it would be well received. But that requires honesty.
At the same way, Musk fans like that he delivered X (there's a lot of impressive things you can put here). Talking about the future is always bullshit anyway, so he being wrong there is less important than he having delivered stuff before. The things those people are ignoring are the fact that he only put money on it, or that the more he gets involved, the less his companies are able to deliver. Not that he is wrong about the future.
Yeah, maybe the point is more about a focus on the future than a "lie" and being willing to be really ambitious about that future. Yes, Trump sort of honestly described the problem, but provided overly ambitious and conflicting ideas on how he would solve it.
Welcome to the social media era of elections!
Vibes > Policy
There are people who are economically literate, and who recognise that the massive money printing under trump to deal with the covid shut down of the economy contributed to inflation, as did the war in ukraine and supply chain disruptions, but that also, everything the dems did after that made the problem worse. By the time Biden took power, vaccines were getting rolled out, lockdowns were not warranted anymore, and the massive spending that Biden pushed was unnecessarily inflationary, as Manchin said at the time. And the fed kept printing money way after it should have stopped, most likely to support Biden's spending plan.
Honestly what Trump would do in this situation is distract with a bunch of other nonsense and make that the talking point instead. Dems haven’t stooped to this level yet to their detriment. The whole thing is pretty sad.
IMHO national politics is insane, both parties use propaganda to hide from the real issues and are only interested in maintaining a keeping political power and money at the behest of corrupt corporations.
I don't think an election in a 2 party dominated system is going to fix this, history has been repeating itself since the 60ies. People need to change there thinking about supporting a system that doesn't work before we make any headway in correcting these problems.
This right here. I just got a fundraising text message from the Dems today.
Like: are you F'ing kidding me? You guys and gals just flushed the executive and legislative branches down the shitter, and you want MORE money?
Shows me what the DNC really cares about: itself.
Fixing it would require constitutional amendments, because it’s an outcome of our system of elections and structure of government.
Yep. Good luck with that (Not directed at you).
Trump's economic plans are extremely inflationary, and even a freshman economics student can point that out. It's just that nobody really cares, they just like Trump and will fill in the gaps to justify it.
You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down.
The reality is post-covid was an inflationary period because of hyper consumerism. Demand shot up, extremely quickly, and supply was still lagging due to covid. There was really nothing anyone could do. It's unfortunate, but voters don't consider these things. They just see the prices, see a blue president, and go from there.
I don't think hyper consumerism goes deeply enough to answer the question of why we saw prices change so rapidly. We printed trillions of dollars and flooded the economy with new money. We had extremely low interest rates, again creating more new money in the system. We stopped student debt payments, meaning people had more money in their pockets to spend. We also stopped evictions, though you would really have to be a special kind of asshole to skip paying rent so you can buy more random consumer goods.
Its worth noting that printing new money was the actual inflation, inflation is a measure of the increase in the money supply itself. Prices did go up, or you could say the dollar lost value, but price changes aren't actually inflation (prices are tracked by indexes).
Sources and sinks - where does the money go? What is it subsequently used for?
"Inflation" by itself has come to be synonymous with consumer price inflation. This rubs the Austrian in me the wrong way, but it is what it is. Personally I always make sure to use an additional term like "monetary inflation", "price inflation", and "asset inflation". For example, Trump created trillions of dollars in monetary inflation, succeeding at the goal of creating immediate asset inflation, which then a few years later caused massive price inflation.
Price rises are tied to higher energy costs, that are linked to the war in Ukraine.
Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. It seems like it'd be difficult to narrow down price increases to just one cause, especially a base resource.
It looks like US electricity costs are up around 10% since 2022. How do you peel that apart to know electricity prices changed first, and that that is what caused all other prices to go up?
I mean - you just said it didnt you? Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. Thats perfect. Yeah it does - and so it raises prices for everything.
Also why do you look at electricity? Its not just electricity, its everything. The war disrupted oil supply from Russia, which is something like 11% of global oil production. On top of it they disrupted supply chains globally.
Also, this is on top of the pandemic's economic hangover. This is pretty much up there from the first few searches on this topic, before you have to get into any detailed economic analysis.
I should have said energy there, I didn't mean to zoom in only on electricity. Oil priced are actually a worse comparison, I'm pretty sure oil is down since the war started.
> I mean - you just said it didnt you? Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. Thats perfect. Yeah it does - and so it raises prices for everything.
That doesn't show direction though. Energy impacts basically everything in the economy, but energy can also be impacted by the rest of the economy.
> Also, this is on top of the pandemic's economic hangover. This is pretty much up there from the first few searches on this topic, before you have to get into any detailed economic analysis.
Doesn't that go against the earlier comment that prices are tied through energy costs and directly linked to Ukraine?
I wouldn't put to much faith in top search results for what its worth. Those are almost never going to include detailed economic analysis. Most people don't click on detailed analysis, search engines won't promote those first.
> You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down.
I used to believe this, but the truth is we haven't been able to import food, energy or homes from China for a while. That leaves autos, and it's very hard to predict how auto tariffs would affect inflation, since people have always purchased more expensive cars over cheaper ones, for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile for stuff you and I care about like computers, well most of what you are paying for is software, which is all made here. Services like health care and education are insensitive to tariffs, and since grocery stores have to provide health care to some employees all the same, it affects prices for goods. Home prices rising is supported by both parties, and besides inflation the government basically guarantees market returns but risk free in owner-occupied real estate in this country.
I wish what you were saying were true - that bringing tariffs down to zero would eliminate inflation - but if it were that simple it would have been done already.
Its not just China. Those tariffs he's advocating for are broadly speaking, against all imports[0]
>Trump proposed a 10% tariff on all U.S. imports and a 60% levy on Chinese-made products, which if enacted would affect the entire economy by pushing consumer prices higher and stoking retaliatory levies on American exports. Trump also threatened to impose a 25% tariff on all imports from Mexico.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-suppliers-importers-prep...
I'm not arguing that bringing tariffs down to 0 will just magically eliminate inflation. But certainly, and without debate, the tariffs Trump proposes will grossly increase the price of goods for consumers.
> The reality is post-covid was an inflationary period because of hyper consumerism
That was just an outgrowth of high monetary supply during COVID to shore up the numbers and prevent economic collapse due to a steep and sudden drop of economic activity. All that money couldn't be immediately mopped up as soon as the economies opened up, so it sloshed around for a while longer.
"You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down."
See Smoot Hawley - it passed in 1930, and deflation accelerated. Economy is a complicated system.
Any other notable events that happened in the 30s that could have driven deflation? Could tariffs be linked to that event? (To be less coy, the great depression occurred in the 1930s. Counter tariffs led to less exports, which further hurt the economy. The arrow of causality is indirect, tariffs -> counter tariffs -> worse economy -> deflation) [1]
Recent example: Gas prices deflated during covid. Why? Massive reduction in driving and buying of gasoline.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Smoot-Hawley-Tariff-Act
"Smoot-Hawley contributed to the early loss of confidence on Wall Street and signaled U.S. isolationism. By raising the average tariff by some 20 percent, it also prompted retaliation from foreign governments, and many overseas banks began to fail. (Because the legislation set both specific and ad valorem tariff rates [i.e., rates based on the value of the product], determining the precise percentage increase in tariff levels is difficult and a subject of debate among economists.) Within two years some two dozen countries adopted similar “beggar-thy-neighbour” duties, making worse an already beleaguered world economy and reducing global trade. U.S. imports from and exports to Europe fell by some two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, while overall global trade declined by similar levels in the four years that the legislation was in effect."
> even a freshman economics student can point that out
And that freshman would be more educated than 1/3 of the country.
I don't mean that as an insult to 1/3 of the country. Trump wins because he messages in a way that EVERY person can understand. A huge portion of the country will disagree with his approach, but that's vastly different than relying on people to understand concepts they've never had exposure to.
> they just like Trump and will fill in the gaps to justify it.
You've hit the nail on the head. They "like Trump." They find him charismatic and entertaining. Democrat politicians are boring and starched. Politics is show business. Why can't the Democrats learn that?
THIS. Voting in America seems completely disconnected from rational policy discussion, people don't seem to care anymore. The average voter gets so caught up in the sensationalism and the most controversial candidates seem to appeal strongly to both Boomers and GenZ. Sadly, I think any successful Democratic candidate in the future will need to appeal to voters in this way.
National elections are essentially yes/no referenda because all the issues average out in aggregate. Issues make for months of tv though.
I understand all of this; I voted for Harris, despite not particularly liking her (or Biden)
Trump talked about inflation, and his desire to fix it, constantly.
Harris did not.
Once again, Republicans Show Up and they win by default. Yes, his "plans" are nonsensical, but the opponents decided to forfeit the match!
This isn't true. Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times. The issue is nobody listens, ultimately republicans have been able to support the lie that they are the "party of economics". Past that propaganda piece, nobody cares.
As I tried to imply in my original post: Harris' talk about low inflation or fighting inflation loses on a technicality, which is that people tend to experience inflation as the current price not the rate of change in the current price. Thus, when Harris is talking about inflation fighting and inflation cooling down, you have a bunch of people who look at the price of eggs/pizza/houses and say, "this shit is still expensive, Dems are full of shit." They are not looking at the CPI, and calculating the year-over-year change.
Let me share an anecdote: I worked on a project to estimate household-level price sensitivities to the market basket of goods commonly used in CPI calculations. (My employer had shopper-card/upc/transaction-level data from tons of major grocery chains across the USA with which to attempt this project.) I tried to read through the docs on how CPI is calculated, and let me tell you: major snoozefest, and I consider myself "a numbers guy."
I doubt the run-of-the-mill American can accurately define inflation. Consequently, "look at how we fought inflation" is the wrong campaign slogan.
"The Rent is too Damn High" is still a well-recognized meme. I doubt many people remember the gentleman's name or what he was running for. But the message worked! It's got to be simple and focused.
Slogans are important. Everyone knows MAGA, it's on the hat, but can you name Harris, Biden, or Clintons?
People are suffering and the Dems ran on 'things are going great'. To the people suffering that feelz/vibez like 'our version of great DNGAF about you'. It's easy to see how that could be a less than optimal message for a candidate for election.
The issue is that she's part of the current administration and the current dominant party. That's all people care about. They look at who's in charge and vote the other way. It's really that simple.
That seems to imply that things can't get worse.. much much worse
Oh, they will get worse, much worse. But the simpletons who think the president is in charge of egg prices or whatever will never comprehend that. Maybe if it gets bad enough people will learn then.
> Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times.
There was this Biden admin. push to not call things a "recession" due to technicalities that probably pissed people off? "Inflation" means 'higher prices' and "recession" means 'economy things suck right now'.
Where are the long form interviews that cover the policy from her point of view?
afaik, Inflation in the us i quite low. Isn't it almost at the target? So why would she have a policy?
To beat a dead horse, the working class cannot afford grocery or rent. If you say that inflation is not that bad, in their mind you dismiss their suffering and dismiss them entirely.
I'm saying that because inflation is what we're discussing.
I have no trouble believing many people are worse off, which sucks. And many politicians should care more and try to do more.
But: 1) I would attribute that to low wage increases for several decades, not the last 4 years. 2) there's no easy fix for these things. 3) Putting inflation in a global perspective is meant to show how this is not mainly Biden's fault, since he doesn't control the rest of the world.
> Inflation is not prices; it is the rate of change in prices.
Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply. The term is used wrong almost everywhere today.
Price indexes like the CPI are what measure the change in prices of a set of goods.
Inflation can influence prices since the supply of money changed, but they aren't directly linked.
Edit: getting plenty of requests for a source here, especially because you will find countless sources online using the price increase definition.
https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...
This is oddly reflective of the elitism that cost the DNC it's victory. "Well actually, my poor man, a tomato is a fruit and every PhD economist knows that inflation is connected to fiscal policy's influence on the monetary supply"
The every day person uses the culinary definition of tomato, and inflation means that those tomatoes cost more at Walmart.
I would expect a botanist to know that a tomato is technically a berry, just like I would expect an economist to know that inflation is technically defined as an increase in the money supply.
Everyday people can use whatever definition they want. That doesn't mean economists, the Fed, etc should say "inflation" when they mean "price of goods".
Inflation is technically defined as an increase in the price level. You'll find the term defined in this way in every single economics textbook.
Entry level textbooks. It's one of those things they intentionally teach wrong to first year students in an attempt to "simplify"
Do you have a source? I've only ever seen it defined the traditional way. Besides, you can increase the money supply and not get inflation (defined the usual way). Inflation happens when the money supply increases more than the economy needs.
Inflation happens when money supply increases more than the value of the goods that you can purchase with that money supply. It isn't about needs, but things that can be bought, especially those with limited supplies like housing.
No, it's not an attempt to simplify. Advanced textbooks define it in the same way.
That definition depends on where you look, and when the definition was written. Between the roman empire and the mid 1900s inflation always referred to an increase in the money supply.
No, it didn't.
Bro, it's 2024.
The tomato price is too damn high!
Get it yet?
This exchange is like a microcosm of the educated elite trying to talk to ordinary people.
This comment made my day.
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> and every PhD economist knows that inflation is connected to fiscal policy's influence on the monetary supply
Huh? I always thought this is common knowledge.
Well, for one thing, monetary policy is the primary determinant of money supply, not fiscal policy.
Second, I think it is fair to say that the causes of inflation are uncertain, even among mainstream PhD economists. The quantity theory hasn't been matching empirical data, and newer theories like the fiscal theory of the price level are gaining attention.
Matter-of-fact discussion of the economy didn't cause people to vote for a serial sex offender promising to execute his political rivals and purge America of immigrants. The messaging could be better but don't gaslight us. Something is very wrong with the calculus being used by a great number of Americans.
> vote for a serial sex offender promising to execute his political rivals and purge America of immigrants
> Something is very wrong with the calculus being used by a great number of Americans
I'm sure a lot of people, especially independents who could have swung either way, voted for Trump precisely because they were sick of this attitude.
People are free to make partisan judgments against Trump or any other politician, but they will also suffer electoral consequences if those judgments are for the most part fact-free, as in your case.
I think it is actually 3 things, but you can't do much about two of them:
-1/3 economic/voters: we need better/different economics/policy
-1/3 cultists/far right christians/nationalists: trump is how we finally rise to power/right the nation
-1/3 lolz/nihilists: i hate everything; burn it all down
2 and 3 are the same group. Accelerationists and white Christian nationalists are just rebranded white nationalists, so there is nothing surprising there. Hard to say what the distribution of purely economic voters is given how illogical that is. I'm hesitant to believe the excuses people have given how extreme of the rest of the campaign was and its parallels to a particular historical figure, going to the point of nearly plagiarizing quotes from the man.
Yeah, so instead they voted for the guy who printed the money. That'll show the DNC!
Both parties have been printing money since Clinton was in office. I don't really see debt or inflation as a problem of one party.
Didn't Clinton basically balance the budget by the end of his second term?
Yes he did. I've heard interesting arguments that they did some clever accounting to hide a small deficit on the books somehow, but I didn't quite follow well enough to say for sure. That technicality aside, Clinton balanced the budget and every president since has apparently thought that was a terrible idea.
First, the Republicans have been running on a platform of pretend fiscal responsibility, and so deserve more criticism for the hypocrisy per their own standards. The Democrats have just been upfront about spending money.
Second, there's a huge difference between spending new money on specific policies for deliberate outcomes, and blindly dumping it into the financial sector to bid up the everything bubble as fuel for the Potemkin stock market and a handout to asset owners.
It's actually libertarian gibberish.
> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply. The term is used wrong almost everywhere today.
The word has multiple meanings. That’s monetary inflation. The primary meaning in use today is price inflation.
> Word X means Y, NOT Z
Wittgenstien would like a word. Words always mean whatever the hell the speaker thinks they mean, which is always unverifiable. We should always endeavor to understand what people _think they mean_ instead of insisting on some (faulty) denotation.
The inflation argument is always frustrating. In a vacuum, inflating the _supply of money_ would delate the _price of money_ which inflates the _prices of goods_. Most people say "inflation" to mean the price of goods, but it does no good to insist that one definition means you can't use the word in other ways!
So I can use the word 'dog' to mean a cat? Nonsense. The purpose of words is to communicate meaning. Therefore we must agree on what that meaning is beforehand in order to communicate effectively.
What's a dog? Is a child's plastic toy in the shape of a dog a dog? Maybe. Is a cross-bread wolfhound a dog? Maybe. Language games! Meaning is "fuzzy around the edges".
If you insist a cat is a dog, we're not playing a fun game - but that's up to me and up to you - Maybe someone in an undiscovered tribe doesn't know these words and wouldn't balk. If you say "dog" when you mean to insult someone, I might know what you're saying. But there is no mechanism to verify internal meaning.
I _strongly_ suggest reading some Wittgenstien if you're interested in this topic! If I say I speak Swedish fluently but refuse to ever utter a word, do I speak Swedish? Only our actions can vaguely point at our meaning. Language is a game we play with each other which does not and cannot communicate ultimate meaning. All we can do is agree or disagree to play games - animals dancing around a fire.
This is my main beef with "inflation" being used differently now from what it had been historically. Going back to the roman empire it was always about money supply increase, Keynes and crew decided that didn't sit well with them since money supply manipulation was their whole game.
You're just parroting the same thing again and again without providing any evidence. For a start, the amount of money in circulation is an unobservable quantity. It's extremely unlikely that the Romans had a word for it.
Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.
Its used in many ways, that doesn't redefine the word though. Inflation is a policy of increasing the money supply, nothing more and nothing less.
Inflation is not price increases. If that is the definition then the metric is effectively useless. Prices can increase for any number of reasons, looking only at price changes doesn't tell us anything meaningful or actionable.
“Inflation” doesn’t mean anything by itself. It is a shorthand for either price inflation or monetary inflation. Or inflating a balloon. Context is needed.
> “Inflation” doesn’t mean anything by itself.
It absolutely does when the correct definition is still used. Inflation is an increase in money supply, that's really all there is to it.
Your point is why the use of "inflation" to mean price increases is so meaningless. Prices change for any number of reasons and you need context. When "inflation" still means in increase in the money supply there is no context required to know what it means, though obviously that's not all the information you need to understand the economy.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inflation
You are wrong and that's why you are misunderstood. I would suggest just saying "increase in money supply" if you mean increase of money supply instead of using a term that means "a continuing rise in the general price level". That will make people understand what you mean.
What's "shrinkflation"?
It's not just "used in many ways," it has several definitions. The one that almost everybody uses -- including the Fed[0], US Dept of Labor[1], and the ECB[2] -- is about rise in prices. Nobody is saying that your definition is bad or wrong, but to claim that it's the only (or even primary) one is disingenuous.
[0] https://www.clevelandfed.org/center-for-inflation-research/i...
[1] https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/statistics/inflation
[2] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb-and-you/explainers/tell-me-mor...
Sure, though it makes sense that most economists use the price inflation term. The change in how "inflation" was being used largely goes back to Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory. Most economists today fall into that bucket, of course they use the term in the same way.
That doesn't change the fact that the attempt to redefine it both co-opted the word and made it functionally useless. Prices change for all kinds of reasons. The amount of change alone is meaningless and using that meaning of the word allows economists today to play a lot of shell games with the numbers.
> change in how "inflation" was being used largely goes back to Keynes and Modern Monetary Theory
This is totally false. It dates to the inter-War period, specifically, to describe Weimar hyperinflation. (If you just look at money supply, it was bad. If you look at prices it was the disaster that it was.)
> Its used in many ways, that doesn't redefine the word though.
That's exactly how words get redefined.
> Inflation is actually the in the money supply
No, that is expansion of the monetary base. Inflation is an increase in price levels. If a country’s money supply contracts while prices rise that’s inflation.
The problem with the metallic definition is a country that loses half its territory and most of its reserves after losing a 19th-century war, thereby setting off double-digit price increases across its economy, doesn’t “inflate” from a monetary base perspective. Once we understood these concepts were separate, we segregated the terms. Insisting inflation refers exclusively to monetary-base expansion is phlogiston-theory stuff.
The problem with the metallic definition, meaning the definition of "inflation" from the roman empire until the mid 1900s, is that it didn't really work well with Keynesian economics or modern monetary theory.
Inflation has a bad connotation historically due to the number of examples where increasing the money supply too quickly ruined economies and destroyed empires. MMT and Keynesian economics use the money supply as the primary tool for controlling the economy.
They may not like that "inflation" described the exact mechanism for the main tool of modern economics, but that doesn't make it wrong. The easily could have come up with a new term for an increase in the price of goods rather than co-opting an existing term. That strategy seems very much like a play driven by ulterior motives.
It isn't so much that we had to understand new concepts as it was they had to redefine terms to put their new game in a better light. That's also why they talk about price increases rather than currency devaluation or theft. Both would be accurate, but price changes sound more benign.
> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply. The term is used wrong almost everywhere today.
I'm sorry I just can't find a single source backing you up. All sources I find define inflation as increase in prices.
> I'm sorry I just can’t find a single source backing you up.
As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“monetary inflation”), others primarily as an increase in (consumer good) prices (“price inflation”).
At least in modern economic literature and usage, the term “inflation” (without modifier) is more often used to denote price inflation rather than monetary inflation.
The insistence that the term “inflation” ought be primarily rather used for “monetary inflation” goes back to at least Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 1912:
“In theoretical investigation there is only one meaning that can rationally be attached to the expression inflation: an increase in the quantity of money (in the broader sense of the term, so as to include fiduciary media as well), that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the need for money (again in the broader sense of the term), so that a fall in the objective exchange-value of money must occur.”
Thank you
As far as I know only economists of the Austrian school use the term 'inflation' to mean an increase in the money supply.
While it may be true that the Austrian school uses it like that, it's certainly not the case that they're the only ones. In fact, I suspect if you speak to anyone economically trained over a certain age, there would be a high chance of them defaulting to this.
Growing up, a close relation of mine was an economist, and certainly not of the Austrian school. As a teenager, I was basically ganged up on by a teacher and some kids when inflation was brought up in class. They seemingly had no concept of monetary inflation, and I was forced to swallow that it referred solely to prices going up. I obviously questioned him on this incident, and he outlined that the "prices are going up" phenomenon is price/consumer inflation, and that increases to the money supply are monetary inflation.
Historically, monetary inflation and consumer inflation coincided (Supply of X goes up -> X is devalued -> consumables are now charged at higher X), and so distinguishing between the two wasn't particularly pertinent.
The Roman Empire's observations that debasement of their coins resulted in the increase in prices, meant that the original conception of inflation really was as a monetary phenomenon, not just that prices are going up.
It's really only a relatively recent phenomenon, from the early 20th century, that you had dual definitions trying to occupy the same word, although the concept that price inflation could deviate from monetary inflation probably was starting to be understood with the establishment of price indices in the 19th century.
Keynes arguing that prices could rise independent of the monetary supply post-Great Depression increased the focus on consumer inflation. It was around the 1970s where inflation more commonly came to consumer inflation in academia. 'Stagflation' of the 1970s is probably the tipping point in usage.
To conclude: it's not really wrong to use inflation to refer to monetary inflation, as it's the original usage, but considering consumer inflation as 'inflation' is definitely more in fashion (especially in the US).
Thank you for confirming my hunch that this level of confident-incorrectness and mixed up history could only have come from some damn article on mises.org.
https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...
Here's a good one I just found as so many here were asking for sources.
This doesn't support your assertion- in fact it does the opposite. The definition(s) of inflation has changed over time. That does not make the current definition(s) less correct
Well I did try to caveat it that its one of the few sources I could even find that reference the fact that the definition was changed.
My argument isn't with the fact that "inflation" is in fact being used to mean "price increase of goods." My issue is that economists co-opted the word at all and made it functionally useless, especially in isolation as it is often mentioned with no other context of why prices changed.
The use of "inflation" to mean money supply increase goes all the way back to the roman empire.
“Inflation” is measured based on the prices of a predefined list of goods.
Have you ever read up on that list of predefined goods? It is pretty interesting to see how regularly the list is changed and how many different factors they add in to adjust prices.
Someone did a study looking at magazine prices for example. They picked magazines because they almost always had prices printed on the cover and cover images are cataloged. I don't remember the exact numbers, but they found that the actual prices went up by a much higher rate than how the CPI calculated it because they were discounting price increase with a claim that quality got better. Meaning you may have seen the price double over time but the CPI only said it went up by 30% because you got more value from the newer issues.
> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply. The term is used wrong almost everywhere today.
Do you have a source that this is the „correct“ definition? Wikipedia for example uses the definition you think is wrong, and specifically says that CPI measures inflation.
Growing up, a close relation of mine was an economist, and certainly not of the Austrian school. As a teenager, I was basically ganged up on by a teacher and some kids when inflation was brought up in class. They seemingly had no concept of monetary inflation, and I was forced to swallow that it referred solely to prices going up. I obviously questioned him on this incident, and he outlined that the "prices are going up" phenomenon is price/consumer inflation, and that increases to the money supply are monetary inflation.
Historically, monetary inflation and consumer inflation coincided (Supply of X goes up -> X is devalued -> consumables are now charged at higher X), and so distinguishing between the two wasn't particularly pertinent.
The Roman Empire's observations that debasement of their coins resulted in the increase in prices, meant that the original conception of inflation really was as a monetary phenomenon, not just that prices are going up.
It's really only a relatively recent phenomenon, from the early 20th century, that you had dual definitions trying to occupy the same word, although the concept that price inflation could deviate from monetary inflation probably was starting to be understood with the establishment of price indices in the 19th century.
Keynes arguing that prices could rise independent of the monetary supply post-Great Depression increased the focus on consumer inflation. It was around the 1970s where inflation more commonly came to consumer inflation in academia. 'Stagflation' of the 1970s is probably the tipping point in usage.
To conclude: it's not really wrong to use inflation to refer to monetary inflation, as it's the original usage, but considering consumer inflation as 'inflation' is definitely more in fashion (especially in the US).
You can see glimmers of the original definition on the wikipedia page, but the term has been misused for decades noe and basically anything you try to find for a definition of inflation will talk only about prices.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
I can't get deep links in wikipedia on my mobile browser for some reason, but here's the full page.
The "Terminology" section vaguely references the original Latin word and gives a few nods to when currency was tied to gold. It is a bit hand wavy, though when it talks about new gold supplies being found or later mentions when the cost of money changes, those are both related to the original (correct) definition. Finding more gold increased the money supply, which may change prices though it doesn't have to.
Toman history sometimes covers the idea well as they inflated the currency by minting more coins to increase supply. I can't find a great link at the moment that covers it well from that angle though, I'll try to come back here when I'm at my desk if I find a good link down that rabbit hole.
If a word has been "misused for decades", its definition has changed.
It's a fool's errand to try to claim the original definition is the "right" or "only" definition at that point.
You've lost this semantic battle against the world, and it's honestly pretty exhausting to see you wasting effort trying to continue fighting a lost cause.
Sure, we could always make a different term for monetary inflation and avoid the ambiguity with the new definition but that doesn't fix the underlying point.
Monetary inflation is an important concept that is now almost entirely ignored. An increase in the cost of goods can be interesting, but its a second or third order effect of an extremely complicated system.
Price changes are meaningless without context and extremely difficult to understand with context. Money debasement, or inflation, is easy to understand and is a primary input to the system rather than a downstream effect.
>the term has been misused for decades now
Am I out of touch? No it is all of modern economists who are wrong.jpg
Wait, is your argument that modern economists couldn't possible be wrong? Or in this case, that modern economists couldn't possibly have co-opted the term to better work with Keynesian economics and MMT?
If physicists decide to reuse the word "meter" for a unit of measuring volume does that mean anyone that uses it as a measure of distance is wrong? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new term for the new need, a term that doesn't collide with centuries of use?
>If physicists decide to reuse the word "meter" for a unit of measuring volume does that mean anyone that uses it as a measure of distance is wrong? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a new term for the new need, a term that doesn't collide with centuries of use?
Perfect question!
In fact, the definition of "meter" has changed over time, and if you stick with the old definition, you'd be off by 0.2 millimeters:
https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/meter
Science changes as it needs to. (And the word "science" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when we are discussing economics, aka the dismal science.)
A 0.2mm difference is so vastly different from the analogy he made to using it as a measurement of volume. Hopefully you're putting this forward as an interesting factoid and did not mean it as an actual argument.
I contend his analogy is wrong; it's not like "inflation" changed from a money policy thing to a labor market thing.
Inflation historically was a measure of the change in money supply. They co-opted the same word to instead measure an entirely different concept, the change over time of a basket of goods.
In my book that's very similar to taking a distance measurement and reusing the word to instead measure a totally different concept, volume. Curious how its different though, I may just be tripping myself up here.
Could they be wrong about the well-understood label they’ve agreed upon to refer to a particular concept in their field? No, and in fact I’m tempted to class the answer as tautologically “no”.
Classical economists didn't seem to use the term 'inflation' in either sense. I can't find any evidence that 'modern economists' have corrupted the original meaning, like you imply.
https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...
This link does at least acknowledge the original meaning of the word, though it does imply that's an outdated use in economics.
Inflation is increase in the cost of living.
You've linked to a privately written article ("The views authors express in Economic Commentary are theirs and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland ") by someone who worked for the Cleveland Fed, who blames printing currency for inflation. No doubt that debasement of the currency increases the nominal prices of things. But it's hard to square the idea that that's all there is to inflation when you consider that lots of countries had inflation after COVID. They didn't all coordinate on printing currency.
I've never actually seen anyone use "inflation" to refer to cost of living. Most economists use the term to talk about price increases of a subset of goods, but that isn't directly measuring cost of living.
It's literally how most people use the word.
Most people are not economists. All they know is they're spending more for less every month, and they don't like it.
The money supply idea has always been Austerian crackpot nonsense, intended to dissuade governments from investing in public services of all kinds because that's socialism, and we certainly don't want any of that.
In reality price rises are mostly driven by corporate profiteering, and sometimes - as in the oil crises of the 70s - by supply shocks.
> Inflation is increase in the cost of living.
This isn't entirely accurate, either. An increase in the cost of living occurs when real wages fall (in other words, when workers paid less, in real terms (adjusted for inflation), for the same amount of work). In principle, inflation doesn't necessarily lead to an increase in the cost of living, although in practice usually it does.
There are many faces of inflation. The "money supply" you are talking about was not the primary driver in the last few years and there was robust demand for the treasury issuance. You will see the money supply inflation pick up when treasury auctions start to fail. I believe this will happen down the road but not soon. Most of the inflation was driven by other factors: low-income labor shortage, and a supply side shortage that fueled an increase of prices for commodities and anything else up the chain.
> The "money supply" you are talking about was not the primary driver in the last few years and there was robust demand for the treasury issuance.
Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe we can be sure of that. The economy is extremely complex, ferreting out the impact of any one intervention is nearly impossible.
On the surface it seems very unlikely to me that printing trillions in new money and giving it to banks, businesses, and directly to every citizen had no impact on prices. The supply of money increased dramatically and the cost of money (interest rates) was also extremely low.
Beyond my hunch though, I haven't found any data that has clearly isolated the inflation out of the equation to be able to show that the price increases weren't driven by the new money at all.
I am sorry, but you are wrong, since about the 1960s. Inflation could be caused by money supply, sure.
But don't take it from me:
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Back...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/inflation.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explaine...
https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/statistics/inflation
https://gisme.georgetown.edu/news/what-the-hell-is-inflation... (Inflation used to mean what you claim it means...but doesn't anymore)
https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/HighSchool/Inflation....
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/what-is-inflation
https://www.rba.gov.au/education/resources/explainers/inflat...
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/26/inflation-definition-evolut... (There is some argument that I may too be wrong, and inflation is coming to mean high prices, but when the DNC campaign was talking about low inflation, it was not referring to prices, but change in prices.)
My point wasn't that the term is used this way, its that the definition of inflation has always been an increase in money supply. The common use of the term to mean a change in prices is a useless definition.
Its extremely common to hear "inflation" used to describe price changes, but the number is then used in isolation. Prices change for countless reasons and without detailed context related to supply/demand, strength of the dollar, etc you have NP idea why prices changed. Maybe we printed trillions and prices went up because the supply of money went up Maybe prices increased because demand is outpacing supply. The response to those situations and economic sentiment should be wildly different, but the inflation number may be exactly the same.
It's pretty cheeky, random internet guy, to tell multiple central banks--whose function can be placed squarely in the realm of economics--that they are wrong about what inflation is.
This Hacker News, people on here think they have a much better understanding than the experts about everything.
And that would even include something like "As a poor, single mother working 2 jobs in Pennsylvania, how is my life better under the current administration?"
"You probably rely on medicaid or medicare or the AHCA for health coverage. The first two are going to get slashed and the third is going to get shit-canned. Oh, and if you have a pre-existing condition, that's going to come under consideration again. Price controls are going away for medications you or your kids might rely on. There will be no raise in minimum wage and with tariffs coming, you might as well get a third job."
That would be my response, based on the past actions of republicans under Trump.
I didn't realize I was talking to central banks here, that's good to know.
I believe your argument, though, is that those in power can redefine existing words to whatever best suits their current needs and we should all accept that and not consider why we had the original definition in the first place?
> its that the definition of inflation has always been an increase in money supply
Can you provide a single source for this?
I'm looking at textbooks from 25 years ago (Macroeconomics by Doepke Lehnert Sellgren) and they also contradict you. How far back are we supposed to look for your definition?
https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...
Heres a good source I just found as so many were looking for sources here.
I believe it was around the 1960s or 1970s when most economists started using "inflation" to mean price increases.
The history there is pretty fascinating, it was basically a reaction by modern monetary theorists who really had to redefine it for their economic system to make sense. A core goal in MMT is to have a fiat currency and controls in place to let you manipulate the money supply quickly in an attempt to move the economy in one direction or another. With the original definition, inflation is actually the tool used by MMT rather than an indicator of economic health.
That history also pretty clearly explains the shift. The argument pretty quickly shifted to being based on the effects. Debtors favored currency supply inflation because it increased prices and thus decreased. Lenders favored the opposite.
Since most of the people arguing about the term care about a specific class of effect, the term grew to encompass that type of effect. As our understanding of the cause of that effect grew, the term shifted to primarily meaning the effect.
This all makes complete sense since most people don't care about the cause in itself but about how prices are changing.
> This all makes complete sense since most people don't care about the cause in itself but about how prices are changing.
I would hope that isn't true, an economy would function horribly if we only cared about the price change percentage and didn't care why it happened. If prices went up because most people had more money to spend you should act much differently than if prices went up because supply collapsed, for example.
> I would hope that isn't true, an economy would function horribly if we only cared about the price change percentage and didn't care why it happened.
That isn't what I said.
The causes of inflation to matter, but we generally only care about them because they cause inflation. We don't tend to care nearly as much about the causes in and of themselves.
Thus as the argument about how much inflation there should be progressed, it is perfectly natural that the term came to refer to the part of the debate we actually care (how fast prices rise) about rather than factor that can sometimes cause it.
The increase in money supply means nothing if goods and services are produced in larger quantities.
I'm not sure I understand this thought, it's possible producing larger quantities would actually increase the velocity of money which would increase money supply
Velocity of money itself is a funny term in modern economics. Modern monetary theory, or at least the economists that follow it, argue that the velocity of money doesn't mean anything and they basically ignore it.
Arguably, with a fiat currency where they can freely manipulate the money supply, they aren't wrong. That's a problem of fist in my opinion though, there are too many moving pieces and the data can be too easily manipulated to say whatever you want it to say.
In my mind part of the calculus in a high interest rate environments has to include the reduced movement in investments and into more stationary savings, maybe it's accounted for indirectly?
"Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply."
NO.
It is the cost of the goods. What people will pay.
Inflation Contributors:
30% money supply
30% was corporations raised prices specifically under cover of people blaming the government. This was actually listed on earnings calls, for profit.
30% supply chain shortages.
> It is the cost of the goods. What people will pay.
No. Even in the modern definition I'm arguing against here, this isn't right. The cost of goods is just a number, inflation in the CPI sense would be the rate of change of prices.
> Inflation Contributors:
30% money supply
30% was corporations raised prices specifically under cover of people blaming the government. This was actually listed on earnings calls, for profit.
30% supply chain shortages.
Where's the last 10%? And how do you come up with such specific numbers? Economies are extremely complex, I don't believe you could have untangled them so precisely or that the numbers behind it would be so evenly distributed.
That is needlessly pedantic.
You said Inflation was Money Supply, I said it was the cost of what you are buying. YES, technically it is the "change" in the cost of what you are buying. Congratulations. I assumed that was understood.
Percentages.
Nothing is exact. There are ranges, and really more than 3 factors. I was going off memory. Congratulations again on your discernment.
More ball park:
"" While pinpointing exact percentages for each contributing factor to inflation is complex and can vary significantly depending on the economic context, a breakdown of major contributors could include: high demand for goods and services (30-40%), supply chain disruptions (20-30%), labor cost increases (15-25%), rising energy prices (10-15%), government spending (5-10%), and currency devaluation (5-10%); however, these percentages should be interpreted as a general guide and not a definitive breakdown"
The point is, it is not Biden's spending, that is just another misleading right wing talking point. (lie)
> Inflation is actually the increase in the money supply
It's not that simple. That might be how it is defined in economy textbook, but in practice, how do government agencies measure inflation? You have predefined basket of consumer goods and record their prices over time, and that price increase is reported as "inflation rate", and that's what gets reported in TV news.
And yet you somehow blame people for misunderstanding the term when the wrong definition is hammered into their brains all the time by all the mainstream media.
> and that's what gets reported in TV news.
That's the clue that it's a signal. If every merchant is mandated to drop the cost of goods to 1$, the measure becomes meaningless for this purpose, while people continue to trade more and more for the same amount of goods. The published values themselves are incidental and barter normalizes, detached from the edge effects, as the underlying cause remains.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=inflation+origin&source=de...
[dead]
>The Dems failed on this count massively
The Dems failed to communicate inflation is a global phenomena and that the US has faired far better at reducing inflation, unemployment and GDP growth then the rest of the developed world.
I would argue it’s not just the economy, but capitalism in general is no longer serving the public well, and hasn’t for a long time. It is corrupting our public institutions, it is creating poverty and suffering, and it abuses power to exploit people. Capitalism is abusive, and very often the things that we aren’t supposed to talk about are what we need to talk about the most.
Schumpeter called it the eroding foundation of Capitalism. Its not technically Capitalism, as the system, at fault though. It's interesting. Feel free to explore it more. Or perhaps you already do
I agree, Capitalism is not working any longer. Maybe changing it would be a start in the right direction (Not that it would ever happen)
Most people are completely innumerate. It's an impossible task.
Yet Paul Krugman told us that inflation was going down if we didn't include food, gas and etc. Just for this kind of gaslighting by the elites, the democrats deserve a giant middle finger.
> It's the economy, stupid:
You are giving Americans too much credit.
Regular Americans don't have any idea what's going. They don't know what inflation is, or what is causing it. They only know what they're told, so what matters is who they listen to. (Look at recent polls that show that Republicans feel that they are heavily impacted by inflation, and Democrats much less so.) Unfortunately, the traditional sources of information have lost the trust of a large body of the American people, so they look elsewhere for a source of trust, and they find it in a charismatic con-man.
Trump spent years pretending to be a businessman on TV, and that skills pays off at his rallies and his interviews, where he perfected the improvisation that rubes mistakes for sincerity. Any other politician speaks in rehearsed clichés, which Americans have been accustomed to, and which they associate with dishonesty, even when they're telling the truth. It helps, and does not hurt, that Trump says crazy shit that keeps people entertained. I don't believe that politics should be based on that kind of thrill, but apparently it is.
Trump's actual policy proposals are mostly nonsense, but it doesn't matter. If you want to compete with him, you have to to be (a) interesting and (b) persuasive.
Yes, exactly.
The election results don't make much sense in terms of serious policy. Voters worry about inflation: they vote for tariffs? Voters worry about democracy: they vote for the guy responsible for J6? Voters are 50% female: they vote for a SCOTUS that care less women's issues? The only issue where a vote for Trump coincides with voter concerns is immigration.
It's easier to explain this election in terms of "Trump seems confident and strong... Harris seems scripted and phony." The closest thing to a real issue is probably the impression that "Democrats are a bunch of radical woke communists"
Go to any middle school in America and figure out who the popular kids are. It's not the ones with good ideas on how to improve education, or even to get Xboxes in every classroom - its the hot, mean kids with charisma who make the other hot mean kids laugh. Its human nature to want to be in that in-group. When you ask them why they vote a certain way, they say something about the economy or trans kids or whatever, but IMHO it's much more primal than any of that. The dems are still campaigning to the greatest generation but society has regressed and America is just one big middle school right now.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this, and it’s worth reflecting on.
Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges, and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.
At a time where there is armed conflict spreading across the world again, this kind of personality is appealing to a large portion of the population, and understandably so.
> Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges,
Sure, but he was plenty popular before all of that. The appeal, imho, is in the calculated appearance of sincerity and toughness... from a guy who is in reality embodies neither of those qualities. Both the assassination and legal challenges amplify the appearance of toughness. The "mean kids" comment is spot on.
> and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.
Not sure what you're referring to here. Joe Rogan and Theo Von are pretty far from being hostile to Trump.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/watch-live-trump-s...
Any such calculated attempt at appearing tough would break down when a bullet barely missed your head. His reaction of staying on stage and encouraging the crowd would be quite hard to fake.
Trump will say in a few weeks how great the economy is under his rule, when absolutely nothing will be different from now, and people will gobble it up.
It's the stupidity, stupid.
He won't say that until after he has been inaugurated when absolutely nothing has changed yet. That is how we went from "struggling under Obama" to "best economy ever under Trump" in a week or two last time he was president.
Also, his supporters will go from saying "lower gas prices were rigged by the president to steal the election!" this month to "Trump brought us lower gas prices!" after inauguration without any sense of irony.
Well, get the popcorn ready because the next 4 years are going to be interesting, to say the least.
> It's the economy, stupid:
It's the [perception of the] economy, stupid:
As I'm learning, perception beats all.
"You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn’t any sugar to put in it.
He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it." -Brautigan
Czechia was hit by pretty bad inflation too, after decades of very low inflation rates. Our current government will likely lose the election in a year as a consequence.
Being in office when inflation hits is a recipe for electoral disaster, regardless of actual culpability, which, in this interconnected world, is likely lower than perceived.
Inflation is the devaluation of currency. Lowering purchasing power.
No, it's definitely the sexism and racism.
Can I ask, what do you think is likely to happen to inflation when you slap tariffs on imports?
Trump has also proposed devaluing the dollar, on top of tariffs.
Imposing tariffs, and starting a trade war, will surely mean that imports will shoot up in price for the consumer. Exports will suffer, which is likely why he'll also try to devalue the dollar - to make exports be more attractive amid the receiving countries tariffs.
So that's a double-whammy as far as prices go, for the consumer.
His grand plan is of course to bring back manufacturing to the US - or that foreign companies will set up plants in the US. But that doesn't happen overnight, and there's no automatic mechanism that will make the companies do so.
And Trump has been clear about imposing the highest tariffs on all Chinese imports. Now look around you, and try to estimate how many things you see that are made in China.
Then you have the other countries, too, which will get hit with tariffs.
Oh, it's gonna send inflation through the roof. Trump's economic policies are likely disastrous, and I am fretting about my 401k.
That said, I have been contending that people experience prices and talking about lowering inflation when prices have recently gone up is net negative for the incumbent administration.
I'm better off than 4 years ago, thanks to stock market. I guess that has to do with Biden-Harris' policies. That said, people are not just economic animals, right? My blood boils when the left attacks 1A, and when Kamala blames retailers for price gauging.
It doesn't help that they've let retailers merge into monopolies for the last 40 years.
It’s not the economy. It’s the charisma.
Look at the history and you will see Americans want someone at least somewhat charismatic as their leader.
Hilary and Harris have less charisma than my cat. They were simply unelectable.
A choice with a slightly more charismatic person and we would see different results in my opinion
Furthermore, and sadly in my opinion, I am not convinced that Americans are ready for a female president. Give it another 20-30 years
While I agree, I can't picture how trump was more charismatic than Harris.
He seems like a used car salesman to me...
Yes, but used car salesman are charismatic, and people are frequently hoodwinked by used car salesman. Despite everyone saying watch out for the used car salesman.
He is not my cup of tea either but a lot of people like him.
Harris on the other hand is like an EU Bureaucrat.
Anyway. That’s my take, doesn’t mean I’m right.
strong man rhetoric is shockingly effective.
I heard an interesting thought on a podcast about Trump. Because he's always used and discarded his 'friends' his entire life, he's gotten very good at getting new people to like him. People say that 1:1 he can be very charming, just up to the point where he stabs you in the back.
Honestly while Trump is a little slimy he's also kinda funny. Visit some conservative spaces sometimes, they're having fun while liberal ones are all doom-and-gloom.
It really does matter.
Go to any middle school in America and find who the popular kids are - its the hot, mean but funny ones, not the ones with smart ideas for change
Did you just say you find Trump hot? Ewww
Of course not physically but hes a billionaire, married to a Russian model. He is glamorous, which is enough for a man.
So if Democrats want to elect a woman. Someone like Sydney Sweeney would crush it in US politics. Maybe they should try that next time.
Politicians are very very similar to entertainers. Being on par with Sydney Sweeney would be a massive advantage.
Sarah Palin came close. Attractive powerful women with the intellectual horsepower of pillaf and she did remarkably well.
I'm sure you have a lovely cat and I'd be inclined to agree with you, as I'm not a fan of Clinton or Harris and find cats typically quite charismatic.
But saying Trump was more charismatic than Harris, your cat, or the shit I took this morning is certainly a divisive opinion at least.
I've encountered farts which cleared a room and were still more "charismatic" than Trump according to 9 out of 10 people exposed to both.
Harris has zero charisma. She cannot talk without creepy laugh or jokes that nobody laughs at, she can't work with crowds.
She was in primaries some time ago and gain less than 10% votes.
Ahh, I didn’t explicitly say that he is more charismatic than Harris.
I said, if the Democrats have chosen someone more charismatic than Harris, they would have won.
You said "Hillary and Harris have less charisma than my cat. They are simply unelectable"
Well.. Trump was elected. If you're not saying Trump is more charismatic then this all seems to contradict your point that charisma is necessary for electibility.
The problem is that the rules are different. For Democrats, if they want to win, they need someone with charisma. See Biden, Obama, and Bill Clinton, versus Hillary Clinton and Dukakis for historical examples.
Republicans don't need charisma: if the Democratic candidate isn't charismatic enough, they'll instead vote for whatever pile of shit the GOP puts on the ticket.
The problem is the voters.
Just arguing for logic's shake now.
You are making a logical jump there. Hillary and Harris are Democrats. Trump is Republican. Based on logic, just because Trump won doesn't automatically make him more charismatic, as there are other factors that play role.
So logically you cannot assert that this is true; Trump winning <==> Trump more charismatic
My $0.02, just one opinion yada yada.. Charisma was a part of it sure, but ultimately people can look past that. Bush Sr. had zero charisma.
The bigger part, amongst other things, Harris is part of the current administration, people are not happy about how things are going, or how much their groceries cost. People are not happy to get censored or called nazi's for having different opinions. When asked on a left-leaning show "The View" with people all on her side, what she would change about the last 4 years, she answered, "there is not a thing that comes to mind".
Charisma didn't kill her, not being able to ask layup questions killed her. The American people are not as dumb as the Harris voters are now screaming about on Reddit/TikTok/X, the American people want to know what their president is going to do to change their lives. Trump is a sociopath, again amongst other things, but he is very very clear about where he stands on things and what he's planning on doing.
> Trump is a sociopath, again amongst other things, but he is very very clear about where he stands on things and what he's planning on doing.
I don't know if you'll agree with this, but I actually think that one of Trump's gifts, or maybe his campaigns gifts seems to be to convince everyone they're going to get what they want, and is in fact not very very clear where he stands on things. He's sort of emotionally clear (tarriffs and illegal immigration)
But I also think...
If you ask a blue collar worker, they'll tell you Trump is pro-union If you ask a business owner they'll say he's anti-union. If you ask someone on the ACA, they'll tell you he'll protect it, if you ask a fiscal conservative, they'll tell you he'll abolish it. If you ask a woman, he'll keep abortion with the states. If you ask a catholic, he'll abolish abortion. He's friends to muslims but will also deport them.
He's the friend to the blue collar worker, enemy of the elites, but also friend to billionaires willing to work with him. I think this is why Trump would have beaten Sanders. Sanders would have never gotten the support of the business class, and if he did it would have eroded his support with his base, Trump is somehow immune to that.
Absolutely, 100%. Biden and Harris have failed in the messaging all along, dramatically and obviously!!
They failed on the policy too. Good policy makes for good messaging.
Current news stories seem to suggest that the upcoming administration will likely worsen inflation.
https://0x0.st/XDTK.png
Do you find it strange that to get cheaper groceries you had to vote for a convicted criminal?
Can I even work in America with a criminal record?
How do people look past this, I'm really having a bit of a moral crisis today about why I even bother paying taxes or obeying any laws since this whole thing happened.
Do I just tell my kids to be successful, jut be like Trump?
> How do people look past this
Why should we discriminate against justice impacted individuals?
The groceries won't get cheaper--deflation is arguably worse than inflation.
You are experiencing Lincoln's Lyceum Address in action.
Absolutely! You are not alone. We have elected a convict as a president. The person who instigated a mob in attacking the Capital. The person who misled his base about 2020 election. Got impeached... the Trump saga goes on.
> Do I just tell my kids to be successful, jut be like Trump?
Trump is a failed real estate tycoon, his companies went bankrupt three times; banks won't lend him money anymore because he always shafts them. He got a big inheritance and lucky that he had some charisma so could make it on TV. He is not successful role model (well, con-man maybe).
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A very large number of Americans (100 million+?) dont see Trump as a convicted criminal. They see a govt that weaponized the justice system to target their political opponent. It's a reason to vote for Trump, not against him.
He was convicted by a Jury not any left leaning judge or whatever.
Yes, for the crime of the century of... classifying hush payments to a porn star (which is legal) as a legal expense instead of a campaign expense. And then they made each time he signed a check a separate count, so they could make a big deal of “34 fElOnIeS!!!” Not weaponized, indeed.
It’s the most mundane thing that has been “Trumped up” to the extent that anti-Trumpers act like he murdered someone. Everyone else thinks “oh wow, improperly classifying an expense, who cares.”
It was an election interference case; not mundane. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/dont-call-it-the-hush-mon...
Yes, based on the tortuous logic that he would’ve lost the election if voters knew that a famous playboy had had an affair with a porn star. Of all the gaffes and scandals he had during his campaign, that would’ve been the one to sink his election chances. Sure thing.
And still at the end of it, it boiled down to “you should’ve classified the hush money as a campaign expense instead of a legal expense.” Do you seriously not understand why no one really cares?
The campaign obviously had that concern and acted on it; it’s irrelevant if you think it’s “tortuous logic”. When did the affair occur? When did the payment occur, and what was the surrounding context? — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels–Donald_Trump_...
Then, read this again — https://robertreich.substack.com/p/dont-call-it-the-hush-mon... “This case alleges that in 2016 Trump arranged to pay off an adult entertainer in order to hide his affair with her from the public. The important thing to keep in mind is that the money was given to protect Trump’s campaign for the presidency — not to protect his marriage or protect him from personal embarrassment.”
>>It’s the most mundane thing
If it's so mundane, why is it a felony then.
He is technically convicted by a jury. It will be interesting to see how they get around that, it doesn't go away just because he was elected president, and he can't pardon himself from a state charge.
In the most left-wing jurisdiction in America by a DA that campaigned on "getting Trump", who was famous for reducing felonies to misdemeanors, but in the case of Trump raised a misdemeanor to a felony. And this was for a charge for which there was no precedent, and nor was there any victim. And the judges daughter had connections to the Democrat party too. People arent stupid.
It was a serious election interference case —- https://robertreich.substack.com/p/dont-call-it-the-hush-mon...
Just to make sure you have all the legal facts: https://youtu.be/KnapsSRptqg?si=7C_tqLO9UGlGxYQA
Well, if they want to use conspiracy theories in their appeals, they are welcome to, and the Supreme court is basically in Trump's pockets, so they could always just make a "because we say so" ruling that annuls the state jury verdict.
What conspiracy theories?
The ones you stated in your comment.
Yeah, I do see that side of it too, I think it was incredibly stupid to try him for anything if he wouldn't be jailed.
It was monumentally stupid to convict Trump for a "crime" that was basically someone else filling his taxes wrong. Something most USA people would feel is unfair and could happen to them.
Also I am not from USA and very happy I don't have to deal with TurboTax lobbying and shenanigans thar make the USA tax code to be just crazy.
Also the "bank fraud" trial is also monumentally stupid when they wanted to convict him and close his companies (thus making people lose their jobs) for doing something that resulted in profits for the supposed victim. Victim in fact that explained multiple times they were pleased with the business and would do it again.
The message in the second case was: we will take your jobs because your boss made a good deal, don't vote for him!
And of course this is just idiotic.
You have some misunderstandings on these cases —-
How to understand next week’s Trump criminal felony trial https://robertreich.substack.com/p/dont-call-it-the-hush-mon...
How Trump is liable for fraud even though no one was hurt https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-trump-is-liable-for-f...
For anyone seeing this, these links are a waste of time. They don’t demonstrate a misunderstanding or provide a better one.
> Many people I speak with are worried that this is the weakest of Trump’s four pending criminal trials because it has to do with an illicit affair.
> Wrong.
No this was the weakest case. The fact that this is the one to get across the finish line, rather than say the Georgia interference case, demonstrates raw political incompetence by the democrats.
Amusingly/sadly JD Vance could tell you exactly why Trump wins. The secret is empty promises. In an unfortunate way, it’s a kind of empathetic approach.
It’s why he called Trump the “opioid of the masses”[1]. You just make promises even when you know it’s total BS. But at least people are feeling heard.
I think the average voter really doesn’t want to have a nuanced discussion where they learn about the problems that they’re experiencing. They just want to hear someone say “I got this”… even if they don’t.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/opioid-...
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I got a raise this year, yet my purchasing power is less than it was two years ago. The stock market just surged post-election. Please explain to me how I am better off.
Please explain to me how "third way" Democrats stood for union values from the Clinton-Obama eras.
The claim is groups like the Heritage foundation, Manhattan Institute, Cato, Hoover Institution, Heartland, American Enterprise and other think tanks are actually propaganda manufacturing companies who lie to people as a profession.
It's a specific claim
Biden objectively kept inflation lower in the US than most of the developed world.
What did you want instead? Actual policy proposals, not vague feelings.
The ultimate crime of democrats is continuing to provide explicit proposals in a post-reality world. The Republicans realized you can just make shit up on the fly, change your mind literally every day, and the masses will latch on to whatever they want to believe and assure everyone else that their own personal interpretation of whatever vague promise they got is actually the right answer.
But only if you have the magic (R) next to your name.
The inflation was a false boogie man pushed by MSM. Inflation was never the problem, it's people lack of understanding that wars cause prices to explode.
The Iraq 91 war literally ended the USSR, which dissolved a few months later because of soaring prices and economical failures. The Ukraine war might end up pushing the US into a second tier country, especially since Trump brings Musk and RFK into the government, who are literal morons when it comes to managing anything.
"Ignore the fact that everything costs more; you're just angry at the war but don't realize it" does not seem like a winning campaign slogan, but what do I know?
The "Everything costs more" is a byproduct of something more important, not sure what that is, but focusing soley on econmoics as the cause of our issues seems shortsighted, but hey, what do I know.
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About 20 million votes less than the 2020 election, with about 15 million less for the democrats, and a measely 4 million less for the republicans. Thought that was interesting.
I see this being pushed on Twitter as a proof of election fraud in 2020 but aren't the votes still being counted?
Reporting appears to be %87 at this moment, expect the numbers to add up when it's %100.
Don't you register to vote anyway? You can't be counting unaccounted for ballots, are you? You probably have a paperwork for for every vote, it's not like counting the cash after busking.
Eventually You will have Total Number of Registered to Vote = Total Ballots + Total Absentees.
This will also give you the turnout. You can't have the turnout first unless you keep track of number of votes casted and in that case you will be able to tell if there were fake votes by comparing the final ballots counted and the number of votes you counted when casting.
This is all very basic, can someone explain what I'm missing here? Why people are pushing for this thing that doesn't make sense whatsoever?
> This is all very basic, can someone explain what I'm missing here? Why people are pushing for this thing that doesn't make sense whatsoever?
You're assuming that the election fraud narrative is pushed by people who care about whether it's true or not. The goal isn't truth-seeking, it's disenfranchisement; any data point is either used in service of the narrative, or it's discarded as irrelevant.
It doesn’t seem like very good evidence that there was fraud in 2020, in the sense they even if (and it is an if) we end up with a decrease in turnout this year, there’s no particular reason to believe that people didn’t just… vote more when the pandemic was happening, they had more time to sit around, and mail in voting was easier. Is it possible that the people pushing this idea are just engaging in motivated reasoning?
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> "motivated reasoning"
Isn't that exactly what you're doing?
meta-whataboutism
Nope, it isn’t.
Not everyone who is registered to vote actually votes (as in they do not mail in their ballot nor do they go in to physically vote). Which is I think the more likely case here.
That 87% figure refers to the number of ballots that have been counted. What you're thinking of is the turnout (usually measured by % of VEP).
California, for example, has about 7 million ballots that haven't been processed
2020 vote count: 155 million
2024 vote count so far: 139 million
2024 vote percentage counted so far: 87%
139 million divided by 87% equals 159 million.
Voter turnout this year will be higher than 2020.
2020 turn out was around 158.5 million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
Agree though that we'll get pretty close to that. CA,OR, WA alone likely have ~10 million votes uncounted.
Still a large chunk of votes yet to be counted on the West Coast.
yeah California has between 5 and 7 million that will take weeks to count
Deadline for mail in ballot delivery is Nov 12. Have to be postmarked on the 5th, but they have a week to get to where they're going.
The vote isn't even close to done. California will likely take weeks to count another 5 million, maybe more. In 2020 it took 2 months to get the final count from all states (not including recounts)
Was expected, lot of Americans don't want to be represented by either of those two candidates.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to express this sentiment via election participation. Abstention ends up supporting one candidate more than the other. What seems to be an affirmation of neutrality is not that in practice.
The national election is an exercise in partisanship. Your opportunity to feel represented is what the primary is for. And for once I'm not sneering at the sentiment because basically neither side ran a primary (the Ds managed to not run one twice!)
How did the Republicans not run a primary?
> Your opportunity to feel represented is what the primary is for
This is why it was a major issue for me that the Democrats did not hold a primary and just decided Kamala would be the candidate. If a major part of your campaign is "vote for us or democracy dies!" it's pretty hard to swallow if you increasingly feel that your voice doesn't matter in your own party.
Given that Biden dropped out of the race fairly late, what was the option? I agree with you in principal, but there doesn't seem like there was any way to actually implement it in the available time, assuming that the population take adequate time to make an informed choice.
You misinterpreted the massive disagreement of the population (20M people) with an affirmation of neutrality. One can hope the dems will not misinterpret it (as they often do, unfortunately, and they already started on twitter and the mainstream media). Hopefully they can recognize and acknowledge that a large portion of the left disagrees with their policies and start listening to their base, otherwise they will keep losing more votes every 4 year.
I and another registered democrat neighbor had this exact discussion and conclusion outside of the voting center we live next to on election day. Assuming we're not the only ones.
Some jurisdictions have a "none of the above" option. I think Nevada has one. An early report there show 1+% voted "none of the above", or something similar to that.
It was just a glance on one of the shows during the returns last night, I maybe be completely wrong.
2020 was exceptional in the amount of voting that happened by mail. I hope nothing makes that necessary again.
> I hope nothing makes that necessary again
I hope nothing makes it necessary, but I do hope it becomes commonplace. It's such a better experience to complete a ballot leisurely in one's own home, being able to discuss it with my own family and referencing a plethora of materials, than having to go out of my way to wait in line and have prepared everything ahead of time (and, hopefully, remembered it).
How can I be sure that you didn't vote under a gun point or you haven't been bribed?
How can you be sure that any voter wasn't bribed?
Usually bribers will want some proof, like a photo of your vote, when you go inside and there are election observers and you're not allowed to use your phone it's more difficult to provide that proof.
Serious question:
Are you certain your vote was counted and not lost? I vote in person because I know when I mail things they don't always get where I intended them to be (and especially when there is a deadline in place)
In my country, I can just bring the letter and put it in a special mailbox in the city hall in the weeks before the vote. I would trust the mail system, too, but that's beside the point.
Just to say it works "asynchronously", too.
I got emails from the county (Boulder County, CO) when they mailed me my ballot, when they received it, and when they counted it.
At least NY lets you track your ballot online ("New York Ballot Tracker").
I got a text message from my county telling me my vote was counted.
In Colorado you get an email when they mail a ballot to you, another email when they receive your ballot, and a third when it's counted.
Colorado came out way against Trump, though, despite having been a swing state in recent memory.
In Utah I checked via state website on Election day
Don't you receive a sample ballot that you can fill out and take with you to the polling location?
I don't equate easy with better. I miss the sense of community inspired by going to the local polling place and seeing your neighbors. It's a ritual that has value. Yeah it takes some effort, and if people want to make it a federal holiday, that's cool too.
Mail-in ballots have so many more issues with them - lack of privacy (so more room for coercion and harvesting), they make auditability more difficult.
Regardless of whether you think the relaxed voting requirements of 2020 led to widespread fraud, it inspired enough distrust that both parties should be advocating to bolster the reliability, auditability, and trustworthiness of the voting process, not decrease it further. The only thing that sucks more than losing an election is losing it under suspicious circumstances. Subject people to that enough times, and it doesn't lead anywhere good, regardless of your political team. Instead, create and enforce policies that improve trust rather than erode it.
We need a national voting holiday.
I wish we focused on voting for more issues like this instead of just the old punching bags of immigration, gun control, and abortion.
We should be discussing more issues! Why isn't there a candidate saying they'll increase the number of holidays, or making public transportation free, or giving people free dogs. Where is the candidate saying they'll make a 4 day work week a reality?
Yes let's make sure no one can vote conveniently ever again. :-p
Sometimes security and integrity matter more than convenience.
There really isn't more security and integrity with in person elections versus mail.
Jimmy Carter spoke about this, literally in some town the sheriff watches you vote and chucks it into the trash if you didn't pick their candidate.
> Jimmy Carter spoke about this, literally in some town the sheriff watches you vote and chucks it into the trash if you didn't pick their candidate.
That is a flaw of the American model of allowing local governments to run state and national elections.
In many other countries, local government has no role to play in non-local elections. All elections are 100% run by either a state or national elections agency.
I believe locally run elections are a good thing. As fraud would have to be perpetrated against multiple election systems. However, I also think there should be standards such as electronically tallied, hand-marked paper ballots saved for potential future audit.
Several other countries have independent electoral commissions running elections, as opposed to elected politicians. It is much easier for voters to trust the people running elections when they are required by law to be apolitical.
Look for example at the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)
> There really isn't more security and integrity with in person elections versus mail.
There's a big list of security and integrity problems inherent with mail in ballots that do not exist for in person voting.
First and foremost: ballot canvasing.
This problem is quite easily solved via a correct procedure and poll watchers.
You can’t verify a photo ID in the mail.
You can't verify a photo ID in person either lol.
There's a whole industry about making fake IDs.
I also noticed a strong push to get people to vote by mail this year. What was up with that?
I believe there is still more vote to count, so the absolute numbers may still increase dramatically, but your point on party affiliation is definitely on point
The current prediction, when all votes are counted, is it to be just below the record turnout, which was 4 years ago.
It not even guaranteed that Trump will win the popular vote, it depends on how the California votes land.
> It not even guaranteed that Trump will win the popular vote
Well the odds are 1000:1 on Polymarket, so if it's at all possible that's a great bet!
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not like people warned that supporting a genocide would cost Harris the presidency...
When all is said and done I bet Gaza had very little effect on overall D turnout. If it did, those that either sat out or voted R specifically because of Gaza did so to spite their face. An R administration will turn their backs on a lot of geopolitical happenings and let those involved run wild, of which the Palestinians will have little to no voice at all.
Also people vastly underestimate the political calculus in full throated support of Palestinians and by association, Hamas. There is a whole other side of this conflict and that is with Jews who also care about the resolution, but also care about Israel and the fact they've had rockets constantly fired into their territory. They also vote overwhelmingly D. You alienate one group for another and you've made no ground in terms of voter share.
Exit polls, especially in Michigan, seem to disagree with this.
Wayne County was never going to be the lynch pin of the election and even so, exit polling is notoriously fickle. If we're taking exit polling at face value, across the country the economy was #1 followed by preserving democracy and immigration. Geopolitics is probably at the bottom of the top 10 nationally.
Dearborn alone voted 50% for Trump, 22% for Jill and 28% for Harris. Thats 50-100k votes right there. A clear message and an axe to the foot of Palestine.
Looking at the Dearborn results[1], it looks like Jill pulled 10k votes at 20%. That's not winning MI.
[1] https://dearborn.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/UNOFFICIAL%...
Literally noone in America cares about this enough to swing their vote.
It apparently was the thing that lost Harris the endorsement of the LA Times. That's worth a vote or two.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/us/los-angeles-times-endo...
the huge protests and the whole big fuss about Michigan disagrees with that statement...
Maybe you do not care.. and I guess you wouldn't have cared about the Holocaust either.
Personally I know plenty of people who didn’t vote because of the genocide. Mostly Palestinian americans, arab americans, those on the far left.
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For context: there are 4,453,908 Muslim Americans and 1,698,570 Arab Americans as of the 2010 census. The DSA, by far the largest leftist organization, has about 80,000 members. Even if all three of those groups don't overlap at all, it still doesn't explain much.
That said, sentiments have power -- the idea that Harris is "more of the same" likely affected a lot of people, even if they don't align exactly with the people behind that message. Sadly, they're about to find out how wrong they are.
> That said, sentiments have power -- the idea that Harris is "more of the same" likely affected a lot of people, even if they don't align exactly with the people behind that message. Sadly, they're about to find out how wrong they are.
She massively bungled that:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/06/politics/harris-campaign-...
> “What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” co-host of ABC’s “The View” Sunny Hostin asked Harris, looking to give her a set for her to spike over the net. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said.
That was her golden moment to distance herself from Biden's admin and show some personal incentive and she deliberately chose not to.
There is probably a large non-vocal group of Democrats outside deep blue areas that doesn't agree, which is why they went that direction
While I agree that genocide is bad, all the numbers point to this not even having had been a factor.
> It's not like people warned that supporting a genocide would cost Harris the presidency...
That's fair. She lost a good number of votes, but 10M+ popular votes? Would that account for it?
Yes, and now those people are stuck with Trump who is far worse on that score.
the devil vs the devil wrapped in a rainbow flag is still the devil...
The devil doesn't exist, and real life is complicated. Have fun telling the living Palestinians "whelp, a lot of you already died, so we're gonna let the rest of you die/be deported to a country you've never been to."
The oft-repeated question "What could be worse than a genocide?" was ill-thought-out, first-order thinking, IMO. Regardless, we are going to find out the higher order results soon.
Yeah. They have no idea Trump is the biggest pro-Israel anti-Muslim fan out there. He'll literally give Israel anything they want, and those people will gasp and act surprised.
We run our nation on oil. Our nation is built on good a relationship with Israel. Nothing about that will change until our priorities as a country change, dem or repb.
US politics isn't easy to understand as an outsider. It looks like Harris was was an ok candidate for the core democrat voter and a terrible candidate to win a populist election in what is essentially a deeply divided and mostly conservative country. She didn't address the swing voters greatest concerns which was their decline in real wealth due to inflation and fear of change. I am sure money and influence had a lot to do with it as well but still a colossal misreading of public sentiment and an inability to reach out to a broader audience.
Just FYI based on your comment you might not be aware but just on ads D's outspent the R's 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion (https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/democrats-republicans-ad-sp...).
In general D's always outspend and out raise R's.
This will sadly be the end of FCC/FTC and all the antitrust efforts that were graining steam over the last few years.
If you want a simple example of how important good regulators are, look at the NTIA / DoC's handling of the .com cooperative agreement in 2018. The US gave up control of the most important technical asset on the planet and no one even knows it happened :-(
And the DoJ, who recently sued RealPage for engaging in a price fixing scheme that has played a large role in the rise in rents across the country.
As well as Live Nation/Ticketmaster
Price fixing only works if supply is constrained via some kind of cartel, which cities often have by way of density limits and NIMBYism.
Not a Trump voter, but this is a huge area where many Democrats are flat wrong. Talking to some Democrats about the supply problem with housing is like talking to some Republicans about why a hard line abortion ban makes maternal mortality go up. It can’t possibly be true because the ideology says it can’t be true.
There is collusion between real-estate owners and property management software companies that are using Large Language models to keep prices high. This has nothing to do with cartels.
Here is an article [0] that talks about the issue. This is a real problem driven by this collusion, don't act like it isn't. And now that Trump is in office, these kinds of investigations are going to disappear and the housing crisis is going to get worse.
[0]: https://thehustle.co/why-is-rent-skyrocketing
I don't think they believe collusion isn't happening.
I think the argument above is that democrats are one of the drivers of building restrictions, leading to the ability to collude. If new entrants to the market were plentiful then the existing cartels would be undercut. Also, rent control puts a tight lock on the rental market by forcing landlords to keep their rents high lest they become locked into the low rents they may otherwise offer.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader whether to be on board with that assessment, but there is a reasonable argument to be made that a free-er market could actually benefit housing costs.
What this completely discounts is the existence of corporate landlords. Thousands of homes are being bought and kept empty to restrict that supply. It's ridiculous to destroy land used for other purposes just to build more empty houses and hope Blackstone et al. don't notice. It's also silly to hand those corporate landlords the right to jack up rents overnight as though they won't use it. The assumption that they'd rather have lower risk agreements over a longer period of time (e.g. lower rents now with slow increases year-to-year) is naively assuming that publicly traded companies will not attempt to maximize profits for the coming quarter.
> that are using Large Language models to keep prices high
Where do LLMs come into this?
Now it's up to see if the world will decouple form the US monopolies.
Good that Europe is working on that to some extent, I guess?
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I don't understand what this means.
due to amount of regulations it is hard to start business in europe and thus they mainly have old business (like BMW etc.) that are in decline. but innovation happens in other places.
There are two exceptions though - France (partially) and Sweden.
Right, I guess it depends on your metric. Happiness, someone?
Well, many believe that Europe is falling so much behind US and China in areas such as economy, technology, innovation that it basically is just a tourist destination at this point, with no power or relevance in shaping the world's future.
Oh, yeah I've read comments like that from US people towards Europe. On the other hand, non-US people often feel that US people genuinely believe that the rest of the world dreams of being like the US.
Don't think Trump is a great friend of Google
He can be. He is extremely transactional in nature. So it's all about the right incentives for him.
Considering how Google was suppressing the stuff related to elections - not showing Rogan's video, not showing directions (and was called out multiple times by Twitter and Musk) to voting locations etc. I don't think the new admistration will be nice to Google.
The directions thing was debunked repeatedly, including by Google itself, to which Musk himself responded in public with thanks for clearing up the confusion. Very weird to see it repeated here on HN.
Basically: it's because "Harris" is a county name in Texas.
lol. I remember trying to navigate to "aqui" which is a restaurant and it dropped a pin where I was.
(aqui means here in spanish)
> by Twitter and Musk
Is there a difference? I thought Twitter was Musk's broadcast platform.
So you're saying he's a politician?
they will probably merge FTC back into DOJ
Prepare for the end of net neutrality, again.
Everyone already dead from the last time it was ended.
I see this first hand. In my town, ATT owns the lines that supply our street that has fiber and our local ISP Sonic.net is prevented from using these lines to provide service. Its my worry that our local ISP's ability to do business in a market dominated by Comcast and ATT is going to be majorly impacted and its only going to get worse. Not saying it would be prevented if Dems where in office because they pretty much tow the corporate anti-competition line but are much more quiet about it.
It's "toe" the line FWIW.
Who paid for those lines?
The customer
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> Lina Khan's policies were very harmful for the tech sector
As they should! It's quite literally the whole reason they exist.
Email unsubscribe links have worked well, and click-to-cancel hopefully can too! The only opponents of these policies are massive companies who rely on predatorial dark patterns. Everyone with a brain should support these "wasteful policies" because they benefit consumers.
I absolutely LOVE having one link to instantly stop being emailed from mailing lists, and I can't be happier for click-to-cancel and related legislation.
"oh no, big tech company XYZ will make 0.0001% less money this year!!!" is the energy you're giving
Please make your substantive points thoughtfully, and omit name-calling, as the site guidelines ask:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hello, I apologize! I've edited the comment now to be much better, thank you for your feedback.
The FTC would be well within their duties to obliterate every single tech company in existence
Would your arguments be any different if you switched them arbitrarily?
Why can't monopolies instead be "very harmful for the tech sector", and Lina Khan's policies be "not a big deal"?
Wouldn't that have already happened, given that he was already president for four years?
I think he was busy dismantling other stuff. He got anti- Roe v Wade judges installed. He got rid of net neutrality. He put a climate change denier in charge of the EPA. He got rid of the pandemic response unit in 2018, and will do that again this time. He pulled US out of the Paris agreement. He's threatened to leave NATO repeatedly. He pulled out of the Iran Nuclear deal.
I don't agree with all your points, but I very much respect that you criticize Trump's policies. That is so much more reasonable and productive than using hoaxes after hoaxes like the media and Harris' campaign team did.
Speaking of abortion rights, I believe few people will even talk about it in the next election cycle, as it has become a state issue. I also find it interesting that many pro-lifers hate Trump for overturning Roe vs Wade because they won't get millions and millions of dollars every year for the sake of fighting abortion rights.
What's not to agree with? He literally did all of that.
I meant that I actually thought some of his policies were right. Not that I'm correct, of course, but as a voter I like some of his doing.
> over the last few years
He was president before it was gaining steam.
Ajit Pai tried his damnedest.
one thing i definitely worry is about using public lands for oil, mineral extraction purposes.
while America has a bounty of public land acreage wise, 4 years and a complete control of the government is a lot of time to do some lasting damage to the ecosystem by opening up these areas for privatization.
The environment is certainly screwed. I also expect that regulations against air and water pollution will be on the chopping block so not only will the ecosystem suffer, but the population will too.
The recent media attention on possible lithium fields in and around Arkansas was an interesting one to me. It seems like one that I could see the DNC latching onto for battery capacity despite the fact that it would still likely meaning he same kind of impact in federal land as mining oil, coal, etc.
Emissions are the bigger issue. Unfortunately, some sort of mining is still required for emission and emission-free sources of energy.
Lithium deposits are common -- Nevada has significant ones too. The question is if the lithium is concentrated enough to make extracting it financially viable.
That wasn't really my point though. The discovered deposits, well expected deposits since its based on modelling data, could easily lead to a massive mining operation to extract it. That will do damage very similar to the exact kind of fossil fuel extraction that is a main argument against fossil fuels and for alternative energy sources.
Republican voters apparently like digging up coal and working in factories, they'll be fine.
No one likes working in a coal mine. I'm not sure what you think a comment like this is helping, but it isn't.
4 years and a complete control of the supreme court guarantees lasting damage to the ecosystem (and all other aspects of society) since all the conservative/right-wing issues just need to be appealed up to SCOTUS and they'll get their way - and set legal precedent on the way.
There's two justices ready to retire, and if Trump replaces them (and he will) that'll be five supreme court justices appointed by Trump and chosen by his cronies. The entire legal system will be corrupted for decades.
Bingo. The Tea Party went away. MAGA, though, is now harpooned straight into the checks and balances for a lifetime.
Yeah, well essentially republican went through 2 transformations over the last 8 years.
Right. This is the biggest damage Trump can do because it lasts so long after his presidency.
Well, the size of the Supreme Court is not fixed at nine. A future Democratic president might just work to increase it to give it more balance.
wouldn't that just start an arms race of each side trying to stack the court whenever they're in power?
Yes, but each time diluting the power of the justices individually. Right now if you have one wacko justice who decides on the basis of political ideology instead of some of the established legal theories they have 11% of a say in things. Add another few justices who are relatively normal and the ability of the wacko to swing things into dangerous territory goes down. Even if the tit-for-tat tries to cram more wackos in you have to try to convince the Senate to let more and more obviously terribly choices through.
Yeah, same with ending filibuster and other speculated tactics. I don't think you can close the door behind you without a constitutional amendment, which won't happen.
Everyone thinks that the Dems and Republicans are different sides, but they are on the same side, money. This has been going on for at least 50 years. Every 5 years I hear this bull shit. IF the dems got in it would be more balanced. Nothing changes until we reevaluate our support for system that doesn't serve us.
You can't really tell how long his presidency lasts. Two term limit is just a rule that can be changed with help of judiciary branch. If Americans want him for a third term who'd object?
Trying to reinterpret "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice" to allow for that would be quite a spectacular feat of jurisprudence.
Key word here is "elected". Prepare for their justification like "well XYZ is not really an election so...."
People don't seem to understand that even Trump's judges still see themselves as JUDGES. They're not going to just make stuff up that's not in the law, and there were several instances in his first term where his own SCOTUS Justices told him to pound sand. It's not so simple as "nominated by Trump == inherently corrupt," much as he'd like it to be that way.
As a counter point, almost all of the Trump decision was "made up." Especially all of the stuff about admissibility of evidence is whole cloth law.
> They're not going to just make stuff up that's not in the law,
The mechanism is that Trump makes up the law, then it's sent to judges and they say "yup, this law is fine and just and in line with US law system".
> Justices told him to pound sand
He learned. Now he selects for loyalty alone.
It's just 22nd amendment. Can't be more important than the will of the nation. The only question is do the Americans like Trump as much as they like booze or can it be at least made to look like they do.
Theoretically, if changes were put into place to allow a run for a third term (which is highly unlikely given age), then that also opens the door for someone like Obama running again.
Trump is too old at this point.
Only saving grace. Although Putin is just 6 years younger and his strive to leave legacy already messed up the world. One can only wonder what mess will Trump's attempts at leaving legacy cause.
Indeed. 5th Circuit -> SCOTUS will easy mode for right-wing causes (if it isn't already).
It's hard to see Trump do any worse than Biden on this front, but I'm sure he'll try. Biden admin approved over 50% more oil/drilling permits than Trump. More than any president in history
And yet people continue to blame Biden for high energy prices. Boggles the mind.
A lot of the "Thanks Biden" stickers quietly went away when gas got cheaper.
In short, granting permits from lease sales performed in the last administration is a trailing indicator of.. the last administration's activity.
The more important measure for the Biden administration's energy development policy was how many new lease sales were performed, and how many leases were effectively cancelled or otherwise put in limbo.
Some resources to help "unboggle" the mind:
https://www.energyindepth.org/why-bidens-oil-drilling-permit...
"Mixed messages from the administration – like canceling lease sales one minute and touting approved permits to drill the next – create uncertainty within the energy industry, hindering long-term investments and exacerbating challenges for the United States"
https://archive.is/9x1an "The Biden administration has leased fewer acres for oil-and-gas drilling offshore and on federal land than any other administration in its early stages dating back to the end of World War II, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis."
"The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 requires onshore oil and gas leasing “at least quarterly.” While the Biden administration has been in office for six quarters, it has conducted auctions in just one of them. That happened in late June, after the administration came under increasing pressure to tame soaring gasoline prices at the pump in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine."
"Mr. Biden pledged to stop drilling on federal lands as a candidate, saying the nation needs to transition to clean energy. He softened his stance as oil prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—calling for boosting oil supplies to ease runaway inflation—but he has nonetheless spurned a leasing program that for decades has been a go-to asset for presidents looking to raise U.S. energy production."
One irony atop another: securing this land (against the onslaught of big business) was a celebration for Conservatives, not Liberals.
That and, I miss the Republican party that didn't actively try to piss off the ACLU every hour on the hour. It's just nonstop…
• book bans • rhetoric about sending the military after political opponents • politicians ruled as being above the law • short circuiting due process with immigrants, both illegal and not • breaking up families of would-be asylum seekers for no damn reason • the Trump Muslim ban • the constant erection of/for Ten Commandments statues
It used to be a thing in some conservative circles, “No, that teacher is Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912, not Council of 1879, I don't want his people educating my child about what he thinks the Ten Commandments really mean!!”
I used to fancy myself a conservative back then. The ACLU and libertarians were the people that the Left had kind of given up on, and we were happy to say “yes, come be conservative with us, and we will try not to piss you off.” Now everyone has given up on them, they had to hold their noses and vote Kamala and pray for a few more years of “not again.”
I'm not even a libertarian, just don't understand why we are wasting resources pissing them off
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> The GOP wants to ban pornographic materials in children's classrooms.
One of the most popular books on the "ban" lists is Handmaid's Tale. If you read that and classify it as pornographic, I might direct you to retake high school English to brush up on reading comprehension.
There's also a huge difference between the government banning content and private entities banning sale of that content on their platform but OK.
> There's also a huge difference between the government banning content and private entities banning sale of that content on their platform but OK.
A legal difference yes, but not a political one.
Really? I'd say there is a political difference. I can escape a private corporation if I really wanted to, or shop elsewhere for that specific content. I can't generally escape government rules unless they're specially crafted to carve out private schools. And if they do carve out private schools, then you're saying the materials aren't actually harmful to rich privileged kids and only the poors?
Can you escape a private corporation if it basically has a monopoly on book distribution in this country? Can you be an investigative journalist who correctly investigates and publishes your unbiased results if only one of those results will be able to earn you money? Really?
Back when I was a democrat, the democrat party would not have stood for this.
> Can you escape a private corporation if it basically has a monopoly on book distribution in this country?
Let's be precise with our words. A monopoly doesn't mean no competition. Amazon only controls 50% of the online+offline print book market which as far as monopolies go isn't as dominant as Google's 88% and closer to iOS's ~50%. It's a dominant position but there's plenty of room for you to go obtain books elsewhere. Additionally, self-publishing has never been easier.
> Can you be an investigative journalist who correctly investigates and publishes your unbiased results if only one of those results will be able to earn you money? Really?
No idea what this is about. If we're still on the can't publish anything "anti-trans" topic, might be worthwhile to consider that people identifying as trans make up less than half of 1 percent of the population (~0.4% if we're rounding up). Maybe there just isn't actually all that much interest in a niche population that has no power?
You're arguing to the degree of monopoly but the Democratic party I knew didn't, for example, claim workers had power because there were three auto companies.
No they recognized the power imbalance and corrected it. That's the party I left. Lord knows what it has become.
But staying on topic. You were arguing that that's the more dangerous situation than the government banning books? I just don't understand this line of reasoning, especially when said "banned" books are arguably not pornography & the bans typically are targeting things like discussion about racism, homosexuality, teen pregnancy, abortions etc. It's basically "I don't like these topics & I don't want my child to think about them and have an alternate perspective shown"
May be useful to read up on the data behind the bans.
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/theres-confusion-ov...
https://pen.org/report/banned-in-the-usa-state-laws-supercha...
At the end of the day, children have no right to free speech. No GOP policy has ever prevented parents from showing whatever to their children. The only thing sought to be regulated is what set of books any child can pick out. I'm honestly shocked this is controversial.
Do I agree with all the curatorial decisions? No of course not. However, it's not censorship, it's curation of material for children's consumption.
On the other hand, Amazon's censorship is targeted at adults. You're correct that Amazon itself is only 50% of the marketplace. But Amazon is not just Amazon the company. It's also a marketplace where other sellers are. Altogether, those sellers constitute 40% of the e-commerce market. Again, a significant portion. Their decision to not allow those selling 'controversial' books on their market (and keep in mind they will sell you all kinds of depraved pornographic material. You can even buy Mein Kampf on amazon [1]) is basically greatly limiting the distribution of the book. That is un-American.
Censorship is not just about government. At some point people need to get that. It's just like redlining. Businesses cannot decide to en masse deny the market to an entire group of people or ideas.
[1] adults should be able to. Children may be not.
> At the end of the day, children have no right to free speech
Was there a change to the constitution I'm unaware of? Children have all the same rights as adults albeit there are certain limited situations where those rights are allowed to be restricted or impinged. Not that book banning is a 1st amendment issue for students.
We're in agreement that it's OK to curate that content. However, that curation should not be random parents complaining and creating permanent bans on content, which is how this book banning works.
> However, it's not censorship, it's curation of material for children's consumption
> On the other hand, Amazon's censorship is targeted at adults
When I like it it's curation and when I don't it's censorship. Got it.
Just to be clear, are you saying that the ACLU has not been pissed off at the GOP for book bans? Or are you just saying they should be mad at Amazon more?
(Because like, libertarians and the ACLU are not going to get mad at Amazon for deciding what rules they want to enforce in their own marketplace. Which makes me read your comment as just another instance of shouting “fuck the libertarians!” that I above called a phenomenal waste of conservative resources. Like, why? There shouldn't be this strange alliance between the “only government that can be trusted is a dead government” people and the fucking political Left, like, WTF if that’s what’s going on)
I'm saying that banning the publication of books on a market place has a greater effect on the distributoin of information than banning books in classrooms.
I fully agree that you can't use the law to force Amazon to unban the books.
I'm just saying that private sector book ban for adults is more damaging than the removal of controversial material in children's libraries.
I get that, probably if I got you talking to my "dead gummint" friends you'd talk past each other about the word "damaging", they'd say "that's not damaging at all, what are you smoking?" etc. etc.
Just to be clear, what you need to understand if you want to bring them back Right is that for them "damaging" is defined by "someone shows up with a gun at your house and tells you to do something that you don't want to do." Amazon can do whatever, precisely because the people who Amazon sends to your house, like they might have a gun if they're practicing open-carry, but they don't tell you to do anything that you don't want to do. They literally cannot define any damage that Amazon is doing by manipulating their marketplace, because Amazon's not sending out the Men With Guns.
And just to be clear, again, I don't agree with my friends on these matters, I just find it absolutely fucking nuts that back when I was a hardline conservative I made these friends and now that I'm moderate and independent somehow they are the ones that I'm seeing supporting Kamala and the Democrats.
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Kids are great and the world is less doomed than some will have you believe. We can improve, create, and make things better and that doesn’t happen if humanity dies out.
> We can improve, create, and make things better and that doesn’t happen if humanity dies out.
Well the very best thing (and by a long shot) for the vast majority of species is for humanity to die out.
The only species who should care about humans is... the human species. Unfortunately for humans, it doesn't.
A leftist idealism quite out of touch with our current reality.
Sorry what? What’s leftist about it?
> We can improve, create, and make things better
Everything the left does in the US is in pursuit of those 3 things. The right has and will now continue to do everything in their power to destroy all 3 those things in the name of money. And not money for you or me.
Of course, the republican populous doesn't believe that, but it doesn't make it any less true.
The reality is much, much worse than you, or even most people realize.
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incumbents all around the world have performed terribly post COVID. UK, Canada, Japan, France, Italy, have all had landslide or shocking election results.
Unsure what the general mood is that can lead to Keir Starmer dropping 30 points in approval months after winning in a landslide, but the mood of general discontent may be relevant in the United States as well. It seems whatever the status quo / incumbent advantage that used to exist, is now working against candidates.
Even if the democrats ran a better candidate in a better campaign, it may not have been enough to overcome these headwinds. Although, I'm not sure I totally believe that myself since she lost by a pretty narrow margin in swing states.
Obviously not to excuse the dems, just something to consider
The reason for this isn't a mystery: the world doesn't work for the plurality of its populace. The current generations were sold a lie of infinite prosperity and comforts by their elders and governments, a lie built on the exploitation of former colonies and underdeveloped nations. We see the lie now, and know it cannot be sustained in the face of our current polycrisis (climate, housing, necessities) simply by promoting infinite growth. There's an understanding that we need to curtail consumption and start properly engineering a global economy rather than letting it spawn and mutate naturally, but there's still enough people out there who believe that this demagogue, this partisan, this policy will give them the riches and posh comforts their elders enjoyed, thus returning their country to a golden era that never really existed.
It's the desperation of the masses for what they feel is rightfully theirs, because that's what they were told by those who pulled up the ladder behind them. That era is long gone, but nostalgia is a powerful force that's easily propagandized by those who benefit from said desperation.
Very well said. I think what you speak of sounds a lot like degrowth and/or idealised socialism. Unfortunately, I don't see either of those ever becoming viable policy in our world. The only times we've managed to even remotely approach such policy is after terrible, long wars. Other than that, the big man promising you shiny stuff has always won.
I agree that they are unlikely to become viable policy, but environmentally imposed degrowth will become increasingly real. Natural physical constraints are tightening and are already imposing into manufactured reality. Hitting the physical bounds hard and having to deal with that is looking more likely since human ecological footprint (population x resource intensiveness) is unlikely to drop fast enough to avoid them.
> The only times we've managed to even remotely approach such policy is after terrible, long wars
Or during/after natural disasters. Any time things get real tough, we tend to default to helping each other out mutual aid style - even in America [0]. Seems worth keeping in mind.
0 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28048.Hope_in_the_Dark
It feels like in many cases the voters essentially do not know what they want, other than something different than what they have now.
Which seems to produce the ironic result you observe, that winning can be damaging.
> Unsure what the general mood is that can lead to Keir Starmer dropping 30 points in approval months after winning in a landslide
The window to do your unpopular policies and announcements is the start of your government in the hope the reap the benefits just before the next election cycle. Not saying it’s the correct approach, but that’s the theory.
> Canada
Trudeau has been PM since 2015 and the last election was in 2021. Sure, it looks like he's gonna lose the next one, but Canada hasn't had a oppositional landslide election.
When's the last time Trudeau won a plurality of votes?
Canada's electoral system is extremely non-linear. The US' electoral college is far far more linear wrt popular vote than parliamentary elections, generally, and Canada's in particular.
> When's the last time Trudeau won a plurality of votes?
For the curious, 2015, which was 9 years and 3 elections ago. And he got less than 40% of the vote.
(https://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/1867-present.html)
The early warning signs are quite stark -- the BC liberal party (despite having no affiliation with the national liberals) effectively disbanded because of how awful the branding is at this point, and the most left leaning province in the country almost swung conservative. (I'm from BC)
Its hard to imagine the upcoming election will not be a landslide in the next few months, but it is true that there has not yet been an official victory yet.
The next election looks so bad for him that there is a chance the Bloc Quebecois could be the official opposition. That party has no candidate outside of quebec.
Wouldn't be the first time though. I'd old timers remember Bouchard.
Granted, the last time the Bloc was Her Majesty's loyal opposition, the incumbent party collapsed, never recovered, and was swallowed by its rival.
There were a couple byelections within the last few months in historically stronghold ridings for the Liberal party that have not flipped in decades. One in Toronto which went to the Conservatives and one in Montreal which went to the Bloc Québécois. It's almost a certainty that the Liberals will not form a government next election, and polling suggests that they are trending below the seat count needed to be the official opposition.
If you look at the past ~15 or so years in the US, it has been pretty constant flip flopping. I think that's a general condemnation of the status quo, and unsurprisingly. For many people the economy just doesn't work for them like it used to.
At the same time, I think the media talking heads put much too much effort into explaining the results, and they basically give the electorate much too much credit. To be blunt, your average voter is not particularly smart, or at least they aren't able to draw a line between cause and effect. Take inflation for example, which many pundits say was the major issue of this election. But if you look at essentially any economist, of any particular political leaning, they will say that Trump's proposed policies (e.g. massive tariffs) are absolutely horrible for inflation. Similarly, at the end of Trump's 1st term, he was absolutely berating Powell for not having even looser monetary policy in 2019 despite extremely low unemployment.
I think it's fine to argue the Dems did a ton of stupid shit (a lot of this I may agree with), but it's pretty clear that the electorate wants a strongman right now, and that's basically the antithesis of what the Democratic Party wants at large. I also think the Dems haven't accepted the fact that there is zero chance a woman from the managerial class will be elected president.
Keir Starmer didn't win by a landslide, it's that the Tories lost by a landslide. People didn't vote for him, they voted for "not the Conservatives". Now that he's in, the approval rating is correcting.
For many this ended up with
"Have i felt better over the past 4 years" .
Imagine coming out of covid, without a recession, only to be hit with inflation (both parties to blame) and sky high interest rates coupled with all other stuff like illegal border crossing to lack of majority support from Women to Harris to Harris being a silent VP for 4 full years and thrown to lime light.
> and thrown to lime light.
She threw herself under the bus. She went thought a great deal of effort to end up there. It's the deftest act of self immolation I've seen in politics so far.
What are you talking about? Biden was utterly incoherent at the debate. She stepped up, and got the party behind her immediately, and brought hope back to the Democrats. In terms of her campaign, she did far better than we could have reasonably expected.
> Biden was utterly incoherent at the debate.
Which was so totally unpredictable?
> and got the party behind her immediately
I remember this quite differently.
> and brought hope back to the Democrats.
I honestly doubt it was anything other than trepidation masquerading as hope. She was the worst performing Democrat in the last open primaries. This hope was not based on anything other than an exigent fear of Trump.
> she did far better than we could have reasonably expected.
The metric, as always, is votes / campaign spend. Are you sure you've evaluated this earnestly?
What’s frustrating is democrats never got to pick o their candidate like the republicans did. There was no. The powers that be picked her and many people didn’t even realize there was a switch.
> Have i felt better over the past 4 years
I agree with you that for a lot of people this is what it came down to, which is so sad. Short-term thinking will lead us to destruction.
Instead of asking whether things have improved over the last four years, think about what you want the country and the world to look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years. And what other countries looked like ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years ago. Think about the rises and falls of other nations. Think about the fact that it's getting measurably hotter every year, and that one party doesn't even acknowledge that fact.
Everything is more expensive, and yes, that sucks. But we've handed over the kingdom's keys to an authoritarian idiot who will dismantle the systems that took hundreds of years to establish. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it sure burned fast.
> Harris being a silent VP for 4 full years and thrown to lime light.
Funny that people constantly talk about how they're not voting for Trump, they're voting for the policies of the party etc. but then they can't apply the same rationale to the other side.
>think about what you want the country and the world to look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years.
This is the candidate's job. She didn't center a coherent vision of the improved future only she could get the country to. Pick one thing that Trump wouldn't or couldn't run on, that wasn't just "getting back thing we lost (under our watch)." Green New Deal. Medicare For All. Defund the police. Build houses for everyone. Monorail. Anything for people to hang a hope on. But any big idea would piss off donor-investors who would be hurt by any change to the status quo. So she offered nothing.
> She didn't center a coherent vision of the improved future only she could get the country to.
So the default is to vote for a person who will run the world into the ground? I don't understand why the onus on the sane person to prove why they're going to make things better. I guess people think that any change is good change? Yet people voted Hitler into power.
My take is that America was founded during a time of very high "mental activity" and engagement. In the 1700s people read for fun, the printing press just having been invented the prior century; and listened to candidates debate for hours, at a level of complexity that is beyond people today. A democracy takes that kind of mental energy and engagement to sustain. The citizens of the US seem to be too complacent, too uncaring, to uneducated to preserve their freedom, and so they won't keep it. Sad to see.
> Funny that people constantly talk about how they're not voting for Trump, they're voting for the policies of the party etc. but then they can't apply the same rationale to the other side.
Different people, different sides. I guess the Republican Party did something very well here compared to Democrats, though I don’t know what or how.
But that focuses on the person of the candidate. When you think that's important, there are a few remarks to be made about Trump. So why do you think this matters? The 15M missing voters?
A very similar thing happened here in New Zealand where we tracked right with fairly dire and predictable consequences, from a left-wing government that was shouldering the blame for a whole lot of macroeconomic issues they had little control over.
It doesn't really matter if they did the right thing or not - enough people were looking to punish them regardless.
FYI, the map looks horrendous for democrats after the 2030 census. Estimates give Texas +4, Florida +3, and various other southern states +1 for a total of +12 on solid red states.
Is this just because people are moving out of California to other states? If so, maybe California needs to change its brand of politics to have a higher retention rate.
A bunch of people I know have moved out of the State. Mostly because housing here is completely unaffordable for an average couple. And it is doable in other states.
Unaffordable relative to wages. Even though you make more in California, you don't make enough more.
This is not just California. I live in Washington and wouldn't have been able to afford my house if I was buying today. Inflation + interest rates + price jumps.
Even in Austin my 200k house from 2007 is 4x the price today.
Maybe they will stop pursuing anti growth policies? Nah that’s crazy
Who is ”they”?
The origin of local power to stymie development is from the post WW2 years when freeways were mandated, but local communities they bisected were inevitably the politically weak ones.
Now, the NIMBYs include those same VCs [1] that publicly posted that America should build at scale again… just not in their town.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...
(I couldn't resist fixing a typo in your informative comment: s/consensus/census/. I hope that's ok!)
Reminder that all of those states were amazing for Democrats pre-1968. Everything changes with time. Many of those states are becoming unaffordable because there was so much displacement from blue states. It’s not easy to predict how voters will respond in 6 or 16 years…
That was more to do Nixon's southern strategy than any change in policy. Remember conservative bulwarks Jesse Helms and Trent Lott both started out as staffers for Democrats.
Nixon’s Southern Strategy only worked because LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act. He famously said “We have lost the south for a generation” after signing it.
No, it only worked because many white southerners were racists twats, and still were at least when I was living in Mississippi in the late 1980s. They still revere Andrew Jackson (founder of D) and hate Lincoln (founder of R), even though they are caucusing with the Republicans these days.
Just a reminder, the census made a mistake and gave extra congressional seats that belonged to GOP to Democrats states.
Citation?
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/census-overcount...
I like the long-term thinking, but what about other trends? Texas was quietly (it seems to me) getting less red up until this election. America is getting more diverse and more educated, and Boomers are slowly dying off while younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism. So shouldn't the Trump / Republican base start shrinking? Maybe e.g. Texas +4 isn't necessarily horrendous for Democrats.
>Boomers are slowly dying off while younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism.
No they aren't. Gen Z young men are all voting for Trump.
>America is getting more diverse and more educated
Diverse maybe, educated no. They're getting more college degrees than 50+ years ago I suppose, but they're not worth much compared to college degrees in the past. These days, college just makes up for utterly lousy secondary school education. Educational standards in the US have been in decline for a very long time.
Gen X voted Trump more than any other generation. Millenials are shifting that way.
You appear to be correct; thanks for pointing it out. I'm now seeing[1] a 10 point lead for Trump among ages 45-64, and a tie among ages 65+. My mental model was still based on the 2016 and 2020 numbers.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
and they will shift back like amnesic goldfish. rinse. repeat.
> younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism.
Young people (18-29) are the age demographic where Trump made his biggest gain from 2020 to 2024. The only demographic where Harris had gains as the oldest demographic.
So while democrats still won the young vote, the trend is in the opposite direction.
Fair point about the trend, yes. And thanks for pointing out that Harris actually made gains with Boomers; I've verified that and updated my mental model.
> Boomers are slowly dying off while younger people have been overwhelmingly against Trumpism.
Is this really the case? My understanding, based on voting data, is that Gen Z was overwhelming for Trump and Trumpism. If anything, Baby Boomers have gone way more left than they have been in previous elections.
I've seen no data showing Gen Z support for Trump, and I'm interested if you have some. I'm seeing[1] an 11 point lead for Harris among the age 18-29 group. That's much more narrow, of course, than the margins in 2016 and 2020, so I guess Gen Z is more supportive of Trump than Millenials were at the same age.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
Democrats had a trifecta but couldn't get DC and Puerto Rico statehood or voter right protections because of Blue Dog members of the party. They lost a critical election that led to some of the worst gerrymandered maps against them while most of their own gerrymandering attempts were overturned. Republicans now control the senate, house, judicial, and executive branch and can cement their power forever.
If you don't believe me just look at Mississippi. A state where demographics alone should've made it between blue and purple. Instead, 15% of all Black adults in that state are not allowed to vote. Similarly, in Florida, 10% of all adults cannot vote. Voters passed an initiative by direct democracy to allow felons to vote, but DeSantis just blocked it anyways and the courts, which he controls, backed him.
Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
> Instead, 15% of all Black adults in that state are not allowed to vote. Similarly, in Florida, 10% of all adults cannot vote.
After some research it seems like this is due to felony convictions. I agree voting privileges should be restored upon completion of sentence, but dang I'm more concerned that 10% of all adults in Florida are convicted felons, what's up with that?
Look at the demographics of those convicted felons. I suspect you’ll see certain trends in who tends to be targeted for arrest—given that rates of criminality are broadly equivalent across demographic groups—that align closely with who the people in power don’t want to have any power of their own.
Mississippi is a very obvious case. The white power structure there simply does not want to allow black people to vote so they use all available means to prevent that.
What’s more, those felons still count towards the state population count, and thus, the number of electoral college votes of the state…
Sounds like taxation without representation to me
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=overpolicing
> Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
This shit pisses me off so much. Why can't they play by the same rules? The supreme irony is, if Dems were willing to occasionally fight dirty/play to win as well, at least when they still had some power, it would have likely forced Republicans to try to govern well occasionally rather than simply always playing to win.
What would be an example dirty tactic the Dems could have used?
NY for example had a map that was gerrymandered to benefit dems. Their SC struck it down and instead we ended up with a map that slightly benefits Republicans.
This is an example of something that happens across the country. Most deep red states are heavily gerrymandered. In contrast, almost every single state that uses an independent redistricting commission is blue. This means Dems are unable to play by the same gerrymandering tactics as Republicans
> Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
It's almost as if they need a different platform that can get them a win instead of complaining that the majority of their voters live in a handful of states.
The election system is what it is.
If you want to win, you need to do something to win - not complain about the system.
This is not correct. The election system changes regularly, and in different ways all over the country.
The Electoral College was established during the Constitutional Convention… in 1787.
Sure, there have been changes since then, but it’s probably always been optimal to go for many states as opposed to the handful of biggest ones.
Wouldn't it be amazing if we had a viable third party? I can dream, can't I?
You'd need proportional representation or something like the French system or you wind up with very skewed results
for example the UK's most recent election had the following
- one party has 410/650 of the seats in government with a third of the popular vote
- they gained 211 seats from the previous election off the back of a 1.5% swing in the popular vote
- another party has 65/650 of seats with 12% of the vote, another has 5/650 seats with 14.5% of the vote
Runoff voting or something similar would work too. Tons of people don't vote for their preferred 3rd party because they realistically want to help their slightly-aligned major party defeat their not-aligned other major party.
That reminds me a lot of South Park episode 8 of season 8.
> You'd need proportional representation or something like the French system or you wind up with very skewed results
Is the French system a good example of a multi-party system? It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties and it doesn't guarantee proportional representation. The presidential election is a winner-takes-all system and in the election for the Assemblée Nationale each constituency is a winner-takes-all.
> Is the French system a good example of a multi-party system?
I would say yes in the sense a new party can (and did) emerge and rise to power when there is demand. Even before that you had some healthy rise and fall of political parties and political alternance beyond just two main contenders.
> It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties
There are like 6 parties with more than 10% of seats, the current government is a coalition of five parties (from two main "families") and no shutdowns or hung parliament.
> Doesn't guarantee proportional representation
That however is true, and by design. This is a property the french voting system share with eg: ranked choice and other systems that aim at resolving the compromise as part of the election rather than afterwards.
I don't mean to say that the french voting system is perfect (I quite like ranked choice), simply that it is a functioning one with interesting properties.
Thanks. I had no idea there where that many parties in the parliament. At the last election I got the impression that it was just Le Pen's party, Macron's party, and a left-wing coalition. But I guess that was simplifying media coverage.
not necessarily, I just wanted to give an example of the kind of measures that would be required to handle multiple parties that people might already know.
The House of Representatives in the US gets voted in the exact same way that Parliament in the UK gets voted. Yet there isn't a single third party seat in the House. The problem is something non-electoral, like the third parties are not trying hard enough, or they are being blocked somehow, if they don't have even one seat in the House.
Not the exact same way — far from it. Look up ranked choice voting. It makes third (and beyond) parties actually viable.
I was talking about the US House and UK Parliament, neither of which use ranked choice voting.
Yep, but it actually breaks the UK system to have more than two parties so the existence of two parties there isn't actually a very good alternative. There's a lot of seats in the most recent election where the Conservative party lost only because the even further right wing Reform party took so many votes.
If I were to guess why third parties don't make much of a dint it'll be because successful movements gradually get incorporated into one party or the other via the primary system. Once a party has drained away the core appeal the third party or outside movement will flounder.
I don't think third parties even really try to organize and do the boring work of proving themselves in local/state office.
They are just spoilers; you don't see the Libertarians or Greens saying "you know what, forget the presidency, obviously we aren't going to win--let's field candidates for like mayor, city council, DA, state legislature, etc. in really swingy/purple districts and show people what we can do"
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-us-states-make-it-tough...
And get this, fewer people voted for Starmer in 2024 than voted for Jeremy Corbyn in either 2017 or 2019.
As long as America has a first-past-the-post voting system, then game theory dictates that it will always be a two-party system.
Unfortunately first-past-the-post was on the ballot in a lot of states this year, and absolutely crushed ranked-choice: https://ballotpedia.org/Ranked-choice_voting_(RCV)#Ballot_me...
I live in Colorado and couldn't be more pissed off. We had a shot at viable 3rd parties and blew it.
Alaska might even repeal it's RCV. Mostly due to voter confusion blaming it for the reason Dems had some minor successes after it was adopted
Canada has FPTP and has 5 parties represented in parliament.
Right now the governing party is a Liberal/NDP alliance, and it's possible that the next election will result in a Conservative government with a Bloc opposition.
The bloc only exist because Quebec is special. The NDP only exist because the liberals just pander and then do whatever they want once elected and everyone knows it. (and Canadians in the east are afraid to vote conservative federally because they are mostly a western thing) And greens having one seat is not anything real
The bloc only exist because Quebec is special. The NDP only exist because the liberals just pander and then do whatever they want once elected and everyone knows it. (and Canadians in the east are afraid to vote conservative federally because they are mostly a western thing)
I don't remember who said it, but I loved the idea of an extra option on the ballot for a redo. If it gets a big enough percentage, you redo the election with new candidates and the old ones can't be candidates ever again.
The problem with that is everyone might vote for it repeatedly, making more and more politicians ineligible. You could end up with 10 or 20 elections in one year and you wouldn't be able to repeal the rules without a government in place.
No because voters eventually get tired of it, because they want a functioning government.
What needs to happen is that the American people need to RUN. Every single time. Take Colorado as an example: A third party candidate could get on the ballot for congress for as little as 1,500 signatures from registered voters. To change the two-party system will be like legalizing marijuana. City by city, state by state, all the way.
The problem is that there's not much money in third party politics...
Don't you worry, even with the large number of parties in the Austrian Nationalrat, German Reichstag or even in the Dutch's Tweede Kamer you still have people who are unhappy with all of the parties.
you need a different voting method first, either ballotage or any of the other systems that don't destroy parties with overlapping voters
Is the destruction a problem? When a viable third-party rises up, you will again return to a two party system, that is true. But it will be with the new party that you want, not the old party that wasn't cutting it.
Ranked choice solves the vote splitting issue.
Ranked Choice is an improvement, but please research Approval Voting. Simpler and better.
Number of parties don't determine ideological span. For example the 14 political parties in the Danish parliament all support Ukraine.
The other interesting thing about Denmark is that most parties are similar on immigration. Across the pond it's likened to a Social Democracy, but it's also a high-trust society with low crime rates.
That hasn't always been the case though, has it?
Which part? The country is over 80% ethnic Danish, so I imagine some aspect of that has been consistent a long time.
I mean, what is now the new Danish immigration policy was considered racist by every mainstream party until a fee years ago, wasn't it?
That's one issue of many. You vote for the party which maches your ideas and opinions on many issues, not only one.
Irrelevant. In this country, there is large ideological span. And allowing new parties a chance to succeed allows old, co-opted ones to die.
Even if a 3rd party got elected president, the Senate and the House are Republican/Democrat, they wouldnt be able to get anything passed and it would be largely useless.
The entire system needs an overhaul.
The problem: more than 50% of people think the system works just fine.
I have always thought that it would be interesting to see an "Ordinary people party" that focuses on the silent majority, held by someone who never wants to be the president but loves to hold a percentage as a bargaining chip.
> an "Ordinary people party"
Hate to break it to you, but that's the GOP at this point.
Is it? You couldn't really know until you split out the parties. One odd thing I find with the GOP right now is there seem to be a lot of people voting with the hope they won't actually do the things they said they'd do.
It feels like there are lots of people in the GOP who want to go a lot farther than "Ordinary people" do.
Is it? You couldn't really know until you split out the parties. One odd thing I find with the GOP right now is there seem to be a lot of people voting with the hope they won't actually do the things they said they'd do.
> I have always thought that it would be interesting to see an "Ordinary people party" that focuses on the silent majority
There is no silent majority. Turnout was >60% in 2020, so by that measure there's a silent minority at best.
Silent as in public discussion, not votes, I think.
Yeah, I was about to write "But looks like Trump kinda does that", but thought that could be a bit controversial so I didn't.
Agreed. And preferably a fourth, fifth and sixth as well.
Ranked choice voting is the only path to this.
Have you not heard about approval voting? Or do you not see it as another path to multi party elections?
Approval voting would be better than what we have now, but I think ranked choice is easier for people to understand.
I think putting preferences is more comforting to people than the idea of approving people equally if you have preference.
> I think ranked choice is easier for people to understand
I strongly disagree. "Vote for one or more candidates" is even easier to explain than "sort all these candidates in the order of your preference".
And once you start trying to explain the potential adverse effects there's no contest. Approval voting today, tomorrow, forever.
Proportional representation is more important than RCV vs approval voting for single-winner elections. And, in the US, multi-winner RCV (single transferable vote) is the most viable approach to achieve that.
* You can cap the number of candidates to rank (in other words cap the number of instant run-offs before another election may be needed). Or you cap the number of candidates, or determine a tie-breaker strategy after X rounds.
* What adverse effects are there that are worse than FPTP?
* I think if someone loathes candidate A, doesn't like candidate B but would tolerate them, and REALLY LIKES candidate C, they should be able to express that preference. Approval voting demands they express B and C with equal endorsement. Personally, I think that's discouraging.
> what adverse effects are there that are worse than FPTP.
* The results of close elections become basically random (due to results swinging wildly depending on the order in which the first few candidates are eliminated)
* You have to convey results with a series of graphs rather than a single graph (which confuses voters)
* You need all ballots in-hand to start an official count, so you can't call elections early
* You lose the ability to perform risk-limiting audits, which are the cheapest and easiest way to audit elections
So bad actors can trivially affect RCV elections by destroying or delaying a few mail-in ballots, as well as cast doubt on RCV results as a whole
The ONLY way this gets fixed is if ranked choice voting is put in place. But this also requires the people in power implement it. Good luck with that.
The good news is, RCV is getting good traction at the city and state level. Actually it was on the ballot in several more places yesterday: [0]
(I haven't seen which of those passed or failed yet.)
[0]: https://fairvote.org/ballot-measures/
Approval voting please. RCV is better than we have, but it makes zero sense next to approval voting.
You're not alone, friend. A three body problem would make for more interesting dynamics.
No. For both France and Canada it’s hollowed out the middle, and both are facing upcoming elections between hard right and hard left as a result
The biggest issue facing Canada is that all of the parties support rising house prices. There's no variety, even under a multi-party system
Canada does not have a hard left party.. The NDP is at best social democratic which is centre left.
Even the conservatives, while courting some hard right views, is arguably not that far right.. evne though I would put them firmly in the right wing.
Canada doesn't have any "hard right" party of note at the federal level.
Today, the Conservative Party is a centre-left party. They support big government, taxation, immigration, interventionism, and other policies that are inherently not compatible with "right wing" ideologies.
Comparing the Conservative Party's platform to that of the centrist People's Party makes the Conservative's centre-left positioning more obvious.
Recently, the Conservative Party's platform has more closely resembled the farther-left Liberal Party's platform than it has the centrist People's Party platform.
I would think that the social policies of the federal Conservative Party place it in Centre-Right to Right. It’d be closer to what you mention if Peter MacKay or Erin O’Toole had no opposition in 2020.
I understand that your political views might see the Tories as Centre-Left, but your pegging of the PPC as centrist strikes me as mischaracterizing the present federal landscape.
All magnets are dipoles.
You did. His name is RFK Jr.
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Your reply absolutely disgusts me even more. There is a lot of evidence that RFK is nuts. See: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/05/nx-s1-5063939/rfk-jr-central-...
> The conspiracy theorist-turned-third-party candidate’s campaign has weathered a series of increasingly improbable-sounding scandals in recent months, from Kennedy’s admission that a worm ate part of his brain to his denial of reports that he once ate barbecued dog (he said it was a goat).
> Kennedy just happened to have an old bike in his car, which he said someone had asked him to get rid of. He recalled that the city “had just put in the bike lanes” after a number of serious accidents, and decided to stage the bear in Central Park as if it had been hit by a bike.
Never vote for crazy. Simple
> This sort of discourse does not belong here. Shame on you.
I'm sorry, it is obvious. Shame on you for not just reading the evidence and making a rash judgement that this guy would be fit to run the country. He makes Trump look like an actual very stable genius.
We would have it if Republicans didn't bend their knee to Trump in 2016. We'd have Democrats, Trumpists and Republicans. But Republicans didn't want to become a third party so they let themselves get completely consumed by Trumpists in exchange for letting them keep the branding.
RFK Jr tried, the dems shut it down.
He joined the Republicans... he was always one anyways, just trying to divert democrat votes.
I guess he has been playing the long game then right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr. >He said that the financial industry and the military–industrial complex are funded at the expense of the American middle class; that the U.S. government is dominated by corporate power; the Environmental Protection Agency is run by the "oil industry, the coal industry, and the pesticide industry";
>In an interview with Andrew Serwer, Kennedy said that the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. had become too great and that "the very wealthy people should pay more taxes and corporations". He also expressed his support for Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax plan, which would impose an annual tax of 2% on every dollar of a household's net worth over $50 million and 6% on every dollar of net worth over $1 billion.[147]
>Kennedy attacked the operations of former CIA director Allen Dulles, condemning U.S.-backed coups and interventions such as the 1953 Iranian coup d'état as "bloodthirsty", and blamed U.S. interventions in countries such as Syria and Iran for the rise of terrorist organizations such as ISIS and creating anti-American sentiment in the region.
>In an article titled "Why the Arabs Don't Want Us in Syria" published in Politico in February 2016, Kennedy referred to the "bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mideast nationalists 'hate us for our freedoms.' For the most part they don't; instead they hate us for the way we betrayed those freedoms—our own ideals—within their borders".
>Kennedy has advocated for a global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy,[169][170] but has opposed hydropower from dams.[129][130][131][132][133][134] He has argued that switching to solar and wind energy reduces costs and greenhouse gases while improving air and water quality, citizens' health, and the number and quality of jobs.[171] Kennedy's fight to stop Appalachian mountaintop removal mining was the subject of the film The Last Mountain.
>As a "well-respected climate lawyer" in the 2000s,[204] Kennedy was "often linked to top environmental jobs in Democratic administrations", including in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections.[209] He was considered as a potential White House Council on Environmental Quality chair for Al Gore in 2000 and considered for the role of EPA administrator under John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008.[209]
Yeah, OK, he was a center-left guy once, who embraced the grift like so many other did.
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Ralph Nader is a better reference point for the dems shutting down the possibility of a third party candidate
Nader is the kind of leader we need, but don’t deserve.
Dems employed some similar strategies with Sanders in 2016, despite his decision to run as a Democrat.
It is interesting to look at the intersection of positions held by the likes of Ralph Nader and Ron Paul, especially where they differ from their respective “most aligned” mainstream party platforms, where they are marginalized. The most prevalent of these are the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes, and in my anecdotal experience 98% of the people agree regardless of their socio-economic status
You're thinking of Ross Perot.
I'm not, Ross Perot played a big part in getting Clinton elected so it'd be weird for them to take issue with him. More recently the democrats blamed 2000 on Nader running third party on the assumption that all of his votes would've gone to Gore otherwise.
You're right, I misread. I meant to allude to the fact that Perot's run was really the only viable 3rd party campaign in recent history. Nader got about 2% of the popular vote, Perot got ten times that, at about 20%. Candidates looking to replicate or even one-up his success need to, likewise, circumvent traditional media gatekeepers to get in front of voters constantly, incessantly.
This is bordering on misleading. In Florida, Gore lost to Bush by 537 votes. Nader had 97,488. There was no need for a conspiracy that all or even most Nader votes would have tipped it.
Today we learned that immigration is more important for Americans than even abortion, so much that 3 states didn’t even codify it.
FL had 57% in favor but needed 60 for an amendment to state constitution. Generally speaking it seems that this issue has popular support, which hopefully counts for something.
Florida unfortunately does not have an actual ballot initiative process. People have been misusing the constitutional amendment process as a makeshift ballot initiative process for the past couple of decades.
Unfortunately, this has a lot of drawbacks. Amending the constitution requires a 60% supermajority, which I think is appropriate for constitutional questions, but is too high of a threshold for ordinary policy legislation. In this case, repealing the laws against abortion and marijuana have majority public support by a wide margin, so why should we have to pass new constitutional amendments with a 60% supermajority just to repeal bad statutes that were passed via the ordinary legislative process in the first place?
On top of that, because measures passed this way become constitutional provisions, rather than normal legislation, it makes it difficult for the courts to exercise judicial review and reconcile these measures with extant law. It's sort of the worst of both worlds.
Maybe we should try to get an actual ballot initiative process into a draft constitutional amendment for the next election cycle.
fun fact: the FL amendment requiring 60% supermajority only passed by 57%
100% agree. No implementation details, just a setup for additional court cases... when we've seen that courts making decisions on reproductive rights doesn't count for too much.
Hot take of the day: no judge should dare review the will of the people, be it expressed in a constitutional or merely legislative vote.
The plebiscite/referendum is the ultimate authority.
On the spectrum from bare majority to unanimity, being in the bottom 20% of the range is not "a wide margin."
If a race between two candidates ended up at 57% vs. 43%, everyone would call it a landslide.
It counts for exactly as much as the votes your comment got, which is to say a few warm-and-fuzzy feelings, but in a legal sense -- zilch.
my hope is that somehow, someway, somewhere.... there is a politician who will think twice about further stripping reproductive rights because of this. Or maybe even someone who will help expand. It is a popular position with wide support.... and hopefully that does mean something.
you've got to stay hopeful. votes do count, but a 60% threshold means a minority have more sway in this instance.
That's a great counterpoint. Thanks!
You believe abortion means murder and that illegal immigrants bring in crime. Those are somewhat reasonable things to believe in and both lead to one candidate. I am not as surprised as you are.
I'm not justifying them, but I completely understand why someone would think like that.
How do you get to those conclusions based of what op said?
Exit polling yesterday didn't really indicate that, despite it being a big part of Trump's rhetoric. It more-so indicated that the economy and democracy (anti-establishment) were the most important issues.
Also learned that massive numbers of latinos supported Trump precisely for those issues. Destroys the argument that supporting illegal immigration is a way to win over American latinos for Democrats
Who makes the argument that Democrats support illegal immigration as a way to win over Latino voters?
"Supporting illegal immigration"
Republicans have stymied multiple useful border initiatives since 2008, most recently this year.
I don't think this is accurate when you consider the "addons" that were pushed as part of these initiatives. Further you can look at the past few months drastic decreases due to presidential initiatives to further bolster the rights argument that the didn't even need these initiatives and could have just enforced existing laws.
That's the problem. The solutions are already on paper, just not enforced. Much like theft in California which appears to have had a drastic shift back with this election too.
People was consistency and enforcement regardless of party.
Unfortunately it seems the gambit to hold the congress hostage has worked for them. Bad juju for any sort of attempt at building political alliances if you are punished for compromising across the aisle, but rewarded for holding the populace hostage until you get a supermajority to enact 100% of your agenda.
> [..] the argument that supporting illegal immigration is a way to win over American latinos for Democrats
Since not all American latinos are "illegal immigrants", why would this be a sane argument?
I mean that makes sense? If you buy into the narrative that illegal-immigration is bad, then anyone could feel it personally. Weigh that against abortion which affects a few people in some smaller states where it is still illegal. Granted it has way more traumatic effects but still it makes sense most people can just ignore it as an issue.
If you total the population of the states which have a ban also I would bet it is less than 50m people, so ~15% of the population live in a state where it is banned and those are heavy rust belt states so they might even be in favor of it being banned.
> affects a few people in some smaller states where it is still illegal
Smaller states like Texas, the second largest state by population?
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I've heard this a lot, so I looked for the bill, because these bills usually have things that politicians don't tell you about.
> Next, the bill establishes an expedited process that authorizes asylum officers to adjudicate certain asylum claims. Among other provisions, these provisional noncustodial removal proceedings impose certain target timelines for determining asylum claims and limit review of denied claims. The bill also establishes a stricter threshold for individuals to remain in the United States pending adjudication of an asylum petition.
> The bill extends and establishes immigration pathways for Afghan citizens or nationals, including by (1) making certain individuals admitted or paroled to the United States eligible for conditional permanent resident status, and (2) expanding eligibility for special immigrant visas for certain individuals who were injured while supporting the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
No wonder Republicans never voted for this. This goes against their MO. I can't blame them for not voting against their views and the views of their constituents on a specific part of the policy.
See for yourself here:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/436...
> The bill extends and establishes immigration pathways for Afghan citizens or nationals
Were R's against this part? I thought giving immigration pathways to those Afghans that fought on our side in the war had R support? I'm very fuzzy but seem to recall a Republican veteran being one of the key people advocating for it on a news segment i'd listened to.
Expediting the process for illegals is something they wont want. This was added on to the bill after its original draft.
If you look at the link I posted they amended things to the bill over time.
The problem with your argument is that this was only 8 months or so ago, and so we all remember how this bill was championed and lauded by the Republicans until Trump said “vote against it because I don’t want the Democrats to have a win”.
My statement still stands, I quoted things ADDED to the bill over time, so by the time they added what the left wanted in order to vote for it, nobody wanted it.
If you visit my link, you will notice the asylum bits were all added on the same day they voted on the bill.
In hindsight seems like a good move on their part.
Why pass a bill with concessions when you can pass a bill exactly how you want it a year later, after sweeping the house, senate, and presidency.
Dems voted against it too
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-democrats-who-voted-again...
But dems don't campaign hard on immigration or the border, except in response to the GOP doing so.
The point is to leave it unresolved so they can run on it again.
I'm so sick of that crap.
This argument is so dumb. Yes, they had a chance, ill give you that, but this bill came up 3.5 years after Biden took office, after 8-10M illegals came in. They only started caring about the open border when they saw it could hurt them politically.
Biden reversed Trump policies on the border, crossings increased, then they back-peddled too late. That is what voters are keenly aware of.
OP doesnt want to acknowledge that for some reason.
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Again the DEM party took another opportunity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
They should have nominated Mark Kelly. The GOP ran on "this bitch hates America". You can't run on that against a 4 star rear admiral who also went into space.
> You can't run on that against a 4 star rear admiral who also went into space.
If I've learned anything since 2016 it's that you absolutely can convince ½ of Americans that a 4 star rear admiral who also went into space hates America.
Nah, you absolutely can. A decent portion of the country still thinks a certain Navy lieutenant faked injuries in order to get a Purple Heart.
I'm curious. Let's say Biden hadn't completely bombed the debate but continued to muddle along as he had been, and the DNC didn't try to force him out. Would he have won?
I don't think so, he wouldn't have overcome that event, and I think this was equally a referendum on Biden.
2016 : Hilary Clinton - People felt that she was chosen because it was her turn 2020 : Kamala Harris - A candidate who never ever even did well in the primaries.
I hope DNC learn from this and let people choose a candidate next time.
Too bad they usurped Bernie. Now Bernie too old to run by next election. Dude was legit Bona Fide.
How do you tell the difference between someone who would suffer a Jeremy Corbyn style catastrophic defeat, and a Keir Starmer who is the PM of the party by the same name but is basically completely different in every other way?
Correct, bernie and corbyn were both well meaning with genuine ideas and were lambasted by the press, opposition and even their own parties to never stand a chance of election. Tulsi had similar issues.
Tulsi Gabbard??? She is completely different, she is an opportunistic cult follower without ideals or ideas of her own. Doesn't really matter much now though.
Agree with the Corbyn analogy, but let's not overstate Starmer's electoral appeal. He got less votes than Corbyn. What got him elected is that tory voters didn't show up to vote because of tory policies.
I don't think Bernie could have won.
I'm almost certain he would have.
Bernie definitely would have defeated Trump. He had unique crossover appeal. Trump was extremely unpopular in 2016 and it took a historically disliked candidate to lose to him.
I do. Even my Fox News grandma liked him. So many people were looking for an excuse to not vote for Trump without feeling blackmailed into HC in 2016.
Only Bernie had a personality cult to rival Trump's. I don't think a single person loved Hillary - they were just okay with her. Many, many people fanatically loved Bernie.
The number of people I know who voted for Trump, AND Bernie—is incredibly high. Now we'll never know!
The way the party worked against Bernie Sanders is a prime example of how it treats the average American: We make the decisions, not you, and if you don't fall in line we will crush you.
Conformity, if you'll pardon me, is not a trait all those Americans who voted for Trump have, nor want. They are individuals and would like to be treated as one.
>Conformity, if you'll pardon me, is not a trait all those Americans who voted for Trump have, nor want.
I'm sure that's what all 72 million of them think. Including the ones (the majority?) who don't like Trump, but who thought a vote for Harris was anathema.
Anyway, I wrote in Bernie. Yes, yesterday.
He is a successful politician. The party is giant and complex. To me, the biggest factor was his support of wealth taxes, which puts him firmly in a different camp than Biden, Warren and Bloomberg, and caused him to be opposed by everybody with power in the DNC. That is the only "line" they really mean to fall into, and it doesn't even affect the average American.
This is why I un-registered and voted Jill Stein as an independent voter.
That, plus the infuriating, incessant spam texts.
Honestly I think Trump would have labeled him "3-home Bernie"[0] or something and sunk him, similar to how he sunk Warren (w/ the Pocahontas meme). Don't get me wrong, Bernie is my favorite, but no one is immune to Trump's attacks, and there is just no way to attack him back (in a way that his supports care about).
[0] https://heavy.com/news/2019/06/bernie-sanders-house-home-pho...
Kamala dominated Trump in their debate, but clearly it didn’t matter.
Yeah. It feels like we missed our one chance to get money out of politics
The DNC will learn nothing from this just as they learned nothing in 2016. They will move further rightward and will lose again.
The DNC has some serious soul-searching to do. If they didn't figure out that people wanted Bernie over Hilary, I doubt they will learn that the US voter didn't like getting lied to about Biden's mental fitness and then just inserting someone we never voted on.
I think they knew full well that people wanted Bernie over Hilary, and they just didn't care. They believed that they could shove Hilary down our throats and actively colluded with her campaign to undermine Sanders. When people objected they fought to defend the position that they aren't required to hold a fair primary election. I doubt they'll learn anything from this and that they'll never give up the ability to make backroom deals then force their chosen candidate regardless of how democrats feel about them.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The general "air" about the democratic party seems to be that they know what's best for you, so shut up and vote blue so that we can "save democracy" (by the people who inserted a candidate that no one voted for).
Regardless of policy, which I won't get into here, we have to acknowledge that treating adults like children isn't a rock-solid battle strategy.
Hillary Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders in the primary. That's not some big bad Democrat party thing. That's literally how Democratic primary voters voted in 2016. I don't know where you're getting your information, but it is completely opposite reality.
The Democrats absolutely shafted Bernie. That's obvious, and it's a shame. Bernie is interesting in a way Kamala and Hillary are not.
No one was shafted. He lost. He lost as bad as Hillary Clinton did to Obama in 2008. Literally the same margin of defeat. You just got manipulated into thinking it was something sinister. You can probably thank a foreign power for that.
In early 2020, Sanders flipped Biden, leading more than Trump lead his rivals for much of the primary, and likely would have gone on to win the nomination, with the momentum he was carrying into the bulk of state contests. Biden's centrist rivals colluded with him and the DNC, suddenly dropping out before Super Tuesday. Buttigieg, one of the dropouts, was awarded with a cabinet appointment that he was completely unqualified for, as exemplified by his gross mishandling of first a rail strike, and then a large accident (caused by conditions the strikers were organizing to rectify) which dumped toxic chemicals into a small town.
That was the one I paid close attention to. If 2016 was anything like it (and I'm sure it was, considering this year's convention tactics were used all the way back in the 1940s to force Truman on us), I have no doubt that this is the DNC's modus operandi. The true steal of the last 3 elections were establishment Democrats' theft of the liberal and leftist vote. And in 2 out of 3 of those cases, they paid in the general.
We have leaked emails proving that the DNC colluded directly with her campaign, Sanders had to file lawsuits against them to get access to information he was entitled to, and in a lawsuit following the leaks the DNC's own lawyers argued as their defense that they had zero legal obligation to run a fair primary. (see https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Wi...) Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned following the scandal and as payment for her services she was gifted a cushy position working directly for Hillary Clinton's campaign.
This isn't some conspiracy by "a foreign power" it's well documented history
Millions of people were manipulated in 2016 by 'domestic powers' and the narrative that only Hillary could beat Trump.
They completely ignored the crypto vote, while both RFK and Trump pandered heavily
They never listen and are just encased in their chrysalis where everyone’s a joke to them if you arent automatically about the party lines
The problem with the left is they're now completely out of touch with the bottom 75%, which is what the massive Hispanic vote swing should be throwing alarms for.
The left is filled with richer, coastal elites (top 25%); and impoverished minorities in blue cities that vote overwhelmingly left traditionally. On what planet does that recipe work out over time?
The left became a gross contradiction. It should be for the masses, it should be primarily focused on the working class. All those elitist Hollywood endorsements are just a big obnoxious joke, they repel the average person and amplify the point that the left is out of touch.
The Democratic Party keeps moving left on cultural issues and right on economic issues, when the world (not just the US) is starting to move in the opposite direction.
These things aren’t actually either/or, but when you pontificate on gender-affirming care in a country where half the population can’t afford just regular healthcare because of high deductibles… the feeling people get is exactly what you expressed.
In what world is the Democratic party moving to the right on economic issues?
1. Tax breaks for first time home buyers 2. Tax breaks for families with a new born 3. Pondering an unrealized capital gains tax
> pontificate on gender-affirming care This is such a hackneyed point and it surprises me that this is something anyone considers. We should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Trans issues should not be difficult to 'pontificate' on. There is gender affirming health care for trans individuals, Democrats broadly support those individuals having access to that care. Democrats are also the party that is aggressive on healthcare and supporting government programs for reducing healthcare costs.
In all seriousness, do trans issues actually impact your day to day in any way? Trans people seem to live rent free in people's minds and I only ever hear about it in a political scenario. It seems like the most manufactured issue aside from immigration in recent memory.
Im pretty left, I just also recognize demand-side provisions (tax breaks) dont work when the enemy is asset inflation (housing costs). In reality, that extra capital would just flow into the hands of people already holding the assets, and the now financially stretched buyer has to hope housing price growth continues (making the situation even more dire for future buyers), or the bet they've made doesn't make sense.
The reality with housing is: someone has to take the loss, but we keep choosing to double it and give it to the next generation.
I think a lot of people are probably not exactly thrilled about the 'extra' provisions for "first generation home buyers" (meaning the parents didn't own one).
In the current political climate, with the current border policy, that sounds an awful lot like a two-tier entitlements system where the more significant help will go to 'illegal immigrants', 'asylum seekers' etc.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harris-propose-25k-payment-s...
Also $25,000 really doesn't mean much when the entire housing market is set to double or even triple when you look at the last 5 years and project into the future. If your mortgage is still going to be $2,500 for a run-down house that would have cost $40,000 25-30 years ago but it's more like $400,000 and rising now... it's not exactly the 'lift' I think most people want.
Honestly as someone who has been scrimping and saving to try to buy a home for the last 6 years, I would be somewhat annoyed if suddenly every broke first generation person is thrust to first in line for the limited housing supply we have, driving prices up further. The fact that it is specifically structured to exclude people with roots here is kind of a slap in the face -- there is no reason it shouldn't just be tied to income, so suddenly it is needlessly political.
My point isn't really to argue the merits of either approach though - just wanted to give you some insight into why as a 'first time' but not 'first generation' potential home buyer I find her plan to be a short-sighted attempt at grabbing votes. Not that it matters now - clearly there is a mandate to swing the opposite direction we have been going.
I'll also add this though: Under the last Trump presidency, I made literally 50% less than I do now (thankfully got a solid 50% bump right before covid happened) and I had MUCH more disposable income. It's crazy that I am longing for the days and economy where I made $60k and could go out AND save money regularly. Now I have to plan any extra expenses, I have moved back in with family to be able to save, and even without the $1,800 rent payment I am still behind where I was in the last Trump economy.
I can't be the only one.
>Honestly as someone who has been scrimping and saving to try to buy a home for the last 6 years, I would be somewhat annoyed if suddenly every broke first generation person is thrust to first in line for the limited housing supply we have, driving prices up further. The fact that it is specifically structured to exclude people with roots here is kind of a slap in the face -- there is no reason it shouldn't just be tied to income, so suddenly it is needlessly political
Yeah, this was my reaction to it as well. The only real way to bring down housing prices is to drastically increase the housing supply and find a way to prevent companies like Blackrock from snapping them up and leaving them empty to keep rental prices high. The "enemy within" is actually PE firms...
"The only real way to bring down housing prices is to drastically increase the housing supply and find a way to prevent companies like Blackrock from snapping them up and leaving them empty to keep rental prices high"
This is exactly the change that needs to happen - the fact that entire subdivisions of housing are being built specifically so these multi-national conglomerates can use them as an investment vehicle, AND all the existing homes are being snatched up by them is criminal in my eyes.
The most impactful thing anyone could do to improve the housing situation in this country is to prevent these operations from using single family homes as investment vehicles. I don't know the 'exact right' way to achieve this - but I'm certain the exact legislative language could be hammered out to make things better for EVERYBODY except the bottom feeders.
Things are 20% more expensive now. How do you have less disposable income with 50% more money?
The economy is approaching great depression levels of 'bad' - and plenty of things have inflated 100% or more, 20% is more like the general 'average'. And plenty of those things are critical items, like laundry detergent, gas, and insurance.
I'll put it this way: When I was making $60k 5 years ago, a night out for two in my preferred 'fun time out' would be: $35 concert ticket x 2, $20 ride x 2(to and from show to avoid dangerous driving), $6 drink x 6/2 -- so a complete fun time out was roughly $140
Now the same concert venue and ticket is $85 x 2, the ride is $40 x2, the drinks (if you don't abstain due to the previous costs) are $14 x 6 and suddenly $140 turned into $354 (more than double). And honestly depending on the day or event that could be more.
This is just one example of how 'going out and enjoying life outside your cubicle' has easily doubled in cost.
You can zoom in on any portion of the economy and find similar. Laundry detergent isn't only up 20%. Gas isn't only up 20%. Insurance isn't up 20%. Groceries have easily doubled, regardless of which basket item you decide to focus in on to obscure that.
Great question though - How have they managed to crash the 'living wage' economy so badly that I either have to live like a broke college student with six figures, when I used to be able to go out weekly.
Averaging out the inflation across the economy doesn't really work for those of us 'making it' -- but if you already made it and the increase in price for laundry detergent, gas, food, or whatever else doesn't actually impact you I'm sure it's difficult to see how bad things have got.
I think you'd have to ask Biden or Yellen or someone in the outgoing administration exactly how they pulled it off though.
EDIT: This graph actually does a decent job of demonstrating that exactly what I experience was happening nationally: https://media.gettr.com/group28/getter/2021/12/14/02/c8e93c4...
The inversion happened in April of 2021 per the graph, and per my memory.
I'm just wondering where in the country you live with those prices. When I used to go out _10_ years ago there's no way I would ever find a $6 drink. Right now a cocktail costs me $13-$15. 10 years ago, a cocktail used to cost me $13-$15. Gas is back to pre-covid prices.
I don't know. I've seen prices go up, but I honestly think people are exaggerating. I buy groceries and food too. I don't spend anywhere close to double what I did even 10 years ago.
Drink = Canned Beer @ one of the countries best music venues outside a major metro area.
I'm not going to be posting more details regarding my location on a public forum however.
"I don't spend anywhere close to double what I did even 10 years ago."
I bet you also have had to tighten your belt buckle to achieve that - if not, you are an anomaly.
Really though my anecdote about my personal inflation woes is not the point, and I just included it as an after thought to provide some context. The core message I am trying to convey is before that, and I don't see much value in comparing individual items in different geographic regions.
If you are genuinely as unaffected as you say, good for you - the only people I know who are in that position are retired already and insulated from changes more than most.
it sounds like price gouging to me. The venue is more than doubling its price and charging you $14 for a can of beer. How is this Biden's fault, of all things?
Anyway, I'm relatively cheap so I always pay attention to prices. Eggs, milk, bread, chicken, etc have all gotten slightly more expensive. Nothing even close to double. I don't understand what people are buying.
"it sounds like price gouging to me. The venue is more than doubling its price and charging you $14 for a can of beer. How is this Biden's fault, of all things? Anyway, I'm relatively cheap so I always pay attention to prices. Eggs, milk, bread, chicken, etc have all gotten slightly more expensive. Nothing even close to double. I don't understand what people are buying."
This is exactly why I tried to redirect you to the core point of my message, instead of the 'addendum'. It was obvious you were looking for some 'leverage' to declare your perceived experience as the 'correct' one.
Now you have pivoted to 'inflation isn't really real, that venue is screwing you' because of zeroing in on one item. I can assure you, prices are similar throughout the city I am referencing. It wouldn't matter one bit which venue I chose.
Perhaps you are OK with staying home and watching every penny and never doing anything enjoyable in life that costs a few bucks. For the rest of the country, they are feeling it in their everyday lives - whether that is food costs, hobby costs, or whatever matters to them -personally-.
Under Trump we were doing demonstrably better. It took an immediate nose dive under Biden, and his entire administrations policies have made things worse - and most importantly, there is no sign they had a real plan to fix that, and it showed at the polls.
It's fine if you want to get hyper-fixated on the one statement you feel compelled to 'debunk' my lived experiences and observations, but that wont change the fact that entire metro areas are becoming either unlivable or pointless to live in unless you are making $200,000+ (in that you can afford the rent but not to enjoy the local attractions).
I'm glad you aren't feeling the squeeze, genuinely.
According to PBS / NPR roughly 60% of the country believe we are in a recession.
You can count me amongst them, because of my lived experiences. I'm not going to continue to quibble about what -I- am doing wrong budget wise accourding to your tiny little insight into my life which this comment provided.. and I think you'll find if you approach most anyone who has legitimate concerns in this manner you will have changed exactly 0 minds.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/views-of-the... - 60% number from here
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/2024-exit-polls-fear... - exit polling showing the current economic outlook is WORSE than after the 2008 crash.
By all means though, if you are comfortable then I'm sure 60+% of the country who feels like they are living through something worse than '08 must bet making up things to complain about and hoarding their money secretly to plan an epic prank on... someone
Yea, inflation sucks. But it's not like Trump can fix the fact way too much money was printed during COVID crisis. The crisis should have resulted in a major economic depression, but instead we got a big party through stimulus. Now we're suffering from a hangover, and Trump can't change that.
Trump can absolutely reign things in, I don't think anyone thinks he can snap his fingers and 'fix' something broken this badly.
But yeah, he 100% can take a different direction than the administration that printed more USD than had previously existed in the entirety of the countries history.
'Trump can't wave a magic wand and un-do what the current admin did, so it doesn't make sense to change directions best to stick with the current administration that doesn't think there is anything they could or should have done different' is not the rationale for my position.
Just look at how the stock market responded today - clearly I'm not the only person who thinks 'this will position our economy much better than it is today'.
25,000 for first time homebuyers will just raise prices on homes by 25,000.
This is simple economics.
> pontificate on gender-affirming care
Dems have not pontificated on gender-affirming care. It is an insignificant issue that affects a minuscule amount of the electorate. There would be minimal discussion on it if it wasn't for the incessant harping from the right to rile up their base.
It is so simple and effective to weaponize social issues. This is easy to see when you read right-wing discussion: they believe that the left is absolutely obsessed with gender-affirming care, because that is the reality they are fed.
I have a conservative relative who talks about 'wokeness' and gender-affirming care almost non-stop, because he believes that it's being 'shoved down his throat', when in reality, it is right-wing media that is doing the shoving.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, as this is spot on.
The Democratic part has completely lost touch with the working class. Harris struggled to articulate any sort of economic policy other than "we're going to ban price gouging, give money to people to start businesses, and help people make down payments on houses" with no details. Meanwhile, they latched onto some of the most fringe culture war issues like making sure that trans men can compete in women's sports.
I voted for her because another Trump presidency is literally an existential threat to the country, but I saw this coming from a mile away.
I believe the Dem plan contributed to the massive apathy or large cohorts voting for the GOP candidate. People that have houses, school age kids and aren't planning on starting businesses see nothing valuable with those plans.
The Democrats are ignorant that their open arms (accepting everyone, working for everyone) policies and rhetoric will sway minorities when culturally there are strong christian and catholic populations amongst demographic minorities that have firm beliefs that are conservative.
The #1 takeaway should be tell people whatever they want to hear. Factual basis and consistency count for nothing.
I agree. It actually looks quite similar to the situation here in EU, with traditional leftist parties losing popularity to right-wing populists. Leftist parties should focus first and foremost on protecting worker's rights, anything else should come second. Supporting open migration policy in particular is problematic, as it drives down wages to the very workers who might want to vote leftist parties. People who are struggling financially also don't particularly enjoy hearing how they are privileged because of their gender/skin color or whatever.
The left should simply recognize that distribution of wealth and means of production is the number one factor affecting equality. It's their job to lobby for things like progressive taxation and social safety nets.
> Leftist parties should focus first and foremost on protecting worker's rights
They should focus first and foremost on improving the economic condition of the average American. The low income, as well as the middle class slipping into poverty. Worker's rights is a major part of that, but only one part of it. Watching the prices of basic necessities like housing, food, and healthcare while billionaires and corporations are making record profits is bound to piss off the people.
That said, Trump certainly isn't going to make any of that better. In fact, it'll all get much worse, but on the slim chance democrats actually try to win voters back vs just counting on America to come crawling back to save the US from the four year shit show we've just started and if our new dictator allows us to have fair elections in the future, I think you've got the right idea for where they can start.
You're thinking of liberals, not the left.
At least in my country it's hard to find prominent leftist politicians who aren't also liberal.
This is interesting as others have asserted that they lost because they were still too leftists.
What data would settle this?
Look at senate and governor candidates that over performed and underperformed vs Kamala in their state. People have studied it for years and the basic finding is the classic one. Moving to the center wins you votes. You'll find that moderate/centrist dems over perform and leftist dems underperform.
They've studied this. And the cause is is the following. Yes you get your base to turn out more. But extremism motivates their base even more than your own, and switched vote from an independent is twice as impactful as an extra vote. A simple example is you get one more of your base to turn out. You lose an independent, and you get 2 of their base to turn out. And end up down 3 votes.
Part of the problem is that our primaries are weird. Primary voters tend to be more extreme (left and right) and when moderates show up to vote in the election, they're upset there's no moderate choice. I was talking to some colleagues from Australia and not voting is a fine. Makes primaries much more representative of the actual election when you get everyone to vote.
There are no primaries in Australia.
I've had the thought that the US primary system prevents any meaningful application of Ranked Choice, or other alternative methods. Currently there's no other proximate-choice candidates that make it to the general election; i.e., the case where Kamala and Bernie and Trump are on the General Election ballot can't happen in most places right now, which narrows the choice field significantly.
This sounds plausible to me. Can you please link to some of these studies you mention?
https://www.andrewbenjaminhall.com/Hall_Thompson_Base_Turnou...
Here's the study on turnout. And basically comes to the conclusion extremists motivate the opposing party base more than their own.
Here are a couple of journal articles.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
https://academic.oup.com/poq/advance-article-abstract/doi/10...
Note: There is small minority that show that this is effect shrinking with time. My personal belief for why this is happening is basically voters are judging individual politicians more by the moderation/extremeness of the party's positions and less by the politicians personal beliefs.
> Moving to the center wins you votes.
I'm confused. No one moved further from the center than Trump and it worked fantastically for hm.
I think people mistake his radical-styled rhetoric for radical policies
Trump is one of the most moderate Republicans on most social issues (abortion, lgb, criminal justice etc.)
He is the most moderate on entitlements (constantly promises to not cut medicare, medicaid and social security) contrary to every Republican campaign in the past (remember Paul Ryan?)
He is a "moderate" on foreign policy (not a Cheney/Bush war hawk, not a 60's style pacifist)
I could go on but I think the important point is; every point he wants to make, he makes in the loudest most wild way possible and people who aren't disposed to vote for him anyway see that as "radical". The correct word IMO is "crazy" or "wild".
Voters who are in the center or can swing either way see him as promising fairly conventional things but in a crazy tone. Maybe tone doesn't matter as much to them
Hotelling's law should apply, no?
An election.
A linear model (liberal vs conservative) is not great. Consider a planar model with two dimensions: social and economic policy. Trump combined conservative social policy with populist economic policy. Harris promoted liberal social policy. However, in her last town hall, framed herself as a "pragmatic capitalist" (her emphasis). This is a continuation of Democratic rightward shift, the Neoliberal compromise, that was crystallized by Clinton with NAFTA in the 90s. In this election, like 2000, the US public had to choose: a liberal social policy -or- a populist economic policy. What was not on the ballot: liberal social policy with populist economic policy.
This true. They will keep playing this stupid game. Thinking they are on the right side of history, which might be true, or it might not be true; but in the end, the right side of history is decided by the winners. And their current strategy is to alienate as many voters as possible by powering through on issues nobody cares about and acting as if there are no real issues left to fix.
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> They've prosecuted their opposition
Because their opposition committed multiple crimes.
According to new legal theories that have never been used before and have been singularly applied to Donald Trump
Fascism is right wing
The DNC has been successful in making fascism much more diverse.
Quid pro quo
SO the democrats are far-right and the republicans are center-right in your book then?
I think they are referring to the anti-liberal authoritarian left wing that has gained a foothold not only in the DNC but into the mainstream culture in certain ways. But "left-wing fascism" is a thing, or at least and idea, that has been around for awhile. Some call it "red fascism" and is in reference to left wing ideologies that are far from the center. It sort of invokes "horseshoe theory" that says left and right get pretty similar the further they get from the center.
>for a protest that got out of hand
Yeah, only a few people died right?...
Only Ashley Babbitt died due to Jan 6.
I had the same thought. When Democrats run a likable, popular candidate they win. Bill Clinton, Obama being the two most recent examples. Trump won largely because his brash, crude, swaggering demeanor appeals to a lot of people and Harris was a candidate that was defaulted in because Biden was just out of gas; nobody really wanted her. Not saying that the Democrats should look for someone like Trump but first and foremost they need someone that a lot of people find likable.
It was easy to do:Just run a proper election at the convention instead of parachuting in the candidate.
Obama and Clinton both were not at the top of the party apparatus at the time of their first runs. Compare to Gore, Harris, and the other Clinton in 2016. I think the DNC clearly needs to step back and let the party make its own choice.
I think Trump won more on him being not in the current administration, and that people want the current admin out.
Overall the past couple elections have been about kicking people out more than putting people in, and Americans are unhappy with the state of their society.
Trump has at least shown an ability to just ignore the law to get whatever he wants done, and no candidate on the current Democratic party is going to have that
I'm not sure any party in office this last term could have won this election, given there was going to be significant inflation as a rebound from COVID.
You cannot be serious. The Democrats regularly ignored the first amendment.
Kamala was, shockingly and as a surprise to all, an incredibly capable candidate in 2024. She didn't underperform yesterday relative to other Democrats.
This year, it wasn't about the candidate. It seems clear there wasn't any Democratic candidate who could have won.
In the interest of HN guidelines, I won't respond with sarcasm.
This is a bad opinion. Kamala was a terrible candidate by all metrics. Definitely, the worst Democratic candidate I have seen in my living memory.
It should've been a dead giveaway that now a single Indian or Black person has a good thing to say about her. Her only victory was in California (single party & famously misaligned with national voting trends) and her only televised primary performance was a disaster. Democrats didn't run open primaries because they knew she'd lose.
She didn't have concrete policy proposals, talks like an under-performing consultant and had zero charisma.
Not by all metrics. She did very well in the debate against Trump. She drew huge crowds with her rallies.
You’ll notice a pattern with those “huge crowds” — they had a free concert attached.
Nah, Harris wasn't an ideal choice, just like Hillary Clinton wasn't. Ideally for next elections democrats would need someone likable with plenty of charisma and moderate stance on social issues. Being male would be a plus too, unfortunately.
I think Tim Walz would have done better than Harris.
I think so, too. He has a much more direct, down to earth way of talking to people.
Charisma wins elections and she was not terribly charismatic https://paulgraham.com/charisma.html
Apparently being a clown and a liar wins elections ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Trump's a clown. Trump's a liar.
Here's the thing. He sells. Always.
He does that if he doesn't know about the issue. He does that if he doesn't care about the issue.
Harris couldn't sell. Watch her talk about abortion. On some level that's one of the few things she manages to convey a sense of genuineness about. For everything else it's like she's saying "What do you want me to be for? I'm for that" it's fine if you're thinking that but when people figure out that's who you are it's more toxic then them thinking you're a liar or a clown.
The one trait all clowns and liars require is charisma
she didn't outperform 2020 biden in any county in the united states.
DNC: People aren't happy with the current administration, let's put the VP as our candidate!!
I think the DNC was caught between two kinds of politics: machine and identity. The party is very interested with controlling everything, but they couldn't take the nomination from the first black Vice President. Michelle would not run, and so it would presume that to keep dark horses and other members challenging The VP, something had to have been offered or promised. Also the optics of someone like Newsome, white, affluent, and male, challenging the first black woman etc. etc. It doesn't look good for democrats and could have been very messy.
Kamala, for better or for worse, was their only choice.
I hate to say it as a progressive woman, but the DNC has a non-minority problem.
They need a good white/Hispanic Christian heterosexual male and they just don't seem to have one at this point. Gavin Newsom is the face of everything that is ( allegedly ) wrong with California. Mark Kelly is not a great speaker. They tried with Walz, but even I had a trouble imagining him going face-to-face with Putin.
If there was a democratic Mark Rubio he would have mopped the floor with Trump. I wouldn't necessarily say that the country is not ready for a black female president, but I think a lot of people think that Democrats only care about minorities and I think Harris just enforced that belief.
Josh Shapiro probably would have been a good candidate and quite likely would have been selected if there had been any competitive process to choose the best candidate rather than anointing Kamala. He may be jewish by birth but seems popular and competent.
I think one of the problems with the Democrats and modern left is they have moved away from
>I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.
And towards a DEI set up where Kamala is hired because she ticks the colored and woman boxes rather than because of competence.
> He may be jewish by birth but seems popular and competent.
I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but what in the hell man.
The point was that he's not Christian, which is a much more marketable religious affiliation in America.
I get what you're seeing but it's very clearly not what that poster intended to communicate.
Not:
> Even though he's Jewish, meaning you would expect him to be despised and incompetent, he seems to be popular and competent
Instead:
> He may be jewish by birth, violating the condition for a Christian, but since he seems popular and competent that shouldn't matter so much.
Yeah.
As one of my friends says, Democrats were running around yelling
1."Women have the right to abortion." and
2."Everyone has the right to alter their own gender!"
and, while I support the above [well, not exactly: I prefer that one should, when possible, pay for their own voluntary medical procedures].
But, in any case, the above rights have no particular appeal at all to people who are neither pregnant nor gender-uncertain, which is by far the majority of the voting population.
In contrast, Republicans focused on the economy and the border, two things affecting everyone.
> the above rights have no particular appeal at all to people who are neither pregnant
This doesn't sound right to me. You don't have to be pregnant to be interested in keeping abortion legally accessible. You don't even have to be a woman. Keeping a fetus in your body for 9 months when you don't want it is a horror movie scenario for me, and I'm guessing most other women feel the same way. And there are surely many men who want that option available for their partners, as well.
FWIW I also support (2) for those who want it.
I think they really overestimated how many people were single issue pro-choice voters. Looking back it was the biggest part of their platform but it probably didn't move the needle much. I could tell you much more about Trump's economic plans than Harris's.
I also really wish they could just stop talking about trans rights. I support them too but its a tiny part of the population and anyone who supports them is voting blue anyway. A lot of people don't get it, don't like it, and are going to vote against them given the chance.
I'll also reluctantly agree with the right and say I don't see the need for trans women to compete in sports against cis women. Playing sports is not a constitutional right and I think sometimes its ok to say "I'm sorry but no."
> Playing sports is not a constitutional right and I think sometimes its ok to say "I'm sorry but no."
The problem is that the left has really painted themselves into a corner with the whole “trans women are women” thing. To say that they ARE women but CAN’T compete in women’s sports would be to admit that trans women are not, in fact, the same as biological women.
Well the Republicans also spent a good amount of time yelling that the Democrats were yelling about those things, which is perhaps part of the reason your friend thinks the Dems only care about those issues.
I think Shapiro would have good _except_ for what's currently going on in Palestine. Palestine was always divisive among the left and now more than ever.
Josh Shapiro has also stated in writing that he volunteered with the IDF, which under traditional norms is completely disqualifying for the Presidency or Vice Presidency as it's service to a foreign military.
> And towards a DEI set up where Kamala is hired because she ticks the colored and woman boxes rather than because of competence.
Biden said as much ~4 years ago and this election was probably doomed from that point on. I don't know how they are so tone-deaf.
I agree that this perception about modern leftism in the West is a very big issue. Through no personal fault of Harris, I think that a lot of non-white men and white women voted for Trump because they feel like progressives don't care about (or even hate) men, whatever their color, and don't care about (or even hate) white people, whatever their gender.
I agree. Crazy as it sounds but in the electorate’s mind they blame the Democrats and DEI for their economic struggles. I blame the ineptness of the Democratic Party that in the voter’s mind Trump represents the working class.
When Biden ran, he pointed to his working class roots at every opportunity. I believe what cost the election was that KH simply was not believed by the people working minimum wage and couldn’t afford rent.
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By the time Primary season kicks off in early 2028, it will have been twenty years since the last time the Democratic Party membership selected a new candidate without direct interference from party bigwigs.
Twenty. Years.
Democrats have more popular positions, but their problem is that nobody likes them. The DNC is part of the problem. They disenfranchise their own base and it looks weak.
The 2020 primary went without large interference. Lo and behold, the democratic candidate won that election. The lesson is clear: to win elections hold actual primaries instead of appointing candidates.
They’ve been incapable of holding actual primaries since at least 2016. They curate, subvert, stifle, and influence who rises up from the primary election. They don’t care at all about democracy or the republic. Any Democrat who is a populist that actually cares about the American people, ex Bernie Sanders, will be shut down in favor of one that can push globalist agendas at the expense of the local population in exchange for looting the national treasury. When Bernie stepped out of line and genuinely wanted to help people, the DNC establishment whipped him back into step and reminded him who’s boss. I’m genuinely surprised this election appeared to ever be close.
America was saved and a better chapter begins. Do you disagree? A plurality of Americans agree with that sentiment as evidenced by the popular vote and the winning of all 7 swing states.
They held a primary in 2020. Kamala, Warren, Beto, Bernie and more all ran with Biden.
That definitely feels like the forgotten primary. My best guess is that its because that primary was book ended by primaries that were heavily influenced and controlled by the DNC.
I mean, primaries usually aren’t generally heavily remembered.
Kamala dropped out early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presiden...
Many believe that the party gave Biden and unfair advantage using their superdelegates. The Republican Party does not have such super delegates, and in fact in 2016 Trump won solely due to his ability to organize and rally a well-working campaign even as party elites were seething at his ascendency and insulting him in public.
DNC was worried that Bernie would be nominated.
Super delegates are undemocratic, and always have been. How does the party of 'democracy' get away with this? The GOP has never used them and always just let its voters vote. When the voters chose Trump despite the leaderships hatred of them, they all stepped aside. Are they perfect... of course not? But compared to the democrats, they've always stood by their voters.
Yep, the DNC has lacked the self-awareness in these past few years to gaze within and cull the cruft that 100% of their voter base hate. Superdelegates need to go. They're this generation's Korematsu (as in they are still active while people would rightfully think they're gone). I feel confident that superdelegates will come back to bite the DNC decades down the line.
In fairness, they actually did change the rules around them after 2016 but stopped short of removing them.
I hope they get rid of them!
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the way I remember it, it was a competitive primary with Bernie and Warren competing for the lead when suddenly Biden mysterious knocked them all out, as if the party had suddenly overruled the process. Maybe that was an illusion but a lot of people interpreted it this way.
No mystery about it: after South Carolina a bunch realized they couldn't win.
Because everyone besides Bernie dropped out right before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden, hoping to get appointments in a future Biden Admin. Many, like Buttigeg were well rewarded for this.
The Democrats even tried to drop the primary here in New York by striking Bernie and everyone from the ballot because they had decided Biden was going to get the nomination.
It’s not so crazy, Biden was more appealing to moderates.
Biden won pretty handedly because moderates didn't like that Bernie calls himself a socialist. If you're chronically online it might seem like Bernie was leading the pack but I've had many conversations with the older voting population that echo the sentiment that he was never their guy.
This conspiracy from Bernie bros is so deeply stupid.
The democratic coalition depends on black voters, and they decisively chose Joe Biden in South Carolina, sending a clear signal about who would have the strength to beat Trump (and in the end they were right).
It was not a party conspiracy.
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Democracy dies when voters elect a candidate who tried to overthrow the democratic system before, and promises to do it again.
Democracy always dies by democracy though. Thats the fundamental flaw.
At least those folks went after the government instead of smashing the windows of every business in my city. But that event, despite being in the “worst global pandemic of 100 years” somehow got a free pass. It was labeled as “the summer of love”.
This country was founded by government distrust and rebellion. It was not founded on bashing your neighbors windows.
Those people who stormed the capitol put the fear of god into a bunch of politicians. Good for them.
…the people who set fire to neighborhood buildings… not so sure about that one.
Exactly.
Does this not get exhausting?
Based on voting patterns, I think to many americans today, the main claim of the J6ers (that there were some fraudulent ballots in the 2020 election) is looking more likely, not less. If anything were to come out, the J6ers would become freedom fighters, just as they are apparently in the hearts of many Americans. Like it or not, perception is how you win an election.
On the other hand, the democrats have tried politically-inspired prosecutions, selecting a nominee while ignoring the party writ large.
Anyway, the simple truth is that Americans worried about democracy went to trump by large margins. Consider that
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In 2016, prospective candidates were told by the party to sit this one out. It was Hillary's turn and if you run in the primary, you will not have a future in the DNC. This is why we only got Bernie (who isnt even a democrat) and a hand full of no name DNC candidates to vote for. She was chosen, and no big names ran against her.
Where is the evidence for this? Obama was also not a big name candidate in 2008. It's harder to be a bigger name than someone who was both a first lady and a senator.
Wikileaks released DNC's internal emails, where they made plans to sabotage Bernie.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/politics/dnc-emails-sa...
Bernie supporters filed a lawsuit against the DNC for disenfranchising them. The DNC argued they operate as a private corporation and are free to pick whomever they want "over cigars in a back room".
> “There’s no right to not have your candidate disadvantaged or have another candidate advantaged. There’s no contractual obligation here . . . it’s not a situation where a promise has been made that is an enforceable promise,” Spiva said.
> The DNC is advancing the argument that any claims to be neutral and fair to all candidates were nothing but “political promises” and are unenforceable by law.
https://www.salon.com/2017/05/13/the-dncs-elephant-in-the-ro...
None of this is evidence for GGP's claims.
It is also not evidence for any interference above 2008. Workers for the DNC had their own preferences for party candidate. This was the case in 2008 as well, but without the emails, it's hard to construct a conspiracy theory. There was no evidence of "sabotage" in the emails.
> The DNC is advancing the argument that any claims to be neutral and fair to all candidates were nothing but “political promises” and are unenforceable by law.
This is a legal argument for throwing out a case (which was thrown out). It is not an admission of being unfair.
one partisan event I found in a quick web search (can't vouch for anything):
from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2143741/fact-che...
_fs didn't say she wasn't a big name, only that "no big names ran against her."
No big names ran against her in 2008. No big names ran against Obama in 2012. No big names ran against Biden. Big name is a relative term.
But she was very divisive on the R side. Democrats need someone who is popular enough with their core base to win primaries, but also likable enough to the other side to get some crossover votes.
When in doubt, always blame the Russians.
They released the emails that this conspiracy theory is based on.
But the DNC wrote them. Don't blame the messenger.
Did we get verification the emails were unaltered? To make an analogy the initial email release was smoke, it demands investigation, smoke often means fire after all, but not always.
Had a single email been altered, you can be sure that the DNC would have been shouting it from the rooftops. Being able to label the emails as 'altered' would have made for fantastic water-muddying, which is a classic defensive tactic in such a situation. Any political operative would be expected to do the same. The fact that you are (as I am) unaware of any such claim, in an episode which was at the top of the news cycle for months, would seem to be a pretty clear indicator that the emails were legit.
> Had a single email been altered, you can be sure that the DNC would have been shouting it from the rooftops.
Easy to imagine they would not in some cases. Often people do not comment on on going investigations. Or in international espionage I know it is common to hide what you know and what you do not know to keep your competitors/enemies in the dark to give your self an advantage. So the USA spy organizations may not want the DNC to show its hand.
I can not make the assumption that you are putting forth at least.
There was nothing incriminating in the emails. Some staffers preferred one candidate. This was spun into a fixing conspiracy theory. If you think this wasn't true in 2008 or that some RNC staffers don't prefer one candidate, you might be interested in a bridge I have for sale.
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The idea that the DNC stole the 2016 nomination from Sanders is silly. Sanders had no path to beating Hilary.
The real problem was Biden not dropping out early enough so that they could have a fair selection process.
But tbh I’m not sure how much it mattered. With the high inflation levels it was always an uphill battle for the incumbent.
Inflation is a complicated topic that doesn't get adequately captured in the sound bites.
I kept hearing clips of voters saying they want prices to go back down, but my understanding of the economics is that this would be terrible. Instead, IMO, what we need is for wages to increase while minimizing the inflationary effect of wage increases. That's not a catchy slogan, however.
Parallel to this, I don't think the post COVID inflation is really due to politicians.
Over 50% of the increased prices are from producers not just recouping their additional expenses, but also increasing profit margins.
Typically you would expect this to be an opportunity for competition, but generally speaking companies are suspiciously raising prices together. They've taken advantage of the COVID shortage and inflation narratives to squeeze consumers.
https://fortune.com/2024/01/20/inflation-greedflation-consum...
https://www.marketplace.org/2024/08/05/ftc-grocery-prices/
>Typically you would expect this to be an opportunity for competition
What competition? Most of them have merged into massive blobs.
Corporate consolidation is one of the biggest and least talked about boogeymen of our current era, one which is set to get even worse under Trump's second term. The Biden admin barely, kind of, got anti-trust authorities somewhat working again, and that will be demolished on day 1 of Trump.
Bigger corpos means bigger donations to bigger candidates. The entire system runs on money and nobody's got money to put in like these supercorps. We live in Gerontocracy that is actively building a Corporatocracy to replace it after the Boomers die off entirely and no money will ever go to the working class again.
> The Biden admin barely, kind of, got anti-trust authorities somewhat working again, and that will be demolished on day 1 of Trump.
You are grossly underselling the work of Lina Khan and the FTC.
Could you name the top-3 examples of the FTC's work over the past 4 years that were net-helpful to the future GDP/capita of the US economy?
And what will it matter when on day 1 of the next administration, it's all blown out the airlock?
If your change is no more durable than a single election, you didn't accomplish shit.
> If your change is no more durable than a single election, you didn't accomplish shit.
That is the way that the country works! The system is working as intended if a single government appointment can't unilaterally destroy monopolies in a single term.
What do you think inflation is? Demand shoots up, suppliers raise prices or run out, and it takes time for new capacity to be rewarded and created. There's no collusion here.
Inflation isn't just a fiscal (even though Biden failed on the fiscal side as well) or monetary phenomena, it's psychological - i.e. expectations about future prices.
Because the Biden administration was characteristically incompetent (Remember Treasury Secretary doing interviews saying that inflation was just a short-term blip and not persistent?) inflation started to get out of control. Once that happened, 30+ years of low inflation expectations went out the window. Market psychology changed, and because people now expected prices to rise, they weren't as resistant to individual price changes. This gave producers (along with legit covid supply side issues) breathing room to increase prices.
This. Just have to look at the last twenty years of argentina.
Any real political problem is multifaceted, deeply interconnected with the way the country works and its place in the world. But peoples experiences of them are not, inflation manifests as someone being able to afford rent one year, and not the next.
A good politician, can speak to the experience, but fix the problem. A good salesman can sell you a solution, even if it doesn't fix the problem. And the democratic party, seems mostly interested in talking about the problem and ignoring the experience.
Of course deflation would be terrible for the economy. Expecting the average voter to understand the intricate complexities of how economies work vs I don't have enough money to buy things, so I want prices to drop, is sadly a losing proposition.
All that mattered was that bread is $4.50
Prices wont come back down; but few if any swing voters understand that. They just see high prices under biden and remember lower ones under Trump. Him losing would have taken a very strong candidate given the predicament.
Well, with a less than 6th grade literacy rate for 54% of Americans, it isn’t exactly surprising that many people have a hard time understanding any nuance. I once heard a woman explaining to her captive audience’s amazement how the colors of a “yingyang” were because “ying” means white and “yang” means black. Aside from being wholely incorrect (reversed), the concepts and meaning behind the yin yang of the balance between “light and dark” is completely lost on her. The extent of her knowledge will always be whatever someone she believed told her.
Edit: I forgot to mention, the reason for the colors. “Ying” has an i, for wh”i”te, “Yang” has an “a” for bl”a”ck. It wasn’t even a light/dark thing, it was because she believes the translated name shares a common letter with the color, so that is the reason for those colors. That is the reason why I’m not surprised by the results.
> my understanding of the economics is that this would be terrible
Deflation is only "terrible" because we have collectively decided to build an economy on debt instead of savings (Keynesian instead of Friedmanian).
In a different economic order, prices declining would be a good thing for everyone.
But we're stuck with it, so inflation it is.
A working economy means professional activity to make goods and services. Deflation actively kills that by incentivizing people to defer or cancel their purchases in favor of savings. So economic activity collapses.
There is no such thing as a durable deflationary market if it’s not justified by productivity gains and volume - and there is definitely no such thing as a durable deflationary economy.
The US was "a durable deflationary economy" for pretty much the whole 19th century, and first decade of 20th century. Things started to change once FED was created and given power over money supply.
> for pretty much the whole 19th century
Not sure what you're refering to, the 1873 panic wasn't exactly the finest hour for US economy. I guess that's not what you want to get back to.
As for the rest of the 19th century, the data we have is mostly consumer price indexes, but I can't recollect another durable deflationary period in the century.
"Trust us, the ONLY solution to our disastrous intervention is MORE intervention!!"
And Friedman never pushed an economy of savings, not sure where you’re getting that from. If anything, he wanted people spending faster.
* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/milton-friedman.asp
Doesn't deflation especially disadvantage the young - since you're usually not born with savings of your own.
Depends how much deflation there is with wages compared to everything else, there's a scenario that they have an opportunity to start saving
The majority of the expenses for the disadvantaged young are housing, gas, and food. With housing being 4x more expensive than 4 or 5 years it basically puts all the disadvantaged from even buying a house and then puts them at the mercy of the renters market
You save money in a bank, they lend it out to someone, that someone is now in debt
Debt = Savings
Actually, banks can "create" money from nowhere. It's called fractional-reserve banking. When you deposit money into a bank, the bank is required to keep only a fraction of that deposit as reserves. The rest can be used for lending.
The exact fraction is determined by the central bank's reserve requirements. And since 2020 it has been set to... zero percent.
So essentially US banks can infinitely create money.
>> in a bank, they lend it out to someone
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022416/why-b....
>> Debt = Savings
That’s only true for public debt, excess spending (that which is not deleted through taxation) by the government shows up in savings
What?? This isn’t correct at all. A deflationary economic environment is bad no matter the fiscal policy or monetary policy we have in place. You propose it would be better if we pushed for savings. Well if we all know that prices in a few weeks/months/years will be less than today, then spending drops. Friedman pushed velocity of money, even he would agree that a lower velocity would crush an economy.
I never got this line of thinking. I'm already disincentivized from spending because simple investments are likely to outpace inflation. That's a good reason to save as much as I can, but I still buy things, and it's not like I can put off buying food for a year so that prices drop. What's so different about this incentive to save and it being a part of the economy?
There are a number of issues with this comment. One of them is that debt and saving are just sides of the same coin.
More importantly, everybody can see that debt for investment allows more growth. Just think about how many more people can afford to own their own home thanks to taking on debt. This allows them to pay a mortgage instead of rent, which allows them to build up wealth.
Equivalent effects exist in industry.
Debt is an extremely useful tool. We made the right choice here as a society.
We need prices to go down in specific places, like CA where I live.
https://www.raleys.com/product/10400953/raley_s-shredded-fou...
I was looking at the price of Lays chips and it's sitting at $6 a bag ON SALE!
https://www.raleys.com/product/30031044/lay_s-potato-chips-s...
Yes prices need to specifically go down. CA decided to DOUBLE DOWN on raising gas prices during the pandemic, and apparently they're slated to vote on another change that could raise prices by $0.45 a gallon. The world has had CHOICES to go in a specific direction, and this administration and all LEFT administrations are pushing for prices to rise, and replace all the failing families with people from China, Venezuela and whoever wants to cross the border.
Look from the good side: you will be much healthier without those potato chips.
Also, from my experience, prices never go down.
This post is a wonderful microcosm of why everyone is so divided and tribal now.
Here we have someone sharing a real world example of out of control inflation, which is true across all groceries no one grounded in reality would deny that.
Rather than acknowledge these concerns in anyway, you took time out of your day to imply because they used 1 unhealthy example this runaway inflation is actually a good thing because they will be forced to eat 'healthier'. Completely ignoring how expensive those 'healthy' items are as well (and that they continue to rise).
Then you use your anecdotal experience to further your dismission with 'well, ackkkstually ime prices don't go down so your concerns are invalid.'
This exact attitude is why there is nation-wide a mandate to eliminate the left from all pillars of power. And this is coming from someone who campaigned for Bernie.
If you live in California, why are you paying for things at stores when it's optional?
I think California just passed the prop to escalate some crimes to felonies, so I feel like the policy commonly used to justify this joke may be dead.
That's great to hear!
I actually disagree, but I'm glad you're happy.
That mattered quite a bit for a three reasons.
1. Kamala isn't a great candidate shown by her poor primary results in 2020.
2. She has all the baggage of running pretty far to the left in 2020. (Like saying she was for performing gender affirming surgery on trans illegal immigrants, agree or disagree with the stance this is a deeply unpopular position)
3. She was tied to the current administration which meant she couldn't distance herself from the inflation issue or attack Trump on age and fitness as much as another candidates not tied to the administration.
> The real problem was Biden not dropping out early enough so that they could have a fair selection process.
This is why it's important for the media to hold politicians' feet to the fire - even if they agree with them. I think there was just a murmur[1] of Biden's problems before the catastrophic debate. Imagine if the media had been hammering the administration on this point 6 months prior.
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13102973/New-York-T...
Dean Philips attempted to primary Biden on the basis of age and low favorability. The media shut him out.
The media didn't shut him out, no one would have voted for that guy.
The media and the party had many opportunities to deal with Biden's age. They didn't. And yes, they did shut out Dean Philips, on the basis of exactly this kind of "he's an unknown, therefore unelectable." Well, they went with a known, and now they're paying for it.
> I think there was just a murmur[1] of Biden's problems before the catastrophic debate.
Before the debate, anyone talking about Biden’s obvious decline was dismissed as a right wing troll parroting Russian propaganda.
No they weren't. It was discussed quite openly with no backlash at all, e.g.:
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/2/8/24066529/biden-special...
One of the more insightful things I heard in the last few days was this generation of politicians got a lesson in how toxic inflation is politically. And inflation wasn't even that bad, but it felt bad.
Underlying that problem were the Administration thinking they could fool us all into believing that Biden's faculties were unaffected. This was a two-edged sword because it also demonstrated that maybe it doesn't matter so much who is president, at least as domestic affairs go, because the administrative state runs so much on autopilot.
I believe his faculties got substantially worse in 2024. He was a lot more present in speeches in 2021 for example. Mental decline isn't black and white, and you tend to see people as your mental model of how they used to be, so you can look at brief moments of clarity and declare him "well", so many did that. But it doesn't work that way.
>I believe his faculties got substantially worse in 2024. He was a lot more present in speeches in 2021 for example.
Well, you're wrong. That's when you noticed, but many others were talking about it for years. It was denied.
>so you can look at brief moments of clarity and declare him "well", so many did that
Nobody dealing with Joe Biden daily thought he was well. They were intentionally lying.
I've followed politics for my whole life and watched tons of Biden speeches going back decades. I was seeing his old "spark" quite a bit well into 2024. The debate, he fell off a cliff, and his follow-up interviews were even worse. 3 months before he competently delivered a barn-burning SOTU address. IIRC a few months before that, he delivered a good NATO speech. He'd slip up minor points but he also did that in 2002. Back then they used to call him a gaffe factory.
He was cooked by 2022, Biden was stumbling over tele-prompted speeches.
The gap between his last state of the union (March 2024) and the debate (June 2024) seemed pretty big, and I'm not the only one to say that. But again, it isn't black and white. Maybe the speech format suited him better.
"you tend to see people as your mental model of how they used to be" Pot? Meet Kettle.
I worked in an advanced Alzheimer's ward for about 4 years when I was younger. There is a look that happens in the eyes which is a sure-sign they are effectively gone - it's like a light has been turned off. (even if they have moments of lucidity, there is a clear switch that is talked about in exactly these terms if you work in these places and are close to them every day.)
Biden clearly had 'the look' back in 2021, and was making enough gaffes for people who maybe aren't as familiar with the signs of mental decline could clearly see it.
Just because you didn't, doesn't mean everyone else was wrong and saw what they wanted to see.
If you are going to argue 'well, that's just like your perspective man' you have to at least see how that same argument can be turned towards you.
You are absolutely right that it is not black and white - I fully believe that back in 2021 he had enough moments of lucidity (which generally are somewhat reliable, which appear to be tied to the circadian rhythm hence 'sundowners') -- so if all you watched were his scheduled speeches I could see how you may have been left with that impression.
There were plenty of other opportunities to watch his decline in real time however.
Biden barely campaigned in 2020.
> thinking they could fool us all into believing that Biden's faculties were unaffected
Yeah, this was a big part of a general trend of the Democrats treating voters like children to be coddled and lied to. Voters don't like being treated as less-than just because they're less educated, and uneducated doesn't mean stupid. They can see through it.
My county went >75% for Trump, and the reason is because Trump is the only presidential candidate in most of our lifetimes who treats working-class voters as his equal. He doesn't talk down to them, he talks like them, and they eat it up.
I think it is stupid to vote based on how a politician talks rather than the expected impact of their proposed policies, though of course I realize that that’s how elections have been decided in practice for as long as representative governments have existed.
The thing is, when you "talk down" to people, chances are pretty good those people's best interested aren't being represented by the one doing the down-talking.
However, if you "talk to" them, you are in a much better position to actually hear and respond to their concerns - with the added bonus of seeming actually human.
The way you frame it seems to imply that people are voting for him because he talks 'like them' while ignoring the 'to' them. I believe the hot leftist term for this is 'code-switching' which just means talking to your audience with language they understand and relate to -- and it's usually portrayed as a virtue, not a defect.
In reality, these people voted for Trump because as a result of him talking to them like equals rather than down to like subjugated servants left many feeling that he was in fact advocating for policies that support their best interests and would be impactful in their day to day lives.
Obviously personality matters more than it should - but in Trumps case the entire media apparatus was single-mindedly determined to make sure they dictate what his personality is, rather than his words or actions. So if anything this win shows that policy matters more than personality at this point anyway.
Now of course, if you see his policies as wrong and evil and dictatorial and the embodiment of fascism, none of that will matter and no lessons will be learned from this absolute rejection of the democrats platform.
You're not wrong about people resenting being talked down to. I've tried to make this point to Democratic (especially progressive) activists for years and years and it's like talking to a dog that just heard a new noise. The fraction of people in the country that actually care about religious culture wars is relatively small; it's one reason why seven states passed initiatives enshrining abortion rights in their state constitutions this go-round. Voters care deeply about concrete things that affect their lives and they're not receptive to someone haranguing them to care about something else entirely.
If you want to catch a fish, you bait the hook with something the fish wants to eat instead of something you want the fish to eat.
>who treats working-class voters as his equal
Maybe that's the message he was sending but is that really true?
> who treats working-class voters as his equal
As long as they aren't blacks, or muslims, or Asians, or Mexicans, or Puertoricans...
Citation, please? I think you're making the error that the media loves to commit, which is to forcibly reinterpret everything as racism.
For example, in the recent Puerto Rican "garbage" kerfuffle, the comedian never said that Puerto Ricans as such were garbage - that was a fabrication of the media. What he said was that the island of Puerto Rico is an island of garbage, which is figuratively true as it has an acknowledged a problem with garbage disposal.
Similarly, Trump never said that Mexicans are rapists, etc.; that's another media fabrication. What he said was that those in America illegally are disproportionately criminals. That may or may not be true, but it's not a statement about Mexicans as a race, but about a particular subgroup set apart by their own behavior of illegal immigration, and notably NOT directed at their cousins in America legally, or still back in Mexico.
Trump says a lot of crap. But if you find it particularly egregious, chances are that it was fabricated by the media. Another very recent example is when the media told us that Trump said that Liz Cheney should be put in front of a firing squad. In reality, the topic of conversation was her attitude toward war, and his statement was that if there were guns pointed at her, she'd feel different about soldiering.
> Citation please?
Behavior of Trump in the Black lives matter movement speaks for itself.
Muslim ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_travel_ban
Trump tried hard (but failed) to deport dreamers out of USA: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-dreamers-...
"Puerto Rico is a garbage island" and Trump trowing paper toilet rolls to victims of natural disasters with a clear purpose of humiliating them.
The problem in this thread is that everybody is trying to find what Democrats did wrong, or say that Kamala was not well known. Well, every voter knew who was Trump, and they still voted him, so changing the candidate by "better" does not matter if people wants "worse". If a country can't use the best people that they had ("elite thinks that are better than us") the outcome is predictable.
And we aren't even daring to discuss the elephant in the room that is "Can't be really, (really) sure that they didn't just cheated?
After all wouldn't be the first time, so is legit to speculate about it. Lets imagine [hypothetically] that in an alternate timeline they just learned from past fails and cheated better this time. How that could be disclosed or done? Was mail vote altered?. How could we spot it in this case?. This is the real meat in this discussion.
How strong or weak is a candidate does not matter if a party just can jump over the game rules.
Blacks:
1)Got the platinum plan which provided half a trillion dollars to black communities
2) He also was very involved in the 'first step' act, helping address 'over-incarceration'.
3) He secured funding for HBCU via the FUTURE act, some of which were at risk of closure.
4) Prior to covid, black unemployment was at record lows (5.4%)
I keep hearing it repeated over and over again that black people hate him and he is racist, but I have yet to see a non-hyperbolic example. Whereas Biden is on video making incredibly racist remarks throughout his career like "I don't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle" and speaking at a 'Grand Cyclops" KKK members funeral... not to mention he was largely RESPONSIBLE for the 1994 Crime Bill, which led to the over-incarceration of black people to begin with.
Surely you have something at least that damning, if you are going to casually label him as anti-black - right? I mean I know that supposedly the fact that the KKK guy later said 'oh no this was bad for my image' absolves him of THAT infringement for some reason, but it doesn't square the other stuff.
I'll keep the rest short, but the point I am trying to drive home to anyone reading this far: Just because you were told 'trump is super duper racist and hates minorities' by the TV every day, doesn't mean it was reflected in his actions.
Muslims:
Less of substance here admittedly, but he did sign an executive order in 2019 to promote religious freedom WORLDWIDE, which included efforts to protect Muslims from persecution.
Asians:
As a large contingent of 'small business owners' the tax cuts for small businesses were a major boon.
Mexicans:
Honestly the fact that you listed this one is kind of weird - like what is he supposed to do for citizens of another country? Or did you mean Latin Americans but just reducing them to 'mexicans' would elicit the mental imagery you were hoping for?
All the Mexican Americans I know voted Trump, and if you look at the voting history in 2020 he got 32% of 'latino voters' and in 2024 that is looking like a jump to 45%. So roughly half seem to support him.
Puertoricans:
If you are going to exploit a minority group to make a mis-guided political point, at least type out the proper 'Puerto Ricans'... but I see clearly you just want to appeal to the 'coloring box of oppression' and throw some minorities out there and see what sticks.
Again, this group went from 30% supporting trump in 2020 to 40% in 2024 -- something tells me droning on and on about how the 'insult comic' harmed Puerto Rico (who does have a garbage crisis) didn't really have the effect you or the media or whoever formed your opinion were shooting for
Anyway, now that the facts are out I think it would be pretty hard to seriously claim Trump is a racist bigot without also conceding that 'your guy' is demonstrably more so -- but at the end of the day these identify politics games are getting tiresome, and no one is listening anymore.
Unless of course, you never cared about facts.
Update:
In an interesting twist "American Indians" showed 65% support for Trump! That kind of damages the 'muh racist' narrative too.
Oh and 'Latino's are exceeding the 45% projection at least a bit, so even closer to a 'tie' sitting at 46% currently.
This is per NBC, who tend to lean left: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
It doesn't matter if he actually perceives them as his equal (I frankly think he doesn't perceive anyone as equal to him, he appears to be something of a sociopath), what matters is that he successfully treats people that way.
Democrats would be welcome to continue believing voters are children as long as they don't project it so blithely.
> Democrats would be welcome to continue believing voters are children as long as they don't project it so blithely.
I hear you and found it irritating as well. Republicans don't even treat their voters as children, it's far worse in my opinion, and yet they reap all the benefits. I think that if Democrats want to continue treating their voters as children they should go all the way and use the same dirty lies in the republican handbook, at least we could finally say they're all the same.
Tangential, but I think a big problem for the world going forward is that modern technology has made the average voter unable to really understand things important to their lives.
People who don't know what RNA, lymphocytes or spike proteins are, are nonetheless trying to make decisions about taking a vaccine.
People who don't understand statistics, can't comprehend graphs and don't understand fundamental physics are nonetheless trying to make decisions about climate change.
See also corporate tax law, Middle East ethnic divisions, AI, pollution, etc.
Our innate intuition is often entirely wrong and disinformation can often make compelling arguments that sound correct to non-experts. I'm not sure what the solution is. We all have to put our trust in others about the many things where we're non-experts, but obviously many people are choosing the wrong people to believe.
Trump also lies to voters. For instance every sophisticated analysis of his tariff plan have shown it will do the exact opposite of what he promises. The analysis is as bad as the analysis of Bernie and Warren's Medicare for all plans where magically everything was 50% cheaper.
>Yeah, this was a big part of a general trend of the Democrats treating voters like children to be coddled and lied to.
Meanwhile the rest of this comment section is talking about how democrats lost because they tried to talk about complex policy issues instead of just giving vague promises. Which is it?
>He doesn't talk down to them, he talks like them, and they eat it up.
"He says it like it is" right next to "But he didn't mean that", and he also literally talked about how devastated he was that the Jan 6 supporters were so shitty looking. He spends all sorts of time shit talking veterans who sacrificed for our country, even when the wars they fought were caused by dumb Republican policy.
It's fucking schrodinger's reality when it comes to Trump.
> who treats working-class voters as his equal. He doesn't talk down to them, he talks like them, and they eat it up.
No, he demonstrably doesn't treat them as his equals - however, you're absolutely right, he does talk to them like they are, and in this sense, it is one of his strengths.
Plus with every iota of decrease in the government’s credibility, the relative credibility of candidate’s promises and proposed policies also matter less too in deciding between them…
Given Trump's current faculties, it might show that people are more willing to trust that he probably won't do much either. He'll be on a similar auto-pilot at this age
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That's the thing about the left, they think the "machine" could just run things. You actually have to have someone that fires people. Think about it, Even Kim Cheatle had to resign! Biden did not ask for ANYONE to do a good job. No one was in control of that admin, it was a complete mess. If there is an atmosphere of governance/leadership that no matter how shitty a job you do, but you get to keep your job, then no one will care about anything at the top.
You may be right but short to remember the chaos in Trumps administration from 2016 to 2020. It really seemed like the country was about to burst. I hope it won't happen this time though...
I think a democrat who could actually distance themselves from Biden, someone who had more leeway to criticize his policies without the obvious "if current policy is wrong, what's stopping you from changing it" question, would have faired better. Maybe not won, but done better. Certainly there was no way Biden would have won re-election and switching was a good choice, but too little too late.
There was not enough focus on economy in a way that actually mattered, certainly - though it probably wouldn't have made a difference.
Biden absolutely should have dropped out earlier. It made Harris look like a last minute sub (which she really was).
It's telling (on a number of levels) that one of the most popular Google searches yesterday, on election day, was "Did Biden drop out?"
> There was not enough focus on economy in a way that actually mattered
Between price controls, tariffs, and excepting tips from taxes, I had no confidence either candidate could pass Econ 101. The proposals can play well politically, but it leaves people who have a basic understanding of economics at a loss of who'd be better.
Inflation caused by Trump (Covid) and greedy corps. Stocks at all time highs baby.
This. Kamala is a very weak candidate with no real platform of her own.
Yet Trump rarely articulates any policy, beyond incoherent rambling, except "I will fix it!". I guess it works...
he sat down on a podcast and talked for 3 hours about his policies
They won't learn because ultimately this isn't painful for them, just their constituents. They're fine.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
It's one unlikable candidate after another. How does one fire Democratic party leadership? How is it all democratic to leave the choice of the only "left" candidate be down to... who? Some boomers?
DNC has done as much for Trump as the RNC ever did.
Gavin Newsom is up next
I can see the idiotic thinking:
"The public wants a straight white man, and they want something more conservative... I know, let's run Gavin Newsom on a pro-business platform!"
It's like the very categories they use to interpret the world have blinded them.
Jimmy McMillan ("The rent is too damn high!"), for example, was the opposite of several of those things, but, if he were still around, he'd mop the floor with Gavin Newsom in an election.
The DNC's #1 goal is to stop socialism in the primaries. A distant #2 is winning general elections.
Fun fact: Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.
“During this period, there were 109 different Democrats who served in the Senate and cast a sufficient number of roll call votes for a reliable analysis of their ideological position. Of these 109 Democrats, Harris has the second-most liberal voting record. This makes her slightly less liberal than Warren, but more liberal than all of the remaining 107 Democrats, and significantly more liberal than all but a handful.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4816859-kamala-harris-i...
The definition of "liberal" being used here by The Hill is "voting with the Democratic Party". Their definitional left end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Democrats" and definitional right end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Republicans". These are not actually meaningfully "liberal" and "conservative" as the terms are used elsewhere.
Harris is a party-line voter (pretty obviously, as an insider she's defining the party line in the first place). The Democratic Party isn't leftist and nor is Harris. It's routine in most democracies for elected representatives to be party-line voters.
Liberalism and Socialism are two very different things. Liberalism is squarely in the Capitalism camp. There are no workers owning the means of production under Liberalism.
The DNC's bread and butter are Liberals. Not Socialists. Not anyone even approaching Socialist. Bernie, AOC, etc are SocDems at best. There are no Socialists in office in the United States.
I don’t disagree. I guess the DNC objective of stopping socialists in the primaries takes care of itself because there are no socialists in the party.
Goal #1 is just an instrumental goal to goal number #2. Socialists underperform moderates in general elections. Hell even Kamala, a terrible candidate who just got trounced by Trump outperformed Bernie (who has literally everything going for him) in his home state by a slim margin. Where as a moderate like Dan Osborn without the backing of the party outperformed Kamala by almost 14%.
Americans don't want to pay European style taxes even for European services. And our public sector is far less efficient than Europe's so we wouldn't even get European level of services for that taxation rate.
>The DNC's #1 goal is to stop socialism in the primaries.
"The DNC's #1 goal is to stop democracy in the primaries."
FTFY.
> I hope DNC learn from this
They absolutely will not. History shows us this.
In 2016, the Democratic establishment forced Hilary down the voters' throats because, hey, it was her turn, despite her being a terrible candidate with huge negatives.
America, thanks to the Red Scare has no viable leftist momentum. But even in the USA, the Democrats almost chose an open socialist (ie Bernie Sanders) as the Democratic nominee in 2016 rather than Hilary Clinton. I remember saying at the time that the DNC are missing how upset ordinary people are at the status quo. The DNC establishment couldn't care less.
What did the DNC learn from 2016? Absolutely nothing. They blamed Bernie voters (even though Bernie voters overwhelmingly came out and voted for Hilary in spite of their reservations).
Trump only really lost in 2020 because of Covid. Yet Biden's campaign did have a sprnkling of progresive policies that people got behind, so much so that it looks like he got 10-15 million more votes than Kamala got. There's a lesson in that but it won't be learned.
I saw someone describe this election as a Republican primary between a moderate Republican (Kamala) and a far right Republican (Trump). It's accurate.
Kamala's immigration policy was the Trump 2020 policy. She is to the right of Ronald Reagan on immigration.
And that's before we even get to the Middle East policy, which is not only bad policy but it's bad politics. Why? Because it gains her zero votes but loses a bunch. Anyone who hard line suports Israel is voting for Trump (and did). This was foreseeable. People were screaming about it for a year. Ignored.
So what lesson will the Democrats take from 2024? That they need to run even further right.
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> I hope the dems wake up and see that far-leftism/wokism isn't the future americans want.
What do Americans want?
>What do Americans want?
I'm a progressive guy. Bleeding heart, even.
But I come from a long line of white trash, and I am intimately familiar with what they do and do not care about.
They DO NOT care about gay, trans, minority people. At all. Ever. Every single syllable spoken about them only serves to enrage them.
They DO NOT care about Palestinians, except to equate them with ISIS.
Americans want low taxes, low inflation, a 400-foot wall surrounded by minefields on the US-Mexican border, and democrats to shut the fuck up about racism and LGBTQ+.
Those sentiments are only getting stronger.
Are poor white Americans really as terrible people as you say they are? I would usually find that hard to believe, though the results do strongly imply that you're right. What a depressing thought.
You have someone who refers to poor white people as "white trash", I would doubt they are a fair arbitrator of explaining their world view.
My extended family are also the traditional "white trash", and yes they do indeed think this same way.
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Security and financial stability. People always vote for the “right” when they feel scared and threatened. History repeats itself.
free money for white people with "christian" values apparently.
Ah yes, we apparently would prefer an oligarchic theocracy.
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I've never felt much sympathy for this take, given the counterpart is being called a groomer, traitor, child murderer, election stealer, deep state benefactor etc.
Why does this only change votes in one direction?
> the counterpart is being called a groomer, traitor, child murderer, election stealer, deep state benefactor etc.
And when did this behavior start? After Democrats started calling Trump and Co. Nazis, fascists, etc. They just followed the precedence that was set by democrats.
I voted for Harris, and as much as I think a second Trump presidency will damage America, the hyperbole really is tiresome and probably contributed to our loss.
The right was calling Obama Hilter long before that. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/3598/
No democrat would call it "our loss"
I'm not sure what you mean by that? The democratic candidate lost, and by no small margin. I'm a democrat. It's unambiguously our loss.
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/787267564405653505
Right, if we simply ignore the plethora of racist things said at trump rallies. Oh, and all the explicitly anti-trans political ads.
People aren't saying this, the GOP is saying this and then people just repeat it back to them. You can't claim you're not anti-trans when the political ads of the candidates you support depict trans women as burly grown men who beat up little girls.
I mean, it's so hyperbolic it would be hilarious if it wasn't so depressing.
See? You're doing it again.
Me pointing to specific talking points and actual material the GOP provides isn't some type of name calling. I didn't do anything - they produced this. If you're not even willing to believe the GOP when they tell you their platform, why are you voting for them?
...
They just can’t help themselves!
Right, me telling the GOP voters what the GOP platform says is the problem. The problem isn't that GOP voters don't understand the platform, or, rather, choose to play stupid about it in a thinly-vieled attempt to hide any bigotry.
I will believe you when the GOP themselves does not say racist things and does not propose anti-trans legislation (coupled with incredibly transphobic propaganda). Until then, it is completely fair and accurate to highlight the bigotry of the GOP. If it bothers you, which I have a bit of doubt it does, but if it does - feel free to vote for platforms that more closely align with your ideology.
You should not be getting offended at me telling you your party's own platform.
My bad, I guess it's just the ones with swastikas at his rallies!
Since those might also be worn in irony and spite of the other side, I wouldn’t be so sure.
What exactly would be ironic or spiteful about it?
I think this is the biggest reason she lost. There's a limit to how much hyperbole (and that's being generous) and lies you can tell about someone before the words lose their meaning and people stop believing everything else you say. Not just from democrats (involved in politics) but the media as well. They made up their mind about Trump (probably via corporate smear campaigns) and were so openly biased against him it was despicable. People (I believe) knew that at best the truth was somewhere in the middle, or knew his whole campaign was being jinxed by very powerful people. And I think this was enough to persuade the swing voters.
> There's a limit to how much hyperbole (and that's being generous) and lies you can tell about someone before the words lose their meaning
For any who didn't get this so far, this is why the 'crowd size' and the height/weight issues (among others) were hit so hard by the left. People don't care about that stuff. What people care about is someone not backing down from obvious lies when we're all looking at the same information. Because of course he's going to lie about the stuff only he gets to see.
indeed as independent i grew tired of the media and all poltical machines/their games in May 2020. Turned it all off and tuned it out as hard to believe and dechipher what the truth is from any side / media.
most people are actually quite reasonable and the identity politics play now has no effect. i am a gay man that voted democrat my entire life until recently, however i don't feel my ideals have changed, i have been left behind by elite snobby people seeking power through division who have corrupted the democratic party. the republicans have their own problems too by fanatic religious and racists types, but it by no means is representative of the average conservative.
> republicans have their own problems too by fanatic religious [...] but it by no means is representative of the average conservative.
65% of the Republicans who participated in a survey by the Pew Research Center said that laws should be influenced by the bible, and 78% said that the United States should be a Christian nation:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/10/27/religion-in-...
Aren't there many edicts in the Bible which are congruent with the law?
the sample size is 97 recipients. probably about as reliable as the polls this election.
As a German this was the most disgusting thing to ever hear from a politician.
She completely devaluated the horrific unspeakable crimes of ww2 in one sentence.
Luckily she got what she deserved and we will never hear from her again
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>The real problem is the electorate.
How does this argument even make sense to someone with half a brain?
Agree. Take the 50-ish million people who cast their vote to Harris/Walz and are eligible (over 35, natural-born, resident for more than 14 years) to be president.
Either one of two things is true:
1. That was the most likely to win ticket possible and the DNC had zero-point-zero chance to win the election.
2. Among those 50 million people is another ticket and/or different platform & messaging that would have resulted in a win for the DNC.
If #1 is true, the problem isn't with the electorate (other than they disagree with the DNC). If #2 is true, the problem also isn't with the electorate.
Exactly, it’s essentially saying “the problem with democracy is the people”.
The problem with democracy is that it's so easy for a demagogue to come to power by pitting the people against each other. The problem with OUR democracy is that this issue is supercharged by our inability to control the outsized influenced wielded by powerful/wealthy parties, foreign and domestic.
If the corpse was male.
This is the reality:
Dnc pushed Hilary Clinton, a woman, and lost badly.
Dnc pushed a walking male corpse, Biden, and won easily.
Dnc pushed a black woman, and lost badly.
Imagine how dumb the average person is. Half of them are even dumber than that. Less than half voted for Donald Trump!
-George Carlin
> The real problem is the electorate
This is similar to a company blaming customers for not buying from them and preferring their competitors' products. The game doesn't work that way.
That pesky electorate. Clinging to their religion and guns. A basket of deplorables. Garbage.
I, for one, will be celebrating with my fellow gun-clinging deplorable garbage people.
This is an interesting statement. To follow it, if the problem is the electorate, how do you think you fix that if the electorate is the one who gets to choose.
Do you think it would be better if we used some other system than democracy, so that the electorate don't get a say?
> how do you think you fix that if the electorate is the one who gets to choose
Education. Democracy relies on a well-educated populace
Democracy is when you vote for the appointed candidate. Fascism is when the electorate decides the election.
> a bloated corpse should have beaten Donald Trump.
That’s the attitude that got us a second Trump term. DNC did not take this threat seriously, and here we are.
They took it seriously enough to change candidates. But again: why is a "just okay" candidate from the Democratic Party not better than a "threat to the free world" candidate from the Republican Party? The double-standard is absurd.
I thought Hillary failing was a clear indictment that America is not ready for a woman to be president. I hate that it’s true, but too much of the American heartland is conservative and plenty of them vote against their own interest (see: abortion contention). To then go ahead with a woman of color, and then have celebrity endorsements that don’t do anything to increase voter turnout shows how out of touch with reality the DNC really is. What a shame, and it doesn’t help that Kamala never had mass appeal. Pete Buttegieg would have been a far better bet, personally speaking.
There was a talking head comment last night.
"The Harris campaign told us today that they are 'nauseatingly confident'. I don't know that I've ever heard nausea as a positive thing."
The DNC are too much in their own bubble.
Yeah, it's bizarre to watch the DNC on the one hand claim that Donald Trump is a once-in-a-lifetime threat to democracy and freedom and on the other hand fail to offer anything to "undecided" voters that might get them to vote Democrat.
My takeaway is that I don't think they actually believe Donald Trump is uniquely bad - it's just messaging.
The only thing worse would be twice-in-a-lifetime ;)
> Kamala was a perfectly good candidate.
You were literally just proven empirically incorrect. Demand better from your party or this will just keep happening, stop compromising.
I'm an independent, but who's going to demand better from the Republican party? Why are Democrats being held to such an incredibly high standard when the standard for the Republican party could not be more obscene?
The DNC doesn't truly provide the means for their party members to actually participate in selecting candidates to the same degree the Republicans do, and therefore they place some kind of party ideal over the democratic participation of their party members. Superdelegates, not holding a caucus primary this time, conspiring against Bernie, all that stuff. It produces manufactured candidates that don't have a real relationship to party members, not an extension of the zeitgeist. They shove square pegs into round holes and wonder why it doesn't fit.
Honestly, anyone who thinks Kamala is perfect at anything other than working the party machine for self-promotion is probably a little too invested to see things clearly.
IMHO "just another politician" would have been a hugely better outcome than Trump.
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They won't.
These candidates are aligned with the Democrats.
That's what the party is.
It's not a party of the left or liberals or whatever you imagine it to be. They've been extremely clear on this.
Go over the historicals. I have. Many times. This is correct.
The Republican Party seems to be able to put forward a candidate the electorate want. What can’t the democrats?
The Democratic primary process is rife with superdelegates and other rules designed to promote candidates aligned with the party insiders.
The Republican primary process doesn't have as many ways for party members to put their fingers on the scale.
Exactly.
Also they've misappropriated words like "leftist" and "socialist" so much that in my interaction with Trump supporters, at Trump events, I hear plenty of actual left and actual socialist policies presented as new ideas or attributed to Trump.
At a policy level, these people actually don't want neofascism, I've interacted with plenty. They really don't.
The Democrats tried to appeal to the hard right voter who found Trump icky. For that they were called socialist so and I know this is hard, people I spoke with associated the word socialism with the policies of Harris
>For that they were called socialist so and I know this is hard, people I spoke with associated the word socialism with the policies of Harris
What the hell are the democrats supposed to do to oppose a party that gets to redefine language however it wants with seemingly great effect?
America spent 100 years demonizing socialism. Not the policies, the word. And now republicans can just deploy it against whoever, because it doesn't have a meaning to US voters.
What possible strategy is there against that? My "democrat for life" (because republicans wanted to fucking murder the french catholics in the area, lookup the KKK in Maine) would vote against "socialism"!
The US is a uni-party state at the federal level. You either play with the republicans, or you will be labeled "socialist", no matter the objective reality, and you will lose.
Well since actual socialist policies like housing, health care, retirement benefits, childcare support, reducing homelessness, infrastructure funding, jobs programs and wage increases are incredibly popular when put in front of voters, the Democrats should just do actual socialism instead of trying to run away from it saying "nuh uh!"
The same response if someone calls you a racist white man. Dgaf
The base of the Democratic Party are moderate black people. They elect the candidate they want.
The base of the Democratic Party is a lot larger than that one demographic. Black voters are less than 20% of the Democratic Party voter base.
Both Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden got more votes than Donald Trump. The Democrats have a better track record of picking the more popular candidate that the electorate wants in recent history.
In fact, the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in all four of the most recent elections before this one (from 2008 - 2020, inclusive).
Except maybe for Obama, they were all lousy. Barely beating an incompetent criminal who sold presidential powers as private services and stole stuff from the Whitehouse, that's not impressive.
1. I didn't say it was impressive. Just refuting the claim that the Republican party puts forth candidates that the electorate wants while the Democratic party does not.
2. Nobody has beaten Trump since he's been a convicted criminal, lied about winning an election he didn't, or stole classified documents from the White House. So it doesn't make sense to discuss "barely beating an incompetent [...]" in the context of my comment that refers only to Democratic candidates who ran before those things happened.
The sentiment is Republicans are focused on winning while Democrats are focused on a deeply unpopular corporate-imperialist political project and scolding people into voting for them.
They will occasionally virtue signal elsewhere but their policies only align with the project
Progressive policies on minimum wage, labor and other things won in Red States once again. Nebraska's minimum wage increase, for instance, went 75-25. 60% for Trump, 75% for minimum wage increase.
It's important to realize the Democrats have no interest in those. Absolutely zero.
Their project is bowing down to companies like Wells Fargo, Equifax, Lockheed Martin, and General Motors and that's it.
Because they're a specific political project. Radical centrism is a common term but the "left/center/right" is a bad name. Things are much more complicated.
There was clearly a winning path with say, Bernie in 2016. The state by state Bernie/Trump matchup polling data consistently predicted a clear and decisive victory. Or, maybe Estes Kefauver 1952, or go back to the 40s and Gallup predicted Henry Wallace would have had a 1936 style landslide instead of the squeak they won with Truman.
As a hobby I've poured over archives of primaries, old newspapers, speeches, going back even to Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's first VP and how he got replaced.
I continue to claim that any actual left project (as opposed to whatever the propaganda industry is deciding to imagine the left is) would be far more successful under a Republican flag because they aren't as committed to the neoimperialist project.
That's why the Democrats had all the warring Republicans on their side this time.
DNC argued that they are a private organization and can do what they want In "Wilding v. DNC Services Corp." case (2017) in response to screwing the dem nomination from Bernie hands in favour of Hillay
Trump has tried a coup and illegal intervention in the election before and now has the SC on his side. It remains to be seen if there will be a next time.
To be fair and objective, he didn't attempt a coup...
Did he ever tell the rioters to storm the capital?
He literally told them to be peaceful: "Stay peaceful!"
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
You can see the Tweets yourself on Jan 6 from Trump: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tweets-january-6-2...
Or actual Tweet: https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1346912780700577792
"Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?"[1]
Trump is very good at covering his own language and culpability. What were Trump's actions while the mob was storming the Capitol? How long did he wait to even put forth those tweets? In his speech before they stormed the Capitol, he said[2]
"We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore"
but he also said
"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
Does saying the latter negate the former in the minds of the mob that had been primed for nearly two months, without real evidence, to think the election had been stolen?
Does it matter that that there's evidence, presented in court, that Trump _knew_ he had lost the election and further knew that attempts to overturn the result were illegal? [3]
We all saw _with our own eyes_ what the mob did at the Capitol that day. There were people there with differing motivations and different understandings of what they were trying to accomplish by storming the Capitol. They've received differing levels of punishment as a result. But, I find it hard to not view the totality of the evidence presented to date and say that Trump wasn't trying to stay in power through unlawful means (i.e. "attempt a coup").
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur... [2]: https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-s... [3]: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/jack-smith-makes-his-ca...
Misinformation. He was actually silent during the insurrection, and he was very strongly encouraged to issue public statements after the attack happened.
He has literally said, and not paraphrasing, to his crowds... "You need to get out and vote, and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote again."
"You know, FDR, 16 years — almost 16 years — he was four terms. I don't know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?" also said
For those curious like I was, he actually said that last May [1] I think though that age is strongly against him, had he been 10 or 15 years younger he could have probably pulled it off.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/18/trump-at-nra-conven...
The context of that was he was addressing a subset of voters (Christians) who didn’t particularly like him but he needs their votes in this elction, possibly due to the perception that Democrats would somehow cheat without a decisive victory.
Trump says a lot of things and does not choose his words wisely. Or maybe he does and these are all dog whistles. I guess we’ll find out.
Another Trump quote taken totally out of context. He was encouraging people who don't normally vote to get out and vote this time.
People who oppose Trump don't do themselves any favors by misrepresenting this stuff. The guy is a ghoul and says plenty of terrible things that don't need misrepresentation to make him look bad.
It seems like it has the necessary context and is without any sort of "misrepresentation".
Your reply explains the "You need to get out and vote" part, but it doesn't explain the "and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote again" part. What context do you believe makes the 2nd part alright?
The country is in good enough shape that they can go back to not caring if it's a Democrat or Republican in the White House.
This perspective is willfully ignorant towards social issues.
And yet, that was probably what he meant.
Ok, that is also a valid interpretation
If you heard this quote without knowing who said it, you would think it is most likely that the speaker meant “vote again for me”. When a politician says “go vote”, it’s normally implied “go vote for me”.
In context, I think it is obvious that is what Trump meant. People that have been told Trump is a dictator that wants to end democracy obviously won’t approach that quote with normal grace they afford others.
Lets say you are right and the correct interpretation is:
"and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote for me again"
Trump would be term limited, so they would not be able to vote him in as president again anyway. That is why this interpretation does not make sense to me.
It would just be a useful reminder of that fact. Remember: you're trying to sell voting to someone who doesn't normally vote. It's easier to sell it as being a one-off thing versus sell them on voting in all future elections.
> It's easier to sell it as being a one-off thing versus sell them on voting in all future elections.
So a promise to permanently and irrevocably change the country? If it is truly one off that is what it would have to be, which is not possible via normal legal mechanisms in the USA.
If one heard this quote without knowing who said it, they would think it is most likely that the speaker meant "If I win, I will make sure further consent of the governed, unnecessary", which is why the quote got the attention it did, and why, to my knowledge, no other US presidential candidate in the entire history of our nation has ever dared utter it.
He will have fixed things to the point that voting someone else in won’t undo the good?
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> let people choose a candidate next time.
You mean like a democracy ? Surely you must be joking.
Hillary Clinton won the primaries in 2008.
She also turned many working class voters into Republicans with her “déplorables” speech.
Ok, but she won the primaries and was denied the nomination. What's the use of complaining that in 2016 she only got it because "it was her turn"? As if being denied what she rightfully won eight years earlier was somehow fair.
I agree. Instead of navel gazing about internal Democratic Party machinations. I would argue it is the policy platform and messaging is what wins. In swing states, the issue that dominated by far was the economy.
Even if you support his economic approach, for example, wouldn't his criminal behaviour, or his racist and transphobic views disqualify him? One does not wash away the other.
The American people have clearly spoken that those are not in fact disqualifying.
why would any one care? a world leader will have blood on his hands, one way or another
I'd expect plenty of people voted Trump just to spite this kind of rhetoric.
My two life-long democrat friends that voted for Trump just got tired of this shit , right here. They just don't believe it anymore. Even Andrew Cuomo admitted that Trump was subject to lawfare in New York. But go on, don't ask questions or think critically.
I've listened to what he said, firsthand and frequently. He's deliberately divisive and uses racist and violent rhetoric whenever possible (even in the last week of the election). 8 years ago I was open to attacks against him being fearmongering and then I lived through 4 years of his presidency. Not everything people say about him is true, but the vast majority is. It is difficult to justify "got tired of this shit" as though it's not true, when a large number of his own former cabinet members AND his own former vice president refused to endorse him, saying that he is unfit for office.
I mean, come on.
Is there some analysis why the polls didn't correctly predict the result?
A failure in representative polls like this should be avoided with statistical methods.
Same exact thing that happened in 2016: if you repeatedly demonise a section of the population, don’t expect that section of the population to be honest with you about its opinions when those opinions are what led you to demonise it in the first place.
I would say from the outside American politics seems to have devolved into this ultra-polarised culture war/identity politics that doesn't seem to benefit the left at all electorally. It probably helps the biggest proponents of it (on either side) in terms of playing to their base, but it feels like it's overall a net win for the right.
But I don't know how big a factor this is in reality versus the economy.
What are you talking about?
In 2016, the majority of outlets gave Clinton a 90% chance or more. This time almost everyone said it was 50:50. The result is somewhat similar, the predictions could hardly be more different.
Whilst this is objectively true - this result is basically within the margin of error of most polls. I highly doubt this argument is going to be accepted by most people. It'll be exactly like Nate Silver screaming into the void for the last 8 years pointing out he gave Trump a ~30% chance of winning and that happens... 30% of the time!
This isn’t an interesting statement. I could pull any numbers out of a hat in (0, 1) as probabilities and regardless of the outcome could use the same excuse because there is only a single event to observe.
No, they didn't.
For one, they said Clinton had a 70% chance of winning.
But perhaps more importantly, people's poor understanding of stats meant that many people interpreted that as "She's going to get 70% of the vote" (i.e., a landslide, "and so I don't need to vote").
> they said Clinton had a 70% chance of winning.
No, they didn't.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/clinton-has-90-percent...
It's more than that. Trump demonized sections of the population. I don't know where this lie is coming from that it's only the Democrats who did that.
"You" in this case is "the people taking the polls". The media is only trusted by 12% of Republicans and 27% of Independents [0]. Right or wrong, most pollsters will be treated as belonging to "the media", and the lack of trust will almost certainly show in the polls. "The media" demonized the right wing, so "the media" can't expect to have people self-identify as such to them.
Democrats were absolutely demonized by Trump, but their trust in the media is double that of Independents and quadruple that of Republicans. So to the extent that pollsters are treated as part of the media, they'll get more accurate answers out of Democrats.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
It doesn't count. It will never count. Even if they see it, they won't acknowledge it. It's not hypocrisy, it's loyalty. The only real sin is disobeying the hierarchy or breaking the chain of command, which is what calling it out would be for them.
Did Palmer Luckey get fired from Meta/Oculus for being a Clinton or a Trump supporter?
The polls were actually surprisingly close. The final margin between the candidates in key states will be smaller than a reasonable margin of error for any poll.
The margin in Pennsylvania will continue to shrink, as the only place with lots of votes left to count is Philadelphia. Michigan might still flip blue, because the only place with votes to count is Detroit. Arizona is still a total coin toss, with 51k vote difference and >1200k votes left to count. Wisconsin is going to be close too, although it will likely stay red.
None of that matters when there are less ballots left to count than the margin in PA, but still, the message from the polls before election was "this will be a nailbiter", and it kind of was.
You didn't listen to what the pollsters were saying.
What they said was that they could not predict the outcome, and were giving basically 50/50 odds of either candidate winning, which is essentially just another way of saying "I have no idea".
Just because their odds were 50/50 though, does not mean the outcome would be close. The pollsters were all warning that the swing states would likely be strongly correlated, so if a candidate performed strongly in one swing state, they'd probably perform strongly in all of them.
I guess the US has it's own version of 'Shy Tories' where right-leaning voters aren't inclined to share their views (truthfully or otherwise) with polls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor
I think it has less to do with shyness and more the fact that almost nobody speaks to pollsters on either side of the isle. Most polling is done by phone call. When was the last time you answered a call from an unknown number?
I don't think Republican voters are shy.
It's just incredibly hard to build a representative sample of the population.
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They do adjust for this when doing the polls. The Shy Tory factor was relevant in 2016, though.
It absolutely does. You can generally count on anyone who describes themselves as "Centrist" or "Apolitical" (doubly so if you're on a dating site) to be more to the right.
It used to be "Libertarian" which for a subset was "I'm a Republican who likes to smoke weed".
the5avage is asking why the polls 'failed', that is, could not predict the result despite the clarity of the outcome. Being unable to compute an answer is the same thing as failing for pollsters.
That's fundamental to this election mode. Most swing states were within the predicted range, they just happen to all be correlated (which is expected) and swung in the same direction having a huge effect on the electoral college.
I disagree. There's a big difference between saying "kamala will win, it's certain", and "we don't know".
That's true, lacking confidence is less of a failure than confidently getting it wrong. But they weren't actually saying "we don't know". They were predicting a split election. Do pollsters even have a way to report that they lack enough confidence to give a prediction? I rarely see CIs on reported poll results so presumably they'd have to just refuse to publish any prediction at all, which clearly, they weren't doing.
Nate Silver has recently written about the clear problems in polling, and in particular the herd-like way they were reporting implausible numbers:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/theres-more-herding-in-swing-st...
I dont belive that claim is actually true?
the most likely result predicted by 538 was 312 for trump [0]
the issue with the model was the 2nd most likely result was 319 for harris.
they thought the odds of a recount being decisive was around 10%.
That hardly seems evidence of "predicting a split election". which prediction are you thinking of?
[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/
538 is not longer run by Nate Silver, he runs the silver bulletin on substack now.
Apologies if you thought I meant this. I was using them as a reference for what people modeling the election from polls were predicting!
I don't know what Nate Silver was predicting. Was he predicting a near-split election or the situation where "someone is decently likely to win decisively, but we don't know who"?
Fair enough. Nate Silver was predicting a toss up, but was upfront that the model uses many simulations. Since the GP mentioned Nate Silver, I mistakenly took your comment about 538 as disagreeing with that since Silver did used to run 538.
What sources are you thinking of? Everywhere I looked, I saw "the polls are very close, the result probably won't be so close but we don't know which way it will go". I don't recall seeing anyone outright predicting a very tight result (beyond "here's what happens if there's a tie" articles -- background info rather than prediction).
>They were predicting a split election.
Who was? A 50% chance to win does not imply that the vote count will be close.
Also: statistical uncertainty is a feature not a bug. A lot of the idea behind statistics is the ability to quantify the certainty of the point estimate. As another commenter put it: a statistically sound "idk" is a better result than a confidently incorrect estimate, from a statistical standpoint.
That's an amazing analysis on systematic bias!
The data he has to back up his "too close results to be true random polls" is fantastic.
First, the words predict and forecast are not interchangeable. Polls do not predict outcomes, they merely forecast them. Since predictions are purely subjective, saying they 'failed' is inappropriate. You can disagree with a subjective prediction, but you can't really say they failed. Forecasting relies on historic data to extrapolate. That same data basically said "its a 50/50 coin toss" so the polls did not, in fact, fail. You just thought they failed because the precise poll value was not 50/50, but rather 49.xx/51.xx which does not account for statistical variances.
The last poll for Iowa, from the highest rated pollster for Nate Silver, had Harris +3 and Trump won Iowa +13.
The polls were better but still consistently underestimated Trumps support by a lot. Basically, the weighting they do for the polls now basically just guarantees that they converge on the results of the last election.
FWIW Nate Silver also said don't trust any polls this year, and his gut was with Trump.
> The pollsters were all warning that the swing states would likely be strongly correlated, so if a candidate performed strongly in one swing state, they'd probably perform strongly in all of them.
Source?
Would it be fair to say that Zuck had some idea (and for some time)? Otherwise he’d have no reason to write the letter about interference.
Indeed, 538’s model showed ~50 out of 100 wins for either side, when running simulations. But that doesn’t mean that they were predicting a 50/50 split, a significant number of simulation results showed a large vote margin for one side, it was just equally likely which side it would be.
Although I don’t actually think it was equally likely like that, we are missing something to make all this analysis actually informative rather than a “all I know is that I don’t know anything”. We had mountains of evidence indicating that it was totally unclear, so frustrating. Perhaps that’s how the probabilities actually were, but somehow guts pointed to Trump much more regardless of personal bias, and in hindsight it feels rather obvious. Confirmation bias I guess, I still want trust all the expert analysis.
The pollsters were predicting a close election. That was universally the message. It was unambiguous. I'm sorry if you somehow missed that but that's what it was.
They were predicting 50% odds of each candidate winning swing states, but with the results for the swing states being correlated with each other. This isn't the same as a close election, it just means the result can't be predicted confidently. It's also worth noting that each individual state and the popular vote were within error margins on the result.
If you look at the polls, they were incredibly close. This result is totally consistent with the polls, given the margin of error.
Virginia was +5 Harris rcp averages.
This is outside of the margin of error.
Iowa was polling at +3 Harris. Trump won it +13. Not even close to margin of error.
That was one poll which was wildly out of line with all other polls.
All of the polls had Trump ahead there. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general... (No intended endorsement of 538, they're just a convenient list of polls)
There were a large number of “herded” polls that basically all predicted the exact same results as 2016 and 2020 (Trump +5/+8).
So, not really even within the margin of error. There weren’t any predicting +15.
And the high quality polls that didn’t attempt to synthesize results to match past results were even more wrong.
Harris won by around 5 points in NJ, Biden won NJ in 2020 by 16 points. That is a far wider swing than any poll predicted.
People in a non-swing state figure "yolo" and vote for their emotional favorite, because they're dissatisfied with the status quo and have no other way to express it?
Well, it was close enough that it should worry the Dems and put NJ in play for Republics in the near future. NJ has not always voted consistently for democrats.
The question is not why there was a swing, any number of reasons can be attributed ex post facto.
The point is no poll caught any of the swings at all. To win with this margin Trump the polls can hardly be tied and be called accurate.
The result is not a close at all, and it is not about swing states and electoral college swings. Trump is winning the popular vote by a large margin something he has never be able to do so before.
AtlasIntel did. I met Thiago (CTO) in Rio and Boston while he was doing his math PhD at Harvard, he is nice person and a fine mathematician: their methodology uses online polling on social media with micro-targeting. I only assume competitors are not leveraging social media as well as they are. Roman, the CEO, said they will donate all their raw data from the final polls to Roper Center at Cornell for academic research[1].
[1] https://x.com/andrei__roman/status/1854051400273244534
atlas intel has got so many elections correctly that i really don't understand why other pollsters are not copying their methodologies.
even nate silver called then the most accurate pollster during the 2020 race.
Você sabe porque Fernando: https://x.com/ajlamesa/status/1854037599641313366
engraçado, eu acabei de ver esse post no reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/1gkq7k7/at...
What I heard recently is that the 2020 polls were actually less accurate than the 2016 polls. (the 2020 polls simply accurately predicted the winner, so there wasn't so much controversy.) From that standpoint, it's not clear that polling has had very good accuracy from 2016. What I'm not sure about is why pollsters are not able to adjust their models towards more accuracy, but it does seem to be a longitudinal problem.
They did. The pollsters that were close in 2020 were close in 2024 as well. (Rasmussen, AtlasIntel)
My explanation for this is that most polls were fabricated, showing enthusiasm for (D) which wasn't there. Basically, a form of propaganda. The most striking example here is Selzer, with that Harris+3 Iowa poll the day before the election.
Just like 2016.
Busy people have no time to answer polsters. When you heavily critisize one group of supporters (and the social stigma associated with it), dont be suprised that in private they think differently. Finally, intentionally fabricating wrong poll results can psychologically influence weak minded (due to group think and our desire to comply with social norms). So it is immature to accept polls as a real indicator of what people think (especially in controversial political environment).
In reality, a lot more people have traditional values when it comes to race, LGBT whatever, sexism, spiritual values, opinions on Russia, Israel etc. However in public they may be scared to voice their true opinions.
Most polls are conducted via text message now and have fairly robust screening to weed out fake responses.
Why do you think the polls would correctly predict the result?
Use Polymarket instead, where money is on the line.
Thing is, prediction markets tend to be gamed by people who bet large amounts of money. I used a (play money) prediction market platform before and there was literally a "markets that get easily gamed by whales" section on the website.
If you're talking about "whalebait" markets on manifold, that's a bit disingenuous - these are markets where the thing you're betting about is related to trading behaviour itself, i.e. self-referential markets.
I don't disagree that the one french dude betting 30M on Trump on polymarket showed that there isn't enough liquidity in such markets for such distortions to be corrected, but whalebait on Manifold is not really related.
I kept hearing people laugh at Polymarket. "It's not a real poll!" But it guessed correctly when almost none of the polls did. I think I'll continue to listen to betting markets.
The polls all said it was 50/50. They seem to be very accurate so far.
Trump seemed to have a head start early on, it really didn't feel like a close call somehow.
But it wasn't actually a race, the votes were all finished being cast and were just being counted, so concepts like "having a head start" or "being ahead" don't really apply.
The live-feed counting process really messes with people's heads. Trump used this confusion to great effect in creating the conspiracy theory about election stealing ("we were winning"), but it's not only the right wing that gets it confused.
It feels like there has to be a better way to present the data to make it more obvious what's actually happening.
Yeah, I personally believe that states should agree to collectively wait till the day after to release all election results at once. That way there's not as much confusion.
Do you mean early in the counting? Surely thay doesn't matter.
yeah it's was a fuzzy comment, i guess you mean the important/big states are always known last, but he really was ahead all along with a comfortable margin
The order in which the votes are counted dows not matter!
He should have written "If it is a close race the order matter for the perception of who will win".
"the polls" are often just part of a narrative to influence the outcome.
The polls predict chance of winning, not share of the vote.
If I predict a coin toss to be 50/50 that doesn’t mean I expect it to land on its side.
The polls were predicting a near-tie for months. That was the correct prediction.
Did they get an unlucky dice roll then?
Unlucky in the sense that it would have been less bad if Trump had lost?
Im suggesting an election is not a random event. Sampling error terminology is being mistaken for probability of the underlying thing.
There was no 50/50 chance of the voter base waking up and instead voting for Kamala yesterday.
Are you coming at this from a frequentist perspective, a Bayesian perspective, or some other formulation of probability?
From a frequentist perspective, it makes no sense to talk about probabilities of the outcomes of processes that can't be repeated, such as elections. So the question is then, "Why couldn't the polls predict a result?" And we know the answer: because the polls weren't precise enough. We already knew that.
From a Bayesian perspective, lack of knowledge is the same thing as nondeterminism in the underlying processes. So, to a Bayesian, you're just wrong; there was a 52/48 chance of the voter base waking up and instead voting for Kamala yesterday.
If from some other formulation, which?
> From a frequentist perspective
This is so confused. The probability models are designed to describe situations where cause and effect is not known.causes still exist whether you can repeat them in an experiment,
You are confusing logical models with real world decisions and actions.
I'm asking what you mean by "probability" and "chance", but it sounds like the answer is that you don't have any idea, because you've never studied statistics even to the point of taking an introductory class. At this point you've explicitly rejected foundational axioms of both frequentist probability and Bayesian probability, with no apparent awareness that this means you have rejected the entire field of statistics.
You’re missing the point. Axiomatic systems aim to be internally consistent. The question is whether they are good model of a real life situation. Your technical knowledge is distracting you from the more fundamental questions.
There is no sense in which Harris had a 50% chance and had an unlucky day. The only “chance” going on is how likely the poll sample represents the population. The math behind that assumes you have a genuine sample and ignores realities like preference falsification.
Please think and read charitably before making personal attacks. I generally take that as a sign you are acting in bad faith and I do not want to interact with you. Goodbye.
I want to apologize for my impatience; you don't deserve to be personally attacked, even though what you're saying doesn't make sense.
Thanks. I don’t think I’m ready to break this down Socraticly to find our shared understanding.
It's a difficult day for me; maybe for you too.
> Is there some analysis why the polls didn't correctly predict the result?
The people in a swing state choosing to spend time responding to polls are insufficiently representative. They're drowning in advertisements, calls, texts, unexpected people at their door and randos on the street. Why would they give time to a pollster?
Heavy partisan bias. Polymarket predict this quite well. Putting your money on the line is still a thing.
Only if this attracts professional punters. I imagine pros prefer to punt on preductible things like 1000 soccer games they modelled using a million datapoints rather than 1 hard to predict election. A combination of vast predictive data and Kelly Criterion. I imagine the election money was dumb. It may have happen to be right.
This is purely devil's advocate: Many polls may just be political levers, designed and executed with a predetermined outcome so it can be used in mass media. There is an undeniable tilt to mainstream news companies and almost confirmation bias in their polling.. Does make me wonder.
The conversation has become so polarized that people are preferring to hide their intentions to avoid confrontation.
Single-event statistics projections are pretty useless. Much more so when the “projections” are 50/50.
If you read on the methodology of some of these 'election models', you'll understand there's a lot of narrative chasing that goes on (or even just "herding towards the least controversial number").
For example, from Nate Silver's blog:
> The Silver Bulletin polling averages are a little fancy. They adjust for whether polls are conducted among registered or likely voters and house effects. They weight more reliable polls more heavily. And they use national polls to make inferences about state polls and vice versa. It requires a few extra CPU cycles — but the reward is a more stable average that doesn’t get psyched out by outliers.
All this weighting and massaging and inferencing results in results that are basically wrong.
Come Election Night he basically threw the whole thing in the trash too!
Seems like they pretty much did? The polls said "a close race in each of the swing states, which either candidate could win". And that's that happened, no?
One experience I had (coming from an Austrian right wing province) is that a significant share of polled people will not reveal to the pollster they are voting for the xenophobic candidate, because they don't want to be seen as a bigot.
It is like when your doctor is asking you if you eat fast food — some people will downplay it because they know it is wrong, but do it anyways in a "weak" moment when nobody is looking.
So suddenly in my village where I know everybody 56% voted for the right wing candidate, yet everybody¹ claimed not to do that when asked before or after.
¹: except one or two open Nazis
This has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor
This is the way it was with Nixon.
After he was finally disgraced fully enough to resign with some remaining dignity, you couldn't find anybody who admitted to voting for him.
And he had been re-elected to a second term !
This is the most likely explaination imo. But even then it should be possible to use bayes rule to price it into the result.
Even outside the polls. Trump rallies really started to empty out in the last weeks.
The polling system even without herding is broken because no one wants to respond to random texts
I've yet to see anyone else mention it but my theory:
Messaging is build on focus groups, and tweaked to get the best results by both sides. That group is the same group that does polls.
Its a Goodhart's law in action: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
Seems like they pretty much did? The polls said "a close race in each of the swing states, which either candidate could win". And I that's what happened, no?
All the polls I've been reading (including ones like betting sites, who lose money by being biased), were predicting this exact outcome.
Bookies are a way better indicator than polls, I've opted to stop checking polls and only follow the bookies. Nearly all of them gave Trump at least a few percentage points of an edge, at a minimum. Now I'm not saying they're infallible, but they make or break their business by figuring these odds out, so there's a lot of skin in the game for them to be on point.
Yes, here is a very good breakdown of how polls were systematically wrong by the French guy who just made over $40mm of profit betting on Trump in the prediction markets:
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1853818243003125934
He put Trump's true probability of winning at 90% and a win of the popular vote at 75%.
His first point - weighting by 2020 vote - is something that Nate Cohn pointed out very concretely as a methodological choice that wouldn't be obvious until the election [0]. Even in retrospect that seems fair, at least based on the analysis that Nate put together.
Worth pointing out though that most pollsters _have_ been weighting by 2020 vote, so in general this isn't a fair critique of the entire polling industry. There are other fair critiques though, for example, that there are entire populations of people that are almost impossible to reach now (e.g. those who don't answer unknown numbers, young people, etc.).
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/06/upshot/polling-methods-el...
I feel like this is confirmation bias, especially since it's a very large number of polls from reputable organizations being compared against one person's opinion.
Even if the true probability isn't 50% I doubt it's that far off.
The president of US called half of American citizens garbage, that definitely had something to do with it. Hillary pulled the same shit, calling half the country "deplorables". Keep insulting American citizens and see what happens.
Because a percentage of people who vote trump tell everyone they will vote dem to not be bullied or frozen out by their friends, relatives, colleagues, etc. Dr Phil described it well I think.
Vegas and prediction markets consistently had Trump as the favorites.
Polling companies are in the business of media deals and government contracts. They will develop methodology and reporting to that end and the money is in "a close and contested race", even if it won't be.
I have yet to see any polls predict any result in any election.
The betting odds were not particularly close, especially in the last few weeks. It’s better to look at these rather than polling.
It seems prediction markets did better on this one: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-...
(and this was while Biden was still in the race)
The polling margins were razor-thin.
Pollsters such as Nate Silver were giving gut-takes of Red over Blue, e.g.:
"Nate Silver: Here’s What My Gut Says About the Election, but Don’t Trust Anyone’s Gut, Even Mine" (Oct. 23, 2024)
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/opinion/election-polls-re...>
I've done a somewhat half-assed take tonight of comparing actual returns to latest pre-election polling by state
Why that is, isn't clear. Political pollsters have been struggling for years with accuracy issues, particularly as landline usage falls (it's <20% in most states now), and unknown-caller blocking is more widely used (both on landlines and mobile devices).
Polling does have periodic calibration events (we call those "elections"), but whatever biases the polls seem to experience in the US, it's apparently systemically exceeding adjustment factors.
Polls / votes and deltas:
Key:- QC: A parsing QC value (number of raw fields)
- State: 2-char state code, dash-number indicates individual EVs for NE and ME.
- EV: Electoral votes
- BP: Blue polling
- RP: Red polling
- BV: Blue vote return
- RV: Red vote return
- Bd: Blue delta (vote - poll)
- Rd: Red delta (vote - poll)
The last two results are the cumulative average deltas. Blue consistently performed ~2.5 points below polls, red performed ~0.6 points above polls.
Data are rounded to nearest whole percent (I'd like to re-enter data to 0.1% precision and re-run, though overall effect should be similar). Deltas are computed only where voting returns are >0.
Data are hand-entered from 538 and ABC returns pages.
Blue consistently polled slightly higher than performance. Polls don't seem to include third parties (mostly Green, some state returns include RFK or others).
There are all but certainly coding/data entry errors here, though for illustration the point should hold.
NB: If anyone knows a source that has tabular formatted polling and election data, that would make it a lot easier to compute this than hand-entering.
With updated (and 0.1% decimal precision) election returns, Harris's polling delta falls to -2.25% (Orange is unchanged). The overall advantage of her opponent over polling data is 2.89%. Which is a lot.
Still want to get more precise polling numbers in there, but again, it's not shifting a lot. Law of Large Numbers dictates that, as multiple rounded numbers tend to even out the precision distinction.
I've just re-run my analysis with higher precision on the deltas. Harris performed worse in every single race save DC than projected. Orange performed better in a majority of races, by as much as 5+ percent.
(I still need more accurate data for polling, I'll add a comment when I've updated that.)
> The last two results are the cumulative average deltas. Blue consistently performed ~2.5 points below polls, red performed ~0.6 points above polls.
So basically consistent with 2016 and 2020: Most polls have a 2-5 point bias in favor of Democrats. Maybe a bit improved from previous elections.
Updated values, all to 0.1% precision.
Observations:- Harris did more poorly than forecast in all but three races: DC, UT, and NE-1.
- Her opponent did better than forecast in 32 races.
- Many of Harris's bigger under-performances were in races she won, notably CA. FL and TX are losses with far worse-than-polled returns.
Net average polling bias is 2.68 points favouring the GOP across 56 contests.
All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
That pool was apparently more the former than the later.
Historically, the polls tend to skew about 3% left on average. So if the left is showing a 3% lead, it's more likely that reality is they're even. Have a look at this site - they were tied nationally with Trump having a healthy lead in most swing states:
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/202...
It was no surprise he won, IMO.
Eh? All the polls basically said "we don't know, either can win", maybe followed with "X is slightly more likely to win".
Also note that a "90% / 10% change to win" is not necessarily "wrong" if the 10% candidate wins. Anyone who has played an RPG will tell you that 90% chance to hit is far from certain. Maybe if there had been 100 elections, Clinton would have won 90 of them.
I guess dead squirrel changed public opinion enough.
The polls did pretty well this election. They underestimated Trump, but by less than previously. Polls pretty overwhelmingly showed a 50/50 race in every swing state but those odds were always correlated since they're not independent events
People are looking at the popular vote and freaking out but lets not forget that there's still 7 million left to count in California and it's expected to net Harris almost 3 million votes
Historically (last two elections) the polls have been about 2% further left than the actual result. Thus a 50/50 could/should b be interpreted in Trump’s favor
Polling has fundamental issues that can't be solved with statistics. The biggest one is the unknown difference between who responds to the poll and who votes. And poll response areas are very low these days - I've heard well under 1% is common (that is, less than 1 out of 100 individuals contacted by the pollster answer the questions).
Nate Silver nailed this in the 2016 election. He said Trump's victory there was consistent with historically normal polling errors.
What may have been less widely appreciated is these errors are not related to causes like limited sample size that are straightforwardly amenable to statistical analysis. They come from the deeper problems with polling and the way those problems shift under our feet a little bit with each election.
People no longer feel comfortable telling the truth about their votes.
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/30/election-gen-z-voting-lies
They weren't that far off. Most were hovering around a tie with a margin of error of +/- 2-3%.
Trump won many of those states by 2-3%.
Yes but when the result is always skewed to one side then - even if the result is within the margin - the predicted mean is wrong.
Otherwise the real result would be distributed around the mean within the margin of error.
There is some bias and the polls did not correctly factor that into their statistical model.
I checked 538 before the election and they had Trump winning more often than not, but very close.
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Regardless of the "manipulate public opinion" claim ... , Didn't Clinton win the populair vote?
That obviously doesn't work; how do you know which direction discourages voters? Most campaigns' whole marketing approach relies on texting voters 2000 times a day saying they're about to lose.
Did anyone else feel like the incessant texts from political spammers made you not want to vote the candidate spamming you? Having to block 5 new numbers every time I picked up my phone for the past month was really frustrating.
I didn’t get a single text.
I guess I’m doing something right. I hate spam texts.
Either your state didn't make the information available to anyone who claims to a political activist, or you managed to avoid having a phone number linked to your voter registration.
That's probably not accurate. A false sense of confidence is just as likely to discourage voters (eg: "I don't need to go vote, candidate ABC is already winning!") as anything else.
What’s your evidence for that claim?
I don't think there is some kind of grand conspiracy where nefarious groups are out to "get" everyone.
More likely, it's what you see with any data set that produces incorrect results: the wrong data in.
Yes, polls often tend to privilege the privileged, Harris voters skewed greatly towards higher average incomes and college education. And also, according to an exit poll, that the majority of Trump's voters decided to vote for him within the past week. It's generally been the case that populist politicians are underestimated by polling because they can't control for these factors.
From a game theoretical perspective this is a good result. It is a clear reiteration of the message to the Democrats: you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad. The Democrats should have fielded a strong personality in their own right. This is not about left or right. It's about mobilizing people by giving them something to care about. "More of the same" and "not like that guy" isn't very enticing.
I don't think the policy positions even matter that much, if you can make a strong case and gain the confidence of the electorate.
As someone living in WI who got barraged with ads from both sides, that wasn't the messaging anyone saw AFAICT. The biggest issue on people's minds was the economy. Dem messaging on economic policy was nonexistent. Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men. It should, but it doesn't. There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
There's a lot of people in the comments parroting whatever narrative they cooked up for 2016, but the reality is that both candidates' approaches were wildly different this time around.
The economy I think was the huge sticking point. You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that. They are so out of touch that they think if finance/econ majors on tv say the economy is doing good than it's doing good.
Compared to pre-pandemic - Housing prices have shot up incredibly - Loan interest rates are two or three times higher - Every day goods are higher - Car prices are higher - Insurance is higher - Utilities are higher
And that would be fine, prices go up over time after all, but all of that is on the back of pay, that for most people, has not gone up anywhere close to enough to cover all of that, if it's gone up at all.
This is an interesting phenomanon. The median purchase power is increasing but people feel poor.
Things with limited supply are becoming more unaffordable because the rich are much richer than they were before. So if housing is limited and is seen as an investment vehicle, it becomes unaffordable.
The same goes for health care. There is a limit supply of medical care. Some people can afford much more than others which compounds the issue.
Americans (and most of the collective West) can afford all things that are not in limited supply - food, clothing, gadgets, transportation, etc. This is amazing in the context of history.
The weirdest thing is that both health care and housing do not need to be limited supply. It's completely artifical. We make bad governing decisions that force it to be so. Our problems are not economic but social/organizational ones.
Relatedly, I was quite surprised when recently I realized that the median (adjusted for PPP) disposable income in America was the highest in the OECD (except Luxembourg):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
This means that the average american really really is financially better off than anywhere else in the world. I'd say that their quality of life isn't - they die much earlier than the rest of OECD, for example. But they are definitely the richest. And not just the richest american but the average american.
There is a fundemental problem that cannot really be solved with housing:
People want a single family homes with a nice property in nice area. They want a short commute and all the convenience of modern life.
There is in fact a hard limit on how many single family homes you can have in a an area. You can build them somewhere else, but then you get long commutes or short commutes to low paying work.
HN, let me remind you, most people do not work in tech banging on a keyboard all day with mild collaboration. Most people still need to commute to their jobs at least once a week. The majority still need to go in everyday.
Families tend to want single family homes. But singles/couples are happy buying townhomes or condos, which we could build a lot more of on the existing land. And we should encourage older couples to downsize (eg CA makes this undesirable because of prop 13)
More families would be open to townhomes and condos if they had 3-4 bedrooms.
An SFH in a big city is a luxury, as you say, something has to give. You can't have cheap SFH in a nice neighborhood next to your job for everyone, there is reason why buildings exist
Add to that a systemic lack of investment in public transportation infrastructure and it makes said commutes completely reliant on private resources.
Factor in good schools and other wants well.
People are willing to live in condos just fine. But everything is unaffordable now. Every new condo building has crazy HOA fees with prices that are totally out of reach.
We're not building out or building up. So yeah. It's bad.
> I was quite surprised when recently I realized that the median (adjusted for PPP) disposable income in America was the highest in the OECD
That doesn't really tell you all that much useful. Disposable income just deducts taxes from your gross income. What really matters is the cost of those other things we're talking about: food, housing, healthcare, childcare, etc. When you subtract those out as well, you get discretionary income, and I bet the US is not leading at all there.
It’s not really a straightforward comparison because those categories are discretionary to an extent. For example people in the US seem to eat out at restaurants far more than in other countries. That would certainly increase food spending but clearly it’s a choice people make to improve their life and doesn’t represent a defect in the economy.
Life expectancy in the US is below average but it’s certainly not “much lower than the rest of the OECD”
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/d90b402d-en.pdf
Frankly, if wage gains kept pace with productivity gains it’d be a very different and vastly better economic story for the average American. The reality is the recent blip of wage gains didn't make up ground on the last 40 years of stagnation, and it shows signs of slowing in any case, and Americans are feeling that
Ironically wage gains have outpaced inflation in the last 4 years, but that's such a minor effect compared to the lost ground over the previous 40 years that it's not noticeable.
It depends on how you measure inflation. The most important expenses for a young person trying to start a family are health-care, housing, food, child care and college tuition. Inflation in these categories is wild. I don't care at all if a big screen TV has gotten cheaper.
Given that big screen TV's are a negligible portion of the inflation basket and housing is by far the biggest component of the basket, I think the current basket is a fairly decent reflection.
Yes, but for the electorate to blame the current party for the last 40 years is irrational.
The definition of “disposable income” used in this chart is gross income minus taxes.
I don’t think this corresponds with what most people think that means. i.e. gross income - (taxes + housing costs + food + health/childcare). I certainly didn’t.
That's the correct definition of "disposable income". The latter value is called "discretionary income", and a lot of people incorrectly say disposable when they really mean discretionary.
It’s always cases like this that make question if the dictionary is wrong, or if everyone speaking the language is wrong.
Yeah it’s hard to calculate a comparable figure on this when savings in one country is basically just temporarily holding money for the medical industry and getting to collect gains on it in the meantime, and in another, it’s actual savings.
Much like, say, IQ, wealth shouldn't be compared across populations without massive amounts of contextual normalization. Individual wealth measures don't account for institutional safety nets, nor social/cultural affordances, nor geography, nor weather, nor history, nor-
Suffice it to say that trying to directly compare individual wealth across disparate populations is so disingenuous as to be tantamount to spreading falsehoods. People feel poor because they are poor; Americans simply cannot afford many of the things that other developed economies provide for their residents. We can make lots of small changes to help with this^ (i.e., we don't need a massive overhaul or revolution), but the people calling the shots have to actually admit that people are not doing well, and that the costs people face today are burdensome. They won't, because they're afraid of not being reelected (and then they lose anyway).
^Solve food deserts by opening bodega-like shops in both urban AND suburban neighborhoods.
^Replace surface parking with structures housing amenities that people can walk to.
^Increase mass public transit access by building rail and bus/bike lanes.
Whether one thinks things are bad or good is subjective and should not be relevant, although it does appear to matter electorally. A rational voting public would vote on a forward looking basis -- which candidate would deliver the biggest expected improvement.
A rational voting public will not vote for someone who normalizes genocide. This is reasonable, because that which is normalized becomes probable for all.
Looking at the numbers, it doesn't seem so much that America chose Trump as they refused to choose Harris; her popular vote total is in the middle of Obama's, and Trump's is roughly the same as last time. I recognize and agree that Trump is worse. As much as Harris wanted to make that what the election was about, as with Biden in 2020, that's simply not what it was. The election was about if Harris could do better than Biden, as an executive. She couldn't show that she would, so the people who came out for Biden did not come out for her.
It takes $600k now to have the buying power of $200k in the 80s
The economy is 100% intentionally managed to protect the prior generations story mode way of thinking
> You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that.
Isn't that literally what happened in his first term? Remember "I built the greatest economy the world has ever seen"? These claims were backed fully and completely by the stock market and not the rank & file. And this is the same situation we find ourselves in now. All these years later we're still in a situation where "the economy" is going gangbusters, but the average person feels left out.
I would say absolutely yes, which is ironic to say the least. I think the fact that he didn't follow through on his promises got lost in the crazyness of the pandemic times but do remember, he did not get re-elected. Also americans don't really think that far back when it comes to presidential elections, they tend to be here and now things.
My prediction is that the next four years won't see any improvement either, and the republicans will similarly be voted out again next election.
If "the economy" is going to be fixed, first Congress and the senate will actually have to start passing bills again, but that's probably not happening for another decade
I think the bigger problem isn't that the Dems didn't try to take credit for growth, but that they didn't point out that actually things weren't that rosy in 2020 and basically conceded the entirely false argument that Trump's term made the economy better and Biden's made it worse.
Sure, Trump didn't cause the pandemic, but neither did Biden and the inflation isn't unrelated to Trump's fiscal policy being looser than it needed to be even before the pandemic either, as well as being fundamentally the Fed's job to solve[2]. It's difficult[1] for an incumbent to win by attacking the track record of the last government especially when much of it was factors outside their control, but not impossible, especially since Trump has presented wavering voters with plenty of other reasons not to vote for him. Trump is living proof that excuses work...
[1]Not impossible though: an unpopular British government won a majority in 2014 by constantly blaming slow post recession growth on the other party's borrowing five years earlier
[2]You can absolutely guarantee that if Trump was in power the US would have experienced at least as much inflation, and he'd have wasted no time in blaming the Fed
I agree, but also think the number of voters that have the attention to be influenced by such a nuanced argument is vanishingly small.
Tbh I imagined it less as nuance and more as attack ads which focused on reminding people that 2020 was a really shit year for people's incomes and that Trump didn't actually deliver on his promises, not even the wall.
Would have been more effective to remind people why they didn't vote for him than remind them of his behaviour afterwards which he's perfectly good at doing himself.
> I think the bigger problem isn't that the Dems didn't try to take credit for growth, but that they didn't point out that actually things weren't that rosy in 2020 and basically conceded the entirely false argument that Trump's term made the economy better and Biden's made it worse.
This is more or less the direction I was heading w/ my post. I don't think it's a messaging issue per se. Rather it's control of the messaging. The economy in general has been on a steady path for a while, despite ups & downs: it's trending towards a bimodal distribution where certain parties are doing quite well and others are doing less well. But what I've seen the last several election cycles is the indicators that dominate what I see on TV, read online, etc swap depending on who is in power. So my expectation is that literally nothing will change yet we'll be hearing about how awesome the economy is for everyone in several months.
> All these years later we're still in a situation where "the economy" is going gangbusters, but the average person feels left out.
It doesn't matter. Trump claimed he'd build the greatest economy again. He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives. He just let people jump to their own happy conclusions.
>> He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives.
He did provide high level detail. He said he'd use tariffs to exclude foreign made stuff, which will necessitate "made in America" and bring manufacturing back. He said he'd balance the budget, which (theoretically) has long-term effects. He said he'd deport illegals, which should reduce demand for housing and hence prices.
You can disagree with any of those things, but I don't think it's right to say he didn't offer anything specific.
> I don't think it's right to say he didn't offer anything specific
I mean; he offered 'specifics' - they simply didn't make any sense on cursory examination. How to fight inflation? Tariffs! How to make already expensive goods cheaper? Tarriffs!
Hell, re: deporting illegals, he didn't even bother to do that his first term, Obama did it at a dramatically higher rate.
It's all a "I'll fix everything by doing nothing" smokescreen.
You're being disingenuous. The closest Republican talking point to reducing inflation was increasing energy production. That is a legitimately deflationary policy. What I think most people don't understand on the left is how far their credibility has fallen with the common person, and is because of attitudes like this. If you actually want to understand this election at all, you have to understand that people on the right feel constantly lied to by institutions and media figures, and disingenuous rebuttals like this don't help, they hurt.
Illegals are not competing on buying homes. Working for cash is not going to allow you to purchase a home
Maybe not buying houses, but they have to live somewhere, right? That has an effect on housing prices.
>He didn't provide any details on what he plans to do that will actually improve people's lives.
No, but he had a very simple and catchy message that even people with the lowest IQ can understand and remember: "Fuck illegal immigrants, fuck China, America first, USA no. 1".
Election messages need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of education and intellect. If you start boring people with facts and high brow speeches that only the well educated can understand, you lost from the start.
Election messages need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of education
Republicans understand that the less educated a voter is, the more likely they are to vote R. It's not a coincidence that they are trying to gut the education system.
What did democrats do to improve the education system?
Yes, that's true, but the problem is that these past four years have been bad for everybody, so they remember the Trump years as being better than they actually were.
> these past four years have been bad for everybody
They've been pretty good for some people.
Yeah, if you're a high earner living the urban/suburban life you've probably done really well. The problem is that rural turnout was off the charts last night, which what handed Trump the popular vote - something that has not happened with a Republican candidate since 2004.
Absolutely not. Inflation hit us very hard and we had to make real lifestyle changes to get back in the black.
I'd love to know the details.
We got hit too. We adjusted mostly in our eating habits. Moved to zero eating out, more bulk buying, cheaper foods, etc. We're also much more discriminating on what activities we do for the kids.
I'm not gonna go all "woe is me" since we're doing fine, but as someone with a family of 5 the discretionary income basically went to zero the last 4 years.
Yes, I was going to come back to say basically all of this. We noticed that not only were we no longer saving money, but we weren't even living paycheck to paycheck and had to make all these sorts of changes and cuts to get off a very bad trajectory.
I agree. But GP said that everybody was feeling pain. That's not true.
I lost my job a few months back, and I feel like the messaging from Harris/Biden was everything's great! Keep doing whatever is happening. Voted for who spoke to me.
Every company I join literally has an arm in Mexico, India, Pakistan, Colombia or Ukraine - and it always started feeling like at any minute those people would have my job. And they do. I want an administration that makes it so that those people don't have my job. And yes, I have always been willing to work for a lot less, but all the other Americans want more and more and more, so that it's expected for a programmer in the US to make 200k, so these companies decide to hire someone in Colombia for 80k. I'll take 100 and work a lot closer than that person in Colombia. But no companies here will listen to that. And I'll do it as someone with 20 years of experience.
But the only thing people on the left care about, as usual, are issues that actually don't matter. Yes I get it you want Gay rights and you want Abortion rights, but the reality is those things are not going away in the states you're already in. But on the other side, American people are being pushed into a terrible economic state.
Go ahead and not listen, HN doesn't. It's WAAAY to left.
Whatever measures are used to portray the economy as great(it's not just the stock market) or unemployment is down do not match with the impact people feel in their own lives. Maybe they aren't lies, but they aren't accurate either. Massive layoffs in our industry and a glut of H1Bs still hanging around are a problem for an American job seeker in this industry and we'll look out for our interests despite what we're told.
unemployment was at historic lows, you just got unlucky. idk what to tell you man
There was a massive downward revision in August, with most sectors hit hard, leaving the gains that remained increasingly dominated by government/education/healthcare jobs.
Telling people 'X' when their eyes/lived experiences tell them 'Y', and then frequently insulting them for not agreeing on top is certainly part of the reason for the popular vote going as it did.
this person basically just went: bad thing happened to me -> blame the president -> vote for the other person.
i have no interest in coddling people's feelings and telling them how right they are when they are operating with this level of analysis. Im not a politician so i dont have to deal with that, but im so tired of trying to explain how the world works to stupid people and getting shit for it because im not validating their delusions.
When presidents are quick to take credit for economic successes, surely it isn't unreasonable to hold them accountable for economic failures.
The disconnect between government data and the economic realities MANY people experienced (as evidenced by exit polling on the economy) only further salts the wounds for people not doing well.
again, youre assuming people's delusions about their personal finances are worth entertaining. theres absolutely no economic indicator you could point me to that validates people's feelings about the economy.
There were no economic failures during Joe Biden's presidency.
Economic indicators are manufactured by government agencies to support the narrative the current administration wants to spin. Meanwhile, people living in the real world observe some actual state of economy, based on things such as "how hard it was to find a new job".
Or maybe they said that "Bad thing happened to me", tired to recover, no recovery happening and it begins to feel like being lied to, blame the president.
It's at historic lows while layoffs are happening all over. I don't know what to say but it doesn't feel like good times to a bunch of people.
John Deere: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/john-deere-faces-b...
GM: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/21/business/gm-layoffs-kansas/in...
Stellantis: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/11/nx-s1-5145932/stellantis-jeep...
https://intellizence.com/insights/layoff-downsizing/leading-...
Exactly what Harris was saying, hence the direction of my vote! Also, 50 job apps and no call backs, this is the WORST economy ever. In 2018, I would submit 3 and get 3 offers at the end of it.
your level of critical thinking is remarkable, i guess this is what we're competing against.
I think the issue is that when people are desperate (lost job, can't pay for needs, etc) critical thinking can be limited to just short term survival mode. Even if it doesn't make sense big picture wise.
Democratic party needs to listen and at the very least fluff up a response that people in this situation feel heard. Even if there nothing they can really do. It's all about appeasing emotions.
Do you genuinely think that this is the worst economy ever?
In my lifetime, yes.
Does that include the 2000s tech crash? AI winters?
Sounds like a skill issue. I never even saw a slowdown of recruiter spam. Maybe you should just try a little?
Also, maybe look into a little history while youre at it - the economy is not even close to the worst one ever, see: 1930s, 1970s, the turn of the millenium, and 2008-2012 for examples in living memory.
It is a skill issue. The folks at the bottom today within the USA economically when unemployment is so low and social mobility is so high do so out of choice. I've traveled the rest of the world and seen what actual poverty looks like (the kind where you have no real hope even if you work hard or are smart). I've seen how much better the US handled every crisis/pandemic vs others. We have it better than anyone else BY FAR.
I'm tired of pretending it's not. Want to call me a coastal elite like it's a slur? I'll wear it with a badge of honor. We are better than you at economic planning and becoming prosperous - also with defending social freedoms (i.e. legalizing the mushrooms).
We lost the low information voters. Bad from the perspective of winning elections but good from the perspective of self selecting your friends and people you associate with. The democrats really are a social club.
you think trump is going help programmers in the US at all? How? Trump merchandise isn't made in the US. His daughters brands are manufactured in Asia.
Under Biden, Mexico is the China replacement for manufacturing.
I have my doubts that Trump will change that.
China heavily invested in Mexico. They are building up Mexico's manufacturing capacity to cover American demand. Either way, China wins.
They've been great for US Stock holders, which basically comprises most of the Upper and Upper Middle Class.
In fact, so good, people think anything buy 10-20% yearly gains on assets is bad
>And that would be fine, prices go up over time after all, but all of that is on the back of pay, that for most people, has not gone up anywhere close to enough to cover all of that, if it's gone up at all.
BLS data shows real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages has gone up since the pandemic.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Their methodology produces results that are not representative of the economic situation of average american families.
The average household income is 80k(ish) the average house is 420k(ish)
In Bethlehem, PA (a fairly middle of the road place tax wise) that means $5050 take home pay a month and a mortgage payment (FHA 3.5 down, 6.7 interest) of $2650 a month. That is more than half your pay just on a mortgage, not pmi, not insurance, not utilities, not anything else. Do this calculation across the country with localized numbers, do it with rent instead. Add a car and insurance for it into the mix. Then try adding in health insurance, groceries, etc. You are going to find that the numbers result in average people being squeezed and guess what? That lines up with peoples actual experience.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paycheck-to-paycheck-definition...
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2024/amid-a-resilient...
My interpretation of this is that pay has not kept up with inflation.
Edited to be less witty
There was a graphic in John Kings (CNN). Segment that showed a vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation. This is just extremely real for the 5k(ish) takehome pay guy. I noticed the 4.5 ish $ eggs and milk.
The overall situation of housing and college costs have been increasing for a while this last round of inflation really was a big part of the last straw.
>There was a graphic in John Kings (CNN). Segment that showed a vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation.
Source? Is this simply because rural counties are doing worse than urbanized counties, and there are more rural counties than urbanized counties, such that if you don't account for population you'll come to the conclusion that "vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation", even though that's not true for the country as a whole?
You responded to a statement about change by talking about state. Both things are true: that average people have it better and that they have it hard.
A $2650 mortgage in Bethlehem PA is a very, very big house. You can’t apply the average mortgage price to a place where you can get a 2000 sqft house for under $200K. Additionally Bethlehem PA is an above average area for PA when it comes to affluence.
The median price per square foot in the US is $226[0]. The insanely economically depressed rust belt area where I was born has a median price over $150 per square foot (you do _not_ want to live there). I suspect your mental model of housing prices is anchored in the past when the world has moved on.
[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDLISPRIPERSQUFEEUS
Okay, but we were not talking about the median house, we are talking about Bethlehem, PA. I got my data by going to Zillow and seeing that there are many 10s of houses near the 2K sqft mark that cost around $200k. You can do the same yourself.
Pennsylvania did not experience the same uplift in housing prices in 2020-2022 that much of the rest of the nation did as people are net leaving the state.
PA is actually one of the places least affected by inflation not just in the US but in the world.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDLISPRIPERSQUFEE10900
The median home in the Bethlehem, PA core based statistical area costs $200 per square foot in October 2024. In October 2019, it cost $120 per square foot.
I'm sure you can find homes that list for half the cost per square foot just as well as someone could find homes that list for double the cost per square foot. That's why the median is useful – and it has increased 66% over the last five years.
Just fyi, I just used it for a location for a online calculator to grab tax for because PA is fairly middle of the road in taxes. If you want to do the math for Bethlehem PA specifically look up the average house sale price and the average income and take a look.
The question is supposedly whether things are better or worse, not whether they're "good enough" in some abstract way.
If you think things aren't good enough for an average person in one of the statistically best periods a capitalist economy has ever seen, there are redistributive alternatives. That doesn't seem to be what Trump voters are expecting. Instead there seems to be a nostalgia for past better times, which isn't really explained by "people are squeezed" based on math that would almost certainly have worked out just as tightly ten years ago.
Something else is going on. I don't claim to have a full explanation but none of the attempts to "fix" BLS statistics that I've seen have been more persuasive than this.
It's worth keeping in mind that inflation is a theoretical construct based on assumptions and formulas that may not apply for every individual or subpopulation.
>It's worth keeping in mind that inflation is a theoretical construct based on assumptions and formulas
That might be so, but it's better than people's vibes, which famously flip-flops based on whether their preferred party is in power.
>that may not apply for every individual or subpopulation
I never claimed that, but the parent comment did imply real wages have not gone up "for most people".
So, CPI adjusted it means that median people are "doing better" about $30 (also CPI adjusted) than in 1980 per week? Given all the "progress" in that time, that is just not enough, and that is what people feel. People feel they don't have the money to participate in modern life, and yeah, an extra $30 per week is definitely not enough to do that.
Also, the median stats say nothing about how people below it are doing. By definition, that is 50%, and that is also about the number of people voting for Trump, alongside your run-of-the-mill racists and fascists.
>So, CPI adjusted it means that median people are "doing better" about $30 (also CPI adjusted) than in 1980 per week?
They're actually doing about $50 better, because there was a recession in 1980. Moreover, the $50 (or $30) dollars are "1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars", not today's dollars. In today's dollars it would be $158.28 (or $94.97). Moreover, given most people's expectation and discussion for income increases are the raw dollar amounts (ie. not inflation adjusted), it's not a fair benchmark for real wage increases.
>By definition, that is 50%, and that is also about the number of people voting for Trump, alongside your run-of-the-mill racists and fascists.
Given how the votes are roughly 50-50, you can make the opposite argument for Harris, replacing "racists and fascists" with "college students and woke activists".
That is about $650 more per month, inflation adjusted in todays dollars, for 45 years of progress?
> Given how the votes are roughly 50-50, you can make the opposite argument for Harris, replacing "racists and fascists" with "college students and woke activists".
Yeah, that is exactly what I am saying. And it seems to bear out: In the demography of income of > 100K, democrats win, below it, Trump wins.
But still haven’t matched productivity gains since the 1970s[0]
Everyone likes to point this out like it somehow made up for all the wage stagnation of the last 40 years and it most definitely did not.
Not to mention these wage gains are slowing fast.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff....
>But still haven’t matched productivity gains since the 1970s[0]
The gap might be real, but it's existed for decades. Moreover at least when it comes to explaining why people voted for Trump: while I have no data to support it, "we're poorer because of inflation" is a much more popular sentiment/election issue than "the top 1% are taking the gains for themselves", especially among republican voters.
> the top 1% are taking the gains for themselves
They deserved it because they worked hard for it!
Considering his very pronounced and persistent support of broad tariffs on all imports, I'm not sure why people would vote for Trump and the Republican platform he steers if they're worried about the economy and prices. This will absolutely drive prices up across the board, exacerbating the situation, while the Republican platform has no proposal for even attempting to offset that, they also want to put the boots on the neck of labor, as it were (see Project 2025 or even the miniaturized version Agenda 47)
The data may show that. The people don't feel that. (Many of them don't see it in their budgets, either.)
Voting for the guy that complained American wages were too high and thinks tariffs are paid by other countries will definitely not help.
Please be more specific if you are explaining why American voters have got angry and done something stupid that will make things worse or if you are defending that stupidity as a good thing that will help the situation you are talking about.
Like Brexit, you have to let the electorate find out the hard way.
My theory is that social media has given people this skewed perspective of reality where everyone else appears to be rich and living in luxury.
This makes their own lives, in which they are still better off than 99.9% of the history of humanity, feel worse.
When your lifestyle suddenly has to change in drastic ways because of a rapid increase in prices none of this makes anyone feel any better. "Think about how much worse it COULD be, kids!"
>When your lifestyle suddenly has to change in drastic ways because of a rapid increase in prices
Where's the evidence this is happening for a majority (or even something vaguely resembling one) of people? I've already posted official statistics that show inflation adjusted median wages are up.
Ok, well, my wages aren't up, and everybody I know's wages aren't up either. Being told this over and over again, that everything is great, despite what's obvious to our own personal experience is why you got the result you got today.
or you know, wages stagnated for 40 years and haven't kept pace with productivity gains, and it was inevitable that this would wear most American citizens down and we'd feel it more and more over time.
The most recent wage gains failed to make up for this fact
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff...
But it’s a skewed picture of the actuality, which that those wage gains didn’t make up for the 40 years of stagnation preceding it.
If wage gains kept pace with productivity gains it’d be a very different and vastly better economic story for the average American
>which that those wage gains didn’t make up for the 40 years of stagnation preceding it.
It stagnated in 2008-2016 but they still voted for obama, but when it finally started rising in 2016 they voted for trump?
It wasn't really rising in 2016. The flat wage growth lasted past 2020, with a relatively recent blip, but it has not meaningfully risen to outpace the stagnation that existed for decades.
If wages increased with productivity increases we'd be in better shape overall as a society, but here we are.
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Reality is always a social construct, and by having air superiority you can talk anything into reality.
You don’t feel earth rotation either but it still exists.
You can’t argue about feelings
People definitely can feel the impact of earth rotation on a daily basis. They literally would not even have the notion of a day without it actually.
https://sciencenotes.org/what-would-happen-if-the-earth-stop...
You can measure the effects but people don’t feel it, just ask flat earthers
When (some) people feel they’re worse off and blame it on the government, telling them government produced statistics says they’re actually better off is totally going to make them trust the government more. /s
Edit: Without the snark, lots of people believe their rent, grocery bills, energy bills etc. have gone up a lot more than official inflation numbers (and that can be true even if the inflation numbers are “accurate” for some definition of accurate), and you’re not going to convince them using anything derived from these inflation numbers.
We're still at 390 levels of cost in a 370 world.
>real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages
I agree "It's the economy stupid".
Where the Democrats went wrong is they looked at the economic figures for stuff like corporate profit margins and the stock market and said "look how good the economy is!" when those profit margins are high because they've jacked prices and regular consumers are feeling the squeeze. Unfortunately there's little a President can do about that. Corporate consolidation was largely complete before they even took office and monopolistic behavior is to be expected. The pandemic supply chain disruptions gave companies cover to increase their margins and that's what they did.
Theodore Roosevelt was well known for monopoly-busting. It is something the president can influence and the U.S. has a dozen major monopolies that should have been busted long ago.
"the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that.
I think I'm an average person. Car prices came down and I was finally able to buy a sedan. Unemployment seems low. Eggs are expensive, sure, but on the other hand, my brand of yogurt always seems to be on sale and oatmeal prices are flat, so it's kind of a wash there. The economy seems pretty fine to me.
Certainly, there have been no threats to shut down the government (like in '18-'19), which did do a number on my retirement plan at the time...
I don't buy it. There's a reality distortion field at work here. If Trump had been in office he would he would have been touting the economy as the greatest in history. And 'average people' would have 'seen that' despite not 'seeing it'.
I don't vote for Trump. I don't know anyone aside from some crazy family members who like him. I'm in an extreme blue state that was called when only a few percent of the vote was in. I don't even know anyone who listens to Trump's speeches or sees this ads.
Every single person I know feels this economy is terrible. Of every age. From new graduates, to senior people. Even the most extreme Obama or Bernie people feel like things are going very badly.
Everyone on campus was consistently outraged when Biden would gloat about his economy.
It's not Trump. I have no idea what his message even is.
This is an own goal. Democrats believed the total bullshit that economists spew about how good things are. When people actually feel how terrible they are.
And trump voters, not understanding inflation, think he will bring down prices.
I'm in the Bay - am I the only person that thinks the economy is going great?
My wages are up since Biden started. My rent, my biggest expense, has held the same. NW up a lot from stock market gains.
There seems to be a lot of inflation with food ,restaurants and domestic work, but isn't lower wage people getting higher wages a good thing?
Yes, it’s been good for the rich. Stock market gains do nothing for most people.
I’m skeptical about the vibes based methods of evaluating the economy, I think the economy really is better for the lowest income workers, but forget stock market gains. Also, rents remaining flat might be a Bay Area specific phenomena. Or even SF specific? Don’t know where you live.
> but isn't lower wage people getting higher wages a good thing
Their wages did not rise anywhere near commensurate with the increased costs of those goods and services - the same goods and services that those people would be buying
I don't think that can be true in the Bay. They would have an even higher percent of expenditure to rent, which is flat.
America wide looks at worse flat: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q (ignoring covid years which distort this)
What you're doing now is what people are so angry about. Stop, "But the numbers..."ing, humor people's feelings for a moment, and figure out what would need to be done to lift those spirits. Gaslighting is not a good tack.
I agree that maybe people need their feelings humored, but how is this gaslighting? I'm not denying that there's food inflation or restaurant inflation - I pointed out that it's a narrow way to look at even your own economic position.
Food might be up 30% in biden's term for all I know. And maybe wages are only up 20%. But as long as rent is 0% and asset growth kept track with inflation (it's blown past it), you are still ahead.
I suspect this is just standard human loss aversion at work. I feel this even from my own wife who looks at our economic position worse than me even though it is the same numbers. What's worsened becomes more important than what's improved, even if rationally, it nets out even.
>But as long as rent is 0%
My rent was up 30% and it was my largest expense. DoJ has been dragging its heels on punishing the companies that were a part of this gouging-via-algorithmic-price-fixing-and-warehousing, and now that Trump is going to be in office, those lawsuits are likely dead in the water. Very much a "Thanks for nothing, Joe," situation.
In gaslighting, the perpetrator insists on denying the victim's perception of reality, while actually controlling the facet of reality that he denies is altered. In this case, Democrats control the means to alter the economy via leaning on Congress, the Treasury, and the Fed. They manufactured an environment where earners would lose out to the concerns of asset holders (the "soft-landing," rather than a swift and severe FFR rate hike and tightening of Treasury holdings that would have squelched inflation), but insist on telling earners that everything is okay, because the metrics that matter to asset holders are doing well. In carrying water for this line of argument, you're participating in their gaslighting. People aren't doing well, full stop.
Dems don't control the fed.
A fast rate hike might have caused massive unemployment which would be much worse.
They can lean on the Fed, and they did.
A fast hike would have caused pain, but the money printing that we did anyway would have helped mitigate that. Instead, it just went to propping up asset prices. Bank Bailout 2.0; we didn't learn our lesson, and the incumbent party was yet again ousted.
America's economy probably did better than anywhere else in the rich world. I don't see how we can view this as a fail
You're doing it again.
Housing’s still shooting up really fast and I guess used cars are just always gonna be expensive now.
Housing: not in the Bay: https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/mountain...
I'm in Texas, in Big Tech. I didn't vote Trump. But I understand.
I'd like to get out of here but can't move because of mortgage rates, among other reasons. I'd like to change jobs but tech layoffs have flooded the job market. It's an anxious time. My 401k is doing great though.
I don't blame Biden for all this. There was absolutely no choice but to pour enough stimulus into the economy to cause massive inflation in order to prevent a revolution during COVID. But if I'm feeling the hangover I'm sure the real working class is staggering.
There was someone upthread that was talking about how unemployment is lowest ever while we have all these layoffs going on. It's kinda surreal.
I’m also in tech. I’ve been looking for work for the last several months. Took some time off after my work contract ended last year.
I likely don’t count towards unemployment statistics. I don’t qualify for unemployment since I was a contractor before.
In my current job search, I’ve sent out more applications and had more interviews than the rest of my career. Granted, I found jobs more through connections than cold applying in the past. I’ve been tapping connections in this search too, though. It’s rough out there. I’ve contemplated taking an exit from tech and picking up a trade.
It sure feels surreal to me when I see reports of a strong economy.
I believe the unemployment statistics, but I'm not sure what industry is doing all the hiring. I doubt it pays as well as the industries that are shedding people right and left.
Becoming the refuge-party for fleeing Republican neoliberals (joining the existing Democratic ones) is really gonna cripple the party when the party that popularized (among the political set—voters never liked it) that damn world-view is abandoning it.
Pay went up a ton too for low income people.
But still haven’t matched productivity gains since the 1970s[0] Everyone likes to point this out like it somehow made up for all the wage stagnation of the last 40 years and it most definitely did not.
Not to mention these wage gains are slowing fast.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff....
That would make it a left/right thing. As a European: there is no left in america, there is a liberal right and a conservative right.
The economy is good in america, but that just means that the amount of "resources" in the country is increasing, but, if "average joe" benefits from that or not is a question of how those resources are distributed.
Left/Right is about economy.
Being on the right means that you find it more important that the total pool of resources is increasing.
Being on the left means that you care more about how the resources are distributed.
What happened here is IMHO that the conservatives did the populist thing, they claimed that regular people would get more resources if they won, while still claiming that they would distribute less resources away from wealthy people.
They are not wrong in saying that the economy is good, it is just that since there is no left in american politics, it seems like some people have forgotten the other perspective, since redistribution of wealth have been almost an insult in america for so long. Yet, last time he was president, trump managed to send everyone a check, signed by himself, but paid for by taxes, without being called an evil communist.
I listened to a radia program where poor americans where interviewed, and that was the thing that they remembered about trump, he sent them a check.
So, in conclusion, there is a large group of poor americans, that associate the guy that wants to remove taxes for rich people with what I (according to the above definition) consider to be left wing politics.
> there is no left in america
There is, though? It’s just no represented at all because of FTPT there is based no constituency where it can get 50%. Usually not even in Democrat primaries.
Sanders got 25% of the primary vote in 2020 despite being a lost cause for most of the voting.
Yes, that was what I meant.
Europe seems to be pretty good at being on the right lately. Even compared to America. I think the two party system just creates more centrist government, which is perhaps a strong argument for it.
As a European: there is no left in america, there is a liberal right and a conservative right
This gets parroted too often. America objectively provides more abortion access than Europe. Speech here is undoubtedly more expansive than in Europe. Sure, unions may have more power in Europe, but not so much more that I'd be saying "there is no left in America".
You left out wages.
And that inflation was caused largely by pre-Biden Trump policies of giving tax-breaks to billionaires and allowing blatant corporate greed. Inflation is not a quick phenomenon. It has lags. It has stickiness. People don't know this because they don't take any economics.
And, more importantly, today's inflation is by large firms exerting their market control and monopolistic tendencies. How many grocery companies are there and in their region? Kroger is trying to buy out Albertsons to completely dominate the midwest, to lower quality and increase prices like all monopolists. What needs to be done is anti-trust enforcement which Biden has attempted. But none of this is known by 90% of the country and 0% of Trump voters.
Yeah, Kroger's behavior is infuriating. I've stopped shopping there; fortunately I have choices.
And Trumps proposed tariffs will only accelerate price increases[0]
It’s clear it has support from rank and file republicans as well, it is more than feasible that if republicans win the house too we will see tariffs in short order
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/trumps-new-tariff-proposa...
It will almost certainly accelerate inflation, but won’t it also give domestic manufacturing workers hurt by globalization a lot more demand for their work, and leverage to increase their wages? It seems like the main people hurt by this would be the upper middle class and above, the execs, designers, and managers who’ve directly and indirectly managed large international teams of laborers working at low rates, as they’ll get hit by the inflation, but see no additional demand/leverage to increase their wages. They’re the part of the bimodal wealth distribution that has until now done very well by globalization, and I think this election is largely a reaction by the other mode.
> won’t it also give domestic manufacturing workers hurt by globalization a lot more demand for their work
Temporarily perhaps, the push for automation in manufacturing (and farm operations) will be very strong.
No. You can't just wave a magic wand and order manufacturing home. Capitalists exported a lot of skill and industrial infrastructure to overseas markets, which can't be rebuilt overnight.
There was talk about this in the first term too, and it ended up with a lot of money from tariffs being used to subsidize farmers because they found themselves doing so poorly that suicides spiked.
Right, it seems likely to be disruptive in the short term, and there would be skill shortages and big holes in the domestic supply chain. I mean more abstractly/directionally. It does seem like it’d be best if it was phased in predictably over a longer period of time, but doesn’t seem like that’s the plan.
It hurts everyone, the price shocks will be felt for years, and any gains that can be made won't matter.
Wage gains won't keep pace with any price increases either, Republican's have already outlined policies that are regressive to average Americans[0][1]
About the only thing tariffs will do is consolidate power at the top and allow the largest corporations to buy out smaller ones that can't cope as well.
We are remember, talking about broad spectrum tariffs here, which will hit any import, from food to solar panels.
[0]: https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/32a303df-1977...
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/10/30/trump-reduce...
That JEC doc doesn’t seem to mention tariffs?
Yes, prices will rise, the question is whether it will increase their leverage in the job market enough to boost their earnings enough to counteract the higher prices.
my point with the JEC wasn't about tariffs its about Republican policies that show that "will it increase their leverage in the job market enough to boost their earnings enough to counteract the higher prices" is fantasy
The highest levels of leadership of the Republican party have shown time and again that they want a permanent poor underclass through their policies (both enacted and proposed) and actions.
There's no sense in speculation here, if they can put the boot on labors neck, they will 100% of the time
I mean, we were just talking about tariffs, not whatever else may be in their plans.
But point taken, you think that the net result will be worse for poor people. I don’t necessarily disagree, it just seems that this one bit might be somewhat positive for the poor.
The net result will be worse for all people except those in power
I don't think the US is the only place where US companies sell things. What about when tariffs are placed on US items, demand will drop with US made things.
It’s not, but our balance of trade is very deeply negative. We import a lot more than we export. Partly because our currency is kept artificially strong by reserve currency status, preventing our exports from becoming more competitive when we go deeply into debt.
The president has huge amounts of executive authority over tariffs. I don’t know where the boundaries are but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw huge tariff increases in the first hundred days.
Right. You would want to do it immediately so that initial hits to economy can be claimed as belonging to Biden. And then you can cut the tarrifs and make things improve.
Nah, he’ll make the Fed a political appointment and goose the economy that way, already seemed pretty annoyed that he didn’t have direct control of it last time and seemed to partially blame that for his loss. His voters will ignore the resulting inflation, say it’s awesome, and you won’t be able to convince them otherwise maybe until the really bad crash on the other side.
Even worse, he'll throw gasoline everywhere just like he did last time and throw the match right before he leaves the room. Fuel prices and the Afghanistan withdrawal were both done specifically with that in mind.
Afghanistan is one of those cases where I strongly agree with the idea (and with his pushing back on DoD crying about how it’d take a really long time to pull out the troops and equipment—I get it’s landlocked but it’s a small force, you control the air, and resistance on the ground is near-zero, so if that’s super-hard for you, guess you’re bad at a really basic part of your job and we should be very concerned) but absolutely hate the inept execution, like the dumb-shit bargain with the Taliban. Cracking down on Chinese cheating on free trade is another—yes, more of that, but be less shit about it please?
> while literally no average person is seeing that
I mean, frankly as a Gen Z man I don’t understand this at all. I’m doing a lot better than I was 4 years ago. Finished school, got a good job, etc.
I was about to retire early, with the risk to the ACA I’m not sure.
I guess, from a Western-European perspective, the problem is that with the choice of Democrats and Republicans you get the choice between right-wing and ultra right-wing. Having right-wing politics that funnel money from the poor to the rich, or the tenants to the landlords, is in the interest of the financial backers of both parties. Messaging-wise, the Democrats have always been "more honest" (low bar, it's hard to be more dishonest/convoluted than Trump anyway), so maybe that's why Trump seems to come out ahead there.
You're touching on one of the struggles for many left leaning voters and why the democratic party struggles with enthusiasm and to win. To many on the left, the party markets itself as "the least bad option" and thus "the only choice". Anyone in sales would tell you that is not the best pitch.
I get where you're coming and the Dems' greatest sin is probably pulling the rug under progressive candidates in primaries of some elections, but at some point you gotta look at the things Biden/Harris did for all Americans as president and consider if it passes the threshold from "least bad option" to, dare I say, "good, but obviously not perfect option". Things like increasing the threshold for overtime pay, an anti-redlining mortgage lending framework, pushing the HHS to reschedule cannabis to schedule III, actually showing up on a picket line, etc.
I agree with all of that but I'm not the voting block that should be seeing that and voting democrat but not. To those people it will never matter how many incremental gains the dems push through. They only see the big things not attempted or failed, that the party is once again running a uninspiring insider, that they are being told who they have to vote for because there is no other option, and that having done that last time not much in their day to day lives has improved.
I don't care about that but the people that do make or break the democratic party. Unfortunately the democrats seem incapable of learning that if you don't appeal to those people, they will lose.
Reminds me of the quote by Gore Vidal:
"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat."
I'm not sure I understand the criticism. This is bad? People like property rights. Progressives like them. Conservatives like them. Economies like them.
Meanwhile there are substantial differences between the two wings, what services and programs they think government should provide, how problem solving should be approached.
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normally I'd agree about Trump's honesty, but in the debate and subsequent Harris interviews I saw a lot more deflection, misdirection, lies/mistruthes and non-answers than I did from trump. Sure trump says some wild things which are often only 50% ish true. But kamala would openly call things lies that were verifiable fact, those are lies too, and she lied a lot.
I dont want to get into a flame war, 50% is a generous number, since many times he isn’t speaking full intelligible sentences. Trump gets a pass on absolutely outrageous things, which he creates by the second. I feel that he is so bad, and so incessant with his content creation., that he causes an integer overflow in the audience. At that point, he is once again assessed with an average rubric.
I feel that his success here suggests that this is a strategy that will succeed globally, and that many political candidates are going to be emulating his “style”.
Yes, the Pandora's box is about to open and show us how bad we've had it, by showing us how much worse could really be.
Hey, this is what works, we have to get rid of our emotions and feelings about it. Be productive, efficient and deliver. /s
I think you perceived that because you expected Trump to lead the election and her to follow in his wake. She deflected to the things she wanted to talk about to a usual degree, and did not lie more than usual for core-Democrat politicians, which is not a lot. They just don't address what they don't want to talk about.
Ultimately she lost, and probably should have even more aggressively emulated him by promising things that aren't even real. Like how do you circle the promise that the war in Ukraine will be over tomorrow. I'm not making it up, that was repeated ad nauseum on the campaign trail. I guess all that matters is winning.
> I saw a lot more deflection, misdirection, lies/mistruthes and non-answers than I did from trump
Yup, it just came without the crass jokes and the mannerisms but I guess the confidence was pretty high that people would forgive her because she's just "not trump".
I think they totally bungled the messaging and stuck their head in the sand. With all the billions of campaign money, they spent most of it calling trump a fascist or orange idiot a bunch more times, hoping that's enough to bump voter numbers. There is a dose-response curve there and after some point it just doesn't yield linear results.
All politicians lie. They're only ever called out by the "other side".
My theory is that legal sports betting makes the economy seem artificially worse for a lot of people. It has had a measurable impact on bankruptcy rates, and is causing a lot of self-inflicted financial stress. Trump's main platform is that your problems aren't your fault, and I think that resonates well with people struggling because they are throwing out their disposable income every month.
I’ve never bet on sports but watched my grocery bill skyrocket. A few years ago I posted year-over-year grocery prices and in aggregate the bill was 50% over the course of 12-months. Since then we’ve seen insurance and utilities skyrocket, creature comforts like streaming services are all up. CPI may say one thing, but my checkbook feels much worse. Disposable income has all gone to sustain a reduced quality of life.
What do you think will happen to grocery prices now?
It depends on how gov spending changes. If the federal government stops hemorrhaging debt hopefully they stay at current levels.
This is peak “tone-deaf coastal elite”.
Does that really impact a lot of people? The total size of the legal sports betting industry is $11B, which is only about 0.04% of US GDP.
https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/39563784/sports...
I am not on Facebook, but my wife is. According to her there are countless posts from women complaining that their husbands / boyfriends are wasting their money on sports betting.
So while it's a small percentage of GDP, it is a much larger percentage of their budget.
I am Facebook friends with a lot of women and haven't seen a single such complaint. That's obviously not a real population survey but if it was really a widespread problem then I think I would have seen it.
I'll have to ask her, but I'm pretty sure that this is in closed groups and not people posting about it on their wall.
When looking at some profiles of celebrating Trump supporters on Reddit, basically 100% had a large number of posts in sports betting topics, or Wall Street/day trading topics. An interesting demographic overlap there.
Back in my day I remember when the same anti-porn conservatives would also tell you that gambling bans are good. I can't believe that conservatives gave up on moral purity.
> Women's healthcare
Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses. They did nothing to help with Women's healthcare. I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Combined...
The 111th Congress was the only time in the last 20 years Democrats had a filibuster-proof trifecta and that was for 72 days. [1]
That was the government that gave us the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
The other Democrat trifecta was the 117th Congress[2] but if you look that's only with independents in the Senate that caucused with Democrats. Obviously also not filibuster proof.
That's the government that gave us the CHIPS act.
Think about how often parties are in power and they can't even fill appointed positions because of partisan opposition during confirmation, let alone pass legislation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/117th_United_States_Congress
> That was the government that gave us the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
Aka Romneycare, originally put forth by the Heritage Foundation. If that's the best Democrats can do, no wonder people aren't too optimistic about them.
The Democratic Party are the ones that passed it. The Republicans didn't, not when they held the legislature, not when they held the presidency and the legislature. Even when Romney signed it in MA (to his credit), it came from the Democratic Party held state legislature.
And its passage has helped millions, people I know personally and probably people you know personally. Maybe anyone who'd ever heard the phrase "pre-existing condition" before. It's one of the single most effective and widely beneficial government efforts in our lifetimes.
It's not that fact that Democrats did it by taking the best parts of an opposition party policy isn't impressive, it's that the unseriousness of Republicans when it comes to their own ostensible policy ideas is depressive.
The ACA is not ideal, but is the line between life and death for millions of Americans.
If people were logical like you suggest, they wouldn't vote for an even worse situation. Yet they constantly do, so I'm sorry I cannot accept "logic" as a reason for the latest vote. People voted something, they got something, and they will get something back (where all those somethings aren't even important for elections). No, I'm not sarcastic, also not joking. Campaign and vote looked as seen from here absolutely bonkers.
It's not a good reason to vote republicans but it is a good reason to be apathetic about democrats and the political system in general.
From Wikipedia:
The public health insurance option, also known as the public insurance option or the public option, is a proposal to create a government-run health insurance agency that would compete with other private health insurance companies within the United States. The public option is not the same as publicly funded health care, but was proposed as an alternative health insurance plan offered by the government. The public option was initially proposed for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but was removed after the independent US senator for Connecticut Joe Lieberman threatened a filibuster.
As a result, Congress did not include the public option in the bill passed under reconciliation. The public option was later supported by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in the 2016 and 2020 elections and multiple other Democratic candidates, including the current President, Joe Biden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_insurance_option
The reason Democrats couldn't do more is because not enough people voted for them, so they can only be angry with themselves. We would have had a public option if Congress didn't have to rely on the Blue Dog democrats. IMO Democratic voters have unreasonable expectations for their politicians and Republicans basically have none. Did Trump face any consequence to failing to pass a border bill during his administration?
Obama was apathetic at best in pursuing the public option once he got elected. He made a deal with the hospital lobby early on to drop it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211027180129/https://www.nytim...
It's not exactly secret knowledge of who would opposed a public option because their constituents fear "death panels."
> filibuster-proof
Well there's your problem. The GOP knows that you need to sidestep those kind of tedious anachronisms in order to wield power effectively and get what you want. The Dems needed to learn that lesson several administrations ago.
>Further, the democrats have been in power for 12/16 years, and multiple years controlling all 3 houses.
When was this exactly? The last time democrats controlled presidency and both houses was during Obama's first term and they passed the most historic overhaul of healthcare in this country, which was a huge win for women's healthcare.
And they had a hell of a time getting it passed, too. There’s no way it would have gone through if it included a hot ticket item like abortion rights.
The "Stupak amendment" was exactly that. There were a group of Dems who wanted concessions on federal funding that were holding out until that amendment went in the bill.
That something I find that the left/liberals/progressives doesnt get.
The democrat party is not progressive. If they ever have 60 seats in the senate they will fracture and argue with the progressives elements. Most of the democrat party’s constituents are conservative, religious. Most of the minorities they take for granted are not onboard with nonbinary identities, or anything to do with fetus elimination. They just are afraid of republicans for one reason or another.
> The last time democrats controlled presidency and both houses was during Obama's first term and they passed the most historic overhaul of healthcare in this country, which was a huge win for women's healthcare.
Was it? From a foreign perspective it doesn't seem to have changed the conversation around US healthcare at all.
Before ACA you could be denied health insurance or coverage due to pre-existing conditions (or they could charge you so much that it was infeasible to get insurance).
This was huge because if you ever lost insurance and got new insurance (switched jobs) then you were often screwed.
ACA defined essential benefits. Before ACA insurance usually didn't cover things mental healthcare. Required coverage of preventative care/screenings/reproductive care for women.
Annual and lifetime coverage limits were banned. Your health insurance could no longer drop you because you got an expensive to treat cancer.
The amount of desperately needed consumer protections ACA added were immense.
Sure there are problems with ACA, especially the marketplace part of it, but overall it was a big change to healthcare in the US.
> Sure there are problems with ACA
That’s putting it mildly. Sure, the ACA was, in many respects, a big improvement over what came before it. But it’s still outrageously broken. Let’s consider the perspective of a person who wants health insurance:
1. You mostly want to be insured via your employer, and you mostly get screwed if you leave your job. The financial disincentives to insuring yourself are huge unless you qualify for the subsidies.
2. For some bizarre reason, you can use only buy insurance at some times of the year.
3. You more or less have to buy insurance through a website that is massively and incomprehensibly bad. Want to figure out what that insurance covers? It’s sort of doable, but it sure isn’t easy.
4. Whether or not you will get to fill a given prescription still seems arbitrary and vaguely malicious.
5. The whole system rubs the insane list prices of healthcare in your face, almost continuously. For drugs, even small amounts of Internet searching points out how much cheaper they are basically anywhere else.
It’s really hard to be excited about the ACA.
(For added fun, and this isn’t really the ACA’s fault but it sure is a failure of affordability and sure seems like a massive failure of government: check out hims.com. Pulling a random example, “generic for Cialis” is at least 3x the price on hims.com as it is via GoodRx.)
And if you are relatively healthy and able to pay your regular doctor bills out of pocket, ACA made catastrophic insurance illegal (because of the minimum requirements). It's sort of like making car insurance require $50 copays to the mechanic. Sure, it's nice if you need an engine rebuild, but paying for all that makes the insurance a lot more expensive if you have a reliable car. There's no need for me to pay the doctor's bill and the insurance company's profit+overhead, I'd like to have the option to pay normal stuff myself and only insure something too large for me to pay.
If healthy people could opt out of insurance, it would get really expensive for the not-so-healthy. That's why mandatory insurances are quite common.
Wheter it's a good idea to do this via private for-profit insurance and healthcare is another question. I prefer to just pay it via taxes.
This might not be quite what you want, but the ACA does allow for High Deductible Health Plans (HDHP). Those have consumers paying out of pocket for normal stuff, using a Health Savings Account (HSA).
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/high-deductible-health-p...
Which are, nonetheless, rather impressively worse in basically all respects than the old medically underwritten individual plans. Other than the fact that anyone can get them, of course.
I’m not saying that the ACA was a bad law. I’m saying that a not-so-nerdy voter contemplating whether ACA is a great achievement of the Democratic Party is likely to be unimpressed.
Worse in some ways, better in others. The old individual plans usually had serious limits on coverage of pre-existing conditions. And they had lifetime coverage limits which could be exhausted by a single serious illness or injury.
> It’s really hard to be excited about the ACA.
While your complains are all true and the ACA is a mess compared to any developed country, it is still very exciting to have the ACA. For anyone who was barred from getting insurance before, it is the lifesaver, literally.
Compared to other countries, ACA isn't very good (to put it mildly) but compared to how the US was before it, it is the most wonderful improvement ever.
Re: 2
You can use a broker (free to you) and get the same (regulated) plans. If your situation is at all complicated you should definitely use one. Probably even for “simple “ cases.
It was a great thing for the people who most needed healthcare, but it priced me (young at the time and healthy) out of the market. I went from having cheap employer-sponsored healthcare to not being able to afford it (literally from less than 10% to ~50% of my paycheck).
I'm from the other side of the Atlantic. Do you mind explaining how that happened?
To give you some context: every country is different here but usually we have an almost free healthcare system covering everything for everybody (but sometimes you have to wait for a long time) and private healthcare that is more expensive, usually faster but not necessarily better.
"usually faster but not necessarily better"
Here in the UK my wife and I have between us spent a fair bit on private medical care over the last year - in the case of my wife for cataract operation on both eyes and in my case dental implants and related procedures.
What I find amusing about private health care in the UK is that in each case I have ever used it they make it clear that if something goes seriously wrong they will take you to an NHS hospital.
>What I find amusing about private health care in the UK is that in each case I have ever used it they make it clear that if something goes seriously wrong they will take you to an NHS hospital.
Privatize the winnings, socialize the losses, the "free market" working as intended.
Most of the prices going up for young and healthy people is just the math insurance companies have to do when they can't deny people and have to provide more coverage.
The part where we don't have the free healthcare system is mostly due to politicians being afraid of socialism or being afraid of raising taxes or both and a very strong medical lobby that doesn't want the salaries of doctors (very high over here) to drop.
Imagine if you could buy car insurance after you crash your car.
Huh? The "car crash" in this analogy is "losing your job", which has nothing to do with your health profile.
And in that circumstance you are allowed to maintain your health insurance (COBRA) or buy a new plan ("qualifying life events," which also includes things like marriage and moving).
The comment you're responding to was alluding to if people could choose to not pay for health insurance until after they got injured or sick and then needed the benefits.
Can you explain this more to me? What does it mean to be unable to afford healthcare? As I understand, it is a law that you must have it, or you pay a fine to the IRS by your tax return. Do you really have no healthcare now?
Unable to afford healthcare is pretty straightforward, I think. My plan went from being a relatively small amount I would pay for peace of mind, to being a giant expense that would leave me destitute. As far as the fine, if it hadn't been revoked it would just come out of my tax return, so "paying" would have been no big deal. Yeah, still don't have healthcare. I realized I don't need it much and became more fatalistic after living without it.
There are no longer fines in your taxes for not having insurance. That law was revoked
Yeah, it was a pretty big change actually. You're right though, the conversation didn't change much even as access to healthcare did change.
Yeah, access. That’s what we were all freaking out about. Lack of access. That’s what makes our system different from the rest of the western world. Access. Glad we’re drowning in access.
They controlled the Presidency, House and Senate at the start of Biden's term.
Democrats held all Presidency, House, and Senate in the first two years of the Biden administration. 2021-2022
You need 60/100 votes to control the senate, which they did not have, so no, they didn’t hold the senate.
With a simple majority, they can change the rules of the Senate so that a simple majority will get a bill passed. The filibuster is not in the Constitution.
Manchin and Senna refused to do that, as the most conservative democrats in districts trump won by double digits. Thus they did not have the votes.
We are probably about to see that in action
someone doesn't understand how passing laws work. Just because you barely have a majority, does not mean you can do anything you want.
Can you elaborate? Genuinely curious!
sure: just because you barely have a majority, does not mean you can do anything you want.
Edited original comment to be more productive.
ah obama, the good old stable days.
The same reason the GOP didn't do anything about the border or gun rights when they had the chance. Why solve an issue when you can use it to get people to vote in the next election? Its a gamification of government. They are more concerned with keeping their jobs than governing.
Trump had the Wait in Mexico policy which was great. GOP never promised anything on gun rights, but Trump single-handedly banned bump stocks after the Las Vegas massacre which is more than Obama ever side on gun control.
And then his judges reversed the ban
I think a gun ban in the US is going to require a constitutional amendment to repeal the 2nd. Anything else is, at best, temporary.
No need. Just appoint ideological judges with no respect for precedent (that they disagree with).
> I have followed the issue closely, and I still don't understand what they Dems were going to do to keep abortion legal. If it's a state issue, how would the President change anything ? If it's national issue, why haven't they already done anything ?
They could pass a national law that protects a right to travel to other states for an abortion if your state bans them.
With the existence of the Senate filibuster, passing laws is very difficult even when you win. There are entire topics where significant reform is basically impossible, from anyone.
This is why America's supreme court is so important: One can argue that most federal level changes in the last 8 years cane from the court just changing their mind on what used to be settled precedent.
The filibuster has existed for a long time and yet Congress was still able to pass laws. I don’t give them a free pass for this, they need to learn to work together with the other party like we did in the past.
I expect they will end the filibuster
So why didn’t they?
Because they didn't have a majority in the last two years.
Do you live in the US? The first half of the Biden administration was hamstrung by Manchin, Sinema, and the Republicans. The Democrats had nominal control of the presidency and legislature but faced implacable resistance from the Republicans and these two nominally Democratic senators. Until the recent Supreme Court decision the US hasn't had a king.
And Manchin had no real chance of reelection anyway.
Controlling the house doesn't mean anything. Any minority easily control legislation with the ability of an easy filibuster. You seem to forget trump was in for 4 years as well with many split Congresses. You can't blame democrats for all the bad things for that period when one party (minority at times) is actively working for the 1%
Isn't it true that Roe should have been codified long ago? I wonder why that never happen like it did in Canada after Morgentaler
Because it was a critical fundraising topic for decades (on both sides, to be fair).
I don't exactly know how much of national politics is optimizing for fundraising rather than for making citizens' lives better, but it's clearly far too great.
More and more clearly.
Woah this is a very interesting point
conspiracies are not "very interesting point[s]"
The reality is that:
1. Abortion has always been one of the most divisive topics in the US
2. Roe vs. Wade to begin with was a very shaky legal hodgepodge based around right to privacy
3. Codifying something like that takes immense political might and public approval neither of which existed in a significant capacity
It’s not that divisive outside the political class.
60+% majorities have supported abortion as a right until near the end of the second trimester, and for the health of the mother after that (for 30+ years).
That is not the case. Support drops well below a majority after the first trimester, and always has.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/321143/americans-stand-abortion....
That's a popular misconception that has been shattered for well over a decade. That is nearly impossible with the filibuster, there was one slim window of 1 or 2 months in Obama's terms that they could have squeezed it in. Otherwise it's a fight to the death every time with the republicans in the Senate (filibuster)
The problem is the filibuster is a choice of the senate. They can at any time decide to do away with it, it’s not law and not a law of nature. But they don’t because it serves their interests to be able to throw their hands up in the air and not even have to try to pass legislation.
That's no something that is going to happen, -both- parties dearly love the filibuster, if it can just be done away with, against, precedence then it will become useless whenever a party gets the slimmest of majorities. I'm not sure how much longer it matters though, if this turns into a dictatorship
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/politics/15abortion.ht...
> "the first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act"
https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/us/obama-says-aborti...
> "I would like to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that result in women feeling compelled to get an abortion, or at least considering getting an abortion, particularly if we can reduce the number of teen pregnancies," Obama said.
Obama wanted to do that but couldn't
I mean.. it is technically not inaccurate, but it fails to account for the remaining portion of the balance of power.
That said, there were very few moments, where a given party had house, senate and presidency at the same time. And most of those moments were divided almost evenly in half so breaking ranks had a big effect.
I think what I am saying it is a tired talking point.
Can't remember where I read this but essentially most Americans are single issue voters on the economy. They just pick their second most important issue when the economy is humming along nicely.
The economy has been fine for many peoples working lives during ZIRP. But when people feel like their struggling to afford diapers and cereal most other issues become secondary.
Then all those people are in for a heck of a rude awakening. I can tell you what’s going to happen to the cost of everyday goods with a 100% tariff placed on top, and the answer isn’t: they’re going down.
And the Harris campaign's answer to this was...?
Keep in mind that this is after the Biden admin/Congress gutted half of his proposed infrastructure reform. That half was already compromised compared to what progressives wanted, and they STILL couldn't pass it. Guess who stayed home yesterday?
When you say, "Your only choice to save democracy is to vote for me," reasonable and rational people conclude that democracy is already done for and simply don't vote for anyone. And there were warnings that this would happen - like the primaries in Michigan - but establishment Democrats didn't listen (or didn't care). So, now, here we are. How's that for a rude awakening?
Populism only works because the average voter doesn't understand economics or politics. Or much of anything they're voting for really.
What “everyday goods” are getting a 100% tariff? Is there a list somewhere?
This has been my thought as well. Inflation was high, so low-propensity voters against the current party show up while those for the current party don't. It will take some time to see what the actual voting shifts were, but the economy has always been an accurate predictor.
The general consensus was to avoid high unemployment as that would anger voters.
Now we know high inflation is much much worse in the minds of voters.
Probably true, honestly. High inflation impacts everyone, where high unemployment probably affects fewer people directly.
The money from ZIRP mostly goes to the upper class as it props up asset values - stocks, land & housing, luxury goods, etc.
In general easy lending benefits the richest the most - that's why you saw such a growing split between the wealth of the richest and poorest after throwing away the gold standard.
>The money from ZIRP mostly goes to the upper class as it props up asset values - stocks, land & housing, luxury goods, etc.
One that people tend to miss: compensation for high-income professionals. When that gets bid up, so does the price of everything they spend money on. Education/childcare, personal electronics, healthcare, transportation, food, etc. It's not just the wealthy and ultra-wealthy; when the upper middle class can pay and not feel pain, that's taken as a signal to jack up prices across the board.
I would most certainly categorize what is commonly known as the "upper middle class" as wealthy. Upper-middle usually has a sizable wealth, mainly in real estate, equities, etc. So it is not only the rich and ultra-rich (but of course them benefit from this the most if they don't do anything too stupid). Of course all of these terms and definitions are quite fuzzy so the whole argument hinges on some implicit agreement as to the specifics.
ZIRP was the cause of that pain.
In Portugal the same two parties have been consistentently fucking up the economy for the past 30 years with no end in sight. It's comically bad.
They then announce pensions for majority groups like the elderly and get voted into power by the same groups they are financing.
Democratic messaging really failed. The economy was a winnable issue for them. Trump's promises (20% broad tariff, mass deportation, make the Fed a political office, trade wars) would devastate the economy and cause significant inflation. Even Elon Musk admits that Trump's plans will tank the economy. https://x.com/whstancil/status/1851265385909092565
Now right wing commentators are saying that Trump won't actually do what he promised.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/11/wh...
Most of the stuff he promised he won't do. Simply because of the sheer complexity and resources involved. It's not in his nature to focus and work out complex issues. Imagine the logistics required to simply apprehend, process and deport 10-15 million people at scale. He'll probably do better at closing the border than any past president. That's for certain. But actually deporting all undocumented migrants already within the country. yeah, that's not happening.
At best , its going to be performative on many things. Even with structural changes to the administrative state that the GOP's project 2025 seems to be promising - it's harder than it appears.
Regarding tariffs - China is currently in an economy slump. Trump being transactional in nature , its certain the Chinese will be open to bilateral agreements. So I don't see tariffs lasting long.
He and Vance both said they would focus on criminal deportation first. Considering that most illegals breaking laws are just let loose free to commit crimes again by left-leaning states - those folks will now get to be kicked out like they should have been.
Then, he will apply his rule of: no adding regulation, unless you first remove regulation. The one-in, two-out program to cut regulatory costs. Considering he definitely did this in his last administration and did save ~$100 billion, reasonably certain he will do this again.
yeah no doubt - he's going after the remain-in the U.S migrant policy that Biden implemented shortly after taking office in 2021. Those are going to be low hanging fruits. Same for other groups of migrants on temporary status, since they're easy to find. But I was referring to the 10-12 million that have been in the U.S for years. Those are going to be a lot harder, unless he has the infrastructure and resources in place to manage the logistics. Not saying they won't attempt it. But they'll hardly make a dent in the numbers. That's a huge number and will have a huge impact on the labor market. Whether positive or negative remains to be seen.
It's not in Trump's nature to do the work, but all he has to do is sign the bill. It's staffers that do the work.
In 2016 the staffers were mostly Bush people, and the 2016 presidency was mostly a Bush repeat.
In 2024 the staffers are going to be much different. If Trump gets a trifecta all bets are off -- we'll get policy set by whoever gets Trump's ear.
> right wing commentators are saying that Trump won't actually do what he promised
I expect a lot of voters actually thought that would be the case: "yeah yeah he has to make noise during the campaign, once he gets in he'll just give us some more tax breaks, he's not crazy."
I guess we'll see if that's the case.
>But when people feel like their struggling to afford diapers and cereal most other issues become secondary.
Not entirely unreasonable.
Now, if only they had the brains to realize that the economy during the current term was shaped by the decisions made in the previous term.
Cue Trump's 2nd term being propped up by everything Biden did to un-fuck Trump's 1st term.
Poe's law comes to mind for me here. But I guess this comment is sincere.
Under the Biden/Harris administration even software engineers were hurting and couldn't find work. Unprecedented
> even software engineers were hurting and couldn't find work. Unprecedented
Is the tech bust of 2000 so easily forgotten? And then the global financial crisis of 2008?
Yes, especially if your username is "mlcrypto."
It was a combination of factors: zero interest rate policies changed to fight inflation and the Tax Cut Jobs act of 2017 changes (section 174) requiring capitalization of everything softwsre development related except bug fixes went into effect for tax year 2022.
If software developer salaries cannot be expensed and it’s now 5 times more expensive to borrow money to expand, jobs will be lost.
Oh, and the TCJA was championed and signed into law by then President Trump.
>and the Tax Cut Jobs act of 2017 changes (section 174) requiring capitalization of everything softwsre development related except bug fixes went into effect for tax year 2022.
Seems like a stretch. "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States"[1] was up into the beginning of 2022. The tax changes were known in advance for years. If the tax code changes were a significant factor, why did companies hire a bunch of people in 2021, knowing that when 2022 rolled around there would be massive taxes?
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
> Seems like a stretch. "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States"[1] was up into the beginning of 2022. The tax changes were known in advance for years. If the tax code changes were a significant factor, why did companies hire a bunch of people in 2021, knowing that when 2022 rolled around there would be massive taxes?
Gruez... Income Taxes are paid the year after they're incurred. Tax Year 2022 is filed and paid in 2023. The effects wouldn't start being felt until March 2023 at the earliest.
Also, literally everyone involved in tax policy thought it would be repealed. Heck, the IRS had to scramble to release guidance because they thought it was going to be repealed. The IRS didn't release detailed guidance on Section 174 until September 2023 -- six months after tax filings were due (a number of businesses asked for an extension to file but still had to pay the taxes as if they had filed on time). https://www.cohnreznick.com/insights/additional-guidance-irs...
The Section 174 capitalization for software development was included in the TCJA as a way to 'pay' for the tax cuts, but no one seriously believed it would stay in the law. The problem is congress is very dysfunctional, so once it was signed into law you'd need a congress to get it out. It's no surprise the congress in 2023 was more dysfunctional than the one in 2017.
Also, in 2021 interest rates were historically low, and as I stated initially the dual loss of the ZIRP environment and the massive change to how software developer policies worked together to kill software development jobs.
>Gruez... Income Taxes are paid the year after they're incurred. Tax Year 2022 is filed and paid in 2023. The effects wouldn't start being felt until March 2023 at the earliest.
First off, 2022 taxes are not paid in 2023. Corporations have to pay taxes quarterly, not yearly.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Second, no CFO is going to going to accept "this year's engineering expenses might be 100% more expensive (because we can't deduct it), but it's only due next year so we can keep on hiring!". The whole point of accounting is modeling the company's books to reflect its financial situation as accurately as possible, not just looking at whatever the bank balance is. This includes modeling future tax obligations.
Gruez. You pay payroll and estimated taxes quarterly. As long as you hit 90% of your actual tax burden, there are no penalties. You file income tax yearly and that sets you up for both your remaining burden that you didn't pay in estimated taxes, and your future estimated taxes. The trick is when you go to file by March 15th, you may or may not have accounted for all of the vagaries of tax changes -- and in fact the IRS pushes out guidance throughout the year that will affect the filing process.
For companies that were expensing 100% of developer salaries (which was a lot of them -- capitalization is very cash intensive), having to now eat 80% of that salary as profit and only being able to deduct 20% is devastating.
1171(!) small software companies have come together to try to get congress to repeal their changes to Section 174. They haven't been successful yet, but here's hoping that by further education of folks like yourself, they will be. https://ssballiance.org/
Yeah. This is a thing lot of people don't understand or see . When they think of Software Developers - they tend to focus on SV companies or FANG. But most software devs work in corporate IT. In that world, IT is a cost center and rarely a profit center. So when cost of anything rises and they need to cut back to boast revenue numbers - it's always the cost center that takes the first hit. In this case, the cost of borrowing dramatically went up.
>Under the Biden/Harris administration even software engineers were hurting and couldn't find work. Unprecedented
Sure.
And why do you think that might be?
In other words, do you think policy changes have instantaneous effect on issues like unemployment, or perhaps they take some time?
It is rather annoying that larger policy changes easily take 2-4 years to actually affect anything so current party always gets both blame and thanks for the changes made by the previous administration.
Democrats insisted on COVID restrictions that were more like religion than science and then they just stopped and everyone was fine. The medical outcomes good and bad still happened, some of them just delayed.
The length and intensity of the restrictions were unnecessary, and the economic consequences of giving away trillions of dollars during them are why we’re in this economic situation.
What would have changed if the restrictions were 6 or 12 months shorter? Nothing.
Not true, restrictive states had significantly lower mortality. Mask mandates being the most significant factor. The largest gaps in mortality occur in the latter half of 2020 and the latter half of 2021, during Delta.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...
This ended up being true but is easy to say retrospectively though! I was in (irrationally) mortal fear everyday.
Maybe if Democrats just played the republican card and refused to sign stimulus package just out of spite we would not be here. Same with the bank bailout in 2009.
You can look at my posting history from the time, I was saying the same thing during the latter half of the lockdown
That's survivorship bias and thus your comment is just an opinion and nothing more. During restrictions covid vaccines were rapidly handed out and improved upon - this undoubtedly halted the spread of a virus that ultimately killed 1,212,000 people. So please go ask those peoples family and those people themselves if 'everyone was fine'
Well, if you remember the 2016 elections, Trump was saying that the economy was extremely bad and disastrous. Then, within his first month of presidency, suddenly, the same numbers were extremely good because of him. During the Obama presidency, there had been a growth of 227000 jobs per month which became a growth of only 36000 jobs during the Trump years. During the last two years of Obama, the annual median household increased $4800, but only $1400 during the first two years of Trump. And then, under Biden the same annual median income was of $3250. And I could go on like that, except on the house prices which is the area where the pattern does not stand. So there are two things here: - Even if has been saying for the last months/years that the economy was a disaster,Trump will say within the first month of his presidency that the economy is already doing better immediately, while the numbers will be the very same at first. And when the economy will falter later on just like during his first term, his supporters won't mind because... - This election was not at all about the economy. This argument is an excuse for the real reasons why many Americans vote: more and more are susceptible to the cult of personality and to the progression of the most radical right-wing extremism ideas.
Yeah. Unless a POTUS is in for 8 years they almost never get to experience the full results of their economic policies.
Biden inherited an inflation time bomb which has been handled. I expect Trump will claim he fixed inflation the first report that comes out after the inauguration.
"inflation time bomb". I never saw that term before. What was the primary cause of simultaneous inflation in all highly advanced economies, and how was Trump responsible for the US component?
He wasn't responsible for all of it. COVID supply chain disruption obviously played a huge part, but it's like everyone has forgotten that Trump also sent out a huge amount of money[1]. We can debate if that was the wrong/right move, but it's annoying when people blame Biden for the inflation that inevitably came once the economy turned back around. Trump has as much if not more responsibility depending on how you look at it. Meanwhile, the Fed under a Biden administration has seemingly engineered a soft landing.
Trump also pressed SA to cut oil production to help prop up gas prices in the US [2]. So when the economy turned demand surged back pushing prices higher.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/coronavirus-aid-relief-and-econ...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...
A thousand times this. I don't know that Trump could have done a better job at economic sabotage when in office the first time. Printed trillions of dollars of undirected helicopter money when monetary velocity was low, which immediately went into asset inflation ("the stock market is great"). Then when things started moving again, it all started chasing goods and we got broad price inflation on top of acute shortages. The fact that the democrats just let the republicans hang Trump's economic destruction around their neck really shows how utterly inept they are at messaging. I shudder to think what inflation will be at in four years after a return to ZIRP corporate welfare and the next national emergency that's left to fester.
They do have an instantaneous effect. The unemployment rate is toggled using interest rates and the impact is seen immediately.
> The biggest issue on people's minds was the economy.
Which is kinda bizzare to me as a European - American salaries and economic output are growing the fastest of basically any developed economy, _especially_ in the poorer segements of society. By all accounts, post-COVID Dem policies have been incredibly succcessful.
But that's not good enough?!
American wealth isn't uniformly distributed. And as soon as you fall below a threshold of poverty in the US you feel it 10x more painfully than an equally poor person in Europe.
The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost. He needs to magic the money from somewhere or simply die. Such a context for the story will sound utterly bizarre to almost all Europeans (including Russians).
> The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost
At the risk of going off topic, this is a popular, but incorrect meme. Walter could have had enough money for his cancer treatment, especially after getting the offer of paying it off by his former cofounders. He started selling drugs to provide for his family because his cancer was terminal. (And continued because of his own hubris.)
I watched it long time so forgot the exact details. But you are saying he could have had enough money from his cofounders, but that was still after he decided to start drug dealing. So how is that refuting that the initial trigger for his drug making was to make enough money for his treatment?
he declined the offer
Multiple offers, in fact.
One in the very beginning of the show, when Walter’s old friend Elliott offers him a job at his company (that Walter originally created with him, but later quit, and then it ended up turning into a very successful business afterwards). With the explicit mention of their health insurance being able to cover all the costs of his treatment.
Then later in the show, Elliott and his wife straight up offered him money to cover everything, feeling that Walter deserves it (not in the least part, for being an original cofounder who was unlucky and quit right before the company got big).
There were more moments like those that i keep forgetting, but claiming that Walter started manufacturing drugs as some last resort to cover his medical bills is complete revisionism.
I think the point they're making is "Walter White is a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer" would still be true even if he stopped dealing drugs after he was offered money.
While I mostly agree with your overall point about wealth distribution in the US vs Europe (based on my purely anecdotal understanding of Europe), that Breaking Bad analogy I keep hearing over the years is just wrong in terms of what happened in the show (even though that analogy being bad doesn’t defeat your larger point at all).
Walter (the protagonist) didn’t start manufacturing drugs as the last resort to pay medical bills. From the get-go, Walter got offered a job by his former co-founder friend Elliott (who ended up turning their startup into a successful corp, while Walter ended up quitting and becoming a teacher), with the explicit mention of their health insurance being sufficient to cover any medical expenses Walter might incur.
That happened literally in the first few episodes of the show. Walter refuses because of his stupid pride. Later on in the show, Elliott and his wife straight up offer Walter to cover all medical costs (current and future ones), and he still refused. He had many many fantastic outs that didn’t require him to continue manufacturing drugs (or even starting to do so in the first place).
I am mostly upset about this inaccuracy, because it undercuts one of the most important aspects (if not *the* most important aspect) of the show. It is a story about a man who lived a life full of regrets, feels impotent, and found an excuse to do all the bad things that make him feel good, self-important, and inflate his ego to crazy highs, all without feeling any remorse whatsoever.
I don't see how it refutes the broader point that not having socialised medicine creates all kinds of diabolical dynamics in society that punishes you as soon as you fall out of the system for any reason.
For example if I understood correctly he got "punished" by the system for preferring to work as a teacher than remain a cofounder and ended up losing his private health insurance this way.
Also, I think that the fact that his wife offered to burn her savings to fund his medical expense will be very difficult for most men to accept it is not really an "out", especially with the survival rate of cancer, you might end up burning her saving and then leaving her fend off for the kids by herself. Also what happens if he took the offer then she got cancer or they got hit by another big medical bill?
> I don't see how it refutes the broader point that not having socialised medicine creates all kinds of diabolical dynamics in society that punishes you as soon as you fall out of the system for any reason.
It doesn’t, which is why I said “while I […] agree with your larger point about wealth distribution” in my original reply. My gripe was about the overplayed and incorrect “Breaking Bad is about a teacher who got pushed to manufacture drugs due to medical bills” trope, not about your larger point.
> if I understood correctly he got "punished" by the system for preferring to work as a teacher than remain a cofounder and ended up losing his private health insurance this way.
He had that private health insurance waiting for him, as Elliott instantly offered Walter his position back upon hearing the bad news. Walter simply refused that offer and decided that getting involved in manufacturing meth was more fun and rewarding to his ego.
> Also, I think that the fact that his wife offered to burn her savings to fund his medical expense will be very difficult for most men to accept it is not really an "out"
Walter’s wife didn’t offer that. It was Elliott (the cofounder) and his wife that offered it, both of whom are close friends of Walter and are multimillionaires due to their company’s success. They themselves said that for them it wouldn’t be a financial hit at all, and they insist on helping out their close friend in need.
Sort of. As far as I remember, his primary motivation wasn't to get treatment (he actually doesn't want to get treated at all at first), it was to leave behind enough money for his family.
The healthcare in America is so bad you have to be a drug kingpin to afford it.
Yeah man, we usually die waiting for treatment instead. I had cervical spine issue which made it impossible for me to work, walk for longer than few minutes, sit in certain positions. I would need to wait 3 years to get it fixed in my EU country and that is after few years of paying more in healthcare contributions than some of the most expensive premium insurance plans in US.
I paid out of pocket to be able to function. Whatever the solution to American healthcare costs is it's not what we do in EU.
Yep this is what a lot of the socialists in the US don't understand - they think you'll get the same level and speed of treatment in EU as the US, you just pay much less.
That is not the case - as mentioned even in pretty serious cases you might need to wait 1 year or more for something that should be done ASAP, on top of that the quality of the doctors isn't the best. This is especially bad for well-off people (as in middle class) as you pay e.g. 500-1000 USD a month and can't even get a basic check-up.
This doesn't paint an accurate picture of socialized healthcare either.
If you go east and look at Japan[0] which also has socialized healthcare the quality of healthcare there is very good
[0]: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264225817-5-en.p...
Right but you also have everyone pay for health insurance in Japan. If you don't pay of it and suddenly decide that you want it, you have to pay the back owed portion as well before it is applied.
Japan is an outlier in most societal comparisons because they have a unique trait called "homogeneous monoculture with a strong adherence"
You end up with cool things like high trust, and shitty things like intense racism.
Japan isn't an outlier, there are other countries with universal healthcare that are also high functioning, like Canada (Ranked 7th in public health and 5th in quality of life), Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden.
Not to mention if it was on the median so bad for citizens you'd see more broad support for repealing it in countries where it is supposedly isn't working, but that isn't really happening either.
Status quo bias is powerful
Yeah and in some countries with private insurance healthcare is good as well (Switzerland). It's just not about public vs private. It's about sensible regulation so services can be delivered cheaper and cartels/monopolies are curtailed.
I agree. The only model we have for this in the US currently is Medicare. It’s the only version of universal healthcare we have and would be the most obvious way to implement it
>The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost.
This is an incredibly bad example and a meme that clueless people (usually Europeans) love to bring up time and time again but if you watch the show carefully, you'll see that Walter actually had health coverage for his chemo therapy from his school insurance but he resorted to selling meth because he wanted the best chemo therapist in the sate of New Mexico, and one of the top 10 in the whole US, so he had to go privately out of pocket. In Europe you'd also need a boatload of cash or a top private insurance if you'd choose the best private chemo therapist and clinic in the country outside the public health system where Walter would be on long waiting lists if he were in Europe.
And reason number two, he mainly sold meth because he had a huge ego that prevented him from accepting charity for his treatment and he loved the danger and thrill of it in his mid-life crisis to compensate for being a looser/push-over his entire life holding his career back despite his scientific brilliance, nothing to do with the US health system, that's why the show's writing and character development was so good.
Anyway, pointing at a fantasy TV show as an argument for real life issues is just silly. It's not real.
"In Europe you'd also need a boatload of cash or a top private insurance if you'd choose the best private chemo therapist and clinic in the country outside the public health system where Walter would be on long waiting lists if he were in Europe."
This is extremely incorrect take. Ask anyone in France, Germany or the UK. The quality of outcome is extremely small between public and private even for the most complicated procedure. Perhaps in private you will get a better experience in terms of customer service.
In fact some of the most notable experts usually work for both the public medical sector and run their own clinic.
This is as incorrect as saying in Germany you have to go to a private university to get access to the best professors.
There are also loads of datapoint supporting the "fantasy" take of the series. For example loads of american only start going for certain cancer screening at age 65 when it becomes free, this can visibly be seen in the data where there is a sudden jump in detection at this age. Again, this kind of behaviour would sound very bizarre for most Europeans.
Long waiting lists for chemo? You don't know a whole lot about oncological care in Europa do you.
I'm not a Yank so I've got no clue about the reality on the ground, but is that actually true? Sure, the statistics say GDP is growing or whatever, but do real, normal working people feel the effects of those bumps? Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more. Companies are doing great, and so are people in the stock market, but is that representative of the rest of the country? I suspect it isn't
The economic term-of-art is the GINI coefficient. And, yeah, the US's GINI is crazy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
The average person sees grocery costs rising, and is unable to move because they can’t replace the interest rate on the loan they have. This feels quite squeezing.
> Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more.
Is there hope that this will change under Republican government?
I highly doubt it, but it obviously also wasn't happening under the Democrats, or at the very least it wasn't being perceived as if things were/could improve.
Eventually people get tired and listen to populists. That's why they get elected, because they'll tell you what you want to hear. Whether they actually have any plans of doing it or not is almost irrelevant when you're dealing with bullshit on both sides.
The only way to beat populists is to have actual concrete plans, which as far as I saw as a non-USAian at least, the democrats barely ever spoke of, and it seems to be the common sentiment across this thread as well.
Denmark is a good example of what I mean, they had a surge in right-wing populist parties due to people's ongoing and ignored issues with Illegal immigration (among other things). Know what the moderates, who were in power, did? They adjusted their policies accordingly with actual concrete plans that they set in motion. And to no one's surprise, the populist parties died down and people calmed down in general once they saw that action was actually being taken.
On the contrary - “Let the millionaires/billionaires do whatever they want” has been a core pillar of their platform for decades.
To be fair, Democrats are historically only marginally better in that regard.
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Yesterday I went out for lunch. By myself. At a local Mexican restaurant. I ordered a burrito and a bottled coke. My bill was $18. Four years ago, that same meal at that same restaurant was $8. My salary has not doubled with inflation, but many of my costs have.
No fancy economics equations can compensate for continual sticker shock at the consumer level.
Same, small town, and the prices keep changing so fast in the last five years that the restaurants went from relatively nice durable menus to cheap little paper plastic flaps, because they kept having to reprint the menus again and again with all the price hikes.
The rapid change in prices have been a lot to adjust to, but consumers seem OK with it because they keep buying expensive goods.
I would be surprised if everyone stopped buying food...
If I understand the argument, we're collapsing the world order over the price of a burrito?
Voters in small town America neither care about nor understand geopolitics. They do understand and care about the price of burritos. Have you seen any recent interviews of voters and their stated concerns? Have you seen the exit polling demographics by education level?
That burrito is the world for many people, and it’s already collapsed.
Could this be that if you don't have a social safety net things are much more worrying economically ?
And because of that, voters have routinely installed the party for 50 years that promises to cut welfare?
I am not saying they're right. If you are told that welfare is a burden to society/communism and that you have to fend for yourself then yes you will only care about "the economy" and not ask for more welfare
We Americans are thinking the same thing. The reality is that America is in the midst of a dramatic cultural decline—especially in rural America, which has become more frivolous, callous, and undignified, even if they're no more uneducated than twenty years ago.
I believe I can answer this as I personally saw it as an issue ( with the disclaimer that I think neither candidate even suggested appropriate corrective actions ). Our household is above average for US and the state and yet I still have near constant drain on my cash reserves on a regular basis. In other words, my real purchasing power decreased DESPITE some increase in absolute salary numbers.
You should look where the economy is growing and where the salaries are growing. It's not uniform at all.
The entire situation (as an EU country citizen who moved to another EU country) and the narratives around it are funny to me because they're the same as the ones going around for years in my birth country.
"Side X should learn they should get better candidates, otherwise people are not going to show up" way of thinking included, which has only led to further decline as the "conservatives" win and make the situation worse taking more and more seats and control in state controlled companies while at the same time pushing their own companies to absorb more and more of the budget. Yeah, not showing up because you did not like the candidate was a great success - if you wanted the decline to accelerate, that is.
Well, good luck US friends, to you and us all.
There's an economic component, and an emotional component.
Economically, inflation hurt. Real wages may have come up to compensate, but you get the inflation first, and then, some time later, then you get the wage increases. It still hurts. Even if the wages increase more, it still takes some time to recover.
Emotionally, it's not just the pain (and the remembered pain) from the inflation. It's Clinton calling people "deplorables". It's Biden calling them "garbage". It's the feeling that the Democrats have abandoned the working-class people - abandoned them for a couple of decades, in fact.
Trump speaks those peoples' language. He understand their sense of rejection and abandonment. Those are the people that the Democratic party claimed to champion, but the party took their support for granted, and championed a bunch of identity causes that the working class doesn't identify with at all.
Turns out ignoring and insulting your long-term base isn't a good way to win.
>But that's not good enough?!
It has never been enough, in at least 70 years, for democrats to do good enough. They are graded on this insane curve compared to perfect, and they always fall short since they haven't had serious (more than 60 senators) political power in decades, so they can't do much.
Consider the Palestine issue. I wonder how many young progressives stayed home because Harris refused to say "I will ban Israel from buying US weapons", despite it being clear from polling that doing so would lose her some votes and undeniably increase republican voter turnout. But nope, they refused to see that reality, so they didn't vote for her "maybe we will tell them to kill fewer babies" tactic.
Oh well, in just a few years the problem of Palestine will probably be solved for good. I hope those voters are happy.
Meanwhile republicans can say "I have a concept of a plan" and say that harris should be shot by 9 guns and they get 70 million votes.
My brother is the weird conservative that thinks "Trump didn't win the election in 2020" and "maybe we should regulate companies a little", but that didn't stop him from voting for the one shouting for violence. Maybe that's because he has, even during bush's term, been of the opinion that "all democrats should be shot", which he says right in front of me. I bet he wonders why we don't have a better relationship. It's always for something absurd too, like he said democrats should be shot because of Michelle Obama saying children should be able to eat healthy food at school, which for some reason made her responsible for the decline of school lunch programs since the 80s (a time which he did not experience). It's just another nonsensical thing republicans believe about their country because fox news said it every day for a year even though it's objectively untrue. Our state's school lunch program was better under Obama than it was when he was in school and yet he is sure that Michelle Obama, who has no powers as a first lady, was personally responsible for decisions our STATE made about it's school lunch program.
I don't know what else to say. They believe lies, when I tell them that they believe lies they tell me to my face that I should be shot, and when I say "fuck you" to that, they insist that I'm so divisive and partisan. It's just absurd the reality they live in. It seems so stressful to believe that the government is going to send a liberal twink to steal your guns and shit in your litter box and trans your kid.
But when you can go in front of a judge and say "nobody rational would watch our news program and believe it" and "we literally made up out of whole cloth a story about how the democrats stole the election, despite the fact that many of us were not so sure about pushing such a total lie" and suffer no consequences, what the fuck else is there to do?
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Cost of living has outpaced wage growth in the last several years for most Americans.
I can't speak for what it feels like on-the-ground, but the numbers saying American real wages are growing fast, especially for poorer people.
If you're making $8 and hour and get bumped up to $12, that's a 50% bump but you still can't afford to live and need a second job. Based on the job postings in my part of the US, that's pretty much standard.
Most Americans have very little interest in and less knowledge of the world outside the US. Moreover, many of them don't want to know anything that would require them to rethink their position.
I get a lot of political text messages from multiple red states (for some reason) and it was almost all culture war stuff from the right. But maybe the messaging was super-different in swing states.
The culture war crap is low-hanging fruit for fly-by-night scam PACs who don't know what they're doing. Hence the incompetence displayed when you get ads for states and races you have nothing to do with.
We didn't see much of it here in Milwaukee County. We got boatloads of mailers from WisGOP framing Trump as a moderate candidate, though.
> don't know what they're doing.
Or do they? This strategy seems to work for them so far.
For politicians, economy is the GDP and stock market.
For the common folk, economy is their purchasing power.
That's where there's the disconnect.
Whats bizarre though is that consumer spending has been strong.
There is this bizarre mixed signals problem where all the metrics look strong, and yet all the people are complaining.
My personal belief is that the crazy economics of the pandemic was kick in the head to most people's perceptions of finances. Things got really good for a lot of middle and lower class people, and now there is pain in the return to normal.
And housing.
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And for financial media it is the stock market.
Which can be separate from the purchasing power.
NB: I added stock market and didn't see your reply.
Or even some "look out for your husband" messaging, but men only mattered to one side in this election to the degree that they were incidentally useful to women.
I think it was even more simple: Democrats put a senile man up for office.
You've heard Donald Trump talk in the last couple of months and you think Biden is senile?
He has good days and bad days. My dad's 82, and he's doing a lot better than DJT.
Senile is not a binary flag here: Biden did not present as well as Trump, it’s as simple as that.
He should have moved aside far, far sooner.
Trump talked for 3 hours straight and was coherent, remembered facts accurately and funny as well.
Harris avoided any conversation that wasn’t heavily edited.
Why is this still being said? Did you not watch the debate? What facts? He mixed up Nikki Haley and Nancy pelosi.
He’s old, it’s not unexpected. I think he got a huge pass with Biden being in office, which was in retrospect a bad decision.
they're talking about Joe Rogan, and the fact you don't know that explains it all.
The point is not that Trump is a shining human. It’s simply not a winning move to run a dying senile man for office who’s two generations removed from having a sliver of empathy for the actual problems Americans are facing and then pivoting mid/race to a VP that gives men vasectomies at her rallies.
That was Trump’s competition. Trump may be abrasive but at least the version of him you see has already lost his mind so you know what you’re getting. And apparently it resonates with more Americans.
a VP that gives men vasectomies at her rallies
Why would you ever think this is true?
Probably because it is? [1]
[1]https://www.npr.org/2024/08/20/nx-s1-5081386/planned-parenth...
Then the actual truth is 'planned parenthood sets up a mobile clinic near the democratic national convention'.
The vice president wasn't giving anyone vasectomies, a mobile clinic was at a huge event.
Now that we've established the actual truth and not a ridiculous hallucination, what is the problem?
I don't know if English is your second language, so I'll try to explain this plainly. When GP says "a vice president" in their comment it is not meant as literally Kamala Harris, they are using a literary device called metonymy. Google's definition: the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing. "a VP" in GP is a substitution for "the Kamala Harris campaign" which absolutely did organize a mobile clinic to be present for a major event, at which vasectomies were offered. Here is further reading on Metonymy if you would care to learn more: https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-metonymy.
I don't know if English is your second language
I don't know if English is your second language, but this is what's known as a lie for propaganda. There is something reasonable that everyone would be fine with (mobile medical clinic) and then there is the lie you're repeating that you're now going on an odyssey to back peddle away from as if you didn't just repeat propaganda.
Now that the truth has been established your forgot to explain what the problem is.
Your clinging to the idea that there is anyone at all who has said and meant, literally, that Kamala Harris was providing vasectomies to anyone is the kind of shrill idiocy that led her to lose this election.
>"this is what's known as a lie for propaganda"
No one is outright lying, but you are certainly being dishonest by insisting someone else was not speaking figuratively when they obviously were.
>"your(sic) forgot to explain what the problem is."
The problem is that it is weird and off putting to most Americans that there is a clinic offering sterilization procedures to supporters of a politician at their rally.
Your clinging to the idea that there is anyone at all who has said and meant, literally, that Kamala Harris was providing vasectomies
If you meant something else, why did you say what you did and not the truth? Because you are lying for propaganda. If you wanted to explain the actual truth you would have said it.
No one is outright lying,
You are and you're doing it on purpose for outrage over something that isn't real.
The problem is that it is weird and off putting to most Americans that there is a clinic offering sterilization procedures to supporters of a politician at their rally.
I would guess they offer it to everyone actually. What is the problem? You still haven't explained it.
Everything you've said is variations of "I didn't meant it so it wasn't a lie" and "it's just not right because it is".
Everything you've said here is completely and absolutely delirious. This is the literal information of a low-information voter: someone who honestly believes that people are getting vasectomies at rallies or that a senile billionaire who says Haitians refugees are eating dogs as if it were reality is a better potential candidate.
Surely insulting people by calling them "low information voters" (read as: stupid idiot) will win this time despite failing in 2016 and 2024. Also, people were at the very least offered vasectomies at the DNC rally[1], so maybe you should check your information levels, they seem to need a top-off.
[1]https://www.npr.org/2024/08/20/nx-s1-5081386/planned-parenth...
You're picking one point in the headline that by itself sounds totally outrageous because in the mind of the low-information voter you read the headline and think to yourself a sketchy booth that says "free vasectomies!!!1" and somebody grabbing you in the middle of a convention saying "Kid, want a free vasectomy?".
In the context of a health check in reproductive health RV that offers a ton of things, _including_ vasectomies in the context of an informed discussion with a health expert, it is not only totally reasonable, but it should be extended to a host of other services that can provided in a mobile clinic the same that mobile vaccination sites were provided during COVID.
>"in the mind of the low-information voter you read the headline and think to yourself a sketchy booth that says "free vasectomies!!!1" and somebody grabbing you in the middle of a convention saying "Kid, want a free vasectomy?"."
You have invented a person in your head to get mad at. Regardless, normal people think having the abortion clinic RV at your largest rally offering to sterilize your supporters is weird. No matter how much you want to dress it up.
Normal people are in favor of abortion and reproductive health. The only way that's weird is if you want to dress it up as weird, which is what people who think you shouldn't be able to do with your body as you please believe.
> There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
Instead, they ran ads implying that husbands were trying to force their wives to vote trump, a narrative that comforts their own biases but does nothing for the people they needed to convince.
Yeah, why would people ever support a party that seeks to vilify them?
> There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
No but there was plenty of "if you're married and vote for Trump you're a misogynist" or "no real man with daughters can vote for Trump" messaging which rightly fell flat.
That Trump won the popular vote is astounding. That he's currently ahead in Michigan is insane, politically/electorally speaking. By 10pm last night the MSNBC crowd was already starting the "this was just about the economy," "no incumbent Dem could have won," "no challenging Rep could have lost" cope.
The Democratic party has an opportunity here to put DEI, identity politics, and culture war nonsense in the garbage where it belongs, and everyone on the left who was talking about unity and bringing America together 24 hours ago has an opportunity now to show whether they meant it, or if they only meant it on their terms.
Calls for unity in politics always is a call for everyone to unify behind the speaker rather than for everyone to find common ground.
Regardless of party it's always good to call out partisan hacks when you have the chance.
Political unity is something of a pipe dream when you look at some of the represented political groups in the US. I won't call out specific groups, but people can likely imagine at least one group they really don't want to have any power. Maybe because of media fearmongering, maybe real, but there's probably some group you perceive terribly. I don't think an electorate is supposed to represent all groups, no matter how extreme. There's no room for justice or equality or whatever if we give power to people actively targeting democracy or other people. It's dishonest to act as if there's some reasonable compromise in this scenario.
I can't wait until people stop saying the guy who won a majority of the popular vote is a threat to democracy.
In your opinion: Are those two things mutually exclusive?
He sold pardons
It doesn't matter how many people vote for you, your policies can still be anti-democratic.
And the people may not want democracy. Democracy is only "good" in the sense that it can allow multiple competing groups. Any given group would prefer, if it could magically get it, an authoritarian gov't that imposes its world view and doesn't cede power to the wrong people. But the Republicans and their base are favorable to that idea now, as opposed to the Democrats who want to preserve an illusion of unity. Not that the Democrats should abolish democracy once they gain power, but then you need something disruptive elsewhere in the system to compensate for these incompatible tensions (such as a revolution).
I think part of the answer is to accept that we don't live in a democracy, we live in a republic, and simply getting 50% +1 doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want. We'll see if the second Trump administration acknowledges that or not. They had a Republican House and Senate in 2016 too and still couldn't repeal the ACA, for example.
Is this the Dunphy lawsuit? Or something else?
As far as I have read, Guiliani has been accused in a civil lawsuit of saying he was going to sell pardons, nobody's provided any proof or evidence that Trump knew about it or did anything, and nobody has even had criminal charges brought let alone adjudicated.
I'm happy to be proven wrong but two third parties being engaged in an unresolved civil claim is a long way away from "Trump sold pardons."
With Trump’s party platform planks #17, about removing race and gender from school curriculae, #18, regarding a ban on transgender female athletes, and #19, regarding political deportation and “making colleges patriotic”, I believe the culture war is being strongly fought by Trump as well, as much as I wish it wasn’t.
Being from California, I couldn’t see what the ads were like and I’m extremely curious about something.
Were there a bunch of ads explaining why tariffs are going to cause pain and raise prices? And would be likely to spike inflation again?
I’m guessing no due to the election result but please confirm.
You can’t explain things like that to most voters, it just won’t work.
> Were there a bunch of ads explaining why tariffs are going to cause pain and raise prices? And would be likely to spike inflation again?
Yes. They billed it as the "Trump tax."
Women actually deserve a constitutional amendment to protect their rights, not a court ruling of the most dubious jurisprudence. Because of Roe V. Wade the political will create a new actually applicable amendment was never pursued - a bandaide that eventually fell off.
Part of the problem is that most people lack the cognitive capacity to understand the legal argumentation of Roe V. Wade and how shaky it was and so they out of incompetence set themselves up as women's rights constitutional amendment obstructionists
> Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, not American, so my opinions don't matter.
I'm married with two daughters who are in their early 20s. The abortion issue has come up in my household when discussing Trump v Kamala, but the thing that the Democrats didn't seem to get is that even though it's something that my wife & daughters care about in the abstract, it's not a PRESSING matter for them because they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.
That doesn't mean that they aren't pro choice & don't want women's reproductive rights protected at the federal level, like it is here in Canada. But on the hierarchy of things that matter to them today, it is extremely far down on the list. What matters to them most right now is the economy and rising crime rates.
The right wing also spun it as "why on earth do the Democrats think that every single woman is dying to murder her unborn baby?" And while us pro-choicers don't look at it that way, I think that kind of worked as a reminder that while it's an issue, it's just not the most important one affecting their day to day lives at the moment.
The problem is, even when there is never the plan of having an abortion, healthcare support for women suffers greatly from the abortion plans. Because it gets legally problematic for doctors to provide healthcare for women. Sooner or later you will have a patient with a medical emergency during a pregnancy. There are already enough incidents where critical ill women don't get medical treatment because they also are pregnant.
While I agree with you I think you are missing the point made by parent which is seems to me that it's not a psychologically pressing issue.
It still seems wild to me because I don't share that psychology but am probably biased because I live in a place with a social safety net and most criminals don't have access to guns here so crime is less scary to me : Muggings are rare probably because it's not very profitable and is more of desperate/drug-addict thing.
Being a drug dealer seems much more profitable and I don't feel targeted as a person. Shootings remain rare
> and most criminals don't have access to guns here so crime is less scary to me
I'm the parent and you did an excellent job of clarifying what I was trying to say.
I do want to respond to this statement, however, since I'm Canadian and in one of those countries where abortion is federally protected (and Canadians strongly favour that across partisan lines for the most part) and I live in what used to be one of the safest cities in Canada.
10 - 20 years ago, homicide was virtually unheard of in our city. I mean, it was like a once in a decade event and almost always domestic violence. Today, we can't go a week without hearing about another stabbing or shooting that happened out in public.
Recently our street saw every single vehicle broken into, including ours. We all filed police reports but no one ever showed up or even gave us a follow up call. The message was clear: the police either don't have the capacity or just don't care to deal with certain crimes now. To contrast, I remember my house being broken into when I was around 13 or 14 years-old, so mid 1990s, and I remember watching the detective powder the windows for prints.
Times have changed here in scary ways. We pay the same taxes and have the same expectations of our government as we always did. Canadians value the social safety nets and gun regulations that we have. The problem is that those don't seem to be working as well as they used to. We earn less due to inflation, pay the same or higher taxes, and get less in return. Most of us know of people who travel to the USA for health care due to our long waiting lists while hearing from Americans how great our free health care is.
What city is this? Toronto metro homicides have been ~100 per year for the last 50 years despite Toronto metro population skyrocketing. Basically all Canadian cities show the same pattern.
Abbotsford is my guess. That place went from a peaceful farming community to a gang warzone in 20 years. There are a LOT of targeted homicides there and it is very visible. I have family there and there have been multiple shootings within a few hundred meters of their home. How can you feel safe?
Almost all of the homicides are targeted gang violence between ethnic groups, but it still makes you concerned for your safety that you are going to take a stray bullet.
Abbotsford is basically metro Vancouver at this point, and they're basically experiencing Vancouver crime now. Crime going up in Abbotsford and going down in Vancouver is terrible for those in Abbotsford but doesn't support the narrative that "crime is going up".
And I was trying to make the point that it already is a pressing problem for any woman living in those states and of course any male who feels attached to them. Because medical support for women of any age is strongly decreasing.
The USA is sort of like two separate countries that share a common geography. Muggings and other violent street crime are largely confined to a handful of neighborhoods in certain cities. In my city we have literally zero shootings most years. So people have completely different experiences depending on where they live and end up talking past each other.
It has never been about it being "pressing", or even about ideology. It's about cold, calculated electoral math.
Abortion is what's called a Wedge Issue[1]. It is so because the public opinion on the US is divided roughtly 50% for it and 50% against it.
On top of that, the US presidential election is a First-past-the-post[2] system. So if I manage to get 52% of the votes and you only get 48%, I win everything, you lose everything. You can probably imagine where this is going: Instead of convincing 51% of the people I only need to convince 3% of the indecisive, and I win.
Finally, the US is a very polarized country. The "other" is always bad, "we" are always good. So the wedge issues tend to "align". If you and I agree on abortion, we will probably also agree in most of the other wedge issues.
All of these factors together result in that both Democrats and Republicans are forced to "optimize", so their campaigns all revolve around the same wedge issues. They must, if they want to win.
If you ask me, the least complex way to get the country out of this rut would be changing the voting system to something other First Past The Post.
Unfortunately, the people who are in a position to make such a change are the least motivated to make it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
rising crime rates.
What can you do about a low information voter?
they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.
People rarely plan to get an abortion. Setting that aside, more than anything, from a political perspective, this is an issue about freedom. I'm not planning on buying a firearm any time soon, but I wouldn't support a firearm ban (and thankfully, I don't have to worry about this because no mainstream politician is running on this policy). It doesn't matter what your thoughts about abortion are, women should have the freedom to have autonomy over themselves. Also, the anti-abortion laws are also preventing women from getting medicine for treating some chronic disease.
> What can you do about a low information voter?
I already explained this in another reply, but while crime rates might be going down across the board, I'm talking about what my daughters, my wife and their friends are telling me. And they are not low information voters, because crime rates are sky rocketing in our area and the data supports that. We live in what used to be considered one of the safest cities in all of Canada, and now we hear about a new shooting or stabbing in public just about every week. Mostly drug and gang related.
Everything else you said, especially about the abortion issue being a freedom issue, is preaching to the choir. I agree with you. I'm talking about the mindset of my wife, my daughters and their friends and what they say matters to them.
> What can you do about a low information voter?
You can cite various statistics to a person up until the point their car or house is broken into. Or, until they don't feel safe at night any longer in the neighborhood they grew up.
We can double down and say these are "ignorant" voters, maybe even insult them, but I doubt that will help win them over. Even worse, it will alienate them.
At what point do you think you should look a little more locally for the problem when nationwide trends are going the other way?
Why do you think crime is down?
Looking at 12 month running averages from FBI UCR since 2012, crime has been in a generally increasing trend from the last minimum, which was in the 12 months starting Jan 2020, to a maximum in the year starting Dec 2022.
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...
Going by the recent FBI report: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2023-cr...
>this is an issue about freedom.
There is a fundamental issue that pro-choice people (of which I am, as well) continuously overlook with this argument: a fetus isn't merely a clump of cells up until it leaves the woman's body. At some point it's a viable human being and also deserves rights. Is that 3 months? 6 months? 8 months? I don't know, but it's somewhere.
Most people in the world share that view; why are pro-abortionists so ignorant of it?
Who exactly do you think gets abortions? When and why? Because this is another obvious lie we hear from the Trump's campaigning: “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.”
93.5% of abortions happen before 13 weeks. 0.9% happen after 21 weeks [0]. Since Texas' trigger laws have been put into place, the maternal mortality rate rose by 56% [1]! In 2022, there was an 11.6% increase in infant mortality! Before that, across the years 2014-2021, infants death fell nearly 15% [2]. On top of this, 4 pregnant women have died because they couldn't get the care they needed and and again, women are finding they can't get certain medicines for chronic diseases because doctors are afraid to prescribe them. If you respect these lives, I would invite you to consider what is happening in the real world alongside your thought exercises about cells.
0 - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/ss/ss7209a1.htm#:~:text=....
1 - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/texas-abortion-...
2 - https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/20/health/texas-abortion-ban-inf...
> What can you do about a low information voter?
Crime has increased in the US. The official numbers were wrong and were recently corrected, instead of dropping by 2% they actually increased by over 4%.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41859346
This is something that the average person saw. The only people who didn't were in a bubble.
The article you're linking to makes claims about FBI data, but its only evidence are links to and images created from another website [0], and not the FBI data it is referencing. Further, following the link, the site claims "the data is here" and links only to self hosted excel files and not to the referenced FBI data.
0 - A website which happens to have a conservative bias and has failed several fact checks according to Media Bias/Fact Check: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/crime-prevention-research-cen...
And even if they were low by U.S. standard, they're still much higher than other countries, and much higher than people would like. Imagine if someone responded like that to other issues:
"I think we should do more to reduce childhood hunger."
"Childhood hunger is already lower than it used to be, you must be a low information voter."
**
"I think we should do more to reduce traffic fatalities."
"Traffic fatalities are already lower than they used to be, you must be a low information voter."
**
"I think we should reduce carbon emissions."
"Carbon emissions are already lower than they used to be, you must be a low information voter."
If these are important issues for you, you're not going to want to be on the same team with the people who respond like that.
The original discuss was around "rising crime rates", not "high crime rates". Even if you want to have this separate discussion, you're leaving out the obvious context of "crime rates are lower than they used to be when Trump was president immediately prior to this", so, if you think crime is too high, the answer is not someone who presided over even more crime.
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You are capturing why I think abortion is a good wedge issue but a poor campaign issue.
* Men aren't directly affected by it (~50% population)
* Woman over 40 aren't generally affected by it
So woman between 18-40 who can vote are the group most affected by abortion policy. And as you point out, even they aren't directly affected until they actually need one. So the skin-in-the-game for most people is very low. Most people vote and are opinionated on it as a sort of proxy for woman's rights.
However, some issues like house affordability, crime, employment, etc are very high for skin-in-the-game. People are currently affected or know people currently affected by these issues.
I would absolutely be affected by my wife dying from something which should be preventable but has been made pretty much illegal.
I would absolutely be affected by my friend dying from something which should be preventable but has been made pretty much illegal.
I am not an 18-40 woman and I am affected by the abortion policies in my state.
So your response confirms why I called it a wedge issue.
Most Americans don't like abortion laws the don't take into account the health of the mother. So that type of law becomes a wedge among Republicans.
Conversely, if a state passes a six week ban (Florida), that's going to draw out these distinctions among Democrats.
I'm not making a moral claim. I'm commenting on the politics of campaigning on it. I think politicians are advantaged at avoiding wedge issues and focusing on material concerns that affect the most people.
> don't like abortion laws the don't take into account the health of the mother.
Texas's law allegedly takes into account the life of the mother. And yet mothers are dying because of this law. When you make it that the OB office needs to have the legal team on speed dial to make sure they're not facing life in prison on a regular life or death healthcare your law is abhorrent policy.
The politics of campaigning on it is to make people think only unplanned pregnancies are affected by these laws. I am making a moral claim on that; it's reprehensible.
> they're not planning on needing an abortion
I'm not planning on being in a car accident. I guess I just shouldn't care about policies that force doctors to let car accident victims just bleed out.
I agree with you but you're missing the point.
As I said, women's reproductive issues ARE important to them. It does come up in discussions.
The point is that people often tend to be single-issue, or few-issues voters... and there are policy issues that are just way more important to them right this very second. Issues like the economy and the housing crises.
My wife and I were living on our own and starting a family when we were our daughters' age. Our daughters not only still live with us but they have abandoned any hopes of ever being able to own a home of their own.
Our oldest daughter, who will turn 25 soon, wanted nothing more in life than to have a family and she is seeing the time window for that slip by. She thought she'd be married with a home and kids by now. She found her partner, he lives with us now too. Why would the abortion message resonate with her when what's bothering her most is that she wants kids?
From what I've heard in the news, the women who were single-issue-voters on abortion tended to be older women who are concerned about the rights of their daughters and grand daughters.
But I do wonder how many young women are in similar situations to my oldest daughter. Women who are more concerned about whether or not they can have kids versus whether or not they could terminate an unwanted pregnancy. They might not be a huge voting block, I honestly don't know. But I can't imagine that the abortion message resonated with this demographic at all.
> Why would the abortion message resonate with her when what's bothering her most is that she wants kids?
Anyone thinking about possibly becoming pregnant should absolutely be worried about whether their doctors will be able to save their lives when something goes wrong, which is very often. If you think "abortion" rights are only about unwanted pregnancies you've got far too narrow of an understanding of the reproductive process and what can go wrong. You think Nevaeh Crain's child was unwanted, or the many other women whose deaths were just like hers?
> they have abandoned any hopes of ever being able to own a home of their own
Project 2025 pretty much ensure affordable housing pretty much won't get built anywhere near jobs are. It doubles down on NIBY housing policies and prevents densification of areas. It doubles down on requiring a car to drive to work on a long commute. Maybe they'll be able to afford a new build in a suburb 70 miles from their jobs eventually.
> Issues like the economy
Looking forward to that new 20%+ sales tax on imported (read: most things) you buy. That'll really do a lot for the economy. Good choice.
Wearing a condom, taking birth control easily prevents a pregnancy. There is no similar protection against car accidents.
OP politely explained their reasoning and you’re being an ass.
Accidental pregnancy is preventable, but abortion restrictions also undermine the safety of women who are pregnant by choice. We saw this recently with Nevaeh Crain, for example, who died because doctors were afraid that treating her might harm her baby. Sadly the baby died anyway.
You can't protect against random medical emergencies.
Many women get pregnant and want a kid and experience complications. Roughly 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Restrictions on abortion care must necessarily negatively affect care for pregnant women who have not sought & don't want abortion. The care for complications of abortion and miscarriage are essentially identical. Incentives are aligned for doctors to deny care for either. There is no medical, civil, or criminal recourse for women who die or have their health affected by improper care for pregnancy complication, miscarriage, or complication of abortion; there is no punishment for doctors who fail to provide medical standard of care; there is an affirmative effort by some states to punish doctors who would provide such care.
Funny you mention contraception here, that's another thing the GOP is openly talking about making more difficult for people to access.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/thomas-wants-...
Even then, no contraception is 100% effective. The only 100% effective thing is abstinence. Just like getting into a car accident, the only way to not have any risk is to not get in the car. But good luck living in the US without getting in a car or being around moving cars.
I'm just pointing out the reality of their choices. They're acting like the only people who get a D&C are people who planned to get one before they were even pregnant. Most people who get this kind of care don't go into it planning on doing it. It's like thinking people planned to break their legs or planned to get cancer.
>Funny you mention contraception here, that's another thing the GOP is openly talking about making more difficult for people to access.
Buddy, we are long past believing NBC's interpretation of a complicated legal ruling. Your guys have been scare mongering for way too long. Believe it or not, there are lots of sensible conservatives.
> In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell
Buddy, if you can't understand what these very direct words mean I don't know what to tell you. This isn't some "NBC interpretation of a complicated legal ruling", he's openly and directly saying these decisions should be overturned. He is directly stating we should reconsider contraception access, throwing gay people in prison for being gay, and recognizing gay marriage.
The modern GOP is openly talking about repealing the court decisions which legalized wide access to contraception, disallowed throwing people in prison for being gay, and requiring states to recognize gay marriage. This isn't some fringe conspiracy theory or complicated legal ruling fear mongering, its directly what they're saying.
Quit burying your head in the sand and listen to what your own party is actually saying.
> they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.
Accidents happen. Do they not have sex ever?
I didn't understand the focus on abortion as an issue for people. It's a legislative problem after Roe was overturned and it's not clear to me what the presidency would do to change that other than asking the other branches to take a federal action.
It's really all about control of the courts. They can, for all intents and purposes, throw laws away, inclusive sections of the constitution with little to no recourse without a level of control of the legislative branch that is extremely rare.
Given that congress is so naturally weak, the most important part of it is the senate's role in federal judicial appointments.
It was a winning ballot measure, and protection for it was passed in most states it ran (even states where Trump won). Didn’t translate to enough enthusiasm for voters though.
It’s currently unclear, but it’s likely congress could enact a nationwide ban.
>Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men. It should, but it doesn't. There could have been some "look out for your wife" messaging, but there wasn't.
Because sensible people don't think that Trump presidency means "no healthcare for Women".
I think Trump won college educated white women. In fact, I think he did better in every demographic? Most of them for sure.
So to blame this on "unmarried white men" is counter productive.
I’ve only seen exit poll demographics for key states. Republicans won college white men but only at 50%. He performed better among married white men (28% of sample) than non-married white men (20% of sample). Looks like his biggest gender gap is among suburban whites. Looks like his most-supportive crosstab is evangelicals, happy with the Supreme Court, whose primary issue is banning abortion.
The "abortion" issue is very poor marketing and I don't understand why this has never been corrected. It's not about unwanted children, it's more about the 1/5 chance a woman has of miscarrying and what happens after (along with the array of other pregnancy related issues).
The issue is that the extremists on both sides get the microphone and muddle the debate as much as possible.
Right, you can't actually talk about any real compromise position. All anyone hears are the two extreme options. People who talk about miscarriage, mother's life in danger, and so on are trying to convince you that because those exist all abortion should be legal. Anyone who is against abortion sees right through that. If anyone was serious about the compromise position where those types of things are allowed but otherwise abortion was illegal they might be able to get many against abortion on their side - except that they won't because give an inch and they take a mile is reality and everyone "knows" if you compromise at all they will just be back against next year asking for more.
If they sold it as a "universal right to basic healthcare" it would be more palatable to most people.
Fact of the matter is most abortions are elective. It is, in fact, about unwanted children. It is however a shame actual health risks are lumped in - mostly due to marketing.
Conservatives think that's just a lie. They openly reject the harms that are actively happening right now in Texas.
How do you win an election when your opponent is apparently not bound by reality? Maybe Harris should have just promised puppies and rainbows and candy.
>Maybe Harris should have just promised puppies and rainbows and candy.
She did, and no one fell for it.
Consider that, just maybe, you're the one not bound by reality.
An liberals are not honest about caring. They are arguing because of a few bad cases all abortion should be legal, instead of using this as a reasonable compromise. So long as those are the two choices a lot less humans die if all abortion is banned even if some mothers die as well. (Do not say a fetus isn't a human - that might work for you but it doesn't apply to anyone against abortion and you just look like an idiot for not recognizing what they see as an obvious fact and we get nowhere).
If you want to support a compromise: most of what you need to do is shut up everyone who will only accept their extreme position.
Stop trying to introduce nuance to a topic where there is none. It should be entirely left up to the woman and her doctor.
And you have just ensured this fight will continue.
I wouldn't compromise on my bodily autonomy, neither should women. It's simple. You making it more complicated is what ensures this fight will continue.
What we have here is a conflict of values. That you think it is simple is insulting the values of others. Most people against abortion value females right to body autonomy: they value the right to not be murdered more.
Except if it's a COVID vaccination.
That's very much a false equivalency as pregnancy and miscarriage is not contagious.
> Dem messaging on economic policy was nonexistent.
In what way do you think the Republicans care about the economy? How should the Democrats communicate better that the Republicans tank the economy with every presidency only to be recovered by the Democrats who hand off a winning economy to the Republicans? To be completely honest, I don't think most Americans can even understand the argument.
> Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men.
This seems to be an oblique reference to something specific about that healthcare. If someone doesn't articulate a proposed specific amount of time or objective physiological thresholds for a procedure, they aren't serious. I saw no evidence for this from either campaign, so I guess they agreed the issue was not at play.
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Yeah. Most democrat leaning people here and outside are not reading the situation correctly. We are currently in the process of the creation of a new world order. Its happening everywhere. Right-wing, anti-immigrant, egomaniacs with little respect for democracy as we know it are taking power in all of the western influence sphere. It might be because this is the way countries like China/russia can undermine the hegemony of the west. It might be because of the way the internet works that takes away power from the systems that used to work. Or what we could conclude that the story the liberals/left are telling all over the world implicitly locks out most people that vote and is self destructive. Either way. Don't believe the pundits they are consistently wrong.
The anti-immigration thing is because the great experiment of mass migration has failed to work for the average person, and the political left have failed to show up with an answer, a policy, a plan -- anything, really. People are voting for candidates who are at least willing to pay lip service to the issue. I don't know how bad it is in the US, but in the rest of the West, it's been a disaster. Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services, competition for housing, suppression of wages, the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards, minority enclaves with values that are fundamentally incompatible with the West... The list goes on.
Very few of the things you’re listing are caused by immigration. They’re caused by institutional neglect. The person telling you they’re caused by immigration has no intention of addressing the institutional neglect, because that doesn’t get them power.
Meanwhile, the services you need, right down to food, are supplied in many cases by immigrants. So it’s working for the average person extremely well.
Both of you are taking these blatantly extreme narratives and putting them ot as though they were fact.
The reality is that immigration is not all good for the average person. Similarly, it's not all bad for the average person either. When we frame these discussions in the stark extremist terms on either side, we get into trouble.
We have to calibrate immigration, so that we get the good, without getting so much of the bad. There are so many untruths floating out there right now about immigration on both sides that it's hard for the people trying do that calibrating to actually make any progress. When we try to get a handle on the good or the bad, invariably, someone's narrative is going to be shown as false.
There is an impact on wages, that's lamentable and it causes pain in a lot of the middle class. Let's put our heads together and see how can we address that?
Some people are not willing to admit that there are people of foreign origin who are critical additions to our intellectual capital. But a reasoned analysis would concede that H1B's are not even close to the same as NIWs in that regard. We probably can source a lot of H1B work natively. We should still offer the H1B opportunity though, so what does that balance look like?
Crime? Crime is definitely a problem. The data shows that it doesn't get better through the generations as one side would have you believe. At the same time, it isn't as prolific among people of foreign origin as the other side would have you believe. (Heck, in all honesty, the data shows crime isn't even as prolific among native born Americans as one side would have you believe.) Do we have to address it? Absolutely, but we shouldn't look at everyone as a criminal.
We need balance to address these issues wisely, but balance is severely lacking in contemporary civic discourse here in the US. And therefore, balance is lacking in our policy decisions.
I know this will sound like denialism but data on crime that claims it's going down doesn't match my day to day experience and so I tend to believe something is wrong with the data.
Ideas that come to mind are (1) reclassifing crimes as not crimes - instant reduction in crime in stats but no reduction in actual crime and victims (2) less reporting because of less enforcement as in police don't enforce the laws either because they don't want to or because there are less of them so there is less reportihg (3) less reporting because of uselessness. if you don't believe the police will do anything why report it. Car gets broken into, reporting is a chore that produces no results, reporting to car insurance just raises your rates.
Etc... as just one example I recently rented a car at SFO and there were signs saying don't leave anything valuable in your trunk because of theft. that's effectively saying the government isn't working to prevent this crime so the criminals are winning so you can no longer use a car for one if it's intended purposes. In can fully imagine in 20 years we'll be told not to store any valuables in our houses. that not how it should work.
I lived in the mission in Sf. Crime is way worse today than 20 than ago, any stats that claim otherwise are lying
Reminds me of this:
>Jeff Bezos(01:34:00) We were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents, and I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then.
Same experience when I studied in Germany. My house got broken into by a Bosnian migrant, with CCTV footage showing the face and all, brought it to the police but nothing came out of it, citing footage not enough to incriminate. Bs really.
Regarding low skill immigration, it can help to supress labor costs (and indirectly control inflation) in very high labor industries, such as non-commodity crop farming (vegetables, fruits, etc.) and food processing. That said, if uncontrolled, it will have a negative economic impact upon low skill natives.
A nuance of like to add, though: some of the ways of controlling immigration, in particular revocable economic visas, are _designed_ to push down the cost of labour at the expensive of natives.
IMHO, if you get permission to work in a country, it shouldn’t be revocable. The revocation just serves as a way of paying the immigrant, and therefore the native who could also do the job, less.
What is a "revocable economic visas"? I am not familiar with it.
An H1B is a good example. The company says they don’t need you, you have to leave the country.
This is simply the ancient political strategy of blaming our problems on groups of people that are different, and not actually taking responsibility to identify and fix the real causes. It is a formula as old as time for despots to seize power by fabricating an enemy that doesn’t exist from peoples prejudice and fear.
you can’t reduce ecological principles to just rhetoric. less resources, more requirements = more strain. the more resources to share, the less impact of the same shared unit, the easier it is to dispense to whoever. sharing resources with others with those who share other properties is more acceptable to most. but this propensity is generally reduced with more resources to share. humans band into groups in competition for resources when they are scarce.
just as how people are getting triggered online more easily by displeasure, so they are triggered by the bad apples more than the invisible good ones. there’s more of good ones, but the larger their absolute number, the more resources are shared and the more bad apples there are, the more this sharing becomes problematic. the fewer shared properties there are, the less there is to dilute the bad-applehood.
abstracting away from this into a symbolic ideal (equivalence via property of “humanhood” and equivalence via property of “need” determined via capacity of empathy and Christian virtue) does no one any good and is experienced as a result of effacement of shared histories (roots). the idea that real present (ie, ahistorical) causative elements are always only just social or imperialist is ideology.
Yet the voters don't want to deal with those who actually hoard these limited resources, and prefer to blame immigrants and other minorities
Um..
because as UniverseHacker stated at the outset, that's a time tested method of gaining power. It works.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Trump is the new President isn't he?
you can leverage not only a reaction, but also its object. increase the pressure, increase the resistance, propose solution (and hide other agendas behind it).
The actual things most people are concerned about aren’t even close to being zero sum- things like economic activity increase with more people and ingenuity. We’re in a time when innovation is rapidly letting us do more with less resources, we aren’t resource constrained for our real world quality of life. Rhetoric creates us vs. them situations that don’t exist in fact- while also artificially constructing groups to pit against one another along lines that only benefit the person creating them. Even if I did think things were zero sum and wanted to use government force to keep resources in my group- the “in group” I would choose isn’t the one any politicians are trying to sell me based on what people look like or where they were born.
"Lip-service" is probably a good way to put it, since all those issues are also happening in countries without a lot of immigration, but most people don't look too far outside of their own country when considering problems in it. It is easy to look for a simple to understand change, and lay the blame on it, and people like easy answers for things they would rather not have to think about (like economies).
Most of those issues are probably better explained by the trend for jobs, especially higher paying ones, to be more and more concentrated in cities. There has been almost no policy push to realistically address that from anyone, outside of lackluster and temporary measures to encourage jobs in smaller cities.
> Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services, competition for housing, suppression of wages, the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards,
Pretty sure the ever wealthier owner class is to blame for that, not immigrants.
> minority enclaves with values that are fundamentally incompatible with the West
And this is a massively overblown problem mostly pushed to distract voters from those listed above.
Most of America 100 years ago was minority enclaves with values fundamentally incompatible with the "old" America. Worked out in the long run because we had a good run of a strong middle class. Money makes everyone merge.
But, the Republicans will just attempt to make the rich richer, and keep the poor and others isolated, then sell the story that the others are the ones keeping the middle class down, not the rich.
How you figure immigration is the cause of all that? You might as well add hemorrhoids and back pains to your list.
Immigration opponents just make up things so they can claim immigration caused it. The biggest tell is that they mention wage suppression, because they think it'll make them sound sympathetic - but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages, and theoretically you should expect it to increase them because of increased demand. (Conversely, when people move away this reduces demand and lowers your wages.)
That and employment for prime aged (i.e. not retirement age) Americans is as high as it's ever been.
Fortunately, we don't need to listen to any "academic economists" (who need to toe the party line) or even internet "experts", we can simply observe reality.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-5210935...
During COVID lockdowns, UK farmers complained that they can't get cheap foreigners to pick their strawberries. Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough". Open borders directly reduces wages.
A single article with no counterfactual isn't as good as the existing literature, which has plenty of empirical studies (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...). Academics love disagreeing with each other and economists are pretty bipartisan relative to other fields.
> Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough"
Looks to me like this needs a specialized skilled workforce, otherwise they won't be able to pick the fruit in time for it to stay ripe.
Paying a smaller population of workers more will not necessarily encourage them to develop enough skills to do this job. It might just be left undone and then no fruit. If you have a larger population of potential workers, then there's more room for people to specialize in this because you have a larger economy.
> James Porter said 200 workers normally travelled to his farm in Scryne, Angus, from eastern Europe.
I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means. If it was Ukraine they were bad then and worse now, but if it's Poland they have incredible economic growth right now and are on track to pass the UK before too long.
There is a current discussing in Sweden about the issue of human trafficking in picking fruits. Historically we have had a fairly large source of Asians being tricked to travel to northern Europe to pick forest fruits, with passports being taken, payments being withheld, and living standards beyond reasons. Last year a fairly large case was brought to bring down the human slavery and disgusting practices, and as a result the practice has been significantly reduced.
As a result the prices of forest fruit has increase multiple times and food companies are reporting a significant increase in costs thus needing to reduce the number of employees. Every industry above in the chain is feeling the economical impact of losing the human slavery. Local government is also concerned since the created void, in combination with increase wages, may encourage new independent illegal workers which then the state must handle.
Even leaving aside the human trafficking component, a lot of berry picking looks like a scam in Sweden. The costs to travel and live in Sweden rarely cover their earned wages. Their per hour earnings are surely far below Swedish minimum wage laws. Why do the Swedes allow it to continue?
I highly recommend this DW documentary if others are interested to learn more about this very specific issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW1QWG3xSNg
The reason why Swedes allow it to continue is of similar reasons why people allow human trafficking in construction. It occurs in the background where it is not seen, it reduces costs, and makes people money.
If human slavery was a net-loss for countries then it wouldn't be historical popular. Be it building roads, railways, bridges, buildings, harvesting or picking fruits, those are not things people in general want to see prices increase. People who talk about illegal immigrants being a net-positive on the economy never talk about that aspect, in the same way that those being against illegal immigrants do not want to talk about increased costs. Even people who talk about human trafficking do not want to talk about human trafficking in construction or food production.
At one point the police even announced (as part of a political move in order to get more budget) that they would stop investigating construction places for human trafficking since just going to a single construction place would fill their work quota for that year, and thus everything else would had to be put at hold. Everyone who work in construction are fully aware of the open secret that a large part of all work is done by illegal workers that do not pay taxes (or minimum wages), do not get safety equipment, and is not limited by regulations that exist to protect workers. Sweden is far from unique in this aspect.
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<< I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means.
Not OP, but I can absolutely vouch for local negative sentiment in Eastern Europe. Granted, some of it is a direct result of war in Ukraine ( and a lot of those refugees getting benefits and priority for government services in host countries ).
It is hard for the population in general to get that they are getting a deal, when they don't. Maybe some individual billionaire does, but if anything, it only exacerbates the issue further by focusing anger on that one person.
I too am suspicous when companies and industries complain they cannot get enough cheap labour. However, there is a balance to be struck. If the UK needed to pay natives at prevailing wages, it might be 15 GBP per hour (or more) to pick strawberries, and then strawberries would probably double in price at the market... and very few people would buy them. When UK was part of the EU, there was freedom of movement, so a lot of seasonal workers came from Eastern Europe to work the fields in the UK. This probably helped to reduce UK food prices.
What bothers me much more: When companies and industries that generate middle class jobs (and above) complain about being unable to find workers. After the GFC ended around 2009, this was a constant complaint in business newspapers for many years (I guess at least five years during the post-GFC recovery). It was so obviously bullshit to even the most casual observer: The offered wages were much too low, so jobs stayed unfilled for months on end. In short, they wanted high skill people to work for low wages.
If this were true, how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote. One thing I will grant you: Open borders suppress wages for low skill workers. That is pretty much undeniable. The people hurt most by EU freedom of movement are low skill natives.> how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote.
Are you sure about that? It seems about equal to me [1]...
In any case, Brexit didn't cause closing the borders; immigration into the UK increased massively [2] (i.e. the politicians didn't deliver what the people wanted). Any negative changes to the UK economy were more likely caused by decrease in trade with the EU... [3] Although COVID makes all these statistics suspect.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/national-gdp-constant-usd...
[2] figure 5 here: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...
[3] https://obr.uk/box/the-latest-evidence-on-the-impact-of-brex...
It's depressing that you discard research in favor of "observing reality". Like, what do you think researchers do?
Someone pointed out online, I forgot who, that the problem with job reports is two fold
It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
It also reports all jobs, not the quality of the jobs. Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive. The jobs report doesn’t disaggregate higher paying jobs from lower ones
That may be true of the monthly jobs report numbers (don't remember how they work), but if you need to know then it's not an issue because there's alternatives.
Here's reports for all these that don't have those issues, as they just come from surveys.
> It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
This simply asks "do you have a job", and it's up to the people responding to decide if being an Uber driver is a job.
> Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032196 - % of workers part time because they couldn't find anything better
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0203127200A - % of workers at federal minimum wage
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 - % people with multiple jobs
All look healthy right now. (Obviously there's a lot more people at the state minimum wage.)
> The jobs report doesn’t disaggregate higher paying jobs from lower ones
That's in FRED somewhere, but https://realtimeinequality.org is an easier way to view it.
Btw, I think focusing on "jobs" isn't the best thing to look at - the poorest people in a country will always be children and the elderly, and hopefully we don't want them to get jobs.
The jobs report is what most media parrots across all media platforms more or less is the monthly jobs report and definitely the one I’m referencing.
No matter how you cut it though Americans do not feel they are getting their fair share economically and want to avenge that, which is why I think voters didn’t push back against tariffs - which have become a cornerstone of economic rhetoric by Trump and his allies - at the ballot box.
I think it’s also because a good chunk of the electorate doesn’t quite understand how tariffs work and it’s going to backfire, but the sentiment is very clear
Americans had what's called a vibecession where they universally thought the economy was bad, but then answered every question about their own finances by saying they were good. The implication was they thought it was bad for everyone else, just not them, so that's mostly on the media's negativity bias.
There was some hangover effect from inflation, although of course that's going to get worse now.
> The jobs report doesn’t disaggregate higher paying jobs from lower ones
Yes it does, and it shows that the fastest growing wages are in the bottom 10%.
It breaks by sector and averages wave growth but doesn’t disaggregate actual by the numbers for each sector and their loss / gross as far I can tell.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
We can make assumptions though and yes I agree it shows that trend.
Even if I’m misinterpreting this my general assertion about people’s feeling about the job reports that I’m telegraphing I think still remains valid
"I've been demonstrably wrong in every single point but I'm still right because I feel like it" is such a good demonstration of what happened this election.
Some people are hurting because there's always some people hurting, and for some reason that means we get the party that wants to reduce social safety nets?!
It seems fairly evident that human trafficking has had an economical positive effect on countries who practiced it. It is an common observed fact that the current construction sector is dependent on human trafficking and most current construction projects would fail to meet their goals without a steady stream of cheap, untaxed illegal labor that do not need to follow safety regulations.
However for people who work in those sectors the picture tend to look differently with wages and good safety practices being suppressed. Construction companies that follow regulations and pay taxes for all their employees will loose in the competitive market. The effect on the economy may be a net-positive, and it may also be true that most countries could not contain growth if construction actually cost as much as it had to without the illegal practices, but that is all multiple aspects of the same issue.
Immigration does have a net benefit to the economy, generally, but of course it tends to depress wages for anyone in sectors the immigrants are landing jobs in. Even NPR admits this, when they cover the topic. If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Whether those sectors include most of the people worried that their wages will be suppressed, when who we’re talking about are illegal immigrants who mostly do stuff like chicken processing and house framing/roofing, is another matter.
It’s weird that “we had a bipartisan bill to address specifically this thing you’re worried about, likely to pass and be signed into law, and Trump scuttled it so he could keep complaining about it” didn’t resonate. Frankly, if that’s too “technical” a message to be received, we really are fucked.
> but of course it tends to depress wages for anyone in sectors the immigrants are landing jobs in. Even NPR admits this, when they cover the topic.
In practice this is not an issue, to the point it's hard to find cases where it ever happened. Collection of studies: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...
One reason for this is that immigrants have differing and complementary skills from natives - eg just speaking a different native language is a skill - and so they're not likely to land in the same sectors. They're more similar to other immigrants from the same place, and so it's more likely they'd lower each other's wages. I think this is totally believable, but the demand factor is still very important here - one immigrant could start a business and employ others etc.
> If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Doctors in the US are a special case because their number is so limited by the AMA and by (US government funded) residency slots. So yes, this could lower their wages if foreign doctors have similar enough skills to compete with them vs complement them. But it's more important for us to just stop limiting how many new doctors we train.
This wouldn't necessarily hurt them though; I mean it probably would, but if it made healthcare more affordable resulting in more people going to see doctors, then they'd all get paid more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Yeah the full answer is “it’s complicated and yes maybe some people see wages depressed or increases that would have happened, slowed, by immigration”. It can, for a given individual or even sector, do the thing people are worried about, even if most benefit—mean or even median wages tending to go up isn’t the same as your wages will go up. Simplified “it doesn’t lower wages” messaging has a smell to people burned by other neoliberal policies, and they’re not wrong to detect a hint of the ol’ BS, even if their concern is overblown or misplaced.
A guy answered me in another comment where I was saying similar things about wages, and apparently it's not true, it's an interesting read (which I can't criticize or comment since I'm not knowledgeable in economics) https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...
It can be the case that immigration tends to buoy wages over all, while there do exist some for whom immigration will depress wages. Again, we’re definitely trying to do this when we craft targeted policies aimed at bringing in or discouraging immigrants for specific professions, and it does have the effect one would expect.
We have a history of doing the Neoliberal “well this will make line go up and we can just help the few whom it harms” and then not helping those few, so I get why people worried their wages might be some of the ones affected aren’t thrilled. Whether most of the folks so-concerned would actually see such a thing, is another matter (I’m guessing not, in at least 95% of cases of people with those concerns).
Yeah, it makes sense what you're saying
> but there is absolutely zero evidence
and here we have another reason for yesterdays results.
> but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages
What? You’re really claiming that increasing the supply side of a market has no effect on prices? That’s absurd. You shouldn’t need evidence for common sense. If labour supply is essentially unlimited then there is never pressure to increase wages. A literal child can understand this…
Using a pure supply argument for the labor market is the worst possible one to do it on. It's usually okay, but labor is people, and people are the source of all demand, so you really have to consider both of them.
Also, I'm going by empirical studies here. Those are better than beliefs, because truth is stranger than fiction.
All I know is in the UK it's not uncommon for jobs to get thousands of applications. I'm pretty confident the immigration is hitting the supply side more than demand. Most of this immigration is from low skilled workers on poverty wages, I'm struggling to see how this would massively increase demand elsewhere in the labour market.
Since immigration started increasing in the late 90's wages have been stagnant. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but hmm.
The UK outside London is IIRC poorer than all but one US state, and your housing policy makes it even harder to build new housing than California.
So you have much bigger problems. For there to be jobs there has to be industry first. That'd provide the demand.
Do you refute that importing mass amount of people into a city, without substantially increasing supply of housing, increases the price of housing?
Where I'm from the shortage of supply is also due in varying proportions to: too many airbnbs and secondary residence, rural flight, families being split in multiple households, increase of average home size, etc. Immigration certainly plays a part, but likely not as much as you think.
Biggest cause is insufficient increase in supply, often due to government regulations.
Immigration can heavily increase demand, and so it can play a big part, depending on the immigration numbers. Anyone moving in needs a place to live as well.
That issue goes far beyond immigration. You want a job, especially one that has growth potential? You move to a city, regardless of if you are a native or not. You can see all the same trends in cities and countries without a lot of immigration.
This argument just doesn't make sense. The US annual population growth is currently 0.5%. Between 1960 and 2000 it rarely went below 1%, but since 2010 it's always been well under.
Depends on a host of factors.
Housing is also one of the few issues that is so local and immigration is such a tiny story around it to begin with. Prices are high in plenty of areas seeing little immigration activity
If the immigration is double the normal expected growth (~tripling the growth) it is not really tiny. It may very well be solvable, maybe even easily. But the problem in many European countries is that "the left" does not even acknowledge that this may be a problem and should be solved leading to many people voting for "the far right" that does acknowledge that this is a problem. In the US housing may not be the biggest issue, but the result is the same: the average voter can choose between "there is no problem, we can take in as many immigrant as we want forever" and "we don't want immigration".
Many of the most expensive cities in the US have relatively low immigration compared to other areas with much more reasonable real estate, and it behooves you to link it where housing is expensive and immigration is very high. You have to actually provide some sources before you throw out blanket comments blaming immigrants for our problems
NYC, one of the most expensive cities, has 37% foreign born population.
You’re entirely against people coming here? You’re not focused on undocumented migrants?
You’re also failing to draw a causal link here. Not to mention NYC is one of the biggest cities in the world period (10th). It’s hardly representative of most US cities.
It's getting really noticeable across every western democracy.
The far-left strategy seems to be clientele politics, and attempting to rule over the fractured result.
Constant immigration is not sustainable. Especially when people come from cultures which are very different than the west. They have different value systems, religions, etc. There is also the problem of scale, imagine if all of India moved to Germany. What would happen? At some point the politicians will have to look at the issue.
Also, specifically regarding Germany, are you German, or have you lived there? Unfortunately, I see a lot of negative media about immigration in Germany ("Oh, too much! Cannot mix different types!" -- All that bullshit). But, then you talk to Germans, especially those under 40, and it is a different story. Many of them grew up with many immigrants in their schools. Germany is already much more multi-cultural than outsiders realise. The number of ethnic Turks in Germany would surprise many. In the last 20 years, this community has become much more integrated into wider Germany society. (They finally have some federal minister roles... whoot!) Yes, Germany has ethnic struggles, as any newly multi-cultural nation has, but, overall, they have a good attitude about it.
Just that this isn't a real issue but a fear topic / terrorism/ propaganda.
The avg joe isn't affected by this.
But hey let's be real here: will the avg American start working all the not so good immigrants jobs?
I live in an area with a lot of immigration and one side effect is that "entry level" jobs are just about impossible to get for teenagers and other low-skilled non-immigrant workers because of intense competition[1]. So no, the "average" American may not care about these jobs, but the poorest Americans and those "just starting out" do.
It's ironic to pay lip service to supporting the poor while kicking the ladder out from under them with immigration.
[1] https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/massive-lineu...
If the avg joe are teenagers and people needing to work as a supermarket clerk, USA might have fundamental other issues...
You know that almost everyone since the Mayflower is an immigrant and descended from one?
What does that have to do with present day? You're comparing two different times and circumstances
Well, we did have slavery. So I'm not sure I would necessarily call everyone since the Mayflower immigrants. Let's just say there has been a lot of movement of people into the US on a population adjusted basis since the Mayflower.
I personally don’t see much similarity between the mayflower (Europeans exiled to underpopulated territory in the empire) to a Chinese grad student coming to work a tech company. And that’s the ideal case!
With this issue it’s all about the particulars
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This is one of the worst over-generalizations.
Cultures are not monolithic, static entities. How do we go from "different cultures" to "negative outcomes?" That's a complete non-sequiter.
Imagine if all of Germany moved to India. What would happen? What if part of Britain moved to UK? At some point the politicians will have to look at the issue...
Here is how:
> During the 2015–2016 celebrations of New Year's Eve in Germany, approximately 1,200 women were reported to have been sexually assaulted, especially in the city of Cologne. In many of the incidents, while these women were in public spaces, they were surrounded and assaulted by large groups of men who were identified by officials as Arab or North African men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_New_Year%27s_E...
Slightly off topic, but what's the difference between North African and Arab? Are Egyptians, Algerians, Libyans etc not real Arabs? How are they classified technically speaking?
If you would imagine a Venn diagram, North Africans are the cross between the Arabs and the Africans. Arabs being the culture, and African being the geographical region. The Arab culture was spread by the sword about 1,300 years ago.
I can see that. It confuses me mostly because North Africans seem, at least to the eye, far more similar to Arabs than they seem to sub-saharan Africans for instance. Arab influence in North Africa being so much more strong than the influence of any other group. Culturally, genetically etc etc.
Just interesting.
Aren’t “Arabs” from the Arabic peninsula (sometimes including Israel and Turkey et al) and North Africans from … North Africa? They may be similar in many ways but they’re geographically distinct.
Arab can mean multiple things:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ArabYour reply was to this GP:
> imagine if all of India moved to Germany. What would happen?
Indian & East-Asian immigrants have much lower violence stats than the native populations. To that end, your example doesn't say much about the GP that you're replying to.
To steel man the GP, let's say they mean any 2 demographics, not German vs Indians specifically. But there in lies the core issue with immigrant conversations. You can't pick 'any 2 demographics'.
Different immigrant groups (grouped by nation/age/gender/religion/skill-level) demonstrate different integration characterisitics. All immigrant conversations should be painfully specific. The conversations will be politically insensitive. But this is a comment thread about Trump winning his 2nd term in office. So, clearly, the ship has already sailed on political correctness.
Speaking for where I know, immigrants have been substantially higher net contributors than non-immigrants while the research on wage suppression suggests it's almost certainly not true except in some very small, very specific scenarios.
So - are population and housing costs going up and infrastructure failing to keep up, while businesses don't invest? Sure - but that's down to a failure to invest the proceeds of change, not down to the change itself.
Where I live I have the impression that cities are overcrowded because that’s where the jobs are. I don’t think immigration is the main problem, but I don’t know the actual data.
I’m curious how “mass immigration” has obviously and clearly impacted people’s daily lives in middle America - outside of media
> the political left have failed to show up with an answer, a policy, a plan -- anything, really.
This is factually untrue. U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 was a legislative bill that was proposed by President Joe Biden on his first day in office.[0] It died in committee.
The reality is that illegal immigration is good for ALL business (regardless of whether you are democrat or republican) in the US. This is the hush-hush wink-wink reality that most politicians understand but would never say publicly. They create appearances they are doing something (e.g. creating legislation that might fix the problem) but knowing it won't ever pass in a partisan legislative body.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Citizenship_Act_of_2021
You would need to show up with data to back up those claims.
I live in (around) a major city. Sure it's overcrowded but that has nothing to do with foreign immigration and everything to do about it being a economic powerhouse. Quality of life has been increasing since the city has invested/is investing in more transportation/bikeable lanes/better air pollution standards/less noise. Also laws that are forcing better insulation standards are a net quality of life both in terms of comfort and footing the bill. Even the people who really need to take their cars will benefit because there will less traffic jams on account of 1. people for whom it was mostly comfort leaving the road and 2. reduced speed means less unnecessary braking to get out and in the motorway around the city.
Strained services seems to be because of budget tightening. It's a policy choice that has to do with ideology (don't fund a service when it could made profitable by outsourcing it) and trying to save on budgets because of a bad economy. Again you'd have to back up with data that it has something to do with immigration.
I could on and on but basically what you are saying there was too much new people too fast but I don't think this is nowhere true in my western european country.
The only thing that could worry is the minorities enclaves but it's not hard to break up a ghetto by opening it up sociogeographically and economically, you just need to the political will to do so but instead it's left in place and used as convenient fear-mongering tool for politicians.
> Sure it's overcrowded
The Guardian (a left-leaning newspaper) estimates that leaving the housing crisis unfixed also fuels the far right parties.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/article/2024/may/06/fix-eur...
The issue here is that there is a global developed world housing crisis. There was a global inflation crisis. There's no quick fixes for these problems.
> There's no quick fixes
Sure is. Change zoning rules to allow building a lot more. Let people and corporations build using their own money. No need for government to use any money, just change the rules. Collect property taxes from the new buildings.
Global housing shortage.
Build more houses?
No! Can’t do that, we need the money for forever wars everywhere! But the Raytheon shareholders can use the profits to add solar panels, so it’s all good.
Lloyd Austin - Biden & Harris's Secretary of Defense - serves on the board of Raytheon. So wars are natural.
I don't know about London but imho people would not equate the housing crisis with illegal immigration since those people can only live together in decrepit apartments when not in the streets. It takes a billionaire funded media ecosystem (as I have in my country) to consistently hammer in the fact that those are linked in people's head.
If wages are suppressed and you look at some guy making less than you with a different skin color, I think you're looking at the wrong guy.
I agree with what you say, I regret not having voted in my Italian city and now third places have been closed because not profitable
Supply of cheap labor lowers wages, not sure why you believe otherwise. There are other things that can lower wages, but cheap supply is a factor.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. Adding people increases demand more than supply, meaning it increases wages. Immigrants also have complementary skills to natives, which further reduces risk.
There is no empirical evidence of anyone's wages being lowered by immigration.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...
That assumes immigrants are average people, but they are not they mostly work in some sectors. Those sectors will see a wage dump, other sectors might see a wage hike to compensate though.
For example if immigrants are mostly highly paid programmers, you can expect waitresses etc to get a wage hike, but if immigrants are mostly uneducated young women then waitresses will probably see reduces wages.
If you look you can see the groups who compete with the immigrants tend to be more hostile towards immigration, while the groups who doesn't see immigration in their sector aren't as hostile. Most immigrants tend to be men for example, so we would expect men to be more anti immigration since their jobs see more competition from it, and that is also what we see in opinion polling.
The first study brought in example literally has to do with low skilled worker, and as seen it does not affect other workers in a negative way (if I'm getting what the guy is saying in his post)
If you read this study it says they found a big negative effect on male workers:
https://giovanniperi.ucdavis.edu/uploads/5/6/8/2/56826033/ma...
> Using a restricted subsample of high school dropouts and the March-CPS4, he finds a large and long lasting negative di↵erence in wages between Miami and its control in the 1982-1985 period.
The article argues that is flawed since it only considered high school dropout men, but those are the main competitors to low skill immigrant jobs. If you include women and other groups who don't compete for the same low skill jobs then yeah you wont find an effect. Some of those might even see increased wages canceling out the reduced wages low skill men see, but that doesn't really help those low skill men.
It makes sense to say that at least a slice of population gets the small stick, but if I get it right the net benefits as a whole are bigger than the singular disadvantages, or no?
I can't seem to understand that
The problem can be that the net whole is “better off” by some minuscule amount but certain subgroups are disastrously worse off.
For example, factory jobs disappearing usually increases the nations GDP “as a whole” but has disastrous effects on the poor communities that provided the labor.
Or another way to put it - if immigration is a net benefit and has little downsides, then a minimum wage for immigrants (legal or otherwise) of $45/hr should be fine.
(Even that might not move the needle much as immigrant labor, both legal and illegal, has “corporate” advantages that can’t be matched by residents. Being able to skirt regulations and laws because you know your employees can’t complain without risking their residency is a powerful tool. See: H1B abuse and OSHA abuse.)
Studies didn't find benefits either, it was mostly non results. More people means more people, they work and consume services at about the same rate, what matters is just how the new people distort the ratio of different kinds of people not that they are more people.
More people means there is more competition for housing until more supply is built though, so housing prices tend to go up from immigration. That is good if you wanna sell, bad if you wanna buy or rent.
In Europe, most immigrants (from third-world countries) are on welfare and are net welfare recipients.
see graph here
https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceUncensored/comments/1565sti/...
from article
https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-t...
Man that's one of the most surprising thing I could discover, like, ever. I've always thought that an increase in the number of workers dropped wages, and tbh the guilt has always fallen on the one who pays slave wages, not the people being paid peanuts. But that's a complete shift of paradigm, you should tell more people about it (although as he says, he probably won't change people's minds about it)
I'd rather have solidarity with other average Joes than put the guilt on them, just because they're enabling someone to pay lower wages shouldn't put the responsibility on their shoulders
Immigration is not at a historic high in us or Europe. I think it’s a combination of regressive social policy and redistribution upwards plus moderately high immigration which leaves an opportunity for populist bigots to leverage anti immigration rhetoric in elections.
What?
5.1 million immigrants entered the EU from non-EU countries in 2022, an increase of around 117% (2.7 million) compared with 2021.
The population of Ireland alone increased by 3.5% in 2023 - a 3.5 per cent increase in population in a given year being one of the highest ever for a single country in recorded history.
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2024/06/10...
Wasn't 2022 a huge outlier because of the war in Ukraine?
Yes
Everyone in Europe has been talking about it for decades and many parties on the left have nuanced views on it, and they're certainly not ignoring it. In the US, "the wall" Trump was banging on about in 2016 already existed. Deportations under Obama were higher than under Trump, and higher still under the Clinton administration.
Secondly in many countries "the left" hasn't really been in power for a long time; often government are in the centre or centre-right.
What you're observing is that:
- there's immigration
- normal people are getting shafted
However, the two things are entirely unrelated.
However, the ones doing the shafting tell people they're related so often that people believe it.
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> experiment of mass migration has failed to work for the average person
Could you precisely articulate this experiment ? America has had stable mass immigration for the longest time, arguably its entire history. Do you mean the entire American experiment ?
In what manner has it failed to work for the average person and in what manner has it harmed their bottom line ?
> Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services
American Cities are some of the most underpopulated in the whole world. Its only crowded city (NYC) has high positive sentiment for immigrants and owes the core of its historic identity to mass immigration. Not sure how immigration erodes quality of life or strains services. The US doesn't offer much in the way of services to immigrants anyway.
> competition for housing
This is 100% a building problem. The US has had high levels of immigration for a long time [1]. Immigration isn't going to suddenly shock the housing system. While the absolute population of the US keeps increasing, American cities have stayed woe-fully underbuilt. [2] New housing also isn't being built where people could use it. IE. within commute distance from offices in city centers.
> suppression of wages
Unfortunately these have been a long time coming. The alternative is jobs being shipped out of the US. The issue is even worse in Europe, where education is worse, employees work fewer hours and skill levels in new-tech are limited.
Wage suppression occurs differently in low and high skilled jobs.
In the low skill domain, the US already overpays blue collar workers, unionized factory workers and restaurant wait staff compared to the rest of the world. These jobs aren't threatened by immigrants, they're threatened by automation.
Among high skill workers, it is a statistics problem. 7.5 billion people from developing world want to be inside America's 300 million people bubble. Even with a 10x inefficiency, there will be twice as many talented people outside this bubble than inside it. So, the only way for the bubble to maintain its superiority is to keep skimming off the top. At 140k employment based green cards/year, that's 0.1% of the children born around the world that year. So even with another 10x inefficiency, the US would only allow the top 1 percentile of the whole world in.
The US wants this top talent. Because at their caliber, they are going to outcompete the US, and fundamentally alter unipolar power structures that give US its modern form. We're already seeing this with China. Now that the US has stopped having the same appeal to top Chinese candidates, Chinese geniuses now build within China, eroding America's control in every industry, one at a time. Eg: The world's best AI institutions are all Chinese [3]. The institutions didn't improve that much. It's just that America stopped being able to poach their best away.
Wages WILL be suppressed. The competition free utopia of the Boomers and Gen-Xers was only possible because the US emerged as sole superpower of the 20th century, while Asia rebuilt from scratch. Now that the world is stabilizing again, American wages can't hold up to scrutiny from the rest of world.
> the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards
Not sure what immigration has to do with any of this.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184487/us-new-privately-...
[3] https://csrankings.org/#/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&infore... _______
> I don't know how bad it is in the US, but in the rest of the West, it's been a disaster.
If you're talking about Canada and Europe, that's a whole another story. Yes, their mass immigration programs have been unmitigated disasters. But, you can't plainly extrapolate that to the US. The specifics matter. On that note, I wish you were more specific about what kind of immigration ?
Skilled vs unskilled
Legal vs Illegal
Vagrant men in their 20s vs Families
Religiously conservative vs liberal
Tolerant vs Fundamentalist ?
It makes a difference.
There’s a simple argument - the USA can obviously support some level of immigration - at the bare minimum the difference between current births and the replacement birth rate - and just as obviously it can’t stably take in half a billion people a year. Somewhere in between there must be a gradual cutoff where it becomes “too much”.
Most opponents of immigration say we’ve passed that mark and either need to compensate to solve the issues caused by it, or dial the number back.
> Somewhere in between there must be a gradual cutoff where it becomes “too much”.
There's a huge range of dimensions beyond how many people: Who is allowed to immigrate? How long do they get to stay? Do their children become citizens? etc.
Fantastic comment. I wish we could've had more open discussions about specific factual details over the past four years. I'm not a fan of "both-sides"-ism, but it there are definitely plenty of uncomfortable truths to go around for everyone.
All the things you listed are a result of neoliberal austerity politics much more than they are a result of immigration.
Having better safety nets definitely helps people look outward rather than in.
Pensions, social security, healthcare; once you have a feeling that you'll be taken care of if things go bad you can think about your neighbours a little more.
This.
The democrats shifted to the center instead of creating a campaign chasm on actual progressive issues that Americans would generally support like universal healthcare[0], student debt cancellation, housing subsidies, stronger pro labor policies (support for unions has grown across the aisle substantially) and generally fairer more equitable economic participation.
That would have reached across the aisle and put Republicans on the defensive especially around messaging
Instead, they went strong with wedge issues and tried to play culture wars. Which honestly I don’t disagree with the conclusions and policy positions democrats made here but it didn’t speak to economic fears or relief for the masses
We did this to ourselves to a certain degree. All progressives have left now is molotovs in the streets
[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/468401/majority-say-gov-ensure-...
I agree focusing on the culture issues was an incorrect move. But, union members seem to have gone largely pro-Trump even after he talked about firing anyone who went on strike and breaking them up with Musk. It's hard to understand.
What austerity politics? The US is running a 6% deficit.
OP was talking about "the rest of the West" so I was thinking more about the UK, where we've effectively had over a decade of austerity politics.
Where is the austerity? Does it have a knife?
You'll get a lot of hate for saying these things, but it's good you said them.
People really need to face reality and that our society simply cannot sustain even limited immigration if those people end up as a negative for the state in terms of financials.
The US doesn't give immigrants welfare, and they pay taxes, so that would be difficult.
False. Immigrants are eligible for various social benefits, food stamps, health care, etc.
Many recent US immigrants are asylum seekers. They do receive substantial government cash payments and free housing (i.e. welfare). I am generally pro immigration, but let's be clear about the cost.
https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/refugees/programs-and-...
Let’s also not pretend that “free housing” is NOT a major transfer of wealth from the government to landlords.
People would likely be less annoyed if the “free housing” was more akin to government owned military barracks instead of subsidized rent to private enterprise.
Find me a republican voter that will sign off on the government building the new housing stock.
Your perception does not make anything a reality. Many nations commit more to immigration and welfare than the US, and are benefiting from it.
Skilled migrants bring wealth with them, and in fact countries like Australia have avoided recession through immigration (and unemployment is still around 4%).
I’m certain that absolutely no one is referring to “skilled migrants” when participating in these discussions of limiting immigration.
But well, immigration has to only increase. Many of the problems of the West are due to insufficient immigration. And at the present time, we don't even care much about quality. We need just "bodies": whoever is willing to come, ideally those who are likely to have lots of children (although their birthrate falls dramatically once in). Because a generation down the road, those people will run out and countries will be competing hard to get ANYONE in.
The dividing edge is if you believe a nation is a people or if a nation is a country. But if you believe a nation is a country - ie its geographical borders, then why does it even matter if people live there or not?
Since we're already treating people like cattle ("we need bodies") to be moved around at will here, then we might as well make a comparison with a cattle farmer. If his cattle are not reproducing and thus are dying out, what sensible person would suggest that the solution is to get cattle from other farmers? When is it time to ask why his cattle is dying? Is it because they deserve it? Is it because the farmer needs the milk more than the calves?
I personally want my people to survive and not join the scrolls of history on the long list of exterminated tribes. If we have to survive outside of our current geographical country in a different place, then that is preferable to extermination.
It is because they CAN. They never wanted to reproduce in the first place. And the reason isn't even the democracy or "rotten Western values" - they die off even faster in authoritarian, patriarchal Eastern countries, free and unfree alike. It's simply economic growth.
Give me any way of "making people reproduce again" which isn't overtly dystopian-totalitarian and i will accept that promoting "as much immigration as possible, not letting in only known criminals" was a bad idea.
Sure government can just start having babies for itself. That will be real cattle herding.
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Huh? Who said anything about ethnically and culturally uniform?
In the US I’ve never heard this narrative from major candidates or seen it in their policy proposals from the democrats
Rhetoric is always about respecting the melting pot and letting cultural and ethnic differences co-exist under the great American experiment as it always has since its founding
> Rhetoric is always about respecting the melting pot
That is the uniform culture. You see it in tv shows everywhere, people looking the same in every show etc. (the 1 black, 1 white woman 1 white man 1 Hispanic 1 Asian group you see everywhere in American stuff)
There used to be shows like Friends and Fresh Prince which means diversity, now everything is just the gruel of the melting pot.
The general melting pot of cultures goes back over a century in this country. It’s been a cornerstone of US idealism for a long time.
It does rest that cultures will become homogeneous over time as they melt together but I take what is being asserted to be different from that, as in it’s promoting an artificial uniformity of culture rather a naturally blended one
> as in it’s promoting an artificial uniformity of culture rather a naturally blended one
Yeah, it feels like instead of enabling a diverse set of cultures to coexist they try to enforce a culture that has a diverse set of things in it.
Which the rhetoric coming from Democrats doesn't match the assertion here. It was never about forcing diversity that I can find from any fielded candidate.
Feelings being what they are, you can't really 'disprove' them per se, but this may be more of a reaction to media representations of diversity vs actual ideals
Migrants are how people are fed and how many esential jobs are filled. They aren't the problem, even illegal immigration are blips (although massive wars have put huge pressures on countries) and are only set to get worse with climate change.
The root causes of the issues are war, climate change and demographics. No amount of "battening down the hatches" or "sticking your head in the sand", which is right wing answers to this, are going to solve it. The real solutions are strengthening global co-operation and international agencies.
Unfortunately we're going in exactly the wrong direction.
Correlation != causation, yet again for billionth time even otherwise smart folks easily do this mistake, usually emotions cloud their rationality. There is 0 proof as in any form of research that proves what you claim, you don't even try to back it up.
All this boils again to emotions - people see french teacher having head cut off by student due to showing muhammad's picture in the class, and this trumps 1000s other data points and discussions. I am not saying such things should be ignored or swept under the carpet, but analyzed rationally, discussed and good measures taken, even very harsh if they are the best course of action. Simple folks don't want to hear arguments, they want to see blood and whole world to fix their lives so they can live like some tiktokers they follow en masse.
For Europe, yet again Switzerland is doing stuff 1000x better than rest of the continent. They have 3x the immigration of average western EU country, yet 0.1% problems with it. But its population is smarter and less emotionally driven, so populists have it much harder here. Also they as society setup the whole immigration as set of rules as expectations that everybody +-adheres to. But EU has too big egos to actually admit somebody is better and just learn from more successful, so they will keep fucking things up till people are so pissed they will vote for people who will do further long term damage but will tackle scary immigration boogeyman.
Now its really not a good time for democracies that don't have well educated smart self-sufficient population, dictators are coming better off.
>For Europe, yet again Switzerland is doing stuff 1000x better than rest of the continent.
Well, being the continent's money vault and avoiding two world wars while the whole continent ravaged itself twice, tends to make a huge difference in your nation's development (time in the market beats timing the market and Switzerland did both).
Also, just like the USA, Switzerland won the geopolitical lottery early on by being in a position that's easy to defend and difficult to attack and capitalized on it over the decades by attracting the highly educated elite and the wealthy entrepreneurs escaping from the European countries as they were torn by wars and revolutions, plus the dirty money of warlords, dictators and criminals from all over the world made them incredibly prosperous. It's not a repeatable formula that any other EU country could have easily replicated.
Adding the fact that Switzerland is incredibly restrictive with who they accept in the country, compared to neighboring EU countries who just let the dross in to virtue signal how tolerant they are, maintains Switzerland a very safe and desirable place to be despite it being relatively diverse (diversity in this context also means diversity of thought and diversity of opinion, not just the US identity politics version of only meaning non straight white males). So another win for them.
But if you look at Swiss elections, plenty of candidates took the xenophobic route in their campaigns demonizing Muslims and burkas as the biggest threat, but unlike EU members they don't really care what other think of them so they're a lot more outspoken about it.[1][2]
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/anti-minaret-campaign-divides-switzerl...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56314173
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https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/us_jury_cognizant_cas...
It's already happening.
That's really a quite very unrefined view of Hitler's rise to power. If you really want to prevent Hitler then you have to prevent the end-stage of the Weimar Republic. So, you'd need a strong economy, rule of law, public order and a culture of decency and trust. What makes people yearn for autocratic rule isn't "blaming the jews" it's the everyday circumstances that arise when liberals are done running a place into the ground. Like California, at the moment.
>it's the everyday circumstances that arise when liberals are done running a place into the ground.
Not just running the place into the ground, but also actively lecturing people how everything is fine and how it's their perception that is wrong. That's what really pisses people off and gets the to vote extremists as those tend to at least acknowledge some of the issues average people are facing or seeing.
Average working class people don't like being lectured by upper class higher educated elitists off their high horse on how they're wrong.
This is idiotic. People who live in California just voted Harris. Their quality of life is fine. The irony is that it’s the redneck parts of the states that are suffering most from neoliberal austerity.
I wasn't talking about California but in general.
California has more Trump voters than a number of swing states combined.
It's just the same playbook. Deny problems, divert blame, call opponents bad names.
IF you were so interested in preventing the next Hitler what you would actually have to do is to rigorously oppose anything that threatens the livelihood of average people. Fighting inflation would be THE number one concern because you'd know that people carrying their money in wheelbarrows was what caused Hitler.
If you want to prevent Hitler, you'd fight like hell for decency. Homeless encampments? Open air drug dens? Only-fans? This would be your concern because you'd know that in the Weimar Republic rampant prostitution and other cultural decay is what caused Hitler.
If you wanted to prevent Hitler you'd also speak out sternly against Antifa and other violent extreme leftists, like those that caused the George Floyd riots, because you'd know that the breakdown of public order due to rampant political violence in the Weimar Republic is what caused Hitler.
Nobody on the left is doing any of that because nobody on the left really thinks Trump is a Nazi. It's just a label, just a tactic. And all it has done is to burn term. Trump or Maga or the current right reaction isn't the big bad. What comes after this might be, if Trump fails. Ironically, it's exactly Trump's agenda which is most suited to fight real fascism.
Exactly what should government do to fight global inflation largely Caused by fuel prices? Perhaps try to decarbonise… but that’s not very MAGA is it? The reality is inflation is lower in the US than much of the rest of the world and the US economy has weathered recent shocks better than most.
"Fix everything or else we'll elect Hitler" well they certainly can't fix everything so I guess they might as well resign themselves to having Hitler elected. Why even bother trying in that case?
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This is not a historical perspective. Around 1900, it were the socialists who opposed immigration as a tool to drive down wages:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-review...
Back then the right wing were the industrialists who wanted immigration.
Hitler blamed all sorts of people, including the socialists (who were against immigration). Using Hitler to shut down any discussion about immigration is not very productive. Obviously there are limits. Less so in the U.S. because there is more space, but in Europe everyone is already living in tiny overpriced apartments on top of each other.
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I doubt that happens as it benefits the elites to pull down tech employee wages
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Your comment is a fantastic display of how easy it is to obscure bigotry with reasonable-sounding window dressing.
That is going to be explosive because there isn't a developed economy anywhere that can avoid major crises without maintaining or increasing immigration levels over the coming decades as the effects of fertility rates really start to bite.
In the UK we saw the Tories try to play the ball in two places at once: Enable lots of immigration while simultaneously pretending the country was under siege to appeal to the anti-immigrant crowd. It blew up in their faces in a spectacular way.
While I'd like that to be an accurate description of why the Tory party lost, my understanding is that the migration topic was basically the only thing the Tories did that continued to resonate with voters, and what actually lost them was a continuing series of incompetent leaders, starting with Cameron (who didn't realise the mic was still hot immediately after resigning). Nobody (of any party) liked May, Johnson got away with pleasing lies until Partygate, Truss was a forgettable joke, and Sunak was basically Jim Hacker.
IMO the only reason the Tories didn't lose sooner was that the Labour party was also stuck with Corbyn.
They lost the anti-immigration vote to Reform. That shows, to me, that the voters that cared about that topic could see the difference between their rhetoric and their actions.
How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?
As a person who can be described that way: why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
>why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
Well, for one: cutting back on illegal immigrants and hating immigrants are not the same thing.
Two: stay where you are? I don't get what your expectations are here. Plenty of skilled immigrants love the US. If it's not your cup of tea, that's fine.
1. Illegal immigration is already illegal. Cutting back on it is tangential to every other statement about promoting, limiting, or targeting migration.
2. I'm responding to a comment that says "How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?"
And in my capacity as such a person: that attitude makes me not interested in anything else on the table. Hypothetically to demonstrate the point: You could offer me your entire GDP, even after accounting for a business plan where I somehow specifically help you double it, as pay… and I'd turn you down.
Remember that the current state of immigration in the USA is exactly what was being proposed to be changed: the previous desirability is specifically not going to remain.
As another skilled immigrant, this is exactly what I want.
> why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
"Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
Why would you personally want to immigrate to a place where you are immediately expected to foot the bill for everyone else?
> "Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
> Why would you personally want to immigrate to a place where you are immediately expected to foot the bill for everyone else?
Because the only places that doesn't describe are those without a functioning government capable of collecting taxes.
You want me to migrate to ${your country} to boost the economy? Well, that's only useful to you to the extent it means I'm supporting all the people in your country that can't migrate elsewhere for exactly the same reason.
> "Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!"
I want to live with people who pull their weight and aren't an immediate financial burden on everyone else, yes.
If this is "one of the good ones" vs "one of the bad," so be it. If one is immediately looking to burden everyone else, I can see why one wouldn't want to "spend [their] time living with" folks who don't want to give them free shit.
> Because the only places that doesn't describe are those without a functioning government capable of collecting taxes.
We're not talking about tax collection, we're talking about how taxes are spent.
> You want me to migrate to ${your country} to boost the economy?
I don't care why or if you immigrate, but if you do, you will not have a net-negative financial impact on the population. Yes: there are freeloaders amongst the population as-is - this itself isn't a valid reason to import millions more.
We're already taking the cream of the crop - which is why H-1B and O-1s visas are a thing. People hiking across the Darién gap aren't magically going to become engineers and doctors.
> I want to live with people who pull their weight and aren't an immediate financial burden on everyone else, yes.
Call us back after you've deported your own parents and children.
> We're not talking about tax collection, we're talking about how taxes are spent.
You're doing both.
In every functioning nation, the rich subsidise the poor.
I as an above average income earner am necessarily always going to subside the poor no matter where I live — unless it's a place that's got no government.
That was true when I lived in the UK, true when I moved to Germany, and would have been true had I moved to the USA instead — all that changed for me was Joe Bloggs became Otto Normalverbraucher instead of Bubba Sixpack.
> I don't care why or if you immigrate, but if you do
Except you previously wrote "How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?"
If you "allow" something but nobody wants to take you up on it, it's not any different than forbidding it.
I'm allowing people to donate infinite money to me, but I'm not taking any steps to encourage this or give anyone a reason to.
> People hiking across the Darién gap aren't magically going to become engineers and doctors
Likewise a degree.
In both cases the capability is already a demonstration of being well above average.
>"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
This entire thread is filled to the brim with people describing the voting majority of Republicans as low information idiots.
We can't have unrestricted immigration, period. How do you propose we select?
> This entire thread is filled to the brim with people describing the voting majority of Republicans as low information idiots.
Indeed, and I think it unhelpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42059010
I wrote both with the intention of inducing empathy, as in putting oneself in the shoes of others.
> We can't have unrestricted immigration, period.
False.
In many threads where the US is compared unfavourable to other nations, e.g. that the public transport isn't as good or as cheap as Germany's, or that internet is slower and more expensive than France, or whatever, the defence is "oh, America is just so big and empty".
You have the most part of a continent. You could, if you wanted to, fit in the whole world — about twice the population density of the Netherlands, which I've been to and isn't that crowded.
And it's not like everyone actually wants to live in any given country anyway — even if you did have the whole world suddenly teleport in and leave the rest of the planet empty like an xkcd what-if, I'd be surprised if less than 80% put in active effort to leave.
> "Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
That is how the left describe men, do you argue the left hates men?
I have yet to encounter anyone saying that, and I live in a country which (and come from another country which also) considers the US' Democrat Party to be suspiciously right-wing.
But hypothetically, if I met someone saying that, I would indeed say that specific person hated men.
They definitely would not be someone I would wish to constantly be treading egg-shells around for fear of getting deported.
> "Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
As a foreigner, I honestly can't see the difference between "want only the migrants that pull their own weight" and "hate foreigners but refrain from saying it to their face if there's a financial incentive".
If your tolerance is predicated on me giving you money, I'll pass the opportunity.
My tolerance is predicated on me not giving you money.
Spend the money you earn on yourself: it will flow through the rest of the economy. But I am not going to give you any to do so.
> My tolerance is predicated on me not giving you money.
Either:
1) You also don't tolerate the below median earner who is native to your country
or
2) Your tolerance is dependent on citizenship not just income
If you're #1, that's a problem for your fellow citizens whom you don't tolerate.
If you're #2, you're telling me to not bring my higher earning skills to your economy.
Doesn't matter if you didn't mean it that way, you still won't get me spending the money I earn on your economy so you won't get rich from me.
Why can't it be both?
Why can't I want to minimize the number of unskilled outsiders (with different values, etc.) because they may cost more while overlooking that fact for those with obvious economic power regardless of where they are from.
I know it hurts to hear: people with wealth are desirable guests and citizens.
A country's citizenry is much like children: some are going to be shitty, but we still support that limited group because of arbitrary moral obligation (perhaps inspired by the fact that we want our "own" to continue.) We're not obligated to extend this tradition to anyone else for any reason.
> you still won't get me spending the money I earn on your economy so you won't get rich from me.
Thankfully there are billions of people in the world and they're literally dying to get into the US. H-1Bs quotas are filled every year - there's no shortage of high-average earners wanting to come here, either.
> Why can't it be both?
Because the depenence on citizenship in the second is an additional requirement beyond the minimal state of the first.
> I know it hurts to hear: people with wealth are desirable guests and citizens.
I know it hurts to hear: I don't want to be your guest.
If I was invited by an American company to relocate, I'd turn it down, regardless of pay.
Most of the billions in this world aren't heading to you, wherever you live.
Studies show you've got it backwards. If you let a nurse or programmer into the country, they're going to take a job that's otherwise filled by an American, depressing skilled wages.
If you let in an unskilled laborer, they're going to take a job that nobody wants. They spend those wages, boosting the economy.
In both cases, studies show that the number of jobs stays roughly the same; immigrants create about the same amount of jobs as they take. However skilled immigrants decrease average wages, and unskilled immigrants increase average wages.
It's the outliers that really tip the balance, though. If one of those immigrants turns out to be Jensen Huang or his parents, that's how you make America great.
> Studies show you've got it backwards. If you let a nurse or programmer into the country, they're going to take a job that's otherwise filled by an American, depressing skilled wages.
But at that same time they're contributing massive amounts to the tax base, furthering society.
Maybe they even start a company, employing more programmers.
They also spend their wages.
> If you let in an unskilled laborer, they're going to take a job that nobody wants.
The price for that work is artificially low because these folks don't have any legal protections of any kind.
Guess what else happens commonly to unskilled, under-the-table labor? Injuries! Which I have to pay an outsized amount for in the form of Medicaid and ER fees.
How much of their remaining income is remitted straight to their impoverished relatives back home?
> If one of those immigrants turns out to be Jensen Huang or his parents
Know how to easily filter out Jensen Huang from the crowd of people swimming across the Rio Grande? Marketable skills.
> How much of their remaining income is remitted straight to their impoverished relatives back home?
The skilled labourers do far more of that than unskilled ones.
> Guess what else happens commonly to unskilled, under-the-table labor? Injuries! Which I have to pay an outsized amount for in the form of Medicaid and ER fees.
The vast majority of the cost of health care is old people, and it's expensive because it's labor intensive. The way to bring health care costs down is to increase the ratio of young people to old people. Which in 2024 means immigration.
> Know how to easily filter out Jensen Huang from the crowd of people swimming across the Rio Grande? Marketable skills.
Marketable skills like shopkeeper? That's what Jensen Huang's parents were.
> The vast majority of the cost of health care is old people
Chronic costs, yes, costs borne out of tail risks - no.
> Marketable skills like shopkeeper? That's what Jensen Huang's parents were.
If you have the drive, economic ability, wherewithal in 2024 to keep a shop - operate a business - in the United States in 2024, yes, this is a desirable, marketable skill.
> Chronic costs, yes, costs borne out of tail risks - no.
Chronic costs are the vast majority of total costs
> If you have the drive, economic ability, wherewithal in 2024 to keep a shop - operate a business - in the United States in 2024, yes, this is a desirable, marketable skill.
That's a priori data. Jensen's parents weren't shopkeepers in Taiwan, so how would you know this?
Lord help your soul though if you are a citizen and do not have the ability to work a high level job.
There are an enormous number of unskilled workers in the US. And they get a vote. And they will vote to kill off competition from migrant workers. Like what trump is promising.
What’s not mentioned is that skilled immigration, if it pushes aside a skilled citizen - that skilled citizen can no doubt find some other work.
But the unskilled citizen labor that gets pushed aside by unskilled immigration - they have a much harder time finding work.
> that skilled citizen can no doubt find some other work.
at a much lower salary, sure.
> But the unskilled citizen labor that gets pushed aside by unskilled immigration - they have a much harder time finding work.
No they don't, not according to studies. Studies show that immigration increases the number of total jobs available. There are fewer available jobs for janitors, but more available jobs where just being a local is a marketable skill. A local has language and cultural skills that immigrants don't have.
So they're less likely to find work as a janitor but more likely to find one as a waiter or retail manager, both higher paying positions.
It works if your existing population is willing to do unskilled labour. Which in my country is not the case
I love this one because it's so basically obvious: the price for this work will increase or it simply won't happen and wasn't necessary anyway.
You can't get native Americans to do farm work for any amount of money, because they'd have to live in the middle of nowhere near the farm and that's no fun.
(That is, you'd have to pay them so much they could buy the farm and then hire someone else to work it. But you're not going to do that.)
The market will take care of this: people will do the work or pay for it or they won't eat.
"They won't eat" is a perfectly possible outcome of this, and a bad one. That is called a recession.
No, it's called a famine and wouldn't happen. Recession would imply that the market was completely incapable of adjusting to allocate resources correctly.
Promoting a second-tier, legally-disenfranchised workforce isn't the win you seem to think it is.
> Recession would imply that the market was completely incapable of adjusting to allocate resources correctly.
It doesn't have to be "complete", just a shortfall in demand, and of course eventually it ends. But if the market doesn't clear for a while, that's still people having to eat less for a while.
> Promoting a second-tier, legally-disenfranchised workforce isn't the win you seem to think it is.
Almost everything is better than farm work, which is why everyone ditches it as fast as they can. Even being a sweatshop worker is better. Nevertheless, the migrant farmworkers are doing it because it's better than their alternatives, presumably because they get paid better than doing it in their own country.
Btw, I'm not even thinking of especially poor countries here. Japan is a respectable first-world country but has surprisingly low wages and a bad exchange rate, and there are recent cases of Japanese people leaving for Australia to do work like this and making 2-3x what they can at home.
And of course back in Japan it feels like every convenience store worker these days is an immigrant from China, India or elsewhere.
This is fine, really. Productivity will increase over time, they'll save money over time, and their kids will have better jobs.
Or everyone pays much higher prices.
You missed what's actually happening, which is that cheap workers don't need to migrate to you to get unskilled work done for you.
The jobs move to distant factories filled with alien staff paying taxes to far away governments and who then spend their wages where they live (which isn't where you live).
Even with tariffs, that's still cheaper for many things. And the work you're incentivising to bring to you with tariffs, that's often automated precisely because it's unskilled. Food has been increasingly automated at least since the 1750s — to the extent that cows milk themselves (into machines not just into calves) these days.
It works until it doesn't — wherever the jobs go gets a rising economic spiral, and a generation later their middle class is corresponding richer and say to each other much what you say now: "why do we need them?", only now you are a "them" in that discussion.
It's a weird thing, migration. The short term incentives absolutely favour it for everyone, but it's bad for the place of origin in the long-term.
But note that I didn't say international migration: the arguments are the same between San Francisco and Sacremento, or between Lampeter and Cardiff, or between Marzahn and Zehlendorf.
cheap labour, not unskilled.
So what you want is to import third world immigrants so you can pay your plumber cheaply instead of paying them appriopriately.
That's the ethos of commerce for thousands of years. Try to pay the least to get the best
Japan is way ahead of the west in falling birthrates, but in spite of very little immigration there hasn't been any major crisis, just gradually declining standards of living.
What are those major crises? Decrease in housing prices?
Pensions and taxes. I guess that's medicare in USA?
Less Taxes: So we would have a smaller government? That's good. Government already gets so much money and waste it.
Pensions: Maybe instead of relying on a pyramid scheme, people would need to manage their investments or have kids and raise them well so they take care of them later. Sounds like a win.
> coming decades as the effects of fertility rates really start to bite.
I mean one solution is to promote policies that encourage people to have more children, but we "can't afford it", expecting we'll be able to afford the incoming social care crisis.
> We are currently in the process of the creation of a new world order ... with little respect for democracy
Damn, we should have definitely installed an anointed candidate with zero primary votes .. to save democracy.
All the libertarian mumbojumbo about the internet and encryption prove to be wrong. The internet becomes a tool of mass surveillance and misinformation affording the oligarchic takeover and dissolution of democracy and broad based freedoms.
It might also be that neoliberalism just is failed and dead.
The wake up call should have been 15-20 years ago.
The result is a combination of all these factors and many others, including racism, misogyny, and a desire to return to a time when groceries were cheap. Next summer, the recession will come as a great surprise to those who expected to be better off under Trump
You sound quite confident. Are you willing to place financial bets?
My financial decisions are none of your business buddy.
Okay, then maybe keep your predictions to yourself. Put up or shut up.
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Bingo
I stopped reading at new world order. I guess we’ve gone full circle now as this used to be what the GOP said about dems.
I'm concerned about this "group paranoia" phenomenon that I increasingly see among friends and family. Yes, just like in the past it was the Devil himself manipulating kings and people, now it is China and Russia that secretly hold sway over Western governments (when it's not the Jews).
Or maybe, just maybe, the Democrats (and other similar parties elsewhere) went too crazy and left and did not focus on real issues ordinary people face?
The Overton window has shifted insanely right in the US. The democrats would be considered centrist or even centre right in much of the EU.
When people say this, they just seem to mean European countries have more universal healthcare than the US does. But /keeping/ your healthcare program after it's already been invented is conservative!
European parties are definitely not to the left of the Democrats on immigration or minority rights.
Nah, there's far more to it than that. Workers' rights, consumer rights, privacy laws, and strong regulations around corporations for a start.
Very much depends on the issue being discussed. Economically? Perhaps. Socially? Absolutely not. The US is far out on its own branch when it comes to things like LGBTQ issues, racial and other identity issues, immigration, etc. I’m not sure these played as much of a role as the economy in terms of this election, but they are absolutely next in line in terms of the issues looming large in voters’ minds.
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Most dems, and certainly Harris, want nothing to do with abortion at 9 months. This is adding nothing to this discussion.
If Dems don't want it why have they passed a bill that allows exactly that? My post is already censored btw.
Considering that our far right government in italy hiked taxes and approved the biggest number of visa for slave workers, yeah they do except for women's rights
I think they do want those strange made-up strawman policies.
Nobody wants abortion at 9 months.
Women who are otherwise going to die because of a medical condition might want to have an abortion at 9 months (for example). The idea of being "for abortion at 9 months" just means allowing those women to live (instead of having to have their babies whether or not it kills them).
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All of which are "social liberal".
These, and a lot of other things are pretty much randomly left/right. For example in the UK it was the traditionally right wing party that legalised same sex marriage. In the 70s the left (then actual socialists!) opposed EEC membership, by the time we left the EU it was the right who wanted to leave.
What the US never had (and which is pretty much dead in the UK now) is a real economically left wing party. In the UK this has lead to a lot of people (including myself) feeling that there is not much difference between the big parties. This helps for extreme parties in the UK. In the US which is more of a two party system perhaps it helps feed the rise of extreme movements within the existing parties?
Social liberal policies are left.
And yeah, politics are a lot more complex than left/right so you will often see a party you'd normally consider left/right enact a policy you'd see from the other side.
Those are not left policies. Just liberal. We have both left and right parties that have similar policies. We also have left and right parties that area against it.
Left are liberal policies, right are conservative policies.
It's more that their marketing targeted people who are already Democrats and moderate Republicans. The first group didn't need convincing, and the second group is small. The independents and swing voters they should have courted were left in the cold and either didn't vote or went for Trump. They kept preaching to choir, and the choir kept shouting "Hallelujah!", so they thought they had it in the bag.
Liberal isn't left. Maybe their problem is that they actually didn't go left (workers).
We just had by far the most pro-union administration in decades, eg they saved the Teamsters' pensions, and in return the Teamsters didn't endorse them. Americans don't care if you respect the working class or not, they're postmaterialist voters.
But they're also "education polarized", so they definitely care if you respect people who didn't go to college. But "respect" doesn't mean you're nice to them or even that you do things for them as a group. It could just mean you don't come off like you went to grad school.
Grocery union workers were hassling people to see their prescriptions where I live recently, before they’d let them in the store as pharmacy workers had a different contract
More local tribal groups who can ask for your papers “please” is not the way either. Unions have aligned with mafioso and pols to propagate violence. Not sure why everyone thinks the past is a good solution. Clearly the average American is a moron; who rewards them with more authority?
Dem pols are 100% useless as any real change screws them too as people. It’s pageantry on both sides. Ones just openly violent and that one won. Great.
What, in practice, was too crazy and left in the Biden administration? (Honestly asking)
Defending trans people apparently was a bridge too far for many, for one.
>Defending trans people apparently was a bridge too far for many, for one.
Which is ridiculous. Trans folks are less than one percent of the population.
Why shouldn't they be allowed to be who they are? Given the tiny number of these folks, it really shouldn't make any difference to anyone who's not trans anyway.
But, apparently, some folks, who appear to believe that their trained-in prejudices are the laws of nature, feel the need to tell other people how they should live and, even more egregiously, try to force them to do so.
That's not liberty. That's not individual rights. That's not religious freedom. Rather, it's busybodies trying to tell other people what to do.
The problem isn't the people, it's the policy.
e.g. https://4w.pub/male-inmate-charged-with-raping-woman-inside-...
The only reason this could happen is because of policy that prioritizes self-declared "gender identity" over sex, and over women's dignity and safety. That's the actual problem, not people just quietly living their lives.
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There's 2x the amount of border apprehensions under Biden than Trump. I'm sure more people are trying to get into the country under Biden than trump so let's say the control is pretty even but not uncontrolled.
https://usafacts.org/topics/immigration-border-security/
And what happens after the migrants are "apprehended?" Saying there are more apprehensions is meaningless.
The number of border apprehensions is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the number of illegals who enter the country. If 0 illegal immigrants enter the country that would mean there are 0 border apprehensions. Would that mean the border was less secured?
Everything indicates there were less illegal border crossings under Trump than Biden
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2024/02/11/trump-...
The parent comment said "uncontrolled".
It also boggles the mind that immigrants are the issue while the 1% own as much as the entire middle class, while the bottom class owns nothing at all. When you pay more for groceries, or rent, or gas do you think it's the immigrants making it expensive?
What do you think illegal border crossings are if not uncontrolled immigration?
Cost of groceries/gas are a separate issue. Does not mean immigration isn't.
And do you think immigrants do not make rent more expensive? If you increase the demand, without increasing the supply, what do you think happens?
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More than that, I think there was a lot of democrat messaging that the economy is the greatest its ever been because of Biden. When I would say, it is because of Nvidia, haha. and what does that have to do with the price of milk or eggs for some random american?
Nvidia has literally nothing to do with record low unemployment.
I'm pretty sure some guy who made it big on stocks now can afford to have his front deck renovated.
Or my electrician friend who’s making boatloads working crazy overtime building data centers.
If you replace “Nvidia” with the much broader “technology” then it is indeed the major reason the modern world economy is good.
Technology is definitionally a thing that improves productivity, so sure.
The fact that Tim Walz made it through a 90 minute debate without mentioning the CHIPS act a single goddamn time absolutely blows my mind.
Dems could try to explain why Trump's economic policy made the US economically brittle, leaving Biden no choice but to pay the piper to avoid a depression. You're not going to woo voters with that kind of narrative, though, even if it's the truth.
Similarly, when the friendly The View hosts asked Harris what she would do differently from Biden, I assumed her team would have drilled that obvious talking point into her with flashcards.
My mind was blown when she said "There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact."
You don’t even have to start a fight - you can just have an answer about how certain policies take time to grow and you’ll continue to nurture them. An analogy about how it takes time to turn a cargo ship might be apt; how the main thing is steady at the help, and hold the rudder.
My parents who are extreme Democrats called me after that interview to say there's no hope and Trump will win. Harris never understood the obvious fact that Biden's approval ratings were terrible not because he is old, but because people don't like his policies.
He's a knucklehead, remember?
Yeah, that's the core. Politicians love to claim "the economy is good!"... but if the people see it in their daily lives that almost none of that supposed "good" makes it into their pockets, there will be problems. People aren't stupid ffs.
Many people got raises after the inflation shock... but rent hikes ate that up, prices for food and staples didn't go down despite fuel/energy prices going low, and many people didn't get raises at all or (especially in the tech sector) got laid off entirely.
People literally are stupid. Inflation was a global phenomenon, clearly not “caused by” POTUS, and the US managed it far better than every peer.
The idea that if you don’t like inflation you should vote Trump is pretty much the definition of stupidity.
This is why the US is so great. You debase the dollar, the whole world suffers, and you can still claim "we've outperformed our peers". Fantastic.
The dollar traded at pretty stable levels through the 2020-2024 period, and most countries that could did similar things to their currencies as we did.
To be clear, it doesn't make sense to say "the dollar traded at pretty stable levels". You need an FX pair to make sense.
There are three big, floating currencies in the world: USD, EUR, and JPY. These currencies are overwhelming used for international trade. The USD<->EUR FX rate has been quite stable (~1.10) for about 10 years. However, the JPY<->USD FX rates has risen dramatically since 2022.
To be clear, it's obvious I'm saying across a basket of all FX pairs, the US traded at pretty stable levels. There is no sign at all of debasement.
JPY, likewise, has performed terribly against a basket of all FX pairs.
JPY is the outlier.
One look at a currency prices chart disproves the "debasing" theory.
The global inflation in question was a result of the COVID over-response. I imagine the indirect deaths from negative economic impacts far exceeded the 0.1% IFR COVID-19 peaked at.
Ugh, a trolley problem.
Yes, this is a utilitarian conundrum.
If seniors weren't the majority of the electorate, the economy would've won out.
Which was neither an American nor a Democratic Party phenomenon, and again the US did better with recovery than anyone else by a huge margin.
Revisionist history points toward COVID response being a left-wing thing, but there was almost zero variation in policy state to state. The only point of variation was school reopening schedules.
The one thing that was knowably wrong to do at the time we did it was to deliberately slow down testing to keep Trump’s numbers looking good. Everything else was flying blind and to the extent we made mistakes (visible in retrospect), we made fewer of them than any of our peers.
> almost zero variation in policy state to state
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears..
Did you visit any midwestern state during COVID? Florida?
You can use the Google on the internet machine as much as you like and cherry-pick some leftist city in any state, but: broad/legally-enforced mask mandates, forced business closures, etc. were absolutely not happening in many areas of the United States.
> there was almost zero variation in policy state to state.
That’s not true, what on earth are you talking about? Everything was closed for way longer in New York than in Arizona for example.
The vaccine was developed quickly under Trump. A genuine success he can claim happened under his rule.
He stopped talking about it at rallies because his supporters boo-ed him whenever he mentioned it.
We're partly at the mercy of his stupidity but also the stupidity (that we're not supposed to talk about apparently) of his most devoted voters.
He stopped talking about it because it was unpopular (because it is ineffective) and was forced.
No other vaccine is given entirely under the pretense that it will basically only be of benefit to other people.
COVID had a 0.1% IFR across the whole population.
If I am 18-30, why would I take a novel vaccine when it doesn't even prevent the illness or make me meaningfully more likely to survive? "To protect grandma, of course!" isn't why we agree to use TDAP vaccinations or formerly administered Polio or Smallpox vaccines.
> COVID had a 0.1% IFR across the whole population.
The US population is around 340 million people, no matter how "low" a rate appears (besides your number being wrong, it's 1% [1] and the number of reported infections is likely to be way lower than the actual amount), the sheer size of the country will be problematic. At the very least 1.2 million Americans died of Covid over the four years of the pandemic. That is the equivalent of one average size city getting wiped out by a nuclear blast - if this amount of death were caused by an external force, the US would utterly annihilate that external force. Hell they flattened Afghanistan for a few thousand people who died in 9/11.
And additionally, deaths aren't the only metric. I caught it two times, I was out sick for three weeks with more weeks of lower productivity following because that shit fried my brain. Others had it worse, a friend of mine was out for half a year. That is an effect worthy enough of a mask and vaccine mandate.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
People are still feeling it in their wallet every time they go grocery shopping. The greatest mistake of the Biden era was to ignore the cost of living explosion and the uncontrolled greed.
They absolutely didn’t ignore the cost of living explosion or uncontrolled greed.
Kamala proposed several policies targeted at those problems. Many of which I disagree with, but it’s demonstrably untrue they “ignored” it.
The American people were just lied to successfully by the world’s biggest liar.
I think the “ignored” is that the sitting VP was proposing policies for later that hadn’t been implemented! That was the biggest hurdle - she had to run as a dependent independent which is basically an impossibility.
Meanwhile the guy who spent years crying about the border only to then instruct the Republican party to kill a bill meant to fix exactly that problem won so....
It was partly a global man made issue because every country (including the U.S.) printed COVID money like crazy.
It was the Supreme Court, staffed by Trump, who stopped the COVID madness with their vaccine mandate ruling.
The other issue is that Biden and his cronies Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan et al. deliberately escalated the Ukraine situation in 2021/2022, with the well known consequences. Note that Zelensky himself begged Biden not to be too aggressive at the Munich summit in early 2022! If I were Ukrainian, I'd loathe Biden.
The Biden administration mandated that their EU "allies" would participate in disastrous sanctions, which sent the EU into economic stagnation.
The U.S. is safe because it has natural gas and the reserve currency, which means they can print money more easily. It is not to Biden's credit that the U.S. economy is comparatively better.
I'd say that over 50% of Europe is very happy with the Trump victory, the EU press does not reflect public opinion.
Only Orban and pro-russian parties were happy today in EU
Americans could had saved Russian economy with this move, currently facing an imminent stagflation, so I bet that Putin is also a very satisfied cat and licking his lips at this moment. He has a golden excuse to pause the war for a while in the most favorable conditions for him, and rearm himself
Why would any European be happy with Trump winning[0]? The cornerstone of Trump's economic policy is shittons of tariffs that will cut the EU out of trading with the US and devastate them.
[0] aside from "it gives us moral cover to start deporting citizens we don't like"
He said that in 2016 and 2016-2019 were great years for Europe. He won't leave NATO either. He has less room to maneuver than people think.
What he will probably do is reverse the insane foreign policies of the Biden administration and stop the world from burning. I think he'll deescalate the Ukraine and Taiwan situations. Probably he'll not attack Iran either even though he is said to be a bigger hawk on Israel than Biden. But he also has a sense for economics and will not want another oil crisis.
If he has a sense for economics why does he want to put 20% tariffs on everything?
Trump printed that Covid money. Trump escalated the Ukraine situation with his scandal over aid and casting doubt in the unity of NATO, exactly what Putin wanted.
I’m surprised you would write all of this, blaming Biden for Ukraine’s situation, without a word about Putin. I guess Putin isn’t responsible at all for Ukraine’s situation eh? It’s all magically Biden.
I never understood this argument. Of course Putin is responsible, but what is the point of mentioning it?
Suppose you are on a tour in Rwanda to observe gorillas, and the tour guide tells you not to look them in the eye. One tourist feels humiliated by that instruction, looks a gorilla in the eye and gets beaten up. Who do you blame if you know in advance what the gorilla will do?
It was patently obvious to anyone who experienced the cold war what Russia would do if Ukraine would be a NATO member, preferably equipped with Tomahawk missiles. It was obvious to Merkel, to Obama, to Zelensky.
Of course Russia is to blame, but what is the point if you are supposed to be the adult in the room? You are also to blame.
Ye, Trump was pissed over not getting info about Hunter Biden doing business there?
And the concept of 'NATO unity' is a joke. NATO is the US and the extension of its 'soft power'. How is e.g. unity between Greece and Turkey supposed to work out, or France with itself.
you got it buddy, been in tech (silicon valley) for 25 years. I got laid off in August 2023 and the market sucked even back then. No recruiters reach out anymore. Back in 2022 it was twice a day or more.
That doesn’t even help for married men because they can use contraception with their wife.
But they can't use contraception to stop their wife dying from a miscarraige of a wanted child in a state where the doctors fear being jailed for taking the necessary medical steps for saving the mother's life, if that looks too much like an abortion.
Remind me again - who in the history of the world has ever not been ok with abortion to save the mother?
I remember a notable Irish case where a mother died because the doctors refused to perform an abortion. Led to a constitutional change.
Woman dies after abortion request 'refused' at Galway hospital (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-20321741.amp).
There have been cases like this in America but I’m not going to look it up. Fortunately the other commenter did. Hope this changed your opinion :)
The line isn’t clear cut as risk isn’t a guarantee.
Multiple US woman have already died when doctors where unwilling to intervene despite significant issues being present. There’s a lot of politics involved but as an example Josseli Barnica died in 2021 before row vs wade was overturned with doctors refusing to act over legal concerns despite clear and significant issues.
https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-mis...
https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar
You're vastly underestimating how cruel people can get, especially when they are on religion.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/21/us/abortion-b...
What do you think those "9-month abortions” people talk about are for?
A few very religious people, but I don't think any of those had traction to get that into law in the US recently.
This has already been covered. Any Dr too scared to read and interpret a law needs to give up their license because they’re pushing a political agenda.
If you don’t want to get pregnant it’s quite easy even if you don’t use contraceptives. Mistaken pregnancies need to go back to health class.
If you've dealt with human behavior at scale at all you know that more friction produces less activity. Of course doctors are going to deny treatment if it's treatment that comes with special legal scrutiny. Of course a new layer of legal review and approval is going to suppress the service that gets locked behind it.
The laws in question are ambiguously worded and untested-yet in courts. They promise severe financial penalties and prison terms for offenders. I don't blame a doctor for being scared.
The hospitals turn women in trouble away instructing them to come back in a comma or something. Not sure what can be done.
The very contraception republicans are in record repeatedly wanting to ban?
https://apnews.com/article/contraception-senate-abortion-bid...
> It should, but it doesn't.
A flight or bus ticket to California or Colorado for a once-in-a-lifetime service costs multiple orders of magnitude less than the recurring cost of groceries and basic goods.
Your wife dying because your flight got delayed, and you being imprisoned for trying to save her, are also once in a lifetime events.
I believe that abortion to save the mother’s life is legal in all 50 states, every territory and the federal district.
There are a small number of women who have died due to their physicians and/or hospitals misinterpreting the law, just as there are patients who die every day due to physicians’ and hospitals’ mistakes. Those are issues which need to be addressed.
But — so far as I know — right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
In principle, that is true. But that is simply not the reality on the ground. States ban abortion with such exceedingly narrow exceptions that doctors and hospitals delay until the point of actively endangering women.
Four deaths, reported on by one outlet, in the past couple months:
- A Texas teenager died after going to three emergency rooms and being misdiagnosed and denied treatment: https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...
- Another Texas woman died after a miscarriage as a result of doctors not treating her due to the state's fetal heartbeat law: https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-mis...
- A Georgia woman with chronic health conditions, which can make pregnancy highly risky but did not exempt her from Georgia's abortion ban, died of complications from a medication abortion: https://www.propublica.org/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban...
- Another Georgia woman died because doctors delayed 20 hours after she arrived at a hospital—9 hours after she was diagnosed with sepsis—before treating her: https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-ambe...
Unfortunately as a practical and legal matter that is false. First, physician incentives are aligned to deny care: they have a defense for denying care ("my lawyer isn't clear that I have authority to do this") and the woman has no recourse. Second, there is a simple matter of skill and availability. Fewer facilities allow abortion; fewer OB/GYNs are skilled at doing it safely. In my pregnancy I wanted a perfectly reasonable and legal thing supported by medical evidence and was unable to find a doctor in the state to provide it (vaginal breech birth as opposed to forced C-section).
When you are pregnant, and particularly if you are experiencing complications, you do not have time to shop around and convince people and schedule in advance and all that. You are constrained by the spatiotemporal availability of a skilled medical professional.
> right now there is nowhere in the country where if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened by her pregnancy then she cannot legally obtain a medical abortion.
This literally happened very recently
https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...
From that very article:
> Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions …
And from the actual text of the law (https://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB0...), abortion is permitted when ‘in the exercise of reasonable medical judgment, the pregnant female on whom the abortion is performed, induced, or attempted has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.’ That is a very broad exception.
The doctors had to be so certain that it was life threatening before acting that once they decided it was life-threatening, she was already going to die no matter what they did. And this is not an isolated incident.
The law has to allow for more uncertainty for the carve-out to be effective.
This might blow your mind, but for a condition to truly be life treating some people will probably die even if they have treatment, otherwise by definition it would not be a life threatening condition.
For example doctors have to wait for sepsis to actually occur before treatment, thus some will die because they loose to the infection
How many people die because they didn't obtain an abortion in the nick of time? Is this normally an urgent service (outside of legally time-limited states?)
How many people struggle to afford buying groceries?
Looking purely at the cases where an abortion is required for health reasons:
Emergency abortions required for health reasons are often needed when things go wrong, and when that is the case it might need to be performed either soon or immediately. Being in a state that opposes it might delay the decision in ways that injure or kill the mother.
Non-emergency abortions required for health reasons - that is, when there is significant risk but it is not unfolding yet - also happen but being in a state that opposes abortions at any level in general might make it difficult - doctors not willing to suggest it to avoid risk to their business, those around you refusing the need and convincing you that it would be bad, not to mention having to plan a medical trip to a foreign location to get it done - and in turn put the mother at risk of injury or death through inaction.
Ok, how many people die or commit suicide because they cannot afford basic goods and services?
I’m sorry, but I don’t see the relevance of your question.
Does it somehow make it less relevant to fix a cause of death because more people die of other unrelated causes?
Far more people die in accidents than any other causes of death in the U.S., seemingly only beat by cancer and heart disease. That doesn’t make every other cause of death any less troubling or worth fixing, and it certainly does not mean that one should hold back existing treatments for “lesser” deaths or injuries.
Any avoidable injury or premature death is one too many.
There have been several cases that made the news in the last few weeks in the wake of new abortion bans, e.g. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/01/nevaeh-crain-death-t...
These edge cases are tragic, yes, and shouldn't happen.
Economic hardship results in orders of magnitude more all-cause mortality, making it the more important problem to solve.
I find it sad that this is framed as an either-or problem.
We have a two-party system: this is the natural conclusion of applied game theory and is unfortunate.
if you believe tariffs and digging are magic pills to an economy, sure (one which in the past year is actually doing extremely well)
How many people struggling to afford buying groceries voted for the guy who promised tax cuts for the rich?
It's a new thing Texas invented.
You are absolutely right, but there are still a lot of people who can't pony up the cost of flight, lodging, etc. at short notice in a stressful situation.
I think not being able to afford food and basic services may make it more difficult to sock away the $500 required for this edge case.
But inflation has been a global/western phenomena post Russian invasion and not unique to the US. Your economy has outperformed the developed averages. Non existent dem messaging on it is inexplicable to me… from a uk or European perspective your economic performance under Biden was enviable.
As a US citizen, it is frustrating but not inexplicable.
The vast majority of the voters who had the opportunity, patience, ability, and inclination to follow an argument like this -- the inflation spike was global and the US did better than its peers -- voted for Harris.
Opportunity is a key part of the problem: many voters live in walled informational gardens guarded by propagandists. The only messages that can penetrate into the gardens are short, emotional rather than rational, and lacking in nuance. They are indistinguishable from the constant barrage of lies and disinformation these people are exposed to.
If you don't get arrested when you get off the return flight.
"bus"???
Isn't one of the proposals from Republicans is to ban inter-state travel for pregnant women?
One of the southern states introduced a new crime, "Conspiracy to commit abortion", which specifically targeted the idea of traveling out of state, researching abortion providers outside the state, and aiding someone with transportation, lodging, or financials around terminating a pregnancy.
I hope you will enjoy your flight to another state the next time you are sick and need surgery.
Fortunately, I'll be able to afford it because I won't be pumping my entire paycheck into social programs, groceries, and supporting a massive population of unskilled illegal immigrants.
Who do you think farms your groceries?
Re: “look out for your wife”: I’m going to say the unpopular but perhaps true thing… there are limits even to the amount of reproductive freedom society can grant women while being able to sustain a replacement rate that keeps it alive, and even women know it. I have been having a small but increasing number of conversations where people are absolutely questioning whether we’ve over-indexed on trying to sell women this “be just like the salary men no consequences” narrative—with women who were all about reproductive freedom in their 20s and all of a sudden they are 35, have a great job, but can’t easily have kids anymore, feel unfulfilled and feel like they were lied to. It’s real even if it’s not how you specifically feel. I don’t have the answer but I think the almost anti-child democrat narrative, which Kamala dialed to 11, really really misses the beauty and wonder of childbirth and frankly the core need society has to actively and healthily sustain itself (which simply cannot be done via import). We don’t all work and make money just to die, do we? Humans are programmed to build legacy.
I say this because I fundamentally believe that Democrats need an answer for this if they want to remain relevant. You can’t milk reproductive freedom for eternity. Americans want the focus to shift back to a more nuanced and biologically adapted conversation around sustainable social narrative. That or we need mechanical wombs.
> I don't think the policy positions even matter that much.
The tribalism at this point is insane, it’s basically organized religion. You choose your tribe and get assigned a (terrible) religious leader and a list of dogmas you have to subscribe to without getting ostracized. Why should my view on trade be linked to regulations be linked to climate be linked to drugs be linked to criminal justice be linked to refugees be linked to Israel be linked to identity politics be linked to abortion be linked to guns? No idea, but take it or leave it. And the choices of religious leaders? Between someone who lies as readily and confidently as he drinks water and someone who’s a boring ladder climber and <omitted because this is an overwhelmingly one-tribe site>. No thank you.
Tribalism is human nature, as social success - a key survival criteria - requires alignment.
The reason it becomes a problem is that there the only options for each "tribe" is one of two extremes, and that these are perceived so fundamentally different it is hard for people to find common grounds. When you have many more parties, you have a wider spectrum where you can have partial agreement and disagreement with much softer borders between political strongholds, and tribes can incrementally move within the spectrum without having to switch all their beliefs and ideologies from one day to the next.
Being more understanding of tribes with other ideas rather than making them villains would also help both sides in communication and political mobility.
Veritasium released a wonderful new video yesterday, "On These Questions, Smarter People Do Worse" which ..... I'm not going to spoil it for you but you will understand why I responded with the link.
Watching, they discuss a study about gun control and I though omg I was thinking about that recently and the study they presented answers the question I've been pondering about gun control. If you watch the video, you will understand my disappointment.
I had been living in New Orleans including when it had the 8th highest murder rate ... not in the United States but the world in 2022 (it was #1 in US hence not 8th). The city couldn't hire police officers and close 120 position had been unfilled. There is a very strange phenomena happening in the past 2 years, the crime rate in New Orleans is plummeting without police. [1] So, in the Veritasium video, they talk about a gun violence study and I think, that is exactly the question I'm asking. Does gun violence go down if law enforcement is removed from the equation because that is exactly for unknown reasons happening New Orleans today. Nobody is taking away guns in New Orleans and everyone I know has at least 2. I was a little disappointed with the study but tapped my self on the shoulder asking the correct question when presented with it.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_OApdxcno
[1]https://www.fox8live.com/2024/09/19/how-new-orleans-went-mur...
Well, the title of the video is actually wrong.
Smarter people did better than Dumber people. The people with a score of 8,9 on numeracy did the best [1] but not as good as they should've. This is basically best shown on page 12 [2] on the actual paper, people with high numeracy have a better chance of correct answer than low numeracy.
I suspect the effect is even across low & high numeracy but because high numeracy people were more likely to get the correct answer to begin with. Akin to say you playing a toddler in Counter-Strike. You're more likely to win a round than them. So if for a round I disconnect one of your controllers then the disconnection is more likely to cause you a loss than the toddler because the toddler was going to lose anyways, the effect of disconnection for them is dwarfed by their innate ability.
[1]: https://youtu.be/zB_OApdxcno?t=413
[2]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992
The title says that smarter people do worse, which is correct in the sense that their relative performance is 20% worse than less numerically inclined people. They cover this in the latter half of the video. However, in order to believe this was the title’s intent, you would have to assume the title should have read, “Smarter people score worse on political numerical questions than on apolitical numerical questions.” Realistically it’s so ambiguous that any interpretation is plausible.
> Realistically it’s so ambiguous that any interpretation is plausible.
The dude isn't some rushed working single mother. He had amble time to choose what he wanted to convey and instead chose that title.
When your study creates 2 populations (those with good numeracy and those without) and you make a claim that one of those populations "do worse" than it's always implicitly with respect to the other population.
All I can say is your frustration is valid, and welcome to modern YouTube.
I currently still live in New Orleans, and I am willing to bet you the surveillance programs and license plate readers have something to do with it.
The study doesn't replicate.
> When you have many more parties, you have a wider spectrum where you can have partial agreement and disagreement with much softer borders between political strongholds, and tribes can incrementally move within the spectrum without having to switch all their beliefs and ideologies from one day to the next.
That is a good theory, but coalitions can also easily create stalemates on many topics and effectively rendering a government incapable of any significant action. There are recent examples in EU countries.
The effect of coalitions is in political execution rather than in ideological separation. The concern here was entirely about the social impact on residents, not the political efficiency.
Coalitions can partly negate the benefit of the “spectrum”, but each member still answers to a different body of voters and going along with too many conflicting proposals would put them at risk of losing the confidence of their voters. Not differentiating from the other coalition members puts the party at risk of voters jumping ship to the others, and each party ultimately wishes to grow their own voter base.
The effect on the residents from a coalition not performing is usually increasing the base of the politically more extreme parties.
> Tribalism is human nature
Nah, tribalism of this sort is absolutely not human nature. People naturally form tribes and define ingroup/outgroup boundaries around their actual relationships and communities.
It takes alignment of a lot of unusual circumstances to get people to attach their identities to "tribes" that are actually aggregations of completely unrelated strangers grouped together on the bases of abstract symbols.
People are naturally loyal to their families and local communities, not to continent-spanning political organizations.
> It takes alignment of a lot of unusual circumstances
Heh.. well.. California *was* majority white not even a decade and a half ago. And, the judge that put the final nail in on that issue for California wasn't exactly a white person.
So..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_18...
It's not clear to me how anything you're talking about relates to my previous comment. Could you attempt to make your point more explicitly?
I’m confused: You start by saying that tribalism isn’t human nature, but then you describe that tribal behaviors are natural.
People are indeed loyal to their local communities - which includes having ideologies that would not greatly offend your peers - but everyone has different communities. Yours might include family A and B. Theirs might include C and D, and E and F, respectively. Continue a few rounds and you’ll see that each social circle is unique and inter-connected.
No one within this “super-tribe” can have a different ideology without offending their local community by aligning with the opposite extreme - even if your opinion only differed slightly, your choice is one of two extremes.
In order to fix this, you need people to have more choices so that they can select something slightly different from your community without offending it.
I feel like I'm using pretty clear qualifiers to distinguish actual tribes from what Kurt Vonnegut would call granfaloons.
The point is that equating these ideologically polarized aggregations of strangers with tribalism is a huge stretch, and not really valid. They're two very different phenomena.
Yes, social circles are unique and inter-connected, and most people are simultaneously members of multiple "tribes", but this has nothing whatsoever to do with vast aggregations of strangers linked only by abstract symbolism.
In group power dynamics. Once a person identifies with a group, and makes the beliefs of that group part of their identity, then they will fight any threat to it. Since there are just two parties you are forced to choose one or the other.
The single greatest thing the American people can do from this moment on is to stop hating each other for political beliefs, put that aside, and just talk without expectation or trying to convince someone. Just talk. America has let political identity supersede all else.
A youtuber spoke about this though I can't remember the name. Veretisium maybe? He goes into how humans inherently want to avoid being ostracized from their tribe so they vote regardless of data or hard science. He said it was a feature rather than a bug though
>The single greatest thing the American people can do from this moment on is to stop hating each other for political beliefs
Many conservatives, including many of my own family members, have enthusiastically declared "all democrats should be shot", for usually really odd and mundane things too, like Michelle Obama saying children should eat healthily. They blame her for school lunch programs in my state going downhill, primarily from reduced budgets that prevent the school from buying anything to eat other than a shitload of frozen chicken patties. But no, apparently that reduction in funding, which was decided at the state level and mostly done during Bush's admin when no child left behind fucked with school funding, is her fault.
None of the hate came from democrats. The first mean spirited thing said by democrats was when Hillary called republicans a basket of deplorables.
Republicans have been calling democrats satan worshippers, literal biblical demons, degenerates, sexual deviants, etc since the 70s.
Republicans walked away from basic decency. Not democrats. None of us feel comfortable talking to our Trumper friends and family because they are our parents who raised us to hate others and we had to individually of our own accord grow past that. They are our brothers who literally tell us we should be shot back in the mid 2000s, before you can even blame identity politics. They are our mothers who taught us we were sluts for wearing a skirt and deserved to be raped. They are our grandparents who taught us that having a baby out of wedlock is an ostracization worthy event. They are teachers who spent a lecture talking about how slavery wasn't so bad. They are bosses who force you to watch anti-union propaganda before you can work.
Fox News specifically has been declaring and waging regular war on most things that aren't stereotypical 50s americana since it's inception.
Like what fucking more do you want from us? How do you talk to that?
I've been trying to argue for some time that with two parties, even accounting for their primaries, the bandwidth of our representation is much too low to communicate a spectrum of political ideas. I forget the exact numbers I calculated, but from memory, current American democratic bandwidth at the national level is something in the neighborhood of 5 bits per year. This can't allow for any kinds of subtle distinctions between philosophy. We're stuck with big ugly buckets of loosely-related (at best) issues because we can't democratically communicate any more specifically.
I think this is somewhat true but not fully true. Elections aren't the only way in which policy gets communicated and so this bit-level analysis doesn't capture it fully IMO. If you look at border policy, for instance, Democrats have moved to the right not because of election mechanisms like primaries, but through public opinion.
It sure feels like ranked choice voting would help a lot.
Considering how quickly the Democrats ousted Biden when his mental fitness to lead was in doubt, I don't think it's fair to describe progressives as having a "religious leader".
<omitted because this is an overwhelmingly one-tribe site>
A woman? Lots worse than "liar" could be said about one of them, I'm curious what makes you think both candidates are equally bad but don't dare say it.
I never said two choices have to be equally bad for me to not want to choose either. And don’t try to gotcha me with the misogyny nonsense.
I don’t think it’s as tribal as you think. At the margins yes, there are wing nuts both ways. But Trump got a lot of votes he didn’t get before and Kamala got fewer than Biden.
Inflation has been a shocker. The border being flooded is terrifying. The economy is and has been struggling in many peoples lives. And the democrats want to still focus on identity politics.
I think they can easily win in 4 years but they need to change their ways. They need to abandon the poisoned ideology that Obama inspired.
But… all of those were addressed by the Dems? Kamala’s policies were explained and even endorsed by economists.
The people who bring the issues back to identity politics are not dems.
Unless… perhaps the solutions didn’t matter, and the polls themselves were much stronger than the results.
Economists are tea leaf readers. For any given economic plan you have economists giving their endorsement. “Kamala’s policies were explained and even endorsed by economists” is a non-statement and you can replace “Kamala” with any presidential candidate in the last 50 years and it will remain true. I think the President gets too much credit for both good and bad economic situations, but the fact of the matter is that the average American feels the economy is terrible after 4 years of Biden policies and that is going to look larger than promises of future policies.
On the issue of identity politics, Democrats have been all in for nearly a decade, and only in the last year or so, when it has become apparent they are out of step with the majority of Americans, have they begun to back off. It’s not unexpected for the Republicans to now be the ones bringing up identity politics given how closely the Democrats have aligned themselves to it for so long, and the current backlash towards it. The damage is done and it will take many years of priority shifting for Democrats to get over it.
The preceding comments were about tribalism, and I was showing that policy had nothing to do with anything. That the dems talked about policy but it still be perceived that they didn’t.
> identity politics
This has squarely been a republican plank to rile and invigorate their base, regularly creating issues where none existed to get their team up to vote,
The fact that this can be blamed on the dems is always strange. I mean, the whole point of Fox was to create a counter narrative to address the march of “liberal science”. The goal was entirely to handle science and research, and present ways to combat this with feelings. Again - my favorite example is creationism.
Inflation being a years-long painful problem to wrestle with was inevitable with all the stimulus pumped in to keep us afloat through the pandemic. We could have fared far worse, and many countries did. I don't know why the left didn't push on this argument harder to defend themselves.
I never saw any Democrats focusing on Identity, it was always Republicans talking about it as a boogie man.
There are actual real genetic disorders Trans people are dealing with.
Republican's just chose Trans people as some small group dealing with a difficult to explain condition and decided to pile on them.
Republicans have been increasingly focused on identity politics and Democrats have been avoiding it for only the last year or so as it has become clear that it is a major liability for Democrats. They spent most of the last decade heavily emphasizing identity politics, and it’s become clear to them and everyone else they have been largely out of touch with the average American in that area. Now that there is a rising backlash, they’ve tried to distance themselves but Republicans have years of material to drag out and pin them with. I don’t think they get credit for trying to downplay a long-running strategic blunder in the 11th hour.
Decade?
Not really. If you want to go back a Decade, then it was legitimate equality issues.
You can't just say, people shouldn't be equal and claim you are fighting against 'identity' politics. Like women being allowed to open bank accounts without their husbands permission. Why do Republicans want to go back to those days? Unless you actually listen to them, and they quote some Bible Versus about Women being property, then you see the actual agenda.
This is the classic motte-and-bailey scenario - that the entire radical gender movement is just trying to be nice to trans people. But overlooking trans women competing against biological women, biological reality, critical gender theory being taught to kids, pronouns, “x” as in Latinx and the adjacent drag queens reading to kids, etc.
"entire radical gender movement"
What is the term for 'take a couple isolated examples and call it a movement'? motte-and-bailey goes both ways.
There is no widespread 'trans women competing against biological women'.
Completely made up issue to stir outrage with the radical base.
> There is no widespread 'trans women competing against biological women'.
It's more common than you may think - see https://www.shewon.org
> The border being flooded is terrifying.
...
> And the democrats want to still focus on identity politics.
Does typing this out not cause the slightest pang of cognitive dissonance?
Implying a contradiction reveals the critic’s own identity politics perspective.
The permanent, irreversible demographic shift that conveniently favors Dem politics is only one of the many, many problems caused by turning a blind eye to unprecedented hordes of inherently law-disregarding third-worlders taking advantage of our weak border enforcement.
If the issue was immigrants in general then possibly. But it’s about illegal immigration specifically and complete disregard for law and order when it comes to the millions crossing the border illegally and being encouraged to do so in many cases or no pressure to deport anyhow. Turns out that’s bad policy.
By the actual numbers, illegal immigrants are by far the group with the lowest rate of felony, violent crime, property crime, and drug-related crime: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-o...
The idea of illegal immigration being "complete disregard for law and order" is based solely in feelings of fear or animosity, not in facts.
Add to that the Democrats have been far more successful with apprehending and deporting illegal immigrants. This is a struggle among people trapped in their own bubbles, disconnected from and uninterested in reality or relevant metrics.
I don’t know if that’s true or not but “sanctuary cities”, “Abolish ICE”, blue city mayors complaining about a migrant crisis, and Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment complexes don’t inspire confidence.
This is precisely his point. Illegal immigration isn’t about identity politics, as it has nothing to do with race or gender or disability, etc. Your comment turned this into a conversation about identity politics.
Most discussions of immigration I've seen seem to be fixated on a subset of illegal immigrants. i.e. talk of border walls (only between US/Mexico, never seen discussion of US/Canada) when most illegal immigrants are coming via boring methods like through ports of entry and on commercial airplanes.
That’s fascinating. I definitely agree that there seems to be a fixation on the southern border. Do you have a source showing that a majority of illegal immigrants are entering through ports of entry or commercial flights? Would love to read it.
I didn't find more recent numbers than this in the minute I spent looking but I imagine they're available if you dig around: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/686056668/for-seventh-consecu...
That’s about 2016-2017. Estimates of illegal crossings in the South border were below 200k per year, I think, but over 800k last year.
Wasn't 2016 when the country was at peak "build the wall and make Mexico pay for it"? Regardless, do you have numbers for 2023 that include visa overstays, for comparison purposes?
I'd be curious to get more information on that. For example, it isn't only Mexicans and Central Americans coming through the southern border. Around 25,000 Chinese nationals have been apprehended on the southern border by the middle of the year, for example. You wonder how many HAVE passed through illegally.
Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like a better pro-immigration strategy for Democrats would be to agree with the fact illegal immigration must be stopped and to debate the methods to stop it. And then secondly, argue for opening LEGAL immigration to more people since there are many benefits to it when done in a controlled and deliberate manner.
These people try and illegally enter the US through the southern border because a CHANCE of a life in the US is better than dying in Mexico to your local cartel.
No amount of border wall or lawfare will change that for Mexico (I personally believe we should be working hard with Mexico to re-assert law and order, that WOULD reduce illegal immigration). No matter what we say, the horde of bodies will continue.
So what are you going to do? Are you going to shoot them? How many strangers will we shoot, how many mothers and children, just to insist that we really care about that border? Will America be better when we kill a thousand people a day in the south? How will doing that improve the economy?
You are not wrong, the Democrat strategy obviously failed, the racist right is significantly better at identity politics, because a) whites are still a majority and b) latinos are very christian and anti-socialist on average.
And Kamala Harris was an uninspiring candidate, the democrats have proved to be the definition of "lesser evil" without any true identity with teeth to speak off. Still, Donald Trump is a pedophile, a rapist, a good friend to Jeffrey Epstein. I don't understand how anyone can be morally bankrupt enough to vote for someone like that.
> From a game theoretical perspective this is a good result.
there is a real not very small risk of the us stopping(1) being a democracy in the next 4 years, and even if not it will nearly guaranteed heal other autocratic rulers weighting that against the democrats learning a lesson they already knew (but might not have listened to) seems like a pretty terrible deal
(1): Assuming you can call a 2 party system democratic, which given how the elections worked out (power dynamic wise) the last few times is clearly not that clear anymore (it still is democratic, but in a gray area). Let's be honest if people had effectively/power dynamic wise more choices (e.g. multiple presidential election rounds ranking of candidates where votes of eliminated candidates spill over etc.) I think non of the last 2 presidents would have been elected.
There is a very very close to 0% chance of the US stopping being a democracy in the next 4 years.
I really really hope you are a better judge of that than I am
If you mean in the literal sense that we will still have elections, then sure. But Hungary is a great example of why getting rid of elections is not necessary. You just need to stack the deck so it's almost impossible for your opponents to win.
Now I certainly don't know what's going to happen in the next 4 years with any certainty, but Trump was not exactly a champion of democratic norms the last time and there will be far less to restrain him now. Those who opposed him in the GOP have been pushed out and the judiciary is far more friendly. Many of those that own or control platforms and news publications were either eagerly cheering Trump on or signaling they would be more deferential now.
We have a much longer history as a democracy than democratic backsliders like Hungary so I don't think it's a given we're destined for the same fate, but I think the risk is a lot more than zero.
Trump appoints 2 more allies to Supreme Court positions. During his term.
Trump runs for a 3rd term, with the help of his existing support (including Musk).
Vance fails to certify states that are unfavorable to Trump or refused to list Trump as a candidate for 3rd term, announcing the Trump has won. Congress may object. Bad news, it's R controlled.
The issue is brought to the Supreme Court, however Trump will effectively still take the position as per ceremony.
Supreme Court decides in favor of Trump, under the doctrine of strict interpretation (bad faith is an existing loophole).
This is just one of the many paths to breaking down the existing political system.
What you and I consider "democracy" may differ. These series of events would be a breakdown of American democracy, regardless.
He is going to be in his mid 80s after this term. At some point age is going to catch up to him no matter what else happens.
I fear more what comes after Trump than Trump himself.
Donald Trump Jr.
Trump is king maker and he will choose a Trump 2
Do you genuinely believe that congress being "R controlled" means all those Rs will be happy with Trump pissing on the constitution? Do you genuinely believe that? That being happy to have Trump in office a second term (as is allowed and normal) is the same as wanting him to be dictator? Do you think every single Republican elected this cycle is a Trump supporter, period?
Same with SCOTUS. They're appointed for life. What in the world makes you think they are more loyal to Trump than to the foundation of the US? Hint: they're not. 2/3 of his SCOTUS appointments are Federalist Society members, who LOVEEE the constitution).
It's hard to know what's "truly" in people's hearts, but the list of Rs who have been (re)elected while opposing Trump is short.
Someone made a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Republicans_who_oppose...
this is extremely out of touch with reality. trump is not going to run for a third term. he didn't even pardon himself when he was last in office, which he could have done, but didn't. he also could have packed the courts and didn't. trump sucks but he's not fundamentally trying to operate outside established powers and traditions of his office. if he was gonna "fuck all this i do what i want" he would have last time
> if he was gonna "fuck all this i do what i want" he would have last time
He tried. There are books and interviews, available today, describing how unprepared he was (ie the basic housekeeping of staffing positions) to take his position as the head of the executive branch. He had no political infrastructure, which has been since remedied by some rather fringe conservatives (related to prj2025). He is unable to manage anything, ruling through typical narcissistic behavior of delegation and blame. He has a colorful history of exploiting legal loopholes. The only thing Trump consistently does, is prop up his own image and power to continue to operate in this manner.
> he also could have packed the courts and didn't.
Meet reality. He did enough by taking whatever Republicans put in front of him. I see no reason to believe it won't be repeated.
> trump is not going to run for a third term.
This is not a compelling statement, in the slightest.
Again, this is one possible path for deconstructing American democracy, which easily sprung to mind and is dependent on his health in 4 years. Saying it's impossible, is another opinion.
With the obliteration of the balance of power by the SCOTUS, extremely favorable SCOTUS judges with a conservative majority, a Senate and possibly a House majority the risks from an authoritarian-loving, narcissistic candidate who has "concepts" of plans, goes against mainstream economics in his economic policy, fanboys over a billionair drug-addicted narcissist who wants to destroy institutions by slashing "100 billion USD per year" from Federal institutions and put RFK Jr in control of the national health who tried to sabotage the constitutional and peaceful transfer of power and who instigated a violent storm of a parliament with casualties involved, the risks have certainly hardly ever been higher?
You're pointing out a bunch of things that are scary to you, without actually describing how democracy will be lost. The majority of our democracy can be attributed to the constitution, which requires a supermajority to be amended.
I also think you would be pleasantly surprised by the number of people who voted for Trump who would not be happy with the dissolution of democracy.
Also I think you'd be hard-pressed to get a majority of SCOTUS judges to be happy with that.
You argue that I am unspecific, however my entire post lists factual occurrences and people which can easily be validated.
You on the other hand present no counterfactual at all.
Democracy will be lost if there are no public institutions to enforce rules in a way which keeps nobody in particular with too much power.
Democracy will be lost if core players of said system do not respect the rules anymore and either try to negate, obstruct or otherwise hinder balance or peaceful transfer of power.
Trump has clearly shown to be capable of the latter and his desire for centralizing power around him.
Read some of the testimony of former staffers that emerged over the past few weeks.
And the SCOTUS ruling has given him a carte-blance to enact his ideas - without impunity.
The Senate or House will not or hardly force him to compromise on legislation, MAGA captured the Republican party.
The legal changes and Trumps demonstrable behavior are much more akin to a Putin in Russia or a monarchy than to a democracy with equal institutions governing.
The constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on if it's just being ignored.
> The constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on if it's just being ignored.
While I agree with that statement, I think you are ignoring that virtually all of the conversation about how the Constitution and Bill of Rights are out of touch with modernity is actually coming from the left. I don’t hear anyone on the right really arguing that point—its quite the opposite actually.
I didn't say you were unspecific, I said your points didn't relate to dissolving democracy, they were mostly just things you fear (but not unspecifically). Here is a more thorough answer to those original points:
SCOTUS has not obliterated the balance of power AFAICT? Otherwise Biden would've had more power than he does/did, right? I'll need more details about this obliteration.
SCOTUS judges are indeed majority conservative. But you'll need a tad more to indicate that "conservative" translates to "supportive of dissolving our democracy". I'll accept statements they've made to that effect, anything they've written, or whatever else you have. But we know you have nothing to indicate this at all.
Your concerns about economics have nothing to do with dissolving democracy. BUT (because I'm passionate about this) – mainstream macroeconomics is pseudo-science peddled by charlatans anyway. It's too multi-variate for them to effectively predict the outcome of basically anything at a macro level. They're not Harry Seldon even if they wish they were.
Your concern about him being buddies (sometimes frenemies) with Elon Musk has nothing to do with dissolving democracy. Elon Musk can't enable that in any shape or form. I guess he could make Trump dictator of Mars if his plans for SpaceX pan out, though.
Your concern about RFK Jr being in charge of public health has nothing to do with dissolving democracy. RFK Jr believing that vaccines cause autism or that fluoride turns the freaking frogs gay has nothing to do with the state of our democracy.
As you helpfully point out, Trump tried and failed to mess with election certification last time around. The institutions holding their own against him is literally the opposite of what you are trying to argue.
I'll concede that maybe the risks have never been higher, but going from 0.001% to 0.01% isn't a huge deal in the grand scheme of things.
---
And here is my answer to your new comment:
> Democracy will be lost if there are no public institutions to enforce rules in a way which keeps nobody in particular with too much power.
This is true. Luckily the institutions that actually enforce this are not the ones Trump et al have expressed interest in cutting.
> Democracy will be lost if core players of said system do not respect the rules anymore and either try to negate, obstruct or otherwise hinder balance or peaceful transfer of power.
This is clearly untrue. Someone trying and failing to mess with democracy is actually evidence of the opposite – that the democracy is robust. As I said before, Trump being unable to stop election certification is not the evidence for your argument you think it is.
> testimony
You mean like the testimony from all the people in the military that aren't big fans? You don't think that maybe the military might have something to say if the President tries to become a dictator? Support of the military is usually required for that, and Trump doesn't seem to have that much support in military leadership.
Which SCOTUS ruling gives him carte blanche to enact anything he wants with impunity?
So far this is all going according to the constitution. The house passing bills which are then passed by the senate which are then signed by the president is... our democracy. I don't see the Judicial branch abrogating their responsibilities to the Executive branch, nor do I see the Legislative branch doing that, even if they support Trump for president. Just because they'll be able to pass whatever they want for 2-4 years doesn't mean they're going to pass something that dissolves democracy. And so far you have nothing to indicate that those branches are interested in doing that. Just your fear running rampant.
If you think we're currently a democracy you're very wrong. Being a democracy means you actually get to vote on things like whether or not we should go to war, whether we should have national health care. We have 0 say in things that matter. That's not a democracy.
that is actually how a representative democracy works. you're thinking of direct democracy.
> Democrats: you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad
It's been confusing since the first trump term how many dems held this position. How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?
I made the mistake of debating politics with a then-friend who called all 75 million trump voters "drooling fucktards". Word?
We don't talk anymore
> It's been confusing since the first trump term how many dems held this position. How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?
How is that in any way contradictory ?
It implies that either they themselves are even more reprehensible and irredeemable, or the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates. The latter is probably true, but why would they say that and then continue to run for elections? Why do they want the approval of morally bankrupt people who prefer reprehensible candidates?
Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see". Or perhaps their claims are not actually "obvious", and they ought to be... kinder to the other side.
> Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see".
Fox News. The folks who voted trump watch only Fox News, which has crafted an alternative and immersive world view that appears coherent if you only watch Fox News and reject conflicting information as lies.
There are more people who voted for Trump than there are people who only watch Fox News. So maybe you ought to re-consider the GP's point.
The OP is correct though. If the issue is that their statement is weak when its being reduced to just Fox News subscribers, then sure.
However the issue is about the kind of information ecosystems that drive polarization and misinformation.
Disinfo and misinformation campaigns target right wing / conservative viewers more than they do left wing / liberals.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07942-8
But I can point to research and articles till the cows come home. The fact is that people reject everything negative about Trump and fill in the blanks with whatever they want to believe.
We’re basically playing whose line is it anyway
Who is defining what is misinformation? It would be easy to reframe such that the opposite can be just as “true, “ depending on your perspective. For example: Trump turned out not to be working with Russia, despite the media and politicians constantly saying they had evidence. Trump started zero wars, despite fear mongering that he would start World War 3. He ended the tensions with North Korea, despite pundits saying diplomacy doesn’t work with dictators. Arguably all of that was misinformation, so one could argue the opposite of what you said is also true. Whomever defines “misinformation” can make that statement with full confidence and be correct in their own mind every time.
This is my domain of work, so - Me. If that’s not good enough you can look at the research paper I linked.
If you haven’t looked at the article - this is directly in the summary:
> sers who were pro-Trump/conservative also shared far more links to various sets of low-quality news sites—even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople—and had higher estimated likelihoods of being bots
If you want more - The original fake news, the Romanian ad farm sites, had greater success and traction when they targeted conservative viewers.
To save us both trouble - this is not some cockamamie argument about crud like “he who defines it can be correct.”,or conflation of bad reporting and hyperbole.
This is straight up conservatives being the victims and consistent targets of mis and disinformation.
I also know that this will have 0 impact on changing minds. I know it wont.
That said, I do hope we can agree that people deserve respect for their efforts to understand a topic, subject or field of work. Do read the article, and when I say that conservative / republican information diets are more vulnerable and exposed to low quality information and conspiracy theories, I’d appreciate the honor of at least having your opinion on the abstract and matter of the paper.
I don’t disagree with your points, as they tend to align with my personal experience. Given that most of the people I interact with are conservative, I can’t really compare to the sources used by progressives, but I suspect it would consist more of links to mainstream media. Jumping on a plane, so won’t be able to respond quickly, but I will read the article you linked.
My point wasn’t necessarily that conservatives aren’t exposed to more misinformation, but rather that misinformation is very difficult to define, since the general public lacks so much information. Very few people actually know the truth. Many people fill in the gaps with their biases and then believe they’ve consumed “the truth.” Without an objective view of all facts, it’s difficult to ascertain the truth, therefore it’s also difficult to ascertain what is misinformation.
Thank you, I will come back and engage with your response.
My apologies for writing my response in a piecemeal fashion as I read through the paper. I’m on a phone, which makes it difficult for me to take proper notes and to write a response of proper length.
My initial reaction is that this study seems to delegate the classification of misinformation to a set of fact checkers and journalists. It then uses this to classify links as being either misinformation or disinformation, based on a trustworthiness score. Unfortunately, I can’t open the table of exact fact checkers and journalists because none of the links work on my mobile browser, so I’ll have to just guess at the contents for now.
Delegating classification of truth to these third parties allows for significant bias in the results. Most conservatives consider main stream media and fact checkers to have a significant progressive bias. If correct, this would explain at least some of the results of this study. I haven’t done a thorough analysis myself, so I can’t say either way, but it would be worth investigating.
The study also mentions that many users could have been bots. I suspect this could also have skewed the results. This is mentioned in the abstract, so I suspect it’s addressed later in the paper.
Either way, continuing to read… very interesting study.
Take your time, please.
As for your objection and concern - the study deals with that issue by letting participants decide themselves, what counts as high quality and low quality.
This holds if you look at outright conspiracy theories. Globally, conservative users are the most susceptible to such campaigns.
I will add "at this moment in time". I expect that sufficiently virulent disinfo which targets the left will evolve eventually.
For additional reading, not directly related to lib / con disinfo efficacy - The spreading of misinformation online. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517441113
This is one of the first papers on this topic I ever read, and will help in the consideration of misinfo / disinfo traffic patterns in a network.
uhh - not that you asked for additional reading.
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You are asking why they would say true things.
No, I am asking why they would knowingly desire the approval of those who prefer "irredeemable" candidates. They would either have to lie a lot to get it, or pull themselves down to be more reprehensible. So, what's their strategy? Lieing a lot after telling the "one truth", or becoming more reprehensible themselves? Probably both.
Seeking votes is not like seeking approval in a social context. Someone trying to win a contested election desires votes for the purpose of winning.
You did: "The latter is probably true, but why would they say that" The implication of your comment is that politicians shouldn't tell the truth because that offends voters.
Or educate and persuade?
> Or educate and persuade?
There's a lot of people around me who are actively against education, or attack facts because they don't believe them, or vomit opinions as "facts".
It's practically impossible to persuade people like that.
> the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates.
Well, to make this non political.
Look at how many sports players have a history of domestic abuse; the character of a player is secondary to their ability to play the sport.
I have another take, the democratic party is incompetent.
If they can't convince voters to vote for them given how bad the other side looks then they must be really incompetent.
What's the point of having all the feel good rallies in cities with famous people if you can't reach people in rural areas.
The democratic party is too elitist, too far from regular people.
Voters everywhere are stupid but in the country of exceptionalism, they lately seem to have become exceptionally stu... tolerant!
> It implies that either they themselves are even more reprehensible and irredeemable > or the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates
You dont need to go that far. You just need to create an information environment that is beyond the ability of the average person to navigate.
At that point, the other side is just evil, and your team, even if they are convicted for crimes, have ties to Epstein or anything - doesn’t matter.
——
I mean, you can have privatized thought policing, there aren’t any laws or regulations to prevent. Everyone reads about Big Brother and worries about government control.
So you can create enough of FUD shared till it’s believed.
Don’t forget - we had to deal with Creationism, and that was wildly successful for a completely unscientific argument.
> why would they say that and then continue to run for elections?
Are you suggesting that the USA should have a single political party? Anyone that cares for democracy would be against that, regardless of their other political views.
My guess would be what they meant was that they should quit. Ie either you respect the intelligence/morallity of the people who you want to vote for you, or maybe you shouldn't be trying to represent them.
And not quit as in leave only a single party, but quit as in leave a vacuum for another party/candidate/etc to step in.
Note these aren't necessarily my personal views, just trying to help clarify what I believe the commentator meant.
One side has good marketing and the other has bad marketing. That simple really.
> Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see".
I think this is the correct options.
I mean, look at the people who worked for him in the last administration:
> So how do we explain this near-universal rejection of Trump by the people who worked with him most closely? I guess one explanation is that they’ve all been infected with the dreaded Woke Mind Virus. But it’s unclear why working for Donald Trump would cause almost everyone to be exposed to the Woke Mind Virus, when working for, say, JD Vance, or Ron DeSantis, or any other prominent right-wing figure does not seem to produce such an infection.
> Of course, not everyone who worked for Trump has abandoned and denounced him. Rudy Giuliani, who is now under indictment in several different states, is still among the faithful. Michael Flynn, who was fired by Obama for insubordination and then removed by Trump for improper personal dealings with the Russian government, is still on board, and is now threatening to unleash the “gates of Hell” on Trump’s political enemies. Peter Navarro, the economist1 who served four months in prison for defying a Congressional subpoena, is still a Trump fan. And so on.
> You may perhaps notice a pattern among the relatively few people who are still on board the Trump Train from his first term. They are all very shady people. I don’t think this is a coincidence; I think it’s something systematic about Donald Trump’s personality and his method of rule.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/trumpism-is-kakistocracy
The GOP party has changed:
> As many people have noted, Trump’s movement is a cult of personality. Since Trump took over the Republican party in 2016, essentially every tenet of modern conservatism has been replaced with belief in a single leader. Trump appointed the judges that killed Roe v. Wade, but he constantly goes back and forth on the topic of abortion rights. Trump didn’t cut entitlement spending, but whether he wants to do that in his second term or not depends on which day you ask him. Trump has flip-flopped on the TikTok bill, on marijuana legalization, on the filibuster, on SALT caps, and so on.
> But these flip-flops do not matter to his support at all. His supporters are sure that whichever decision Trump makes, it will be the right one, and if he changes it the following week, that will be the right decision as well. If tomorrow Trump declared that tariffs are terrible and illegal immigration is great, this would immediately become the essence of Trumpism. Trump’s followers put their trust not in principled ideas, but in a man — or, to be more accurate, in the idea of a man. That is what Trumpism requires of its adherents.
* Idid.
> or the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates
Correct, yes.
Maybe 4th time is the charm with this kind of divisive messaging?
something can be true but not politically advantageous to mention
My goal isn't to sway trump voters, they've already demonstrated time and time again, and again, and again, and again, that they have no intention of meeting liberals anywhere, let alone "in the middle", and that there's nothing, ever, ever that anyone could ever do to pry them away from their GEOTUS, so there's no real reason to try to appease them. So I'm left with just calling it like I see it.
Trump supporters blaming liberals' rhetoric for their decisions is a troll tactic: It's a way of trying to bait liberals into paying more positive lip service to Trump. And it works, all up and down the media organizations are terrified to say things that offend trump supporters. All for some vague belief that if they coddle his supporters enough they get some "centrist credibility" or something.
The "grab them by the pussies" comment should have been enough to show everyone that he's a morally reprehensive little clown. I originally typed out a long comment to further elucidate why he is despicable, but it actually takes away from the message. An SA advocate shouldn't be president in the 21st century.
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So you expect progressive voters to simply politely ignore the awful things Trump has done, and the fact that his supporters don't seem to care?
Short list: Trump has been adjudicated in court as having sexually assaulted a woman, and has admitted to doing more. Nearly every person who has worked with him has described him in the worst possible terms. Stories of him celebrating Nazis [1], sexually fixating on his own daughter[2], horrifying things like that.
The man is a convicted felon, and has only escaped punishment for various other crime by virtue of his own appointees in the court system.
If a reader accepts these well-supported items as facts, what should they think about somebody who votes for that?
Should they lie and say "a reasonable person would support this"?
Or should they tell the truth even when it is "divisive"?
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-...
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/trumps-lewd-talk-a...
Yes. I think having a healthy community and successful future political campaign will require reframing this rhetoric.
So we can't call a rapist a rapist because it upsets conservatives too much?
We can't call a failed businessman what he is? Or correctly point out that he idolizes dictators and Hitler specifically? Or that he is so fucking stupid he said he wanted Hitler's generals even though they were 1) Not very good 2) several tried to assassinate him and 3) fought like middle school girls?
Why do we have to abandon reality? Why do we have to treat conservatives with kid gloves?
I seem to remember something along the lines of "Facts don't care about your feelings" and "Fragile Snowflakes"
Did I say any of that?
> rapist
Source?
this is pathetic and embarassing
No. That would be being unable and unwilling to build a theory of mind to understand 80 million people from all walks of life.
So your opinion is that elections are a referendum on the moral virtue of the candidate, or that you shouldn't run for office if you think the electorate is morally bankrupt?
I'm sorry, but I have to be blunt. That is an extremely narrow view, and a single second of critical thinking should present a million other possibilities. The former is obviously untrue, considering Trump's long list of vices. The latter is a complete non sequitur. Power is power; the electorate's morals only matter insofar as they're willing to check the box next to my name.
Trump can be reprehensible and irredemable, and still win if he's more believable on the issues Americans care the most about. He could be a fraud, a cheat, even a traitor, so long as he's persuasive. That's how democracy works, how it should work.
It's like being a pastry chef and mocking someone's cake as if it's the worst cake ever, but you can't even make a better one even though it's your profession.
Or you do make a better one but still lose because people did not actually care about the cake but about the messaging.
Or in meme form:
https://i.redd.it/g0r0x1ldi0e71.jpg
I think it’s more about taste being subjective. So if my “better” cake is actually less preferred, then it’s not actually better.
Making an objective statement about subjectivity is kind of silly in the first place. Then losing shows it to be stupid.
So the election was about nothing objective?
Definitely not. It’s the weighing of the population’s subjective preferences. It’s quite literally each voter’s perspective and choice that matters.
Hopefully, subjective preferences are based on objective facts and reality. But who can really know.
It's more like making an edible cake but the customers preferring the one containing rat entrails because they'd rather eat rat entrails than let anyone else eat an edible cake.
No, it isn't. And the fact that you think it is, is the problem.
This kinda of argument is the crux of your issue. "no it isn't" vs "this is why I disagree:"
User above hasn't really given any points to disagree about.
You're saying "the Turd Sandwich is inedible. Everyone should order the Shit Burger instead."
Maybe you could leave the Poop Cafe and have something that's food instead lmao
The median person is pretty dumb and half of the population is dumber
It's always amazing what a biased media/social network can do to the perception of otherwise rational and intelligent people.
Just remember how rational and intelligent the average person is. Then realize that half the US population is less rational and less intelligent than that.
Original quote by George Carlin, not US-centric: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
Carlin had no father and you can tell.
I take it confusing the arithmetic average for the median is part of the joke?
Intelligence is not inherently quantifiable. IQ is an arbitrary way to quantify it, but there average and median is pretty much equal by definition.
IQ roughly follows a Gaussian distribution, so median and average are the same here.
IQ is normally distributed, so the two are the same.
"The average person" typically means the median person.
> just remember
I don’t and you shouldn’t. Mocking others intelligence only shows that you lack enough to understand them. As I understand it, this is precisely the point of GP
I don't think it's a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of ignorance/knowledge.
I read a statistic that 50% of grown up Americans have only 6th grade education. Which means that what? 60%-65% may have 9th grade?
The vast majority of people is uneducated and only responds to simple thoughts: as someone said: they see their wallet shrinking, and they decide to voté for the alternative. Other more complex issues don't matter, they don't care about them.
The same thing happened in my country (Mexico) where we have also tons of uneducated people. The people voté for the sound snippet, for the demagogue who told them what they wanted to hear.
And similarly, the other parties in their smugness didn't understand why people didn't vote for more complex issues.
It's sad, but most of us (highly educated people) live in a bubble.
> How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?
because not being any of notorious lair, repeatedly make comments you normally only would expect from fascist, having systematically undermined various check and balances in their last term, having lost sexual assault cases, shamelessly abusing the reach of a president for deformation etc. seem to no longer matter even through any of this points where believed to be reliable carrier killers
now "reprehensible" that is a much more personal non objective judgement so arguing around that is pointless
Irredeemable seems obvious, but if the things you need redemption from don't matter anymore it really doesn't matter either.
I think the main problem here is that politics in the US are fundamental broken due to way to much polarization in a 2 party system and no good way to fix it.
If Tump wins I personalty think it's hardly avoidable that in the next 20 year there will be a point where you won't be able to call the US democratic anymore at all (based on a objective standard) and the question is if the US will then realize they fuck up and fix it or not (if not autocracy will mass spread even more and likely also take over the EU and given past history of how autocrats tend to cooperate while fighting democracy but then turn onto each other quite reliable the moment their power stabilized we probably should expect WW4).
Naturally I would love to be proven wrong, I really would.
And I think it's best to always stay polite.
But I can understand why someone gets angry with a lot of people voting for someone who comes with such a risk. Especially if a deep dive analyses into their positions show that 1) he lacks concrete (public) plans for most of his positions and 2) they likely will end up making live worse for many potentially the majority of the people voting for him.
But then people voting more based on "feeling" and "popular"/"populist" believe always has been very common. It's also kinda funny how close the words "popular" and "populist" is, sometimes just a change of perspective apart.
> because not being any of notorious lair, repeatedly make comments you normally only would expect from fascist
Kamala's rhetoric, especially around the military and border security, seemed almost specifically designed to be "1% less fascist." Some of the lines wouldn't have been out of place in Starship Troopers.
If you triangulate yourself into 98% fascism, it's hardly surprising that people who don't like fascism aren't excited to go out and vote for you.
From your choice of candidates, it’s obvious that you don’t mind coarse language or a tell-it-like-I-see-it attitude. I wonder what about your friend’s comment bothered you so much.
He wasn’t wrong
You have put the point on the entire issue. People use party/candidate affiliation as the barometer for all future interactions, and when they don't like something about the other party, they use that as judgement of the whole person.
That is a person's right, but it is also failing to recognize that they are two sides of the same coin. So long as people hate one another for who they are voting for there will never be societal cohesion.
How is this different from what Trump supporters were saying about Democratic voters? Genuine question - I'm not in the US and from my perspective the vitriol was pretty universal.
The right gets to hate, the liberals don't. Basically the media let Rs play on handicap and the electorate basically buys it.
You're right it's unfair but if you're not American and thus stuck in the political media stew then you can see it clearly.
This is a deep insight. It's a reactionary vs. establishment dynamic where the reactionaries get a free boost because they're fundamentally more provocative from a content perspective. I think it's more like "the reactionaries get to hate, the establishment doesn't" and R and D may swap those positions.
I'm not so sure about that, I've seen plenty of hate from both sides.
Covid was a great example, anyone who disagreed with the main narrative or even just wanted bodily choice was blasted by many liberals, including the president, with all kinds of hateful speech.
Since 2016 many liberals also have used hateful speech to describe anyone willing to vote for Trump. I personally didn't like either candidate the political machine offered us, but in many of my discussions with anyone liberal Trump voters were often held as something like a second class citizen, that's pretty damn hateful in my book to consider anyone "lesser than."
Of course your comment is being downvoted. Hackernews is an echo-chamber of Trump haters. I'm only here for the cope today.
If both sides spouts vitriol then you pick the side that doesn't pour it on you, that is the problem described by "one side is 1% less bad than the other". If you want voters then try to welcome them instead of blame them for all the problems, goes for both sides.
Sure, but then shouldn't the universal vitriol cancel itself out somehow? Democracts have been on the receiving end of a lot of name-calling too. This doesn't feel like a good enough explanation. It feels much more like the Democrats ignored (or were perceived to have ignored) a lot of substantive issues for a large section of the population.
> Sure, but then shouldn't the universal vitriol cancel itself out somehow?
It does, both sides got about the same amount of votes as you can see.
> It feels much more like the Democrats ignored (or were perceived to have ignored) a lot of substantive issues for a large section of the population.
I don't think so, it doesn't matter how much you try to do for people if you also namecall them at the same time, they will assume you aren't on their side even if your policies are better for them. Vitriol ensures the vote becomes tribal instead of rationally inspecting both sides and picking the better option.
I realised through hearing through channel 5 and average Americans that they don't really get it. They don't want to think, they want an easy solution to complex problems and anyone coming with a pre made thing is seen as the Messiah. The other part don't care because they saw a lot of screaming and failed to grasp what was so bad about Trump. If he was so bad why was he still nominee? If he was so bad why wasn't he arrested? If he was so bad... You get the picture...
This can be seen as the democrats also not understanding the average person and this is where Bernie was actually hitting good points, his message was consistent and he was never demonising Trump on his name but explaining what they could do better by explaining policies in a way that people understood what they would get from them or lose if they didn't get implemented...
Of course the issue is a bit more complex, but they exacerbated the people that were unseen instead of helping the healing and some actors of course were way too happy to fan the flames.
This is a very bad day that is marking the beginning of a very bad period for everyone...
Well the Trump camp was mostly blaming illegal immigrants in this cycle, and illegal immigrants can't vote, so seems like that strategy works ok.
That is assuming half the country are Democrats and the other half Republicans. But the most important voting block considers themselves to be neither one nor the other, and then it becomes strategy to spit fire at your opponent.
And I don't know about other people, but I consider any rhetoric against a political party to be directed against their politicians, not against their voters - unless explicitly stated.
I think Trump and the Republicans did actually succeed in welcoming in a truly diverse base of new and former voters: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/06/us/politics/p...
This is the Red Wave that was promised in 2020 and 2022 but failed to materialize.
Why didn't Harris and the Democrats pull it off? Well, they could start by not playing identity politics or calling Americans deplorables, Nazis, and garbage. Godwin's Law was in full swing for them.
I'm Japanese-American, demographically I should be a bleeding heart Democrat, but truthfully I can't stand their constant victimizing and divisive rhetoric and is why I voted for Trump and the Republicans in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
I can't stand their constant divisive rhetoric and is why I voted for Trump and the Republicans in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
I'd be curious what your gut reaction was to the comedian that Trump's team hired to open at his rally at Madison Square Garden, just this past week, who referred to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage" (starts at about 0:16):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNBdYplmKcI
Would your reaction be the same if he had referred to, say, Japan in the same way?
As someone who pays attention to politics exceptionally closely, I wonder what you would call Trump's rhetoric if not divisive.
I call it practical, on point, gruff, and charismatic.
Practical and on point because Trump talks about things that the common American actually gives a shit about in a way that the common American can understand and relate to. This also has a side effect of uniting people under a common cause despite outward appearances.
Gruff because that style of speech appeals to most Americans who don't like being sophisticated, or worse: Being politically correct. Remember that being politically incorrect was one of the reasons Trump won in 2016, and it's still one of the reasons he won again today.
Charismatic because, well, I think everyone has to at least admit that the man draws people in despite any and all odds.
> uniting people under a common cause
If the common cause is being against other people, that's still divisive.
"They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats"
Is that gruff or on point?
Don't worry he will fix the economy.
So when he calls the other side names and makes threats, he is practical and gruff.
His practical message was incoherent; it was more of an erring of grievances, conspiracy theories, and wild policy ideas that he seemed to have come up with while speaking.
I can't argue with the fact that it appealed to people, but you can't say it wasn't divisive because it was practical and gruff. Those two things don't rule out divisiveness.
BTW, I voted Republican in every election until Trump, and the reason why I didn't vote for him was due to how divisive he was.
I think you just happen to agree with his side of the divide.
> erring of grievances
I don't know whether this was deliberate or a typo, but it's funny and apt.
You literally voted for a guy who said things 1000x worse and this is your take?
I recall a vox pop in the Washington Post that included a woman who was voting for Trump because she thought he'd be better than Harris at standing up to Putin. Trump seems to attract a combination of low information voters and voters who are reluctant to give their real reasons for voting for him. Either way, don't expect the given reason to make a lot of sense.
He doesn't have a reason to hide why he was voting for him, so I'll chalk it up to the low information voters who vote on vibes.
In low-information voters' defense, it's been amazing to me as a non-American how Trump's literal dementia was not in the front pages of the media every single day. The complicity of the news media in normalizing a senile candidate should't go unnoticed.
>Trump's literal dementia
Nope.
I watched that now infamous three hour marathon podcast he did with Joe Rogan. That kind of performance is not something a demented man can do, full stop. To say nothing of his utterly crazy rally schedule, I legitimately don't know where he gets his energy.
Hate him if you want, that's your right and I will respect that. But Trump is terrifyingly sharp, especially for a man his age.
>The complicity of the news media in normalizing a senile candidate should't go unnoticed.
The media dumped Biden right quick after his old age couldn't be hidden anymore. That debate he had was straight up elder abuse by the media.
> I legitimately don't know where he gets his energy.
Drugs. Incoherent hour-long rants are the product of stimulants, the kind that give you the sort of terrible judgement that no one would ever want out of a presidential candidate.
> Well, they could start by not playing identity politics or calling Americans deplorables, Nazis, and garbage.
Why not, though? Clearly, it is a winning strategy for the Republicans. So why not adopt it as well?
The double standard for Trump vs ANYONE else is mind blowing.
Half the stuff Trump says is some insult to someone. "Owning the libs" and "libtards" has been a thing for a long time. Remember when the tea party said Obama was literally Hitler for trying to come up with a better health care system? etc. etc. etc.
But somehow everyone else needs to be on their best behaviour and as soon as they say "fuck you back" in response to a torrent of "fuck you"s it 's a big deal.
If you want to talk tone and insults then you're definitely starting at the wrong end.
To your point, the Democrats should win every election, especially against Trump. But, they can't get out of their own way. Go all the way back to when the party hosed Bernie, and now this time when they were Hiden Biden.
While the economic numbers are good, they are mainly good for people with already high economic status like existing home owners and professionals. For example, student loan forgiveness sounds great but then leaves every blue collar worker who didn't go to college wondering WTF are they doing for me? They are giving more money to people who are already ahead. When Musk says pain is coming, many of Trumps supporters are happy because they are already in pain and want to see those benefitting feel some of that pain.
Then they go and overplay their hands with social issues. I didn't see it at the time, but all of the DEI rollbacks we've been seeing over the past year or so should have been a signal. One of the middle of the road people on TV last night mentioned he had friends who tried to avoid interacting with people at work because they were afraid of saying something offensive. And these were likely center left people. I have had similar discussions with even my most progressive friends. The almost refusal to message young men is also a problem.
Most Americans want legal immigration, but the Democrats took too long to do something and then Trump was able to kill the bill last minute. It looked like the Democrats wanted to simply ignore it until they no longer could.
There are more, but I think these are some of the big Democrat self owns.
There was no student loan forgiveness.
There has been several hundred billion dollars of it.
https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/biden-harris-adm...
Looks like very recent proposal and the money hasn't been forgiven yet? If they had the power all along, then why wait til the week before the election?
> Looks like very recent proposal and the money hasn't been forgiven yet?
No, look down at the bottom under "A Significant Track Record of Borrower Assistance".
> If they had the power all along, then why wait til the week before the election?
Judges blocked all the other ways they tried to do it.
They tried extremely hard to do it though, and wasted a lot of political capital on the issue. The fact that they tried so hard and couldn't get it done is a good example of what the GP was talking about.
I mean, you can “waste” capital on anything, if the other team is going to demonize whatever you do.
Obamacare was based on Romneycare, and Romney had to disown it. Let’s not have discussions on things that dont happen. There is nothing the dems can do which wont be spun into harm by the republican side of the media sphere.
That goes both ways too. I also don't find political talking points about the other side couldn't do particularly intriguing, but the Democrats did have a field day in 2019/2020 pointing out how little Trump actually did with regards to building a wall.
The most annoying part is that almost every time with an issue that couldn't be done, it should have been clear from the beginning. The idea of the government vacuuming up all (or most) student debt seems completely untenable right out of the gate, just like the idea that we would be able to build a physical wall across out entire southern border and make Mexico pay for it.
Its lazy politics all the way around. And that lazy politics wastes plenty of tax dollars and distracts everyone from issues actually worth talking about.
I mean, it definitely doesn’t go both ways. The repubs made an issue of a tan suit as I recall.
Again - the Obamacare-Romneycare example. One party tried to reach across the aisle, to bend over backwards to build common ground.
The republicans refused to cross the aisle, even when their points and desires were incorporated.
From the Gingrich era, it’s been a clear goal to stop any bi-partisan behavior. That only winner takes all policies and behavior is acceptable.
That dems started to do this, for DJT, is kinda sad. They should have started a lot earlier.
I request, that when policy is brought into the picture, let’s not forget that policy is fundamentally irrelevant to the Republican Party. It’s nice to discuss policy, yes. But policy is a treatment for real world issues in a working legislature. Not one where good policy must be rejected if it’s brought up by the Dems.
At this point, the game theory solution is for Dems to respond by also rejecting bipartisan efforts, and copying the republican playbook.
It's almost as if they're premise is invalid then.
This is a lot like liberals complaining about things Trump didn't do.
The Biden administration attempted to implement student loan forgiveness despite lacking any statutory authority to do so.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...
The problem is he tried to means-test it, which made it a program that had to go through Congress. If he had just waved his hand and done it unilaterally, it would not have been blocked.
"They are giving more money to people who are already ahead." They did that three times in Trump administration. Resulting in the largest deficit increase ever...
The pain ahead is realizing China is the new superpower. Tawain won't make it to 2028.
IIRC, Trump gave it to everyone whether they needed it or not. Perhaps there were more that I’m forgetting. But people who perceive themselves at the bottom rung (and are told they are by media and sometimes dems), will see it as unfair if people perceived higher up get something extra.
Of course the super rich are going to get themselves tons of benefits, but that remains in the abstract for most.
Trump may get lucky for the time being on China. They are struggling economically and may not have the desire to pick a fight right now. IMO, countries bordering Russia are under a more immediate threat.
PPP loan fraud disproportionately benefited already wealthy people who both had the means to navigate the bureaucracy and the lack of morals to steal.
> Most Americans want legal immigration, but the Democrats took too long to do something and then Trump was able to kill the bill last minute. It looked like the Democrats wanted to simply ignore it until they no longer could.
You forgot the part where they claimed their hands were tied, then finally did something about it 8 months before the election.
Yes, completely dropped the ball on an issue they could have addressed head on.
Biden introduced a bill for border security on the first day of his administration, GOP nuked it. Wasn’t ignored.
Automatically allowing a specific quantity of millions of illegal immigrants as a "compromise" isn't "border security."
The Senate passed a bipartisan bill earlier this year that had almost everything Republicans have asked for. The House wouldn't even consider it.
Did you read it?
https://youtu.be/oZw7xijmeGM?t=89
Lindsay Graham did!
"Everybody who comes on this floor and says our border is broken. We should do something about it. You're absolutely right. And unfortunately, we didn't get there. President Trump opposed the Senate bill."
It’s fascinating how no one mentions that Trump didn’t pass comprehensive immigration legislation during his first term despite it being core to his platform.
This issue is a mess and has been kicked down the road for literal decades at this point. Maybe finally it will get passed…
He seems quite literally incapable of a “comprehensive” solution to anything. Every solution was the simple one that had the predictable unintended consequences.
E.g. on immigration he prevented courts from deferring certain deportation cases, which meant high-risk immigrants stayed in the country for longer.
> He seems quite literally incapable of a “comprehensive” solution to anything. Every solution was the simple one that had the predictable unintended consequences.
That is because the result doesn't matter, not in "starve the beast" [1] cycle politics - it used to be mostly about money but the model can be used also for general politics. The playbook is:
1. side A rise to power claiming "issue X must be solved by doing Y" (all while knowing that doing Y is useless or counterproductive, but the voter base doesn't care - be it immigration or the defunding of healthcare or whatever)
2. The consequences hit delayed, when the term is at its end and the competitor B takes over (usually in US political cycles every 8 years, but these days it seems like the ping-pong is accelerating)
3. That leaves an opportunity for side A to constantly barge in from the side "look at issue X, vote for us next time and we'll fix it (for realsies this time!)"
4. Side A wins the next election.
When it comes to anything budget related, replace the campaigning slogan with "look at issue X, it is clear that the government is incapable of doing anything about that issue, let us privatise it".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
This is all true but I actually don’t think Trump knows his solutions won’t solve these problems. I think he’s actually a simple-minded man who’s saying the simple solutions he thinks will work because he hasn’t ever thought about the problem.
I mean he came into power and proudly declared he had never heard of NATO before running (!!) but was brought up to speed in ~2min (!!). That’s who he is.
Someone like Trump should have access to actual experts able to estimate the impact of his political ideas.
The whole problem with "someone like Trump" is that if said expert tells him he's wrong, then said expert is gone in short order.
This is why autocracies and oligarchies are bad. Not because they're just de facto evil, but because they produce undesirable outcomes, often even undesirable by their own standards (see: Russia's ongoing 3 day special military operation in Ukraine)
Every single person around him is playing a loyalty test. Thank god Fauci was expert enough to navigate that dynamic so delicately, but most others don't have the talent or appetite for it.
> Then they go and overplay their hands with social issues. I didn't see it at the time, but all of the DEI rollbacks we've been seeing over the past year or so should have been a signal.
Yeah, a signal of large players in economy preparing themselves for a Trump victory - the begin of which was Meta unbanning Trump and the culmination of which was Bezos banning the WaPo endorsement. Big Business doesn't care about any values, all it cares about is money, and so it prepared for Trump possibly taking over again in time and getting into good terms with him.
That's basically it in a nutshell for my experience as well. Elections are won by swaying Independents...the Dem strategy for Independents appeared to be "Trump is a fascist" "Trump supporters are garbage".
Ok well..that's not really an argument?
And yes we can bring up all the terrible Trump examples but if the point is separating yourself from that, how is what they've done any different?
It just feels each side just despises the other and it all ends up like children arguing on the playground.
Where are the adults?
There's going to be all kinds of hyperbole thrown around today on both sides but personally see this as a failure by the Democrats to sway Independents.
One major difficulty with addressing republicans and “low-information” independents (there aren’t a ton of true-swing voters anyway, most are partisans who prefer not to label themselves that but vote as if they were) is that you can’t discuss issues with them. If you try, you immediately get sidelined into dealing not with disagreements on issues, but with having to try to convince them that basically their entire list of concerns is fictional.
We had an R state rep candidate come by our house. Highlighted two issues in her message to us. Both were simply not actual things. The existence of the problems were lies. WTF do you do with voters who consume media that’s made them believe those? It’s like a huge moat around even being able to talk to them about anything real, even if only to disagree about some real thing.
> If you try, you immediately get sidelined into dealing not with disagreements on issues, but with having to try to convince them that basically their entire list of concerns is fictional.
I wish that democrats had spent less time telling republicans that the boogeyman doesn't exist and more time showing them how we're going to keep them safe from the boogeyman. In WI, there was a referendum question that asked if people wanted to add language to the state constitution which would explicitly specify that only US citizens could vote. The democrats fought against that saying that election fraud was basically non-existent and that it would be a waste of time to change anything since it's already illegal for non-citizens to vote.
They fucked up though, because no matter how right the democrats were about the safety of elections the fear republican voters have is very real and it's never a waste of time to ease those fears.
As it turns out, if the referendum passes (and I'm guessing that it has) the result will be replacing language which says that every US citizen gets to vote with language which says only US citizens get to vote. It never said anything about replacing language in the referendum question voters saw though. The fear of illegal immigrants voting has likely been used to remove language protecting the right of US citizens to vote in WI and could open the door for laws that prevent certain US citizens from voting.
Since Democrats and Republicans are in full agreement that only US citizens should be able to vote the smart thing democrats should have done was push to add language explicitly stating that only citizens can vote but without replacing anything else. That would have satisfied the fearful republicans and protected the voting rights of all citizens. Instead they just wanted to lecture republicans about voter fraud statistics.
Every parent who has checked under their child's bed or looked in their closet for "monsters" understands this. When you have people acting like frightened children about something that isn't real, sometimes you just have to comfort them.
This is the same problem democrats have when republicans say they are afraid of small children going to school and getting sex change operations. Trump tells them it happens which is scary. Democrats just want to tell them that they are misinformed and that little kids aren't getting surgery, but they'd be smarter to say "You're right, little children getting sex changes at school is a horrible thing and we are putting forward a law that would ban that practice so that no child gets sex change surgery!". Why do democrats keep letting these issues both sides agree on become arguments that divide us?
Heh, I have similar feelings about gun issues. Democrats are dead right but I wish they’d just drop the entire issue completely. I mean they already barely talk about it, though, so who knows if talking about it even less would be enough to convince e.g. my dad that his homemade “Biden and Harris will take your guns” sign is definitely wrong and makes him look ridiculous (somehow, this never happening no matter how many times he thinks it will hasn’t convinced him)
The trick isn't to stop talking about gun control. Democrats should be proactive about addressing the fear. They should campaign on a promise to never go door to door and take everyone's guns away and push for legislation that specifically states that the mass-unarming of the public is explicitly illegal while giving them an opportunity to carve out the exceptions that the majority of people, including republicans, agree on like keeping guns from crazy people and violent felons.
The point is that the irrational fear has to be addressed. Making fun of it, ignoring it, or lecturing on why the threat is imaginary won't help.
We are now at the point where tucker Carlson and Alex jones are saying that they are fighting demons - I am not sure how we can make any rational arguments when one side thinks they are fighting against the literal Christian devil!
Sounds like America suffers from a collective psychosis.
Yup. The folks I know who embraced MAGA were all going through difficult emotional issues. It seemed to give them something they could rally around (i.e., bond with others to blame democrats, migrants, trans people, et al, for their problems)
When I registered to vote in WA all they asked for was my address and the last 4 of my SSN. No ID whatsoever. I could have got as many ballots as I wanted. Voting system security is nonexistent, and when Democrats pretend like this isn't an issue and fight tooth and nail to keep it this way it just makes them look like cheaters.
Democrats aren't opposed to making voting more secure. They just want to do in a way that doesn't make it harder for poor citizens to vote. Republicans have been using the fear of voter fraud to keep US citizens they don't like from voting. They'd do things like pass a voter ID law and then close DMVs in poor democratic districts so that it's harder for "the wrong" US citizens to vote. They weren't even remotely subtle about targeting specific groups of voters (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...)
Every democrat I know wants elections to be more secure than they are. They just also want them to be fair. There's been a lot of room for proactive measures here that democrats could have been pushing for, but there have been efforts too (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/1007715994/manchin-offers-a-v...)
Democrats actively fought against voter id laws. Instead, they should have supported those laws, but with an amendment to make it easier for people to get an id.
I do think trying it is a better tactic than not, but would not bet on embracing reasonable ID laws preventing a push to modify those to unreasonable ones from becoming exactly as big an issue, through the same mechanism, among the same voters.
That’s the risk when the measure is more-or-less harmless but also the problem it addresses isn’t real. They can just keep claiming the problem still exists and running on it.
In Canada Im required to show my ID to vote and things work just fine.
This appears to be province-by-province but looking at Ontario’s rules they appear to allow a lot of documents to count as an ID for voting, and do not require a photo ID, nor do they have multiple tiers of ID that require bringing, say, several ID documents if you lack a single “better” one—any single one of the many examples works.
https://www.elections.on.ca/en/voting-in-ontario/id-to-vote-...
Some US states have voting ID requirements, and they tend to be (though not always!) significantly stricter than that, sometimes requiring a specifically a government-issued photo id, for instance.
I’m pretty sure laws that have much looser definitions of “ID” and/or provision resources to ensure timely, free, and easy access to such an ID, see less resistance from democrats. If the entire pro-ID movement just wanted to do what Ontario does it’d be less of a contentious issue, I think.
[edit] for the record, though, I agree this is a place Democrats could safely give ground—the data do not well-support their disenfranchisement concerns, and 30+ states already have some kind of voter id law.
It is, separately, also true that there is no evidence there’s any actual reason to enact more of these laws. The data also don’t support that, at all. But whatever, it’s probably not significantly harmful, just a minor waste of resources.
Canada also made it cheap and convenient for you to have that ID.
When the average voter attempts to prove that elections are insecure by doing the things you claim you could easily do, they end up getting caught and facing election fraud charges.
Being able to cast a vote illegally is trivially easy because there are exceptions baked into the system like provisional ballots. Lucky there is an thorough audit process so having that vote actually counted while avoiding election fraud charges is a lot harder.
We would expect the several attempts by Republicans in government with as much access as possible to hunt for fraud to have found more than trivial cases of it, then.
They’ve been beating this drum for what, fifteen years at this point? More? They should at least have found smoke, if not fire, instead they just keep saying they smell a raging forest fire and coming back with single burnt matches when given the reigns of government to go look for it and tell us what they find.
> We had an R state rep candidate come by our house. Highlighted two issues in her message to us. Both were simply not actual things. The existence of the problems were lies.
This has been a constant refrain from Democrats: "The thing that you are upset about is not happening. Well, it is happening, but it is the exception. Ok, it's happening everywhere, but it's a good thing." No, of course Harris isn't for government sex changes for imprisoned illegal immigrants, except for the fact that she said she was. The truth is that we all know that she would say anything to win, and holding her to any position she ever publicly held feels unfair.
The people who have been kept low-information are the Democrats, because they have been surrounded by media largely controlled by their political party. Republicans often have bad information, but they're constantly out there consuming information and hate-reading what Democrats are saying. Independents, in my experience, are the highest-information of all, because they don't think of political parties as something they can offload their morality to. Independents only see politics in terms of actual issues, and track those issues rather than having parasocial relationships with political celebrities.
In that vein, I'm pretty sure that if I had an experience where a political candidate came to my house and talked about issues that weren't real, I'd talk about those issues specifically, and speculate about their origin. I think you don't mention them because they were real, but a lot of liberals have taken this position of officially denying reality if reality could help Trump. Is widespread voter fraud real? No. Should people be unconcerned about making it easier? Also, no.
If upper-middle class liberals could have won the "stop sounding like Scientologists" challenge, they could have won. If The Democratic party could have wanted to win more than they wanted to avoid alienating any donors, they could have won by taking any popular position on anything. Trump spent most of his campaign actively campaigning for Harris by calling her a radical-left socialist; if she were actually a radical-left socialist instead of an empty vessel to be filled with cash, she would have won. If the Democratic party hadn't chosen again not to run a fair, open, lively primary, they would have won.
With Trump campaigning against radical-left socialist Harris, and Harris campaigning against rapist Hitler, homophobic Stalin, and racist Mussolini, the majority of people looked at which candidate was lying the most, and voted for the other one. Everybody knows who Trump is, and he's already been president, and nobody went to camps. It was a rather sleepy standard Republican presidency, whose few deviations from the norm pleased people. The only reason we heard about Harris is because she (and Buttigieg) pretended to be for single-payer healthcare in order to destroy a popular candidate who was running on an honest program.
> The truth is that we all know that she would say anything to win
While Trump wouldn't do any of that, right? He would say things because they're true :D
> It was a rather sleepy standard Republican presidency, whose few deviations from the norm pleased people
Just a small insurrection at the end, no biggie. Oh, and some international agreements were shattered, but who cares about those anyway. I mean, there was also Corona which jolted some people from sleep, but thanks to Trump's recommendation to get some chlorine you could get right back to sleeping :)
Ensured an R-partisan Supreme Court for the rest of my life, odds are. And I’m only middle aged.
Is that a good thing?
To the 35-40% of the country that’s on board with basically everything they’ve done or are likely to do, who constitute a reliable mega-bloc of Republican voters, yeah.
1) “Local crime in your specific hilariously safe rich town is out of control and rapidly rising, which is why the cops are asking for more money and I’m going to give it to them!” I double checked to be sure, and no, of course this was fiction. So you encounter a supporter of hers and want to talk about actual issues, you get stuck pulling up the cops’ own crime stats on your phone I guess. Good luck with that conversation, we’ve tried it with relatives who are convinced it’s true about their own different rich low-crime towns. Now you’re stuck fighting phantoms.
2) “boys in girls sports”. So incredibly niche that who gives a fuck, and does not appear to be an actual problem that sports conferences and associations aren’t handling just fine on their own. Why does anybody care about this? Right wing news, entire reason. Not an actual issue.
> So incredibly niche that who gives a fuck
And then you're surprised why people vote differently to you...
I’m not, I’m well aware of the boring shifts in policy and law over three or so decades that have gotten us to fighting phantoms instead of trying to decide whether incentives or mandates are the right way to achieve greater healthcare access and lower costs, or what have you.
> boys in girls sports
So why can't Democrats just come out against this insanity and take the easy W? The whole, "well it isn't a really an issue" argument doesn't fly when you still demand your way on it.
1) I don't know where you live, you may be right about crime where you are. It is not specifically Republican or uncommon to run on law & order while exaggerating disorder.
2) Boys are in girls sports, and Biden destroyed Title IX with an executive order. And you've gone from "fictional" to "Why does anybody care about this?" You don't see this as a dishonest progression?
edit: and now edited to "who gives a fuck." Women who dedicate their lives to sports. Men who think that half the population deserves half the medals and half the opportunity. Me.
> Biden destroyed Title IX with an executive order
Oh she mentioned defending title IX and I had zero clue wtf she meant (I mean, I know what title IX is, but figured it was some kind of allusion to something I’d only know if I listened to Mark Levin even more than I already do). A glance at The Googles and this appears to be exactly the kind of thing I mean.
> Oh she mentioned defending title IX and I had zero clue wtf she meant
Feel free to label anyone who doesn't vote the way you do a "Low information voter"
Being unaware of an issue that only exists in hard-right media and hadn’t happened to come up in the times I’ve dipped into such—which I do pretty frequently—isn’t, like, a problem. I correctly guessed exactly what it was, anyway.
If you believe false things, you are a low-information voter. And if someone doesn't believe the lies you believe, they will disagree with you. Vundercind's point from the beginning was that problem isn't a difference in values or priorities but facts.
Fundamentally, that’s a better way to put it, really. I have two young daughters and the examples that have come up every time I’ve tried to engage on the sports issue as if it might have merit have done the exact opposite of convincing me I should be worried on their behalf—it very much appears to be nothing and quibbling over how much of that one story from Florida that they decided to champion as a key example is demonstrably a fabrication again isn’t really “discussing real issues”. We literally disagree on what facts are. If I believed their facts I might even at least partially agree with them! But I look at what they present and I disagree about the basic reality of the problem they’re trying to convince me exists.
[edit] shit, we can’t even get to substance on issues where we agree the broad category of thing needs to be addressed. Immigration! Yes! Let’s do some stuff on that! “Biden’s open border” ok well congrats we already solved that because that’s not a thing, rhetorically or in fact, zero democrats with any power want an open border and the border is not open, so… “illegals smuggling fentanyl!” wait how much money do you want to devote to that specifically, because that’s a negligible source of fentanyl in the US (citizens smuggling fentanyl, however…) and yeah we’re just bogged down disagreeing on facts again.
One of the hardest lessons to learn growing up is that there aren't really any adults, not in the sense I believed when I was a kid. "Adult" is a role people play when they're interacting with kids. Some do it better than others. But inside every adult is a terrified child† desperately struggling to make sense of an uncertain, incomprehensible world. Unfortunately for that child, life always ends in death; it won't be long until you are dead and everyone who remembers you is dead. And our reasoning abilities are not capable of understanding very much of the world, so often nothing we do matters, not even for the purposes it was intended for. Mostly our understanding of the world consists of stories we tell ourselves with relatively little connection to reality.
Our understanding of the world is profoundly mediated by fiction, which is to say, lies.
That's why it all ends up like children arguing on the playground. The kind of playground‡ where my 14-year-old classmate Evangalyn Martinez got stabbed to death for, I think it was, stealing Joella Mares's boyfriend, and nobody leaves the playground alive.
Under those circumstances, what does it mean to live a good life rather than a bad one? Good answers exist, but they're not easy.
______
† This is a metaphor. I don't mean that each adult has literally swallowed a child and is digesting them alive like a python.
‡ Technically that was actually the parking lot. Also, I was already no longer her classmate at the time, and because we were in different grades, I don't remember if I ever met her. She wouldn't be my last classmate to be stabbed; in my high school biology class each student was paired with the same lab partner for the whole semester, and the next year, someone else at the high school nonfatally stabbed my lab partner, Shannon Sugg, now Shannon L. Schneider (ginga.snapz1718). If memory serves, she dropped out from the psychological trauma. You can read the decision in her lawsuit against the school at https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/nm-court-of-appeals/141549..., which says it was Alicia Andres who stabbed her. ”Plaintiff asserts that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment imposed a clearly established duty upon school officials to protect her from this stabbing.” I'm glad violent crime has dropped a lot since then in the US.
Ok, well... that's not really an argument, is it?
It actually is, though.
Sure, it didn’t work—probably because enough people weren’t convinced that it was true enough (and also because they didn’t care)—but it's not unreasonable to think that such an argument should have been enough.
Appealing to insult is not, in fact, an argument. It's a form of rhetoric which doesn't change peoples minds, it reinforces them.
"X is a fascist" is not just a simple insult. Pretending that's all it is is ignorance at best
“You are fascist” actually isn’t just an insult. If you display fascist tendencies then you’re a fascist, and he displays many of those typical tendencies.
There are actual fascists (and not as few as I would like) and they need to be called out, but using the term inaccurately and provocatively on a broad group makes it easier to oppose the usage outright. Optics are important to politics, like it or not.
99% of people don't know what fascism (Italian fascism, I suppose, not national socialism, Falange Española or BUF) actually is and only mean "some kind of vaguely traditionalist (but not monarchist) authoritarian" by it. It's actually a pretty good red flag for people who shouldn't be trusted to discuss politics.
> the Dem strategy for Independents appeared to be "Trump is a fascist" "Trump supporters are garbage".
> Ok well..that's not really an argument?
Choosing to not put a fascist(-leaning) individual into power is "not really an argument"? So it's okay to re-elect individuals who have tried at least once to stop the peaceful transfer of power?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
”where are the adults” I mean, the Republican game plan was to create this situation. Once they decided that they will do what it takes to win, they really did succeed.
I mean take everything from the climate crisis, to my favorite - creationism being taught in school at the same level as evolution.
The playbook is literally right there, you get experts to come on stage, ridicule them to your audience, show that they are cartoons and have no real value.
Then you provide you viewers with good sounding news bites and manage the optics, and you can get a convicted felon elected to President.
Yes - it really is just the information ecosystem. There really is no free speech when one side is a regular joe and the other side is a marketing and political speech behemoth.
It is that simple, and we can’t do anything about it, because that would be harming our ability to speak freely.
As a European I have to ask - do you really need another argument? If I stand on a platform for government in Europe with an arguably fascist agenda I will get called out as a fascist and will lose. Never mind if I am a convicted felon, rapist, and probable russian intelligence asset. Seriously, what are you guys thinking here? Americans would actually vote for an extreme right wing candiate just to prove a point to the dems? Just to get one over on the libs? Please explain.
Giorgia Meloni - President of Italy.
Victor Orban - President of Hungary.
The AfD in Germany got a higher percentage of the vote in Thuringen in Germany than any other party. Currently polling higher than any member of the governing coalition nationally.
Geert Wilders - successful in the Netherlands.
Marine Le Pen - possible next president of France.
The Freedom Party of Austria - has been in government.
These parties all sometimes win in Europe.
In italy happened the same "nooo you can't call them fascist"
Freedom of protest was, in fact, restricted in italy in a way that it affects climate manifestations more than lobbies manifestation - we have taxis striking and blocking cities if someone wants to touch their ungodly privileges -
Journalist striked on the public news because news has become unreliable, propaganda spewing news at a level before unheard of
It didn't happen, but Giorgia meloni wanted to abolish the crime of torture to better allow police to do its work (lmao even)
At the season opening of the teather la scala di Milano, one man shouted "viva l'Italia antifascista" (long live antifacist italy). Police was sent to check his documents and similar intimidatory shit
I think there are also a lot of single issue voters who don’t think about the ethics of the candidate or their world view.
How many evangelical Christians just voted for an adulterer and convicted criminal because he’s not pro choice?
I live in a very Republican area and know quite a few people who do vote only on the one issue of pro-life. I don't think many of them would actually agree that Trump is an adulterer or a criminal though. They would chalk it up to Democratic lies or political attacks using the legal system as a weapon.
Heck, I know quite a few people who are very strongly religious and somehow view Trump as a good Christian candidate. That one really blows my mind, unless they've changed the ten commandments entirely since I was growing up.
> I live in a very Republican area and know quite a few people who do vote only on the one issue of pro-life.
it is an important issue.
> Heck, I know quite a few people who are very strongly religious and somehow view Trump as a good Christian candidate. That one really blows my mind, unless they've changed the ten commandments entirely since I was growing up.
What makes it bizarre is not things like adultery (a fundamental tenet of Christianity is that we are all sinners) but that Trump is clearly not a Christian. He does not even know the basics of Christianity - remember when he wished people "Happy Good Friday"?
> it is an important issue.
For sure. I don't take issue with anyone voting based on whatever they care about in general. I don't feel strongly enough about one topic to be a single issue voter, but I get it for anyone that does feel that strongly.
> What makes it bizarre is not things like adultery (a fundamental tenet of Christianity is that we are all sinners) but that Trump is clearly not a Christian.
100% agree. No one is perfect and I wouldn't expect anyone who is religious to always fit the bill, but Trump is an example of someone very far from any religious ideals. I was raised Catholic, if Trump were catholic I don't think he would have had time outside of confession to even run for office.
> was raised Catholic, if Trump were catholic I don't think he would have had time outside of confession to even run for office.
That literally made me lough out loud. Raised Catholic too (been an agnostic since, and some sort of Christian and technically if not theologically a Catholic now).
Fascist has become an overused word by the left. Everyone else (the majority of the american voting population it would seem) are tired of the label and tune out anyone who accuses someone of being a fascist. The response from the left has been to double down and accuse more people of fascism.
Trump has called his opponents fascists a million times.
This word really means nothing at this point, like racist, it's so misused that it has lost its meaning.
Yes, and wasn't it silly of him to call his opponents Fascist?
It sure was but you were implying that this was a problem with the left.
So maybe the left should reduce their usage of the word? Especially if they want to win over some of the people that voted for Trump in this election?
Just a thought
Yeah, you all keep making that point. But I don't believe for a second that a single voter went with Trump because the libs had called them mean words.
Well your belief is wrong. The libs have spent years calling people of certain backgrounds, ethnicities and genders as fascist, racist, homophobic, sexist, transphobic, deplorable.
This behaviour culminates in what you're seeing.
I know that they have, but that's not why people voted for Trump. You just like to say that to try and make it look like something the libs brought on themselves.
And as you agreed, Trump does the same, more than anyone. So unless you are openly stating "the left should behave more decent than the right if they want votes", there is a problem in your logic as well.
Yes he has called people fascist in some of his speeches. Now compare that against everyone on CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hollywood, etc etc etc relentlessly calling people names for nearly a decade. The difference is a thousand fold. There is no equivalence in quantity.
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Was America under Fascist rule from 2016 to 2020?
America was under a fascist ruler, but not under a fascist system of government.
Trump tested American democracy by consolidating power and was not successful, so we avoided being under a fascist rule
The fear is that we might get to test democracy again, and most of America doesn't seem to mind that. Maybe it's due to lack of understanding, not caring, or genuinely wanting fascism, I don't know.
The distinctive fascist doctrine of perpetual war doesn't seem to be a MAGA calling cry. In fact isn't the opposite more true?
And then the cult of traditionalism while strong in the NRx movement, is arguably stronger in the Republican side than in MAGA itself.
Ultimately Fascism is deeply spiritual but all I get from Trump is brash 80's boomerism. He's not ideological enough.
They are fighting an alleged "culture war" and also call it that way. I also think that Trump's movement is very spiritual, almost like a cult.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that based on common criteria the term Fascism is adequate for Trump's movement. I'm not claiming that it's strongly related to prior Fascist movements. These occurred in other countries at other times and I leave it to scholars to make comparisons if they must.
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It's sometimes written with a capital F because it's a name, sorry if that offends you. I'd like to change them to small letters but can't edit the original post any longer. Other than that, the only argument I can see is an ad hominem, which is kind of pointless. I do have credentials for talking about the topic but I won't bother you with them because it would only lead to more ad hominem attacks.
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Calm down Jonathan, I was just trying to get a clarification on your point, it wasn't flamebait. Besides when I asked the question the other response hadn't been posted. I'll now stop talking to you Mr. Strange.
I wouldn't be so sure about the fascist agenda in eu given some recent results of some parties throughout the union
(Except in Austria, which now has Volkskanzler Herbert Kickl.)
Edit: maybe not, I think they're still in procedural limbo because no other party wants to be in the coalition.
I can't begin to speak for America, my point was about the importance of Independent voters: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/first-us-independent-turnou...
only European but if your choice is binary, you can only make it that way.
Some Americans may well vote for the rightwing candidate because they want to stick it to the left (or whoever the "anti" would be).
Personally, I don't think that alone makes a majority in that binary choice; in Europe, it would mostly end up in the vote for a minor "ultra" party. And less-"anti" conservative voters have other options.
In the US though, as someone with conservative values and views, one always has to choose ... do I want to vote with everyone else who votes for "my" camp including the stick-it-tos (because there's only one option "on my side"), do I not vote, or do I even vote against what feels closer to me because the stick-it-tos vote for them as well, and/or their head on the ticket is clearly one of the stick-it-tos ?
Am I glad I needn't make that choice. And am I sad what kind of asocial extremes are encouraged by the binary, winner-takes-all US political system.
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Now try and add some evidence?
Right. In the US, on politics and the issues, getting the information and "evidence" is a really big problem.
I have and/or have seen good evidence for all that I mentioned, but such evidence is NOT wanted by or common in the media which means that I have no well written, comprehensive, single reference to give.
Uh, YOU try: Write a document with good evidence, details, quotes, video clips, etc., and see how much interest the US MSM (mainstream media) has in publishing it!!! I predict you will regard your effort, no matter how carefully done, as a waste of time.
E.g., so far I've never seen even one credible graph over, say, the last 16 years, of, say, the US CPI (consumer price index). Same for budget deficits, spending bills, balance of foreign exchange, Fed loans, spending on the war in Ukraine (was there actually ANY spending or did we, instead, actually just ship war supplies produced in the US?) -- the actual details are absurdly messy, sloppy, missing, etc.
Clearly, bluntly the details do not SELL -- won't get a big audience.
To give good evidence here would exceed by several times the 10,000 bytes or so limit that Hacker News seems to have on a single post.
US media credibility? Here is evidence of biased, cooked up, gang up, pile on, organized mob attack from 2017:
With that example, there is less than zero credibility. So, for your "evidence", don't expect that from the US media.I wish, profoundly wish, have posted many times on social media, that the US news media should provide JUST such evidence, at least up to common standards of high school term papers. All that is no more than a spit into the wind -- the media does NOT want to expend bytes for such writing, documentation, evidence, etc.
So, here I did all I can do to respond to the question I quoted, apparently, from a European. Agree or not with what I wrote, but it is the best I can do under the circumstances. The question from Europe are not very deep; so I gave answers of similar depth. The speeches in the election were not very deep. The Trump statements at the economic clubs in Chicago and Detroit were deeper.
That's my explanation, best I can do, take it or leave it.
But, really for an accusation of "Nazi", etc. the "burden of proof is on the accuser". The rape? He said, she said. There in the dressing room of the department store, did she scream and get some witnesses? Nazi? Just what is the evidence that Trump has done anything like the Nazi stuff Hitler did? Felon? He has never gotten a sentence -- if he does, then he can appeal, win the appeal, and show that he is NOT a "convicted felon". So, no sentence. The papers case, the J6 case, the Georgia case, the "hush money" case -- all are falling apart due to appeals, etc. They are NOT legal cases but just efforts to misuse the legal system to have others, as here, believe he is a felon. But with the appeals, e.g., even to the SCOTUS, ALL of the cases are falling apart. My view is that the wrong here is from low level parts of the US legal system and not from Trump.
And where are the arguments about 10+ million illegal immigrants, the inflation, the attacks on US fossil fuel energy, the Ukraine war, the Gaza war, the Lebanon war, the hundreds of missiles from Iran, the promotion of biological men in women's sports, the lies about abortion (Trump sent the issue back to the states to decide), the bans on gas powered cars and trucks, etc.?
Traditional media generally requires having three different independent sources to publish.
You have failed to provide one.
>In simple terms, in the US no really good student is short on education due to lack of money.
In the south, at least this is flat wrong
In the south, this is flat right, Memphis State University, University of Tennessee.
I am happy to give you a tour of Louisiana.
Get book on high school algebra, plane geometry, trigonometry, solid geometry, and calulus. Study all of them. Then take tests, e.g., SAT, to confirm excellence. After high school, keep living at home, and get a job, even just mowing grass. Take the money and get a bus ticket to one of the midwestern states and apply to a college, not a university, there. Being a good student with good SAT scores, should be able to get a scholarship with $0 tuition. Or work hard, make all As, and then ask for a scholarship, use a work-study program, etc. Go to the available offices and see what programs they have for low or no cost schooling. Then with a high GPA, apply to grad school -- $0, zip, zilch tuition. Get a Masters in something. Let the Masters confirm excellence and f'get about the quality of the high school or even the college.
A niece got PBK at Indiana University, went to Harvard Law, got first job at Cravath, Swaine, & Moore. Left for an MD, and has been practicing since then. Suspect she spent very little on tuition.
As a first grad student in math at Indiana University, I got paid for teaching, had a nice single dorm room, actually lived well, and saved some money.
There are a lot of buttons to push, strings to pull, to get low cost or free college, then free through Ph.D. Being a good student, good SAT scores, already know calculus well, all can help.
I had to teach a doctor’s daughter from Alexandria who showed up to my physics recitation not knowing what a function was, despite having taken AP calculus AB. And how did this happen in the public schools in Alexandria? Because the gym teacher taught it and everyone got 1s. Furthermore, the school board gets bonuses for kids taking AP tests and teaching gifted classes and then hands the teaching jobs out to their sycophant favorite teachers
Starting with first algebra through my applied math Ph.D., nearly everything important that I learned I got heavily from independent study. (1) Loved plane geometry. Slept in class then worked ALL the more difficult supplementary exercises. (2) For my first year of college, went to a cheap state school, partly because I could walk to it. They put me in a math class beneath what I'd had in high school and would not let me take first calculus. For their class, a girl I knew also in the class told me when the tests were, and I showed up for them. For calculus, I got a copy of the book they were using, not a bad book, and started in and did well covering the first year. For my sophomore year, transfered to a fancy college, took an oral exam on first calculus, then got into their second year, did well, and was caught up. (3) Linear algebra? Sure, went through Halmos carefully word for word. About a fine point, wrote a letter to Halmos and got a nice answer. Also worked through Nering's book -- Nering was a student of Artin at Princeton. Later did a lot in linear algebra applications, e.g., in statistics, numerical issues, etc. (4) In grad school, got pushed into their course in 'advanced linear algebra'. When the course got to the polar decomposition, I blurted out in class "That's my favorite theorem!". Blew away everyone else in the class. Partly intimidated the prof. In grad school took an advanced applied math course then in the summer went over the class notes word by word. Wrote the prof a letter improving on one of his theorems. Back in class, took a 'reading course', and from the study in the summer saw a problem and solved it with some surprising math, two weeks. Later published it -- so, technically it was a dissertation.
Point: Self study can work well. Obviously: Once a prof reading research papers, nearly always have to use self study, and the papers are generally much less polished than good textbooks.
So, I recommended to students short on money just to do some self teaching and show up, demonstrate what learned, and ask for a scholarship.
The problem is that it doesn't stick and people see it as desperate.
Trump was very favorable to Israel and has a Jewish daughter. Not typical fascist behavior.
Debbie Dingell said Trump will build internment camps and put her in one. Were were the internment camps in Trump's first term?
Anti-Semitism isn't an inherit trait of fascism. It's an inherit trait of Nazism.
Mussolini was in power in Italy 10 years before Hitler was in Germany and he wasn't very anti-Semitic at all. He was influenced by Hitler towards the end of his reign but even then his anti-Semitic policies were mild when compared to Germany.
Part of the problem with calling someone a fascist is that people associate the word with Hitler. But Hitler wasn't the only fascist or even the first fascist.
Ok but I believe the topic is Donald Trump who has been directly, repeatedly, relentlessly, compared to Adolph Hitler, and he and his supporters slandered as Nazis. Specifically. Directly, relentlessly, repeatedly.
So perhaps this:
> Part of the problem with calling someone a fascist is that people associate the word with Hitler.
Is not making the point you think it's making.
He'll definitely go away without a fuss after his second term, right? He isn't considering what could be done about the 22nd amendment. Putin extended his terms in office in creative ways, but Trump isn't Putin and has a high regard for established political mechanisms, even if they mean there will be less importance for Trump at some point in the future.
In four years trump isn’t going to be able to speak in complete sentences, much less run for office.
We don’t have to worry about him stealing any more elections, he’s far too old for that to be an issue
He'll be 3 years younger than Ali Khamenei is now, and 5 years younger than the pope.
There is already very clear cognitive decline. I don’t think he’ll be able to function as president in a couple of years.
I am less optimistic than you; I don't see how that would matter to the current MAGA movement.
I'm sure Trump will be happy to go into being former president Trump at the end of his term.... if the left let him.
What kind of a veiled threat is that? How would "the left" not let a president leave office?
Is there any source of reassurance about this I can look to, or only your gut feeling?
>Trump was very favorable to Israel and has a Jewish daughter. Not typical fascist behavior
So because Israel is involved in something means that something can't be fascist? What about the fascist things Netanyahu is doing with Israel?
Not all nationalism is fascism.
Yeah that's why I called Netanyahus actions fascist.
> As a European
As a European you don't have presidential elections that matter. Executive and legislative power is in the hands of your parliament and the president is a figurehead (if you have one).
If you want to compare your European experience to the USA, you should look at congress and not the presidential elections. You'd probably find the same dynamics there as in your own country, with the exception that the blocs that you have in parliament have been distilled into two parties.
My home country has 3 major parties each at about a quarter of the seats, the rest split between about half a dozen others. The various parties have very different views, only one of them I'd argue is "right wing" in the US sense, and they've all mostly learned to make compromises and not be too divisive, or they face a more moderate party taking their seats.
US two-party system really is the weird one.
Every European parliament will form into a "government" bloc and an "opposition" bloc after the election. Right wing / left wing doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. The US congress does manage to make bi-partisan bills. Because members of congress can go against their party sometimes. In European parliaments that kind of behaviour usually results in a crisis of government and a vote of confidence.
> or they face a more moderate party taking their seats
That's not right. You cannot lose your parliament seat in any European parliament until the next election. If an MP or an entire party in Europe is too divisive, they might not be able to be part of a majority and they will be in opposition.
In the USA, the executive government is not elected by parliament - so you're comparing apples to oranges. The president builds the executive government after being elected by the people in the states. That's something different.
Okay, but what about the truth?
I mean, if one of Trump's own closest advisors carefully states that he fits the definition of a fascist, is it not fair to call him one? If Trump outwardly celebrates many of the traditional concepts of fascism like attacking the media, attacking minorities, attacking "enemies from within" is it not fair to call him that?
And what do you say about a person who supports fascism? That they're very fine people?
I mean ... if you support that guy. It's accurate.
I assume by 'strong personality' you mean populist. I think it's a big mistake to think populism can only be fought with populism, otherwise all democracies would have fallen to it long ago.
I do think if we're pointing fingers, most of the problems came from before the Harris campaign kicked off.
Populism is just democracy taking the reigns back from the entrenched political establishment. There is nothing democratic about a social class of bureaucrats gatekeeping all political offices. If anything, it seems to me that populism is necessary to overcome the local minimum that the political landscape settles in from time to time.
It's pretty hard to define what populism is; it's kind of a "know it when I see it" kind of definition for most commentators.
My best attempt at a definition would be a platform that denies known truths in favour of superficially popular positions. For example, claiming that tariffs don't increase prices, or that legal convictions are lies, or even that solid, established scientific evidence (like vaccines are safe and hugely effective or climate change is real) are untrue.
Nah, that is not what it means.
Populism is a political approach that seeks to represent the interests and voice of "ordinary people" against what is perceived as an elite or establishment. Populist movements often emphasize a direct connection between the leader and the people, bypassing traditional political institutions or parties, and claim to speak for the "common people" against corrupt or out-of-touch elites. Populism can appear across the political spectrum, taking different forms depending on the issues and ideologies within a given society.
This is likely to cause winners and losers to come out of the situation... and probably after time, the leaders end up becoming elites who become out of touch with the "common people" and the process is likely to repeat.
I think it is closer to Democracy than whatever the democrats seem to say - which they seem to define as: "whatever gives them the power to do what they want"
In the ideal, populism can be seen as a good example of democracy. In practice, voters just go off of feelings and "he said, she said", at which point it's not about the benefit of the people so much as whichever elites manage to wrest the conch this time. For the most part, the people themselves aren't well educated and able to understand what is actually to their benefit or not, even if they are college educated. Adding to that, people are bad at long-term thinking and focusing on multiple issues. In practice, the outcome is the same.
Good definition! Here’s the Cambridge one:
“political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want”.
Giving someone all they want is not seen as a good thing… unless you are the recipient, in that case internal bias comes to play.
That is how populism has been branded as bad, to you. By your definition the most populist parties are the republicans and democrats ("denies known truths in favour of superficially popular positions").
> the most populist parties are the republicans and democrats
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone...
It's funny how "populism" has a shifting definition (as I see it). Your comment implies populism is the opposite of democracy. While it's literal meaning seems to be exactly democratic (doing what the populous wants).
It's not "doing what the people want", but it's "telling them what they want to hear".
..but it isn't doing what the populous wants. It is making it appear to do what they want based on populistic (yet unrealistic) resentments.
Dear OP, if you don't understand why people are making fun of you, imagine the trump guy that mostly exists in your own heads saying "We must avoid falling into tyranny by leaning into the fuhrerprinciple!"
And now we know why Confucius said the first step is the rectification of names.
From the outside this is what I think too. Biden tried too desperately to be the next candidate again and Harris' campaign could have started 1 or 2 months earlier than it did.
If Trump actually wins, the world might be in for a lot of trouble very soon. Quite worrying. Aside from totalitarian regimes, wherever you look around the world people were hoping the crazy dude would not win, wondering how anyone could be so blind not to see what kind of person he is, how uneducated, silly, and what a loser in the general sense.
A second administration will look quite different. If he remembers his campaign ideas, the economics will look much closer to Brexit than the chaos of his first term.
...Brexit not being chaos?
"impotent gridlock" would be more accurate than "chaos" to describe Trump's first term.
Yeah, the application of new tariffs will look like the disorderly negotiations of Brexit rather than magic marker hurricane prediction.
> Aside from totalitarian regimes, wherever you look around the world people were hoping the crazy dude would not win
Can you list some of the places where you've looked "around the world"? The locals I know out here in Asia (and a few in Southern Africa) aren't Trump haters.
Basically everywhere in Europe, where we still have democracy, even if more and more shaky these days, because we don't get our act together with regard to the war in Ukraine.
Then Ukraine itself of course.
I think no one wants to have to deal with a deranged dude, who calls NK dictator a "great guy". Surely people in South America don't like his hate speeches and outlandish ideas about them paying for any kind of wall either.
In general people in many countries take statements like wanting to be a dictator "only on the first day" as very serious indications of some guy's mental health and for what they will have to deal with in the near future. Generally people are not a big fan of having to deal with authoritarian figures, who could impact their country's economy tomorrow, by doubling down on some idiotic tariffs policy or some other crap that comes his mind.
> Basically everywhere in Europe
Ohhhhhh, the other half of the Global North? I don't consider that representative of "around the world". Europe's population is a minority (reference the Valeriepieris Circle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle) , and it doesn't hold a monopoly on functioning democracies either.
>Surely people in South America don't like his hate speeches and outlandish ideas about them paying for any kind of wall either.
But....have you been there, and asked them? Or have you just been to Europe? I've never been to South America, and only know a handful of Mexicans, Brazilians, Argentinians, and Colombians....not enough to say that I can speak for their politics.
> Generally people are not a big fan of having to deal with authoritarian figures, who could impact their country's economy tomorrow, by doubling down on some idiotic tariffs policy or some other crap that comes his mind.
I think authoritarians are more popular, globally, than you realize. I know Filipinos who spoke highly of Duterte because his crackdown really cleaned up crime in Manila, as one anecdote. Trump's tariff policy will probably not work out well for the overall quality of life in America, agreed on that point though.
This is likely game over for Democrats and democracy in the US. Democracy has already been on the backslide here for some time, so it’s not overly surprising, but I don’t expect either to last the next couple of years.
Citizens United and the coup attempt neither being treated as five-alarm fires for our Democracy were probably the moments when a major slide toward authoritarianism became far, far more likely. Democrats just sat on their hands.
By the time we got to the news that at least two Supreme Court justices and very likely more are being bought, and collectively shrugged rather than making that the issue until they were out, well, that wasn’t so much a landmark on the way down as another ordinary day.
"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?-Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."
— Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
Excellent book. I read this book after my WWII Veteran relatives passed away, had fought in Europe and survived the Battle of the Bulge. His wife invited everyone over and wanted everyone to look through his books and take some that looked interesting.
That's one of the ones I took, certainly the one I remember most.
That entire book is excellent.
Sums it up beautifully, thank you
I'm reminded of how we react to pandemics. If we are successful with vaccines or masks or whatever, then not many people get sick and die. No big crisis. And people are wondering "why did we do that, see it was no big deal".
It's the same looming issue with climate change.
And they all have the same undercurrent: doing something might cost us money, so we don't do it. Thus the economy being the greatest predictor of elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_in_Germany
Whatever you think about Trump, 2016-2020 was in no way, shape or form comparable to the 30s under NSDAP Germany and to *insist* on making such comparisons ad nauseum is one of the reasons you were rebuked at the polls by the electorate.
It's also electrifyingly funny that Trump took the largest Jewish counties (e.g., Rockland, NY) -- those self-hating Jews must want to go back to the concentration camps. This is your brain on progressive logic.
I took this particular case as highlighting one way by which functioning liberal democracies slide into authoritarianism and sharply-shifted political and social norms, one hard-to-reverse step at a time, not all at once. I also think the direct comparisons to nazis are mostly not useful, but that’s not how I read this excerpt’s being posted.
You missed the point spectacularly.
Looks like more of the same antifa boilerplate but in the form of an incoherent postww2 ethnography by a confused leftist (whose sample was a total of ten people btw) and is exactly why your ideas were thoroughly smashed yesterday, no?
Have you read the book? It’s not trying to be an academic population-level study or anything, it’s accounts of and reflections on the reported experiences (and some verifiable—sometimes conflicting—facts surrounding those) of a few members of the Nazi party who were otherwise just ordinary people going about their lives, which is a perspective lost among focus on SS members or the Nazi political elite. A different book that was a statistical study might also be interesting, but could not accomplish the same things. It’d be a totally different book, not a better version of the same book.
my entire voting choice was based on "who is willing to take on the blatant corruption at the supreme court"
> By the time we got to the news that at least two Supreme Court justices and very likely more are being bought, we collectively shrugged rather than making that the issue until they were out
It's happening to this day, too. Yesterday, "Oh, possibly Russian-originated bomb threats closing election stations? Sure, we'll talk about it briefly and move on." Elon Musk-funded PAC sending fake text messages from Kamala Harris saying that kids will be able to coordinate gender-affirming surgery while at school "outside of parental interference" and that she will be legalizing abortion upon delivery? "Oh, that might be illegal, maybe? Next story." are demoralizing in the amount of indifference they come with.
Citizens United was literally about citizens showing a film critical of a political candidate. It’s one of the purest examples of free political speech there is.
No Supreme Court justices are bought.
I share your concern about the lack of seriousness with which many seem to regard the Capitol riot, which is a black stain on our history.
> Citizens United was literally about citizens showing a film critical of a political candidate. It’s one of the purest examples of free political speech there is.
You should read fuller accounts, it’s a fair bit more complicated than that.
The part that made it so harmful, at any rate, was the court deciding without prompting from the plaintiffs to buck their normal “as narrow as possible and don’t make things major constitutional questions unless you have to” policy and widen the case to be about something it initially was not, with the result that campaign finance control at all and keeping foreign money at least kinda out of US politics became impossible.
> No Supreme Court justices are bought.
Uh. I dunno what to say. Yikes.
Pretend George Soros had been giving Sotomayor gifts amounting to huge sums of money over many, many years in ways that plainly violate rules for lower court judges, and that she’s “accidentally” not disclosed a lot of it.
> No Supreme Court justices are bought.
What do you call the controversy around Thomas and his billionaire benefactor?
Candidate wins in a landslide election against someone who had not won any votes in a presidential campaign on her own merits ever and you call that game over for democracy?
That wasn't a landslide. To see what a landslide looks like, look at 1972.
Or 1984[0]:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidentia...OK he still won. Unless you will claim, like MSNBC already is, that it was stolen by the Russians.
Where do you see that?
(not that MSNBC is a monolith, but) This article claims exactly the opposite: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-steal-elec...
> Trump didn’t need to file frivolous lawsuits before federal courts. The Supreme Court wasn’t given a chance to throw the election his way in a redux of 2000’s Bush v. Gore. The false bomb threats to polling places that have been ascribed to Russian actors don’t appear to have had any measurable effect. There’s been no reporting that indicates that the promised hordes of MAGA-trained poll watchers blocked any Democratic voters from casting their ballots.
> He just won.
These are the same noises that were made on the right prior to the election. As long as people are sufficiently mad about the status quo, the other party has a chance to take over.
Keep in mind this site swings heavily right wing.
Fiscally conservative, socially liberal (in that order) probably best describes HN.
Of 5 years ago, maybe.
Economically liberal (as in Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell) and socially liberal.
Trumps tends to be economically liberal internally and a conservative for international economics.
I feel like that's a story HN and a lot of tech likes to tell itself, but the truth is that when push comes to shove they support candidates who are neither, but _are_ deeply right wing.
Concrete actions tell the real story.
fiscal conservatives that nevertheless don't want their mil contractor jobs to disappear.
The actual lib-left side of tech evaporated. ACLU, EFF, even fedora-core atheists etc are a shell/joke of their former selves. The remaining ones (i.e. Stallman) back Bernie, Yang, or still buy into the green party.
I got mass downvoted earlier and a "talking to" from Dang in regards to me pointing out that a certain Ron Wyden having one bad vote about BDS/isreal isn't a good enough reason to throw the baby out with the bath water and turn against one of the only reliable techno-libertarians. This site is done with its purported liberalism.
>fedora-core atheists
What, exactly, is a "fedora-core atheist?"
How might such an atheist differ from an atheist who runs Debian or OpenBSD?
So... Right Wing?
Entrepreneurs are kind of by definition neoliberals, aka libright.
I agree there are a lot of right wing, libertarian types, but I'm guessing just voting by the HN crowd would be a Harris landslide over Trump. For example, donations for Alphabet employees was supposedly 89% to democrats, 11% to republicans.
I mean considering the degree to which people on this site style themselves as intellectuals, it would be pretty astounding to me to hear that most of them voted for Trump this time around given his fairly disastrous economic agenda. Mostly tariffs—I don't really believe HN is that protectionist
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It skews techno-libertarian, which is more right than left. Always has done, at least as long as I’ve been here. Makes sense considering the audience.
There are certainly vocal and well spoken conservatives here, but by and large this site skews massively liberal. I mean just read this threads comments, ffs.
I'm always amazed by how many people consider it a failure of democracy for the candidate they voted for to lose.
The candidate who was just voted into power is a convicted felon awaiting sentencing and also awaiting 2(?) other criminal trials which are now probably going to just disappear. It's objectively a failure of democracy.
Are criminals not allowed to be elected?
They are, apparently, which is why it's a failure. He was also awaiting trial for interference in the previous election. The irony would be amusing if it weren't so seriously wrong.
I mean, he'd be ineligible to join the military, but can run it. He'd fail a security clearance, but can hand them out. Many states forbid felons from even voting.
"You can be president from a jail cell" is likely to be a "well that wouldn't happen" oversight on the Founding Fathers' plate, not an intentional design.
Convicted felons cannot legally run for office
No. The Constitution doesn't bar convicted felons from running for office. Perhaps it should but that would require an Amendment.
He was convicted of 34 felonies.
If people want him in, maybe those laws aren't great?
I'm no Trump fan, but I'd much sooner trust an election over a judge and jury to decide who should be in charge
It's not that she lost, it's that somebody who seems to oppose democracy won.
As a non-American, how does Donald Trump seem to oppose democracy?
That is the message continuously published here by generalist German newspapers, but I cannot find any substance behind it.
He has said all these things:
- the Constitution needs suspending
- he needs extrajudicial purges
- vote counting shall be stopped at a particular time. Officials in charge of the mechanics of democracy need to be pressured explicitly about this.
- the peaceful transition of power needs to be interrupted
- expectations held together by norms hold no value. The very tradition of democracy is optional.
It might be irrational to spend effort voting —engaging in democracy— to elevate someone so skeptical of it. And your newspaper and even in this thread people are extremely polite about those doing so.
- Media that criticizes him should lose their broadcast licenses (ABC, CBS) or shut down (Google).
- The Federal Reserve should do what he says rather than be independent.
- Military generals should be as obedient to him as German generals were to Hitler.
I'm also not American, but how can this not be obvious to you? Start with the January 6 coup attempt.
Here's a list, though: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/29/trump-dem...
Where's the chart? I can only see the first paragraph
Try this gift link to the article: https://wapo.st/3CeK2hk
https://archive.ph/fFirx
He generates doubt around the election result "if I lost, it is because of fraud" and provoked a group of people to attempt the overturn the previous election. Plus more subtle things like election rule changes that reduce democracy in the background.
I personally came to this opinion when he declared previous elections rigged without any evidence. The election institute and its fairness is a cornerstone myth of a democracy, you cannot destroy it without ruining the democracy. If the election institute is corrupted there is no way to have a legitimate president. You can have only tyrants and dictators after that. It means that you are not anti-democratic you can oppose the election institute only if you know it is corrupt. But Trump didn't know, I'm sure he knew that the elections were not rigged, and yet he attacked the elections.
I was not sure, because I had a hypothesis that Trump is just stupid and do not understand what he is doing. But before the current elections he talked a lot how he is going to abuse power to persecute political opponents, or just any opponents, if we believe his words, he is going to persecute everyone he doesn't like.
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That is exactly what I am doing, looking harder by asking people around.
Your attitude es not helpful.
You've been given multiple lists and have refused to engage with them. This doesn't sound like intellectual honesty.
You know that Hitler was literally voted into power, right?
I am NOT saying Trump is literally Hitler, but the idea that democratic vote can't have un-democratic outcome in the long run is simply false. It can, and history showed us that more then once
That's the problem with this statement: Trump is not Hitler and any hypothetical "undemocratic outcomes" aren't apparent in the extreme short term. He hasn't run on a platform of eliminating democracy and there isn't any indication at this point that he will.
I've not been as immersed in the presidential race, but hasn't he explicitly said he wants to be a dictator, this is the last vote you will need, we should stop so and so from voting and so on? Like, right out of his mouth? How is that not an undemocratic platform?
> he wants to be a dictator
The full quote was that he was going to be a dictator but only on the first day. It's probably one of the dumbest things he's ever said, but the fact that he put a limit on his own supposed dictatorship contradicts him being a dictator. At any rate, while I'm not a fan of what he said, he definitely did not preclude the continuation of American democracy even if interpreted in the most literal possible way.
> this is the last vote you will need
He said that you [the people at his rally] aren't going to need to vote anymore because hes going to accomplish all his goals this time. Not that there won't be a vote or that his supporters won't be allowed to vote. They definitely won't be allowed to vote for him since he'll be at up against the term limit.
> we should stop so and so from voting and so on
This one I've never even heard before outside of him claiming that his opponents want to let non citizens vote
I believe people who claim he will "end democracy" do not believe he will literally put an end to elections. Many places widely considered "undemocratic" also have elections.
> They definitely won't be allowed to vote for him since he'll be at up against the term limit.
I'm sure if Trump were younger and up against term limits, he (and his party) would simply ignore them or change the rules. That's the kind of democracy-ending actions that could easily happen. Lucky for us, I think he's too old for this particular problem.
Trump is not the end he is the means to an end. His party will absolutely change the rules just to take advantage of them in the future.
He ran on a platform that he won the 2020 election, and it was stolen.
How is that not anti-democratic?
If he and his supporters genuinely believe that, it's an extremely democratic position.
Remind me what its called when someone's geniune belief's don't align with reality?
You are going with the assumption that the election wasn't stolen. If you are correct then Trumo would be taking an anti-democratic position. If the people's will was genuinely to elect him and the election was actually stolen then he would be taking the democratic position.
He has literally said "Vote for me, and you'll never have to vote again."
That's out of context. He was trying to reach people who just don't vote in general, telling them they only needed to bother this one time and he'll fix their problems (costs, economy, etc) so well they can go back to not bothering to vote.
Yeah, they'll be so "fixed" nobody will have the ability to "unfix" them.
He absolutely said vote for me and you'll never have to vote again because we'll have it fixed. How is that not running on eliminating democracy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_...
This stuff was not merely spicy words, it was dangerous. Democracy runs on norms and good people, and is precious and hard won. Trump being in power is a risk.
He said many times very explicitly he will be a dictator on day one. We'll find out in a few months what the means exactly. I honestly don't know.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tells-christians-they...
What about when he said he wanted to be dictator so people wouldn’t have to vote anymore? And when he made himself above the law with MAGA court justices? Or talked about a firing squad for his opponents and opening fire on peaceful protestors? Or when he attempted a violent coup on the White House? Or when he praised Hitler and asked for generals like Hitlers that will do anything he says without question? Or when he praised Putin, Kim Jun Un, and other the dictators of the world?
“Except for day one”
> hasn't run on a platform of eliminating democracy
Didn't he literally say in his victory speech that he's now elected the 47th president, as he also was the 46th?
In the story Trump tells, he literally already is a third-term president.
He did not say that [1]. I can't decide whether people keep misrepresenting his statements intentionally, or there's some psychological process in play that prevents them from parsing his speech. He is a terrible communicator after all.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI9fbbQ-aTo&t=96s
He speaks backwards and from the inside out of sentences. Changes subject mid sentence. Etc.
I think normal people think that is OK but academics thinks it sounds stupid.
In the beginning I believe he got a boost from journalists feeling smart by nitpicking that to manufacture some "gotcha". He is way to easy to misquote to resist the temptation.
He literally tried to overthrow the election 4 years ago. I mean, he wasn't exactly being subtle about it!
But in the end he didn't end Democracy, he let the democratic procedures take place, a fascist wouldn't do that.
> He literally tried to overthrow the election 4 years ago
Not openly, the people who went to the white house weren't under Trumps command. He argued against the election result using the proper tools of the democracy, you are allowed to do that.
I'm not sure why worry now when we already know he handed over the power once. Maybe it wasn't willingly but he will be forced to step down in 4 years as well.
The call to Brad Raffensperger asking him to "find" votes has been public for years. I'm in disbelief that anyone could listen to that conversation and conclude it was anything but an attempt to steal the election.
Trying to cheat a few votes isn't more fascist than gerrymandering, it is corrupt but it isn't fascism.
If he had rigged the whole election I'd say it is fascism, but rigging a whole election is on such a different scale and planning and conspiracy level that it isn't the same thing, he didn't even try to rig the election. If he tried to rig it then it wouldn't be one such call, it would be hundreds with many accomplices.
Trump also made calls to officials in other swing states he lost attempting to change the result. They weren't as public and damning, but had several of them been successful after all was said and done, it would have rigged the whole election.
Trying to cheat a few votes
This is some pretty hardcore rationalization even by modern standards. Trying to "cheat a few (10s of thousands of votes so you win a swing state)" is called trying to steal an election.
but rigging a whole election is on such a different scale and planning and conspiracy level that it isn't the same thing, he didn't even try to rig the election.
He literally did from many different angles. Asking for changed vote counts, fake electors, 60 court cases with no evidence, planning violence to stop the certification of the election.
How do you square what you are saying with these facts?
> 60 court cases with no evidence
That's the one thing in the list I'm OK with. Determining whether a claim has legal merit and factual basis is what courts are for.
> he let the democratic procedures take place, a fascist wouldn't do that.
He did so because he had no other choice. Mike Pence, of all people, rescued democracy. If it hadn't been for him, Donald Trump would not accepted the transfer of power.
And this is what the difference boils down to. You and I both know that Trump would have declared himself the winner no matter what the vote count had been. And we also both know that Harris is going to concede to Trump because the vote count says so.
Luckily it isn't the presidential candidates who decides the winner, so it doesn't matter who Trump or Harris thinks the winner is.
True, but it still negates your claim that "He hasn't run on a platform of eliminating democracy".
>But in the end he didn't end Democracy, he let the democratic procedures take place, a fascist wouldn't do that.
Fascist wouldn't fail?
Again, You know Hitler literally tried a coup, failed and then switched to 'democratic' means?
> Again, You know Hitler literally tried a coup, failed and then switched to 'democratic' means?
Hitler never left the seat of power once he got it. Trump did. They are not the same. Hitler did a coup to try to get power, he failed at that, Trump already succeeded grabbing power (he got elected) and then left it.
Which he said he regrets doing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/us/politics/trump-pa-rall...
He didn’t or he couldn’t pull it off?
>You know that Hitler was literally voted into power, right?
He was not. This is a popular misconception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_rise_to_power
What do you call being the majority party, winning referendums, etc?
Certainly there is a lot of voter intimidation, control of the press, etc. behind it, but I think that's precisely what is being debated here.
>What do you call being the majority party, winning referendums, etc?
Nazi's were not the majority party when Hitler ran for president, they were the largest party, but not majority. They weren't even a majority even when Hitler was appointed (not voted) chancellor by Paul von Hindenburg, the man who won the presidential election. There were a few more steps before he acquired absolute power, but none of them involved voting. It's interesting, read the article.
Like I said, it's a common misconception.
Well the largest party (as per HN rules please "use the best form of the argument", no need to nitpick), and not by a small margin -- at least 10% over the 2nd largest. And you'll still argue he did not "win" elections?
(You could not "vote" a chancellor. In a lot of perfectly valid democracies, the PM position is always appointed, never directly voted, usually from the larger party or the at least the candidate most likely to pass a (constructive) motion of no confidence. So he was elected legally per the correct democratic process. Cleanly/Fairly -- that's another question. But would you really be surprised Hitler could win elections? He had pretty ridiculously good reputation in some circles. He would have likely polled pretty well even in the US.).
>And you'll still argue he did not "win" elections?
The Nazi party won elections, Hitler did not.
>>You know that Hitler was literally voted into power, right?
He was not. He lost the presidential election in 1932. He forcefully took the presidency after the Reichstag fire. He was appointed chancellor because the Nazi party won elections. He lost his. I can see where you think it is splitting hairs, but you specifically named Hitler and not the Nazi party. That might not have been what you meant to say, but it's what you said that I was refuting.
Also, Hindenburg didn't have to appoint Hitler, he could have chosen another from the Nazi party. He certainly didn't want to appoint Hitler, but some backroom negotiations that he wasn't a part of ultimately led to Hitler's appointment.
>So he was elected legally per the correct democratic process.
This is like saying the SCOTUS is elected because the President that appointed them was elected. They are not, they are appointed. Hitler himself never won an election.
FWIW, here are the 1932 election results:
This would be considered an absolute blowout. Please don't feel like I'm scolding you, I really enjoy historical conversations, so thanks for this one.People really don’t understand interwar period Germany, and helpfully pluck out a narrative that suits their interests today. Treaty of Versailles and “dolchstoss” myth included.
Thank you for sharing the truth. It’s worth understanding why Hindenburg chose Hitler as Chancellor, too. Hitler was popular, and seen as a useful force that might be controlled by the conservative elements of the German political system. It didn’t work out that way.
There’s no contemporary analogue to Hitler today in American politics. There’s no significant paramilitary force, for one. No true populist — in spite of trump’s rhetoric his policies don’t qualify.
Ironically, the closest to fitting the mold might be Vance? Somebody unelected, young, brokered his own access to power in exchange for political support (via Elon, Thiel).
> Ironically, the closest to fitting the mold might be Vance? Somebody unelected, young, brokered his own access to power in exchange for political support (via Elon, Thiel).
Kamala Harris fits just as well: She was so unpopular in 2020 she dropped out before the primaries, then got picked for Vice-President. Then because Biden was in office, she again didn't get votes in the primary this year but instead was selected by the DNC when Biden dropped out.
I think that the journey Hitler undertook in 1924 is actually more useful as a comparison to Trump's story... The media and courts and the incumbent's/MSM's expectations verses the reality of how that would land with the volk. A tangent from the parent but they did say they enjoy historical conversations :D
> I can see where you think it is splitting hairs, but you specifically named Hitler and not the Nazi party.
Yes, I do consider this is splitting hairs. First, yeah, I do not think explicitly making the separation between Hitler and the Nazi party makes any practical difference to the argument. Let me know if you can think of one.
Second, Hitler did get into power through democratic means -- definitely not the presidency, but he was made chancellor, which is, to the best of my knowledge, equivalent to a PM and therefore head of the executive. Don't move the goalpost and claim that "Hitler didn't get into power until he illegally made himself president", because he was into power before that; as much as you could within the limits of the constitution. They voted him into office and he was made chancellor through legal means. For the last 2/3 elections that can still be considered "somewhat" free, his party got the largest number of votes.
He won the elections, and legally speaking had every right to be put into power and made chancellor. Or at least to try until he was voted out by a no confidence or failing to pass laws. He had no right to become president, much less to become dictator.
> This is like saying the SCOTUS is elected because the President that appointed them was elected. They are not, they are appointed. Hitler himself never won an election.
In a lot of democratic countries, the PM-equivalent figure is NEVER directly elected. Would you call Italy, Spain, etc. non-democratic countries just because the PM is appointed by parliament instead of elected directly? The PM is the actual head of the government; the head of state (monarch/president) is a figurehead.
> FWIW, here are the 1932 election results:
_Presidential_ election. President is much less important than you think if you see this from a US-centric view, because the actual head of government is the chancellor! The secretaries/ministers are appointed from the majority parties in parliament, not arbitrarily by the president as in the US. This is still pretty common in many European democracies...
And in all parliament elections, Hitler's party won with a comfortable margin:
1932 July elections : Nazis 230 seats (out of 608) ; next party 133. Almost 2x distance. Hitler's coalition : 267 seats and 43% of vote. Won by simple majority.
1932 November elections (arguably last fair elections in Germany) Nazis 196 seats ; next party 120. In coalition: 247, 42% of vote. Simple majority.
1933 March (definitely last free elections in Germany): Nazis 288 seats; next party 120. Coalition: 340, ~52%, absolute majority .
There's no other way to put this, even if you ignore 1933 results: the Nazis _and Hitler_ were put into power by the (simple) majority of the population. If they had lost even in % of votes to a second party, or something to the effect, then I would also argue that voters didn't put Hitler into power. But as it is...
And you can't really argue that someone could be voting for the Nazis (or coalition parties) without knowing you'd be voting for Hitler, considering how personalistic they were by 1932.
> Please don't feel like I'm scolding you, I really enjoy historical conversations, so thanks for this one.
This has been discussed ad-nauseum, even on wikipedia...
Disclaimer: I already mentioned that results of an election when there is literal vote coercion going on (intimidation, control of the press, etc.) cannot be considered fair. This doesn't negate the fact that he did win elections, and therefore this is still a valid lesson for generations to come.
Are you attributing the US Democrat Party to be the progenitors of democracy?
It's probably not that, but (separately) both the Democratic Party and democracy for the same reason: if Republicans successfully engineer (what's effectively) a one-party state.
Regardless if the dems still exist in name or not, both them and democracy are done.
Highly unlikely. The next Governor of my state is likely that person who stood up to Trumps fraudulent voting claims. We will see if the Democrats can find a decent candidate but I doubt it. They used the same person twice with the same results.
If the democrats were interested in winning they would have had a few options this election. The party seems to have other priorities that they always prioritize over winning though, and that hasn't worked out well for them.
They were interested in winning and I think they made decent moves. Dumping Biden amounted to huge increases in their win probability. A stronger candidate could have bolstered that further but Harris ran a decent campaign. The broader state of the economy and border put them on the back foot so I think they would have struggled with most candidates. Perhaps an outsider similar to Bernie’s 2016 campaign would have had the best shot.
If they really wanted to win they never would have had Biden on the ticket. At a minimum they would have allowed a primary rather then forcing RFK out of the party and keeping any other potentials off the stage.
In my opinion Biden was clearly slipping 18-24 months ago. But even if that's wrong, the best way to show the country Biden was fit for another term and energize the party would have been putting him on stage to debate with other democratic leaders.
I don't personally think she ran a decent campaign. It was very standard and bland talk of unity and other hot air -just the stuff you expect politicians to say when trying to get elected, nothing to really build trust in her. She needed to make Trump look dumb, dishonest and inept by comparison. Talking to voters as if they're smarter might have helped, but I don't really know.
This is all because of Reagan. Removal of the fairness doctrine and lowering of the highest tax rate from 70% to 50% to 28%. Now, we live in an oligarchy full stop. All the "free press" is owned by billionaires who crave tax cuts and election ad money more than "truth". (Look at the LATimes and WaPost refusing to endorse a candidate at the sole direction of their owner.) The oligarchs soon realized that you don't have to buy the country, just 10 people to control 2 of the branches of government. We really need to move the Supreme Court to 13 that are elected by popular vote in the 13 districts. We elect the heads of the other 2 branches of government, why not the judiciary?
The greatest trick the rich ever pulled was convincing the middle class that poor people are the cause of all the problems in their life.
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Someone democratically elected can still end democratic processes.
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But it isn't wrong, is it? Democracy elected Hitler, Hitler ended democracy in Germany. I'm not saying that is going to happen here, but your flippant comeback to a valid point is not a rebuttal.
This guy isn’t interested in having a real conversation with you btw
You could try better arguments?
I wasn’t even talking with you, just observing your comments with others
I wish people didn't use the Hitler comparison because it always derails discussion (almost everyone is better than Hitler, even Trump). There are however enough other cases throughout history of people being elected and then becoming dictators.
Interesting point.
Actually there are more interesting parallels to be found between Trump and Mussolini:
- Both displayed arrogant ignorance and avoided in-depth conversations
- Shared a tendency to appear knowledgeable rather than actually being knowledgeable
- Demonstrated hostility toward the press
- Appointed family members to high government positions
- Exhibiting thin-skinned reactions to criticism
- Showing contempt for experts and professionals
- Took credit for successes while blaming others for failures
- Working with existing nationalist movements
- Attacking democratic institutions as "enemies of the people"
But I don't think that would not derail the discussion. Pretty much any comparison with a dictator leads to painful discussion.
The question is, how would it even be possible to address this in a constructive way. I honestly don't know.
> But I don't think that would not derail the discussion. Pretty much any comparison with a dictator leads to painful discussion.
Yes, but when the dictator is also someone who orchestrated the holocaust, the discussion becomes all about how Trump doesn't literally hate Jews etc.
It is the exact right comparison though. Conservatives failed to maintain power on their ideals. The weak party clings to power, and propels a populist into power. He scapegoats immigrants, and liberal ideas for the general malaise. The only saving grace is that he is old, and not genocidal.
People wouldn't be as familiar with the outcome if we were to discuss those other dictators. I'm certainly unaware of their parallels.
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Guy said he'd be dictator on day one and that sometimes it's okay to suspend the constitution. Some of us are concerned about what things he said might be true.
Fact check: False.
It was clearly a joke, as in taking the first day of office to clean up the perceived mistakes of his predecessor. Do you know any dictators who only planned to rule for one day?
And also, are you still confused why Americans wholeheartedly rejected this BS?
How are you so confident that it is a joke? I'm not that confused about why people give him a pass on stuff like this, but that doesn't mean I like it.
"When people tell you who they are, believe them."
Huh?? But how is he wrong?
Edited: nevermind.
Read about Godwin's Law here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodwinsLaw
In a nutshell, you automatically lose any argument if you have to invoke Hitler or the Nazis.
seems like liberals collectively forgot about it
how you know there's not going to be a pandemic
I meant that the pandemic was something that did change things and wasnt "more or less the same". But that has little to do with Trump.
Yeah, that's the problem.
Last time we had the fake electors scheme, which was stopped due to someone having integrity.
How that Pence is gone, and Vance - who still claims the last election was stolen - what's going to stop round two, come 2028?
Have people been sleepwalking the past years?
Why are you so sure there will be no pandemic this time? I think mismanagement of Trump's CDC was a big contributing factor to the last one. Compare, e.g. how Obama's CDC successfully fought ebola.
You don't think the democratic state Governors will step up if there's even a hint of that happening?
In the end a lot of the money and power is mostly in blue states.
I think you'll see a huge clawing back of power to the Federal government. Just around the things where they want to stick it to blue states.
Definitely. This will involve a tariff regime explicitly disadvantaging the ports in coastal blue states. Certain bureaucratic centers will be moved, the kinds of things a real estate developer can follow in a short meeting.
The side effects of this will both hurt his base, and offer opportunities for smart people. For example, careless tariffs can raise the cost of everything at Walmart by 60% with Amazon not far behind. You know this and I know this.
Tariffs also demonstrate to domestic companies that they don’t need to innovate. The material and labor to innovate will be cheaper overseas. You know this and I know this.
Governors can be killed by executive order. It’s an official action so under the new Supreme Court ruling the President can’t be prosecuted. Anyone who carries out the order can be pardoned. The courts can of course reverse the executive order, but not resurrect a man so the case would be moot.
This is a man who has talked about shooting political opponents on the campaign trail, I’d be astonished if he doesn’t follow through if there will be no consequences.
Governors can be killed by executive order
This is a bald faced lie. Stop talking rubbish.
Can you explain why? It seems like that is exactly what was implied by the recent SC judgement.
The sequence of event presented by the poster you are responding to is indeed a joke in 2024. Can you however not see a future where it becomes a practical possibility?
When the liberals on the Supreme Court say this:
> Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting). The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Then the claim that the President can in their official capacity assassinate others with impunity and protection from prosecution is no lie.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
You're living in a pre-Trump world. The Supreme Court changed the rules while you were asleep.
That money and power doesn’t seem to be willing to move towards centrists policies. And there is a lot of power in the president, considering how unstable the world is the most likely scenario now is further consolidation of that power. And Russia or Israel are good examples, if anyone wants to see what happens after the power gets consolidated.
I see this claim often but (from my position as an outsider, not American) it doesn't look very plausible: Trump was already president once and that didn't happen, why would it happen now?
It did begin then. The Supreme Court of the US is since then conservative and will now probably remain so for many years to come.
Further, he needed the second term then, so he couldn't go all crazy as he needed the people to vote for him once more. Now he doesn't have that limitation any more.
The SC being conservative is the result of a democratic process, not a threat to it.
If Trump wanted to be dictator, why didn't he just do all that stuff in his first term and not worry about reelection in 2020?
Things take time. Erosion of trust and the creation of political apathy in the populace takes time. Also, as has been said, he did try things but was continuously pushed back on by the actual politicians he put in his cabinet. He's also 8 years more elderly and emboldened. His cult of personality has essentially stabilized into an American institution. He's also had an entire administration to place judges and pass legislation that favors his power plays. In general it seems like you're asking, why might it take more than 4 years to topple a democracy, which i think has an obvious answer, democracy doesn't want to be toppled.
Again, I'm not arguing he's gonna go full dictator, but i think it's a lot more likely this time around than last time.
Trump has stated that his biggest regret from his term is that the people he appointed to various positions, while quite competent and/or experienced, would push back on ideas or plans he proposed. In other words, they weren't loyal.
The difference between this term and his previous is going to be a much stronger focus on making any position he can appoint be one that doesn't tell him no. And it looks like many of the positions he can't (the senate and likely the house) are going that way too. That, to me, makes him represent a meaningfully larger threat to the balance of power in the US than his previous term.
Because Trump selected career Republicans who still followed the Constitution and law for his cabinet.
This time around: 1. He allowed an insurrection and was voted in anyway, so his extremist followers are emboldened. 2. He surrounded himself with yes-men.
He's significantly more unhinged than he was 4 years ago, and even more obsessed with personal loyalty than he was before.
And in general this sort of thing doesn't happen overnight; there's a process to things. It's like the old quip on how someone becomes bankrupt: "very gradually, and then suddenly all at once".
I don't know what will happen, but it's a dangerous path to walk. Maybe the next four years will be sort-of okay-ish, but what about the state of things in 10 or 20 years?
In large part, democracies work because we all believe it should work, and once that belief goes out the window for a critical mass of people then you're playing with fire.
The GOP in general has been engaged in scorched earth politics since Obama: all that matters is a win today and doesn't matter what conventions or institutions get damaged in the process. A healthy democracy would have disqualified Trump from running again in 2020. It would not play highly nihilistic power games with the supreme court. etc. etc.
It's absolutely not a healthy state of affairs.
When Trump took power in 2016 there wasn't much of a plan because nobody expected it. Today Trump's backers have Project 2025 ready which has a specific plan to replace anyone who might be able to slow things down in the civil service, armed forces, justice department, etc... Not to mention the immunity doctrine that the administration now has from its handpicked supreme court.
In theory there are things Biden could still do right now to help preserve these institutions but I doesn't look like he will, or even like he has the mental capacity and empathy to be motivated to do so.
> game over for Democrats and democracy in the US
So voting is the end of democracy? Interesting take
Because no dictators are voted into power? Hitler, Mussolini, Mugabe, Chavez...
“Not worried about Trumpism” is a near-100% accurate indicator of extreme ignorance of authoritarian regimes and of the American political system, unfortunately.
> near-100% accurate indicator of extreme ignorance of authoritarian regimes
extreme ignorance of authoritarian regime is particularly visible among people who think that things happen like in movies with singular figures like Darth Vader showing up and suddenly grabbing power out of some kind of ether.
Which isn’t and wasn’t ever the concern with Trump.
SO everytime someone is voted in, the idea is to panic? Especially when the guy was already in the office 4 years ago and was not Hitler?
No, only if they tried a coup, filled his cabinet with yes-men, and have a following full of neo-nazis. Then you should be concerned.
If this is somehow the end of democracy here, it wasn't Trump's election that killed it. One election alone (or two if you believe both terms were the cause) couldn't likely kill an otherwise healthy democracy. Democracy would have been dead for my of my lifetime if this is the moment it becomes clear that its gone.
That said, I very much dislike Trump and would rather have an empty oval office (arguably we have that already), but I think his threat to democracy has been wildly overblown. Unless a rogue president throws out the book entirely, Congress would have to be the ones to actually get rid of most of our democratic processes and systems.
I'd point back to at least 2000 and the Supreme Court stopping the count in Florida, but maybe back to when we sabotaged the Iran hostage deal so Carter couldn't have a win
Sure, both are good examples of democracy being attacked. More broadly, I'd point to all the lies the public is fed to "nudge" us in whatever direction the political parties and lobbyists want. Its not much of a democracy if voters are asked to vote based on massive piles of bad information.
The second you have a president willing to mobilize the most advanced military in the history of the world against its own populace there's no chance of realistically resisting.
When Martin L. King was murdered there were thousands of soldiers sent to the DC. I would say that movement was rather succesfull anyways.
I have absolutely no expectation that Trump will actually order the military on the US populace, but even if he tried it matters whether the military would follow such an order. It could always happen, that's part of the reason I wish our federal government was drastically reduced and our standing military disbanded, but I simply can't think so little of our troops that they would actually do it.
That said, if somehow that did happen one day I fully expect to die by their gun. At that point that army becomes an invading force and I'd feel like I have no choice but to fight.
I really hope you are right about that. I worry because I listened to what he said...and he said he wants to use the military against the "enemy from within, and named specific political opponents and mentioned media figures.
I tend to believe him when he says that's what he wants to do. But you are right, one would hope the military would refuse such an unconstitutional order.
You mean like Abe Lincoln?
Didn't the DNC kill democracy in the US all the way back in 2016?
No, way back in 2000, the Supreme Court prevented a recount of votes in Florida.
In theory, I agree with you. In practice, however, they've lost elections before, and it's never really affected their policies. They move ever more right, regardless of what happens. The border wall used to be bad, and now it's something they actively pursue. Universal health care used to be a thing they'd at least mention (and it's still a very popular position to take), and these days? Not a peep.
Their strategy, at least the past three cycles, has been "I offer you nothing, but do you really want to vote for the other side?" And I don't see that changing.
You’ll get downvoted by women because "I offer you nothing,” is strikingly untrue about abortion.
We've had four years of a democratic regime. What have they done for abortion?
To clarify: I think this is an important issue, but I think the past four years demonstrates that the promises democrats make regarding protection of abortion rights are empty ones. The capability to do something is demonstrably there (look at Trump, he got Roe v Wade overturned, which is huge, and it's not like he has more power than a democrat president), the will to wield this capability is not.
They vetoed all 0/0 national abortion bans that reached the Oval Office.
Ok, I'm not super sure what point you're trying to make. I think the claim you're trying to make is that the democratic party has something on offer regarding abortion. We're on the back end of a four year democratic presidency. There's logically two possibilities regarding abortion:
- there's something on offer now that Biden wasn't offering four years ago
- Harris' offer is the same as what Biden was offering four years ago
That's a mathematical fact.
In the first case, my question is "what is it?" Personally, I haven't seen anything in the messaging of Biden and Harris' respective campaigns to indicate there is a difference between them on this front, but I could've missed something, and I'm glad to be corrected.
In the second case, we have a means of seeing what this offer actually means in terms of actions and policies. And judging by the accomplishments of the Biden regime on this front, that's basically nothing. Effectively, nothing is on offer on the abortion front.
Listen, the Presidents signature on a national abortion ban won’t be a Democrat. You’re extrapolating a political strategy when it’s simply: don’t sign a bill that makes menstrual tracking a responsibility of the United States Government.
Listen, when we look back at the achievements of presidents, we don't talk about the things they didn't do. We don't praise Ronald Reagan for _not_ signing a bill that reinstates slavery. We don't praise Carter for _not_ starting a war with Denmark. When I apply for a job, I don't tell my interviewer I won't shit on their desk, I tell them about the stuff I can do for their business. Saying you won't do something is not making an offer.
The dems started this when they black balled Bernie in 2016. They were too focused on their own self interest and they are going to reap what they sowed long into the future now.
> I don't think the policy positions even matter that much, if you can make a strong case and gain the confidence of the electorate.
If this were true it would mean Americans are dumb as rock and don't really care about "boring", technocratic but important decisions like climate change, geopolitical alliances, etc. - and just want a showman to dazzle their softened brains.
This is obviously true and has been for decades. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death from 01985 makes the case fairly strongly, but probably even stronger evidence is that the US apparently just elected as president a Twitter troll and reality-show TV host who doesn't know how to capitalize English and signed bills with a Sharpie in his previous presidential term.
So... dumb as rock it is then?
Yes, I said that was obvious. Postman makes an excellent case that that's what happens when you reduce public discourse to entertainment.
Don't get complacent; the process producing European leaders like Putin, Zelenskyy, Orban, Meloni, and Erdoǧan is no better, nor other American leaders like Lula or Maduro, nor Modi. And, although Xi's path to power doesn't depend on how relatable his stories are about how he had difficulty climbing into a garbage truck, that process is flawed in other ways that are likely worse.
> just want a showman to dazzle their softened brains
Nietzsche made this case really strongly in his chapter/essay “The Flies in the Marketplace” back in the 1880s, and pretty well predicted how this would emerge play out half a century later in Germany. “ Full of clattering buffoons is the market-place,—and the people glory in their great men! These are for them the masters of the hour.”
Yeah. Exactly.
Also the left's constant political games of trying to do everything and anything to put him in jail and etc the public grew tired of.. ignored unless you were on the their side. They tried so many things impeachment, pee pee tape, this trail, that trail.. nothing worked and probably helped him in the end. As well the economy yet as independent I voted for whom I've done better under financially and it just happens to be under the 46th so that's how I voted. But didn't care either way as a part of me wanted to vote for the 47th due my republican family legacy and the very distant hope home interest rates go down to 3 to 5 percent which I know that's a distant hope. But either way I'd been happy with the first woman or with the 47th as I too grew tired of the crap they threw on him, he survived an assassin and his no tax on tips, overtime or social security will help those in need. Get rid of income tax altogether sounds interesting yet crazy via the crazy comedian off hinged man who will surely say things people will incessantly talk about.
The reason why our courts, which are historically apolitical, tried to convict him is because he committed a nearly uncountable number of crimes. And he broke even more norms.
Our biggest failure as a nation was not convicting him sooner and more decisively.
Political gaming is done by the left and the right ..the majority spoken they are tired of it. Fake news is real and it's rampant from all sides and everywhere used for political to economical advantage (startups do it all the time like OpenAI demoing & promising a H.E.R. Like product but it's nowhere to be found ..was that all a fake demo?). My point is people are tired of all that ..I surely am.. I want truth reality I do not want an internet filled with AI fake crap nor do I want to hear about another Donald Trump impeachment case... give me truth reality yet will there ever be such when lying and making up crap at times behooves the parties doing so. Yet as we see here in this instance same fake playbook against him the majority had enough.
You say The courts are not apolitical as a left leaning you sound you surely have said the Supreme Court is right focused have you not?
People who commit crimes should be prosecuted for them. That is not a political statement.
The political choice was allowing someone to avoid prosecution pending the results of an election.
But I have some optimism that prosecutors and courts will be less willing to allow this in the future. Prosecutors need to bring cases sooner, and courts need to move more quickly, to avoid this kind of bad outcome in the future. Lesson learned.
>I don't think the policy positions even matter that much
I disagree hard. You should have a strong policy that people can believe in. When the average person sees that the price of certain groceries are 3x what they used to be, they stop caring about petty personal attacks.
I agree that the price of groceries probably decided the election. But I don't see how Trump had any "strong policy that people can believe in". There was just anti-status-quo amongst the 10% of votes that are up-for-grabs at this point.
I agree but the point is: democracy mandates all candidates strenuously pursue the 5% in 7 states. The Republican Party has a better model of their psyche. I think you and I agree it’s a cynical model, but the Democratic Party doesn’t get results with theirs.
The Democratic Party can't win with those tactics anyways. If it imitates the Republicans more and more, everyone will just slide further right. It should've taken a different stance and hard-lined on it. Trying to appeal to voters within the existing, rigged game is a nice show of bravado but not going to get results.
Yet the success of Republicans is that it’s easier to convince stupid people than it is to convince smart people. I’m open to other theories of tactics, if you want to elaborate.
This seems like you're agreeing that policies don't matter? Trump's policies are actively hostile to decreasing grocery prices.
I think what you're saying here is that neither policies nor personalities matter as much as outcomes. And yep, that seems right.
And Trump owns those outcomes now for the next few years, for better or worse.
How are Democrats to blame for inflation caused by Trump-era COVID entitlements funded by money printing? Sure some of it continued for months into the Biden administration but the bulk of it happened under Trump.
Why didn't they focus on that? I think the average person would care a lot more about that fact than Trump being convicted on 34 counts of not properly filing business records. Since inflation actually affects them. Yet the convictions took up no shortage of airtime in attack ads.
I think this part changes the context: 34 counts of not properly filing business records in order to hide the fact that he paid a porn star to keep quiet about their affair in order to hide this information from voters before an election…
But it seems nobody cared anyways, he didn’t need to hide it
Quibble on the numbers, not on the basic statement. I'm not sure that campaign promises such as suspending the Constitution, jailing political opponents, etc., really are only 0.1% worse than continuing the Republic as it has operated for nearly 250 years. Looking back a few years from now, we may find a delta of 0.2%, 0.5%, or possibly even more.
> continuing the Republic
We're a democracy.
"A republic, based on the Latin phrase res publica ('public affair'), is a state in which political power rests with the public through their representatives—in contrast to a monarchy." - Wikipedia
sigh. we are a democracy.
We have until Jan 20 to argue which word was more accurate.
This time the Americans could choose between two completely different types of personalities for their President.
- A quite smart and kind Woman who believes in demcratic values
- An extremely selfish, through and through corrupt and unbelievably stupid bully with a clear agenda to end the Democracy
The chose. That's all. Nothing to see here.
> The Democrats should have fielded a strong personality in their own right.
I think Biden's decision to run for a second term was what sunk them. That was a selfish decision. He then bowed out too late, and Democrats had to scramble and nominate the only viable alternative. Biden should have refrained from running last year in order to give the Democrats a full primary to choose a candidate.
Agreed. I thought it seemed obvious back in 2020 that we'd see a candidate flip for this election, but no one in the Dem's leadership saw this coming? If they'd been positioning Harris and laying groundwork for the last four years this would have been an easy win for them.
Or perhaps if they had used democratic practices and let the constituents of their party actually vote to choose who they thought was best suited.
Biden pulling out so close to election didn’t let them actually go through their process to elect their nominee. It’s quite possible democrats would have chosen a candidate who was not associated with Biden and thus more electable.
>I think Biden's decision to run for a second term was what sunk them.
They didn't have anybody else they could think of who was more electable. They had squandered years when they should have groomed flashier personalities having more substance than Trump.
The only reason Trump got in to begin with is the Republicans had squandered their own years, and by the time 2024 came around neither party had anyone to offer who wasn't a bit more elderly than average.
I would have liked to see Biden pick Haley as his running mate, and if that didn't work, then resign and make Harris president right there at the primary.
I think Biden is going to go down as the person that broke the democratic party. But in reality, the blame lies on Obama for convincing Biden to step aside in 2016 and let it be Hillary Clinton. Biden had a much better chance at beating Trump in 2016 than Clinton.
I see what you're saying, but I put that on Hilary. How much dirt must she have had on everyone else such that that the party establishment treated her candidacy as Manifest Destiny and the best democrat unafraid to run against her was socialist grandpa from Vermont who wasn't even a democrat?
People were praising Biden for stepping aside, but he only stepped aside once he was forced. Had he made this decision earlier, the Democratic Party would have had the time to do a proper primary.
> would have had the time to do a proper primary.
But then they wouldn't have been able to try and transfer his incumbency bonus as easily.
Yeah he RBG’d American real hard. Not only the late drop out after the primary, but also he put in D- effort into selling his work during his term. I think he did many decent things, but sold them like a wet sock.
lack of good messaging around the economic policies was also a big factor during Harris campaign. They could have attacked Trump on tariffs but mostly gave him a pass. Also mostly gave him a pass on not debating. Was puzzling.
> I think Biden's decision to run for a second term was what sunk them
You think?
> Democrats had to
Oh? Oh— They had to.
> the only viable alternative
K.
> I don't think the policy positions even matter that much,
Right. The misogynists won. There are simply too many people in this country who don't want a woman President.
Probably not a good message to circumvent the democratic process and skip the primary either
If you think there is a 0.1% difference between the parties, that is because there is that much difference in the issues you care about.
I think the Democrats were claiming to be more like 75% less bad, but other than that your point stands.
I can't agree this only shows the game theory sometimes fails because despite almost all the advantage to select one version of a thing vs another, often an group or individual will go against their own best interests because of pure emotion. When an option is a little bit better than the previous version of itself and the other option is complete failure of the system with the system destroying itself (democracy) then the winning group loses along with the "losing" group.
Bernie Sanders is that strong personality, but he got shunned from becoming a candidate because he's too opinionated. It feels like the democrats push for a centrist candidate because anything more progressive/liberal/left will scare off the moderates. But the dems have so little to work with.
I think it would have been better if they didn't hide Biden's mental deterioration and let the primary process pick out a better candidate. There isn't a single county that she outperformed Biden from 2020.
I think the policy positions do matter though... The Democrats were pro labor before Clinton helped to pass NAFTA. Limbaugh would even mock Democrat voters who thought Bill would "find you a job". There's no illusion of that anymore. There's just people dropping out of the workforce and the unemployment numbers being fudged to make it look like everything is fine.
Neither party responded to this until Trump came around. Meanwhile, the Democrats also seemingly gave up on the whole social safety net argument as well. Obama at least ran on helping people but, well, I don't see that anymore. While I agree that their messaging has failed, I ultimately think they've failed to provide any substance to their argument.
I think it's pretty much undeniable this will only push the dems further right.
"I don't think the policy positions even matter that much, if you can make a strong case and gain the confidence of the electorate."
That's pretty sad state of the system. Policy positions should be the primary thing voters care about.
"It's about mobilizing people by giving them something to care about."
Yeah, but this is how you get the most extreme candidates. Look at the primaries. They have very small numbers of voters, and the voters in just a few states set the tone for those elections due to timing. You can make a huge difference by mobilizing voters with increasingly extreme positions or rhetoric. As you said, status quo doesn't energize. That means the people are less likely to get involved fir the staus quo unless they have a strong sense of duty about voting.
From a game theory perspective, Trump is like a 2/2 MTG card that deals 10 damage to yourself when played.
Trump, personally, will not do much to contribute to the Republican cause. Trump's contributions will mostly be saying dumb things that get his opposition riled up and energized to vote against him next time. He's also going to be a very old sundowning president--it's Republican's turn to defend that.
In other countries we have this thing called civic duty. Do try it sometime.
Yep. The most interesting phenomena in all most all electoral history is the Obama-Obama-Trump-Trump-Trump voters (those that voted Obama twice, then Trump thrice). It is probably 1-2% of the electorate but probably 5-10% in most swing states.
Democrats should study those people very very intensely and understand how they lost them. It was exceptionally radical to vote for Obama in 2008, people were calling him a cupboard muslim and terrorist sympathiser. They really believed he will deliver change and create a decisive break with neoliberal policy (both domestic and foreign), it is quite amazing that exactly these voters would vote 3 times for Trump after that.
Yet apart from Obamacare Obama delivered basically zero change in foreign or domestic policy. You simply can't take voters who went out of their way to vote for you for granted in this way and expect there won't be a backlash.
Hm that's kind of interesting, what's your source for this phenomenon?
It sounds plausible, but I haven't seen anyone discuss it
It is well known phenomena:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama%E2%80%93Trump_voters
although anecdotally most people know people personally that voted Obama then Trump. Obama was very much a populist outsider in his original campaign, he even pioneered devious social media ad targeting.
> It was exceptionally radical to vote for Obama in 2008
What are you talking about? He got 68% of the electors; 53% of the population voted for him. That’s not radical: that’s mainstream.
Yes exactly I meant for some people it was very radical to vote for him despite the aggressive McCain/Palin campaign that was painting him as a black foreigner cupboard muslim with a strange un-american name. Imagine those white, MAGA ultra-anti-woke Trump supporters. Some of these voted for Obama twice there is a whole wikipedia page about it. They would be like a feminist Ivy League literature professor voting for Trump now, relative to her demographic it is very radical.
The fact that Obama won so much of electorate implies that there were quite a lot of people who radically went against their usual political leaning. Those voters gave him the benefit of the doubt that he would shake the system.
Democrats lost the enthusiasm once they sidelined Bernie Sanders for Hillary Clinton at that time they had a similar fire among it's voters. I feel they lost a lot of young male voters at that time and they are still paying for it
Yes. At that point many people saw the corruption of the democratic party.
That "enough of the damn emails" moment from Bernie Sanders during the democratic debate was very weird to say the least. It seemed he wasnt interested at all at moving forward with the nomination.
Nah.. as the old saying goes: "It's the economy, stupid."
Trump wasn't elected, the bad inflationary economy created by monetary shenanigans elected Trump.
You realize though that Trump’s policy plan is more inflationary than Kamala’s right?
They nominated one of the most progressive senators to ever serve, promised huge changes to Medicaid and home buying assistance, protecting abortion access, and legalized marijuana. Oh, and “believes in democracy”. That’s a lot, lot more than “1% better”
> The Democrats should have fielded a strong personality in their own right.
Wonder if keeping Biden have been better. He got 80M+ popular votes, after all! Why swap him out? I guess Harris was seen as Biden++, already working for Biden admin and younger, so naturally she would get 90M+ popular votes or something.
> From a game theoretical perspective this is a good result. It is a clear reiteration of the message to the Democrats: you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad.
Yeah, I said as much on a reddit comment prior to knowing the results: This is a good thing for the future of the Dems! They can now take this valuable feedback and put together a better platform to run on in future races.
Running on social activism isn't a winning strategy, no matter how loud that vocal minority is shouting.
This has happened before... I don't expect Dems to ever really learn this lesson
Why would they? The party in its current form exists as a reactionary pressure release valve for after the actual party of action deconstructs the roadblocks that keeps the money controlling both parties from self-replicating.
What kind of political landscape will democrats come back to in 2028? Doesn’t project 2025 aim to dismantle a lot of the current establishment?
> Doesn’t project 2025 aim to dismantle a lot of the current establishment?
Didn't the Reps distance themselves from that? Vocally and repeatedly?
You may think that that playbook is their playbook, but apparently their distancing themselves from it worked well enough.
Project 2025 is basically QAnon for the Democrats
Project 2025 is not an actual policy of anyone with power.
I saw so many ads by Harris complaining about it, and that's part of how I knew she would lose: when you fight against something that isn't real, you're going to lose.
Trump and Vance will almost certainly pull strings to erode the current political system in Washington with no regard for the spirit and likely even the letter of the constitution.
Did Harris run on social activism? I didn’t get that from the campaign’s messaging. Not Biden’s, either.
I believe social activism has been associated with the Democratic Party recently, I suppose it is implied when you run under their umbrella.
It’s rather tricky to fight this perception when it doesn’t primarily come from either one’s messaging or one’s actions.
Not tricky at all: any politician can distance themselves from some fringe group of vocal nutjobs.
Even Trump has done so on occasion, like with the project 2025 conspiracy theory.
Indeed, just denying it while having a ton of actual close ties to it worked in that case.
Or, his voters didn’t care in the first place so the blow was never really gonna land (I suspect this is more like it)
It’s clearly the perception. Before Harris entered the race.
It doesn't need to specifically be Harris or Biden's policies to drag them down. There's very obviously a backlash against some progressive ideology going on, and the democratic party is clearly at least partly beholden to adherents of that ideology. That's why Harris can't give obvious and clear answers to (some) simple policy questions.
Yes, but the claim was they ran on that. Fixing the problem (if it is a problem) is a lot easier, and the necessary approach to fix it very different, if you ran on something and it backfired, compared with not running on it and still losing votes over it.
[edit] I also truly wondered if that’d been a significant part of their message, and I missed it—in the age of granular ad-targeting, who knows?
> you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad.
Please.
Dem here, Harris needed to deliver her first speech and separate from Biden on policy...i.e. knockout punch....
Any less was always a crap shot....
This speaks to relationship between Bidden, Harris and the Dem elites...in that where no alternate leadership can rise...
I sincerely fear this will inject way too much inertia in wrong directions globally even if it sends a clear message to non right wing crowds.
I've often found this is a mistake WAY too many people make. A successful team has a failure. Often, the reaction is restructuring, big changes, ...
I try to tell people that. "You're a 10 person team. You've had some 50 successful projects before this failure. That means this justifies at most a 2% change. A 2% change in the team is about half a day change, once per month, NOT more than that".
Invariably, the whole team is changed entirely, randomly, or going with the political winds, usually with much worse quality as a result. And afterwards they do see it didn't work.
And then they respond differently: they'll no longer admit failure, because they do see that the changes were a disaster, but you apparently fix that by refusing to admit anything ever goes wrong ...
I'm different. I think every project is a failure, it's just a matter of degree. You don't succeed in projects, you minimize how bad they are. Drives people up the wall though.
this is not a team project, it's a whole planet at stake here
i can focus on 5% improvement per year, but if the head of states ruin things at 20% during the same time i'll be dead in a few
This is a terrible take. Everyone wants to believe that this result will vindicate their pet peeve about the Democrats.
A lot of people want this loss to prove that Democrats should have been stronger on Gaza.
A lot of people want this loss to prove that Democrats should have rejected identity politics.
And there's a long tail of other things that people think a Democratic loss will push the Democrats towards: protectionism, isolationism, socialism, etc.
The Democrats are going to lick their wounds, crunch the numbers, and probably move towards Trump on economics. Or something else. 95% of people who are hoping that the Democrats are going to suddenly see the light on their pet issue are going to be disappointed. They aren't going to go hard left on Gaza. They aren't going to go hard right on identity politics. The loss is going to cause a whole bunch of damage, and we're going to get very little if any long-term benefit to weigh against it.
Other way around on Gaza. The US should have done more to help its ally.
The fact that Houthis have shut down shipping, and the US hasn't stopped them is absolutely shameful.
And by helping its ally more, the war would have ended quicker leaning to overall less death. Which is why a majority of Muslims actually voted for Trump.
I know this would only happen in an alternate universe, but they should be able to come out and say "ya know, we got it wrong" on certain issues, such as immigration. They will face a bit of immediate shame from pundits, but gain in the long term by removing that point of contention from the conservatives. Thus opening up a share of their voters.
To be fair to Republicans, they could say "ya know, we do believe human civilization has caused climate change and there is a government role to address it. We just disagree on the terms and mechanism for how that should work"
Most mainstream media being owned by right-wing billionaires manufacturing what is actually (mis)informing the public of Trump's decline, combined with other people only getting their "news" from randos on TikTok or podcasts, and just the general decline in critical thinking taught at schools (and lack of reading)... I don't know what can be done with these disparate realities.
I don't put blame on Harris' campaign, since it actually did discuss and put out policies to help people beyond just calling Trump a fascist and evil. That you think (or at least say you think) they didn't shows how badly their message wasn't conveyed BY the media that are the only people that can convey it.
If the local news owned by Sinclair is your station and it says only right-wing talking points, if two newspapers can have their endorsements scuttled by their billionaire owners, if podcasters like Joe Rogan can pass along Russian misinformation and facebook memes as truth, how can the Harris campaign get through to people?
But was the campaign actually passed down to voters? and did those voters willingly seek it out, since it will not be presented to them in their chosen bubbles? The entire system of billionaires blatantly criming in an election without repercussions and the media manufacturing consent silenced any chance of fair representation of what is happening and who is at fault. Like inflation being a consequence of Trump's policies and not Biden's due to inflation's inherent time lag that most people never learn about
From a game theoretical perspective the Democrat establishment is fine with this since they all support Trump anyway. They'd rather not be in power but have their policies represented in the President, than have the president but have him not do what they really want.
This is an extremely bizarre take. People just re-elected someone who tried to overthrow the government and is a complete know-nothing. It's well reported that he doesn't actually do anything during his presidency until he acts on a whim with some nonsensical action.
You claiming this is a good result from any perspective is so strange. If anything, it shows the U.S. is a lost cause and that the majority of Americans are narcissists alongside the person they just elected.
The Republicans have won by actively dumbing down and pigeonholing their constituency.
Not an American, but it's wild to me how anyone could describe Kamala as "0.1% less bad". She's an accomplished politician.
Accomplished politician wouldnt be a compliment though would it. One of the recent issues is bureaucratic bloat caused by career politicians. In that sense she would be less appealing.
I understand that this appears to make sense for a lot of people but to me a president should... actually be qualified to be a president.
Otherwise, it's as if you had a string of bad CTOs and then decide to hire a gardener with no tech skills as your new CTO.
Experience as a politician is not a qualification for US President
Legally, no. But prior to Trump, every single US president had served either in a political office or in the military.
It just seems unreasonable to assume that knowing how to govern isn't an important qualification for the job of actually... governing.
In a democratic system everyone should be fair game to hold office, that’s the whole point. What you’re advocating for is aristocracy and leading to phenomena such as career politicians existing, who are leeches to productive societies.
It would be aristocracy if you had to be born into it.
Now, I'll admit that the US system of mostly only very rich people getting access to top universities is not exactly fair - but you can in principle become a politician no matter your background.
I don't think it's crazy to assume that qualifications matter. And most of the US's best presidents (such as Lincoln, both Roosevelts etc.) were highly educated and had had political careers before.
I know what you mean, we've come a long way from "Honest Abe" to "Dishonest Don" :\
Err no. Let me educate you a bit. The word aristocracy is an ancient Greek word that means “Rule of the most capable/best”.
I'm aware, having taken Ancient Greek in high school, thank you very much. Meanings shift. An aristocracy is not a meritocracy and is mostly distinguished by its reliance on social status instead of actual merit.
See e.g.: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/aristocr...
I’m Greek so I’m using the actual meaning of the word, not the one produced by Western hegemony.
We're speaking English here and not Greek.
I’m not asking you to speak Greek, just to respect it.
But we're speaking English.
Everyone is fair game but most often experienced leadership is what is preferred and gets elected because overall, people who have a choice don't want "just anyone" to end up as president even if it is technically open to all.
One of the worst travesties in any organization is when there are non-leaders occupying leadership positions for any reason. And that is already too common in areas where people don't have a choice.
I don't see a connection between "career politicians" and non-"productive societies". Corrupt societies can be corrupted by career politicians or a revolving door of temporary politicians.
I never said that there is a link between career politicians and unproductive societies. I said that whenever there is a productive society, there will be career politicians leeching on it.
When you can't be productive yourself, you leech off the biggest thing you can, in the hope you can go un-noticed until the parasitism has been forgotten and you can convince people you are a symbiotic life form :)
There is a difference in qualifying for having prior experience and for being born into a certain family. Trump inheriting around half a billion dollars is Aristocratic, Kamala Harris having a successful career in politics is not.
Trump's success in only partly due to his inheritance though. I'd liked it more to a charismatic religious and authoritarian leader.
What did she accomplish?
https://www.miamidadedems.org/what_has_kamala_harris_done
I honestly expected more, especially more specifics, but I recognize I'm biased. The reason I asked, is that nobody really knows when you ask them, which is what surprises me often. You needed to send me a link as well.
Of all those, I really like the insulin one.
I guess people in America have different priorities than the accomplishments on that list.
I sent you a link for your review and reference, not because I couldn't name accomplishments. I prefer to respect the intellectual honesty of the person I speak with by providing citations for information they are unaware of.
It says she “Led the push for the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, federal worker unionization”. Federal worker unionization is very undemocratic b/c federal employees essentially blackmail voters. They become untouchable.
In most countries in the world, unionization doesn't mean "get everything you want", it means collective bargaining. It's an approach that cuts both ways, creating stable employment terms, which benefits both employer and employee.
Indeed. It's crazy to me that unionizing is seen as a bad thing by exactly the people that would benefit from them, these days.
They're only bad for big companies that prey on and abuse their workers.
Government-employee unions are bad for their employer, the government.
They’re particularly bad when politicians can take money from taxpayers, give it to union members, who are then forced to give it to their unions, which then turn around and donate it to the politicians’ campaigns.
How'd she do in the primaries?
The accomplished politicians seem to struggle a bit because they have a history of being terrible. It isn't like Trump came out of nowhere - it has been most of a decade now and when he won in 2016 that was on the back of backlash that had obviously been brewing for a long time. It was notable in 2016 that he had to knock out Bushes and Clintons from the presidential race who visibly couldn't wring compelling support out of their insider status. The Bush family name was more of a serious liability because of the family history of, you know, the Bush years. Trump's most memorable line of attack on Jeb Bush was making callbacks to how bad George's tenure was (which isn't entirely fair, but it does go a long way to showcasing why being an "accomplished politician" is a handicap given how badly US policy has been playing out for the last few decades).
If the US political class had a history of success then being an accomplished politician might be a tick on the report card, but in practice it seems to mean that they have sympathies to the military-industrial complex and a number of extractive lobby groups.
The Republicans didn't have anybody in 2016 or Trump wouldn't have had a chance. He stepped up to the plate even though he is the complete opposite of a lifelong Republican.
So was Hillary, so the vision of lifelong Republicans has been completely out-of-reach for almost a decade now. They had no choice but to settle for less.
I think it's been well demonstrated currently with Trump's live appearances where he really thinks he's doing the right thing all the time whether he makes very much sense or not.
Just last week alone Trump made Ronald Reagan with Alzheimer's look like an absolute genius by comparison.
Constantly lying, grifting, and being a convicted felon somehow is only worth 0.1%...
Anything of the shit Trump has done would be an immediate disqualification for anyone else, yet everything constantly gets a shrug.
Imagine if a convicted woman were to be the democratic candidate
> She's an accomplished politician.
So accomplished she could not even win a primary against an old man and was the first one out.
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They did exactly that 4 years ago and America didn't float anywhere. US state is surprisingly strong despite weird people in power. As to why old men with obvious dementia signs, who are unable to clearly reason without being on drugs (yes, both of them), are being candidates to President - that's a puzzle to me. Are those the best Americans for this work? I doubt it, so selection system does not work somewhere.
So many doomers everywhere. This is exactly the same rhetoric as in 2016. Do y'all hear yourself? America isn't going anywhere, democracy isn't dead, calm down. The world won't end, and you know it. Being so over-the-top is why democrats lost anyways.
Trump has said he won’t make the same mistake of having people like Kelly or Milley or Wray around.
Commander in Chief is an official duty of the President. With the Supreme Court ruling, is there such a thing as an illegal military order from the President anymore?
There are less guardrails in place now than were in 2016. It is dishonest to act like everything is the same.
I’m 100% sure he’s committed to an even smoother transition of power in 2029 than 2021 /s
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I'm not American, no need to insult me. Also, I don't agree :)
It's weird how when a company gets acquired by Oracle, everybody here understands that it's dead day 1 but it'll still take years for people to feel the effect.
Yet when it's about a country of 400 million, there's zero concept that shit takes time.
You understand that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was greatly helped by Trump's previous presidency, for example, right?
> You understand that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was greatly helped by Trump's previous presidency, for example, right?
The invasion was helped by the President who was first to send lethal military aid to Ukraine?
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/lethal-we...
https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-did-trump-send-ukraine...
Please elaborate on your position.
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Yes, I think a lot of Trump voters are just trying to force this to a head so we can reset and shake the bugs out of what is clearly a political system that is going off the rails.
I think it is naive to attribute this victory to accelerationists. Trump has a very clear mandate and this seems to be what the American people want now.
> Do Trump voters really think he's going to improve their lives?
Nope, but ask how many of them expect their sons to have to kneel in the next four years.
You aren't asking the right questions.
PS. Not American, think he' a dick, but spent a half-century watching hundreds of millions where I live keep voting for the worst people.
> The more important question, who are those people that happily vote for a convicted felon, rapist
Some people voted for him because of that.
He was found guilty on 34 counts of paying a pornstar, Many people see it a persecution not prosecution because he doesn't even know what he's guilty of. The judge allowed jurors to decide on whatever secondary charge they wanted and not even have to tell him what it is. They didn't even have to agree on a single crime, as long as they all found a one.
He denied he raped that woman (who doesn't even remember what year she was raped in) so she sued him for defamation. Jury found him not guilty of rape, but guilty of sexual assault. The judge reversed the decision saying that sexual assault is basically rape so he awarded her millions of dollars.
In both cases laws were changed specifically so he could be charged. Alvin Bragg even ran for district attorney on a platform of getting Trump.
Donald Trump ran his 2016 campaign on getting Hillary, but never actually did it. The Democrats actually prosecuted him by any means necessary.
The media people consume will never portray Trump like you are doing just now, their vision of Trump is so distorted that you can't really even tell them any of those things, they will just disregard it as nonsense.
If Hamas had not attacked Israel, trump probably would have lost. Plenty of people just didn't go out to vote this time, abstaining because they only care that Biden and Harris support Israel. Talk about cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Statistics show that Israel/Palestine wasn't really an important issue for voters on either side.
This hypothesis doesn't pan out when looking at states that flipped Blue to Red.
The biggest reason for Trump's win is the fact that 50% of Latinos, 46% of Asians, and 20% of African Americans voted for Trump - all significant increases compared to 2020.
And the biggest reason for that flip is because of Illegal Immigration and Inflation - for legal immigrants illegal immigration is basically a big F-you for following the correct path, and inflation has had a general impact nationwide.
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I'm Asian...
And my dad flipped to Trump for those very reasons.
The Trump team built a very strong minority outreach apparatus, and actually microtargeted based on ethnicity.
The Dems were not granular enough so their messaging didn't land.
From the outside looking in sometimes I wonder if it's the democrats that are the ones that "have a black friend" and use minorities as props, not the republicans...
You write like those people are wrong on not wanting to support a very clear and blatant genocide by a foreign belligerent state.
You do know Trump will deliver whatever Netanyahu wants right?
"my workplace does not allow open toed shoes" class Americans all over the political spectrum are sooooo much more sick of the foreign wars the "everyone in my workplace has some sort of college degree" class Americans think they are.
Not really. There is a reason Ron Paul didn't win in 2008 and 2012 despite dominating early social media.
No matter how dank the memes no 3rd party meme candidate will ever win. The two big parties are just too rich and powerful and you need the support of one of them to have a legitimate chance.
Trump voters think the conviction was excessive, the rapist claim is untrue, and that he is not a bad person.
They believe he will improve the economy and thus their lives.
They did not vote spitefully against Harris, however, due to the pressure from left wing controlled law makers, media, talking heads and general vitriol from the left of their opinions... they might have voted spitefully against progressives in opposition.
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We're well aware people are looking to genocide us, yes.
Not you all, you specifically. And for your rhetoric too.
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Apparently that's the case.
It's about the courage to be honest- or perhaps just plain honesty.
Note I'm not saying Trump is honest - it's just some of the democrat dishonesty was off-the-scale.
As an example - "Biden is fine to serve 4 more years".
Such obvious dishonesty is really damaging when voting is largely emotional.
I can't understand. The orange goon can't complete a sentence, hates everything, crimes everything, is basically a 300# toddler... A literal toddler would be 99% less bad. If given the choice between Hitler and Trump ... at least you know what Hitler thinks. Trump will change his mind for an extra ketchup.
A lot of people wanted more of what he has to offer. You won’t gain much by understanding why, even from his most eloquent supporter.
The best knowledge is how to benefit from this. And the topmost rule is that Trump wants to live out his life without fear of court. We may have to strike a deal that the stability of America depends on that.
He's run out of Russia, and that explains a lot. This is really a worldwide battle, but the death mostly isn't caused by bombs in most places.
It's caused by intentionally mismanaging health crises while sending healthcare to Putin. There's nothing mysterious about this. It's simple warfare, but on the terms used within the Russian regime domestically.
We've been the Zone for some time now, and the fog isn't any lighter this morning.
You really don't know what you're talking about.
Dear Democrats,
Yes! You're right. You should have run a stronger personality. Much stronger. Harris didn't "think big". She should have been more strident in advocating for censorship, inflation, imprisoning her political enemies, and legalizing crime. Please run these stronger personalities in every election from now on. We'd appreciate it.
Thanks, and much love,
Republicans
It is much simpler than that. My dad watches Fox News all day nonstop. When I say all day I mean he is watching it from the time he wakes up at 6am until going to sleep and doesn’t watch anything else. It does not matter who the democrats field, Fox News will just demonize that person and their viewers will vote accordingly. He does not even agree with any traditionally conservative ideology; he is pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights, pro-union, doesn’t like tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy doesn’t agree illegal immigration is a huge problem, but he votes for Trump because he watches Fox News nonstop. The one common thread among every Trump supporter I know is Fox News.
I know tens of Trump supporters, not a single one of them watches Fox News.
>The one common thread among every Trump supporter I know is Fox News.
Nobody I know watches Fox News. My social circle is almost entirely current/former US military expats, so it's not easy to even access cable television outside of work, if you even work on a US military base (and not everyone does). Most people are tied into YouTube, podcasts, etc.
Mostly economically liberal, socially conservative, with graduate STEM educations or MBAs. Mostly prime working-age males or kinda close to retirement. Significant over-representation of minorities. Religiously either atheist, Catholic, or Muslim. Almost all vocally Trump-leaning or at the very least VERY anti-woke.
The anti-Trump contingent in my personal life is all older people:
(2) retired boomers, one a white Progressive guy from the Pacific Northwest, the other a black guy from Virginia, both with TDS from consumption of legacy media (NYT in the white guy's case, mainstream cable news in the black guy's case)
(2) almost-retired black women, both unmarried, one with no kids and the other a now-empty-nester with adult adopted children. Both watch a lot of US TV as well.
Just out of (actual) curiosity: is the culture divide now strong enough that dissolution of the Union is a possibility? If so, why? If not, why not?
No, because the resources are owned by the United States regardless of how much the people like/dislike the United States, to leave the United States you have to physically leave it. You can't just announce your land is part of some other country. Sure, you could try and fight Civil War 2, but remember all the might of the US Military soldiers/weapons/intelligence/etc. belong to the United States side. You have a 2nd amendment right to form this opposing militia but you'd have to outspend the US Military using your own resources.
This would assume that there is consensus on what the "United States" is. If a significant portion of the US Military feels differently, then a civil war is inevitable. This is what basically happened in the actual American Civil War, as a number of U.S. officers and soldiers formed their own forces (under their new Confederate government) to fight against the United States.
My civil war knowledge is limited. Are you aware of what happened to larger assets like cannons and warships?
I imagine today these would be far more of a deciding power than troops.
My understanding is that the Confederacy did seize federal armories, navy yards and other military depots located in the South, which would have supplied a non-insignificant amount of small arms and canons. But most of the antebellum industrial capacity for manufacturing more was in the North, so the Union always had a strategic advantage there.
In terms of warships, the CSA did capture and convert existing Union ships in Norfolk, Virginia (despite the Union's efforts to scuttle them as they withdrew). A good number of ironclads were also constructed or purchased from England. With the remaining being commissioned and put into operations by the CSA itself during the war. Interestingly, this also included some very early submarines, which is I think the first time they were used in warfare.
That said, the CSA was never able to effectively break the Union's naval blockades, and battles by the opposing armies were far more decisive in the war's outcome. Particularly in the strategically decisive Eastern Theater of the war.
"Property of" is an abstraction quickly lost when the chips are down; there is no "Essential" property of something, and your honoring of such an idea (or lack thereof) is a direct reflection of your beliefs and values; and, more importantly, your motivations.
I think we're very nearly there, and this could be the tipping point based on how things shake out. If we take Trump et al at their word, then the US economy is going to violently shudder under the weight of unreasonable tariffs, mass deportations, tax cuts on the obscenely wealthy, and a ramming through of unpopular policies that he proclaims (absent evidence) will fix a given problem. The man is a salesman, and he's good at selling lies to the desperate.
So what happens if he goes so far that the United States loses or jeopardizes its global dominance? The same states that voted heavily for him would be the first impacted, with massive job losses and higher costs. Coastal states and cities wouldn't be too far behind, with higher costs tempered somewhat by proximity to logistics hubs, and unemployment would be more limited due to the higher concentration of jobs. That is, until our economic dominance falters, at which point our heavily-built-up services industry is likely to fracture and collapse in on itself under the weight of competition from countries like India and China.
All of which is to say that, yes, it's a potential outcome that the United States does dissolve in some fashion, as some states seek to preserve their power and economic control even as the Federal Government loses its mind.
Now then, do I personally think this is the outcome? No, not really. We lack debt to spend frivolously on deficit financing, so there goes that easy out. The stock market is not the economy, and workers will quickly realize that when stocks skyrocket and they're all laid off 2008-style, which would be bad for those with the most to gain (billionaires and Private Equity). I still think there's enough backstops in place to prevent runaway collapse and dissolution...
...although the biggest one of all is a divided Congress. If the GOP gets a trifecta (Executive, both Legislative chambers, and SCOTUS), then there's nothing stopping the full suite of plans from being implemented post-haste, at which point the music very suddenly stops and everyone realizes how screwed we are. Our prior backstops, our allied countries, cannot be depended upon with a President that is vocally supportive of Russia and while they're dealing with their own populism issues.
All in all, my read is that while things are about to get really bad, they're not likely to be maximum bad, if that makes sense. The current world order has always been fragile post-Cold War, and this might be the time for a grand realignment. It'd be a shame to lose our dominance, but no empire lasts forever.
While this seems like a fairly rapid doom and gloom scenario if you think about it in the context of a single term, one has to wonder about what happens in 4 years. He had no problem trying to subvert previous elections. With all branches of government falling in line, it seems like he'll have plenty of time to do as he pleases. So I don't think this is all that far fetched if we look at it as a decade or two process. Obviously he'll die at some point but I imagine he'd appoint a similar successor.
But Americans knew this because of Jan 6, so it's what we deserve I guess.
The big thing to remember is the election isn't over. I'm not talking about the president, but the house. Most of the things on the list of actions in the article, or list of concerns in the comments, will require congress to enact. We could still end up with a split congress. Even narrow majorities should imped the most extreme items. In my opinion, narrow majorities or a split is beneficial. It helps keep stuff from being rammed though without real thought or debate.
The big picture still is what it is. Americans want a king.
You can get into the more nuanced weeds and there is plenty more nuance there, but the overarching dynamic is people made a tradeoff, and they chose a king.
And the rise of anti intelllectualism in the USA continues to rise.
Meh, I have a PhD in engineering from a top five school and I was in between Dr Stein and Trump.
Some people really loath Biden (me), the Democrats and/or Harris.
Maybe a PhD isn't sufficient evidence of intellectualism, then.
PhD should never be considered a sign of intelligence. Anyone can get one if they pay enough and don't have any better prospects
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I think that Harris was a very poor choice of a candidate. I have no way to know this, but I like to imagine that a better Dem candidate would have led to a different president.
Between covid economic recovery and a war that dramatically and suddenly increased gas prices, I don't know what candidate would've done anything to turn the ship around. On election day, google search trends for "did biden drop out" had a massive spike. I think we consistently and considerably underestimate how tuned out the average voter is. Especially the independents that are the most likely to answer that they've made up their minds in the past 24 hours. It really does just come down to a vibe check for some of the most important swing voters
If they had had a serious conversation and a primary, maybe they could have distanced themselves from Biden? I doubt it though, too much party loyalty to admit to the failures of the incumbent.
I think the key word in this is "choice", which is what D voters did not get. They got an attempted installation. Installation failed. See error log.
Biden should have picked Klobuchar in 2020
Who else could they have possibly picked on such a short notice? I think, it made sense at the time - now, of course, we can all Monday morning quarterback.
Back in the spring, I had a long conversation with my father (a lifelong Democrat whose only vote in a presidential contest that wasn't for the Democrat candidate was for John Anderson in 1980) about Biden's chances against Trump. He insisted that Biden made the right choice to run because nobody else seemed like they would have a good chance against him, but I argued that this was because Biden choosing to run again essentially made it impossible for anyone else to make a serious attempt at it, and that the best thing would have been for him to announce within the first couple years of his term that he wouldn't be running for reelection, which would have given other candidates a chance to make a case. I still think that I was right about this; anyone competent enough to be a worthy candidate in the general election would know that they'd have no chance at winning the nomination against Biden running as an incumbent, even if they'd have a better chance at winning the general election. Anyone reasonable who was concerned with Trump winning had no incentive to enter a contest they couldn't win and risk being perceived (perhaps correctly) as a spoiler who hurt Biden's chances, so the smartest thing for them to do both for themselves and the country would be to hide their ambitions until next time and hope for the best.
I know that I've probably been wrong ten times for every time that I've been right about something like this, but that didn't make it any easier to watch the last six or seven months. You're correct that there was nothing else anyone could have done to avoid the train wreck by the time Biden withdrew because the only way to avert it would have been to change speeds way back before we got to the sharp curve. The worst part is that I don't even think that Harris would have necessarily been a bad candidate if she had been given a proper chance from the start; there are articles as far back as early 2022 mentioning that her public appeal was hurt by the Biden administration tying her to issues like immigration and election reform. At minimum, ignoring the harm to her future electability showed extremely poor foresight, and it's not hard to imagine that it went beyond negligence to the point of outright sabotage of someone viewed as a potential threat.
It’s very unlikely that he would deliberately kneecap her. But I agree with you…that it was too late by the time he dropped out, the electorate had already made its mind.
In the end, I think his policies turned out to be great. But he didn’t have the skills to capitalize on the gains, to seize them and point to them as “wins”. Instead we often saw a somewhat slow, very old but good natured grandpa who was clearly not fully present all the time.
The policy on Gaza though, that made 0 sense. He had the power to bully Netanyahu into stepping back but consistently took no action. Solving that crisis would have been HUGE for reelection, keeping them festering only contributed to the feeling of chaos.
The short notice was a self inflicted problem. Biden's issues did not start in July 2024
For sure. I am asking who could they have picked after Biden's performance at the debates? E.g. after the damage was done. Kamala was probably the most prominent of all democrats at the time. The alternative would have been some no name senator or Hillary.
They could have turned to the second place contestants from their sham primary election which was held this Spring and largely ignored by the media.
Shout out to dang for all the hard work at moderating he does--there's going to be a lot of flagged comments to slog through in the coming days if this thread is any indication
Also shout out to HN for fixing whatever it was that caused threads as large as this to slow down the whole of HN to the point where loading any thread would take forever.
That's also dang.
Give that man a raise.
Seriously. Managing these threads must feel like tax season for a CPA
Believe it or not, the hardest part right now is Javascript's lack of tail recursion. The browser extension I rely on for moderation (written in Arc and transpiled to JS) is stack-overflowing on this thread because there are so many comments.
Not sure whether it's more efficient to fix these errors first, or just power through moderating the thread manually, but boy does the latter suck.
The hardest part of moderating a big, high-traffic, heated political thread being JavaScript's lack of tail recursion is the most HN thing I've ever seen.
> Javascript's lack of tail recursion
Even in Safari? [1]
[1]: "As of July 22, 2023 Safari is the only browser that supports tail call optimization" https://stackoverflow.com/a/37224563
Hacking a Lisp compiler is a perfectly reasonable sidequest for any task!
I have a little extension I wrote for myself to improve some things, and that's also having difficulty. So yeah, not just you.
> The browser extension I rely on for moderation (written in Arc and transpiled to JS) is stack-overflowing
Throw more hardware at it! Get a maxed-out Macbook same day delivered.
Server(s?) seems to be holding up well given what must be record activity levels.
Maybe because of how good he is at moderation, I would say that this seems to be the least awful one of these threads that we've had during the Trump era.
That's because the US west coast is just waking up and sitting down at their computers right about now. The next few hours will undoubtedly be, um, challenging for the moderators.
Possibly but HN still runs on a fairly more niche (this is not an insult) reputation system, it's not Reddit which is known to absolutely everybody
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Apparently claiming the other side is worse in Gaza issue is not enough. Democratic voters simply refuse to turn out in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin.
Is there reason to believe that the extra voters would've helped Kamala instead of Donald?
Not necessarily, but the total number of voters for both candidates is down compared to 2020. This election will be a story of who chose not to vote.
Because we know that those who didn't turnout who've voted before were mostly democrats
Harris' vote total was down from Biden 2020 by 15M and Trump's was down from 2020 by like 4M. So a net 11M Dem voters didn't show up.
Only if you assume people who voted for Biden in 2020 would vote for Harris in 2024.
You can't blame the swing states for this one. Trump over-performed polls EVERYWHERE and by the looks of it he dominated the popular vote.
Not really everywhere but most of the eastern half of the US. The popular vote should narrow to within 2 million votes. California still owes us over 7 million votes, mostly from blue cities. That alone should net Harris almost 3 million
What do you mean by worse? It's a hypothetical versus a very real year long conflict that killed tens of thousands, with unwavering support from Biden ( in terms of actual material support). They even openly support the invasion of Lebanon, something that even other Israeli allies seem to be much less enthusiastic about.
Saying that it would be worse with the other side is absolutely meaningless, no other administration (red or blue) let something like this go on for a year and even expand to another invasion down the line.
Eh Trump doesn't care at all about Palestinian lives, nor do his followers, meaning he'd be able to give Netanyahu a carte blanche and trade it for political favours, and he's got the personality to do so.
From Israeli intelligence sources itself, it was noted that the Hamas attacks were planned in part as a response to the abraham accords under trump (Israeli/Saudi appeasement and the movement of the US embassy to Jerusalem) which Hamas warned against.
Third, Trump literally ensured the US was the first country on the planet to recognize Israel's domain over the Golan Heights, which is internationally viewed as annexed land. And it's likely further annexations will be recognised as well, with no recourse, leading to the gradual decline of the Palestinian political project to the point that it ceases to be an issue (e.g. look at US history, its 300 million non-native Americans are here to stay, it's a political non-issue)
So yes, Trump is worse. Not only did his middle-east policy help cause the escalations in the first place, recognize Israel's annexations, Israel would be even more free to run wild in Palestine than before.
It is worse. Just look at how happy Netanyahu is with the Trump victory is all you need to know.
How many palestinians died during the Trump administration? More importantly, what did Biden do that didn't amount to full Israeli support? Like, you are again arguing about more abstract stuff, whereas no matter what Biden or Trump say, the reality is that Israel has been left to do whatever it wants, with full american material, for a year now. That's almost unprecedented and that's my entire point.
And even if we go by what they say instead of what they do and did, Trump at least keeps hammering the point that the war will need to stop as soon as possible. The Biden administration has openly supported the Israeli escalation in Lebanon very recently. And has shown absolutely no care for putting an end to this (other countries like France for example, supported Israel in Gaza but openly condemned what happened in Lebanon).
Again, Trump is a lot of things, but he does not seem to like war. Biden on the other hand seems rather unbothered, and tries to pretend to care while providing almost the entirety of the munitions that Israel has been using to genocide Gaza and invade Lebanon. But at least he doesn't recognize more Israeli annexations I guess (not that he ever condemned the settlements or did anything against the current settlements either, but hey he's just the president, not someone with power to do something about it right?).
So to see the mental gymnastics that Democrats do to openly support Biden while also sweeping under the rug the dire consequences of his foreign policy behind 'both sides would do it' is extremely off-putting. The side that's doing it right now is the side that they are actively openly supporting! I guess I am biased as I have close friends that had to flee from their homes and had their entire family properties obliterated in Gaza but still.
Ps: Netanyahu reacted to Biden's victory in a rather similar way, so what would that mean ?
I'm not interested in arguing in defense of Biden because I can't and I won't.
What I will do is argue that Trump would've been even worse. What I will do is again, reiterate, that the current violence is in part a direct result of Trump's actions. For one in Saudi/Israeli appeasement, the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognising Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, the recognition of annexed lands. We know this to be true. These are massive and likely irrevocable steps in US policy that slowly will end the idea of a Palestinian state and turn them into a native-american minority in someone else's state.
Further, we know that Netanyahu is in power because of Trump's support. Trump was famously pissed at Netanyahu for congratulating Biden indeed on his victory, noting he recognised the Golan Heights as Israeli land during the election which massively helped his win. These guys are doing each other favours. There is absolutely no reason to suspect Trump would've restricted Israel more than Biden. Trump doesn't care nor do his followers. Trump has done things Biden hasn't, and he's likely to do more.
> Trump at least keeps hammering the point that the war will need to stop as soon as possible.
Biden has been doing the same for more than a year now, only its toothless. Trump may stop the war but only by giving Israel exactly what it wants. Do you think he's going to use his credits for a Palestinian cause, for what benefit to him? Due to his own ethical standard? Don't make me laugh.
Again, not defending Biden, but Trump simply is worse for Palestinians. I don't think he would've protected Palestinian lives any more, but rather set the scene for more Israeli support, more annexations, more military aid, and more future escalations. Israel has had lots of plans that didn't get pushed through (e.g. pushing Gazans into Egypt and taking Gaza as part of Israel) that might well be a reality under Trump.
> Ps: Netanyahu reacted to Biden's victory in a rather similar way, so what would that mean ?
No. He was the literally the first leader in the world to congratulate trump. For Biden it was extremely late, even 12 hours after the US media had called the election. He didn't refer to Biden as president-elect and in the immediate subsequent tweet went on to thank Trump for all that he had done. Now that Trump won again he called it a great victory and the greatest comeback ever with exclamation marks. It's not a regular political message 'congratulate the new guy and start up diplomatic courtesies', it's happiness. His cabinet celebrated the victory. 2/3rds of Israeli's support Trump. This is not for nothing.
I was told Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and Ethel Cain would deliver this for the Dems months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020940 and that Musk's actions wouldn't matter.
More recently Joe Rogan
> If you have no idea who Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, or Ethel Cain are, you're going to miss what's going to happen this year.
That's the most chronically online thing I've read in a while.
Chappell Roan famously did not endorse Harris, so maybe the poster had a point haha
I don't understand what this is, have you been saving that link for 3 months so that you could say I-told-you-so to a comment that wasn't directed at you and which you didn't reply to at the time?
For some reason I can't help but read this in the voice of Milton, from Office Space.
I'm very African unfortunately
It's because Milton said "I was told..."
Women endorsing Kamala was expected for obvious reasons. And I guess mocking women after the loss should've also been expected for... obvious reasons
> Chappell Roan
She actually received a great deal of backlash from "vote blue no matter who" liberals for her criticisms of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.
Chappell Roan and Ethel Cain didn't endorse Harris due to Palestine
Do we need to allow parties to put up multiple candidates and implement ranked choice voting? would that help us with outcomes like these?
I think it would. Idaho proposed an amendment to its constitution this election which proposed to replace closed primaries with an open primary with ranked choice voting (top 4 move onto general elections).
Sadly, it's looking like the republicans campaign to shoot it down succeeded because it would have threatened their grip on the state by allowing democrats and independents to temper their candidates to more moderate picks
Your position is "the position of the majority is wrong."
No we don't need to change the system on the basis that it leads to outcomes you want.
68% of people say "I often wish there were more political parties to choose from" describes their views either extremely or somewhat well.
Rounding up looks like around 145 million people voted in this election, that's less than half the population of the united states.
Do you have any evidence to support the idea that the current system reflects the "position of the majority"?
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-well-the...
> No we don't need to change the system on the basis that it leads to outcomes you want.
I definitely agree with that view. But maybe we could/should change the system on the basis that "the majority does not agree that the system is working".
While measuring that is hard since you would always tend to find that the system is working if it favours the candidate you like; there still is a significant number of people both left and right leaning that agree that the bi partisan winner-takes all voting system is fundamentally broken.
If only for the fact that a president can ben elected by winning less voices than his opponent, thereby showing that some votes are worth more than others.
The system that your "we" (US voters) has is flawed (as all voting systems are) in a greater way than variations of ranked voting are.
It's doomed via repeated iterations to fall prey to variations of Hotelling's law - the evolving of two parties seeking to 'capture' the First Past the Post votes of greatest majority while also directly representing the least (non representive two party politics).
This wasn't as the US founders intended, many expressed an extreme distaste for party politics and envisioned a congress with factions in proportion to the views of the greater population that bargained and dealed within themselves to find comprimises acceptable to most via robust debate.
Instead the US has landed in a wasteland of little to no choice for the public at large.
It's a poor system after 400 years of growth, stagnation wasn't seen by the founders as the way of the future, rather expressly as the hallmark of doom and eventual depotism (to Benjiman Franklin at least who was quite explicit on this).
Made possible by the internet.
Personally, I think it was the Joe Rogan podcasts (they got an insane number of views). I figured Trump would win the Electoral College votes, but I was surprised when Trump also won the popular vote.
The outcome elon musk paid $44 billion for.
Purely based on gut feeling, Twitter had less of an impact on this election than it did in 2016.
If Reddit isn’t real life, then twitter definitely isn’t. No website could do what you saw.
Well, what I saw was the culmination of a multi generation plan by wealthy and organized far right activists to accomplish this result or one similar to it. I'm not saying twitter alone accomplished that, I'm saying musk bought it in order to make it part of that project.
Maybe. I would argue that while he is fully on board the trump train now, he was not a few years ago. When you are harshly criticized for a few unorthodox views, it’s not surprising you embrace those treating you legitimately.
Like this? https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-Y...
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Matt Bors is a pulitzer finalist but ok.
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No organized right-wing group tipped the scales in this election. Aside from the Democrats' weak presidential candidate and last-minute substitution, arrogant and clearly biased big media organizations annoyed people enough to turn out and vote against what they were selling.
Foreign policy under Trump will generally be isolationist.
- US out of NATO? Trump will at least threaten that. The larger European countries are currently weak militarily by historical standards. There does not seem to be enough will in Europe to spend at US levels, outside of the countries on the front line, such as Poland and Finland.
- Ukraine war: Heavy US support for Ukraine probably stops. Whether Ukraine surrenders is up to Ukraine. Ukraine can fight on, but won't win much. Trump will meet with Putin and will give Putin much of what he asks for.
- Israel's wars: US support continues.
- China vs. Taiwan: Reduced support for Taiwan. China starts treating the area inside the nine lines as their own lake, and no US Navy craft go there. Pressure on Taiwan increases. China will attempt to get Taiwan to cave without actually invading. A blockade is possible.
- Trade with China: heavy protectionism on the US side. Few other countries will go along. Overall, China's influence in the world will increase.
- China's influence in South America will continue to increase. This isn't noticed much in the US, but it's big. South America now trades more with China than with the US. China controls about 40 ports in South America. The US had military bases around the world. China builds ports.
Can the EU muster political capital to fill the void that the US will leave in Ukraine?
I am most worried about East Asia, really hoping Taiwan survives the next 4 years.
Theoretically, yes. It's pretty unlikely.
The US alone currently has more than 2x the military expenditure of the entire EU. The US also has a larger GDP than the entire EU.
The US supplies the main bulk of Ukrainian military aid. https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...
The EU would have to make some very serious budgeting changes if they wanted to fill that void. A bunch of EU politicians would need to make the case for deep budget cuts, tax increases, war bonds, or some combination of those.
I just want to mention that EU has around €200 billion in frozen Russian assets. On top of that the various countries will contribute.
Even if it turned out that Trump has some backroom deal with Putin, and pushes hard for Ukraine to surrender - he'd be an absolute fool to not take that kind of money, and sell arms to European allies, and Ukraine.
That's money in the pocket for the US arms industry.
Why don't they? Isolationist USA is not ideal, but USA spending way more defending Ukraine than the combined EU is also stupid. Russia is literally knocking on their doorsteps, they should be the first to push back.
I really hope too. If Taiwan falls, what message does it send to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines? Are the US willing to lose their influence there and give a free pass to China?
They will have to when Russia knocks against their borders.
This tracks with some of the models we have been dealing with in the defense industry. Big reason why a lot of our national security types did not want to see Trump reelected.
I don’t think your average US citizen realizes how expensive and difficult things are going to get as US global influence eventually hits an “unrecoverable dive”
There are American right-wing commentators who are praising "de-dollarization" and the rise of BRICS. It's a combination of having half your lifesavings in crypto and letting anti-LGBT/immigrant identity politics override the geopolitical interests of your own country.
US global influence, at least militarily, hit an all-time low when Biden twice said to Iran "don't", then Iran did, and Biden did not respond. Decades of investing in a Navy that is literally one of the most expensive enterprises in human history have been eroded as Biden demonstrated to the US's enemies that American deterrence means literally nothing.
This is incredibly ahistorical.
What is ahistorical here? This is the video of Biden stressing "don't":
https://youtube.com/watch?v=aWFefjhPtQk
That this is "an all-time low".
I see, and yes I agree. I should have said "all time low since the second world war". I did carefully state "at least militarily".
The point is that US enemies are now openly mocking the US for stating "don't" so blazingly, then doing nothing. They see that the US will not use real force, so they openly defy the US now.
I don't think that's right either, but it's closer.
I doubt we see the same isolationism w.r.t. China, who remain Trump's main bogeyman (other than immigrants). The policy will probably make less sense, since as you mentioned his tariffs and transactional diplomacy may confound US efforts to build an anti-China alliance in the Pacific.
It would probably be a poor move for China to blockade Taiwan (an act of war). If the US decides to intervene, it would be very painful for China without a pre-emptive strike on US bases in the region. For all the talk of Trump as an anti-war candidate, he didn't seem to say no to many military strikes as POTUS, and this hypothetical would represent the US' best possible entry into a war over Taiwan.
China has repeatedly demonstrated 2 things WRT Taiwan. They're patient and they're serious about their red lines.
I can't recall a single instance where China announced anything about Taiwan that wasn't reactive. They just keep repeating the "one China" policy.
Their official stance is that there's no need to invade Taiwan because Taiwan is already part of China and they reserve the right to use force to enforce their territorial integrity.
The practical manifestation of that policy has been that China and the US both get to pretend that their view on Taiwan is the reality and nobody will do anything if the other side doesn't rock the boat.
Their red line is a formal declaration of independence by Taiwan. As near as I can tell, all but one of their "military exercises" has been in response to actions that get close to that line in diplomatic terms https://globaltaiwan.org/2024/10/chinas-military-exercises-a...
During many of those exercises effectively blockaded Taiwan. They did that for a week after Pelosi's visit and they experienced no pain in response.
I draw 3 conclusions from these observations:
> Israel's wars: US support continues.
This means US soldiers dying in Iran if the escalation continues. I’d hardly call that “generally isolationist”.
Israel has no chance of fighting Iran without US troops. Trump received a hefty amount of Zionist money this time around (Bill Ackman swinging right is crazy) and is cozy with pompeo et al. The writing is on the wall.
The US will back Taiwan once musk tells trump that's where the AI chips come from. After that there will be no guarantees.
Biden's Chips Act attempts to onshore chip production, arguably so that we wouldn't have to protect Taiwan in the future (or mitigate against it's eventual capture). However, were Trump to allow China to take Taiwan it would make him look incredibly weak - he won't do that.
If it happens, it happens this year.
Lewd charisma wins over kind intelligence.
If you can point to any video from the last several months where he comes across as charismatic, I'd be genuinely interested to see it. Maybe I've lost touch with what charisma is.
He was fairly down to earth on the Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz podcasts. I'm not saying everything he said was true but the tone of the conversations was fairly different from how he conducts himself at other moments.
Joe Rogan's #1 talent is making crackpots seem reasonable and chill. It's what makes his show interesting.
He seems to have realized lately that it's a better idea to take his "unhinged" persona mask off in one-on-one interactions like in podcasts or personal interviews. He wasn't like this before, a lot of his interviews used to be disastrous.
Kind intelligence? Harris can barely string a sentence together.
We had two horrible choices.
Nonsense. I've met her, she's very intelligent. The problem is that she thinks and talks like a lawyer and it rubs a lot of people the wrong way, so she is constantly trying to maintain a 'relatable!' public filter so she doesn't get called a bitch.
I can’t opine on how she thinks. But the way she talks is not like any lawyer I’ve ever worked with.
I mean, this just isn't true. She's extremely educated and well-spoken. Generally I think the attacks on her intelligence come from her being a black woman - I have doubts anyone would question her high qualifications if she was a white man.
EDIT: If you're going to downvote me I expect at least some explanation of how she is uneducated, unqualified, or not articulate. I have yet to see any, from anyone, which unfortunately leaves me no choice but to make unfavorable assumptions.
If your opinion is not fueled by racism or sexism, that should be extraordinarily easy to prove, and you should be motivated to do so.
To be generous I will assume you just haven't seen enough of her.
This is just one of dozens of examples that have convinced me personally that she's legitimately not the brightest lightbulb out there:
https://x.com/Sansa314159/status/1854196650178175101
Yes, noticing her word salad is racism.
What word salad? You can't just make things up. Even republicans can admit that she is pretty well-spoken. Lying about her doesn't make you look better, it actually makes you look worse.
Since you are looking for examples of her word salads, please feel free to comment:
https://x.com/Sansa314159/status/1854196650178175101
I’m hardly the first to notice it. Just google, there are lots of examples. Here’s one. https://m.youtube.com/shorts/zgifVPolWi8
First off, I am perfectly able to understand what she means. Perhaps it was not the most eloquent way to put it, but I understood every word and the sentence made sense.
Secondly, I can match your examples 1000 to 1 of times she was very well-spoken. One example, one in which she does not stutter or mispronounce any words, means nothing. I know you know it means nothing. She has spoken so, so, so many times throughout her career.
Perhaps she would've better served learning Trump's "weave".
As far as word salads go, Kamala side salad doesn't compare to Trump's Seinfeld "Big Salad".
The kind intelligence was kicked out in July. The brat is as sharp as a rolling pin.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Something I've been wondering lately is how big of a blind spot I have from being habitually online. Like, I'll read the news, and I'll read political discussions on HN and r/politics and r/conservative and Twitter, and I'll try to get a sense of what everyone is thinking, but unfortunately I don't think that's possible. The posters on these sites all have one thing in common: they're into politics and current events.
Having a chance to talk to more people in meatspace this year, it was a surprise to find out how many people have only a passing interest in politics, but still vote. Like, the average user here probably reads 5+ news articles a day, but there are plenty of people IRL that will read one a month, or maybe just skim a headline. They don't really keep up-to-date with the race. They mostly vote by feel and pragmaticism.
People always talk about "shy" Trump voters, but what makes me more curious are voters that match the description above. If you put someone in a voting booth who isn't interested by news, who do they vote for? I mean, Trump has a lot of surface-level qualities - he's a tall, confident white man who's a successful boss of business and an anti-establishment outsider - and maybe that's enough to capture this demographic.
I live in rural Illinois. Surrounded by people west coast elites would consider "simple". They aren't voting for a candidate because he's tall and confident.
They have 401ks. Own small businesses. Have Mortgages. Send their kids to public schools. Budget for their families. Hell, even farmers are trading commodities and are very familiar with the markets. There are so many legitimate factors that go into who they vote for.
The blind spot won't go away until people feel safe having an honest conversation about their political views.
Who doesn't feel safe doing that? This does not seem like a real problem to me. Nearly everyone speaks freely about their views all the time.
> Nearly everyone speaks freely about their views all the time
How do you know they are speaking freely and not just trying to fit in while secretly cloaking their true thoughts and views?
I promise you this is not the case.
In liberal strongholds (like SF, where I live), many conservatives will hide their political views for fear of social alienation. I've experienced this directly, when someone I'd recently met sort of sheepishly/obliquely brought up that they supported Trump. That fear is warranted: I really had less interest in developing a closer friendship with that person after learning that. It was especially jarring to me that this person was a non-white woman, and I just cannot understand how someone can support someone whose rhetoric demeans her on two axes.
I expect the same happens in conservative strongholds too, with liberals self-censoring. I know I wouldn't be comfortable openly discussing my (leftist) political views in, say, suburban Texas.
No...you get ostracized or cancelled in many social circles for indicating that you might support Trump or Republican policies. Even mild ostracization would make people hesitate to voice their opinions, never mind the level it is currently.
This is, largely, because a lot of republicans have a difficult time expressing their views without using tools like racism and misogyny.
Just take a look at the Trump rallies. Even if you agree with 100% of Trump's policies, look at how he talks about women. Could you repeat what he says in the workplace? No, you'd get fired. Not for being republican, but for sexual harassment.
If you were able to support anti-immigration policies without calling entire classes of people "garbage", then maybe people wouldn't get mad at you. But for a lot of republicans, they just can't do that. They don't know how to word their policy support without saying something incredibly offensive.
Or, for example, it's one thing if you're pro-life. But a lot of republicans will use words like "slut" and "whore", and even President Trump wants to "punish women". Again, this just isn't acceptable speech in most social situations.
Until your average republican and, hell, our president, figure out how to address these topics without being offensive, people will get offended.
This is basically all TDS.
Does my Colombian immigrant wife somehow hate immigrants and women because she thinks Trump would be better than Kamala?
Of course she doesn't. But, can she express that without saying it in a way that says "I hate immigrants"?
This is what I'm pointing out. Having republican beliefs is fine. Can republicans voice those beliefs without bigotry? Often no. For Trump, certainly not. For many, they can't either.
If you just say "Trump addresses immigrant better", then okay. If you say "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, we have to clean up our country" then... yeah you're getting pulled into HR.
I have never heard Trump say he hates immigrants. His wife is literally an immigrant. Do you actually believe he hates immigrants?
Actually hating immigrants and being politically (and sometimes factually) incorrect are two different things. The latter is forgivable.
It's essentially the first thing he said when he kicked off his campaign in 2015.
the men in your life are dishonest with you. You will never know what people really think (and no one will be able to explain why to you because you won’t hear them)
I absolutely hear them, but they're incapable of voicing their beliefs without bigotry.
You can say, for example, that there are challenges to gender-neutral bathrooms. Okay that's fine. You can't say "those dirty pervy <slurs> are molesting our little girls!". Do you see how that's now bigotry?
How many republicans are able to do 1 without ever touching 2? Very, very few. Certainly Trump can't, and Cruz can't either. If those are your role models then it's no wonder you can't express your beliefs.
Apparently people that support Trump
I really think this conventional wisdom is drastically overblown. Especially in places like this, which are San Francisco liberal adjacent.
Yes, it is not surprising that people who are in the minority in a place with a strong majority viewpoint are less excited to rock the boat. But very few places are like San Francisco.
You were respectably drifting away from your elitism in the first two paragraphs.
Then the last paragraph shows you have a long way to go.
> If you put someone in a voting booth who isn't interested by news, who do they vote for? I mean, Trump has a lot of surface-level qualities - he's a tall, confident white man who's a successful boss of business and an anti-establishment outsider - and maybe that's enough to capture this demographic.
I live in a rural working class region. I have beers with these guys all the time. They're my best friends and I'm the odd coder guy that works from home.
They do not care about the surface level qualities, besides the fact that he's hilarious. They might not read articles but they listen to podcasts a lot on their commutes at 4AM in the morning.
They don't want war with Russia, they're pissed about the COVID stuff, and they aren't happy with the price of gas.
They don't care that he's tall.
> I live in a rural working class region. I have beers with these guys all the time. They're my best friends and I'm the odd coder guy that works from home.
This is what America needs more of — people from different worlds just having beers together, and realizing that we’re all normal people trying to get by.
Do you know of anyone who can articulate a compelling case of why Trump would make a good president? I’m left-leaning but I want to understand where others are coming from.
I tried to make one earlier. I also consider myself left-leaning.
1. Don't want war with Russia. Trump's presidency was relatively low-war. He's also expressed a great desire to end the Ukraine conflict. If the Donbas and Crimea is the price of avoiding Nuclear war, I'm on board. The moment that switched me to deciding on Trump was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala.
2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
3. Illegal immigration. I lived in South America for 4 years. My wife is Colombian, we just moved back to the States. Legally. It was a long and arduous process to come in legally. That should be made easier (something Musk at least has espoused) and coming in illegally should be made harder. I know quite a few illegal immigrants and they are being abused by the urban elite to build their summer homes. They're not living a better life and they're stuck here.
4. Federal bureaucracy. The federal bureaucracy has become a parasite on our progress. Just look at what's happening with SpaceX. This ties in with the immigration thing. The problems we have with immigration are actually that the lazy and corrupt bureaucracy takes years to process something that should take 2 hours. (and does! even in "third world" countries like Colombia)
5. Trust. Everyone who hates Trump likes to talk about how much he makes stuff up. But he's authentic. Meaning he rarely reads from a script. He talks off the cuff. He's not controlled. I'm tired of having politicians that basically hate half the country and think we're dumb because we don't like to listen to their corpo-bureaucrat speeches
> Donbas and Crimea is the price of avoiding Nuclear war
On the contrary, the risk of nuclear war increases when Putin gets Donbas and Crimea. Because what he wants next will be even more valuable to nations with nukes.
Appeasing sounds great but at some point you run out of other people's countries.
The Neville Chamberlain comparison has been used to involve us in every major war since WWII and literally all of them turned out to be total disasters.
It's like Charlie Brown and the football.
One could argue there have been no major war since WWII and the belief in the futility of appeasement is exactly the reason.
Leave us alone Neocon Lucy, America will resist the urge to kick your warmongering football.
I don't understand this perspective.
Russia is gettin North Korean troops to fight for them because they are losing so bad, but Russia is also an aggressive superpower hell-bent on invading even more countries with far better defenses than Ukraine.
This isn't accounting for Russia's disastrous demographics problem. The biggest reason they are moving so slowly is because they can build new artillery, but are demographically forced to do everything they can to minimize casualties.
It also isn't accounting for Russia trying to get a permanent peace deal 2 months into the conflict. That's not the behavior of a country bent on conquest.
Finally, I can't take people seriously when they are basically asserting that Russia believed they could take over all of Eastern Europe with just ~200,000 troops. When Ukraine changed from regime toppling to an actual war, Russia was caught with their pants down. They had to hire Wagner and draft prisoners to buy time to start pushing soldiers through training. If they'd been planning some large invasion campaign, they would have started serious troop training a handful of years prior and have millions of already-trained troops.
It also isn't accounting for Russia trying to get a permanent peace deal 2 months into the conflict. That's not the behavior of a country bent on conquest.
When invading powers think they've prevailed and have their prey over their knee, and attempt to seal their conquest with a treaty -- they always call it a "peace deal".
You knew that, right?
> I don't understand this perspective.
It's because it's not based on fact. These people (rightly so) hate Putin. But just because you hate Putin does not mean he is capable or intending to be Hitler.
Same actually goes for Trump actually. Just because you don't like the guy doesn't mean he's literally Hitler.
Putin himself is already tired of the war. He just doesn't see a way out where he can save the face. He wanted it to be a 3 day campaign, remember? I have doubts Putin is eager to start Ukraine War 2.0
Russia wants a few years of respite, ideally without sanctions and with the Ukraine military stripped to the studs, so that its own military can regroup and finish the job in a few years. Once that happens, the rest of Eastern Europe will be next and the Ukrainians will be first in the meat wave attacks, just like their compatriots from Eastern Donbass in 2022 (it has been occupied by Russia since 2014 and by now the towns there are nearly void of male population).
> the rest of Eastern Europe will be next
Do you have any evidence of these plans?
They literally showed them during the first days of the war.
There was a press conference where they accidentally showed a diagram with arrows continuing through Ukraine into Transnistria, which is Moldova's equivalent of the Donbass.
You have to be very ignorant of geopolitics to think that there aren't more countries like Ukraine that Russia would like to return to their empire.
Some might join voluntarily but many -- like Kazakhstan -- won't without a fight. Unlike Ukraine, most of the others are not conveniently next to Europe and hence will be impractical for western nations to support.
After Ukraine falls, Moldova is next, and then the various -stans will be rolled up in quick succession. This will create a Soviet Union 2.0, which will be a net positive for Russia, and a mixed bag for the rest of the world. It'll likely be a net negative for Europe, which is why they're supporting Ukraine now.
So no?
"the rest of Eastern Europe" was the claim
Serbia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and possibly even Hungary are all in eastern Europe and at non-zero risk of a repeat invasion by Russia.
Sure, not all of Eastern Europe is at risk.
So... is that okay then in your mind? As long as Putin only takes some of Europe, that's acceptable?
I literally said if he takes Donbas and Crimea, yes that's worth it. You've failed to present any evidence he could take anything else except Transnistria which has already been defacto independent and considered under Russian occupation since 2022.
Russian conquest wars in the last 30 years: Chechnya 1994–1996 and 1999–2009, Georgia 2008 (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) & Ukraine (2014 - today).
If Putin ever gets tired of war, he seems to quicky recover and start again.
We let it go with two land parts in Georgia. Then he attacked Ukraine. Now, if we let it go with land parts Putin will attack again.
Are you me?
What do they care about, then? I have no connection with people like you're describing, so anything you can say would be interesting to hear. My understanding is based on the news is the economy, and gun control.
It seems you didn't read my comment?
> They don't want war with Russia, they're pissed about the COVID stuff, and they aren't happy with the price of gas.
Sorry, to clarify: I did read that part, but I'm saying, can you expand on that?
Sure. They care about most of the stuff people have cared about for thousands of years.
They want to grow their families, low prices, government to stay out of their business. They want to grow their side jobs, like contracting or excavating or HVAC. They distrust smarty-pants paper pushers. They work side-by-side with a sudden increase of illegal immigrants.
None of this is simply surface level, at least not more so than any other human being. We're all just humans bro.
Cool, thanks for the response!
> they're pissed about the COVID stuff
Pretty much the entire reason I stopped being a loyal democrat. It’s hard to call the other team a bunch of fadcists when your own party set up hotlines to dime out your neighbors for having a picnic in their backyard. Or close your kids school for two years. Or destroy your community by shutting everything down (except protests, but only for certain topics). Or threatening your job unless you take a medical procedure. Etc…
And let’s not forget the massive economic damage caused by all that. This election is basically the result of democrats absolutely horrible covid policies.
You, me and millions of other Americans. Just that there are few of us in spaces like Hacker News or the New York Times.
This election is honestly vindicating. At least I can know I’m not going crazy when I scratch my head about the massive double speak from democrats. Forgive me for speaking so crude but my former “tribe” flushed their entire set of values down the toilet and went all in on Covid.
Bodily choice? Nope. Get a shot or loose your job.
Deaf or have language issues? Hope you enjoy not being able to read lips. Fuck you though. Only Covid mattered.
Education? Nope. Close schools for two years. Prevent kids from going to the only sanctuary they have from abusive care givers. Fuck kids. Only Covid mattered.
99%? Nope. Transfer massive amounts of wealth from poor to rich. But hey at least I’m privileged enough I can work from home.
Small business? Nope. Close small businesses and celebrate ordering all your shit on Amazon (to be delivered by poor working class, expendable delivery people so you can stay comfortably isolated working from home at your large house and not get exposed to those deadly deadly Covid germs)
Science? Nope. Almost none of the covid interventions had any science supporting them. We were literally running an uncontrolled experiment that nobody consented to.
Data? Nope. We will actively suppress people who take public data showing Covid isn’t as bad as portrayed. Let’s also treat deaths with and from COVID as the same.
Elderly care? Nope. Lock them in their care home and let them die completely alone. But hey, zoom calls, right? Oh yeah and when grandma dies, no funeral for him! Only George Floyd can have a funeral.
Minority’s? Fuck them. Only Covid matters
Community? Close it all down. Fuck them. Only Covid matters.
Anti-authority? Naw. Call this 800 number and dime out your neighbors BBQ. Cheer on when the police arrest somebody for sitting on a park bench or going onto the beach. Cheer on authorities towing cars parked at trail heads. Cheer on people getting fired for not electing a medical procedure.
Naw… these assholes deserve the loss. They brought it on themselves when they sold their souls to politically driven covid hysteria.
It blew mind how so many people I thought were in “my tribe” could so rapidly turn against virtually every single value I thought we shared. The real moral is fuck tribalism and if you are scratching your head wondering why Harris lost. This is why.
Agreed down the line. My parents are actually Deaf and had a tough time.
When COVID happened in March 2020, I talked to my Trump supporting cousin and she said it was being blown out of proportion because there was an election coming up.
I dismissed it and even expected it from the Trump side to say that.
But now I realize they were totally right.
It just goes to show that party politics has nothing to do with values- just does my tribe have power or not.
Glad to see there are some of us that still care about these basic American values, and willing to change our minds in defense of these values.
I didn't intend for my post to be about rural vs urban, or smart vs dumb. The point I was trying to make was that some people just aren't interested, no matter their background. You can find these people everywhere, which might explain why Trump gained in almost every county this election, even urban ones.
It's a spectrum of course. The friends you describe sound like they fall somewhere in the middle of caring about politics vs not. My point of discussion is on the people at the low end, as these are likely to swing. People past a certain threshold of attachment have had their votes locked in for years.
No, my friends don't care about politics except that some of them went to vote.
If you went to vote you obviously care about politics at least a little. The idea Trump won because people don't care about politics but then went and voted for him is inherently self contradictory.
That they're simply "attached" to him because he's tall or whatever is obviously elitist and it's exactly this mentality that repulses the people who voted for him, ie the majority of the country.
Not wanting gas to be expensive, without knowing literally anything about why gas might cost more, is about as surface level as you can get.
What happened with covid? Trump was a complete clown, but they still support him? Sounds again, very, very surface level.
You say they don't care about his height, or his gender maybe, or his race, but if he were a short female minority, that would 100% affect their opinion, even if they didn't understand it or wouldn't admit it. Very surface level no?
You're just taking every policy position and asserting it's surface-level.
We're now 8 years in of the elitists calling anyone who disagrees with them stupid, shallow, and racist.
You have learned nothing.
I agree, except we're more like 80 years into elites calling everyone else stupid.
Your first sentence is based, if you can't see how following a couple of simple talking points like "herp derp gas is to spensive" isn't anything but surface level, you're actually stupid, because I'm telling you, there is a shitload more to gas than it coming out of the pump at a price someone wants it to be. You can't just vote for cheaper gas, trump isn't an oil well.
I understand you think everyone who voted for Trump is stupid. But it's simply not true.
Also price of gas isn't the only things I mentioned. You hilariously omitted war with Russia, and all the other plausible reasons one might vote for Trump, like making illegal immigration harder than legal immigration, reducing bureaucracy, wanting to cut red tape to go to Mars, lower taxes.
You could assert all these things are somehow superficial, but that doesn't make it true.
I didn't say that at all, I was responding to a commenter talking about their particular friends, who they claimed weren't voting on shallow premises, when the examples they provided were absolutely as shallow as they were trying to claim they weren't.
You went off topic and started defending all trump voters.
I don’t understand the war part.
It does seem like Russia will continue to push west once they take Ukraine. At this point it seems like this is almost inevitable without US support.
We have a lot of Ukrainian people in Canada and they are mortified by this event. To them, US support was a lifeline. Some friends were literally crying over this turn of events because they’re terrified for their family back home.
If Russia takes Ukraine and is emboldened to continue west, how will this impact the USA? Will you want to remain uninvolved and isolated? Does it really seem safe to allow this to continue?
Or do you think nothing much will happen and this hand wringing is unnecessary? Or perhaps that Russia won’t move further west, or it’s fine that they might?
It strikes me that a lot of Trump’s policy is that of a remarkably uninformed person who struggles to connect dots and anticipate the results of these actions.
Russia invaded Ukraine with ~170,000 troops. When it turned into an actual war instead of a quick regime change, they had to hire Wagner and draft prisoners until they could train up troops to send.
Do you seriously think Russia was going to be able to attack another country if they took over Ukraine? 170,000 wouldn't even be enough to actually hold on to Ukraine (in Kosovo, we needed 1 soldier for every 34 people to preserve peace, that would be over 1 million Russian soldiers in Ukraine to occupy it).
This assertion simply doesn't make any sense to me.
> Or do you think nothing much will happen and this hand wringing is unnecessary?
This. The Neville Chamberlain comparison has been used to involve us in every major war since WWII and literally all of them turned out to be total disasters.
Epstein said it of trump, he is good at real estate and otherwise a complete moron. He said he can't think ahead what might happen with any issue, and if you've been watching him, that should be pretty obvious.
That's why this is so dangerous, he's a con man, and everyone supporting him has bought into the con, because I never see any trump supporter posting a clause that says they will stop supporting him the moment he crosses line x, they just support literally anything he does or will do.
Not an American, not a Trump fan - he grosses me out a bit.
But I've come to the realization that both sides have an ugly component that is winning out on online forums. It's the classic tale of the vocal minority controlling the narrative.
So to answer your question, being habitually online, and using that as a basis for your opinions on the world will very much make you vulnerable to a serious blind spot.
The amount of shit-flinging on Reddit, from both sides, is shocking to me as a non-American. That people can espouse so much hate towards their literal neighbours is unreal to me. This country is so divided that I'm not sure how things will be fixed soon. Online has become such a cesspool that it's not possible to sit around the same fire any more.
I like to think that the majority of people are waaaay more moderate than what you might think from looking at social media. And I would encourage anyone to try and interact with more people in meatspace. Don't try and convince anyone of anything, but try to understand why they feel the way they feel, and have some goddamn empathy.
I blame two things for our current situation:
1. Social Media. In hindsight it makes perfect sense, but polarizing content will generate more engagement, and since engagement is a primary KPI for many platforms, that is what the Algorithms will select for naturally. It's a positive feedback loop, that resulted in people defacing their neighbours front-yard political posters, and then smugly posting about it on social media. Because of course that's how you'll convince them to vote for the other party.
2. Two party system: I like eating meat, and I would like to continue doing so if I can. But I also care for the protection of animals and sustainable utilisation of resources. But because meat is part of the Carnivore party's platform, and everything else is part of the Herbivore party's platform. People might support more worker's rights, but now in order to get that they must also be anti abortion. It's a broken system and it breeds deep deep divisions.
The divide is real and very noticeable in meat-space, not just online. This is also happening in the rest of the western world, and has been brewing not just since the Internet but since WWII.
There was a study done on bipartisanship in the US senate, where senators were mapped into a 2D space and pulled together slightly if they voted together, and pushed apart if they voted against each other. 50 years ago the two parties were mixed together, then slowly but surely drifted apart. The animation over the years was like watching cell division. There's now only a couple of senators left in the centre, everyone else is far apart in two blobs.
I have zero in common with people that make their hatred of transgender people a substantial part of their politics -- but have never talked to one and have never been influenced by one in any way.
It's like talking to an alien species that singles out green eyes. Not blue, not brown, just green, but with a seething hatred that goes beyond anything I have ever felt. "You need to also hate the green-eyes or you're bad." is not something I can wrap my head around. Not now, not ever.
The Internet has nothing to do with me feeling this way about green-eye-haters.
Apparently searches for "Did Joe Biden drop out?" spiked yesterday. That's a level of unawareness that is difficult to comprehend.
Yep, spot on.
And these same people are gonna be pissed about a bunch of the stuff Trump does, because they truly had no idea what he was saying he would do.
This is how "thermostatic public opinion" works.
> he's a tall, confident white man
Imagery, vibes, personality, all of these have powerful effects on people, educated or not.
Few can express how these intangibles impact them, and if they can they are usually won’t say it out loud,
This is why you NEED to run a primary, to debug your campaign. You don’t know how your candidate looks and feels to people in Tennessee, etc until you try it.
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>How nauseatingly condescending. How about issues like illegal immigrants coming in raping/killing women, taking over apartment complexes and living off struggling Americans' taxpayer dime? How about all time high inflation or massive layoffs?
Just curious, I agree on the illegal immigrant issues.
But for inflation, how do you think Trump will help given that inflation is expected to increase during his presidency due to expected tariffs?
Also, why do you think mass layoffs is attributed to democrats and how do you think Trump would help? To me, mass layoffs was just a repercussion of covid spending, zero interest rates.
I'm making the point that voters care about more substantive issues than height or color.
The fact is inflation was at a all time high during Biden's presidency as were mass layoffs. Whether they were directly a result of Biden's policies is definitely up for debate. But what is unequivocally true it happened under his watch. The buck stops with the sitting President.
So I disagree with the GPs condescending view that Trump voters were swayed by the fact he is "tall, white and confident." Voters cared about issues like immigration and the economy and felt the country was going in the wrong direction on these issues.
The vast majority of the inflation issue can be attributed to supply chain bottlenecks during covid and money printing. I don't think Biden had anything to do with it.
I get your point about people voting for Trump not because he is a white male and Harris is a diverse female. It's a naive view. People overwhelmingly voted Obama in and he's mostly black.
I'm more interested in the facts of the core issue for why people vote for Trump.
Your vomit of misinformation makes their point for them.
exactly which part do you think is misinformation?
Probably in the end fundamentals beat candidate quality.
Rightly or wrongly, economic sentiment indicators are all in the dumpster and historically incumbent party loses in that scenario. We've had the best covid recovery, lowest inflation and lowest unemployment in the developed world but that doesn't matter to the average voter.
Biden probably would have done worse (look at approval rating & imagine another debate). Open primary might have helped, or not, total gamble. Probably less than 25% of this is attributable to Harris or her campaign.
If there was a dem mistake it was in picking her as VP in 2020 to lock up a demographic they already would win. From there it made her the presumed successor to an elderly president who was assumed to not really run for a second term.
I think a lot of people forgot that before Covid hit, Trump was headed for a fairly routine reelection. Many people thought he was doing a solid job, especially on the economy. All American elections still come down to the James Carville truism, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Despite what the official metrics or stock market says, we’ve been in a “vibesession” due to inflation and elevated interest rates. Anecdotally, I'm still seeing stores run low/out of things far more frequently than pre pandemic times, which just adds to the feeling that all is not right with the world. America is actually in better economic shape than most other countries, but people are not feeling happy or optimistic, and the incumbent party is going to pay for it.
> elevated interest rates
Interest rates are either average, or below average, provided your lookback period is longer than the last 15 years of zirp.
You are technically right, but anyone 35 and younger is currently experiencing the highest interest rates of their adult lives.
Whether higher rates are good or bad is irrelevant considering the economic churn that occurs when a system that's built up around one set of assumptions (cheap money and low return on fixed income) has to rebuild itself around a new reality.
15 years is a long time and reshaped the entire economy around basically free credit, so any change to that was going to be painful. And one of the real disconnects between economists and regular people is around the term inflation. Ordinary consumers actually care about affordability, not inflation. Raising interest rates to tame inflation does not improve affordability. In fact its goal is to further decrease affordability to reduce demand, which should then cause inflation to moderate. That works fine for economists and policymakers, but for ordinary people that’s more of a bite off your nose off to spite your face kind of solution.
Akstually stupid voter technically you’re wrong. Don’t believe your pocketbook. -Topkek
It’s all about the economy (remember, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’).
We keep hearing statistics showing that the economy is doing well, but I have yet to meet anyone who feels like they’re actually better off.
I’m not saying that the stats are wrong, but when it comes to politics, you can’t address economic anxiety by just pointing to statistics and saying, ‘Look, the numbers say everything is fine.’
I live in Finland which is a pretty 'expensive' country, I come from the UK which is less so but not really cheap. I live/lived in the capitals of both countries pretty much exclusively.
I visited the States in 2019 (Boston), and then didn't until last week (NYC).
The level of inflation in the US for everyday things between that time seemed insanely high compared to anything I'd seen in Europe. How anyone couldn't look at the price of rent and food and whatever and think "5 years ago I was paying a lot less" and have that not feed massively into their decision making process at the (private) ballot box is beyond me.
There's been crazy high inflation of everyday goods in Australia too, and government officials went on TV saying that inflation is not really that high. They were factoring in things like bulk industrial products, which are purchased in such high volumes that if their price doesn't change (or decreases), the overall average inflation is depressed.
Meanwhile rents went up 60%.
Now have a party telling you things were fine, and that at the same time they would fix them, while ignoring they were the party that was in power.
Add in a terrible candidate who nervous laughed nonstop, did almost nothing but attack the other side, and here we are.
> Add in a terrible candidate who nervous laughed nonstop, did almost nothing but attack the other side, and here we are.
I can't tell which person you're talking about.
Trump doesn’t really laugh much, it’s a bit odd when you noticed it.
Apart from the laughter bit that sounds a lot like the UK government going into the last election there and we know how that ended for them...
look, whatever the charts say is a 100% bold faced lie. have you seen the price of a little ceasars pizza? it's jumped nearly 50% in the last 4 years. my salary has not gone up 50% relative to my experiece in the last 4 years. most recently i got a salary cut. you can't make me believe the economy is doing fine.
Do all the population eats Caesars pizza? Inflation (or more accurately CPI) is a weighted average where the items that represent the biggest spending on the consumer (not on volume, but also relative to their income) is calculated and changed over time. Housing is the biggest item there, then there's food, energy and health services and communication. How does Caesars pizza change of price affects inflation: via restaurants, an item that has lost relevance after the run away price increases over covid.
For purposes of GP's example, yes, the entire population eats Little Caesars.
Even worse, my Kombucha went from $3->$4.
But, GP's example vibes with pretty much all food prices I've seen. McDonalds went from 2 for $3 to $3 each. It's really kind of surprising. Easy to avoid all this junk food, but price increases are very substantial.
Here's the CPI numbers for food [0] where we saw increases from 261 to 332. 27%
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDNS
I don't agree with the idea of everything being a "lie" as they put it, but I have also noticed prices have risen over 50% for a number of food items. I'm a regular consumer of dark chocolate and brands that used to cost $2.50 or less just four years ago are now $4.00 or more.
What is pizza made of?
Okay, I hear you. But can you tell how Trump is gonna fix it? Pizza price won't go down from $15 to $10. If anything, it will be $25.
He's not gonna. It's related to the fact that people are saying the economy is fine and people don't like being lied to.
But Trump _was_ president when it was $10, and now he is not president it is more than that. People are going to make that connection even in the absense of a ten point pizza price plan or whatever and are going to think that they will be better off with him.
But it was Trump demanding lower interest rates while he was president and which in turn created the high inflation we have today.
Interest rates remained relatively low compared to history throughout the 2010s and the year over year inflation figures for that decade remained below 2.5% throughout those years, during both Obama's and Trump's presidencies. Inflation spiked after the Feds debasement of the currency in 2020 and 2021, during both Trump and Biden's presidencies, when it expanded the money supply at an unprecedented rate.
Money Supply: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
Consumer Inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA
Yeah, unfortunately voters cannot connect inflation to the ramp up in COVID spending and stimulus checks and free PPP money Trump gave out.
I mean, there's more than one dimension to "the economy". Unemployment rate and GDP recovery is good, inflation curtailed, wages are growing - but obviously not enough. Then Harris proposed a decent policy to improve housing affordability, but that would only beg the question "why didn't Biden do this?".
Basically, too little too late. They fucked up that, and fucked up on the border, when there was no excuse to fuck up. I believe the Harris' policies would have been better for the economy than tariffs and deportations, but it's a moot point in voters' minds.
Your first paragraph should be printed, framed, and put in a museum as a perfect example of why the Biden-Harris messaging around the economy fell flat. Nobody gives a shit if unemployment is down and GDP is up when a pizza that was $10 3 years ago is $15 now. The answer to someone saying that they can't afford as much as they could a few years ago is not to tell them that they're wrong.
Her housing credit suggestion a) was less than the amount the median home price increased by under Biden, and b) would have only served to increase the price of housing further by increasing the supply of money available, exactly the same thing ZIRP did.
I'm not referring to the credit. She had proposals to boost supply.
Tax incentives for builders that build starter homes sold to first-time buyers
An expansion of a tax incentive for building affordable rental housing.
A new $40 billion innovation fund to spur innovative housing construction.
To repurpose some federal land for affordable housing.
To remove tax benefits for investors who buy large numbers of single-family rental homes.
as per - https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/harris-has-the-right-idea-on-h...
> I'm not referring to the credit. She had [all these things]
… that people didn’t believe.
She ran for her first 50 days claiming Bidenomics was working. That term was so stupid I thought it was a joke that conservatives made up. Surely they weren’t trying to say the economy was good right?
Well, no surprises on my end last night.
They plainly had no awareness of them, nevermind believe, but even if they did it probably would not have sufficed for the aforementioned reasons. Like you said, no surprises.
No one is talking about the real source of a lot of these problems: there was supposed to be a minor collapse/major correction of the economy around this time in 2022. Essentially, there were signs that people were preparing for a major recession that was going to be precipitated by a collapse in one or more major markets (probably real estate, either American CRE or Chinese residential); inflation necessitating rapid FFR hikes would have played a part in this. Instead, everything was backstopped by various means, and the Fed went for a "soft landing". This didn't solve the problem, it just shifted the burden onto people who didn't own the assets that were backstopped. A number of other actions (breaking the rail strike, a number of actions taken to prevent turmoil in securities markets) also forestalled the correction.
The result is that, instead of taking a big blow early in his presidency, leaving us currently in the recovery period, Biden disrupted every "attempt" by the market to correct. This allowed for common economic metrics to read as healthy, even while the portions of the economy that most effect the average American were distorted.
Nice anecdote, but that's not how we arrive at the truth. Good data and a scientific approach does.
Now there are tens of thousands of highly educated credible economists with enormous amounts of good data in the US. It'd be for them, trivially easy, to constantly hit news headlines with a couple of papers substantiating why certain official inflation statistics are wrong and actual inflation is much higher, and we're all actually much worse off than before.
But there is no such widespread consensus economic research being published, I wonder why. I guess the quarter million people in the US who graduated with an economics degree in the past decade are all corrupt, as are all the institutions who report on inflation, captured somehow by Joe Biden... /s
> I have yet to meet anyone who feels like they’re actually better off.
Hi! I’m doing better than ever before. It’s hard to attribute that to a political cause, however. I expect to be doing even better in 4 years, regardless of who’s in office.
I'm doing great.
That doesn't mean I don't notice my grocery bill is three times what it was in 2019 after being pretty much the same from 2009 till then.
It's kind of annoying having people tell me this doesn't impact me. I'm literally spending more money for the same thing and my salary hasn't tripled in the last 5 years - my shares though. Which is kind of the point.
Three times? The CPI increased by 25% from 2019 to 2023. That's a lot but not three times. Major grocery retailers cut prices earlier this year as well.
I have a feeling that increases like you describe are likely due to lack of competition and much exaggeration. When I lived in rural area my closest grocery was over 30 min away. Where I live now there's probably 50 within 30 minutes.
The cpi is not the price of groceries, that's literally its definition.
It seems like food prices are up 28% since 2019: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/price-of-food
To me, this is at the heart of why Trump won this election. I honestly do not believe your grocery bill has tripled. That's 200% inflation, which is an insane number. The statistics we have are that groceries have gone up ~25%. I have such a hard time imagining any combination of products that would add up to 8x the national inflation average of groceries.
But, I also don't think you're lying. I think you honestly believe your grocery bill tripled, and I think a lot of people have a similar internal impression about how bad inflation got. It's not useful for me (or, for politicians) to try and argue it logically. No one can check your receipts from 2019 and 2024 and say, look, things aren't actually that bad. Dems needed to kind of take it at face value and come up with a solution to something that people feel is real, and they just did not do that.
Editing to add: I might as well add the lowest effort source to the ~25% number, which comes from using the search feature of ChatGPT (sorry). https://chatgpt.com/share/672b7e09-4b58-800e-a3df-58f38c33bc...
I'm in Canada, but anecdotally, in 2019 I wouldn't buy tomatoes if they were over 0.99/lb . Meanwhile today, I bought some at 2.49/lb, and only see them below 1.99/lb maybe once every 4 mo.
Similarly cucumbers I'd buy at 0.99; now I get them at 1.99 . Those are the ones I personally remember best.
It goes well beyond fresh produce.
Over that time period in Canada, I've also seen a 2 to 3 times increase in the unit price of many other basic grocery items, including dried pasta, rice, bread, canned goods, bags of frozen vegetables (peas, corn), meat, and so on.
The government-reported inflation numbers are well below what I've experienced and what many people in Canada I've talked to have told me they're experiencing.
What is the 25% figure coming from? Not disputing it, just curious.
Unable to give US equivalents but I think the price increases were pretty significant on the lower end and less so the higher you go up.
Until a few years ago it was possible to get instant ramen noodles for ~15p, you could get 6 eggs for like 80p, baked beans for 20p, etc. All of these things and similar spiked massively very very quickly. There was also a kind of double inflation where a lot of the value offerings seemed to disappear from shelves for an extended period (e.g. I remember a patch of several months where those instant ramen noodles weren't stocked in any supermarket near me at all while the 90p branded version was).
They've actually gone back down somewhat since but what you're looking at is people barely scraping by seeing drastic increases in their grocery bills.
Similar issues occurred with energy costs in the last few years; along with the rates going up the companies drastically bumped up the standing charge so even if you almost cut out all usage entirely you still could wind up seeing an increase.
Aggregate data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/Food/price-inflation/2019-to-2...
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/price-of-food
It's closer to 28%. I wrote the initial post from my memory of the stat, which is why I approximated it.
> I honestly do not believe your grocery bill has tripled.
So much the worse for you.
why do you people insist on using hilariously stupid numbers? you legitimately think we've had 300% inflation in 5 years?
Everyone does, that's the point. Most people aren't doing as well as they were before covid.
I'm doing better than ever too, but my family talks about how prices have gone up crazily while service and everything else has gone down. You have to be blind to not notice this, and the stats don't reflect what you see when you go around anywhere
> I’m not saying that the stats are wrong, but when it comes to politics, you can’t address economic anxiety by just pointing to statistics and saying, ‘Look, the numbers say everything is fine.’
So improving the economy can't address economic anxiety? That's a pretty grim picture of human nature.
For what it's worth, I feel better off than 4 years ago. My investments are up ~20%, which is a lot considered it's all diversified funds.
Only ~61% of Americans have any stock holdings and most of those are pretty minor and/or locked up long term in retirement vehicles like a 401k. For practical purposes that money doesn't exist for people which is why a well performing stock market is a crappy indicator for how people will actually feel about the economy. My 401k is up 30% YoY but I can't feel that because the money is locked up for another 30-35 years and I can't access it via the stock market because of my job.
A much better view IMO would be median real wage growth vs inflation because that's how people mostly interact with the economy, simple day to day purchases of food, shelter, and fuel/power.
I think people stop believing in statistics when they don't feel it is related to their daily life.
Looking at the prices of bread, eggs, meat, car price and rent/mortgage interest from another country, it's a lot of burden. Meat shoots up really a lot in Costco, and mortgage payment went up 50% as well.
Talking about the cars, the exactly same car was 30K when I bought it 4.5 years ago, and now it is 45K+ (Same model different year). It's hard to explain the differences by "the advancement of technology". And not to say that back then I got a 0% interest rate and nowadays it's at least 5% or 6%.
IMO, for ordinary people, this hike of interests does nothing to prevent real inflation that they care about, but simply increasing everything.
The Cumulative inflation rate since 2020 is 21.8%.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
I think people fail to understand is that a large portion of the population has literally 0 investments, let alone diversified portolios that are technically up.
These people give absolutely 0 shits about the stock market being up and the economy being considered fine.
We on HN are sheltered and generally have decent jobs which do allow us to have investments and thus don't see the impact as much as those who don't see the bullish line of the stockmarket driving their portfolios up.
SPY is up 70% in the last 4 years.
Polling clearly indicates that the percentage of Americans who feel financially secure has been steady for years while the percentage who think the economy is in poor shape is increasing rapidly. It is 99% perception. People who are better off just won't say it when they think everyone else is struggling. The bull market in stocks and rising home values indicates anyone who owns any assets is doing very very well.
Posts on HN about tech workers struggling to find jobs and mass layoffs reaches the front page every week. Half my tech friends are laid off right now. That was not the case four years ago. Everyone I knew had a job, everyone had money.
> half my friends
Yes, this is
> 99% perception
That's perception. In reality layoffs happen all the time even in a growing labor market. I saw tech layoffs in my network up to maybe a year ago and almost everyone is employed again. We had a correction after what was the most overheated job market ever.
Can you link to some of that polling, please?
honestly feel like we're actively being lied to about how "good" the economy is.
Turns out a majority of Americans agree with you.
What motivated people according to polls was firstly inflation, then a distant second was either abortion or illegal border crossings. You're pretty much correct. It's been pointed out this quarter that inflation has been abated and wage growth has improved, but notwithstanding that people continue to feel worse off financially, they remain resentful.
The DNC made some blunders. Leaving aside covid spending, they screwed up reverting Trump's border policy and waited too long to fix it. Harris was weak on messaging and came up with the Housing plan too late, didn't champion the CHIPS act enough. Also, the newscycle was constantly showing the US spending large sums both domestically and abroad which had an impact on inflation. And of course there's all the other culture-war/DEI stuff that isn't strictly within the purview of the feds but feeds into resentment.
The frustrating thing is that the economy lags policy, and policy has limited influence on the economy to begin with. Inflation rose because the US consumer was ready to spend much faster than the supply chain could recover from the COVID era. The Inflation Reduction Act could only do so much to soften inflation, but the whole thing was blamed on Biden by the average voter.
For some of us this is not unexpected at all. But the margin and the likely win of the popular vote should send a clear message.
Can you please explain to a non-America what is that message is? I hear this refrain all the time and all I get is a vague insinuation that people are not being listened to.
Stop calling working people without a college education stupid and stop alienating men. "Non-educated" people work just as hard or harder than the rest of us. I've been to college and the only thing it "educated" me in is Computer Science, which I majored in. I'm not in any way better as a human being than my friends working in construction. Quite the contrary, their job is far more important to society than mine. If I stopped my niche research tomorrow, no one would really care. If handymen, farmers, or truckers stopped working, there would be riots.
Also, the DNC should really stop forcing unwanted candidates down people's throats. It doesn't work, even when you spam social platforms with your narrative.
> Quite the contrary, their job is far more important to society than mine.
Non-american here, but I feel pretty much the same way. I also do niche research in computer science. People working in the supermarket, people driving trains and busses, medicine workers, construction workers, they all do work that is vastly more important to society than mine. A single educator in my child's kindergarten most likely does work that is orders of magnitude more important to society than mine is. Maybe this attitude comes from the fact that both of my parents never set a foot into higher education, but it is something I feel very strongly, and which is quite humbling.
I remember my father predicting in the early 2000s that the academic elite was increasingly crippling the country by adding more and more non-pragmatic rules in seek of some idealistic utopia, and that they would lose the support of the masses pretty soon. As a young teenager, I did not believe him, and in my arrogance of youth, I also dismissed it as the ramblings of an uneducated worker. But sure enough, most of the things he feared back then turned out to come true.
> I also do niche research in computer science. People working in the supermarket, people driving trains and busses, medicine workers, construction workers, they all do work that is vastly more important to society than mine.
Today, for sure. I think it's far more nuanced in the long term. Most of these jobs would be non-existent without the researchers of yesterday.
Of course, if you disregard today completely for building the tomorrow, a lot of people who don't get access to wealth today will be pissed. Which is very roughly what's happening in the USA. "What we have now is perfect, and can sustain forever, stop with the progressive BS", chant the conservatives.
It's a hard balance. Dems messed it up, Reps will mess it up further, I bet.
I'm just observing from an another continent.
> Most of these jobs would be non-existent without the researchers of yesterday
The research of yesterday was on another level than most of what is done today. Not to say that it's worthless, pursuit of knowledge is always worth it.
> The research of yesterday was on another level than most of what is done today
In what ways? The impact? That can't be proven until "tomorrow" comes, no?
Survivorship bias
This is all moot now. We have a far-right supermajority in government. America is fucked for the next few decades at the very least. The DNC is no longer relevant.
Calling republicans far right is the exact rhetoric that alienates and divides people. Take the next four years to try to find some common ground with the right.
Not at all wanting to be confrontational- genuinely curious; if they’re not on the far right then where are they? The Democrats seem fairly centrist, and it’s the more wayward independents (eg Greens) that seem to be on the Left.
My perspective is European & Australian, so I wonder if that skews it.
They are absolutely far right, they just hate it when you call them that.
Because it’s illogical. Far right implies there is an edge to a majority “right”. Calling the entire majority “far right” is just lazy adhominem attacks. Calling the entire the democrat party far left is equally stupid.
> Because it’s illogical. Far right implies there is an edge to a majority “right”.
"far right" and "far left" are terms for contextualizing a political stance, based on the world view and actions. It's doesn't matter where the majority of people stands, they can be all far right or far left or in the center, it wouldn't change the definitions.
In America you generally only see "Far X" used as a slur to basically imply extremism. I'm sure a lot of people will have strong feelings about whether that's accurate or not but my point is mainly that I think it's weird when people in places like Europe go by the academic definition with regard to American politics.
No, they’re relative terms. “Far right” doesn’t mean anything in a vacuum.
The nazi government of Germany was "far right" even when a majority of the population supported it. The political left-right spectrum is roughly defined with socialism, communism on the far left, social democracy on the left, classical liberalism on the center-right, conservatism on the right, and ultra-nationalism, fascism on the far right.
Far-right is well defined globally. Few core values: nationalism, authoritarianism, anti-socialism, economic libertarianism, racial and gender hierarchies, anti-establishment sentiments.
If you think a party is ticking many boxes, you may label it as "far-right".
Maybe I am missing something but Trump doesn't support much of that?
> nationalism, authoritarianism
Sure, you could say he supports this.
> anti-socialism
Not a fair right position. This I'd what anybody who is right of the center left position thinks.
> economic libertarianism
Trump doesn't support this. He wants all sorts of tariffs and the like.
> racial and gender hierarchies
I haven't seen any proof he supports such a thing.
> anti-establishment sentiments.
This is not a far right position. This is a populist position.
Calling the democratic party "far left" is stupid for a different reason, viewed from a global perspective, they're probably best positioned as centre-right.
Depends what you care about. Broadly speaking the entire developed world is further left than the US on workplace/business/union policy issues.
The US left (federally, not talking Alabama dems here) is generally more left on immigration, abortion and LGBTQ+ and affirmative action type policies than Europe, broadly speaking. Drug policy is a wash IMO. There's a lot more variation in Europe because the EU doesn't arbitrate social issues the way the US federal government does.
> Broadly speaking the entire developed world is further left than the US on workplace/business/union policy issues
This is what's crippling them. We initially built the social security net to counter this issue. Then we increased employee rights to maximum levels. I think one of either would be beneficial, but not both.
> not talking Alabama dems here
As an Alabama Dem, this is something that is just so disappointing to see when we're assumed to be not "generally more left"
There are so many here supporting and doing good, hard work with things like the Yellowhammer Fund, ¡HICA!, and Magic City Acceptance Center and Academy but we have to fight for any acknowledgement. We had more people vote for Kamala than several states but they amount to nothing in the public eye. It's so deflating and discouraging
I think you have to acknowledge that the democratic politicians that rise to prominence in your state are not exactly the left of the left when it comes to policy in the same way that Christ Christie and Charlier Baker aren't hardline republicans. It's just a reflection of the electorate, not a personal slight.
Doug Jones was our last democratic politician on the national stage and he voted quite liberally. We just don't have many anymore, due to gerrymandering and our electorate. I think Terri Sewell is our only non-Republican
It is not the best
https://ballotpedia.org/Doug_Jones_(Alabama)
This is not true. Their identity politics stances are widely unpopular across the globe, and you won't find another country where they are represented in political discourse.
Can you give some examples of what a far left country or government would be?
Yeah, you’re mixing up a couple facts with opinions here.
What opinions?
By that reasoning Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy weren't far right, because a very significant portion of their population actually voted for that. Or France now, our "Rassemblement National" used to be far right, but now enough people (about a third) vote for them that they no longer are.
Sorry if that feels like a strawman, but I find the idea of using popularity to determining what counts as "far" stupid and dangerous.
Maybe the problem is with all of you trying to reduce this to one dimension.
Democrats believe a man who thinks he is a woman is scientifically a woman. They believe in censorship. They believe in supporting and growing the military industrial complex. They believe in a discrimination campaign against whites and Asians, and meanwhile allowing unfettered illegal immigration with the intent of giving amnesty to the millions that entered through the forcibly unguarded border.
They are not centrist by any stretch of the imagination.
> Democrats believe a man who thinks he is a woman is scientifically a woman
It's a bit more complicated than that. Gender is a social construct, mostly determined by genes & genitalia. It's not quite enough to believe you're a woman, other people have to believe it too. Another issue at play is that there are far more "intersex" people (who have some characteristics of the opposite sex, sometimes to the point doctors don't quite know whether to list them as male or female), and from what I've heard trans people often (possibly generally) are "intersex" in a way that wasn't visible at birth. The idea of a female's brain in a male's body isn't that far fetched.
> They believe in censorship.
I believe this one is more popular in the far right (when in power) than in the far left (when in power)
> They believe in supporting and growing the military industrial complex.
Militarism sounds like it's more popular on the right. Though it can be more complicated: military backed imperialism can indeed support stuff like welfare at home.
---
Now the elephant in the room: last time I checked, democrats were firmly capitalists: they believe the means of production should be owned privately. Even if you exclude actual communism from acceptable discourse, they're fairly poor at public services and keeping inequality in check.
> The idea of a female's brain in a male's body isn't that far fetched.
How could it possibly be a female brain if it's part of a male body?
Can you name a policy of today's republican party that is further right than the republican party of 20 years ago? From my perspective they've ceded ground on many social issues. They had a porn star speak at the RNC convention this year. Dick Cheney, one of the people responsible for the "War on Terror", endorsed Kamala Harris. The idea that federal politics in the US has shifted right, not left, is baffling to me.
> Can you name a policy of today's republican party that is further right than the republican party of 20 years ago?
Sure I can: "mass deportation now"
That is one of infinite potential framings. It should be obvious it has served its usefulness and is no longer helpful and constructive.
Can you define far right?
That some people are born better than others and they deserve more in life. It’s an incredibly appealing message.
If you think you’re exceptional, vote Gorgoiler ‘28!
Why would you ask someone to define a known concept that has been around for decades? It’s not like definitions are based on someone’s opinion.
Definitions are often based on opinion. Definitions differ depending on many things.
Some definitions are not opinions.
The definition of "far right" is an opinion. Failing to define it in discourse will inevitably result in a lack of positive outcome.
Because they’re trolling, knowingly or unknowingly. There’s a presumption here that HN commenters can operate a search engine and read pages of text, and are therefore capable of basic research.
If they’re asking for a definition, it’s likely because they already know it and just want you to fall into a “gotcha” they can then divert discussion toward in their favor. It’s cheap theatrics.
You can't be unknowingly trolling as it requires intent. You could argue wilfull ignorance I guess?
At a quick glance, I found 10 definitions of far right that differ slightly. An assumption of malice here fails. Remarkably so.
You can miss me with that last part, because I have to assume malice on the part of those who try to steer discourse around vocabulary or policy nuance rather than acknowledge the binary reality of the question.
Vocabulary is what we have for textual discourse lacking other inputs, and clarification on terms is a basic and actual necessity of such. You say you "have to assume malice" and, in line with what I already alluded to, that requires malice.
It's not pedantic to ask that your statements be taken clearly and in the right context.
It's worth noting as well that in the context of inclusion, pointing out pedantry at all is going to exclude a group in the "common" understanding of exclusion.
Most importantly, this person is trying to understand your perspective and instead of trying to sway their opinion, you criticize them. One thing that the "far right" has accomplished recently is an understanding that everyone is a person and worth respect and voice. Which is evidenced by the countless videos displaying such behaviour and the ubiquitous response of blessing attributed to people with such inquisition in comment sections everywhere.
In stark contrast is the term uneducated and it's supposed link to intelligence. Don't they teach logical fallacies in college anymore?
I am actually not. I just don't know of any policies or promises of Trump that I would genuinely categorize as far right. Border control is not far right according to me.
First of all I dislike Trump and for sure have liberal views in lot of aspects. And say even if I have malice intent and I am a hardcore Trump supporter, comments like yours wouldn't have changed my mind. Assuming you want to change people's side, it is not the reply that would change it.
According to Wikipedia, "Far-right politics ... are typically marked by radical conservatism, authoritarianism, ultra-nationalism, and nativism"
Digging into the page for radical conservatism, "Elements of ultraconservatism typically rely on cultural crisis; they frequently support anti-globalism – adopting stances of anti-immigration, nationalism, and sovereignty – use populism and political polarization, with in-group and out-group practices.[3][4][5][6] The primary economic ideology for most ultraconservatives is neoliberalism.[6] The use of conspiracy theories is also common amongst ultraconservatives.".
Trump is well-known for his populist, anti-globalist, anti-immigration, and pro-nationalist rhetoric. He has also promulgated conspiarcy theories such as the Obama birther conspiracy and claims of stolen elections.
As for authoritarian, Trump forms a textbook example of a personality cult. He frequently attacks existing institutions and an independent media, undermining trust in a free democratic process. He frequently issues positive messages about authoritarian dictators in other countries such as Bolsonaro, Orban and Putin.
Ah, yes. That well know impartial source of political facts, wikipedia.
>>Trump is well-known for his populist, anti-globalist, anti-immigration, and pro-nationalist rhetoric. He has also promulgated conspiarcy theories such as the Obama birther conspiracy and claims of stolen elections.
You can be patriotic and anti-immigration without being far right. I think the claims of a stolen election are yet to be properly investigated. I'd welcome a truly impartial look into all the covid postal vote shenanigans last time.
>>As for authoritarian, Trump forms a textbook example of a personality cult. He frequently attacks existing institutions and an independent media, undermining trust in a free democratic process. He frequently issues positive messages about authoritarian dictators in other countries such as Bolsonaro, Orban and Putin.
You can criticise institutions now? And I'm sure he'd be in favour of an indepenndent media if America had one.
Putin is a obviously a dictator. Bolsonaro and Orban not so much (especially Bolsonaro as he was, er, voted out which would seem to automatically disqualify him from being a dictator).
Let me turn the question to you. At what point would a politician become far right? Have you ever seen a far-right politician?
I think if they actually advocate violence against minority groups, start genocidal wars, cancel elections etc.
I guess everyone is moderate in your book.
Political ideologies are defined by a cluster of stances that collectively form a narrative. Those stances may individually have some debatable justifications, but it's when they're taken together that it becomes compelling.
It's not just
"there's something wrong in our society"
it's
"there's an insidious dark force at work, it's brought us down from our glorious past, these groups of people are involved, violence against this threat is understandable, only a few men are strong and capable enough to lead us out of this...".
In 1930s Germany and Italy the "groups of people" were marxists, jews, gypsies, homosexuals and a few others. In modern Russia it's LGBT, central Asians, objectors to the war, and various religious groups like Jehovah's Witnesses. For Trump and a lot of Europe's right-wing it's LGBT, immigrants, intellectuals, and liberals (though he calls them communists).
He's not said anything like this though:
"there's an insidious dark force at work, it's brought us down from our glorious past, these groups of people are involved, violence against this threat is understandable, only a few men are strong and capable enough to lead us out of this...".
A few examples...
For insidious dark forces, he alludes to the "deep state", talks about an "enemy from within", and uses phrases like "poisoning the blood of the nation".
For glorious past, there's the MAGA motto, and his narrative that political correctness and lefty lunatics have destroyed American exceptionalism.
For violence, he's repeatedly threatened violence against protestors to his rallies, defended or refused to condemn violence by his own supporters, and suggested that political opponents deserve to have violence inflicted on them.
For only a few men, his prodigious hyperbole about how he's the best at everything, and he literally describes himself as "I am your retribution" who will usher in a "new golden age". And again, he's generally praising of strongman authoritarians around the world
To give you a bit of perspective,the democrats are right of the Conservatives in the UK.
So they would kinda feel feel far-rightish to us only because the democrats are more conservative than ours
They are a corporate party, just like the democrats. Supporting secure borders is not far right. Republicans have support of every race, they are not racist despite the media repeating that they are. Trump is very hesitant about getting involved in wars. I see nothing far right about them, maybe they are somewhat nationalistic instead of globalist, but the US is a diverse nation. At the end of the day they are just another corporate party that appealed more to the American people.
Non-American here too, but since your perspective is EU, what is Nazi party when the Republican party is far right? Like, far far far right?
Depends on how you define 'right'.
Were they conservative? No, they wanted to upend society and create one that is nothing like anything ever seen before. They were also anti-religion. In many ways, they were anti-tradition, and I wouldn't consider their obsession with bringing back dead traditions to be traditional.
Were they hateful, racist, etc.? Yes, up to you if that's considered 'right'.
Were they, like how American political parties are, friends of big business? Not really, they wanted to sponsor monopolies and whatnot but also wanted the businesses to have no influence over the state, rather the other way around, the state can force the big business to do what they want. As far as if it actually worked that way when they were in power, I'm not sure.
[flagged]
Common ground?
They don't believe in climate change, want zero controls on guns, are generally anti-immigrant - even the legal immigrants are lied about e.g. Haitians in Springfield, don't believe women should have certain rights concerning their own healthcare, want to keep cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, etc.
They are impenetrable. Yes they'd claim I'm unwilling to compromise but we're talking about different starting points - I have to get them to accept certain actual real-world events and facts as true before starting a meaningful conversation.
Legal immigrants overwhelmingly voted red. "They" are minorities, white people, men and women, young and old.
I watched the victory speech. He promised three things (1) only four years of him in the White House, (2) appointing RFK to eliminate vaccines and gut the health care industry (3) end current wars, so basically give his boss military control of Eastern Europe.
I don’t believe (1). The other two would mean our kids’ life expectancies just halved.
- Eliminating vaccines is a terrible idea, but public school vaccine requirements are state law in my state. RFK won't be touching them.
- Gutting the health care industry? That's not necessarily a bad thing. Wasteful health care administration (passing the buck) was something like 30% of health care costs pre-ACA, and health care is now 17.3% of GDP. Shedding 1/3 of health care costs would bring our health care expenses to the same ratio of GDP as the UK. Of course it would also cause an unemployment crisis...
The very fact he feels the need to promise (1) says it all.
Common ground. The whole democratic apparatus of the United States might get severely hollowed out for the foreseeable future, and you're talking about finding common ground.
What he means is: please let us hollow out democracy without you interfering.
Why is everyone else responsible but the people responsible? Not calling out fascism is surely just as problematic.
Do you have any data (except for interpersonal psychology) on whether letting fascism slide or calling it out ultimately makes the situation worse? At what point do you call fascism fascism? When it's too late?
> At what point do you call fascism fascism? When it's too late?
You call it fascism when it is fascism. Once it is openly fascist then it is probably too late to stop, but you don't call it fascism until it is fascism.
So, only when it is too late can you talk about it?
How exactly is Trump/Republican party fascist?
Let's hope we never have to find out, but so many people captivated by a conman while simultaneously crying about everyone else's position is a recipe for abuse.
Separating children from parents at the border, reverting hard fought women's right to their own body, that is the stirring of fascist behaviour.
> Separating children from parents at the border
That wasn't his main intention. It was to stop the flow of illegal immigration into the country. And after popular criticism, he reversed that policy and never enacted it again. That doesn't sound authoritarian/fascist to me. It sounds more like bending to the will of the people you govern.
> reverting hard fought women's right to their own body
And a large swath of the country believes abortion is murder. I guess for that, they are fascists in your eyes?
The term really has lost it's meaning and is just used by the Left to demonize the other side.
> The term fascist has been used as a pejorative,[74] regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum. George Orwell noted in 1944 that the term had been used to denigrate diverse positions "in internal politics". Orwell said that while fascism is "a political and economic system" that was inconvenient to define, "as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'",[75] and in 1946 wrote that '"Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."[76] Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times".[77]: 1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
You could try to answer this yourself by looking up the definition and cross checking it with the rhetoric from the republican party during this campaign.
The burden of proof is with the accuser.
I fail to see how the Republican party is fascist. I think it's a term the Left uses to demonize their opposition. Ironically, that is kind of fascist-like.
> The term fascist has been used as a pejorative,[74] regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum. George Orwell noted in 1944 that the term had been used to denigrate diverse positions "in internal politics". Orwell said that while fascism is "a political and economic system" that was inconvenient to define, "as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'",[75] and in 1946 wrote that '"Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."[76] Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times".[77]: 1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
I assume you have good reasons to believe Republicans are fascist. I'm simply asking you and any others who believe this to share your reasons. Is that not reasonable?
Even if I listed all reasons why the rhetoric during the campaign reeked of fascism, you’d simply dismiss them, like all the times before where this has been called out already. This is why people rightly feel people like you act like they’re in a cult. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
Like right now, by editing your comment you're desperately trying to pose there is no accepted definition of fascism. Dismissing definitions only fits the bill.
Ah yes, the "you're too stupid or unreasonable (i.e. deplorable or trash)" to reason with so I won't even try argument.
> you’d simply dismiss them
I'm a random internet stranger. How could you possibility know me so well? Again, it's just a blanket stereotyping and demonization of people who have different beliefs that you do. A mass ad hominem attack. That attitude is a root of many problems in the political arena. I expect that kind of rhetoric on Reddit, but am disappointed to encounter it here.
> Even if I listed all reasons
I'm a busy person and I assume you are too. Why don't you list one and we'll go from there?
You already try to dismiss an accepted definition, so why would I bother reiterating all the easy to find articles, videos and podcasts that literally quote and warn of Trump's rhetoric? Do you think you sound like a person that is trying to understand criticism of his party, especially right after voting for them?
> You already try to dismiss an accepted definition
In this discussion, we've already defined it? where? That's news to me that I can dismiss something that I wasn't aware of.
> Do you think you sound like a person that is welcoming criticism
I am very welcoming of criticism of my party and the one I voted for. Trump can be a bombastic jerk. I voted for him because his policies align more with my values than Harris'. He was the lesser (much lesser) of two evils. I didn't vote for him in the primaries and I wish he wouldn't have won them.
Anyway, you continue to make assumptions about me rather than discuss/debate the issue of why you think Trump is a fascist. It's not much of a discussion and so I'll opt out now. All the best to you.
If you think every debate should first have a discussion on definitions, before you can get to the heart of the argument, you should not be debating.
We don't have to define it. That's the point. It's already been done for us.
It's the same with asking me to list reasons or sources that explain the republican parties fascist tendencies, while that's been done thousands of times through the course of their campaign. If you were truly curious as to why people might feel that way, you could have done so at any point during the last few months.
You did't accept the definition you bothered to look up and you didn't accept the valid concerns people had during the campaign.
The real reason you're walking away from this conversation is because you don't care if I am right.
You're not afraid of fascism, because you think you're in the right group.
I think the other poster was just being polite, trying to have a discussion about the left's misuse of the term fascism, yet failed to account for the degree of intelligence required to understand such nuance. So let me spell it out for you all, you are misusing the term and on the odd occasion that one of you actually checks the definition, you view it through your own biased lens, rather than reading the complex description thoroughly. You cherry-pick some terms and twist others around to suit your own dogma, with the intended goal of using it to villainise the enemy.
If you replace nationalism with partisanship, in very many ways the modern left is far more closely aligned with the vile components of fascism than the republican party, or even Trump supporters. The left have done everything they can do vilify anyone who disagrees with their core beliefs, which they hold are a matter of morale superiority and to which, in their minds, no person of moral substance could ever find disagreeable.
By very definition, conservatives are conservative. When they disagree with someone, they continue to treat them respectfully and move on with their lives, comfortable in the reality that there exists people around them with very different beliefs than their own. The left, on the other hand, do no such thing and yet look in the mirror and convince themselves that they're the better people in all this.
Trump less won this election than the democrats did lose it by arrogantly putting up a candidate with strong ties to the current unpopular administration and whose other policies and attributes did not appeal to the swing voter.
I don’t even have a dog in this fight since I'm from the EU. I can see why the Democrats lost. I can also see why Trump won.
And I'm factually correct when I say that Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous. He has motivated even a reasonable person like you to defend him vehemently. He made you part of his group, and by the looks of it you’re already starting to hate those who are not in it.
I was watching a streamer who once referred to something as “stupid” before they corrected themselves to use a different word (I don’t remember because it’s not the point). The reason for their correction was that they believe that word to be a lazy way of describing something; lots of things can be considered generally “stupid” but there’s always some underlying reason for that conclusion which will invariably be a more informative descriptor. (It takes effort to discover this reason, hence it’s “lazy” when one does not.)
I do commonly see “fascist” used to describe things in similar ways where the person seems to be expressing a general disdain for something. They do successfully convey some meaning but it’s very non-specific. Just food for thought for readers who want their opinions heard more than they want to hem and haw over the specific meanings of words.
Many, many ways:
1. Rhetoric of an "enemy within". Trump has already made it clear that he intends to use the US military to "clean out" our country.
2. Supreme consolidation of power. Trump plans to re-enact Schedule F. Tens of thousands of federal workers will be fired, and their replacements will be required to vocalize their devotion to Trump. The bureau meritocracy system, which has been in place since the 1800s, will be removed completely. In its place, a system of political loyalty.
3. Supreme avoidance of the law. Trump is completely immune to any criminal prosecution while president, and he has made it clear he plans to use this newfound power "very aggressively".
4. Desecration of education. Within the first 100 days, the department of education will be dissolved. States will pivot to ahistorical pro-conservative education, if they provide any public education at all.
Objectively, the use of force to eject protestors at rallies is of the fascist mindset. Trump endorses it.
The counter-argument is that a culture of violent police suppression is just modern America, and it’s not fair to tar one particular party with that particular brush.
> the use of force to eject protestors at rallies
This has happened at Harris rallies as well.
Advocating conspiracy theories, undermining trust in democratic process, pro-nationalist, racist, sympathetic to (if not supportive of) white supremacists, ultra-conservative and traditionalist, stoking unfounded fears of communism/marxism, etc...
Those items on your list are more opinions than facts. They are terms used by the Left to demonize their opposition.
Okay. Let's take conspiracy theories. Trump has promoted the Obama birther conspiracy, pizza gate, that the Clintons are responsible for the death of Epstein and other political opponents, that there was fraud in the 2012 election and various false claims about the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections, various tropes about Soros etc...
It's a fact that Trump shared and promoted these. It's a fact that they are conspiracy theories.
You can read why Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly (right wing Marine General) called him a fascist,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/24/trump-fascis...
The positions the Republicans voiced in their campaign cam ony be summarized as far right. So applying the moniker to the party in it's current form is accurate. The party isn't the same as their voters/supporters.
As a non-american, I don't see what else they could be defined as. Why try to seek a middle ground with the far right when they clearly don't want to
It seems to me like those in power should be the ones to attempt to find common ground with those they govern.
Am I crazy to think that?
They like authoritarianism for a reason: they simply don’t care about other people. The lack of empathy is chilling.
No, it's the people who must be wrong. Surely!
Perhaps you haven’t been listening to the rhetoric of republicans.
Common ground with people who voted for someone who campaigned on hate is a pretty steep hill. Funny how Republicans are never asked to "find common ground"
That really isn't the primary alienating and divisive rhetoric from this election. It's just the bit you didn't like.
All of the moderate Republicans were primaried out over the last eight years, the senate has a few holding on but the house has been mostly cleared out. The party is very much far right. Did you not see how many Republicans refused to certify the election in 2021? It’s only gotten worse since then.
I’m sorry, but OP was right in calling the party - the entire party, and its supporters, and its candidates, and its institutions - far right. Because at the end of the day, many believed this was a nuanced choice about policy differences rather than what it really was: a binary choice between an imperfect Democracy, and strong man totalitarianism.
The voters made their choice clear, and those of us most impacted by GOP authoritarian policies now get to spend the next four years (at least) trying to make sure we survive attacks against us while also maybe still salvaging this grand democratic experiment.
So no, you can take that “find common ground” and shove it. We adhered to decorum for decades, even as the GOP marched ever further right and ignored, plowed through, or destroyed any and every uncrossable line or improper decorum in their path. You don’t get to try and apologize on behalf of an electorate that willfully has chosen violence, nor should we (those affected by said violence) have to tolerate their excuses.
In my country in Europe our most "right-wing" parties would be considered leftist in the US, so hopefully this brings into perspective just how extremely right-wing republicans are.
Which parties and country would that be?
No. Turns out I found common ground with Liz and Dick Cheney. Wouldn't have had that on my bingo card in 2016.
I mean, they call Harris a communist so all bets are off. Even Sanders would barely register on the left side pretty much anywhere in the western world
Pretending that Republicans aren't far right is just disingenuous. The democrats are solidly right and America doesn't have a left.
Republicans stopped existing in 2016 when they found out they either have to bow down to Trump or become third-party behind democrats and trumpists. Last meaningful actions of republicans was suppressing Trump during his 2016 reign, but those people are out now. There are no republicans left in power.
Who's in charge now are not republicans. Now it's just far right believing in genius and ability of their cartoonish leader.
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Actually that statement shows exactly the political and societal problems there is today in the US. If people can’t even talk together and even get insulted it’s going to go even worst.
There is really no worse left to go.
Your illogical and hyperbolic rhetoric is part of the problem.
Ho really? Did not history teach us everything that is happening today and can happen tomorrow ?
It can go worst as in a civil war. To a full split of the country in x countries. Now I don’t think it will happen but saying it can’t go worst is both factually false and not anchored in reality
There’s no bottom, bro.
Nothing has happened to you. Nothing is happening to you. If you're in hell, than what is Gaza?
It's just the standard leftist doublethink of the past decade. Any realistic definition that labels 99% of Republicans as far right would label 95% of Democrats far right too. If their ideas were popular they would have started their own party a decade ago instead of being ground up in the DNC.
They claim "harm reduction" but that's not how just not voting works, 95% is still a super majority and anything you "win" is just tokenism at the end of the day.
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There is not going to be a lot of important differences in major policies (economy, diplomacy) between the two parties, IMO.
> Stop calling working people without a college education stupid and stop alienating men.
Nobody is calling anyone stupid just because of the lack of education.
However the lack of education makes people gullible and easy to manipulate. From bleach as a Covid remedy to marginal tax as a grave danger to working people - you don't have to go far for examples. And when someone does believe this sort of blatant bullshit, then, yeah, they don't come across as particularly bright individuals.
> Nobody is calling anyone stupid just because of the lack of education.
> However the lack of education makes people gullible and easy to manipulate. From bleach as a Covid remedy...
You may not realize you said it, but you said it.
But are you arguing that when people believe things that are demonstrably false, like using bleach as a Covid remedy, not because there is any evidence behind them but only because they were uttered by someone they trust wholeheartedly, and this person does not have any hint of medical training, that nobody should say they are stupid, but only quietly believe it in their minds?
If not that, then what were you trying to say?
> But are you arguing that when people believe things that are demonstrably false, like using bleach as a Covid remedy,
These are morons you read about in your news bubble. The average American is not like them.
So what is the takeaway here? When referring to trump supporters, follow the line of reasoning:
- Trump floated bleach as a covid remedy
- Bleach as a covid remedy is obviously stupid (we should both be agreeing on this one)
- Trump supporters support such statements from trump
- But pointing that out is "calling them stupid" and thus we shouldn't do it?
I'm genuinely curious about this because it makes up so many discussions with trump supporters in a nut shell. I don't want to condescend to them, but I also shouldn't be pointing out things that genuinely are stupid about trump, because doing so would offend them too? What should I do, just pretend all the dumb things Trump does (and that his supporters support him for) don't exist? Just so I can find common ground? (I mean, strictly speaking this is exactly what I do in polite company with trump supporters. I just pretend all the really dumb shit doesn't exist and just talk to them about policy and stuff, and in the end I end up finding that we agree on 90% of stuff and we go on our way. And they continue to support trump for reasons I don't understand.)
Realize that in most of those conversations, those actions serve to derail. That's intentional, it shuts down any rational discourse.
> Nobody is calling anyone stupid just because of the lack of education.
I can find you dozens of examples right now, in the press, from today. That the entire election is the fault of uneducated people.
Do show mainstream press examples pinning this on stupid people.
Not "uneducated", but expressly "stupid".
Let's not argue words. Other kind labels were deplorables, fascists, Nazis, garbage, sexists, racists, xenophobes and anti-American.
Overeducated people are as much manipulable, but in a different way
I've seen research shared here that suggest that more education scales with more radical political beliefs and overconfidence, for both sides of the spectrum, not just left. So you're right. Though of course more people concentrated in cosmopolitan areas with liberal cultures means more educated people lean left.
Do they wear diapers and garbage bags?
You are calling other people gullible and easy to manipulate, and yet somehow you believe that Trump actually suggested bleach.
He didn't.
Seems to me you need to look in a mirror.
They all just voted against their own economic interests to win their culture war.
Objectively, they are stupid, even the ones who went to college.
The entire point of being wealthy (and USA is one of the richest countries on earth) is to be able to afford to sacrifice some extra wealth (e.g. by not working, or giving to charity, or abolishing slavery, or enforcing worker's rights) to accomplish other goals (whatever you deem good, or moral, or just fun / entertainment).
On the contrary. The voted for their own economic interests and ignored the culture war. Economics was the number one issue.
It was a reactionary response though. The fantasy of going back to low grocery prices is just that. Or are we actually going to pursue deflation?
I don't see any policy there, just platitudes.
On every objective measure the US has the best economy it has had in...pretty much ever. So they voted for "their own economic interests" by voting in a guy with plans that every economist says will be absolutely disastrous and will not only massively spike unemployment, it will lead to far greater prices for American consumers.
Trump's plan for grocery prices is to put massive tariffs on grocery imports and to deport millions of workers. There is no one with a functioning logic cortex who doesn't see the problem with this plan. But at least they can rest comfortably knowing that the Musks, Sacks and Bezos' of the world will get a killer tax break for their next yacht.
American elections are the guy in the big suburban house complaining that filling up his F350 costs a little more than it did during COVID shutdowns and thinking that somehow the guy floating insane plans is going to fix it. It's bizarre.
> On every objective measure the US has the best economy it has had in...pretty much ever.
Except the one metric that really counts: People can't afford their basic needs.
> So they voted for "their own economic interests" by voting in a guy with plans that every economist says
You mean leftside selected economists with their own agenda.
> will be absolutely disastrous and will not only massively spike unemployment, it will lead to far greater prices for American consumers.
He had the lowest unemployment numbers in decades.
>People can't afford their basic needs.
Wage growth has far exceeded inflation in the United States. Americans as a whole have never, in history, been wealthier or consumed as much. This is one of those fun "you don't know what you've got until it's gone" things where people bought into a political narrative to such a degree that in their world-leading affluence they truly think they are hard done by and wronged. I sadly feel that a lot of Americans are going to learn that there is a long, long way to fall.
>You mean leftside selected economists with their own agenda.
If you really look at everything like this, that's incredibly sad and self-deluding. Trump's economic plans are scattered spitballing that sound like something the most ignorant person just randomly contrives. There is literally nothing Trump has proposed that would in any way improve the US economy or reduce prices of anything. But they absolutely would do the opposite. No one, ever, has convincingly described how Trump is going to improve the economy. It's just random score-settling and self-enriching nonsense.
>He had the lowest unemployment numbers in decades.
In Trump's first term he was constrained from doing much of anything, and actually accomplished shockingly little policy, just coasting on Obama's policies. In this term he will have zero checks. He can actually do the crazy nonsense he has proposed, and destroy the country.
There are two possible paths ahead for the United States-
-economic calamity with zero upside where people learn that tariffs aren't some magic thing that other countries pay. Where inflation truly starts going wild again, while federal services collapse and the oligarchs reap. Musk, Bezos and crew will never have it better. Many Americans will have it much worse.
-...or..., and what Trump voters repeatedly reveal they are assuming in voting for him, he just lied about everything he says he's going to do to get a vote and actually won't do anything much at all beyond some corruption and self-serving.
Either is pretty terrible. But here we are.
This is an honest question, I'm not American, I don't live in the US and I genuinely don't know: how has Donald Trump served the interests of "working people without a college education" during the four years of his presidency? I'm also curious to know if the Democrats have done any different.
In the interest of full disclosure I am totally guessing that neither did anything to materially improve the lives and fortunes of working-class Americans and neither Donald Trump will, nor would Kamala Harris. Working people in the US, as in the rest of the world seem to me to be shafted for good, by all sorts of economic forces that they have no control over. I'm speaking in this as a current academic but one-time unskilled, immigrant worker.
It used to be that you could feed yourself and your family with "the sweat of your brow". Not any more. Who is working to change that?
> how has Donald Trump served the interests of "working people without a college education" during the four years of his presidency?
Uneducated working class folks compete with illegal immigrants for jobs and cheap housing. During his presidency illegal immigration was lower and wages rose for the working class and housing costs were relatively stable. He’s also positioned himself as the “law and order” candidate, and crime tends to impact the working class much more than the middle/upper classes.
Mostly folks who voted for him voted on the premise that their experience of the economy was better when he was president rather than on the basis of individual policies.
> During his presidency illegal immigration was lower
Is that true? Legal immigration was lower especially during the lockdown (for obvious reasons). But the number of deportations of illegal immigrants barely changed, e.g. https://www.cato.org/blog/president-trump-reduced-legal-immi...
> wages rose for the working class
That happened. And it happened even faster under Biden.
> He’s also positioned himself as the “law and order” candidate
And yet the murder rate rose to the highest level since 1997.
> their experience of the economy was better when he was president
I feel like it might be more accurate to say "perception" than "experience".
>https://www.statista.com/statistics/329256/alien-apprehensio...
Trump’s first term and Obama’s second term were fairly steady, then you see a massive bump under Biden.
Border patrol apprehensions is very different from illegal immigration! You can't control how mnay people try to get across.
https://x.com/SenJohnThune/status/1793001514211967288
You actually can, by working the incentives. For the first three years of Biden’s administration one could show up, be apprehended, and be relatively certain that they would be released into the country, where you might be housed and fed.
Under later Trump and Biden’s current policy, you are released into Mexico.
One more to the list: Stop trying to twist science into conforming to political or social will.
Yes! I hate that. Also, "listen to the science" people are obnoxious. There are regular scandals of people in STEM faking their results for decades and I've seen garbage labelled as research more often than I can count.
I do not trust political sciences or humanities at all. There is little to no valid method to most things they publish. And I'm not alone in that opinion in my circle.
That would be true if there was a change with that population. Right now the numbers are that Trump won with slightly less votes than when he lost in the 2020 elections; and Kamala lost with significantly less vote than Biden got in the 2020 elections. There are almost 20 million of voters that didn't show up on this year election that showed for the 2020.
I understand calling people stupid is not a strategy to convince someone.
But it’s not like that is why someone votes for Trump, right? It’s maybe more of a way to disincentivize conversions back.
I… really wish there had been a primary though. Biden deserves to be hated for the rest of his life for this (along with all of his other decision making)
I wish there had been a primary, too. The DNC did a massive disservice to the American people.
there was no time to have a real primary with biden dropping out when he did if she still wanted to end up on ballots.
Yes. It was Biden and his team’s decision to prop him up til it was too late.
Biden promised to be a one term president, but his ego craved more power. He will go down along with RBG for helping hand democracy to fascists.
They should have had a primary instead of having a ritualistic anointing of Biden. The reason Biden had to drop out is because he was there when he shouldn't have been.
I can vaguely understand fixing a primary for H. Clinton, but for Biden? One of the things Biden ran on in 2020 was a vague indication that he would leave after one term.
There was a primary, Biden won it. Maybe you wanted a second primary after he stepped down? That would have been tough.
I get and fully understand that many Americans are angry and want change, and they exercised their democratic right and pursued that change. We all need to respect that. Many things are not on the right path, and I have a feeling "DEI" and grievance farming is going to have a rough time ahead. And I get it: As a white male I honestly am tired of government being a tool to suppress white males. I am sick of living in a Western country that endlessly self-flagellates and acts like it needs to host the world in some act of contrition for success.
Having said that, it's hard as an outsider to look at the things Trump is campaigning on and not see that as not just calling "non-educated" people stupid, but he is literally relying upon it. Either his voters are extremely ill-educated, or they simply don't believe a word he says and actually make his lying a feature of his candidacy. Either aren't great.
When just about every economist says that the US economy -- quite literally the best economy on the planet -- is going to implode under the policies Trump has stated (even just the tariff proposal, not even getting into the crackpot "abolish the IRS and write on a piece of paper that crypto wipes out the debt", or Elon magically cutting 2/3rds of the federal budget, etc.), for people to then vote for Trump to "fix" the economy is not educated. Being isolationist in one of the greatest eras of peace in human history will not bring peace to Earth, it's literally guaranteed to bring war that will end up on your doorstep, etc. Nuclear non-proliferation dies with this election, and there are a lot of powers that existed under the US umbrella that are going to fire up a nuclear program, covertly or not.
I fear that many Americans just have no idea how much they have to lose. There is a sense of comfort and complacency to assume that this is the baseline. But it isn't. It can get much, much worse, very quickly.
I find a lot of his voters seem to respond to criticisms with "Oh don't worry, he's not actually going to do those things." I think your point about making his lying a feature of his candidacy is spot on. Here's to hoping that nothing ever happens.
Well said.
What I don't get is how the bar for the Democrats seems to be so much higher than for Trump. Sure, "the typical man" is more easily validated by Trump than Harris, but at the same time Trump says much worse things about women than Harris about men. I can see how the Harris seems more "elitist" in a way than Trump, but to me that seems like a subtle negative versus Trump's long list of very obvious flaws.
How does the hatred for the Democrats get so big?
We call that "double standard" and it's top on the list of common fallacies. The lack of education, whether I demonize it or not, definitely has a saying in its spread. And dismantling the department of education won't help getting people more educated in the following elections.
I think the difference is that Harris (less so than Clinton but to some extent) was seen as representing a liberal consensus that men, particularly white, heterosexual men are 'over', that the 'future is female', etc.
Trump is just Trump. A rhetorically violent, deeply unpleasant convicted rapist, but not the vanguard of an explicitly misognist movement. At least not one thats culturally hegemonic. So while American progressives may label Trump voters sexist or racist, the overwhelming majority of them don't see themselves that way. Meanwhile, a highly vocal minority of progressives do actively demean men, while people, straight people etc, and have for a decade. They've enacted DEI practices, and scholarship and funding practices that exclude men from fair participation in the workforce, education and the arts. As efforts to correct historic imbalances in that participation. At the same time, they've ignored how male participation in higher education has dropped off, the epidemics of alienation and underemployment affecting men.
Edit: Just to clarify I'm addressing the question - not advocating Trump, or suggesting that life for men or white people or straight people is in fact materially worse. Just pointing out people strongly dislike being disliked, actively biased against and demeaned and this does in fact affect their voting preferences.
> convicted rapist
You may think you mean, or maybe you did not, the accurate description: adjudicated rapist. And that difference right there, between adjudicated and convicted, and all of the other ambient hoaxes, is in big part what the referendum yesterday was about.
Ask yourself how long it was between late 2017 and when you found out the "fine people" hoax was actually a hoax. Or if just now, whether you knew that even Snopes confirmed the hoax that Kamala wantonly repeated (as if it were true) in the debate is indeed a hoax.
Most normal people don't see the difference between adjudicated rapist and convicted rapist as an innocent mistake but as something that those who push such hoaxes -- rather than innocently parrot them out of ignorance -- should be put behind bars for in response to the damage they do this great union of states.
Yes, being a woman in power is clearly a political statement in this country.
Some people definitely think it is.
I'm genuinely at a loss as to how that connects to anything I wrote. It's not Harris' gender that was the issue - to the extent that the position I'm taking helped shift the dial. It's the perception that she would continue the policies and forward the ideological perspectives listed above. It doesn't help that she seems extremely disingenuous and politically opportunistic. Trump is of course both these things - but conservatives seem to care less about that, likely because of the redemption narrative built into Christianity. You can be as much of a villain as you like provided you push that button. It's worth noting that Obama and Bill Clinton both pushed their Christianity when campaigning, and that appeal wasn't lost on evangelicals. Progressives, it would be difficult not to admit, are pretty adamantly set against redemption currently.
My impression is that it's not about what Kamala Harris (or most Democrats) said, but the fact that the Republicans were able to create the perception that there are strong movements which hate "whites" and which hate "men" (in various combinations), and that voting Democrats would help those movements. Apparently, they were able to convince enough non-white men and white women that Trump will be better for them.
The simple fact is, Trump is a rorschach/inkblot test.
He is everything people claim and nothing at all. He says so much bullshit constantly that you have to just ignoring or discounting shit he says. So he reflects what you believe.
It doesn't. Part of what you're seeing is just straight up cheating. Florida wouldn't allow election observers. It might take a little while to sink in, but American elections are more or less running like Russian elections at this point, and these results are what you get when it's not honest. Sometimes it's like this, and sometimes the leader figure is said to get like 99% of the vote, when he doesn't feel like playing coy about it. It's up to him, not you.
America started when it rebelled against being ruled. I'd say that's not entirely off the table. First it has to become clear that we're getting ruled, not represented.
Wait who cheated when? Maybe you should go to the capital and protest
I dont know about the USA. But I know from personal experience, that COVID politics destroyed my trust in left-leaning parties. I voted left until 2020. I will never give them my vote again, ever.
I would be interested in learning what happened during COVID that led to this, if you have the time to talk about that. No worries if not, of course.
That's madness. Trump - along with several other right-wing figures in the US and globally - consistently downplayed COVID's danger, went on wild tangents about hydroxychloroquine, ultra-violet light, and injecting disinfectant, and challenged the use of effective measures such as face masks and social distancing.
But most people's anecdotal experiences with COVID amount to "It was just like having the flu, I don't see why they made such a big deal about it and banned Twitter accounts for saying things that line up with my experience"
> and injecting disinfectant
This one I know is a straight up lie, because I remember where it came from: Trump asked an expert if it was possible to use disinfectant inside the body, was immediately shut down with a simple "no", and dropped it. Audio of the conversation was leaked and immediately twisted into "drink bleach", ignoring everything else about the conversation.
Also UV light treatment actually exists, just not for this purpose. It's a completely normal thing to ask once you learn UV kills viruses.
In this snippet I hear no „No“ to the disinfectant, he is just suggesting it an seems to go on: https://youtu.be/zicGxU5MfwE?feature=shared
Sorry, which of those measures were effective? People really live in completely different world is amazing.
you know that everyone is still getting Covid over and over and over again every year, right?
COVID has mutated to become far less fatal. At the time, social distancing and mask wearing were effective ways to reduce incidence and prevent hospitals from getting even more overwhelmed.
Except looking at when the waves occurred and when measures were in place they didn't do anything.
Yes. To me, it looks like this was intentional, as a form of warfare against the country. I mean, it sure worked, and it's said that RFK Jr., a weird crank, will get put in charge of all healthcare. That basically means all medicine becomes underground, forbidden.
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To be fair, RFK Jr believes that vaccines are linked to autism and wants to ban fluoride in drinking water because it's "linked to cancer". It's very worrying that he could be setting health policy.
Trump doesn't alienate a specific group of hardworking Americans who turn out to vote. The people who are turned off by him largely don't vote at all.
> but at the same time Trump says much worse things about women than Harris about men
One would think so, but Trump's talk about women is just how society in general talks about women. As sad as it is, women are used to that rhetoric.
> How does the hatred for the Democrats get so big?
Multiple high profile members of the Democratic Party actively demonize rural Americans and especially men.
Trump talks shit about everyone—somehow all his supporters ignore that he has trashed each and every one of them at some point
You're saying that Trump won because US society is misogynistic?
In essence, yes. I'm saying that Trump's narrative on women is no worse than societies default. Women experience far worse things than macho talk. It takes more to alienate a lot of them.
It feels like you're balancing two conflicting notions here:
1. Stop calling average people ignorant.
2. Average people are misogynistic.
I'm politically the opposite of the person you're replying to, but these two notions are correct and not contradictory. Average people are ignorant and misogynist, and we should acknowledge this and talk about it, but not to their face. If you're not the direct target of the ignorance or misogyny, you should explain to them why their assumptions are false in a dumbed-down way, not using university-level language. Calling people ignorant directly will get them defensive and emotional. They will think they are being attacked because they are a man.
Of course, for people who are directly targeted by the ignorance and misogyny, it's their right to directly call it out, but they might not call it out at all, because they would be targeted further.
The difference between what they are and what you should call them. Getting voted in asks for coddling your potential base.
Which candidate was unwanted?
Harris. She was dead last in the 2020 primary.
The one that didn't win their primaries.
That‘s the fault of capitalism. Which the right supports even harder than the democratic party (which also completely supports it).
Eh, if ONE builder stops working nothing happens. Likewise if ALL researchers stop working… we don't feel it the next day, but it will be felt.
Yea Kamala should not have been the candidate. She was tied to Biden who was associated with inflation which I think really decided this. I'm not sure the rest of your comment has that much to do with it
> She was tied to Biden who was associated with inflation which I think really decided this.
What about the rest of the world who've also been experiencing the same?
It's a very shortsighted take, and we've seen the same in the UK where Liz Truss 6 weeks as PM has taken the blame for global inflation in the court of popular opinion
Of course, its not logical, but voters "feel" they were better under trump without realizing inflation was a global phenomenon. This was also a failure of Dem messaging.
"Associated with" not "caused by".
This is why we call Trump's voters "stupid", the US is still under Trump's tax plan until 1/2025. So if someone has an issue with taxes, it's not Biden's fault even though he is in office.
I know this and I'm not even American
Inflation and taxes are two different things.
Inflation was caused by the Covid stimulus of 2020, and the mountains of free money printed that year (which is why it hit the entire world - every government did the exact same thing). Last I checked, Biden wasn't president at the time...
I merely pointed out that taxes and inflation are different things and that the respondent said one, where they were replying to the other.
Making it a left or right issue makes no sense given the content of my post was to point out the mismatch in arguments.
EDIT: This post is the same thing fwiw.
Given that Trump's economic policies are primarily the cause of inflation in the US, not sure what your point is. He printed and gave away 8 trillion dollars when combined with his tax cuts for the wealthy and people wonder why the cost of everything went up. Corporations across the planet were the beneficiaries of corporate welfare as governments printed money to battle COVID, and then they pocketed the profits and told their employees that they couldn't afford to give them raises.
Doing stock buybacks with government stimulus is next level evil shit - but there were zero penalties for doing it, so why not?
> Quite the contrary, their job is far more important to society than mine.
I doubt it. Think about how connected the world is, you can't even apply for jobs without the internet.
Both jobs are equally important. The main difference is that you can get started doing construction without many pre-qualifications, while a construction worker may take a year or more to get the basics of computer engineering down.
What you've written is exactly what happened in the UK during the Brexit referendum. The lessons still haven't been learned.
What happened is that the remain side had to fight on the side of a reality that existed and the Brexiteers made up a fantasy future that has failed to materialise.
> Brexiteers made up a fantasy future
Worse: many different and mutually incompatible fantasy futures, which they denied ahead of the referendum, and which after the referendum became a source of infighting that made all possible Brexits impossible to get past Westminster until Johnson came along and lied to everyone to get enough support to actually close a deal.
(The only time I can think of when digging a deeper hole got anywhere, even if the where was a… I guess in this metaphor: a disused basement where the stairs were missing?)
Your comment somewhat illustrates the point. It disparages those who voted for Brexit instead of trying to understand them, which is a recipe for eventual failure as we've seen.
Judging by this thread, it's still not possible to have a discussion on this...
> It disparages those who voted for Brexit instead of trying to understand them,
But why? Why is it the job of the people who are on the side of established truth who have to understand the views of the fantasists? I saw more "disparagement" from the pro-Brexit crowd than the Remainers. Why isn't it their responsibility to understand the realist position?
We told them Brexit would be a disaster. We were told we were scaremongering. It went ahead anyway, and it turned out to be awful. It was a stupid decision, and it was terrible judgment.
Why can't we tell people that some proposals are stupid? And why can't we tell people after the fact that they made a stupid decision? How is it our fault that they make bad decisions?
I think — as a Remainer who remained so hard I responded by moving to Berlin — that "why" is "because it was a referendum and that's how those work".
It's not sufficient (or necessary) to be correct to win in a democracy, winning requires being convincing, which may be easier with the truth but is also much harder when insulting half the electorate.
Even when it's very tempting afterwards to say "we told you so".
As for how to be convincing… dunno. I'm much more comfortable with computers where I can google the errors.
People were concerned about loss of sovereignty and high immigration. These are perfectly valid concerns and the Leave campaign perfectly understood that when they picked "Take back control" as slogan.
Immigration is also a big factor in the Conservatives' defeat in the general election. People felt cheated as immigration hit a record high and voted Reform UK, which handed Labour a huge majority despite actually getting fewer votes than at the previous election.
So it's quite extraordinary to see the comments here with zero reflection on why all of this happened. This is the real, dangerous divide between the well-offs in and around London and the rest of the country.
I have read that the two main issues on voters' minds in this American Presidential election were immigration and the economy, so result is not very surprising.
Loss of sovereignty in particular was a fictional concern in regards to the EU, given the structure of the EU and the relatively high power of the UK within it. The degree to which the EU should be made more democratic is precisely the degree to which it remains exactly what leave campaigners said they wanted to replace it with: a traditional boring free trade agreement in the hands of negotiators appointed by the governments of the member states.
"High" migration likewise had nothing much to do with EU membership, as the government demonstrated precisely by following Brexit with, as you say, record high immigration.
One of the other famous big concerns Leave campaigners had was the cost, which famously became the £350 million a week on the side of a bus. This number was even called out as a falsehood at the time, but it was believed by enough to make a difference.
Remainers were unable to convince the majority that the benefits of EU membership was worth the cost, financial or otherwise, regardless.
There was nothing coherent to understand. A rag tag coalition mainly built on delusional positions.
- we can have all the trade benefits without freedom of movement (specifically denied by EU at the time, didn't materialise)
- we will have 'more trade' afterwards (fails to understand how trade works)
- we won't have to follow EU rules (in reality, we can't really diverge that much from how the EU works without incurring penalties)
- we won't have to pay anything to them / we hold all the cards / ... (we did pay for our liabilities and we definitely didn't hold the cards)
- we can become much more left wing if we leave the neoliberal EU (fails to account for the fact our country isn't particularly left wing overall)
- politicians will have to take responsibility/can't blame the EU (brexiteers keep blaming the EU even now, BJ et.al. have faced minimal or no consequences for their actions)
- we can fish again (ignores relative importance of fishing vs the actually productive economy, disregards that EU is a big market for said fish)
What do you suggest we engage with?
Well oversight on financial institutions by EU is gone, yeah you still have regulations for normal business that you have to do with EU. But super rich and corporations can drop their money in UK puppet territories and EU is not going to have pressure points. Google "UK tax havens" and I bet brexiteers were handsomely paid for their efforts by people who want that scheme to continue instead of sharing any of that money with EU.
As in, they were right calling people bigots if they wanted to get out of the eu? That definitely didn't improve uk, I've even heard about people feeling "betrayed" by the now valid tariffs that damaged their UK business
I believe the argument being made is that calling spades spades is bad when spade is an insult and you need to convince the spades to vote for you.
Which is also why Republicans calling Democrats childish names such as "Dummy-crat" or saying "socialist" (or "commie") for all things to the left of their Overton Window doesn't convince any to their left to change their minds rightward.
I think that might be the culprit, but then you have no escape. Some post brexit interviews have been - at least for an European - quite hilarious. I feel sorry for them tho, but it's sort of a leopards ate my face situation
Indeed, and similar.
I used to live in Cambridge; I knew only one person who was a long-time UKIP voter in EU elections, who was "delighted" by the result of the referendum.
Even though I'd already been openly discussing moving to Germany ahead of the referendum, and went on an InterRail trip immediately before it to find a place to move to in the event of Leave winning, he did not comprehend that my reaction to the result included cutting him out of my life entirely.
He wanted the Cambridge to shrink, I left. That's his face leopard.
(As for intelligence: he also sometimes boasted of being in the international maths olympiad, this was Cambridge after all).
Working class people who, especially, wanted to control immigration were called bigots, uneducated, stupid, racist, etc and were ignored. Result is that they voted for Brexit. No, that didn't change anything because this was ignored by the establishment (both Labour and Conservatives) and that is still festering with the resulting rise of the Reform UK party (of Nigel Farage who's celebrating with Trump in Mar-a-Lago right now).
Here's a better analysis of the Brexit thing which was posted here yesterday. It was mostly decided by the fact that the pro-Brexit people had better marketing campaign.
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/q-and-a
Your "analysis" is from someone involved in the Brexit campaign. Of course Cummings is going to say he was amazing at marketing.
Another argument would be that Vote Leave broke campaign spending rules. In countries with legally binding referenda, that would justify rerunning the referendum. But in the UK it was "only advisory".
"Better marketing" campaign is another word for saying that they understood people's concerns better and were thus able to use that to their advantage instead of insulting the people they were supposed to convince (as the Remain campaign did). This is what Cummings did to win.
> instead of insulting the people they were supposed to convince (as the Remain campaign did)
Can you point to any examples of this? I don't think the official Remain campaign did anything of the sort. Insulting the people you are trying to convert is a poor strategy, which is why I don't believe they did it.
When you say "were called bigots, uneducated, stupid, racist, etc", what I think happened was that the Leave campaign alleged that that was what the Remainers thinking/saying and it gained traction.
Use that to their advantage by telling the truth or by lying?
What lessons haven't been learned? Keir Starmer's Labour won the last UK elections by a landslide and the Tories got the boot. I do think your analysis oversimplifies a complex issue.
I'm not ignoring that Starmer got elected by keeping his mouth shut and his hands behind his back, but the Tories' smash-mouth politics did not win the day anyway. What I can see from where I am is that Brexit was a very special case and it's all gone back to normal now.
There was no landslide. Labour actually got fewer votes than at the previous election when it was by Corbyn!
What happens is that Conservatives voters voted for someone else, mostly Reform UK. And the reasons have been the same as what's been festering since Brexit with the added factor that the Conservatives increased immigration to record level...
Labour won with 411 seats (up 211 from 2019) and 33.3% of the popular vote (9,708,716 votes) vs. 121 seats for the Conservatives (down 251) and 23.7% of the popular vote (6,828,925 ).
YMMV but I call a lead of 290 seats and 2,879,791 votes a landslide.
It was the Lib Dems that seem to have taken most of the Tories' voters: 72 seats (up 64) and 3,519,143 votes. The latter at least checks out. Reform was up 1 seat from 2019 for 5 seats total. Not quite a big splash then.
Labour also won big in Scotland against the SNP for the first time in years (but that was rather the fault of the SNP).
Data from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_general_el...
You're completely missing the point and where the votes went.
Labour got 9,708,716 votes in 2024 vs 10,269,051 in 2019. Starmer and Labour did not convince voters adn lost votes to the Greens.
What happened is that people did not vote for the Conservatives and instead voted Lib Dems and, especially, Reform UK, which got a massive 14% (3rd place and more than the Lib Dems). The Reform UK vote is because the Conservatives did not deliver on Brexit and even more importantly did the opposite of what they said on immigration, which reached record level.
The number of seats to Labour is a result of the above (Conservatives dropped so Labour candidate was elected) not because people voted Labour more than before. The surge is Reform UK.
So the same issues that have been at play in the Brexit referendum are still the key issues.
This BBC article shows how seats moved between parties. The seats lost by the Tories mainly went to Labour and the Lib Dems:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4nglegege1o
Reform's seats came from the Tories, unsurprisingly, and like you say Reform won more of the popular vote than the Lib Dems (4,117,221 vs. 3,519,143; not a wide margin) but Reform also campaigned in many fewer constituencies where they didn't have to compete directly with the three largest parties (not to mention Lord Buckethead and the Monster Raving Loony party, their nemeses). So maybe they have lots of supporters in certain areas, but only in those certain areas.
Reform is not a serious political force in the UK. They only renamed themselves from The Brexit Party, but they remain a single-issue party that appeals to a tiny minority of voters. The majority of the electorate are much more concerned with real issues like the economy, the NHS, education, law and order, and the environment. Brexit wasn't even a particularly big issue in the last elections. Even the Lib Dems, who had campaigned for a second referendum in 2019, laid it to rest this time and focused on more recent issues like sewage spills in rivers etc.
Might I also hog the mic a little while longer to say that I, personally, am mostly socially conservative, and am absolutely appalled both at the Tories and Reform, who are nothing but right-wing populists and demagogues that do not care a jot about all the things that socially conservative voters care for: jobs, order, stability, lawfulness, the economy, family, etc. And let's not forget that it was Margaret Thatcher's Tories that got the UK into the EU, and did so because it was beneficial to the economy, trade, and the stability of international politics. Exciting the EU was exactly antithetical to conservative ideals: it was a radical act of self-mutilation.
Labour are now the conservative party, the party of business and fiscal responsibility (and sitting on your hands while you kick the can down the road) and that's why they took all the Tories' votes: because the socially conservative constituency got fed up with the Tories' antics and, the Brexit fever having passed, wanted to go back to order and stability.
Was Kamalas campaign demeaning to the working class and alienating men?
I was under the impression that the Dems were doing more for the working class, and that Trump was alienating women.
It's a good marketing case-study.
Costed policies that are feasible and attainable in one-term? Boring
Promises of fantastic wealth and glory? Much more appealing
Same thing the Brexit campaign failed on.
Flooding the country with millions of undocumented workers to compete with Americans is not a favor to the working class. That is a hand out to corporations.
I can’t find any statistical reporting to back there being millions more undocumented immigrants coming into the country in the last 4 years. Data-backed reporting indicates that we’ve had ~11 million undocumented workers since the 2005 with little change until 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...
Any chance you know where to find some more?
Look at monthly border patrol contacts with people crossing the border illegally. About 55k/mo recently with much higher numbers in 2023.
It seems that most undocumented workers are doing jobs left unfilled by Americans, for example farm labor.
They’re unfilled because they don’t want to pay competitive wages.
I take no position on why these jobs are unfilled by Americans. But trying to claim these jobs are stolen or taken by undocumented workers (as implied by the comment to which I originally responded) is just wrong. If I assume you are correct (and it is in fact a quite plausible theory), I would allege the jobs are being stolen from American workers by the employers. Certainly the employers are relatively more profitable as a result of their shenanigans, if you are correct.
Ah, yes, because all those people are working at Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft.
It's a handout to anyone buying those services and a loss to anyone selling them (trade workers).
Companies can't "just hire" illegal immigrants in most states - the majority of the ones Trump won.
It's also a hand out to middle class, who cosume a lot of services provided by illegal imigrants (landscaping, renovation, cooking in restaurants etc.). The Dems kept the price of maintaining a nice lawn low.
The working class and young men (all young people really) have been completely left out of the economic recovery. Harris saying she would change nothing about what Biden has been doing was a huge problem. She tried to address it later.
At the end of the day, "it's the economy, stupid".
Both represent the working class, just different subsets. Rural working class vs urban working class.
Depends on who you ask. Both sides demonize the other, but say they don't. Republicans are just much, much better at it. The ads and rhetoric are all designed to solicited emotional responses from the constituency, putting them in a very easy position to "Other" anyone who disagrees. If you can make your followers feel like they are disenfranchised then it's a simple matter to control them by promising to be the solution for their discontent.
Project 2025 also helped, since Democrats answered it with shock and horror instead of countering with their own improved version. Say what you will about the depravity contained within those pages, but Trump voters hold it up as "at least it's a plan" without having read it, much like their other beloved book, The Bible. Knowing that, it was quite easy for the Trump campaign to whip up support.
As much as I want to end with some pithy comment like "manipulation is a hell of drug," I can't. Half the country just got permission to put their ugly truths on display and they certainly did not disappoint. I have trouble laughing about that anymore.
> Republicans are just much, much better at it.
Isn't it the Democrats who sling words like nazi, fascist, racist, deplorable, trash?
When one guy is talking about domestic military deployments and shooting his political antagonists, and it’s not clear that the courts will stop him, then I do indeed think the F” word is in order.
The rest of it is self evident, but I’m not going to be the one to say it out loud.
It was not, but the Trump campaign continuously lied about it. Trump lied and lied and lied about the democratic party being anti-men, anti-cis, anti-Christian, Kamala being low IQ, and whatever other stupid shit he could think about, but somehow it's Harris fault for being "too divisive" (not sure how).
Trump is the incarnation of a thin-skinned bully, he allows himself the worst but will cry as loud as possible on the first sign of a backslash.
If people who voted for him are not stupid, they certainly act like it.
And I view Kamala as a fake, policy flip-flopping, question dodging word salad spewer.
> If people who voted for him are not stupid, they certainly act like it.
This attitude of "you must be stupid if you don't see things my way" I expect on Reddit, but am disappointed to see it here.
> if you don't see things my way
This attitude of putting words in people's mouths I expect on Reddit, but I am disappointed to see it here.
They literally said anyone who voted for Trump, which they obviously disagree with, is stupid or acts like it
> If people who voted for him are not stupid, they certainly act like it.
Being stupid is not a prerequisite to being apathetic.
The Kamala campaign had one and only one major problem.
COVID stimulus and an economic slowdown from 2020 caused four years of inflation in the entire world, and people see the price of milk going up and punish the incumbent (not even the person who was in charge in 2020.
At which point, it doesn't matter how you campaign, or if the opposing candidate is actual Satan, nobody's going to vote for the incumbent.
It also doesn't help that the press normalized actual insanity that would not have been tolerated from anyone else, and collectively pretended that it's normal and reasonable behavior.
It does matter how you campaign. Very few people live without access to information beyond the price of milk. If you see that global inflation is a thing and that it is a topic of importance for potential voters you could acknowledge that it exists and work on your messaging/make it look like you're trying to do something to fix it.
The messaging that really gets through to people who can't understand that is naked, blatant lies. It worked with Brexit, and it worked yesterday.
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Yep. Hence the recent push to kneecap the education in States - be it book bans, forced Bible studies or other eye-popping regressions. Watching this unfold across the pond was a bewildering experience.
I would have thought young people having access to the internet would have allowed them to educate themselves and see through bullshit, but apparently not.
I really do think this is the beginning of the end for the US. At least I have front row tickets to the show.
I think this is the middle of the end. The beginning of the end was probably 2000-2001.
Who are you calling uneducated? Just because your have an opinion doesn’t make you an authority on what people under other life conditions need to lead a successful life. Speak for yourself.
> Just because your have an opinion doesn’t make you an authority on what people under other life conditions need to lead a successful life.
That has nothing to do with anything. Every single person voting on the economy for Trump, blaming Biden for inflation is an example of a lack of education. Just for one example.
There's a reason college educated people vote so differently to non college educated people on average.
Again, it’s an opinion. It doesn’t make it so just by having it.
It's an opinion the way gravity an opinion, and those who disagree have an opinion the way thinking the earth is flat is an opinion.
The difference is one is backed by hard data.
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and everybody just pointing out that climate protection cannot be forced onto a population is also framed as a climate change denier. i don't deny climate change. but i don't see why current generations' lifes should be tougher just to help out future generations. there needs to be a healthy balance.
That's what the previous generation said in the 90s. They could afford that choice, because they knew they would likely be dead before climate change started really affecting everyday life. Our generation – those who are not close to retirement – does not have the same luxury. Our future will be tougher anyway, both from the climate change itself and from the efforts to mitigate its effects.
Do you want your children to have a better life than you? They won’t unless we start putting in the work to fix climate change.
As a species we took on some climate debt to improve our standard of living, and we’ve been talking bigger loans every year. Those loans are coming due in the form of larger and more frequent weather-based disasters as well as health problems for millions. If we start paying off the loan more aggressively now, we can help prevent harsher payment plans for the next 50 years.
You don’t pay off a house all at once, but you’ll thank your future self for paying it off earlier rather than later.
i don't have children and i don't care about the future of our species. solution is easy - don't bring children into this world. having said that; life always finds a way and even dire future projections won't be much worse (maybe not even close) to stone ages, dark ages or natives living in a jungle. and they all did well enough and do. that's how it is.
Have you been living under a rock? Our current lives are already tougher because of climate change, and it's only going to get worse. More extreme and more frequent weather events (droughts, floods, heat waves, ...) are already happening.
> I don't see why current generations' lives should be tougher just to help out future generations.
Most people want a good life not only for them but also for their children, and their children's children. I don't have children, but I still want a good life for future generations. Is that not simple basic human decency?
Note that the longer we wait, the more difficult we make it ourselves to change things, and the more tough even our own lives are going to be, even ignoring future generations.
> There needs to be a healthy balance.
Yes. The status quo is not a healthy balance (or arguably any kind of balance).
People with these beliefs tend to largely vote Trump. On the other hand, not every one who votes Trump has these beliefs. You can't just inverse this.
> think a zygote is equivalent to an infant
Missouri and Florida were won by Trump and both passed constitutional amendments to guarantee abortion access.
> think vaccines cause autism
I don't think this is a partisan issue. I've spoken to plenty of liberals who believe similar things. Basically the "crunchy mom" stereotype.
Florida's failed to pass
Thanks, I didn't realize that it needed 60%. It only got ~57%.
But it outperformed Trump in the vote totals, so the point stands.
The road is clear now for the right-wing to ban abortion federally.
He released a video the other day specifically to clarify that he wishes to leave it to the states to decide and that it's not a federal issue.
Which is getting way to close to real life Gilead.
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> We should never doubt climate change as is presented to us,
Oh god, you're one of them, aren't you?
It's not like there's literally decades of evidence showing climate change to be objective truth...
Sigh.
Great job.
Please understand the "as is presented to us".
I'm not denying climate change as a whole or in absolute, I just want to point out that there's enough evidence to think that the world as we know it won't actually end in 2012 as some studies indicate.
Climate change is a part of Earth's lifecycle. There have been ice ages, and there have been periods like jura, when it was warmer. It's all natural.
What you probably mean is how humans influence this cycle; whether accelerating or delaying it, in effect disrupting it. For that, there's no evidence; however, there are many politician lobbyists (and yes, also scientists taking advantage of juicy grants to deliver what was ordered) going to capitalize on the fear that it might be.
> how humans influence this cycle; whether accelerating or delaying it, in effect disrupting it. For that, there's no evidence;
Le sigh.
Here is a graph to explain the difference between what's happening now and previous changes:
https://xkcd.com/1732/
Do you get it?
~99.9% of studies agree on human-caused climate change [0].
We know, with absolute certainty for an undeniable fact, that Exxon's own climate scientists skillfully and accurately predicted climate change as a result of increasing fossil fuel use [1].
And we know that Exxon's response to that was to systematically sow doubt for decades, using tobacco-lobby style FUD tactics.
And yet you want us to err on the side of apocalypse. "What if we create a better world, and it was all for nothing".
You've been conned. I know how difficult it is to show someone they've been made a fool of, and I won't try. In fact, I agree with you that in many cases science ought to be questioned - lobotomies, mockery of germ theory, racism presented as science based, Daszak's infamous Lancet paper, etc.
On climate change though, there's very little to respect on the side of deniers. I would argue that, at this point, denying anthropogenic climate change amounts to treason against life.
0 - https://phys.org/news/2021-10-humans-climate.html
1 - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...
Again, I find it very small-minded to imply that I'm a denier because I advocate for questioning what we are told. Furthermore, you are putting words on my mouth which make no sense at all.
People should understand there can be healthy middle grounds, which Parent obviously struggles with.
I don't deny anthropogenic climate change, on the contrary, I'm believe it's real and there's evidence for it.
I am, however, sceptical of how it's being presented and used.
An odd choice; to present your points layered in snark and sarcasm, then complain that you weren't fully understood.
> I am, however, sceptical of how it's being presented and used.
Then say that. Poe's law is rampant on this topic. If you want to be understood, then you need to write clearly and plainly.
> People should understand there can be healthy middle grounds
We're so, so far from a healthy middle ground on the discussion around climate change; and comments like yours above push in the wrong direction.
Questioning "what we are told" on climate change without differentiating between what 99.9% of scientists are saying, and what political/industry goons are saying, is guaranteed to receive clapback from any right minded individual.
So, don't act surprised when there's pushback. It's not "small-minded", it's people responding sensibly to the words you wrote.
I concede you're partially right, and I was later regretting my tone, until I re-read a few of the comments and answers. Still, I actually agree with the content of what you're saying, although maybe not the intention or the conclusions.
My tone is, after all, pushback, precisely because we didn't start from a middle ground to begin with (parent's comment). I am pushing in a direction. You might disagree with it, and that's fine.
> differentiating between what 99.9% of scientists are saying, and what political/industry goons are saying
Even if what scientists say can be inaccurate, as has happened throughout history, the point is rather that I question what politicians or the industry says, based on Science, because while the science might be correct, the message is easily corrupted.
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5 logical fallacies in 10 words that's a pretty good score!
Be fair - I actually count at least 8. That's impressive af for 10 words.
Red herring, whataboutism, false dilemma, straw man, tu quoque, hasty generalization, moral equivalence, and appeal to extremism.
And with a dehumanization cherry on top.
Perhaps listing fallacies without adressing the core concern isn't the WINNING strategy you hoped it would be.
My core concern is that you feel comfortable talking about "removing" countries.
My secondary concern is your refusal to acknowledge/engage with the data which was presented to you, both in text and in interactive graphs.
And that's more than enough concern for me to refuse further engagement.
Hang on, what exactly tf do you mean by "remove"?
... Also, yes, the West is responsible for the vast majority of CO2 release. It's not remotely close [0].
* The United States has emitted more CO2 than any other country to date: at around 400 billion tonnes since 1751, it is responsible for 25% of historical emissions [at 4% of world population].
* This is twice more than China – the world’s second-largest national contributor [18% of world population].
* The 28 countries of the European Union (EU-28) – which are grouped here as they typically negotiate and set targets on a collaborative basis – is also a large historical contributor at 22%.
* Many of the large annual emitters today – such as India and Brazil – are not large contributors in a historical context.
* Africa’s regional contribution – relative to its population size – has been very small. This is the result of very low per capita emissions – both historically and currently.
0 - https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
OK but what does cumulative historic data have to do with anything. It's a dynamic system, it's about of rates of release and removal. Might as well list total contribution by the mammoths.
To declare an arbitrary date when a human being starts to be a human being is so hypocritical, its no longer funny. Actually, I would call that ignorant and evil.
> To declare an arbitrary date when a human being starts to be a human being is so hypocritical
How is that avoidable?
200,000 BC, were we still humans? 2 mya? 20?
Or for individuals, why care about a fertilised egg rather than (as per Monty Python) "every sperm is scared"?
No matter what we pick, it's arbitrary.
We're using abortion as birth control, in at least 90% of the cases, if not more. Because we dont want to tell the people involved that they have responsibilities in life, and if they dont want children, they are supposed to keep their legs closed or use some other form of birth control. The motivation is clear, its a convenience. But morally, its absolutely evil. I used to see it differently, but that was for my own convenience. Because I secretly hoped that if I ever accidentally knock a women up, I could avoid my responsibility if she is willing to abort. 20 years later, I realize its my responsibility, and I cant make a doctor kill a human being just because I would like to have an easy life.
> But morally, its absolutely evil.
At what level of development is a human foetus anatomically distinguishable from a cow foetus?
There's no fact-based reason to draw the line in any particular place. We, humanity, don't know what "personhood" really is beyond the laws we write while guessing and the just-so stories we tell each other to justify those laws.
That's why I'm vegetarian, and why I'd become vegan quickly as soon as someone can get milk from GM bacteria. (And sell it in supermarkets).
It's also one of two reasons why I try to be nice to LLMs: just in case. (The other reason takes it as read they have no experience of existence: by being trained on humans, they'll do better and worse exactly when real humans would do better and worse, and that means worse on holiday season and when getting insulted).
> We, humanity, don't know what "personhood" really is
It's self-awareness, at least in general and as considered by a court when granting it to a chimp.
It's also why I would likely never go vegan, although I do advocate for a drastic overhaul of animal welfare standards.
Self-awareness itself is poorly defined. So is consciousness, so is sentience, so is intelligence — and by some (but not all) definitions those are four* different things.
* or 5, if this list also has "personhood" in it
> Self-awareness itself is poorly defined.
No, not really. It has pretty standard definitions in philosophy and science, or it wouldn't have been able to be tested for over several decades. I suggest spending some time reading the wiki, it gives a pretty detailed overview.
The only point you have is about consciousness, and we don't need to understand the entire thing to understand parts of it or observe it, just like gravity.
Self awareness can mean:
• The ability to recognise one's own body as distinct from that of others, as demonstrated by plants.
• The ability to pass the mirror test, which some AI pass, but whose relevance is widely debated in animal psychology both on the grounds of sensory chauvinism and because it may cause both false positives and false negatives owing to us not being able to converse with the animals we're testing.
• Introspection, except that now we've got LLMs responding much the same way Turing hoped they would when outlining his eponymous test and suggesting that a "viva voce" interrogation would have us know if the machine was innovative or "learnt it parrot fashion"*.
As humans are also demonstrably great at confabulating reasons for their acts (see: split brain surgery, specifically experimental research on patients' cognitive functioning after surgery), it is unclear whether humans score any differently than LLMs in this test irregardless of if LLMs do or don't count as people in any other sense.
• Qualia: nobody knows.
• Mindfulness, meditation and spirituality: arguably only those who explicitly practice the appropriate mental techniques, e.g. Buddhist monks and similar.
• Public/social awareness of self-standing in community: everyone who is "cringe" fails.
* fun fact: AI critics have been stochastically parroting the stochastic parrot criticism since at least 1949
> Self awareness can mean:
Like I said, it's actually very well defined because it's been being studied for decades at this point. Just because it can sometimes be an overloaded term in colloquial usage doesn't negate that.
I again suggest you give the wiki page a read. It's quite in-depth and detailed with plenty of good references.
It's overloaded in academic research.
That makes it not well defined.
I did in fact read the Wikipedia page, and also have an A-level in philosophy, which means I've written more about this in three homework esseys than the total length of the English Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness
> That makes it not well defined.
It's absolutely well defined it's just a complex topic. Most of the examples you gave in your last reply are never defined as self-awareness in an academic paper, e.g. qualia is always separate and the mirror test has always just been an indicator not the thing itself.
Throwng in self-awareness in that context seems like a very slippery slope. That sounds like you are advocating for legal infanticide?
Besides, if you believe animals are not self-aware, why d you care about "welfare"?
I do care about welfare, and the difference between infants and zygotes is sentience.
Most medical professionals and ethicists consider 24 weeks to be the reasonable cutoff for abortion because this is when the fetus starts to develops sentience.
The reason this is relevant is because that is the first stage of development capable of having an identity relationship with the future person that fetus/infant will become.
Animals don't have to be self-ware to suffer. Not introspectively self-aware at least.
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No, thats not what I said, and you know that. I believe we are using abortion to a very high degree for basic birth control. I am aware that there are exceptions, like those you mentioned. However, while necessary, these exceptions also pose a threat. Because if we have abortion legisation which only allows for abortions in cases of rape, millions of women will, out of desperation, start to claim rapes which never happened. Its a bad situation, no matter what we do.
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The abortion thing is very much down to opinion.
Also, why is bacteria life on mars but a clump of cells is not life on earth? ;p
There's no winning this. That's why it's actually smart to let the states decide this - that way Trump has no say in it.
> why is bacteria life on mars but a clump of cells is not life on earth
That is conflating life (the ability is eat, shit, reproduce, and the potential to late become sentient) with actual sentient life, which is not correct.
Also, no one is planning to ban antibiotics because bacteria is considered life so we can't do anything to save the host by killing it.
> Also, why is bacteria life on mars but a clump of cells is not life on earth? ;p
Because the bacteria on Mars would plausibly exist on it's own. On a different planet.
A newborn can't exist on its own though. It needs to nurse, has to have someone change its diapers, etc.
>A newborn can't exist on its own though. It needs to nurse, has to have someone change its diapers, etc.
A newborn by literal definition can exist on its own. It has been born.
A newborn can breath, metabolize foods, and does not depend on being connected to another life giving organism.
The more appropriate work you're looking for is "care". You need to care for a newborn for it to survive.
You can provide care specifically for a newborn. You cannot specifically provide care for a fetus, you are providing care for the mother.
I know all of this is falling on deaf ears though.
The mother is providing care for the unborn child with her body. Seems like needing care vs. being unable to exist on its own is a distinction without a difference.
We could make it not opinion with ease. Make the test:
“Can the fetus survive without the host body?”
That’s a medical question that will slowly move toward not aborting ever. And it solves the medical issues as well. “This fetus is killing the host” always allows for removal, because we can either keep them alive, or it can’t survive.
Then the folks who want more babies to reach term can focus on improving medical technology instead of getting involved with the mess that is people’s love lives.
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Huh? Since when is a zygote not alive? It has a cell membrane, contains genetic material, has metabolism, can maintain homeostasis, and can grow. That's pretty much the definition of life.
Do you also think neurons, muscle cells, etc are also not alive?
The abortion debate is not about whether or not the thing that gets removed during abortion is life--I doubt you can find any competent biologist who would say it is not--but rather whether that particular cell or group of cells should be treated different than other cells or groups of cells in your body.
E.g., why should abortion be any different from removing tonsils or from circumcision, both of which also involve the removal and death of living cells from the body?
> Do you also think neurons, muscle cells, etc are also not alive?
There is a difference between something being 'alive' (although I think the examples you give are dubious), and being a 'life'.
By that logic, we should also consider banning antibiotics. In a world where we consider a cell or a small grouping of cells to be a life (rather than just alive) antibiotics are essentially a tool for genocide.
The whole purpose of antibiotics is to kill life, and the term itself means 'against life' in Greek.
That does not mean that it is necessary a tool for genocide; conversely almost anything can be a tool for genocide depending on how it is used.
That is exactly my point. People are conflating being alive (explicitly in this thread in the sense that a single cell is considered alive) with having a life that should be preserved. Complaining that if we found single celled life on Mars that we'd protect it even to our great inconvenience, but we will end a single cell or small group to save a host body, are making their argument based upon a false equivalence. Any life that might be found on Mars isn't ever posing a risk to a sentient host, and those defending harsh abortion controls because “all life should have a chance even single cells” don't extend “all life” to, well, all life.
How long until you guys ban periods...
Why is this attached to my comment? My comment has nothing whatsoever to do with abortion. (Which I not only do not want to ban, at the very least I'd like it to go back to how it was under Roe v Wade).
My comment was about people misusing the terms life and alive. The correct way to argue that abortion should be legal is not to redefine life and/or alive so that some living cells or collections of living cells do not qualify rather than trying to redefine common terms used by biologists.
The correct way is to argue that we only only protect some cells or collections of cells and not others and then to argue that fetal cells belong in the not protected group. The question then comes down to deciding what it is that makes some groups of living cells protected but not others. Probably the best argument would be something along the lines that before that collection of cells has grown and developed to the point that it has a brain that can think and feel it is not really different from a tumor or other collection of cells that we don't protect.
A zygote is not a life? Is bacteria "a life" for you?
You probably meant "human life".
A zygote and a bacteria have some fundamental differences.
> You probably meant "human life".
No, I said exactly what I meant to say and meant exactly what I said.
> A zygote and a bacteria have some fundamental differences.
Interesting. What makes a bacteria "a life" and zygote not "a life"?
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Could you please stop taking this thread further into political flamewar? You've been doing it a lot, and we're trying to avoid that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Yes, they can.
Not voluntarily, only due to medical necessity. As I said.
> It seems to me you like to substitute what you want to be true for reality. That's the opposite of critical thinking.
The irony here.
Not trying to continue a political flamewar as per dang, but correcting blatant misinformation like the above should be everyone's social responsibility.
I don't care for the abortion topic but that cell comparison is really good.
No it's not. "a [human] life" and "life" are completely different things. For example: a tree
True. Although the scale for anything from sperm to baby is probably human<->animal<->bacteria life. I liked it because it definitely shows it's a form of "life" in an accessible way. Where on the scale it falls and whether that life should be protected is an entirely different matter.
I remember reading about college professors who shows a 1 day old zygote or whatever and a skin cell which appear pretty indistinguishable from one another.
Does any reasonable person believe that zygote at that stage is truly equivalent to a human life?
Next up no one should be masturbating because each sperm is potentially the next Mozart or Einstein.
How do you feel about cancer cells?
I know, right? It's not mine. I don't really care for it either (except for the "kill at 9 months" thing), but it's interesting to see the two groups argue about it. Both seem to think they're undoubtedly 100% right, as a fact, etc.
Compromises must be made!
Allowing abortions up to some reasonable time limit is the compromise.
By that logic ending slavery should have been a 'compromise' as well.
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I couldn't agree more. This "my political enemy is stupid" approach is very divisive and will not lead to good outcomes.
How come? Trump’s just won an election with it.
There does seem to be a real double standard here.
I realized the stupidity argument during covid first, and it all came from the left. So much contempt, a reason why I no longer can identify with liberals. In fact, I am disgusted by what I remember from 2020/21.
But Scholz, Esken and von der Leyen are really popular! Oh wait, we're talking US politics here, my bad ...
If one handyman or one farmer or one trucker stopped working, no one would really care. If all CS researchers stopped working, I'd wager people would care, just as they would if handymen/farmers/truckers stopped working.
I thing OP point is that if the trucker stopped working people and businesses will be impacted that day (before he gets replaced, easy with trucker, not with labour). The impact will be more direct and tangible way than, say, a CS researcher not showing up this morning.
don't take the voters as stupid, don't impose candidates who can't 1 win a 1 horse race.
pretty much the democratic party has to introspect and stop blaming voters for their failed campaign.
Bill Ackman, https://x.com/billackman/status/1854019674385547454
> The Democratic Party.. lied to the American people about the cognitive health and fitness of the president. It prevented, threatened, litigated and otherwise eliminated the ability of other [Democratic] candidates for the primary to compete, to get on ballots, and to even participate in a debate.
Isn't that sentence literally true for the Republican party as well? So how would it be a differentiating factor?
There was a 2024 Republican Presidential Primary, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Republican_Party_presiden...
And it turns out the voters don’t seem to actually care about the cognitive health of the President, nor do they seem to care about being lied to about it.
Joe Rogan's three-hour interview of one candidate got 40M+ views.
Soon: "Terrence Howard nominated to head Department of Education"
The Republican Party didn't hide the President of the United States from the public because he was no longer able to speak publicly.
Yes, they do hide Trump's health reports from the public - or rather he never releases any information like other presidents do. Hell, he GOT SHOT and never gave any details of what happened.
I agree that Democrats denying Biden's cognitive decline was a disaster.
The gibberish that routinely comes out of their candidate barely qualifies as speech.
The reality is, nobody who was wringing their hands about Biden's cognitive abilities, or his son's legal problems actually cared about either issue. If they did, they wouldn't have voted for an mentally declining criminal today.
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Agree 100%. The "am I wrong? no, it's the voters who are wrong!" is a sure sign the next campaign will flop as well.
A large percentage of Americans aren't interested in what the Democratic Party is selling. The party can either stick to their policies and live with these kinds of showing, or take some time to really think about what the American voter is looking for.
I look at the grander picture. It’s not that the democrats aren’t connected, it’s that the American people are culturally bankrupt. The romans became decadent after all, culturally incapable of maintaining their empire and slowly declining in power and influence over Europe. The American idea itself is in decline.
> The American idea itself is in decline.
America isn't an idea any more than England is an idea. We're a specific group of people with a specific heritage.
If you want another word: American culture is in decline.
I don’t believe you are correct. People who vote for a man as debased, self centered, sexually depraved, and criminally inclined as Trump are “wrong”. White men latched onto a horrible person as their savior. If that’s what they want then they deserve what comes. But the people who don’t want that should stick to their principles.
What does it say about Trump that so many of his lawyers and advisors ended up in jail and that so few former cabinet members endorsed him? What does it say about his supporters who cared not that he raped children with his pal Epstein?
Remember when Cruz and Lindsey Graham spoke honestly about Trump just before November 2016? Recall what they said then to what they say now. It’s a cult.
> People who vote for a man as debased, self centered, sexually depraved, and criminally inclined as Trump are “wrong”.
Maybe you're too young to remember Bill Clinton?
He was accused of sexual harassment by a number of women (including a rape). His relationship with Lewinsky (22 years old), is highly exploitive in terms of the power he held over her career. While he might have supported women's right politically, he was certainly exploitive in his personal life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_assault_an...
There were also a number of "questionable business dealings" in his past. Arkansas land deals, Whitewater, almost impeached by Congress for lying.
But I'm sure you'll say "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Republicans". Ok, then don't blame Trump voters when they think "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Democrats".
So while people got worked up, he got re-elected handily.
It's funny to me when people entirely overlooked Clinton's life because they liked him as a President and they liked his policies.
You'd think the Democrats would know this.
The Clintons earned $120 million in 10 years after he was President. Hilary gave 30 minute speeches at Goldman Sachs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clearly these were payouts for repeal of Glass-Steagal and other policies. He was a predator and not deserving of the adulation he got. She became senator for New York by having it basically handed to her.
It would benefit humanity if people were taught to be consistent in their views. If they understood that extremism is when the cause is more important than the truth.
But I'm sure you'll say "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Republicans". Ok, then don't blame Trump voters when they think "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Democrats".
You’d be wrong. I don’t have your apparent level of inconsistency.
I am sure you’ve heard the phrase “Trump with a dictionary”
I never have but I think this is doubly funny since I've more than once heard Trump derided as "orange Bill Clinton" by hardline fiscal conservatives.
I think the only lesson that Democrats can learn from the past three elections is that women have no chance at presidency. If anything, as an outsider, the campaign Harris led, seemed to reach vastly more people than Biden's.
I am 100% convinced a Republican woman could win. I was in touch with a lot of deep-red middle-of-the-country Republican voters and candidates for state and federal offices when Palin was the VP pick. Shooting-stuff-in-political-ads sorts. It was practically all they talked about. They liked her a ton better than McCain. I think they’d have gladly voted for her at the top of the ticket (granted, they lost that one, but I think an R woman could absolutely be elected President, probably more easily than a Democratic one).
That would be missing the forest for the trees in my view. I could see it having an impact, but when 60% of people say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, putting up a candidate who was in power the last four years just isn’t going to work. Biden would not have won a primary, and neither would she have
People who vote for a sexual predator, a conman, pathological liar, a felon, a cheat, and a person who obviously has narcissistic personality disorder are stupid. We are living in a tyranny of the stupid. He’s the President we deserve.
It clearly shows how bad the D candidate/policy is, such that people prefered the R candidate with all the flaws you listed. The eye opener should be why people rejected the D candidates.
It's not about policy though and it never was. There is no way the Democrats could have "policy-ed" themselves out of this.
I'm inclined to agree with you. At the same time, I don't think Kamala should have spent some of the limited time she had cozying up to people who wouldn't vote for her, antagonizing her base, and for the most part sidelining the people she had to convince.
It’s a white nationalist backlash. They cared not about the messenger; only the message. It’s also the product of Russian disinformation. Russia has perfected the art of sowing division and faux outrage. We’ve done it to other countries so we deserve it in some sense. We’ll see a rise of toxic masculinity. Women exercising sexual autonomy and gaining power is not something snowflake men can handle.
Such is my belief. I could be entirely wrong.
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The is right out of Alexander Dugin's playbook.
Russia and China have been waging a cyber war against the U.S. for a long time now. Russian accounts on social media have been effective at sowing dissent, chaos, conspiracy theories, and false information. Tim Pool and others on Russia’s payroll is clear evidence of this.
The lesson of the day is that the U.S. is far more conservative than I thought. Trump is the President we deserve and we deserve what comes next. White rural voters will not be helped by him and I will not shed any tears at their plight.
> Russian accounts on social media have been effective at sowing dissent, chaos, conspiracy theories, and false information.
Let me see... are you saying the CIA is sleeping at the wheel and don't know how to sow disinformation by themselves, and that a third world country like Russia is somehow more capable at this kind of game?
You should the entirety of what I’ve written.
Russia has perfected the art of sowing division and faux outrage. We’ve done it to other countries so we deserve it in some sense.
It’s possible that Russia is better at some things than the U.S.
Everyone at this level of power is either psychopath or sociopath. So it's not like the voters have any choice in that.
For the most part. But one can vote for the party that is more supportive of human rights, the environment, etc.
Also don't blatantly exaggerate and lie in journalism:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/01/politics/donald-trump-liz-che...
As a foreigner, the Democratic party just lives of to crying wolf on the Republican party without offering any meaningful difference. And people have gotten tired of it, judging by the fact that Trump is not getting more voters than in 2020, but they are getting considerably less.
Maybe I'm a bit too optimistic, but rather than "people want Trump" I read all this debacle as "people want something different from the Democrats".
Nah, the problem is that Republicans have openly played a dirty game for almost a decade with ZERO repercussions. They flaunt the laws and conventions of politics and nothing happens.
Democrats still play by the rules for some reason and don't call out the shit done by the other party with simple enough terms.
This. One side sticks to the rules and watches silently while the other side slowly undermines them.
At the same time, the Republicans have perfected the twin strategies of sowing distrust in neutral media reorting and playing the victim card consistently to everything, even their own attacks.
And Donald's first term taught them that when you lie ALL THE TIME, nobody can fact-check you effectively. Just stick to the script and talking points, no matter what the question.
By the time the first ad-libbed bold faced lie is checked and sourced, he has told 42 more. It's not a game you can win by playing by the rules.
Hispanic and black voters won’t turn out to vote for a woman, regardless of race.
Next time, run a 6’2” white guy with good hair.
They turned out for Obama so it’s definitely not a white thing, as much as people wish it was
Gavin Newsom tried.
There might not be a next time
shrugs
Don't kill squirrels just before election
The vice-president doesn't order squirrel murders.
For those who haven't heard of this:
https://checkyourfact.com/2024/11/04/fact-check-did-trump-re...
But it is a shiny example of what most sane people call Too Much Government.
People love to hear Trump saying he will drain the swamp.
I think calling this too much government inaccurate. IMO it is government not doing enough what it should do, and putting its hands into private issues too much. So cutting government regulation won't work.
This is a case of a home raid and tossing the house that resulted in the killing of a pet. If you don't think that is too much government power and abuse, I don't understand your world view.
In my ideal world, a govt. rep would reach out or knock, even with a warrant, to do an animal wellness check and remove the animal in case of abuse and to cite the owner and specify the correct forms needed to keep the squirrel.
The squirrel died because it bit a cop and cops LOVE killing pets. Objectively they kill a lot of pets.
In this election, the Democrats were unable to offer the majority of voters the past they fondly remember or the future they can look forward to. It's that simple.
Succinct. Haven't seen a relevant explanation phrased like that.
The message is the same even for non-America - we need to engage with these folks and stop disparaging them. We need to talk to them, we need to understand where they're coming from, we need to help clear the air between "us and them" so that there won't be an "us and them" and so we can _together_ avoid people that tell us what we want to hear.
I bought that line in 2016 and again in 2020. I'm not saying I'm done with trying to understand, but that level of fks to give is very minimal now.
Obviously, I don't think 50% of the population is stupid, but every time I try to "understand" it's becoming increasingly clear it's about his "charisma" and "our team" and less about hard policies.
People out here voting against their own interests or blaming things on ignorance (inflation, etc.).
> 50% of the population is stupid
That would be the charitable interpretation, the alternate is that they are knowingly misogynistic, deeply racist and have strong fascist leanings to follow a flawed corrupt politician with cult-like devotion.
It’s clear that people hunger for the lash. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
That's why Kamala lost: they called supporters of the other camp racist and misogynists like you're doing right now instead of discussing and listening to their grievances.
Shitting on your voter base is no way to win sympathy.
The marginal voter doesn't have grievances like that unless the country is seriously in trouble (like it was in 2008 and 2020.) They're not paying close enough attention to have them, nor do they have clear ideas about which piece of government is capable of addressing which problems. They have better things to do.
If you talk to the median voter their thinking will be like "something happened three years ago I was mad about" or "my husband wants us to vote this way because he saw it on TV" or "the Democrats want to legalize incest" or "I like voting for whoever I think is going to win" (and yes these are all real.) They especially do not have coherent opinions on economic policy.
Mainly the problem is the US doesn't have a coherent media ecosystem anymore and Republicans were better aligned with newer media, ie Facebook posts and bro-y podcasts like Rogan. So TV ads and "ground game" don't work.
Simply put, this chunk of the electorate doesn’t have any kind of grasp on the workings of government. As you say, their motivations for voting are simplistic and difficult for campaigns to reason about because they’re so particular to each individual.
Part of the reason why political media has seen such a decline in quality is because of that fundamental lack of understanding by the people. Neutral nuanced analysis doesn’t resonate because that’s some combination of too incomprehensible and not entertaining enough, which has led to the media landscape we have now where it’s turned to the televised version of junk food: hyper-processed with lots of salt and sugar and practically zero nutritional value.
That said, to some degree I don’t place fault on the people for this. A lot of it comes down to inadequacies in the education system when it comes to civics, wherein young people are not well equipped to become highly functional, fully conscious voting adults.
> don’t place fault on the people for this
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Economic vibes with simplistic immediate effects if truly were a major factor then 2020 Biden would have won with bigger margins than Reagan did .
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Countries with far poorer literacy and school attendance rates and patchy education systems vote quite well informed.
In India for example every candidate (party or independent) must have a simple symbol because many voters cannot read, yet nobody is saying Modi wins because of lack of awareness or good understanding of his Hindu nationalist agenda or extreme right wing policies.
It is the third election for both, voters have had a decade to see the effect of the policies have had first hand no matter what they have been told
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Body electorates aren’t as dumb as we like to explain away.
Education, economics, even disinformation (foreign and local) all play marginal role, but can’t explain the core
At some point we have to accept that this is a deeply racist(who come in all colors) misogynist society with facist Christo white nationalism deeply ingrained.
You have no idea if thats why she lost. Thats why you want to believe she lost but it could be things like inflation, immigration, and not having clear messaging. Also not distinguishing herself from an otherwise unpopular president.
If what you say is true, that only confirms the point.
We should hear their grievances on our bodily autonomy and healthcare ?
There are aspects where we can compromise, or empathize and learn to live together on such as economy or immigration, basic human decency and healthcare are not it.
Also bit rich that we have to listen to their grievances, they haven't afforded anyone that courtesy, or respected the process of democracy.
If the results were other way round, we would be hearing conspiracy theories about election interference non stop. You can only compromise with people acting in good faith, it is clear that majority of Americans don't want to do that.
But how Obama and Biden got elected then?
They were both men, it should be obvious .
Misogynistic was my first qualifier, it is not an coincidence that Trump has won only against women twice, and it is not an oversight that in 250 years America is nowhere close to electing a woman president.
That's a good point, although it was projected he would win against Biden.
Perhaps he may have, however June polls not a good indicator, it is lifetime away from November elections, politicians have recovered from such gaps.
But they weren't running against women.
Technically Obama was running against one, McCain had Palin on the ticket .I don’t think that made a difference, VPs don’t .
misogyny is hardly the only factor but if there was woman on the top of the ticket than it absolutely seem to be number one factor .
You have to keep in mind it just wasn’t symbolic like in 2016. There are real tangible immediate threats to reproductive healthcare that this election also represented.
> misogyny is hardly the only factor but if there was woman on the top of the ticket than it absolutely seem to be number one factor .
You're going to need to show your working here. How'd you get to this conclusion?
Maybe mankind ain't yet so developed that what you list isn't present in general population in large numbers, even majority.
Echo chambers like HN or typical workplace of typical HN user give skewed image how much rational folks out there generally are. Most people that I ever met are trivially susceptible to smart manipulation via emotions, even to the point of shooting their own foot.
"Am I out of touch? No, it's the American voter who is wrong"
You are so right. Thank heavens she was defeated.
I've read people say this over and over. And yet, I don't know of any single substantive position that Kamala has taken. She chose a vibes fight and she lost.
The common answer to that was often "just read this 90 page document where she vaguely describes her opinions". This isn't how it works, people.
Do you wait for candidate to come tell you their position? Even in smaller elections, I feel like its my job to find "my candidate".
look at the comment i’m replying to. if you go to both candidates pages, they’ll have their policy positions laid out. Kamala made none of them a part of her core message. She instead leaned bizarrely into the threat of fascism.
middle class taxes cuts, bringing back roe v wade.. all that..
She was weak on messaging, but her proposal for housing was good (improving affordability has appeal, but she failed to capitalize on it). What confounded this in part was that she probably meant to mostly stay in line with Biden's policies, and you can't connect with voters on that. They're concerned about inflation and the border. Biden's administration already fucked that up for her; they fixed the border, but too little too late (so what is there to say?), and while inflation has abated and wage-growth has improved, people still feel poorer than before 2020 (so what is there to say?).
I can't see how anyone else in her position would have done much better. I don't blame Harris much.
I think the lesson is you can't win an election with "Well they aren't like the other guy.."
The last 20 years of the UK is an interesting rollercoaster.
There was a massive international financial crisis that outed the Labour government and brought in a Tory/Lib Dem coalition government based on promises of government austerity.
There was an independence referendum in Scotland where the main campaign point for staying with England was to ensure they stayed in the EU etc.
Then the Tories managed to pin the blame for the failings of the coalition on the minor partner and drew a line under that for the next election.
Then there's brexit, which was really a vote to put an end to bickering inside the Tory party. But the population, narrowly voted to leave the EU! This was very much a protest vote.
Then there's a utter crazy story of quick rotation of prime ministers and scandal and sleeze and very very poorly-received budgets and things.
So then this year Labour are back, and their main strategy was 'at least we're not the Tories'. They are not popular, but they are not the incumbents.
The funny thing is that Labour is now 100% "like the Tories". It's the Tories who are no longer "like the Tories" and have morphed instead into a rabid populist party without real politics that bank instead on identity politics.
And then there's Nigel.
The UK is rapidly collapsing and at this point is a husk of a country in which nothing works except the City banking accounts.
The UK is just developed country facing the same problems associated with an aging population as every other developed country (and also many developing countries—sucks for them...). There's absolutely nothing special about the UK and if the UK is a failed state then so too is Germany (where I live) and the rest of Europe, and the only "successful" countries on the planet are the US, Switzerland and a handful of microstates.
Well at least the trains run...
... yeah, fuck it.
> There was an independence referendum in Scotland where the main campaign point for staying with England was to ensure they stayed in the EU etc.
in reality this was maybe priority #10
the main campaign point was currency
Also can't win with substantive policies or personal integrity either, so what's left?
She didnt explain why inflation happened. She didnt explain why dems did not crack down on the border until right wingers made an issue out of it. She didnt distance herself from biden. She didnt explain how she would protect abortion rights. I wanted her to win but she didnt have answers or her messaging was not getting through
Inflation: "inflation has come down over the last two years, a lot of it has been from the healing of the supply side of the economy.
What is that? Supply chains have improved. The labor force has expanded, partly due to increased immigration, and that's helped to take some of the edge off of the supply-and-demand imbalances that we had when inflation was very high two years ago." https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/examining-how-economic-pla...
Immigration: "After hitting a record high in December 2023, the numbers of migrants crossing the border has plummeted since then. Harris and the administration have credited their tough anti-asylum measures for stemming the flow, although increased enforcement on the Mexican side has also played a key role." https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2024/where-trum...
Abortion rights: "At one of her first campaign events, she stated that if Congress “passes a law to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States I will sign it into law.”" https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/how-kamala-ha...
If you don't like what her positions are that's your prerogative but it's just not true that she did not have answers to these questions.
> Inflation: "inflation has come down over the last two years, a lot of it has been from the healing of the supply side of the economy.
I think this is one of the disconnects: inflation has been decreasing. What I think people hear, which is wrong: the prices of things are coming down.
They're not coming down, they're increasing _slower_ than before, and before was bad. Prices for lots of things are much more expensive than before covid.
The reason that "inflation is better now" didn't stick is because half the country was telling the emperor they were clothed, and half the country saw a naked person.
A little bit of calculus could go a long way for understanding rates of change.
They teach calculus in high school, and most liberal arts majors don’t take calculus.
What is your point?
That's exactly how Keir Starmer's Labour won the last UK elections: "we're not like the Tories".
I think that's mainly why Biden won in 2020.
Of course 50% of the population is not stupid. It's much higher than that.
The problem really is that we need to accept that they are "stupid" but in an empathetic way, remembering that we were once stupid and ignorant. We took it for granted that other people wouldn't confuse correlation with causation, blaming Biden's presidency for inflation. But all of us thought correlation was causation at one point until somebody educated us on science. When a topic was confusing and complicated, we leaned on correlation to guide us until we learned better in formal education. It would be immensely difficult to explain to someone why groceries have become unaffordable without extensive exposition, but it's a hard problem that we should try to solve instead of just calling people ignorant in frustration.
Yes and the media needs to stop being so obviously biased because it both undermines their role as the arbiters of truth and it undermines the party they allegedly want to win
I liked this podcast from Zachary Elwood:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5DYBm6we1WcTtktFpqHj7K?si=A...
I was just thinking the exact opposite, maybe the US needs to split into two nations. I was drawing border lines in my mind around central regions and wondering how things would pan out if they seceded. The lack of geographic continuity would be a problem for the coasts, but perhaps they could join Canada.
Won't this be impossible since you have the urban/rural areas of the same state belonging to these two different nations ? At-least impossible without a gargantuan civil war that makes the 1861 war look like a toddler's quarrel.
Try splitting Georgia, where Harris wins a few populous counties with a 30 to 70 pp margin, and Trump leads the lump of smaller counties with a 30 to 70 pp margin.
They reelected the DA that's prosecuting Trump on one of the populous counties, on the same election where the state swung further towards Trump.
In the past, maybe. Trump won the popular vote last night. He swept almost everything, as painful as that is for me to say. There is no way to divide the country without mass migration which would never happen.
Didn't the south try this, before being forced back into the "union"?
True, that was an awkward episode. Now you've got me reading about the motivations for the civil war. I mean obviously slavery, but why go to war rather than let the Confederacy be a separate nation? Seems the fighting was over the political future of yet-to-be Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma (if I've got the right territories there), and whether they would have slavery, once populated.
That would need some population exchange.
Blue areas aren’t states. They are cities. Democratic voting counties account for over 70% of the nations gdp. Conservative counties quite literally cannot support themselves.
> Blue areas aren’t states. They are cities. Democratic voting counties account for over 70% of the nations gdp. Conservative counties quite literally cannot support themselves.
But they can feed themselves.
Not without illegal labor they can’t.
GDP is a flawed measure, and that's especially true when you look at the 70% figure in detail. For details see https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/gross-domestic-fraud
> Conservative counties quite literally cannot support themselves.
And yet they hold democratic counties hostage. Somewhat like parasites.
Conservative counties produce goods and food. Democratic counties produce rent, interest, financial fees, mortgages, insurance.
Conservative counties produce goods and food that can be produced anywhere.
Democratic counties produce goods that generally require an education and are significantly more valuable. Think big tech, big pharma, engineering, etc.
Democratic counties would be just fine without conservative counties. The inverse is not true.
It works the same way in other countries, such as the UK and Turkey - rural areas are where the traditionalists live.
It's much worse in the US though because the gap is so much wider. Even in the UK or Canada or Australia, the right is not opposing climate change or healthcare or anything reasonable to the same extent as in the US.
The last time the right got voted in in Australia, they revoked the carbon tax that the left had recently set up.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/southern-crossroads/...
Meanwhile the governing party in my home province in Canada is doing this:
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/11/06/UCP-Members-More-CO2-H...
How on earth does anyone think that is a good idea?
Sigh. It's always a minority of humanity that has to save the rest from themselves, as they kick and scream and resist every step of the way.
They absolutely are here in Canada. Especially around climate change because Canada is an oil exporter. And they will be emboldened by what just happened in the US.
Alberta outright banned renewables development for 6 months and then slapped a huge set of restrictions on them after that "moratorium" was lifted. A tax on electric car owners added. The conservative parties nationally are on a constant drum beat about the national carbon tax and it's doomed. Weak emissions caps we have are also doomed. Any little things that have been done for the last 10 years will be undone.
At a recent party convention in Alberta, the ruling party passed a climate denial resolution as official party policy.
Amazingly lots of people on this forum trying to sanitize what these people are about.
Cross the border from here in Canada into very "blue" New York and you'll drive through a huge swathe of what is actually "red" Trump country in Western New York.
Outside of the urban areas even "blue" states are red, or "purple."
The reality is that America voted for this guy. It's not nearly as regionally divided as liberals in America want to think.
For me, it means not going there anymore. I just won't cross the border for any reason.
Rural Canadians are eating up trump style rhetoric as fast as it can be minted.
Canada is next. There’s no escape from this kind of madness.
Yeah I live rural Ontario. Last municipal election people's lawns were covered with idiotic "Stop Woke" signs. And my parents are in rural Alberta. Oh boy.
Not with a bang but a whimper, etc. etc.
Why do you think Stop Woke" signs" are idiotic?
Hey...
Screw you, buddy.
It might at least be the correct time for blue states to stop subsidizing the existence of red states.
The Joye of Ye Taxes is that you cannot choose to stop paying them just because of a disagreement about how they are spent. Elections need to be won first.
We need to understand that such people want to be distracted and entertained.
Give them the show they want, promise them something and they happily make you their king.
They don't ask you to fulfill the promises. They just want to hear them.
That's it.
You're losing if you write like this, because this is liberal/left wing writing. If the voters prioritize strength and machismo, you should be insulting them even more. They don't mind, they'll just assume it's about someone else.
Meh, it is clear where they care coming from and they talk quite clearly. What we need to do is to stop like naïve Pollyanna's, stop relying on fact checks, stop pretending "both sides are equal" and engage with dirty fight they do.
What "dirty fight" are you envisioning? Prosecuting Trump in court doesn't appear to work and is disparaged as "lawfare". Biden calling Trump voters trash apparently backfires, but nothing Trump or his campaign says ever backfires.
I for one think the an anti-Trump campaign that just spammed his "grab them by the pussy, you can do anything" comment would've cut his support among religious voters significantly. It was mentioned in D-leaning spaces but never a campaign focus (at least, not in any of the attack ads I have seen - they were all about issues only D's care about, rallying the base rather than actually trying to care what non-base voters think).
The economy might be what swung this vote, but long-term it's hard to understate how much ground the D's have lost among religious voters for "embracing sexual immorality". Believe it or not, bringing up hypocrisy does work on many of them (at least it might make them stay home) and mere apologies won't erase it. Latinos are where this jumps out in statistics, but it's far from limited to them.
Possibly the reason D's didn't do that (much) was because it would have little down-ballot effect, and no effect on future candidates?
(on another angle, we could've seen "we have reined in Trump's inflation so at least it won't get worse", "Trump gave unconditional handouts without the Democrat-recommended constraints", etc.)
Prosecuting Trump in court is not dirty fight. It is something that should have happen, because being politician should not mean being lawless.
I envision actual politicians and journalists calling trump what he is more rather then less.
> politician should not mean being lawless
Well, the US Supreme Court decided more or less exactly that presidents can break the law and get away with it: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czrrv8yg3nvo
And "calling him what he is" has so far failed to sway his supporters, I don't see how it will do it now. OTOH, he (probably?) won't stand for election again, so the point is probably moot...
>the US Supreme Court decided more or less exactly that presidents can break the law and get away with it
no, they did not. The court pointed out that the remedy (specified in the Constitution) for a president who breaks the law is impeachment and conviction by the house and senate. After which, that former president could be subject to prosecution.
Democratic party goes out of its way to look center, be accommodating and non confrontial. It just does not work.
I stand by "politician should not mean being lawless". US Supreme Court being pro lawless when it comes to GOP is just politics of US Supreme Court. It does not mean law should not matter or that trying to apply law is fighting dirty.
"Lock her up!" Wasn't that the chant from some of his supporters?
It is funny how these things turn out and who actually does what in the end and how differently it is treated.
> Prosecuting Trump in court is not dirty fight. It is something that should have happen
I agree, but I call it "dirty fight" because that's what it's perceived as by the Trump supporters.
Trump and his supporters will say anything and accepting their framing again and again should be already seen as proven failure strategy. It just does not work.
It is not dirty fight, full stop. Dirty fight would be to act like Trump and his supporters do or approaching it.
Again, what specifically are you suggesting? To me, it looks as if neither the high nor the low road is working.
I suggest we stop with the "we need to engage with these folks and stop disparaging them" nonsense designed to create unequal situation where GOP and Trump can be arbitrary dirty, but everyone else needs to treat them with kids gloves and use euphemisms.
I suggest Democratic party to become more aggressive rather then forever trying to paint themselves as "the adult ones" and forever put themselves into center. It just does not work and serves only to allow overtone window to move toward radical conservativism.
I suggest we stop demanding that "both sides" are described in the same terms. I suggest we stop following nonsense:
> We need to talk to them, we need to understand where they're coming from, we need to help clear the air between "us and them" so that there won't be an "us and them" and so we can _together_ avoid people that tell us what we want to hear.
For example, conservative Christians are coming from the point of view of someone who thinks women should be submissive to men, should have less legal rights, abortion and contraception are wrong because they allow for safer sex.
For example, quite a lot of people in GOP are coming to it with idea that being gay is disgrace, being trans deserve severe punishment and that being criminal is cool as long as you are rich white guy.
Actually engage with these rather then euphemism them away.
That's not what the GP means, the popular vote is likely to be for the Democrats, as has happened basically every election. It's only because of the electoral college system that Republicans win the presidency.
The current results are unfortunately such a blowout that Trump may very well be winning the popular vote. I guess this is what OP was referring to.
Ah interesting, I don't know enough about which states do what. Is it not at the point where the states we knew the results of have been tallied, and the swing states are still unknown?
I suggest you look for yourself at reuters or something. Whatever I type here, it's out-dated every 10 minutes or something.
You can easily look at any news site for this.
I would respectfully suggest you check the results before commenting, but I know reading TFA isn’t all that popular anymore.
Trump is currently leading by over 5,000,000 votes and there does not appear to be momentum to change that lead in the remaining precincts.
it will shrink with california but yes hes on track to win
I don't know how US elections work, for all I know all the Democrat states haven't finished being counted yet.
Won’t matter. It doesn’t matter if Harris beats Trump by a billion votes in California.
It will for the popular vote, the vote we're talking about.
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But they do have free elections.
Yes - they are free to vote, and the electoral college then selects who they put their votes towards to represent the voters, which is in line with the majority voting sentiment.
The lesson is that Reddit is not real life, and that calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters turns out to not be a winning strategy.
Whether democrats finally learn that lesson is another thing. I am not optimistic on that.
Have you seen how Trump describes half the country? It worked for him.
> calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters
The Democratic campaign did no such thing. Can you point to any examples? As far as I can see they went to great lengths to avoid saying anything like that.
As far as I can tell there was far more venom from the Republicans. Maybe the lesson is that a winning strategy is to be more insulting.
Obama was chastising black men the past couple weeks for not wanting to vote for Harris. And what a surprise that they went hard for Trump instead.
> Obama was chastising black men
Can you quote what Obama said that seems relevant to my post? I doubt he outright insulted anyone.
> And what a surprise that they went hard for Trump instead
According to an exit poll, Black voters voted 86% Democrat this year, compared to 87% at the 2020 election.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Oh my this is awful - could you post a source?
Did you miss biden calling all trump supporters "garbage"?
It was a single remark by the outgoing president who wasn't standing for election, and something he quickly rowed back on. It was clearly something he didn't intend to say, but at some point in an election campaign someone is going to misspeak.
Anyway, you're moving the goalposts. The allegation was "calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters".
You're right, he didn't call them that. He called them garbage.
In response to someone calling Puerto Rico garbage? It wasn't "all trump supporters".
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Republicans (mostly voters) have been openly saying "all democrats should be shot" to my face since at least the creation of Fox News.
Trump himself said Harris should be shot with 9 guns.
Somehow they still get elected.
>calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters turns out to not be a winning strategy
But calling Puerto Rico a pile of trash is okay?
>calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters
They don't (in general). Some of them over-apply those words. Some of them apply them to an over-broad category ("conservatives" or whatever). Some of them apply some of those words to some Trump supporters, which is not even the same thing as Trump voters, Republicans, or conservatives. And of that sub-sub-subset, sometimes the harsh words are even understandable, considering the hideous, immoral things they are being applied in response to.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are much harsher with their words, and use much broader strokes when applying them.
I.e. it's the opposite. One of the defining characteristic (as opposed to simply a tendency) of the speaking style of Trump supporters is mockery and provocation and insulting and name-calling and threatening. They don't all do it, but it's an undeniable part of their ideology.
Voters on the left need to learn that lesson, the DNC already knows. Harris campaigned to the right of Biden, at that.
Inflation. Record illegal immigration. Identity politics. Inflation. An anointed candidate. Perceived censorship. Inflation. Income inequality. Cover ups. Inflation.
I’m not saying Trump will fix any of this. I’m just saying people feel like PC culture has gone over the top while a 20oz Coke has tripled in price. Harris campaigned on “we’re not going back” but a lot of people would trade Trump’s insanity for housing prices of yore.
Inflation was global, and the USA navigated it much better than other Western economies.
But of course that’s far too much nuance for the average voter anywhere.
Funny thing is we saved ourselves from 2008-style economic collapse with stimulus, which partially caused the inflation here but also caused it in all the other countries. But nevertheless, all their incumbent parties lost over it.
When you get punched in the face, the first thought is not who else got punched. Of course ppl will vote based on their own recent face punching. "I didn't get punched in the face when the other guy was president"
So what you're saying is that voters are stupid? Punch-drunk unable to think about the consequences of their actions?
I wouldn't say stupid, I'd say ignorant. A more progressive interpretation: you can't help someone else until you have your own mask on. People are voting based on how they feel their life is compared to 4 years ago and apparently half of america very much recalls life being better then. They don't feel the need to dig any deeper than that; they need to get their own oxygen mask on.
Which is a bit of a weird argument because people did get punched hard in 2020. Things were mostly very bad during Trump’s last year in office. Jobs were lost, millions died; Trump himself spent days in intensive care in October 2020.
Political memories are very short. Trump can get excused for the botched Covid response because it’s ancient history, but Biden can’t get excused for global inflation which followed from the same disaster.
> Inflation was global, and the USA navigated it much better than other Western economies.
This comes across as very out of touch. By "navigated it" you mean brought inflation under control. But it's not like prices came down.
The $1,500 per month grocery bill that was $1,000 in 2019 is still $1,500.
People don't look at the CPI and think "phew, glad the Fed was able to get inflation back to target" they think "I remember when I used to have $1,000 left over each month".
And they remember that every single month.
It is astounding how many people don't get that.
Also how many people blame it on Biden while giving Trump credit for Obama's work.
Spot on. You nailed it. And dems needed to communicate why those things were not their fault or have answers... instead they tried "vibes"
Not only will Trump not fix these things but he’s the cause or at least contributor to all the things you just mentioned. You may be right that those are the reasons people voted for Trump, but if they did they’re naive at best.
> Inflation.
The lack of basic macroeconomic education is truly becoming an ever more problem in free societies.
Living in capitalism while not really understanding basic tennents makes one ripe for manipulation and that way endangers freedoms we all cherish.
Wasn't the inflation done by Trump though? Not allowing Powell to raise rates and threatening to remove him?
Yes. We Americans have the collective memory of a Mayfly and the inability to pay attention to things that drive actual inflation that take a lot of time to resolve, like bad housing policy, logistics logjams, and starving the beastly budget needed for oversight.
Could be, or the Ukraine war, the pandemic, or some other policy
It's nonfalsifiable. People will settle on the simplest observation:
it happened under Biden
of course. And this was a failure of messaging by dems
I completely agree that Trump printed a ton of money, but Biden also continued to print a ton of money.
In addition, people tend to associate outcomes with the administration in power even if it’s due to a prior administration. Inflation appeared under Biden, not Trump. Inflation decreasing also does not mean prices decreasing.
Obama is the only 2 term President to have gotten a majority of the vote both times since Ronald Reagan. Our system had been broken in a sense (depending on your perspective). We’ve had candidates get a plurality and some a majority of the vote who did not get elected. I think the electoral system needs to be abandoned.
The U.S. is far more right wing than people thought. That Trump got a majority of the vote is a huge win for him. No one can claim his win is because of a backward electoral system and not because he is popular. This is huge. Democrats will be dead for 2 years minimum. Trump will be able to enact whatever legislation he wants to.
He is the President we deserve. The DNC needs to be abolished. Democrats had the opportunity to reform the system. It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
> Democrats had the opportunity to reform the system. It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
When? How? Any change like that in the last few decades would be very hard, and probably before that as well.
I don't disagree with you, I've argued "fixing the system should be #1 priority" for years, but even if the Democratic party wanted to, I don't see how they could have done so.
When Obama was President his first two years Democrats had clear majorities of both houses. But that fool was obsessed with “bipartisanship”. He acted as if the political norms of the 70s had not changed. Also, they haven’t even tried to fight for the things I mentioned.
In Obama's first term, the parties were not nearly as ideologically sorted as they were today. There was a Democratic majority of 257 in the House, yes, but 54 of those were members of the explicitly conservative Blue Dog Coalition. They wouldn't have agreed to vote for sweeping partisan reforms.
I think they would have gone for updating the number of a Representatives. But they didn’t even try to do such things. Obama kept trying the make a deal with Republicans and acted like it was the 1970s. In the end he saw what his efforts were worth when Republicans refused to even vote for his Supreme Court nominee.
Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment and that wouldn’t have passed with enough states.
I don’t think number of representatives matters as it’s mostly representative of population. If the ratios are the same then I don’t think 435 vs 4035 matters.
> Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment
No, the size of the House is determined by Congress; a century ago they decided to cap it at the current number, and never increase it since then, regardless of population increase.
> I don’t think number of representatives matters as it’s mostly representative of population
That's not the case, though. A quick look at constituents per representative across states is all it takes to see how stark that is.
It's extra important because the number of electoral votes each state gets is dependent upon their number of representatives.
Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment…
You are wrong on this. You should look up Reapportionment Acts. The number of Representatives does matter in an electoral system and for other reasons. A Representative from California represents far more people than one from North Dakota. This is a major power imbalance in both electoral matters and in matters of federal legislation.
The number of Representatives hasn’t been updated in a 100 years.
> It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
As much as I'd like to think the waning days of the 2022 Congress were wasted, I don't think this would have been feasible.
Manchin and Sinema refused to get rid of the filibuster. And with that in place, nothing else that you mention was possible.
> The U.S. is far more right wing than people thought.
Yup. In 2016 we thought Trump was an aberration, a temporary cultish fad. In 2020 we felt justified because he lost, but we ignored how barely he lost. And now, knowing everything about Trump there is to know, we've elected him again, and we can't even say he lost the popular vote this time. The GOP took the Senate, and may even keep hold of the House for at least the next two years. Thomas and Alito will likely retire from SCOTUS, and Trump will appoint young, carefully-chosen, extreme right-wing justices. The makeup of the court will be hard-right-majority for the rest of my life. I'm sure he'll also appoint more hard-right judges to the federal judiciary in record numbers.
This is who we are, and it's time we start accepting that. Dem leadership needs to internalize that and drastically change their strategy. I'm not sure
In 2008 these things could have been changed but Obama was too interested in bipartisanship.
the message is: we don't want immigrants, we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us). like it or not, this is what people want.
And: we don't care about ethics or looks as long as it serves us.
> we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us)
It is not even that since what they basically propose is to dial down the war in Eastern Europe but get more involved in the war in Middle East and possibly soon in East Asia. That stance always seemed very confusing to me as a non-US person.
> That stance always seemed very confusing to me as a non-US person.
Europeans seem to overestimate how close America is to Europe.
If you live in the Western half of the United States, Asia is much closer than Eastern Europe, most US military deployments are in the Pacific, and most foreign trade the US has is with Asia.
Both parties campaigned on leaving the Middle East, but it is difficult to disengage from the region without devolving power to a regional ally (similar to how the US historically let France take the reigns on African relations). Historically, that ally has been Israel and Turkiye, but relations between the US and them have fallen precipitously.
Rephrased: we, the average tax payers, want prosperity too.
But you aren't getting any with this ticket. There is no political force in the US that would question the trickle-down fairytales, and your broken elections system won't allow one to emerge.
So you vote for change, yet the economics policies stay as unequal as always. But in the process you supported a rapist and a criminal who calls execution of journalists, suppression of women, blatant racism and just death and destruction of non-privileged people everywhere.
if the genuinely unprivileged gain some consciousness of their condition because of Trump, there will be changed. You cannot claim it for them.
So, accelerationism?
accelerationism would be launching yourself into the unknown and not committing to a particular political ideology except the continuous development of capitalism. This is simply working with the concrete situation: a Trump presidency, which clearly opens up more opportunities for radical action then a Harris presidency, since Trump will be too busy completely destroying the economy and the FBI, CIA, and NSA, the judiciary and the legal system more broadly, to be even capable of fighting back against resistance or even stopping the conditions for a popular foment. Or, maybe I'm wrong, who knows. But at least now we'll get to know.
That's what's the most mind-boggling for me - since when are the Republicans the ones considered most likely to bring prosperity to the masses?
Since they don't promote politics that keep salaries low, inflate housing prices, increase external spending or drive criminality.
You may want to give Republican policies a quick double check.
Can you give an example of such a policy?
(Not to doubt it, I just don't know as I'm on the other side of the world.)
Illegal immigration disregard, feeding stupid wars, ignoring petty crime.
Republicans started the war in Iraq and Afghanistan so that's not true.
And Republicans are against increasing the federal minimum wage so that's also not true.
Disinformation is what won this campaign.
Notably those wars were not started or escalated by Trump's republican party. While >Dick Cheney< got accepted by Dems now just because he is against Trump...
I see that we're already moving goalposts.
Trump has a responsibility in escalating the tension between Israel and Palestine following the move of the American embassy to Jerusalem.
He also escalated bombings in Syria.
His terrible Afghan deal also made it so that there was no time or guarantees to fly Americans and people that helped America to the US while also leaving a lot of American military gear to the Talibans. This also ridiculed the US on the international stage.
Considering it seems Arab American voters were willing to punish kamala or even outright vote trump on account of the current administrations stance on IvP since then, it seems they are willing to look past the embassy issue for a bigger issue - the current state of affairs.
Considering how the Obama administration handled Iraq and Afghanistan, I doubt they would have acted any differently wrt Syria.
Alas if I recall Trump managed to have ultimate responsibility for that fiasco occur under Biden's watch on account of losing the 2020 election. Whoops.
> Alas if I recall Trump managed to have ultimate responsibility for that fiasco occur under Biden's watch on account of losing the 2020 election. Whoops.
Yes, he was completely out negotiated by terrorists and his successor had to clean up the gigantic pile of poop that leaked from Trumps diaper.
Not much Biden could have done about this.
Well, so long as prosperity doesn't mean cheaper TVs with Chinese parts in them. I guess they will have to buy American TVs from now on.
I’ve seen more than a few comments and tips on HN about how to keep one’s TV from phoning China.
it's actually really interesting, Trump already modified his rhetoric. In the rallies in the last week and in his acceptance speech he has suddenly talked about how they want immigrants to come in legally - even went out of his way to talk about "geninuses" in the acceptance speech. Pretty clear here that people like Musk have been heavily exerting influence to shape his viewpoint towards favouring immigration that allows high skilled workers in.
> we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us)
More like stop trying so hard to bring us closer to a WWIII. The USA's current foreign policy is the main cause of all the turmoil we're seeing in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Anything that can change it should be welcomed by anyone with a desire to live.
The game theoretic irony is that peace can often only be achieved by building up the military strength to deter potential attackers. There are a few places in the world where US involvement can lead tonkore stability.
Faltering US support for the Ukraine will tempt Russia into more territorial expansion towards or even into NATO.
China will probably ramp up aggression against Taiwan and against the Philippines. It is a minor miracle that no lethal shots have yet been fired in the persistent and aggressive military incursions into Philippines territorial waters. Several navy vessels have already been damaged this year.
I believe that the best way to release tensions in the Middle East would be by improving relations with Iran - but Trump bombed the deal that would have enabled that. The relqtive economic stength of the US could have been a good motivatir. Now Iran is aligning itself with Russia.
>The game theoretic irony is that peace can often only be achieved by building up the military strength to deter potential attackers.
But the utility of military build up is non-linear. There comes a point where further gains for your side are marginal while further losses for your adversary are existential. A neutral Ukraine represented a sufficiently balanced state of power that rendered war negative sum for Russia. We overextended ourselves in trying to peal Ukraine away from Russia's orbit. NATO in Ukraine would have been a strategic noose from which Russia would never escape. The Ukraine war is blowback for American policy towards Russia, i.e. expand NATO up to Russia's border, bait Ukraine and Georgia for NATO membership, foment anti-Russian movements in Ukraine that lead to the expulsion of the Russian-friendly president of Ukraine and install someone western-oriented.
> NATO in Ukraine would have been a strategic noose from which Russia would never escape.
Reminder: Ukraine was (strongly) against NATO membership before Russia invaded in 2014.
NATO threat is a red herring that Russia likes to dangle in front of the western countries to cover up its expansionist agenda. The only reason it's "afraid" of NATO is NATO can make that agenda much harder to pull off.
> The game theoretic irony is that peace can often only be achieved by building up the military strength to deter potential attackers.
Nobody has attacked the USA since Pearl Harbor. Military strength has been used to impose hegemony over other parts of the world, not to protect the nation.
> There are a few places in the world where US involvement can lead tonkore stability.
How can you say that after the countless deaths, pain, and strife caused by the USA in the Middle East, Asia, and South America?
> Military strength has been used to impose hegemony over other parts of the world, not to protect the nation.
I'm not a scholar of military history. I assumed that no one would dare attack the US because the US military is larger than the next ~dozen militaries combined?
> Nobody has attacked the USA since Pearl Harbor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
Seems big to leave out especially since your next remark is about strife caused by the USA in the Middle East...
You mean the terrorist attack orchestrated by the same guy (Osama Bin Laden) the USA propped up in the 80s when he was fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan?
The 11 September is the perfect example of the USA bringing instability to the world and giving life to future enemies through their reckless interference in the Middle East.
You keep mentioning things done by republican administrations as a defense.... of a republican president?
> the message is: we don't want immigrants
It wasn't the case last time with Melania. And it won't be the case this time with Musk.
It's not immigrants. It's illegal immigrants. It was very clear from the beginning that this is what will kill the democrats chances. When you have poor people that have lived in this country since birth not be able to get help from the government because the government services in their community are over ran due to the influx of people. Who do you think they are going to vote for? Why do you think the Republicans had an historic election with minority voters?
All they had to do was actually do anything about the tens of millions of immigrants coming over the board, but they ignored it and Trump used it against them.
The Democrat party is ran by a bunch of idiots. Hopefully this is a wake up call for them to get with the real world on issues.
Calling someone Hitler when they clearly aren't is also not going to help people support you especially AFTER he was president before and they experienced a presidency under him lol.
This has happened and is happening in Europe, too.
Many people are coming in, some of them don't integrate and cause problems, the center says it's not a problem and the left says let's have more of them.
More people are coming in, problems are getting worse (both real and imaginary), people are getting upset, the right realizes they can use that and they build their whole agenda or that and win the elections.
The number of countries this has happened in increases, so non-right parties need to rethink their strategy if they want to stop losing.
Europe is able to change political course much more gradually: the EU is 27 countries, and the EU Parliament is elected with proportional voting systems which leads to coalitions and compromise.
A 10% increase in 'right' votes means roughly 10% more influence for the 'right' opinions.
In the USA, a tiny increase in 'right' votes means 100% more influence.
Europe is already rethinking it. Have you heard of Sahra Wagenknecht?
Europe is currently experiencing a hard shift to the right because progressives keep lying and downplaying bad economy policies and illegal immigration. Yet somehow each party has their own scapegoat.
"Tens of millions" "coming in over the border"? Mexico only even has 120m people in the first place. What, you think that half of their population walked into Texas and bought a house in Dallas?
> From 2014 to 2020, migrants from outside Mexico and Central America — known as “extra-continentals” — accounted for 19 percent of immigration court cases.
> In the last four years, those “extra-continentals” have risen to 53 percent of all court cases. They have arrived from countries such as India, China, Colombia and Mauritania.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/interactive/2024/...
Okay. Sure. Mexico only has 120m people. You think that a third of their population walked into Texas and bought a house in Dallas? A quarter? Hell, ten percent?
Fine. I'll bring some of my own statistics. There might be ten million undocumented immigrants living in the United States total. There are fewer than half a million illegal border crossings a year; if the expected lifespan following an illegal border crossing is, I don't know, forty years, then it's obvious that the overwhelming majority of illegal border crossings don't convert to undocumented immigrants. These numbers are easily available on the relevant Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni..., which itself has extensive citations from a wide variety of sources. Saying that there are "tens of millions crossing the border" is clearly and blatantly incorrect.
And, of course, that's not even getting into the real meat of the issue, that's just sarcastically calling out the surface-level lies. No, what I really want to say about illegal immigration is that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than either documented immigrants or outright citizens, that they pay more taxes than they cost in government spending, that they do not affect job access or pay of legal residents, that they prevent offshoring, and that they contribute to GDP via spending and labor. Undocumented immigrants are, as far as I can tell, purely positive contributors to America at every level I look at, for the people working alongside them and going to school with them all the way up to the grandest statistics. If we truly wanted a healthy economy - if we wanted more citizens to have better jobs, if we wanted more money for education and healthcare, if we wanted less crime and less exploitation of labor - we would legalize all of them and invite more in after them.
250k (recorded border patrol contacts) came across in December 2023 (peak), about 55k this last August. It is usually fewer then a million per year but still a significant number of people. Bad policies in 2023 led to an absolute flood. That is competition for American workers.
Still not "tens of millions", don't motte-and-bailey me.
Also, I thought competition was good and that we needed more of it. That's the usual fiscal-conservative line, right?
I'll further note that there are more job postings open right now than there have been at any time since 2000, that unemployment right now is incredibly low considering the pandemic and 2008, that the unemployment that still exists can be fairly easily traced to the previous trump presidency rather than any other cause, and that multiple detailed studies (refer to previous Wikipedia link) fail to find that illegal immigrants have any effect at all on the jobs or pay of American workers. Having more workers in total increases spending which opens up more jobs, for example, standard jevons paradox stuff. Your conclusions are not supported by any kind of evidence, your models do not describe or provide accurate predictions of reality, and your proposals will not work the way you think or claim they will.
Is it really competition? Do American workers get paid in cash from employers who don't ask for their Social Security number? Skilled jobs require documentation. Unskilled jobs require documentation. Working undocumented means being paid in cash by an employer who doesn't tell the IRS about you. Are citizens really lining up to work these jobs that undocumented immigrants perform? Food prices will increase again when all of the migrant farm workers are deported.
Most of the illegal migrants coming into the U.S are not from Mexico. They're from Latin American and Asia. Actual migration from Mexico by Mexican citizens has been on the decline in the past 10 years. Possibly due to Mexico's growing economy.
It’s not /only/ Mexicans crossing the border…
Even I, a Canadian, know that immigrants from all the way down to South America are streaming across the US border.
if Biden will sign a decree to welcome everyone and every migrant would be legal, people still won't like it. people want to reduce immigration, legal or illegal.
>Calling someone Hitler when they clearly aren't is also not going to help people support you especially AFTER he was president before and they experienced a presidency under him lol.
One bigly reason I voted for Trump was because his first term was by far the most peaceful both this country and the world at-large ever was in my lifetime.
For four years we didn't start or join any new wars, we even flat out refused to when the military industrial complex begged to Trump to start one with Iran after they shot down one of our drones. North Korea didn't fire a single missile and China wasn't anywhere as loud with their saber-rattling (I'm Japanese-American, I care deeply about Japanese security). Russia didn't invade Ukraine. Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah/et al. weren't brutally killing each other.
For four god damn years life was actually peaceful, and I want that again.
> North Korea didn't fire a single missile
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_Korean_missile...
> Russia didn't invade Ukraine
Russia invaded in 2014 and the conflict stabilized (but didn't stop) in 2015.
In the meantime, the Syrian civil war was raging on.
Similarly, if we ignore all the events in the prelude to WW2, the world was a very peaceful place. According to Hoover, Roosevelt was a threat to world peace, not Hitler.
I'm not implying anything with the analogy, I'm only trying to illustrate that the world was not peaceful between 2016 and 2020, despite the president's efforts.
Perhaps if we had gotten 2 consecutive terms, it might have provided more long term stability.
Er, Russia was already in Ukraine.
Warring Middle East nations signed more peace treaties under Trump than in any other time in modern history. Israel signed four peace treaties with Arab Nations under Trump.
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Ignoring the issue and calling everyone nazi or fascist is precisely why the democrats lost today. Hey, at least you have 4 years to learn your lesson
Calling out people who invoke Nazi themes doesn't make them more Nazi, nor does giving them a pass make them less so.
> ...are poisoning the blood of this country
Isn't that Nazi rhetoric? "Blood of the country" seems like exactly the sort of thing the Nazis would have been focused on. Are you going for irony?
> Are you going for irony?
Obviously yes: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-im...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-im...
Congratulations on discovering the punchline.
Yes.
They're poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told the crowd at a rally in New Hampshire.
"All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning," Hitler wrote.
Devil's advocate.. if Hilter once remarked that broccoli is good for you, would people throw that back at someone saying the same?
Hitler was vegetarian back when that was very unusual, and post-war the vegetarian movement in the UK was set back significantly as a result.
If Hitler then used that line to try and justify murdering millions of brussels sprout eaters, then yes. Otherwise you've missed the point by an almost impressive margin.
There is nothing inherently "Nazi" about being anti-illegal immigration. 30 years ago the left stood for a lot of anti immigration rhetoric.
Sure, but invoking Hitler's language while denigrating people from other countries is pretty Nazi though.
And when told that it sounded like something out of "Mein Kampf" Trump's response was that he had never read "Mein Kampf".
Every individual is a rational/irrational actor. I don't know the split of time they're irrational vs rational. Maybe 50/50.
Some people are better than other people at convincing other people to do things in a certain way. Might have a little to do with genetics, probably more to do with education and size of platform, which is mostly a function of whose legs you popped out of and a little bit of whatever magic sauce makes you, you.
Most people that are good at convincing other people to do things a certain way are doing so in a way to personally enrich themselves. Sometimes they have a little more empathy, or perhaps intelligence, and know the personal enrichment can't be too flagrant, but regardless they all share that goal.
Unless one becomes too much of an outcast from the other good-convincers (think e.g. Lenin, Mao, CKS, Washington and his friends) and they convince everyone to go kill the followers of the other good-convincers until an equilibrium can be reached where either only one good-convincer is being enriched or at least both are to an acceptable degree.
This dynamic will play out eternally. Part of the mechanism of good-convincerness being sustainable is that you never disturb that equilibrium too much, so in this case to ground it, hence why the democrats tried to pivot right to fight accusations of being leftists (an ideology very much opposed to this idea of the best convincers being extremely personally enriched). In the end, they didn't really lose. Kamala will continue to likely have a powerful political career, and if not she can at least write some books and die phenomally wealthy like Hillary will. Democrats can switch from having much federal power to being an opposition party. Nothing actually changes, the message simply switches from "give us votes and money to enshrine whatever it is you care about" to "give us votes and money to fight fascism rah rah." Both messages are of course a lie, the real message is "give us votes and money in a way that allows us to continue to collect votes and money."
The message is that in the global zeitgeist, the natural human tendency among everyone, good convincer and not, for liberation, personal agency, and fulfilment, is obviously not being met when no matter where they turn there's someone telling them that if they want these things they have to all support a given good convincer. In the early Soviet Union, communist leaders too advantage of the opposite zeitgeist to achieve the same thing. Right now, the reactionaries have acquired a greater share of the zeitgeist, maybe because their messaging coincides well with several refugee crises and the inevitable climate refugee crisis.
In my personal opinion these tendencies can't be rewarded in this form of top down hierarchy where it's good-convincers pitting their supporters against each other. Imo we can overcome the nurture and saecular aspects of what makes someone a good convincer (education, self determination, material conditions provided for) to make everyone more level in their ability to convince others to do things. Early societies had this more "flat" organization, where the best convincers lived basically on raw rhetorical ability (look up some old Cherokee transcriptions for their interactions with missionaries, they were genuinely hilarious and viciously good at humiliating rhetorical opponents), and even that could only go so far.
During the Spanish civil war I believe the anarchists did a phenomenal job educating and "leveling the playing field" among an astounding number of people - off memory as I'm on my phone, something like 70% of their economy had been syndicalized. Somehow they convinced a shitload of the population to think deeply about their engagement in society and politics and become active, daily, if not hourly, participants in that process.
This fascinates me and I want to try this again. It of course involves sucking it up and talking to Trump supporters which I find very difficult because they say some very silly things, but regardless, if an alternative power structure isn't injected into the mix, the game of good-convincers playing hackey sack with the zeitgeist to maintain power will never end.
This fascinates me and I want to try this again. It of course involves sucking it up and talking to Trump supporters
That’s a good attitude, because nothing is truly solved with a Trump presidency. His victory was always just an expression of the undercurrent. The electorate has just voiced it, for a second time, but that’s all.
> In the early Soviet Union, communist leaders too advantage of the opposite zeitgeist to achieve the same thing.
What was the opposite zeitgeist?
I agree that it's a clear message. The messaging the last time Trump won the election was that the electoral college was broken, Trump lost the popular vote, Americans deserve better.
8 years later, after all of this political baggage, prosecution, and media repudiation the Democrats managed to lose in resounding manner – not just the electoral college, but the senate, house, and popular vote.
This is after what is arguably a great Biden presidency, economy-wise. The Democrats have centered their entire identity for the last 8 years about being anti-Trump. There are no bright spots in the results for them, no messaging that they can hang their hat on, and build on going forward. From a base building perspective, this is brutal. The next election is square one for them.
The Democrats never seem to do much about the system when in power.
If they'd done something they would've lost more. Voters, who on average are near retirement age, hate it when you do anything because they think it'll affect their retirement.
In this case they were blocked by Manchin/Sinema from anything like filibuster reform, but they did get some big important economic reforms in.
You nailed my biggest complaint.
My new unhealthy conspiracy theory is democrats like being perpetually in the minority where they can talk a good game but don’t actually have to follow through on anything. That’s why they always tack right and try to compromise with people who call them enemies and groomers and demons. “We’ll welcome them into our cabinet” never sat well with me in the era of Trump.
Polls show voters think Harris/Walz were too liberal, not the other way round. They mostly haven't gone right either; Biden campaigned as a moderate and ran as the most progressive administration in my life.
(Which was good! But voters hated it because they don't like change and don't like inflation.)
To me it seems like Democrats just failed to listen to their constituents, and being one who wanted Bernie Sanders to have some chance at running in 2016 and 2020, I think this is the reckoning of that more than anything. The Democrats have ignored their own base and this is what happens when they pander to signals from everywhere else.
the message is America completely rejected the "establishment"
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I don't understand everything you're saying, probably because I am not involved in day to day US political discussion, but a few of your points seem wildly exaggerated or misunderstood.
No one is forcing anyone to turn any sons into daughters, are they? What you're really saying is that you don't want anyone to be allowed to change their gender. That's a quite prohibitive stance for a country that puts so much emphasis on freedom.
What's this "male perverts sharing locker room" stuff about? Who's campaigning for letting random adults into kids locker rooms?
Who's being forced to take an injection?
In California for instance if the child wants to transition then you must let it. If you attempt to stop it or guide them out of the decision in any way you’re at risk of having your child taken from you. That’s the force being used, do what we say or we’ll take your child.
I believe Elons kid had this happen to him, hence why he’s so pro trump despite the fact that trump is pro oil industry. The lesser of two evils he said.
Parent got voted down because HN is largely extremist left.
They are talking idpol in general.
Exactly. The race rhetoric is the most important point.
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They are not. Strive to understand while not vilifying their position. Your inability to do so is why you may be confused by half the country
This is harsh: it’s effectively trolling, but it’s not by the original poster but a calculated political campaign designed to smear Democrats. Saying anyone wants “male perverts [to] share showers and locker rooms with their kids” is untrue, but it’s really effective at getting people to pick a side because it sounds terrible and even though this is not a pressing problem in the real world (if we’re talking child size abuse, the risk is family members and trusted adults) it’s perfect for getting strong emotional reactions, as we can see from how heavily used it is.
Governor Youngkin got elected in Virginia riding on a wave of anti-trans sentiment based off of a single reported assault where the accused wasn’t even trans, didn’t identify as such, wasn’t allowed to be in the bathroom where the assault occurred, etc. but that was such a volatile claim that it was all over the news for the end of the campaign even though it was a single assault out of thousands.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/magazine/loudoun-county-b...
I think it’s possible to recognize that a position is not factual and based on emotional impact but we need a better term than trolling to describe it.
agreed; I'm not saying the person is _right_. If the left wanted to get dirty, they should have tossed up all the pedo priest data. At the end of the day, it was absolutely a messaging problem. People very literally believe that their kids could be targeted and become trans. Education and more propaganda are the only options.
I think it should have been focused on the economic issues: there was a little of that but it should have been louder on what people experience like the way grocery costs include corporate profit-taking or how the guys deciding to have layoffs or hiking rents were heavily supporting Trump - there are a lot of abstract or targeted issues but almost everyone thinks about their paycheck and how much of it is going to living expenses.
Nope, trans ideology is still unpopular and we all still remember it.
Ideologues care about trans people but it’s not at the top of any large group of voters’ priorities in poll after poll.
You believe polls? The right notoriously is undersampled because they simply don’t take them. If you need more evidence, the polls also put her in the lead.
Polls had it as a tossup similar to what we saw. I believe that when voters repeatedly say they care about the economy and immigration, they probably are saying those because they mean it and not because they’re fixated on trans people but shy.
that’s a toss up? no that’s a commanding victory. if republicans take the house and all else is the same they’ll have won popular, electoral, house and senate. that’s not a toss up
It’s still a tossup: you’re conflating the polls being within the margin of error with the electoral college vote count, but all of the major analysts were saying it was even odds that either of them could win with a range of vote totals. 538 had it at 52:48 favoring Trump yesterday, and the EV range went high because so many states were close.
https://abcnews.go.com/538/538s-final-forecasts-2024-electio...
> But it is worth stressing that the polls will not be exactly correct. Polls overestimated Democrats by an average of 3-4 points in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, for example, and overestimated Republicans by an average of 2.5 points in the 2012 presidential election. Our election model expects polls this year to be off by 3.8 points on average, although it could be more or less — and our model thinks this error is equally likely to favor Democrats as Republicans
> And that’s why we’ve been saying the race isn’t necessarily going to be close just because the polls are. Trump and Harris, our model says, are both a normal polling error away from an Electoral College blowout.
The Democrats just lost an election because they tried to dismiss poorly-articulated-but-legitimate concerns as trolling/ists/phobes. Could be a teachable moment, if they are willing to learn.
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Wow you couldn’t misinterpret this any more.
I am interpreting it correctly. Donald Trum is repeated choice of GOP and its voters. He won twice. They are choosing him, because they want exactly what he is, who he chooses to cooperate with, who he picks for supreme Court.
He is not some kind of outlier either. There is whole network of media, influencers, think tanks doing the same to various degree. The same kind of rhetoric was here for years.
This is explicit choice.
GP is indistinguishable from a bot. Treat him that way.
My thinking exactly. Just steamroll over everyone with disregard.
It works well for GOP. It is literally key to their electoral success.
Also, seems like there's general disregard for law and order when the person doing the disregard is "one of us". Maybe there's a lesson there.
It doesn't send me a clear message. Trump got fewer votes this time around than he did in 2020. And overall I read that 20 million fewer voters participated this year. The message I'm getting is apathy.
Every time somebody wins, their supporters say it sends a clear message. You should consider that the message you believe is so clear that you've left it unsaid is demonstrably not clear.
I absolutely sympathize with individual reasons to vote Trump and don't automatically look down on Trump voters (immigration, for example). But, Trump himself and explicit "Trump supporters" (i.e. people who make it clear they support his general identity - negativity and all) 95% of the time don't leave any room for sympathy when I encounter them, online or in person, and they are extremely common. What the average liberal is shown (and I assume you care about the average person in each camp, since lauding the common man is a prominent value) is an unheard-of-in-their-lifetimes amount of verbal encouragement (with varying degrees of explicitness) for hatred of others, violence against others, imprisonment of others, and disrespecting of the law/constitution in the name of those things. It's not comparable with any past Democratic candidate (or Republican, for that matter).
On the personal scale, my wife and I don't express anything close to extremist positions, or any cheerleader-type love for Democrats, or any name-calling of conservatives, and yet we are called every slur that's popular with Trump supporters. And we're white, cis Americans. My wife, because she's so friendly when strangers talk to her, has been stalked by one Trump supporter and had another call her a slut (to another Trump supporter, not to her face). She's terrified of these people now. It's insane that they even state out loud their support for Trump in the short time we encounter them.
You can't expect humans presented with that to think, when that candidate wins, "Wow, I guess political issues X, Y, and Z are really important to those guys. Maybe I was too harsh on them." They're going to think, "Wow, those guys really are leaning in a fascist-y direction and have a big problem with evil people in their ranks. I'm scared for my country, community, and family." I don't think that's an extreme or unnecessarily provocative thing to admit.
Indeed, how the heck did the Democrats lose the popular vote?
With Biden getting 80M+ votes in 2020, where did those millions of voters go? Harris was supposed to be Biden++
Because Harris was such a bad candidate.
I gotta admit, I didn't see it until the last minute. I had family members canvassing for her Michigan and everything. But hindsight is 20/20.
She seemed so fake.
I'm trans. Yeah, the message is clear, alright. This country either hates us that much, or is just that willing to throw us to the wolves.
Also trans. This is the beginning of the end. Do not out go with a whimper.
It's more likely that there is a small vocal pro-trans lobby, a small vocal anti-trans lobby, and almost everyone else who gives it no thought whatsoever.
I did say "or is just that willing to throw us to the wolves".
You can't pretend that we we haven't been forced into the political eye over past several years. The winning party has been extremely loud and extremely clear about their plans for us. I don't buy the ignorance argument anymore, not after three election cycles of this. If you voted for them, then you're okay with more of us dying in exchange for whatever you think you're getting out of the deal.
(Using the nonspecific "you" here—of course I don't know how the person I'm replying to voted.)
This is a little outside my bubble - what specifically are you worried about?
I have a couple acquaintances that are trans and they seem like normal happy people that aren't overtly oppressed. I'm under the impression that the state of trans rights is more or less equivalent to black rights, is that not the case?
> ... acquaintances...
I don't think we should try to draw any conclusions about the mental state or hopes and fears about people who we consider acquaintances. We just don't know them well enough, and they don't know us well enough to open up about the hard stuff.
To be clear, trans people face much more violence than you would think. It doesn't help when the GOP runs ads showing "trans women" as burly grown men who beat up little girls. Yes, that's real.
It's very difficult to not see the right's treatment of trans individuals as a slow genocide. Not only do they offer them no protections, but they also take healthcare rights away. But worst of all, they demonize them as monsters and sic their followers on them. The GOP doesn't actually need to kill trans people, it just needs to convince people to kill trans people. So far, that has been incredibly effective.
Where/how are trans people being killed?
republicans spent +$100 m on anti trans ads this cycle. it was a major talking point of the whole campaign. “gender reassignment surgeries happening in school”, etc.
sides of the same coin :[
You're not as important as you think you are
Then why won't they leave us alone?
Has any of your rights or space been materially invaded by whoever "they" are? Or is it all just communal paranoia?
I could literally lose my access to care over this, if the new administration follows through with what's been promised.
Are you losing access to all care or free care?
Care that I earn through my work that brings in more to my institution than it costs to have me on board. As if that distinction should matter.
Then the trans activists (not the community) should not have been pushing stuff onto the kids side of things. That's a 100% no-go area and I don't know how anyone thought that was a good idea. People, all people, want themselves and their children to be left alone.
Sorry, someone else in this thread already beat you to that particular propaganda point.
Because people like you are often at the forefront of wider social movements. Stuff like healthcare, safety nets, worker empowerment… Your influence goes way beyond gender care or women's rights. Beyond their bigoted sensibilities they have an incentive to shut down many of the wider political views you may defend.
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I can't wait for four more years and beyond of hearing these same talking points over and over and over again. I could put up an argument here, but it's been done before and better, and frankly, I'm just so tired today.
> Stop doing that and almost everyone will happily leave you alone to dress and behave however you please.
I'm pretty sure they won't. And for that reason alone… https://www.youtube.com/@TacticoolGirlfriend
>forcing non-trans people to accept a fiction (people can change sex)
This is dishonest.
Obviously, vanishingly few people disagree on basic reality. Undeniable facts include: Whether or not I have a penis; whether or not I have a Y chromosome; whether or not biologically male and female brains/bodies normally differ; whether or not I feel like a man or feel like a woman; whether or not that feeling is permanent (that one would involve predicting the future, but is still ultimately factual).
The things people actually differ on are:
- The semantics of words like man/woman. This is 99% identity politics - "semantic argument" is practically a synonym for "pointless argument". "I'm using this word in a new-ish way."; "No, I disagree with that usage." It's utterly tangential.
- More relevantly: How (un)comfortable they feel about some of those basic realities listed above, and whether or not they express that using pettiness, word-bending, cherry-picking, physical violence, murder, etc.
>influencing vulnerable children into harmful and unnecessary medical procedures
I can't say that a "you are whatever you feel like" influence has literally never resulted in an impressionable mind making a horrible decision for themselves, but it's monumentally overstated by conservatives, which is easy to do because it's so subjective and so dramatic. The line between the obviously correct "be who you are without fear" and the less prudent "wouldn't you like to be who you feel like you are?" can be very blurry.
>Stop doing that and almost everyone will happily leave you alone to dress and behave however you please.
Surely you can read this and see that "almost" does not qualify this into reasonably true territory. This is just not how people are.
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Do I upvote the sarcasm or flag the transphobia?
I answered the question, feel free to flag it if it upsets you.
Flagged because it's false and troll-y, not because it upsets me.
The popular vote is not a good indicator. I live in a deep blue state, the fact that my vote doesn't actually influence the electoral college reduces the incentive to go vote, drastically.
That goes both ways. In fact, there might be more Red voters who think their vote is futile and don’t do out to vote.
There isn’t. The polling and results are all out there.
Exactly, unless you rerun with a "popular vote wins" election - it's not concrete at all. The campaigns would not have been run in the same way, and the people would not vote in the same way.
I say this every election when democrats play the "but we won the popular vote" card as well - that wasn't the game being played, so it doesn't really mean that much.
If he didn’t win it, the democrats narrative right now would be the electoral college is a fraudulent system and he is illegitimate. #notmypresident
Now you can question 2nd order effects, but that’s not a message that’s easy to communicate through media.
Yeah, that the US democratic system is broken; each state having an equal say is not fair given the populations are far from equal.
You're confusing the electoral college with the Senate. In the electoral college, the states are weighted by population. It's a flawed system, but it's not "each state having an equal say".
But even then the weighting is _very_ uneven. The number of votes per elector can vary wildly by state, by as much as some small whole multiple. So the “weight” of one vote in one state can be say, four times that of another state.
It’s amazing to me that this can stand and efforts to change never seem to get very far.
My bad, I thought it was massively unbalanced in favor of flyover states vs population centers.
I'm an outsider; is the US a democratic union of 50 states (plus districts and territories) or is it a democratic union of ~ 335 million individuals?
Is the EU vote in Brussels passed by countries or by individual citizens?
As I recall the current electoral system was set up to weight the votes of states that were members of the union .. if the US has moved to a single unified country of individuals then it might be time to reset the rules (the US founders would be in favour if I read their comments on evolving systems correctly).
Perhaps 'dated' is a better description than 'broken'.
> is the US a democratic union of 50 states
If you mean "state" in the sense of "nation-state", then no, the US is not a democratic union of 50 states. It's a federal republic. While each state does have its own identity, government, and laws, the US federal government has much more power over US states than the EU has over member countries.
> the current electoral system was set up to weight the votes of states that were members of the union
The current electoral system was set up to appease the southern slave-owning states who would have had little representation if the straight popular vote was used.
> Perhaps 'dated' is a better description than 'broken'.
Potato, potahto. Distinction without a difference, in this case.
That's a silly comparison when even the EU is a mix of by-country/by-population (council/parliament—and even the parliament is weighted toward giving smaller countries more representation)
He is taking the popular vote too. Have other ideas to bash his presidency?
He increased the deficit while supposedly raining in on spending?
I didn't know that at the time of writing. Anyway I don't need to bash his presidency, he's got that covered.
How about some good old-fashioned respect for the office of President?
Trump's legacy already speaks for itself.
As far as Europe and other overseas countries are concerned, Trump's most remarkable accomplishment was quite some time ago when he was President the first time.
He made unprecedented Presidential history already, and for the rest of his life (as well as the lives of millions of other senior citizens) he can bask in the degree of admiration that he brought to such an esteemed executive office.
He clinched it like no other in over 75 years of very strong & respectable leadership, recognized worldwide which really means something to international partners of all kinds.
He made sure that President Barack Obama will go down in history as the final US President to effectively be the "leader of the free world", in a long line of illustrious Republicans & Democrats who may one day regain such a level of respect again.
Only not possible in the lifetimes of millions of people around the world, for whom it's just a little too late now. Biden couldn't recover that mantle in only 4 years unless he was a miracle worker of some kind, that's how elusive it really was.
Completely eluded Trump, and once again the traditional American kind of world-class leadership on an international stage fades further into the past, with no recovery on the horizon any time soon.
This is something that nobody can deny.
You do know that USA stands for United States of America, right?
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I would like to skip that rethoric here on HN whenever possible. You cannot possibly reduce 70M voters to that.
I would like to explore the whys and hows of this apparent step backwards in so many things and why Trump was voted like he was and this reductionist view helps no one.
You're right to point out that this kind of rhetoric isn't really in the spirit of HN.
On the other hand, it's a fallacy to assume that there must be merit to an argument just because it's championed by a majority.
I'm aware that it's politically suicidal to say that "most people are stupid", but I'm not a politician (I'm not even American) and I feel like "stupidity" should not a priori be ruled out as an explanation.
You would have to provide a better and more precise definition of "stupid" then, the word has a tendency to become circular
Perhaps you could use the word "idiot" and refer to them as "idiots". The term has been used in a medico-legal context in the past to define a person's mental age.
That there is a divide between the two parties and the average intellectual ability of their supporters is a well-known fact. I'd contest that this is less of an issue than their racism.
Engineering students are actually more conservative than a group like communications majors. Are communications majors smarter?
I was moving the point away from a measure of smartness to one of racism. I do hope you haven't just damned all the other engineers on HN!
So you really think more than half of the Americans are mentally impaired? The probability of being mentally impaired is higher for a random poster like you than for half of American people.
Your understanding of statistics is deplorable. Also, your reading ability. I specifically said it's racism, rather than the (verifiable) lack of intelligence.
True, "stupid" is a very imprecise term. But my main point was merely that epistemically, there is no validity to something just because a majority is behind it.
Well, technically, stupidity is relative. If you're defining it as "below 50%", then that's half the people. "Below 90%", even more, etc, so the statement in itself doesn't really make sense.
If you're in the 90th IQ percentile, sure, most people are stupid to you.
You would be a fool to think that an entire population is stupid. Perhaps a proportion sure but the deciding vote comes from a large proportion of the population that are by no means stupid. Democracy in theory is a form of distributed computation and just because you don't agree with the end result does not make every else stupid
So you are saying people who think other people are stupid are, in fact, the stupid ones. Fascinating.
What would you say if most of a population think that most of the population is stupid, themselves excluded?
Which seems to actually be the case quite often.
>I feel like "stupidity" should not a priori be ruled out as an explanation.
If that is the case, stupidity shouldn't be ruled out for both sides.
That is correct.
People feeling disenfranchised and reaching for populists is a common issue throughout time.
I believe social media has widened the most extreme opinions and forced polarisation on most people, I can feel it with the UK too, where a very clearly corrupt government, with a revolving door of leadership: one losing the country enough money in 14 days to pay for the NHS for a decade… are being talked about favourably over a meek, awkward, slightly right of centre leader who happens to be wearing a red badge instead of a blue one.
Discourse is so swollen with bitter defence and snide attacks with soundbites of “sides”, I really do believe that its the fault of platforms showing the most divisive voices most often.
The thing that pushes me towards right for example, is seeing people dehumanising men for being men (not behaviours, just clear misandry against the gender) on social media so openly- and to much fanfare. I would otherwise be considered extremely left wing by UK standards.
> people dehumanising men for being men
Is this something you do actually experience in real life though?
Because I'm with you that social media is part of the problem. When I was using Twitter, many years ago, I also saw a lot of these super-woke people that I thought were just crazy.
But in real life, I don't see these caricatures so often (where they do exist, they tend to stick together in close-knit organisations and so are easy to avoid). Most women, gay and trans people, minorities etc. that I met just want to have some basic rights and don't care about culture wars about language use etc.
no, exactly, you can feel the effect on some peoples beliefs and behaviours but they can always be reasoned with in reality. You are completely correct that these behaviours are so much more extreme online with the #KillAllMen Movements, 4B[0] and choose the bear. I still hear whispers of these beliefs, but it’s not nearly as strongly held or widely seen as it is on social media.
More impressionable people might hide stronger beliefs, like my mum, who is a reformer in the UK and parrots all their talking points and soundbites, but only down the pub with her like minded friends, or with me. Never to a labour supporter or in a public forum- so they almost never get challenged; and they become so deep rooted.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4B_movement
I don’t believe we can judge what happened just by looking at the majority opinion and give it merit, but I also can’t dismiss it as simply "stupidity."
Messages from certain leaders can resonate deeply with people. If a message is well-received by so many, it could mean the opposing side didn’t present a strong enough argument—basic politics.
In my persoanl view, the discourse needed to challenge figures like Trump is limited by U.S. politics, which is heavily influenced by corporate funding. This influence likely explains why the Democratic Party often seems unwilling to take bold stances.
Policies like stronger unions, better social protections, higher taxes for the wealthy, and a meaningful minimum wage increase are hard to promise if campaigns depend on corporate backing.
"this apparent step backwards"
When optimising globally, sometimes a backward step is required to escape a local minima. It is possible that progressive politics has made a misstep, and that correcting that is the right thing to do.
I think we can all see that correcting to oligarchy/authoritarianism/fascism never works out well for any nation. I don't see your suggestion of a correction working out here either.
I really wish your comment to be relevant.
There is probably no single thing that you could ascribe to 70M voters except that they vote. However, there are plenty of themes that are touted amongst supporters, many (all?) of which are easily shown to be false. Also, his biggest benefactors are people with a lot of money or influence... which are definitely not most of those 70M voters.
The man was convicted by a jury, impeached, and is known to have raped people. He is a known national security risk. ... the "critiques" are endless.
IMHO, to say that there is a useful message to be sent by electing him is naive at best. The fact that nobody can seem to discern that message despite truly trying is also telling.
Is the message, "people just want to watch the world burn?" Is it something else? As far as I can tell, nobody actually knows.
Meanwhile, he has declared victory before the votes are actually finalized. Is the probability high? Yes. Does it undermine the process? Also, yes.
Are there factors such as, "Kamala is a black female" at play? Almost definitely. Does Trump pander to groups that are covertly/overtly racist? Yes. Do all of his supporters understand/admit that? No.
Voters complain that the economy is bad.
Trump promises to truly crater it, Musk stands behind him and promises said austerity.
Voters still vote for Trump on the basis of economy.
Are there any other ways to interpret it? Than that your average voter simply doesn't know the basics of econ?
What are the "basics of econ" in your view?
Tariffs increase prices, for example.
I agree that tariffs aren't good econ policy. What are your views on grocery "price gouging"? Rent controls?
Tariffs are worse, but, all three aren't great.
Depends on implementation but in general we already don't have a free market, and if we did the American economy would collapse with the destruction of the entire farming sector and possibly the oil and gas sector, so I don't dismiss price controls on groceries or rent controls out of hand.
Singapore has nationalized housing and is extraordinarily prosperous. Perhaps rent control isn't a good measure and we should simply do that instead.
In interviews with people who are primarily voting on the economy a common response is that they feel things were economically better for them under Trump than they were under Biden. They want to go back to that, and they believe Trump can do it again.
Structure:
We have a first pass the post voting system which only allows for two parties.
We have this thing called the electoral college that further obfuscates the popular will.
Both of these flawed systems disillusion millions of people every election cycle. People in non-swing states who have a minority opinion feel they have no voice, and often do not vote.
People who have serious issue with the two major parties have no viable method to express their political will.
---
Media:
We have a highly polarized media environment where a large number of people only get their facts from highly biased sources. This can happen on "both sides" but it's particularly evident with conservative media such as Fox News. In this outlet, millions of people see an alternate reality to the one we live in. They don't see Trump's age-addled brain or his most offensive rhetoric.
---
Policy:
Many people seem to think that the Democratic party is responsible for the inflation of the past 4 years. Many people seem to think that Trump stands for lower taxes for the working class, in ways that won't hurt them.
If we take Trump literally, he wants to deport many millions of people who live and work in this country peacefully, but do not have proper documentation. He wants to give Ukraine to Russia. I believe he is at best ambivalent to a national abortion ban. He doesn't show any support for combating climate change.
I'm probably leaving some points out, it's late.
You mention that the EC obfuscates the popular will, but you ignore that it's a balance that gives a voice to many who would otherwise have none.
Would you find a popular vote system that entirely ignores the votes of dozens of states in favor of just a few somehow carrying less obfuscation of the will of the people?
Why do states matter more than people? And of all things to comment on, why the EC?
Ok, let's take the nuanced route. Not all are stupid.
They're just more uneducated than ever, more conservative than ever, and idolizing dehumanization and evil totalitarians more than ever.
The root of everything is social insecurity and bad education, caused by the USA actually not being a country for its people but for corporations and billionaires.
I'm sorry but if you want a pathological liar, criminal and an overall horrible human being as a president of the (probably) most powerful and influential country in the world, you're just scum. Keep the downvotes coming.
The inequality in a nation must have a huge effect on the nature of the people in that nation. That a treatise on inequality has won a Nobel prizes for economics would tend to support your thesis [1]. That another Nobel prize winner has also written on inequality should clinch it [2].
Fix inequality.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2015/dea... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz
> I'm sorry but if you want a pathological liar, criminal and an overall horrible human being as a president of the (probably) most powerful and influential country in the world, you're just scum. Keep the downvotes coming.
This is precisely what I'm talking about. You really think this comment is going to do anything but push even more people to vote for the right? Because why would they side with your camp when you just called them scum, because you don't understand their intentions for voting for him/the party?
Which is extra unfortunate, because your comment up until that part was pretty good.
I understand their intentions. I understand that these votes come out of a place of fear. They are unhappy and a lying demagogue is pointing them to a solution and fuels them with hate. [1]
I also understand that they willfully choose to ignore massive red flags and are a bunch of hypocrites. These people have no shame and need to be shamed. It is the key emotion that leads to change and motivates to action.
Sadly, due to electoral interference by totalitarian regimes, media outlets, Musk, and the internet in general, these people who would otherwise be ostracized by the community due to their antisocial behaviours have been normalized.
Once you're set up like that, it's extremely difficult to get out of. I am afraid that the US has check-mated itself for at least an entire generation. The only thing that can drive a change is hope and basic human decency, ethics and morality.
Which brings us back to people wilfully being the exact opposites of those values. We've had lying oppressive demagogues probably since the dawn of humanity. Most certainly in the last century.
However, despite being afraid and frustrated, many people sided against such leaders. And this is why I consider not doing so a personal moral failing.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/trump-voters-li...
> These people have no shame and need to be shamed. It is the key emotion that leads to change and motivates to action.
> these people who would otherwise be ostracized by the community due to their antisocial behaviours have been normalized.
The Internet (or global communication in general) does indeed mean shame won't work, because people can just ignore you and go find people who support them - whether that's Trump, Musk, or some randoms on the Internet is irrelevant.
So let's double down on the shame thing, which has worked out so well lately?
> The only thing that can drive a change is hope and basic human decency, ethics and morality.
I think the crux of many social issues is that people have different ideas about what 'basic human decency, ethics and morality' even mean.
> I think the crux of many social issues is that people have different ideas about what 'basic human decency, ethics and morality' even mean.
Everybody knows that lying, stealing, swindling, rape, misogyny, selfishness, narcissism, taking pride in ignorance and probably a dozen more wouldn't make that list. Everybody.
People vote for who they identify with as this gives legitimacy and backing to their own views and behaviours.
Morality is not universally as simple as 'stealing is bad' - a basic lesson in ethics, really. Is it bad to steal food for your starving family? If your answer is a simple 'yes', then I applaud you your certainty in life. I wish I had that. But for me, and many others, things aren't quite that simple.
In any case, I wasn't really referring to things like those on your list (one of those things is really not like the others, by the way. Seems very bad faith to me) but more things like trans issues, immigration, welfare, etc.
My point is – how can you trust someone who says that they'll fix your issues if they have a track record of being an opportunistic pathological liar?
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Just so you know, this is exactly the sort of divisive rhetoric - from all sides of the political spectrum - that has led America down this path, and will continue to do so.
You can chalk it up to "stupidity", which is rather silly on its face, or you can acknowledge that this result is the symptom of something far deeper, and try to explore what those issues are, and try to find solutions.
One's easier though, I imagine.
What is it a result of? I'm guessing: voters blamed post-covid global economic downturn on Biden because he was around at the time.
Erosion of democracy didn't seem to trouble the minds of the land of the free very much. I'm not too worried by Trump's second term, but I'm anxious about his third and fourth. One other issue is a fear of turning into Mexico, which people seem to think might happen by letting Mexicans in, but may yet be accomplished in a home-grown manner through insurrections and dismantling institutions.
It's well documented that Americans are, on average, quite undereducated. And it's also quite well documented that most of the people that vote for Trump are poorly educated.
So, not stupidity, no. But a lack of education can look similar.
https://www.uneducatedamerica.com/useful-links
I'd argue that anyone blandly categorizing dozens of millions of people who vote for a candidate (including many from communities of color and among immigrant demographics) as just uneducated ignorants is themselves overwhelmingly ignorant.
You can be against Trump for many good reasons, but a good look at why he won is about much more than just deriding his supporters as ignorant.
I'm against Trump for all the obvious reasons, which there's no need to enumerate here.
Being against him doesn't explain that an openly fascist craven liar just won the US presidency. A poorly educated population does.
Racism, and misogyny appear to be the deeper issues vs the more general and generous stupidity.
Has there been a root cause analysis on why the racists and misogynists only strike sometimes? They appeared to be powerless when the Democrats nominate charismatic candidates like Obama. My read from a distance is the man was propelled somewhat by his racial background.
I put it - as an outside chance - that it is possible that the policies and outcomes of said policies have a bearing on the voting decisions people make.
Millions of desperate people from very different cultures came into the country overwhelming welfare services and small communities, getting paid under the table by greedy businesses undercutting Americans and subverting labor laws. The current party in power allowed this influx to reach record levels, and didn’t do a thing about it. Any path to amnesty for these people down the road will change our political landscape forever, and Americans never voted for this policy.
> ... and Americans never voted for this policy.
Seems a bit of an overclaim. Strategic questions of how to handle the border was a defining issue in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections. Americans are continuously voting on border policy, it is one of the major elements of their national conversation. What the Biden administration did was a bit extreme but ballpark what was on the tin when he was voted in.
How do you justify the gains he made with Hispanic and black voters?
Please explain the large increase in black and other non white votes Trump got this time around, then. Or were those just the stupid ones?
The problem is that one side engaging in divisive rhetorics while the other trying to take the high ground is why Trump is winning.
Trump is engaging in hate and divisive politics, he rules GOP. Democrats are constantly trying to play the high ground, they are loosing.
You've missed the point, which is that painting one side as angelic and the other as evil is exactly what has led to this point.
I am painting one side as kinda evil and other one perfectly within norms of non-evil. Not angelic, but clearly and significantly less anti-democratic and destruction seeking.
I think that the politics got to this point because the "sides" are graded on the curve. No matter how bad one side gets, you are supposed to project best possible intentions on them, worst possible intentions on their liberal opposition just so someone can say "they are the same". Like common. The long term plan to destroy Roe vs Wade for real and worked. The rights of gays and trans are going down the drain. There is literal plan to make anticonception harder to get. Trump was literally talking about this being last election and literally tried the coup after last election.
Can we please, stop with the nonsense? I remember center mocking feminists when they said abortion rights are at dangers. Guess what, they were right.
This is not about needing to listen in a more approving way. It is about needing to listen and oppose more strongly, because what they say about themselves is that they find "evil" to be something to aspire to.
How is accusing him of being a Nazi, an extremist, a dictator, etc "taking the high ground"? He was already president once and was provably NOT Hitler..
His own running mate called him America's Hitler.
Firstly, Democratic establishment goes out of their way to not say these. Which is their mistake, GOP has no equivalent problem to accuse democrats of evil.
Second, he literally said he aspires to be a dictator, talks approvingly about dictators, and he does engage in literal extremist rhetoric on his rallies. You can be Nazi, an extremist, a dictator while not being literally Hitler in every single detail.
He likes when people say that about him. Not saying those is just lying, insisting that others dont say those is insisting on everyone lying.
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In their defense, they faced a tough choice: convicted sex offender or empty suit.
It's sad if that's tough.
Indeed; I don't mean in their complete defense.
All other things aside, don't you think choosing a convicted sex offender over an empty suit is quite damning on its own? Are his values the values USA wants to promote both internally and externally? Apparently so. :(
And, also, both are empty suits (and that's rather par for the course in politics). Additionally, one of the empty suits shows cognitive decline.
Trump's victory, including popular vote and all, is quite astonishing and in many ways incomprehensible.
What kind of four years (and beyond) is this going to be, yikes.
Yeah. It's been scary to see how Big Tech and the media presented Trump as a threat to democracy and someone you cannot possibly vote for. It becomes dangerous when one party has that much power and support. It's not a democracy anymore when people are not presented with facts and are not allowed to express their opinions without getting cancelled or labeled a certain way. You can see it even in the comments here: "Far Right", "bigot", "redneck". We should acknowledge that blunt words like this are at a very low level of political discussion. "Far Right" is a particularly nasty label because even a liberal from 2010 would meet the definition as it's used today by liberals.
Look at this [1] - Oprah warning women that if they don't vote they may lose their ability to vote. This is ridiculous. Trump is not a saint and January 6th was a dark moment but they (the Big Tech, the media, the celebrities) blown the negative image of Trump out of proportion and are making stuff up. Whether you like him or not he is the candidate of the other party. There is no democracy without the other party. The reality is that the megaphones have been cornered by a single side and are used in the most unfair way with additions of fake news and negative coloring about Trump and the "Far Right". Elon Musk saved the day by buying Twitter. It's the last social media platform where Republicans and their supporters could have any presence.
There were plenty of reasons to not vote for Kamala. Perhaps the biggest ones are her views that align with communism. [2] And by the way, Merry Christmas! [3]
[1] https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1853659788678156648
[2] https://x.com/theconread/status/1853834480944881871
[3] https://x.com/MattWallace888/status/1853234344187355332
"EndWokeness" is literally an agenda poster who has openly and willfully lied to your face multiple times.
You're complaining about how Trump was presented as a threat to democracy after he made a speech saying how if he wins you'll never have to vote again? After he lead an insurrection and tried to illegally overthrow the previous election both on paper and in person?
Seen a good few Trumpers complaining about the label "far right". If you don't like the label that's on you, it's like an orange complaining about being called an orange, it's a fact.
Like I said, it was a dark moment. However, Democrats have been in charge for 12 out of the past 16 years and have the support of billionaires owning the biggest content platforms. Recently, they used those platforms to the fullest extent to drive their political agenda with the general message being "Democrats are the only moral choice". He stirred up an insurrection but like I said it's not just about Trump but the 2-party system that makes this a democracy. I would repeat the second paragraph of my previous comment.
What am I supposed to think when I see a campaign ad like this? [1]
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/04/politics/video/will-ferre...
>Like I said, it was a dark moment.
The parent pointed out that Trump promised the same thing again - so not a dark moment, but a dark pattern. Very dark. There's not much darker than overturning the rule of law and creating civil unrest.
>"Democrats are the only moral choice"
I agree with you that Democrats are not somehow unusually moral, but I don't think this is the lie you are portraying it as (or exaggeration? It's unclear what your criticism is exactly). Plenty of people have been given plenty of concrete examples indicating that the Trump camp contains a significant portion of people who espouse unusually immoral ideologies. Maybe they're wrong, but they don't have to do mental gymnastics to arrive at that conclusion in an intellectually honest manner. And, as you rightly point out, there are effectively only two parties.
>I would repeat the second paragraph
Regarding that, then:
>if [women] don't vote they may lose their ability to vote. This is ridiculous.
I've heard Trump supporters say they think women shouldn't vote dozens of times - on the social media platforms you claim are (or were at the time) lacking conservative voices. The notion isn't ridiculous. It's unlikely. But when it comes to threats to the most foundational rights, "unlikely" isn't good enough for the voter's mind.
>Whether you like him or not he is the candidate of the other party. There is no democracy without the other party.
Democrats largely don't take this stance beyond petty disrespect like "not my president" and demanding recounts in very close regions. Trump supporters, on the other hand, explicitly do take this stance when the other candidate wins, as you, again, have already admitted.
>Elon Musk saved the day by buying Twitter
Twitter moderation under Musk is at least as right-leaning as it was left-leaning prior. That is to say, somewhat. What Musk did do was declare the word "cis" a slur, broadly. A word I used to describe myself and my wife in another comment, because it was relevant and correct (the usual comparisons are the words "Jew" or "gay").
Republicans haven't been anywhere near absent from social platforms for 15 years. Underrepresented, maybe. However, social platforms bring out the ever-living pettiness of politics on both sides, and the conservative flavor of pettiness is naturally more likely to break even the most politically-neutral moderation rules (or be "shouted down", by whatever definition you want for that) on social media platforms, because it is more anti-social than the liberal flavor of pettiness.
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> It's been scary to see how Big Tech and the media presented Trump as a threat to democracy
Please explain how Project 2025 (written by the Heritage Foundation etc etc, not big tech / the media) is not a threat to democracy, specifically its sections on consolidating power in a single person (= autocracy) and dismantling various federal systems of checks and balances in favor of loyalist political appointees.
> It's the last social media platform where Republicans and their supporters could have any presence.
Truth Social was built specifically as a safe space for Republicans and their views. Musk did not make Twitter a bastion of free speech, not when using words that personally offend him get you banned.
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You're claiming that the left uses more "blunt words" and "nasty labels" than Trump supporters.
Amazing victory.
I am waiting for the final tally to understand how the Dems lost 15M votes from one election to the other.
The only thing I've been able to see so far is that Harris has 67M votes with 81.2% reporting. Assuming the remaining precincts have the same population size and roughly same D/R split, Harris would end up somewhere around Biden's total once the count is complete.
Might be mistaken, but isn't it usually the bigger, urban and slightly more Democratic-leaning precincts that take a longer time to report?
Yes, it is. We saw this in 2020 where states came from behind and ended up being for Biden. I feel like that late-counting of Democratic votes was very partly was spurred the ensuing election conspiracies. Election votes are not counted uniformly at random.
My analysis is the Democrat party leadership should have conducted a true primary election.
She was "gifted" the nomination, vs being selected in the primary. I think the populace responded in turn: This wasn't their candidate. Compare this to the Obama vs Clinton selection, which I actually believe the populace would have supported either.
btw: I'm not sure I'd compare this to the 2020 primaries as 2020 was a special year, and I don't think really any of the candidates really resonated with the voters, Biden just "wasn't Trump".
The issue isn't how she got the nomination but how bad of a candidate she is. People did not like her before she was VP. She was considered a joke candidate was performed extremely poorly in the 2020 primaries. The main reason a primary would have been better is because Harris would have lost and been replaced with a better candidate.
Yes, for sure, but the way Biden’s mental fitness was poor-pooed as misinformation for years and then Harris was installed at the last minute really undermines the “we’re the party of democracy” narrative.
If his VP was 2nd or 3rd place in the 2020 primaries, it wouldn't be a big deal compared to Harris because the candidate would be someone that a significant portion of the Dems actually support and want as a president.
Biden picked a VP who wouldn't be able to mount a challenge against him for a second term, and now we're paying for it.
And Biden was himself picked as a VP because Obama thought he'd be too old to run after his second term, and so would be completely loyal, rather then thinking about how decisions he made as a VP would affect his own future campaign.
This is my take as well.
I was opposed to Biden dropping out because skipping the primary means you go into the general election without the real pulse of the voters in your party.
I think Democrats in general are putting far too much weight on survey based polls, and not enough on ballet box polls.
I wouldn't even rule out 2020 like you're doing - I think Biden is actually a very compelling candidate for a lot of folks that don't get much mention in typical democratic discussion circles. Religious, relatively socially conservative but economically left (traditional union left, not neo-liberal), white, male.
While people complained about it not being Sanders online - Sanders and Biden were fairly similar platforms in a lot of respects, with the difference being that corporate money was less hostile to Biden - and it's telling that they were the only two to take any significant percentage of the primary vote (no other candidate broke 3mm votes)
---
Basically - I think there's a solid chance that despite the polling news around the first debate, Biden might have actually performed more strongly on election night.
As an extra note - As someone who was initially very critical of Biden... I have a lurking suspicion that he's going to be considered an excellent president in a historical context because he managed to invest heavily in infrastructure.
If she lost on the economy, it wouldn't have mattered, no one was going to turn it aorund that fast.
a lot of people were advocating for a primary in 2023 and got shouted down by the establishment dems
But aren't we supposed to wait out the Red Mirage / Blue Shift [0] before calling a winner? (Linked to timestamp of where former political director of Fox News testifies about it being a known thing).
[0]: https://youtu.be/5XEQ_7zZ-bw?t=93
I think that's it. What could happen overnight already happened.
Indeed. By the way, for anyone that's interested on the topic, I just stumbled onto a nice Stand-up Maths video that goes more in-depth on the subject and cautions against "nice, simple, neat, easy narratives" [0].
[0]: https://youtu.be/KXQ1ieFRr0o
Parties basically switched sides this election. From 2008 to now: - Pro war party: Repubs -> Dems - Dick Cheney party: Repubs -> Dems - Elitist party: Repubs -> Dems - Working class party: Dems -> Repubs - Pro free speech party: Dems -> Repubs - Bigger spending party: Dems -> Repubs - Skeptical of large corps: Dems -> Repubs
There are some issues where they haven't switched (eg. abortion)
I think this could be correct if only look at what they say rather than what they do.
We'll see if Republicans in control are anti-war, anti-elite, pro free speech, pro-working class, anti-large-corps, etc.
I know where I'd place my bets on policies.
This is a good point, but when you compare to Kamala, she's even worse on this front.
Kamala never talks like just a normal person. My wife was telling me this this morning. You can't get through the facade. How on earth are you gonna know what she's really gonna do?
My wife was like- "I just don't see Trump being a warmonger, but Kamala, she very well could be."
And then you take into account what she has said and done (Cheney anyone?) and it's open shut case of who's less warlike.
> "I just don't see Trump being a warmonger, but Kamala, she very well could be."
It's not Trump that will be the "warmonger", it's the people he empowers. Trump is a shallow personality -- all he wants is attention, he does not have an ideology. For the boring part of actually enacting policy he defers to supplicants and this time around his supplicants are more unserious and self-interested than the first time around.
This is just basic 2nd order reasoning that it seems like so many people in this country lack.
All the Republicans who were against him being re-elected are the warhawk wing of the party. There is zero evidence of him being inclined to be a warmonger, and a lot of evidence (and history) to the contrary.
> all he wants is attention, he does not have an ideology
This is not demonstrably true. He's had a consistent ideology since the beginning- MAGA and now MAHA too.
I used to think Trump was shallow, for maybe a few months in 2015. The problem with that is if you think Trump is shallow, it means all the people who voted for him and love him are stupid. In fact, you implied you think this:
> This is just basic 2nd order reasoning that it seems like so many people in this country lack.
Your operating philosophy cannot be that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid.
Your point about supplicants can be equally applied to Kamala.
> Your operating philosophy cannot be that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid.
I don't think people are stupid. I think they don't think things through.
MAGA is not a coherent political policy. Project 2025 is at least soundly documented and is probably the set of policies we'll see out of this admin.
I googled MAHA and it doesn't seem like a thing beyond a boilerplate website and twitter account nobody follows and some videos from RFK. Again, not a policy, just a platitude like MAGA and an unserious one at that.
"Those people don't think things through" then parroting the objectively false Project 2025 nonsense.
OK then, think this through - Trump has said the parts of P25 he's read are stupid, he doesn't support it, and it's from a group of people who don't work for him (some of them used to but none did when it was published). It's bog standard DC think tank pablum that nobody cares about.
Even supporters of Trump routinely say that you shouldn't take him on face value, vis-a-vis tariffs, etc. Why should I take what he said about 2025 seriously? His son and VP are absolutely aligned with the goals of the Heritage Foundation.
It's exactly what he did with Roe, trusted and subsequently empowered people whose ideology is stronger and, frankly, unaligned with his and look what happened.
Dobbs didn't happen because Trump got hoodwinked by a bunch of social conservatives. Maybe I'm retconning this in my brain but overturning Roe has been a thing with the GOP for a long time, Trump always said he was going to appoint conservative judges and justices, and he's said since that he'd veto a national abortion ban.
It's unfortunate that on this issue most of the GOP is in the "never, ever" camp and most of the left is in the "any time, any place, for any reason" camp. We'd be much better off as a country if we allowed it before ~20 weeks electively, disallowed it after ~20 weeks unless the mother is about to die, and just moved on. That would keep us more liberal on this issue than 99% of Europe, still protect people from unplanned pregnancy, and result in net fewer abortions in the US.
If you voted for him, possibly still not stupid. Love him? Definitely stupid.
> Your point about supplicants can be equally applied to Kamala.
Ah yes, the district attorney with a long political career is exactly same as the reality TV star.
IMO Ex-president is a better credential than having a long political career, which often means, connected, corrupted and conformist.
> Kamala never talks like just a normal person.
And Trump does? He says absolutely insane things.
However, "normal people" don't run for president.
In an age of inauthenticity on social media, people are inherently drawn to someone who appears authentic. Trump comes across as a straight-shooter. People may not love everything he says, but they feel like they can trust him because he isn't hiding behind a mask.
Do you even notice yourself how you consistently refer to Harris as ”Kamala“, but Trump by his last name, and what that means in terms of respect towards the candidates?
The blame for why nobody says Donald goes to Walt Disney.
Lame, boring
Uh, Trump barely talks at all.
Trump has many 3 hour long podcasts and routinely gives 3 hour long speeches, off the cuff.
His ramblings are borderline incomprehensible.
Might wanna brush up on your english listening skills then.
He does move his mouth a lot but I wouldn't call whatever sounds he produces "coherent speech"
You do realize almost every time he goes off the cuff Fox and co pretend it doesn’t happen or they immediately go into damage control if it spreads, right?
RE: "Skeptical of large corps" do you mean their voter base or their actions? Because I seriously doubt whoever is replacing Lina Khan is going to be more skeptical of large corporations
JD Vance said he supports the anti-US-big-tech campaign of Lina Khan and that he thinks she has a place in the new admin.
They will most likely break up Google and Meta for "pushing the woke agenda" but are smart enough to hide behind Lina Khan's anti-US-big-tech arguments that has populist support on both wings of the political spectrum.
This particular issue would be great for competition, and the economy. Conglomerates always have a discount. Whilst (perhaps) unpopular, this is one thing I'm rather in favour of.
I'd love this to be true but there's no reason and plenty to the contrary for me not to believe anything said by people associated with Trump. Time will tell but I expect the opposite.
Maybe last decade. This time, Trump's direct answer here was that he doesn't want to break up Google, because they are powerful, and he likes them powerful because he is going to force them to obey him and act in his interest.
I'll believe it when I see it; but yeah they _might_ target Google/Facebook for not following the free speech ideals of present day Twitter.
Don't think they'll actually break up either of them in that case though; more likely use them as a boogeyman to endlessly dispute with so they appear anti-big-tech whilst doing everything possible to boost share prices of the same and similar companies.
This will clearly happen because Pence was so influential in Trump’s first term, and Trump also followed through on so much of his and/or his vice president’s claims in the first term.
You cant be serious lol.
I read it as almost certainly sarcasm (usually when people use “clearly” like that, it’s sarcasm).
I disagree with him. Peter Thiel supported Trump before but the vice was from the religious part of the sector.
Vance is Thiels man. And Theil wants to be a Supreme Court Judge.
Why do you say Theil wants to be on the Supreme Court? This is the first time I'm hearing this
Vance called Trump "America's Hitler" a few years ago. You can't trust what he says.
JD Vance isn't president, Trump is. Trump does not care about breaking up big tech. What are we talking about here?
OpenAI is surely a goner now -- with Musk holding the reins.
How are the repubs not pro-war?
They are pro-Israel and anti-Palestine.
They are pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine.
The republicans I know have pretty varying opinions on those two wars. One pretty common thread is that they don't want us involved though, regardless of which side of the wars they align with.
Then call them what they are, isolationists not anti war then. Carrying water for Russia's invasion of Ukraine; opposing aid for Ukraine is incompatible.
Sure, you could call them isolation if you prefer.
Many of the republicans I know sit in a gray area in between, they definitely don't want us involved but they also don't have a strong opinion on the wars either way and see them as someone else's fight. That definitely isn't the main narrative I see in the media, but I personally know very few republicans who care strongly about one side of either war.
That view is a bit like a libertarian anti-war view in my opinion. Its antiwar without attempting to get involved in anyone else's business.
Basically questioning tax-money spendings
All of the Trump voters I know think we should obliterate Iran.
Well that's interesting. I live in a very red area and have never heard this. At best I could hear it said as a joke, I don't know anyone that would actually think we should do that.
Here's 1 that doesn't think that.
Maybe you just don't know enough Trump voters?
I live in Georgia; my family is from South Carolina, North Carolina, and Florida. Try again.
Ultimately those opinions will not matter. The president has full control of the State department and will align with the autocrats who stroke his ego: Putin and Netanyahu.
Expect the money to stop flowing to Ukraine, and to keep going to Israel, and try to divine a logic for that.
Thankfully the state department doesn't hold the purse strings, though the democratic party did so poorly that Congress may still be willing to approve whatever spending the Trump wants.
Trump is going to send more money and armaments to Israel and not one of them will object because he will abandon Ukraine and they’ll all hold that up as an amazing thing.
Maybe, at which point I expect their being pretty hypocritical. I wouldn't begin to say one side of either war is in the absolute right or wrong though. War is messy, terrible, and bloody. It'd never as simply as right vs wrong or good vs evil.
When has hypocrisy ever caused self reflection when people are playing the team sport that is politics?
It’s always “your hypocrisy is worse than my hypocrisy” because even if they admit the hypocrisy exists (not a given) they just chalk it up to “both sides.“ We’ve seen this song and dance for a decade straight.
True they are pro-israel, but so is most of the dems. It's the one topic that actually gets bipartisan support.
repubs aren't pro russia. they are just anti-getting-involved in there.
As de-facto world police, inaction on the US' part is compliance.
Of course, it took what, 70, 80 years of US influence to weaken the European armies to the point where we're highly reliant on them for defense, deterrence, tech and material. The Crimea invasion should've been the catalyst for the massively increased spending and prioritization of the military in Europe, not the 2022 escalation. I hope for Ukraine's sake that Europe has been able to catch up and restart production of equipment and that they can supply it asap, because after Ukraine it'll be Moldavia and Georgia, which already have pro-russian separatist movements / areas. Poland has invested a ton in updating their military at least.
I hope the US doesn't have veto powers to stop article 5 from being enacted if it does come to that.
No small portion of US economic dominance is spending more on the military than he China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine combined. Sending money to Ukraine wasn't out of the goodness of US hearts, it was to fight a low grade proxy war with Russia. Every dollar the US spends in the Ukraine destroys many times the amount of Russian equipment and spills no US blood. I am not endorsing these actions.
trying to be de-facto world police has caused many issues for US. (Current) repubs wants to stop getting involved in other conflicts (except supporting Israel)
This sounds like "Silence is violence" garbage that is used to bully anyone who's not an activist. In this case, actively pro war.
No. We don't want to be world police. We want to make money and grow our families.
It's a little more than silence. The US is actively selling weapons to Israel, actively sanctioning Israel's biggest enemy/rival Iran (not specifically to help Israel, but still), pressuring other Israel enemies to normalize relations with them, using their Security Council veto to block any UN resolution against Israel, etc.
Israel's diplomatic position would be much weaker if they didn't believe that the US would keep supporting them no matter what they do.
> Israel's diplomatic position would be much weaker if they didn't believe that the US would keep supporting them no matter what they do.
Why do you feel that Israel's diplomatic position needs to be weaker?
And how would the Palestinians' diplomatic position be, without the support of Iran, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Turkey, Lebanon, Libya, Tunis, and the USSR and now Russia?
My comment was in reference to Ukraine/Russia. I don't think we should be involved with Israel/Palestine either
> I hope for Ukraine's sake that Europe has been able to catch up and restart production of equipment and that they can supply it asap,
They can't and they won't.
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-weapons-shells-european-unio...
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-ukraine-military-aid-2026/a-69...
Sending more munitions to Ukraine means it takes the Russian military longer to overcome the Ukrainian army by force of arms. The unstated aspect that is often glossed over is that this requires more and more Ukrainian men to be forced against their will to die for the territorial integrity of the country (because in 2024 the Ukrainian military is fueled overwhelming by conscription, not by volunteers). It's bizarre to me that is considered a "pro-Ukrainian" take. It's like egging on Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance to keep fighting, no matter if ~70% of your male population dies in the process. Just don't surrender!
It's pro-ukrainian in relation to the alternative, which appears to be the eventual complete dissolution of Ukrainian sovereignty?
> It's the one topic that actually gets bipartisan support.
Gee I wonder why. Every single US senator takes AIPAC lobby money.
And they pay well and on time
If only there was a president that wanted pro Israel lobby groups register under Foreign Agents Registration Act, wonder what would have happened.
>repubs aren’t pro russia
They sure are for the right price.
> repubs aren’t pro russia
This only matter if we think that the Republican party still exists, and was not silently replaced by other party carrying its blood stained skin. Is GOP still alive? Is a serious question.
I have a lot of doubts about the real independence of republicans in this situation. The man at charge is obviously pro Russia and the republicans can't do a s*t about this. They will be replaced one by one. Anything that would try will be pushed out of the road.
GQP/MAGA is the party now. Old GOP was definitely swiftly executed.
I heard Mitch McConnell called a RINO a few weeks ago. That says it all.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen many republicans be anti-Israel and anti-Palestine, anti-Ukraine and anti-Russia. Their stance is pro-America.
Yup, me too.
They have managed to have themselves perceived as anti-war, which is an obvious untruth.
They are certainly more anti-war than the Dems right now
The GOP would rather the Ukraine war end (probably with Russia winning).
[flagged]
Boy what an over generalization.
Most are anti palestine because Hamas is a terrorist. Sorry I won’t support terrorism and support what Israel is doing.
I support Ukraine because I know what Russia needs Ukraine for.
Do I want to see people shooting? No because I’ve been to war and seen how ugly it is. Sometimes you have to defend yourself though.
I still voted for Trump.
> Sorry I won’t support terrorism and support what Israel is doing.
This just means you support State Terrorism instead of non-state terrorism.
> Sometimes you have to defend yourself though.
Unless you're Palestinian. In which case defending yourself isn't authorized. Just ask the West Bank residents being regularly killed by armed illegal settlers pre-October 7th how laying down their arms has worked out for them.
I'm trying to follow your logic, seriously please help me. You are suggesting that murdering people at a music festival and kidnapping children and kidnapping elderly and beheading civilians is a form of defense against other people hurting other people in a different geographic region? Please, tell me I'm wrong and do tell me how you see things.
> You are suggesting that murdering people at a music festival and kidnapping children and kidnapping elderly and beheading civilians is a form of defense against other people hurting other people in a different geographic region?
I'm suggesting murdering people at a music festival occupies the same space, morally, as bombing entire families with aviation ordnance. One of them is painted as wrong, and the other isn't, because state terrorism is tacitly approved in the Western mainstream information space....depending on the perpetrators. When Hamas (or Russia) does it, it's "kidnapping", when Israel does it, they are "detaining suspects". From August 2023 (before the Hamas attack) AP News was reporting Israel had 1,200 detainees without charges. Why aren't they called hostages? ( https://apnews.com/article/israel-detention-jails-palestinia... )
The two regions are both enclaves of Palestine, engaged in a joint struggle for emancipation. There were 100+ Palestinians killed in the West Bank in 2022: ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63073541 ) and 200+ killed in 2023 before the October 7th attack ( https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/08/1139922 ). Clearly disarmament and NOT being ruled by Hamas is not working for the West Bank Palestinians. I'm sure if you asked any of the various Palestinian militant groups, yes they are engaged in a joint defense of their people. After all, the primary purpose of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to try to capture enough Israelis to force a prisoner exchange and get their own people back (similar to snatching Gilad Shalit and trading just him for 1,000 Palestinians). They suffered from "catastrophic success" mixed with undisciplined follow-on echelons (Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as others) who inflicted far more civilian damage than just a cross-border snatch & grab....and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.
> I'm suggesting murdering people at a music festival occupies the same space, morally, as bombing entire families with aviation ordnance.
Then I'll address that. You are again, 100% correct. Bombing entire families with aviation ordnance would be abhorrent.
When the Gazans set out to attack a music festival, they did so with the explicit intention to murder civilians. When Israel drops a JDAM on a civilian home in Gaza, one of two things happen: Either the target is a high-ranking militant, and unfortunately the civilians he lives with (like everybody else, they have families) are collateral damage. Or, the target is military infrastructure in those civilian homes, and the home gets warnings to evacuate before the bombs fall.
Let's be clear: Israel has been willing to cause far more collateral damage since the 7th of October last year than beforehand. Every Israeli I know mourns the civilians killed as a result. I am certain that there exist Israelis who celebrate Gazan civilian deaths, I see them online. But nobody that I've ever met - and I served in a combat unit here - has ever felt that way.
If you really feel that bombing entire families is wrong, you should know that a rocket from Gaza fell not far from my apartment in November 2012. We had just a broken window, but other neighbours had far more damage and one was critically injured. The rocket fell where one of my daughters was playing just as the sirens rang - that siren saved her life and others.
> After all, the primary purpose of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to try to capture enough Israelis to force a prisoner exchange and get their own people back
You can't possibly believe this when there are numerous confirmed reports of entire families being massacred with 0 hostages taken. If your purpose was really to take hostages; those could have been easy bargain chips; instead they raped them, murdered them and paraded their bodies in front of cheerful crowds.
If the central point of the operation was to grab hostages; their whereabouts and well being (or at least survival) would have been central to the whole ordeal; instead the were disseminated with little to no proof of life. It doesn't even appear that the Hamas leadership knew what to do with them, or even had them accounted for and located.
The goal of the attacks was to inflict a major blow to the Israeli government by forcing a strong military response that would delay the normalisation of the relations between Israel and other arab states. To do so Hamas was wiling to sacrifice civilian blood which is exactly what is happening now. They placed their hideouts in schools hospitals, and NGO headquarters to maximise the political cost of any military operation. Hostages were "nice to have" as they were supposed to further increase the pressure on the Israeli government by people who would be pushing for their return.
They did not anticipate how far BiBi was willing to go and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.
Arguably being pro-Israel is anti-war. Israel's current conflict is the direct result of several entities starting a war with her last October. Suggesting that Israel should not fight back is promoting the idea of war as a means of getting what one wants.
Ah yes nothing happened before last October right
There was lots of conflict. But not war.
Are you deliberately trying to conflate conflict with war to push an agenda?
Free Palestine weirdo
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Nah, Americans aren't that dumb. We send billions and billions to Israel every year, for what? Most Americans want to stop being a blank check for them to bomb whoever and then get mad, deplete their resources, and ask for more when they get attacked back
I'm glad that you feel that way. You'll be relieved that those pushing the "Israel bombs whoever and then get mad" agenda was lying to you. We've been (we as in my family) absorbing rocket fire for literately years - hardly been bombing every time we get mad. It took something egregious - literally beheadings and burning of babies (I personally know at least two families whose babies were burned to death) - to ignite this war. My daughter's classmate was murdered in his home along with both his sisters and both their parents. My son's summer camp counselor was kidnapped, his body was later retrieved. Shall I go on? What would you have your country do under these circumstances?
Your heart is in the right place. But you've been manipulated.
Renounce Israel’s war crimes or face tribunals
I don't buy that Repubs are the free speech party (or even that Dems were the free speech party). Republican complaints about free speech were almost entirely self-serving and never on principal.(this is not to say judges or other conservative thought leaders may not be pro-free speech) but for the political parties: commitment to free speech comes from the tension between the two parties. Give either of them too much power and free speech is out the window.
Also, pro war party is a weird thing to say. Repubs in 2000 wanted to be the aggressors. Defense to Ukraine has thus far been pretty bi-partisan.
> - Pro free speech party: Dems -> Repub
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/media/trump-strip-tv-station-...
Those broadcast licenses are not a god given right to CBS. Did you see how CBS cut up Kamala's and Mike Johnson's quotes?
The US government is under no obligation to CBS to give them airwaves to propagandize fake news.
Have you ever seen Fox News?
>Skeptical of large corps They will surely get rid of Lina Khan almost instantly, who is one of the few people in a position of power who is actually poutting skepticism of large companies into action.
Granted, there is a good chance that she would be fired either way if Harris had won.
Dems are the only ones pushing antitrust. The Republicans taking over is dominated by CEOs of large companies. How could you possibly say its Reps that are skeptical of large corps not dems. Antitrust is probably gonna die now because of this outcome
Also, thinking that Republicans aren't just as, if not more, bought by the military industry complex is just sticking your head in the sand. The GOP is more adamant about funding Israel than Dems are
Bill Clinton didn't have major wars, but did have wars. Bush Jr had major wars and the dems fought like hell against that, but then Obama had a bunch of wars and kept one major war going. Trump didn't have new wars and insisted on ending the one major war (which didn't happen until Biden). Biden has a major war. Harris got the endorsement of the Cheneys and some Bushes.
There was no party switch. Both parties love the money flow that wards create.
Trump is not a party; he's the only one against the wars.
You just made a great case for voting for Trump.
Name one, just one antiwar group that's pro Republican. They're all on the left, who was once again, excluded from participating.
The Democrats think that by going harder right, the Republicans would stop calling them Communist.
They don't realize the accusations are pulled out of thin air to begin with. The Democrats pushing harder right won't quiet the right wing bullshit machine.
> The Democrats think that by going harder right, the Republicans would stop calling them Communist.
Is that why there were all the college protests? I had no idea college kids did it hoping that the right would stop calling the left communists.
Oh, wait, that __isn't__ why they did it.
If you think the Democrats who did what the students were protesting and sent in the cops to beat them up are on the same team, you're cooked.
They sent armed people in to round them up and destroy things.
The kids were protesting the Democrats because the Democrats have become the right wing party for those who dislike Trump. Foreign policy, economic policy, immigration, it's all right wing
Multiple people in this very thread are claiming the Republicans have more left policies on these issue.
Harris is a prosecutor cop. She also wanted to round up immigrants and toss them in camps: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-immigration-borde...
How is that left wing unless you're definition of left wing is "not Republican"?
While I disagree on your other points, I agree that traditional left wing is totally dead in this country. It's been co-opted by wacko identity politics.
The politician closest to the traditional values of the left wing is ironically Trump.
It has not been coopted by wacko identity politics.
That's a made up story by right wing podcasters who sell boner pills.
For instance, here's the schedule for a socialist bookstore in LA https://allpowerbooks.org/ ... There's Zero idpol. Here's the books they're highlighting, https://allpowerbooks.org/collections/books here's a publisher https://www.versobooks.com/ scroll and read the titles.
Here's the upcoming schedule for DSA, https://dsa-la.org/calendar/list/ again zero. Nothing here https://jacobin.com/ either.
Then there's anarchist groups like the ones that try to prevent drug overdose https://www.ieharmreduction.org/ or feed the homeless. Here scroll through the Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/lafnb they give no shits about idpol.
It's manufactured presentation by right wing media celebs - a projection of their characters like Milo Yinnapolis, Andy Ngo and Oli London onto what they imagine the left is doing.
The right is full of loud bombastic personalities like Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Mike Cernovich, Baked Alaska, Cat Turd, Libs of Tiktok and all the plastic surgery ladened evangelical TV pastors dripping in make-up. It's just psychological projection.
> It has not been coopted by wacko identity politics.
Proceeds to quote wacko communist politics.
When I say traditional left, I don't mean far, academic, elitist left. I'm talking union, FDR, JFK, LBJ, Bernie Sanders types. Not academics who write books about the role of Cuban women in the Communist revolution.
You hilariously proved exactly my point.
You think "identity politics" means "communism", that "communism" means "socialism" and that "liberal" means "left"?!
Alright. We're using different dictionaries.
Sometimes Democrats are like "but I'm a woman" because their policies are otherwise indistinguishable from the Republican, ok sure. Democrats are just Republicans that wave a pride flag. If that's the claim than agreed.
> Alright. We're using different dictionaries.
The two of you maybe, not the OP and most of the rest of the world.
Thinking identity politics, liberalism, leftism, socialism, the Democrats and communism are equivalent.
I know people who think this. I have them in my family. Doesn't mean it's correct
Liz Cheney voted with the GOP for the four long Trump years, how is she not a Republican
Because the partied seem to have largely flipped when it comes to platform and Cheney followed the platform rather than the party allegiance.
It's become evident that Cheney's will wear whichever color funds more war.
I am honestly unsure why the characterization of Trump as anti-war overlooks his stated desire to "order the Department of Defense to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other covert and overt actions to inflict maximum damage on [Mexican] cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations." Whether or not you think that's justified, it is a very clear statement of intent to use military force on foreign territory, at our discretion. And that's a quote from 2023.
I'm surprised more people hadn't noticed this switch during this campaign cycle. It seemed pretty clear to me, especially coming off the heals of a pandemic response that saw the democratic party flip so dramatically to blindly trusting big pharma and reaching for law & order as a pandemic response strategy.
The best explanation I heard recently was that Trump in 2016 made a play to pull working class Americans into the Republican party. The party basically clinched its teeth and looked the other way, knowing that they either accept the voters or risk a real problem. Since then the Republican party has largely embraced the working class while the Democratic party continues to favor more and more towards the rich voters and massive corporations, finishing off the full party flip.
I do have to say, that I'm very curious to see what the next four years look like. The strange thing about the working class people that Trump brought over, is I think many of them expect Government action/intervention in their lives, and a large part of the Republican party still seems to be pretty hands off, de-regulation, attack the welfare state, tax cuts for billionaires.
So I don't want to immediately just dismiss the idea that Republicans are the party of "blue collar workers", and if they really can bring manufacturing back, they'll be heroes, but I'm curious how patient the base will be for it. If they really do cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, there will be big time economic losers. It seems like a geo-economic realignment to bring back manufacturing could take more than four years, and it seems hard to believe there won't be economic costs. will they be patient? Will that geo-economic realignment even help the current generation, and can they stay in power long enough to fulfill it?
>Since then the Republican party has largely embraced the working class while the Democratic party continues to favor more and more towards the rich voters and massive corporations, finishing off the full party flip.
Insane to say this when Trump and Republicans want to lower taxes for the rich and even suggest "abolishing the IRS".
Tax is always paid by the workers. “The rich” are not the problem, they own the businesses that create jobs and add value to the economy. The problem is the government that can never have enough.
You need to reduce the need for tax money, not increase the amount paid.
Cutting taxes on the rich helps the rich, it doesn't directly hurt the working class. More importantly, Trump and the Republicans embracing the working class has everything to do with rhetoric and who they target for voting and very little to do with policies they actually enact. Most voters end up caring about what is said and pay little attention to what is done.
> it doesn't directly hurt the working class
Until the programs and benefits that the working class relies on are cut because "who's gonna pay for it?!" And "we've gotta reduce the deficit!". Then the working class will be directly and painfully effected because they are the ones that need tax credits and Healthcare options and foodstamps and support! Who's gonna pay for it? The people that already have enough! I understand the human urge to hold on to everything you have. But when did we stop caring about contributing to a functioning society?
That's all totally possible, sure. But those are down stream impacts that are influenced heavily by other factors and by how people react to a change in taxes, for this example. Its way more complicated than that.
> I understand the human urge to hold on to everything you have. But when did we stop caring about contributing to a functioning society?
I'd ask when we decided that a functioning society was only possible with a powerful government collecting and redistributing wealth. Neither are required in my opinion, though we likely couldn't be as centralized as we are today without large governments and taxes.
Trump wants to lower taxes for everyone, not just the rich. Which will have more of an effect on the working class.
It's a matter of fact that Trump has pulled a huge portion of the working class vote from the Democrats
You probably think the working class is just stupid.
I think the working class is way smarter than you think. If you genuinely explore that possibility you will understand clearly why Trump won.
I'm sure we'll see a flourishing of the working class under the Republicans, then. We'll see Trump going to bat for unions in their fights against Corporate America, we'll see minimum wage increases throughout the country, maternal leave, and much more.
Or, people have fallen for a demagogue selling them a cheap lie (it's not corporate America keeping you in low paying jobs despite massive productivity and profitability, it's those damn immigrants stealing your jobs!).
Getting a block of voters to support you is very different from actually doing right by those voters in the long run. If the Republican party doesn't end up doing much, or anything, to help the working class voters that Trump brought to the table they'll lose those voters eventually. Its just a lagging indicator since it first has to become clear that the party isn't actually on those voters' side.
You're trying to make it cut and dry that Dems good Repubs bad for the working class. And working class too dumb to know it.
It's simply not true and we can go through every line item and add nuance.
> Trump going to bat for unions
Union jobs have been exported to other countries
> we'll see minimum wage increases
No taxes on tips
> maternal leave
Higher child tax credit, and generally pro-family
These things are not as simple as you make it to be. Maybe you disagree with Trump voters, but that does not make them stupid and gullible.
> Pro war
I was surprised to see Trump not entertain much war during his last term but I don't agree. Both parties equally entertain war and I fear any Republican anti-war this time will be pro-Russia and further destabilize the world.
> Working class party
I think the voters see it that way and it's a real win for Republicans since they're the opposite and get away with it for who knows what reason
> Pro free speech
I've absolutely no idea how you came to this conclusion
> Skeptical of large corps
I'd love for that to be true but I bet they'll be just fine with any large corp that helps them remain in control.
And yes, the entire topic of religion has not only remained the same but perhaps gotten worse.
> Both parties equally entertain war and I fear any Republican anti-war this time will be pro-Russia and further destabilize the world.
Trump is emphatically anti-war and he's dragging the Republican party kicking and screaming to that position. Just look at his relatively low-war presidency and his rhetoric on war throughout the years.
> I've absolutely no idea how you came to this conclusion
Free speech? The Dems are calling left and right for censorship. The only person that has stopped it is Elon Musk, now a vital facet of the Trump coalition. I have no idea how you can make the case the Dems are the free speech party.
> I'd love for that to be true but I bet they'll be just fine with any large corp that helps them remain in control.
Again, this is something that the MAGA types are dragging the Republicans kicking and screaming. MAGA abhors big pharma, whereas Dems trust it. Was the opposite in 2008 or even 2012.
We like to discuss Trump so much, but a lot of this shift is actually the Dems moving their positions too.
calling elon a proponent of free speech is hilarious
trump is so anti-war he increased troop presence in the middle east while biden pulled out of afghanistan
> trump is so anti-war he increased troop presence in the middle east
Gonna need a citation for that one.
> while biden pulled out of afghanistan
That's ridiculous. By the time Biden came into office, the pull-out had been long decided. If anything, Biden inherited a messy situation because Trump had rushed the exit too much.
I guess you've not been paying attention to MAGA types who equally as much want censorship and who are for any person, corporation, or government who will help them to further their goals on that front. I would love for "MAGA" to come to represent the genuinely good things that Trump said on the campaign trail for 2016, and none of the bad things are associated with the those who claim to be part of "MAGA", but fool me twice shame on me.
What?
Trump pulled out of the Iran deal, which pushed Iran to redevelop its nuclear program. Anti-war what?
Trump signed the abraham accords with Saudi/Israeli appeasement, which Israeli intelligence notes pushed Hamas to attack on oct 7 and launch this war. Anti-war what?
Trump withheld military aid from the Ukraine until Zelensky provided dirt on Joe Biden, which was critical for Ukraine's defense against Russia's aggression in Eastern Ukraine, leaving Ukraine weaker and invaded in full two years later, anti-war what?
Trump has threatened to jail his opponents and go after the press, free speech what?
Republicans have banned books, want to ban teachers and fire massive amounts of civil servants, free speech what?
Elitist party, Trump is literally a billionaire who is supported by other billionaires, some of whom he will put in his cabinet. His biggest two policy positions are tax cuts for big corps (elitist) and deportations of the lowest class of people in the US. But Dems are elitist?
I don't think there is much that they've switched on actually in the last election, other than Republicans convincing the working class that they're their party, something republicans have done on and off for many decades.
This reads like TDS.
Simple facts: Trump had way less war than now. Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen. Dick Cheney supporting the Dems is a simple way to look at it.
Free speech: Random local Republicans have proposed all sorts of things, but Trump's circle is more pro free speech than the Dems right now. And Republicans as a party have stated free speech as a policy position. Whereas Dems state they want to "combat misinformation". They do not advocate free speech. There's even a clip circulating today where "The View" hosts call for cracking down on "misinformation"
Trump has literally been brought to a courthouse and had his mugshot taken and you're talking about "jailing opponents"?
Your arguments basically boil down to: "Trump bad, half country stupid" which is absolutely elitist.
> Trump had way less war than now. Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen.
That’s about as accurate as saying that I ”had“ less war on my previous job. As it turns out, though, the world doesn’t revolve around me, and neither around the US president. Other actors exist, and they make their own decisions.
I don’t know how to take your rambling around free speech seriously. Do you really argue that we should treat „alternative facts“ as valuable free speech? That we should support people actively deceiving others? Maybe, just maybe, when free speech collides with basic democratic resilience, democracy itself ought to win out?
> Trump has literally been brought to a courthouse and had his mugshot taken and you're talking about "jailing opponents"?
For an actual crime he committed. As it is supposed to be. Yet, he pushed for legislation to ensure he’s literally above the law.
> the world doesn’t revolve around me, and neither around the US president
lol, yes you are as important as the US president.
> maybe, when free speech collides with basic democratic resilience, democracy itself ought to win out?
Exhibit A of how libs now are against free speech^
> For an actual crime he committed
For "mislabeling campaign funds", something the DNC and Clinton was fined for doing but never criminally prosecuted. It's simply because people don't like Trump the actual thing he did doesn't matter.
> lol, yes you are as important as the US president.
That’s besides the point. The recent wars didn’t start because Trump wasn’t president, and that wouldn’t have prevented them.
> Exhibit A of how libs now are against free speech^
That… doesn’t relate to what I said. Well. I don’t think I want to continue this discussion.
You've proven yourself incapable of a normal argument. If I tell you that Israel itself thinks that Trump's actions caused the Hamas attacks and Israeli's retaliation, you'll respond to that by saying 'but the attacks happened during Biden's presidency thus it's Biden who started the war', then I really don't know how to have a conversation with you.
If you cite Yemen without understanding that the civil war started in 2014, and the cease-fire started in 2022 under Biden, as a reason for why Biden is pro-war, then I don't know how to have a conversation with you.
If you think the guy who literally says journalists are the enemy of the people, the enemy within, and that that national guard or the military can resolve it, that he wouldn't mind if journalists get shot, that he'd take away broadcasting licenses, that he'll throw journalists in jail, that he'd bring the independent FCC under white house control, ban books, teachers and civil servants if they don't align with his views, is a guy who made free speech a genuine policy position, then I don't know how to have a conversation with you.
If I give counterpoints to your arguments and you paraphrase that by me saying 'trump bad, half country stupid', which I've not said, and then go on to classify that as elitist when the ENTIRE cabinet is envisaged to be (billionaire) elites with two major policy proposals benefitting elites and deporting the opposite of elites, then I don't know how to have a conversation with you.
So I won't.
Trump doesn’t care about abortion at all, yet for some reason Dems think it‘ll be Handmaid‘s Tale. States can do what they want.
Trump doesn't care about anything but himself, of course.
But the judges he appoints do. And if his first term is repeated, he'll again just appoint the far-right judges that republicans hand to him.
You're right, some things will be left up to states and I think we'll see more state divisions and self-sorting of people among states.
On abortion, it will be interesting to watch republicans fight over trying to push a nationwide ban. Trump is savvy and powerful enough to squash that, probably.
It's more important to look at what Trump does than what he says. Because he says whatever he thinks people will like. He's a chronic liar, by the way.
Trump did in fact enable the judges who changed the law on abortion.
As an American who grew from nothing, served in the military, and expanded in my career -
I find the concerns for Democracy comical.
Most of you do not understand the type of people that built and fought for democracy. There is no real fear amongst these same type of people in modern America.
As someone who spent most of his life in a dictatorship, I don’t think you appreciate how easily a society can slide into a totalitarian state and how apathetic most of the population can become.
It’s also interesting that you served in the U.S. military and didn’t recognize how self-serving and institutionally corrupt it is. I come from a country with an oversized military relative to its government, and the parallels I can draw between its behavior and that of the U.S. Army are uncanny.
I appreciate what you’ve been through.
However, comparing American society with one of the Middle East does not resonate with me. That goes hand in hand with comparing a military of a dictatorship with one of a democracy.
There is nothing inherently special about Americans that makes them more democratic. I agree we shouldn't compare the U.S. with Middle Eastern countries; they were never democratic in the first place. A more appropriate comparison would be with the German Weimar Republic, where a charismatic leader managed to overthrow democracy.
Many people raised in democratic societies don't fully understand the intricacies of the relationship between the military and dictatorships; they see the military as a tool in the dictator's hand to wield at will. This couldn't be further from the truth. A (strong) military in a dictatorship is its own institution, largely isolated from the rest of society and granted its own perks and benefits. The dictator can wield the military only to the extent that it aligns with the institution's goals. Competent ones try to align the military's goals with their own; incompetent ones get overthrown.
Because of this isolation from broader society, the officers and soldiers believe that what is good for the institution is good for the country. They're not suppressing their citizens; they believe they are protecting the republic.
The U.S. Army is already operating as an isolated entity from broader U.S. society. Monetary corruption is quite substantial—consider the medium- to high-ranking officers and their relationships and revolving doors with defense contractors.
I'm not saying the U.S. is going to become -insert non-democratic country here-, but if we ignore the usual Western caricature of Stalinist-style dictatorships and realize that there are multiple forms of eroding democracy, you'll start to understand why it's not such a far-fetched idea.
Comparisons to Weimar Germany are ridiculous because the state of the two countries are vastly, VASTLY different. Nevermind the fact that we're also in a different, much more interconnected and mixed world than back then.
On the one hand you have a once-proud and powerful state recovering from the most devastating war humanity has ever waged (by that point) that it lost in, which subsequently forced them into paying back massive reparations, sanctions and economic and military limits imposed on it by the victors of said war. Of course a charismatic, populist leader who gives the resentful nation a boogeyman to fight against is going to win.
On the other you have the de facto #1 world power with the most cartoonishly powerful military on the planet that has their fingers involved in every single pie on the planet, which was founded on the principle of democracy some 200 years ago, with strong safeguards put in place to prevent the exact thing that happened with the Weimar republic.
Even pretending like the Weimer Republic's military was anything even resembling what the US military is is ridiculous.
> On the other you have the de facto #1 world power
Wasn't always the case, and honestly it's hard to tell where China stands right now, and it seems like it's not slowing down... if you look at e.g. robotics or drones...
> which was founded on the principle of democracy some 200 years ago
Didn't it need a civil war to actually become a democracy? My understanding was that it was not exactly founded as a democracy. But maybe I'm being pedantic there.
> with strong safeguards put in place to prevent the exact thing that happened with the Weimar republic.
Genuinely interested! What are those safeguards and what do they prevent that happened with the Weimar republic?
> Didn't it need a civil war to actually become a democracy? My understanding was that it was not exactly founded as a democracy. But maybe I'm being pedantic there.
Definitely think you are being pedantic. By that standard, we're not a "real" democracy right now with felons not being able to vote in many states. That's a valid position to have, but imo not really useful for this discussion.
I'm saying that because I recently read somewhere that it needed a civil war to modify the Constitution and make it a democracy. The article was making the point that it was purposely not designed as a democracy at first.
Which I found interesting, but admittedly not necessarily useful here.
With the Weimar Republic, it was specifically section 48 of their constitution which granted emergency powers to pass laws and the normalization of its invocation, paired with a dysfuctional legistlative body that was the only check on that power, that allowed the measures to be taken that culminated in probably unconstitutional passage of the Enalbing Act that killed the republic.
> Wasn't always the case...
Sure, but it has been for the better part of a few decades. The whole reason US hegemony has spread so far and wide is due to this.
> Genuinely interested! What are those safeguards and what do they prevent that happened with the Weimar republic?
I'm not American so I'm probably getting the tiny details wrong here so please correct me if I'm wrong on any points. A lot of this is going off my memory, so I'm probably getting some dates and such details wrong as well. I'm definitely not including a very comprehensive answer here, as it's a complex topic with a lot of history attached that I don't know too much myself. I'm mostly just a nerd who finds this kinda stuff fascinating, not any kind of expert :)
The big sticking points for the Weimar were that the president wielded much more legislative and executive power than US presidents do. Article 48 let the Reichspresident call a state of emergency without ever involving the Reichstag (Parliament) which basically enabled them to become dictators whenever they wanted. Article 48 was one of the early keys Hitler used to seize power, as a fire in the Reichstag parliament house gave him an excuse to call a state of emergency because of a supposed Communist uprising. He used Article 48 to arrest Communists en-masse on the basis of the Reichstag Fire Decree which was signed shortly after the fire, which also included many provisions that restricted free speech, movement and other similar civil liberties. I'd recommend further reading up on the Fire Decree yourself, as it's quite interesting as a key turning point in the Weimar turning into Nazi Germany.
In contrast, US presidents cannot supersede congress and decrees are subject to congressional oversight (there probably exist exceptions, so take my words here with a grain of salt). Even emergency powers (such as the ones Hitler used) are much weaker for US presidents and have to go through congressional approval. Even if every single member of congress is a republican, republicans are not a completely united party. A lot of them dislike Trump and have their own agendas they'd prefer to be pushed, and ultimately they have no real reason to bow to the president since they are elected in completely different timeframes, wield different but almost equal power and are also competing with every other member of congress. For example the fear mongering about leaving NATO, there's basically a 0% chance of that happening because it requires a supermajority from congress, despite whatever the President might want. It's a pretty common reason why things like the recently proposed student loan debt forgiveness never end up happening, the president can't just will it to happen.
Another big one is that the militaries work under different philosophies and circumstances between the two, and you can't have a takeover without military backing. The Weimar military was still pretty loyal to the old monarchists and viewed Weimar as a forced state that they were put into under pressure after losing WW1. You have to understand that the whole "democracy" idea was a pretty fresh one at that time for Germany, they only switched from monarchism to republicanism in 1918 after the November revolution.
By contrast, US military as far as I understand it isn't really all that loyal to whoever the current president is, but rather to the constitution. The president might be commander-in-chief, but that doesn't mean he can tell the military to do whatever they want. They still wield power over the military of course, but it's a lot less pronounced than it was in Germany, because the military were loyal to Hitler. If the military leaders who are ultimately the ones commanding the troops don't like the president, there isn't much they can do. Even the national guard is interesting, since it's a split responsibility between states and the federal government. And, again, congress also has a say in many military things, though my knowledge there is for sure lacking so I'd recommend you do your own reading up there.
An example there of the limited power of the president was when Nixon was getting the boot, the secretary of defence James Schlesinger at the time instructed military leaders to run Nixon's order by either him or the secretary of state, because he was worried about Nixon's reaction.
And again, the economic and social situation in Germany at the time cannot be overstated. People were miserable, the country was massively poor and were in a major demographic problem due to the war. Their industry was quickly stagnating due to the aftermath of WW1 and there was a lot of resentment building up in Germany for what they considered to be unfair and harsh treatment from the Allies. They were, to put it charitably, extremely unstable times and it was a matter of time before all of it exploded like it did. If it wasn't Hitler, it would've been the next charismatic leader promising to take revenge on the people who ruined the country (which is massively oversimplifying things of course, but you get the gist)
That is super interesting, thank you so much!
There are real, significant between Weimar, Italy 10 years before and the USA today.
However the explanation for the rise of Hitler you allude to is woefully incomplete. Hitler and his party didn't get into power by winning the majory popular vote. Instead the Hitler and the Nazis formed a coalition with the monarchists and convinced Hindenburg that they would help restore the Monarchy if Hindenburg helped them take power and granted them new powers.
I'm not going to claim we are necessarily in the same situation today, but I do think it is worth being aware of how this kind of thing can happen.
We should be extremely wary about giving a charismatic leader extraordinary powers, even if that leader promises that power will only be used to accomplish your goals.
You're 100% right, my comment was definitely not meant to imply that the Nazi party's takeover was a simple affair that was as cut and dry as Hitler winning the vote and turning the country into Nazi Germany.
However the way I see it, people (not you, I just mean in general people who seem to believe Trump will bring about the 5th Reich) are probably out of ignorance of the history there also massively oversimplifying and overestimating how much power the president ultimately wields, especially when compared to Weimer-era Germany. People aren't aware that there are safety mechanisms in the US that didn't exist in the Weimar Republic, and as such simply bringing up that "This is exactly what happened with Nazi Germany!" is massively oversimplifying things as well from the other side.
The comment my comment was replying to did this exact thing, in fact, where they equated the election of a charismatic leader to what happened with the Nazis.
I do agree with you though, I personally tend to align with Frank Herbert when it comes to people who want to wield power and rule over others, in that they should be studied and watched closely and carefully and disposed of swiftly if they pull any Hitler-tier shenanigans
> A more appropriate comparison would be with the German Weimar Republic, where a charismatic leader managed to overthrow democracy
This doesn't resonate to me. The conditions in the US are so different than the German Weimar Republic. I mean sure it's possible but without a compelling reason I kind of discard those arguments. The US has had lots of charismatic leaders screwing stuff up and yet still survived.
More importantly, American Exceptionalism is deeply ingrained in our philosophy. I think we're wrong, but it exists. So the general populace doesn't believe this stuff and just makes people sound out of touch. I think when someone is thinking about inflation and rent and mortgages, the idea that they should care about an existential threat to democracy doesn't seem to matter much. That's a rich person's worry.
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> There are many aspects of America that make it uniquely more democratic than any other country could possibly be.
Including how the presidential election is decided by 538 appointed political insiders? Is that really more democratic than any other country?
These people can, and have previously, overruled the votes of the population.
This is the weirdest thing I have read in a while. I can name multiple more democratic countries, for example starting with the Nordic countries. Just having a multi party system goes far in this comparison.
If you were going to give an example, Switzerland would have been a good one. But they have elements of exactly what I'm talking about, considering there are French, Italian, German quarters of the country.
Nordics have only recently become democracies, <100 years ago.
To clarify, the context of the discussion was the resiliency of democracy, not some dick measuring contest of which country is presently more democratic.
> There are many aspects of America that make it uniquely more democratic than any other country could possibly be.
Now I'm curious: how is America uniquely more democratic than Switzerland could possibly be?
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today everything feels like a joke, i also thought americans had more common sense and values than this.
Reading the comments, I think the value that they have is: charisma. Another comment wrote about Paul Graham's essay.
You like 'em, you vote 'em into power.
It is what it is.
Ok, sure, I can bite the argument charisma matter. I just don't see how Trump is charismatic in any way. He's a spoiled rich kid that throws tantrums when things don't go his way.
Not grandparent but I have an idea.
First of all, that's how you see it. That's how I see it. But what about someone else?
This comment is going to be a bit rough as I'm going to play act a lot to really drive my point home.
I remember talking to my carpenter friend. He told me he voted for someone like Trump in my country. I asked him why.
My issue with the local politician where I'm from is that he puts all Islamic people into one bucket: the stupid one. I think that's crazy and unfair. He does it with more things. I think his policies are stupid whenever I hear them.
My carpenter friend and I go way back. We met each other when I was 7 and he was 9. He was part of a dizygotic twin. We haven't spoken to each other in 4 years and just vaguely kept in touch.
When he told me that he voted on that bullshit person of a politician, I asked why and he's like: "he's charismatic!"
The thing is. I know this carpenter friend. He might be a lot older but I know him emotionally. He hasn't changed a bit, he just got more mature. But underneath, whenever I see someone from my elementary school, I still see the same child. I also think they still see me that way, that's the impression I get.
The charisma doesn't come as much from that our crazy local politician is actually charismatic. It comes more from the fact that - if I had to guess - from his perspective: politics is boring as hell. It's crazy boring! Why bother! Yea, yea, right to vote. Fine. Fine. He'll vote. Fine.
But if he'll vote. Why not have some fun? Why not vote for someone that wants to throw a bit of a ruckus eh? Why not vote for someone that talks in a way that he talks, that thinks in a way he thinks, that cares about his issues. What are these Islamic people doing here anyway? It's uncomfortable (note: I think this is dumb as hell, I'm just paining a picture - Islamic people should feel comfortable where I live because in my view they are the same nationality as I am).
So in my carpenter's friend mind, this local politician has some charisma. Does he have the best charisma? Don't know but definitely some.
What do other politicians sound like? Nuance 1, nuance 2, policy x, policy y, blah, blah, blah, BORING!
I wish it wasn't as childish as this but I know my friend. It is. He just wants to go to his carpenting job, make something beautiful, be with his wife and kids and call it a day. Thinking for him, like thinking deeply. That's painful. He can do it, but he sure as hell doesn't like it. He likes to do things with his hands.
When I emotionally understood I was shocked. I live in a village close to a big city. I know this village, I grew up here. I'm the odd one out, the intellectual. But I know how "these people from the village think". And my carpenter friend is a very average person in it. So suddenly I realized, this is how many people in my village think.
My suspicion is that something similar happens with Trump. However, with some differences such as: he's a business man! He tells it like it is! We don't take no shit from some ippity uppity democrats! Why should we?! Don't tell me what to do! I will do what I want to do! And all these immigrants are taking our jobs! That's not okay! Trump tells the truth.
Again, I think, that such type of thinking is the dumbest thing ever. Nor do I think that every Trump supporter thinks like this. But there are Americans that think like my carpenter friend. And my suspicion is that they think like this. From that perspective, it's clear to see why Trump has charisma. Because (1) he talks at their level, (2) he talks about their issues and (3) he's a successful business man.
I know we can both make arguments that (1), (2) and (3) aren't true. But dude, remember, for them, thinking is fucking painful.
I'm sure there are more archetypes/personalities that have backgrounds and contexts as to why they find Trump charismatic.
There was that whole civil war thing that happened. And it didn't even matter who won this election, it's clear we are very driven by us/them thinking just considering alone how much purchase you have as a politician when you promise to deport people.
If you are looking at the breadth of history, you would be much more justified in saying that "struggle" and even "violence" is what makes things happen or not. There are political formations, disruptions, rifts, responding to endogenous and external factors. There is now also the extra-political force of capital which is a big player.
What you see, or what you desire, is the so-called "End of History". Where all things are just variations parliamentary-democratic struggle, where in fact globalism is the very thing that assures you of the USA's (very broad) stability. You can allow for a superficial rollercoaster of politics, just insofar as you truly believe (and I bet you do) there is a trajectory and it is good. Good ole' USA.
Its very much like believing either that the world is just 200 years old (again, that whole civil war thing was a big deal), or that we are in a kind Groundhogs Day decade (of the 90s).
I could say a lot, but ultimately I envy you and the world you live in. I understand how it can really sustain you. I hope at least you don't live long enough to see your worldview shattered. You don't, truly, deserve that. Noone does.
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Please don't respond by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Trump has already floated
- Imprisoning criticizers
- Removing the broadcast licenses of news network that questions him. He's been calling them fake news for years.
- More power to the rich buddies. Not just more money, now they get more control over government affairs. Musk and Thiel are frothing over this.
- Control over women and minorities.
- More power to the theists.
Looks like "comparing American society with one of the Middle East does not resonate with me." will soon become apparent as the parallels start to be clearer.
Right, you’d be better off without any media that convinces you of this fear. /s
nobody needs media to tell them this. it comes directly from his mouth. it's hilarious that you think people get their opinions from media. no, just listen to what the politicians say. he said he's gonna do mass deportations? believe him
Lmao how? To where?
I guess repeating his words are a bigger sin than speaking them in the first place.
I urge you to read this:
https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
Im not even a trump supporter but last night he said he was leaving the white house after this term on live TV, so i think the whole trump-wanna-be-dictator thing goes out the window - no ?
"Don't worry, man who famously lies every single time he opens his mouth about even basic objective facts before everyone's eyes, says he won't abuse his powers, so there's nothing to fear!"
Also even going by his own words, what about his "dictator on day one" comments?
Not picking a side here, but didn’t he say if he lost 2020 we’d never hear from him again?
I think the concerns about him trying to stay on a third term are way overblown, but outside of that: you can't trust what he says versus to what he will do later.
He’s not the first leader of a democratic country to claim it will be his last term, only to have another term thereafter.
He would need to change the US constitution to do that.
he has proven to be a man of his word
tbf he looks nothing like the guy he was in 2016 and it's not like he signed up to a relaxing job
> I don’t think you appreciate how easily a society can slide into a totalitarian state and how apathetic most of the population can become.
We all lived through 2020-22, yes.
How did Ashli Babbitt die? She was shot in the head, on January 6th, at point blank range, by the secret service, because she was trying to break through a barrier that was protecting the vice president of the United States, the man whose job it was to certify the election. Why was she there? Because from the top of the Republican party down, they spread a lie that the election was stolen because they devoid of morals and they knew their followers would believe them. The concerns about democracy are very real.
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There is video of this. There is a mob of people behind her trying to get the vice president to stop him from certifying the election. It wasn't just her, she was just the person in front. This is what people talk about how Trump supporters are detached from reality. There is video. Watch the video.
Read They Thought They Were Free. People who vote for dictators _rarely_ view themselves as enablers of the bad things that come afterwards, even though they are an essential part of the process. Supporters choose to ignore the bad stuff. Let's hope the worst of it is just hot air, but I'm not giving people a pass this time around personally because it's way too dark.
As a non-American, my personal concern for Democracy in regards to the USA is the questionable system of the electoral college which, in my opinion, is one of the worst forms of representative democracy on the planet and certainly not apt for a country so proud of its democratic values.
This also goes hand-in-hand with the black-white thinking of a two-party-system.
If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now. Thus when we are forming a union we stipulate that we have equal voting rights.
It's going to happen in EU in some form as well (assuming EU goes into closer integration direction) because there is no way small countries accept closer union without a mechanism similar to electoral college.
> If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now. Thus when we are forming a union we stipulate that we have equal voting rights.
That's not how the electoral college works. The electoral college equivalent would be one village with 1000 people, the second with 2000, and the third with 4000, and each village getting "electoral votes" proportional to their population that gets awarded entirely to the candidate with the majority vote in that village. The entirety of the first two villages vote for candidate A, which awards 1 electoral vote for the first village and 2 electoral votes for the second. In the third village, which has 4 electoral votes, candidate A only gets 1999 votes, whereas candidate B gets 2001 votes, so they win the electoral vote 4-3 and become the leader despite only winning 2001 votes overall out of 7000.
The reason that the analogy needs to be this complicated is because the electoral college isn't some sort of common-sense system that happens to occasionally produce quirky results; it's an extremely contrived system that produces equally contrived results, which shouldn't be remotely surprising.
I'm sorry but... WTF?
The US voting system doesn't even solve that one "problem" you are presenting. The number of districts and votes are constantly adjusted to population.
A good dive into the history of the electoral college can be found at https://www.hks.harvard.edu/more/policycast/if-electoral-col...
I don't disagree, but Trump won the popular vote by a decent margin.
The popular vote would be very different if it weren't for the electoral college.
Just a reminder that not all votes have been counted yet.
The margin is so large that it doesn't matter (I did check before commenting). Something truly spectacular and unprecedented needs to happen for Harris to win the popular vote.
This is completely untrue. While Trump is favored, there are around 7 million votes left to count in California alone. Predominantly from major cities. Harris is expected to gain a net of almost 3 million from that
No it's not. Harris has less than a 1% chance of winning the popular vote at this stage. You can put $100 on her right now and make $20K when she wins.
That's not how I read it when I looked earilier, but we'll see how it turns out. I can't be bothered to check again, and I don't think it's an important point to argue right now. For what it's worth, I hope you're right and I'll gladly be wrong here.
Yeah, if we talk about it, counting votes for days/weeks, and no ID laws are ridiculous.
Counting votes for days/weeks. No ID laws. States not allowing pre-counting votes. States not allowing early voting. Having to wait 7 hours to vote at some polling locations vs 10 minutes at others. Allowing some forms of state agency issued ID to vote but not others.
I'm sure everyone from every side can come up with their own list. How about we solve it all once and for all.
Counting for days is ok. Having fights about it for a week or two is also ok. None of those break anything.
The no ID culture and everything around it... I honestly can't understand it.
As incredibly disappointing as that is to me, the fact is this is only the 2nd time the Reps have won the popular vote.
In other words the US leans left and Reps only win because of the electoral system.
> the fact is this is only the 2nd time the Reps have won the popular vote.
Definitely not, where did you get that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
hmm I read that somewhere this morning but it seems to be way off. I stand corrected.
Second time in the current millennium is probably the talking point you saw; Reagan was the the last Rep president to win two terms with a popular vote majority.
I would argue the Democratic Party is hardly "left-wing". The old joke is that the US has two parties: the right wing party and the very right wing party. They have moved a bit to the left though, but many "left wing" policies they support have broad universal support among the left and right in Europe. Today it's more the centre/centre-right party and the monster raving looney party.
But yes, the system is not great. This matters even more in the senate elections by the way, where every state gets two senators regardless of population size. I get the argument that you don't want densely populated cities dominating large swaths of rural areas, but 1) elections are about people and not trees, and 2) now it's the reverse where sparsely populated rural areas dominate. So...
They also have broad support in the US, but once a policy gets the socialism word attached to it it loses popularity.
For example, the ACA is very popular. Obamacare is not. It's all about the messaging.
All true, and I feel there's hope that this is the wake-up call the American left needs; that if they keep playing the role of the centrist establishment what they end up crafting is a super boring campaign that no one feels the passion to get out and vote for. Total voter turnout this election is shaping up to be significantly lower on the left (-15M currently) versus the right (-3M) as compared to 2020.
I think the takes that this is the right taking over America etc are super doomerist. The more accurate story is: The left put up a really boring, bad candidate. The only campaign the left has figured out how to run for literally the past three elections is "stop Trump", and its not even resonating with their own voters anymore. What are they going to run on in 2028 when there isn't a Trump to stop anymore?
The left needs to wake up and have a Trump moment of their own.
Trump is incredibly boring. All he does is throw insults and is obsessed with personal loyalty. He has barely any meaningful ideas at all, and has very little interesting to say. It's almost all just politics of grievances and whipped up anger, at times based on abject malicious lies.
That really is the problem: one side runs a nihilistic campaign completely unencumbered by any truth, morality, or any sense of decency, and the side, well, doesn't. There are two sets of rules and two games being played here. That much has been obvious for almost a decade now. So how do you counter that? Well, no one really knows.
The little he has to say still got him the most powerful position in the world, which is a problem. I am thoroughly afraid of his capability to destroy and deceive.
Progressive policies are broadly popular; inevitably, some totalitarian and intolerant wokeists always end up hijacking the progressive wing, driving the center rightward.
States elect Presidents, not the People. If you knew anything about why states exist at all, and their history in Constitutional law, and that they have far greater sovereignty than any other country's sub-national political division, you'd understand why the electoral college system exists.
Is the EU president elected by popular vote?
There is no president of the EU.
There is a President of the European Council (Charles Michel, elected by member countries' heads of state), there is a President of the European Commission (Ursula von der Leyen, elected by the European Parliament), and there is a President of the European Parliament (Roberta Metsola, elected by the members of the parliament).
Seats in the European Parliament are not proportionally allocated (small countries have more seats per capita), and member countries have different systems for allocating their seats among representatives, but nobody uses first-past-the-post, maybe except Hungary (debatably - their system is weird).
So, no, none of the "EU presidents" are elected by popular vote strictly speaking, and none of them have a role that is even remotely similar to the US presidency.
+1. America has immense sociopolitical inertia. It is absolutely incomparable to societies like 1930s Germany, 1910s Russia, or post-war China that gave rise to the brutal dictatorships of the 20th century. This a blessing if you are worried about totalitarianism, and a curse if you are hoping for deep structural reform.
A reasonable worry is not that America is going to become just like China, Russia, or Nazi Germany, but that it will become a bit more like them in some ways. Which I think would be bad.
"Average Joe" thinks he knows more political science than people who went to school. Inadvertently demonstrates why it's so easy to manipulate the public into voting against their own self interests while convincing them they're somehow smarter than the "elites", who are really just educated people trying to save them.
As I get older, I grow increasingly weary of this kind of condescending rhetoric. As an example, where were these educated saviors when there were calls to "defund the police"? Most low-income neighbourhoods want more police presence[1], not less because crime hurts them personally and not just in an abstract way on some spreadsheet.
You can't "save" someone without understanding what their day to day problems are.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2019-06-04/gallu...
In Florida 10% of adults are not allowed to vote. In Mississippi, 15% of all black people are not allowed to vote
Florida is particularly bitter because Floridians voted to give back felon voting rights and DeSantis and the judicial branch he controls just declared it unconstitutional
> Most of you do not understand the type of people that built and fought for democracy.
I AM the type of people that built and fought for democracy. My people donate to the ACLU and drive people to the polls. We marched for civil rights and women's rights. We fight voter disenfranchisement and poll intimidators and insurrections.
This is EXACLY why I'm concerned for Democracy.
I find it less comical. I don’t think my friends or family care that much about democracy… they just want their guy in charge.
> I find the concerns for Democracy comical
Trump has explicitly and clearly stated he plans to fill the supreme court with cronies, and then dissolve massive parts of the bureaucracy to instead divert that power to the president. Keep in mind, on top of this, he is also now completely immune from all crimes.
This new-found concentration of power in the president has never before been seen in American politics. It is genuinely worrying, even if you believe Trump will use his new powers in benevolent ways.
The other problem now is that, whoever succeeds him instantly gets the same power, it's actually fucking wild.
This is working under the assumption a succession will be like the one's we're typically used to. With this newfound power, that might not be the case. At the expense of sounding like a doomer, I think there is a possibility the next president won't be democratically elected.
Other high ranking military officers that have worked closely with Trump disagree. I might be inclined to believe them over you, unless you've also worked with Trump? Or are you just someone that he would call a 'sucker'?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/us/politics/john-kelly-tr...
Yes you should listen to an actual grift and live in fear.
People like me won’t. You not being able to resonate is what makes you and I different - and one of us capable of defending freedom and the other not.
Ah, so he's a person who built and fought for democracy, but not the right person who built and fought for democracy.
And it's really not hard to find more veterans supporting Harris; just the top two search results:
https://commondefense.us/vets-for-harris
https://votevets.org/press-releases/votevets-makes-historic-...
> and one of us capable of defending freedom and the other not.
Did you just imply that these high ranking military officers are not the ones actually defending everyone's freedoms?
Please stop with the talking points and actually think about what you are repeating again and again.
America joined the ranks of Russia and China. If you think Democracy isn't threatened, then you believe it never existed
Nice anecdotes you have there, but history suggests that you might have a bit of myopia.
1. Abraham Lincoln said "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." Whether you agree or not, some people think we may be at that inflection point right now. If you think American citizens haven’t lost substantial freedoms in the recent past, then you haven’t been paying attention. Is it at the level of “destroying ourselves”? To be determined, but the potential is there, and some folks really aren’t shy about trying to implement that a policy of reduced freedoms.
2. There are many cases in the last 100 years or so of authoritarian regimes rising because people want order during a time of distress — Saddam, Hitler, Mao, Lenin, and others rose to authoritarian power by offering stability during unstable times. They were welcomed with open arms, and often times people (including and especially the military) were willing to give up their freedoms for this potential for stability. Some folks think that the US is one big destabilizing event from welcoming an authoritarian. You may think this way of thinking is hubris, but none of us will know that it happened until after it has occurred.
I’m glad things have worked out for you, but I hope you have open eyes about how things can go south, as they have in the past.
It’s comical because you’re comparing literal communists and human rights offenders (some pure evil) to a _republican_ president in a democracy over 200 years old with decentralized power between the states as well as private sector independence.
I’d question which party would bring us closer to something such as the cultural revolution or government-ran industries.
Still, what most fail to understand is the core values instilled in places like our military as the ultimate check/balance.
One thing that's struck me since Trump was announced the winner is how many Replublican voters are determined to invalidate the opinions of people who voted for the Democrats.
I'm left leaning, but I think jobs in rural areas, inflation, cost of living are all valid concerns that should be addressed regardless of who is in power. I disagree to varying extents with Trump's stance on abortion, immigration and gun control. But I also understand why people have a different opinion to me.
What I see online is a continuing anger towards the left and a determination to not only discredit their opinions, but also punish them for their dissenting views. There is this gleeful perception that it's time for payback.
You should check out the It Could Happen Here podcast!
behind the bastards is a great series as well
See, this is a real problem in the US.
People assume that there's going to be some grand take-over event, a third-world coup d'état if you will.
In reality, modern democracies die slowly. Russia was once a democracy, now it's democracy on paper only. What will Americans do, when their courts are infringing their freedom?
Again, it happens slowly. Bit by bit, in the boring court rooms.
I agree with your general point, but the comparisons to Russia don't work.
Russia was barely a functioning democracy in the 1990s and had no democratic tradition before that, just different flavors of authoritarianism for centuries.
The problem is the US only really has traditions. We were hardly a democracy at our founding in the modern sense of the word and as such the guard rails are fairly weak. The electoral college wasn't established in some brilliant attempt to moderate the votes of states, it was so rich land owners could control who ran the country.
Yeah, ok? I'm not sure what your point is.
At the time of founding the USA was probably still the most liberal and democratic government in history of the world.
This is why people don’t fear what is coming, they have no clue about history.
Decades of defunding and weakening education does that to you.
This is a false history narrative about Russia. Your insight is tarnished.
What Russia are you talking about?
The brief highly instable 1990s after the Soviet collapse that was followed by Putin’s rapid consolidation of power?
Since last time, he survived two impeachments for which he was dead to rights and had the SC declare he has near total immunity for official acts. With a senate majority he knows that he can now operate with total impunity. He can cancel Congressional appropriations, cancel investigations, direct prosecutions and it doesn't matter if he does that illegally and he knows it.
Sounds like the government had been subsidizing your life for quite some time.
Can you explain a bit ?
As somebody not living in US, that's surprising. My opinion is that Democrats did a really shit job - focusing on wrong problems, promoting stuff nobody cares about etc. Trump / Musk did appeal to a lot of people for different reasons, some of which I can understand. But both are grifters and very dangerous in my view.
The winner of this election tried to overthrow the government. You are delusional.
Hopefully, the economy will recover with him as president.
Recover? It’s better than ever on every actual metric.
But I do look forward to February 2025, when journalists will once again travel to rural Pennsylvania to interview Trump voters in diners who will say that the economy is amazing now that the Great Man has been in power for a whole week. The magic of recovery!
This will absolutely happen. Within days of taking office he will take credit for the “great” economy and his followers will eat it up.
I disagree. He will start taking credit for anything good that happens in the economy now, and blame anything bad that happens in the economy on Biden.
> Recover? It’s better than ever on every actual metric.
Except for all metrics that matter. People are on average much poorer.
Yes, the economy is incredible but wealth disparity is too. The average person isn’t winning. Trump’s proposed economic changes appear to make that much worse, as well.
So much of this election has been utterly perplexing, but probably the most confusing part is how many people have legitimate gripes about how the economy is serving them, yet are voting for someone who has plans to make their situation worse.
"He said he'll decrease inflation!"
"But his plans for tariffs will make inflation much much worse!"
".... but he said he'll decrease inflation"
Yes, voting for a bunch of corrupt billionaires and their friends will surely fix the wealth distribution issue. A sound plan, for sure!
Just an observation from a limey. The Western (and Christian) world has changed massively over 2 generations from a predominantly white Western world to a mixed culture one, which takes a bit of acclimatising to.
The politics around gender (and however many there's supposed to be) makes people lose their frame of reference also IMO. For some, the world is changing too quick, or their neighbourhood is changing too quick.
Older generations who've witnessed the change perhaps see it most, as perhaps younger white men who have had the blowback of historical racism, misogyny and generally assumed to be the most privileged, though many (the majority) are not. I hear that the Trump campaign focused on them who generally do not vote.
I hope the USA moves on and accepts the result. In the end people vote with their desires, sometimes illogical but ultimately their desires are their motivations. The USA is also a good age now, as I was reminded by a Canadian taxi driver while living in Canada, regardless of what foreigners nebs think about US politics, better a world with the USA in it than without (though I'm probably biased as a Westerner).
Perhaps to an extent it's hard to keep an identity, like national pride or what a country stands for when things move so quickly.
Personally I thought Harris was a shoo in, but the people have spoken.
Insert caveat about big tech algos persuading people.
Or vote for a cow:
https://www.discoverdairy.com/vote/
Where everyone can be happy regardless of the result.
My daughters adopted cow is Milkyway. Milkyway 2028
My condolences to all north americans.
Over half who voted chose him.
There is more to North America than the United States.
And he got 71M votes, not even half of the US population.
Condolences are still possible
House and senate sweep? Interesting times intensifies.
The whole world now lives in interesting times.
There is quite a bit of pessimism here.
Well yeah, because Trump is a very bad person and a very risky choice to lead an important nation like the US. He'll also be our oldest ever president if he serves this full term, and even now shows clear signs of decline. We just went through that same thing, but with a person who was younger at the time of the election, and it's not good.
I think there are plenty of reasons to remain optimistic for the US on longer timescales, but for the next few years, this was a terrible outcome for which pessimism is warranted.
i blame the media for "trump is literally hitler" for the past ten years
You act like the guy didn't himself say he wanted to use the military on people who disagreed with him or that he just needed people to vote one more time and after that they would rig it so you didn't need to vote again. Comments like this make me wonder if people are actually paying attention.
I've never heard that before. Have you got a link to those statements? I suspect you're not accurately representing their meaning in your summary.
"...get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore."
https://youtu.be/gE7xoHJkgvE?si=MVL_GibOGn2WDpLV&t=18
"I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics...and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military."
https://youtu.be/BfSAOPPSYC8?si=C-6ZUrvU0yoFl9Aw&t=22
These are real and trivial quotes to find. Google is free my friend.
https://youtu.be/FOGTCKQklPQ?t=14
> In 4 years you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good you're not gonna have to vote.
Seems pretty clear to me.
trump is the most anti-war president of my lifetime, i don't know how anyone is accusing him of using or misusing the military.
what is it specifically about a second term that allows him to rig all future elections? what is different this time that wasn't true in 2016?
> i don't know how anyone is accusing him of using or misusing the military
Because he explicitly stated he wants to use the military domestically to retain power and clean out the US?
Are we really meant to just... not believe the words Trump says? On the topic of Trump?
When they agree with him he's serious and when they don't he's joking or being misunderstood. That is how cults operate.
No he isn't. He crapped all over Obama for ending the war in Iraq, along with most other Republicans. He kept the US in Afghanistan for his whole term and sabotaged the US exist on the way out, by setting a date far in the future, drawing down most US military assets, and negotiating the release of ~5000 Taliban who went right back to fighting. His policy toward Putin was pure appeasement.
Please find me any Republicans who gave Obama credit for ending the Iraq war - in his first term no less.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fact-checking-donald-trumps-...
> trump is the most anti-war president of my lifetime, i don't know how anyone is accusing him of using or misusing the military
Trump is going to let Israel flatten Gaza, Russia take Ukraine, and possibly China engage Taiwan but anti-war. No one is accusing him of misusing the military yet.
> what is it specifically about a second term that allows him to rig all future elections? what is different this time that wasn't true in 2016?
A majority in Congress, a loyal Republican heavy Supreme Court, and the presidency as well as the desire to stay out of jail.
Exactly their point - I/they don't want the US to get directly involved in those situations. It would make it worse. The US doesn't need to be getting into wars, especially not with nuclear superpowers.
The supreme court balance is the same as it was when he was president, Republicans had the majority in the House from the beginning of Trump’s presidency in January 2017 until the 2018 midterm elections, when the Democrats won control of the House, and Republicans had the majority in the Senate for the entirety of Trump’s presidency.
literally nothing is different this time that's going to let him round up people into camps and turn himself into god-emperor. if he was interested in abusing power in completely new ways he would have pardoned himself before he left office.
The US is not directly involved in any of those situations and all of those situations have consequences for the US even if they are not involved, especially Taiwan.
> The supreme court balance is the same as it was when he was president
I think it's a safe bet that Thomas and Alito will step down in the next two years and be replaced by similarly right-wing justices, just much younger. The court will be majority hard-right for the rest of my life.
> literally nothing is different this time
This time he and his supporters are prepared. If you look at Trump in 2016, he seemed genuinely surprised he won. His transition team was ad-hoc and clumsy. His cabinet and advisory picks ended up being sub-optimal for him, as he kept appointing people who wouldn't go as far as he wanted to. Project 2025 is a thing now, and is a playbook for weakening and subverting the US federal government -- except in areas where conservatives want to keep power so they can impose it on states that don't share their ideology.
And any time states complain, SCOTUS will tell them to stuff it.
The rhetoric has only amplified in negative ways since he came on the scene in 2015. I don't know who kicked it off, and don't think it matters. Both sides are equally guilty for the hatred they've spewed.
Both sides are not equally guilty and the "both sides are the same" rhetoric is tired and old.
> Both sides are not equally guilty
Yes they most certainly are.
You're going to have to point me to when the Democratic nominee said we should kill political rivals. Since both sides are equal. Because I can point to when the Republican nominee said it[0].
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/01/politics/donald-trump-liz-che...
> Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?
You generally don't give a rifle to people you want to kill. Trump was making an obvious and anodyne point, which has been made time and again, in song and story, which is that war hawks generally don't fight in the wars they cheer for.
Does he have any responsibility at all for the words that come out of his own mouth? Blaming the media has been the right wing propaganda strategy for the last 3 decades. Fox News and the alte unlamented Rush Limbaugh have made entire brands out of blaming the media, while also crowing about being the most successful media brands in the country.
Another perplexing decision. It reminds me of when Bush won his second term. In retrospect, nobody today thinks that was a good move. But you'd be surprised how many people vote for Trump because they want to save money on taxes and think republican policies will help the economy.
I don't think it's the economy or anything else. All this seems like rationalizing to me not an understanding of what happened. Trump was able to motivate more people to vote than Harris was. I have yet to meet anyone who truly rationally made a choice that they had not already made to begin with other than after the fact rationalization. It is all about perception and what the other person believes. Reality and facts do not matter as much as we would like them to. There is no interest in anyone want to actually change their views. What argument or evidence would actually cause you to change your view? It would take extraordinary evidence for me to change my vote. I suspect that is the same for most voters, it's more of an issue of who can motivate better.
This is already the most commented post on HN. An intense thread for intense times...
Not sure why this is double the comments from the first time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201
Tech employment had hockey stick growth from 2016-2021 and I suspect the number of HN users followed that curve. My guess is that the ratio of comments/users is the same or perhaps even slightly lower than 2016.
It’s good to periodically reexamine your own positions against that of the majority and be open to realignment and different ideas, but remember that the collective opinion of society over the long term may look back unfavorably on the collective opinion of society over a period of time in the past. It’s OK to hold minority opinions, and it’s OK to disagree with the majority of Americans who voted for Trump.
Not super worried from a European perspective, it might even spur on some cooperation in our own union, which I support.
Just a bit nervous for Ukraine... I wish Europe could step up on that front but we just don't have the capacity for it. Which is entirely our own fault, Trump is right to call us out on our reliance on the US. It's our continent we should be the one spearheading this.
Hopefully that will change in the near future. But that doesn't help Ukraine now.
The democrats need to do some serious introspection on their policies and priorities. And perhaps just return to running a white male as candidate...
Oh well at least it's a very clear victory, so no weeks or months of anxiety over the results.
The US leaving NATO would be terrible for Europe. Ukraine is very likely fucked with that result. I’m European and extremely worried.
I don't see this. France and UK have nuclear submarines. We need fewer boots on the ground interventions, not more.
Should not have to worry about US pulling out of NATO. Trump is stupid, but even he realizes that it would not benefit US in a any way. Significantly reducing funding might happen, but hopefully that will make EU countries increase their defense spendings as a reaction.
That assumes that Trump is a rational actor when it comes to these sorts of things, and I'm not sure we can rely on that.
The question is how much of his leaving-NATO rhetoric was sincere, and how much of it was empty threats to try to get other NATO countries to devote more money toward defense.
There is absolutely no reason to expect Trump to act like a responsible leader. If he feels like leaving NATO he will do it.
If Putin orders him to, he will.
Europe in total has contributed twice as much to Ukraine as USA. And much of that is spending that actually affects their economy, not just “we’re going to give a billion dollars of equipment that we were going to have to replace soon anyway”. I’m not trying to dismiss USAs contribution here but it’s a fact that much of it is really more of a program to modernise the stock of US military weapons and ammunition, which incidentally frees up old stock for Ukraine.
Also keep in mind that Europe now supports Ukraine by setting up arms production within Ukraine, which gives more weapons per dollar spent than donating weapons made in USA or Europe.
That said, while European military spending has improved a lot since the invasion, there’s still a bit further to go and it’s not such a bad thing if Europe is forced to become more self-reliant militarily.
Will be very short sighted for USA though. They benefit on so many levels from Europe being so dependent on USA.
Will be very short sighted for USA though. They benefit on so many levels from Europe being so dependent on USA.
This is the part that I don't get with the USA's recent obsessions with isolationism. One of the reasons the US is so rich is because it is a world power with a lot of loyal allies. We align a lot of our policies with the US when we are asked (see blocking ASML exports to China).
If the US is not willing to step up for its allies [1], it becomes a regional power, and the loss of influence will result in worse economical outcomes.
China is happy to fill the void.
[1] Also don't forget that (most) allies stepped up when the US asked (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.), even when much of their population thought it was not the best idea.
Trump is wrong in that. Europe relies on the US, because the American world order is built that way. That's what the US has traditionally wanted. They are the hegemon that maintains the world order and pays for it. Europe usually supports the US, both for ideological reasons and because it benefits from the American world order.
But if the US is no longer committed to their world order, I can see the return of a more selfish Europe. One that is willing to work with both the US and BRICS and does not automatically favor either.
> But if the US is no longer committed to their world order, I can see the return of a more selfish Europe. One that is willing to work with both the US and BRICS and does not automatically favor either.
I don't see this happening unfortunately. The much more likely scenario is that the US diplomacy in EU will adopt a partisan stance, favoring far-right parties. Anyone who has followed far-right EU movements in the last two decades can't seriously believe that US conservatives talking about isolationism means they will stop pushing their views in Europe.
What you call "far-right" is not a unified movement. Nationalism is one of those ideologies where ideological alignment can make you just as easily allies as enemies. If the US wants to work with European nationalists, it must simultaneously increase military support to Ukraine, isolate Russia even further, restore normal relations with Russia, and make cheap Russian natural gas available again.
So far, the policy differences between the different far-right parties in Europe hasn't really prevented them from cooperating. Besides, a lot of the meddling by US conservatives pushes on specific issues, so they don't mind funding two parties with opposed views on orthogonal topics.
> So far, the policy differences between the different far-right parties in Europe hasn't really prevented them from cooperating
They literally have. France's RN officially stopped collaborating with the German AfD over the latter being too "extreme". Now they sit in different fractions of the EU parliament.
That is the one such development I can think of in recent history. We'll see if this becomes more common as far-right parties become more mainstream, but I'm not holding my breath.
On the other hand, I've seen US-influenced and Russia-influenced movements happily cooperate for years now. There's been some tensions over which side to support when the war in Ukraine broke out, but so far it hasn't prevented these same groups clashing on this specific issue to cooperate on other issues.
Funny how "far right" parties are always the fault of foreign countries and never the result of the parties in power fucking over the local population year after year.
country X is funding party Y != party Y exists because of country X.
> And perhaps just return to running a white male as candidate...
This isn’t why people aren’t voting dem. Did you forgot that Obama was elected? People don’t want to vote dem because Dems have moved significantly to the left and are supporting crazy policies.
From the British side of things, we are now a ballistics rag doll.
We had Brexit, a catastrophe in itself. And with that we've sold ourselves to the US for "alliance" means; meaning that we will be dragged through everything the US wants.
When we were tied to the EU, at least we had a some sort solidarity.
Well, you and Germany are one of the few influential western countries left that has some sort of stable center-left government. Almost everything else is rightwing conservative, neoliberal or slowly descending into fascism.
Spain has a left-wing government, Poland is back to being centrist after getting rid of PiS, Switzerland has its own distinct government where all major parties are represented in perpetuity, ...
Also to call the current German government "stable" is... a choice.
Poland isn't stable either. PiS may come back at any point. You'd think that consolidating power, destroying relations with all neighbours except for the totalitarian Hungary, and implementing a total abortion ban would do them in, but no. PiS can run a campaign entirely on anti-LGBT and anti-immigration rethoric and win. Poland turned into Florida every recent election. The anti-LGBT nonsense is already coming back ahead of the next presidential election.
Those are the few yes. And it looks like the goverment of Germany is about to fall. AfD is set up for a big win, so that will be that.
We're trending very far to the right as a whole, with the edges getting bigger and more extreme by the year.
> AfD is set up for a big win, so that will be that.
The AfD is currently polling at about 18% of the vote. Alarming, yes, but nobody wants to work with them. The next government will likely be CDU led, with either the SPD or the Greens as a junior partner.
> Also to call the current German government "stable" is... a choice.
Just hours after I wrote this, the German government basically imploded.
You have to find some good in all things and I think this is the most likely good. Other countries and continents realizing it's time to move on from America and start to stand on their own two feet.
I'm really tired of American being the center of everything, especially after this fiasco. It would be nice if it was a more progressive country for a change.
By progressive I mean, a country who believes in climate change, renewables and nuclear and women's reproductive rights.
I'd be nice if the EU would step up and become more self sufficient with Trump in the White House.
Though I am nervous. I think Trump could still do us a lot of harm.
The EU was holding world peace. This destabilisation is in part caused by America.
Iraq, war on oil. Isreal funded by US arms
Russia owns Trump and Russia wants the EU dead.
By no means should the EU get cosy with the US.
Why shouldn't the US get cosy with the EU?
Why would Russia want the EU dead. They were selling 10's of billions of dollars of oil and gas to it each year. Russia is however a bit paranoid about its own security, having being invaded numerous times over the centuries and wants to keep control of its own economic destiny.
Provide a way where security of both Europe and Russia can be provided for and peace will quickly follow.
If EU dies, Russia will keep selling its oil and gas to European countries, but the latter will be more divided when it comes to negotiating prices. As a large business, you want your customers to be as powerless as possible so that you can jack up prices as high as you can.
> Russia is however a bit paranoid about its own security, having being invaded numerous times over the centuries and wants to keep control of its own economic destiny.
In soviet Russua, Russia is the one constantly being invaded.
> Provide a way where security of both Europe and Russia can be provided for and peace will quickly follow.
So if i'm following you correctly, Russia's nuclear arsenal wasn't enough to provide security. Only thing we haven't tried for more security is to have every European nation be in control of their own nuclear arsenal?
Its a bold claim, but by golly you've snorted enough foreign-sourced talking points that you might actually be right!
Russia is however a bit paranoid about its own security,
Every rational actor (including Putin) knows that not a single NATO country is interested in invading Russia. He might have been worried about a democratic uprising in his country like Ukraine in 2014, but given how much an autocracy Russia has become, that's pretty unlikely now.
Provide a way where security of both Europe and Russia can be provided for and peace will quickly follow.
It's very clear that Putin wants to annex countries that he considers Russia's property (mostly former Soviet states). He has wars in Ukraine, Chechnya, and Georgia to back it.
Putin's word in a peace treaty will be worth as much as him saying that he wouldn't invade Ukraine up till the invasion. Nada. The only thing that will work is military deterrence.
>It's very clear that Putin wants to annex countries that he considers Russia's property
Nothing more than fantasy that justifies the warhawk stance among liberals. It is completely disconnected from reality. What Russia wants is safety from NATO. NATO in Ukraine would have been a strategic noose from which Russia would never escape. Ukrainian neutrality lead to peace. Ukraine with NATO aspirations lead to this war. The simplest answer is the right one in this case.
If Russia wants safety from NATO, why is it annexing territory that brings its borders closer to NATO?
This is a false narrative that Putin propagates all the time (besides that Ukraine is run by nazis) and is not supported by history. He did attack Georgia and Chechnya. There was no danger at all of these countries joining NATO anytime soon.
At any rate, it has been a severe miscalculation on Putin's part. He thought they could take Ukraine in days and the aggression led Finland and Sweden to join NATO.
>This is a false narrative that Putin propagates all the time
It turns out that bad people do speak the truth sometimes, at least when the truth is in their corner:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1ghs32...
That "truth" is speculative fiction. Nothing more than unsubstantiated conspiracy-theory nonsense.
It's weird to see people say stuff like this. Like, are you completely ignorant of the history of US initiated regime change around the world? Do you not find it at all plausible? The US has a very long history of doing this very sort of thing[1]. Do you think the three letter agencies have just been sitting on their hands in recent decades? I just don't get how people can engage in such willful ignorance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
I can simultaneously find something plausible and see that there's historical precedent for it, but not accept unsubstantiated fantasy stories made up on the internet.
> It is completely disconnected from reality.
Russian conquest wars in the last 30 years: Chechnya 1994–1996 and 1999–2009, Georgia 2008 (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) & Ukraine (2014 - today).
> Ukrainian neutrality lead to peace.
When Russians invaded Donbas in 2014, Ukraine actually had a non-aligned, neutral status. It only invited the Russians as they perceived it as weakness. Ukriaine's effort to join NATO was in hope of gaining a defense umbrella.
To call them "conquest wars" is just a-historical self-serving nonsense.
>When Russians invaded Donbas in 2014, Ukraine actually had a non-aligned, neutral status.
They had a non-aligned status up until the moment their elected government was overthrown. At that point Ukraine's status is undefined. How was the government overthrown you ask? A US regime change operation: https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1ghs32...
No.
Government was overthrown in February 2014, the Ukrainian parliament renounced Ukraine's non-aligned status in December 2014 while Russia annexed Crimea in February/March 2014 and attacked Donbas in April 2014 - all while while Ukraine was still neutral and non-aligned.
> US regime change operation
I haven't seen any actual proof for that, only speculation like what you are linking to.
LE:
And you'd need some strong proof considering that everything that happened afterwards completely vindicated Ukrainian people's fear of Russia and their desire to get closer to the West.
As someone who lives in Eastern Europe and who also lived through a bloody revolution to get out from under the Russian boot - let me tell you: we don't need external influences to desire to live in peace and freedom, to pursue our happiness and prosperity. We are just like you, people of the West, in that regard. We don't want to live under Russian occupation any more than you do and we are willing to pay the blood price for the privilege.
The point at which neutral status is officially renounced is of no consequence. When the existing polity is replaced, any agreements or expectations of the behavior of the nation are moot. Hence their status being "undefined".
>I haven't seen any actual proof for that, only speculation like what you are linking to.
Yes, it turns out sometimes you need to make inferences and compare historical events and M-Os to get a clear picture of what happened out of the public eye. The fact that some people can't even entertain the notion that the US had a hand in Ukraine's revolution just underscores your psychological need to feel like moral heroes while calling for escalation in the war. But there is enough circumstantial evidence (like the Nuland intercept) that paints a very clear picture to those who aren't taken in by motivated reasoning.
And sometimes it's just conspiracy-theory drivel, thought up by people who have an axe to grind.
> The EU was holding world peace.
I can't fathom where you got that from.
> Iraq, war on oil. Isreal funded by US arms
All true, and the EU complicit in all of those. Maybe not by choice (see remark about sovereignty at the end), but complicit nonetheless. You also forgot Syria, Yemen, Yugoslavia and probably a few others as well.
> Russia owns Trump and Russia wants the EU dead.
Sorry, but this is not Reddit.
> By no means should the EU get cosy with the US.
The EU has no choice other than be "cosy" with the US. It's called Pax Americana.
In simple terms, the deal is this and always has been this since WW2 ended: the EU has traded political sovereignty for security, to and from the US.
> Russia owns Trump and Russia wants the EU dead.
What's Reddit to do with anything? Trump is a failed businessman.
His business have failed and Russia bought him out. This was evident back in 2008 and it's evident now and ever since the 80's.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helpe...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_projects_of_Donald_...
Russia wants Trump as his backhand man and that's what they got. America wants freedom yet at the same time they're happy to accept brokerage from a man who dreams of an neo-USSR.
> I can't fathom where you got that from.
world peace was a rush mix of words. What I mean at least they held stability of the world stage.
> EU is complicit
I'm not saying the EU is a saint. The EU has an agenda and evils of its own. But as a figurehead and representation of many countries up on the world stage it held a positive power.
Countries could count on the nation for relief unlike any other.
> Just a bit nervous for Ukraine...
> The democrats need to do some serious introspection on their policies and priorities. And perhaps just return to running a white male as candidate...
Considering that one of the main points of Trump's campaign was a swift end to Ukraine's war, and considering the large vote margin by which he won, I believe the lesson the democrats should learn is that most USAers don't want the USA to be involved in foreign wars.
By definition the democratic party should be able to read the population, right?
>By definition the democratic party should be able to read the population, right?
In the 2016 elections, they literally went to court to argue that they are a private company and their internal processes (eg. the primaries) don't need to be democratic.
This is why GP is nervous: Trump's "swift end" will likely be trying to broker a deal where Ukraine gives up all the disputed territory, and Russia effectively wins, validating Putin's approach to territorial expansion.
This my outsider perspective, I am not into US politics at all but I have spent a couple hours catching up today and my takeaway is simple (and probably wrong):
the Democrat's messaging wasn't clear enough in my opinion and Kamala Harris was a weak candidate.
I listened to some of her interviews and I had a really hard time understanding what her campaign was about besides not being Trump. She also failed to put some distance between her and Biden which means that in my mind and probably in the mind of a lot of voters, she was seen merely as a carbon copy of him but as a woman.
Also the fact that KH was parachuted on the ticket without a primary vote because it was too late for that meant that she just wasn't ready. She put up a good fight but it wasn't enough to beat Trump who by that stage had been on the campaign trail for more than a year and spent time crafting responses, rebuttals and finding ways to attack his opponents.
I think Biden shares some of the blame here but she must have known this was a suicide mission.
All in all I don't think I missed anything by not paying attention to this whole circus.
Biden should take on a lot of the blame by immediately deciding he wasn't going to run this year. Then we could have had a robust primary, hopefully ending with a more appealing candidate than Harris. Not a slam dunk, but better chances.
It's interesting how bad the democrats seem to be at the game of winning elections. They continuously seem to pick bad candidates and poor strategies resulting in them losing the election when they seem to have had the general conditions for winning. This time, the elephant in the room is of course the late ousting of Joe Biden, but there were similar issues that (in hindsight at least) were obvious in the Clinton 2016 campaign. This pattern can be seen in other countries as well, where it's clear that one group knows how to play the game while other groups don't, but it's surprising to me that a massive organization like the democratic party wouldn't have streamlined this process.
It would be interesting to hear from someone more familiar with the inner workings of the democratic party why this is. I.e., if it's a cultural issue in the party, if it's economical, or if my view on this is completely off.
"interesting how bad the democrats seem to be at the game of winning elections" Since 1992, haven't democrats had power for over 20 years as opposed to GOP's 12 ?
Yea, but the game's changed. The Republican Party has figured out how to rally millions behind charismatic candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if we were in for a couple more years of Republican leadership.
it remains to be seen whether they can find the next trump hes unique
JD Vance is extremely likeable, and much less polarizing than Trump. The "weird" attack on him died the moment people heard him speak.
I wouldn't call him "much less" polarizing than Trump, he still is more unfavored than favored: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/jd-v...
Is that just due to his association with Trump?
A charismatic candidate figured out how to hijack the Republican party more like. Who is the other charismatic candidate up their sleeve?
Ron DeSantis comes to mind
I wouldn't say charismatic, but he's solid. I think people mistake charismatic for blunt. Trump is more blunt than he is charismatic. That makes him appear like less of an NPC compared to other politicians, and people actually like that.
Trump literally said "you won't have to vote again".
And if the Project 2025 plan works as they planned it, that's the truth. America will become a single party state and that won't change without a civil war.
They will stack the courts and every appointable position with pro-Trump (not Republican) people who will make sure every election goes their way in the future.
People won't have to vote for him again because he can't be voted for again due to the two-term-limit.
!RemindMe in four years
Oh people already say civil war? lol.
Nah, nobody is saying it, and it's not happening because the party with all the gun-nuts and survivalists won.
I personally can't see any other way out unless Team Donald messes up badly enough to make their own people shun them.
Charismatic or populist? Same thing in effect, but the latter has a bit more weight / context to politics.
Also if they're having their way, they will break the current system; Trump has said people would never need to vote again if he wins, and Project 2025 aims to give much more power to the president (autocracy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Given what democrats stand for, you don't even have to be charismatic to push them into a corner. Any candidate who will shout anti trans anti illegal immigrantion talking points will always carry the day
You specifically chose a range of dates to make this as dramatic as possible. Could easily say GOP has 24 to 20 since 1980, or 16 to 12 since 2000, or 8 to 4 since 2016.
Doesn't this just demonstrate that the parties have both been very competitive in the contemporary era?
It does, but that doesn't seem to be the argument the commenter upthread was making.
Agreed.
They regularly win presidential elections by the most obvious definition, the popular vote, but lose them on the EC, which is what actually counts.
The fact remains that more Americans vote Democratic than vote Republican, those votes are just badly distributed for the EC system.
If elections were decided by popular vote campaigns would run differently though
It remains to be seen whether that will be true this time around.
Sure, but it's true of 7 of the last 8 elections.
My view since 2016 has been that winning elections in the US is about telling a good story. Whether you're trueful or not doesn't really matter as long as people believe it.
Trump's story is pretty ridiculous, there's no way that his plans on how to fix the economy or the border or the whole department of efficiency thing work anywhere close to as well as he says. Regardless, his demographic believes it.
Kamala's story was a lot weaker, involved a ton of hard truths and concessions about things that people in her base care about such as Gaza. Additionally her story on the border was mostly the same thing as Trump's. If you like the border story, why not go for the guy pushing it harder?
Obama had a pretty good story in 2008 (the whole hope thing). Dems need to get back to that.
It would have been pretty silly for Harris to campaign on a Hope and Change™ platform, since that would imply she is doing a very poor job as incumbent.
Well she lost anyway. Bidens policies were generally unpopular, it would have made sense for her to distance herself from them.
great point I agree
I don't think "have had the general conditions for winning" is at all accurate this time around. It was clear ahead of time, and much ink was spilled on it, but it's even more clear in hindsight that this cycle was always going to be a giant uphill battle. Incumbent parties all over the world have been and are having the same issue. We're all still going through a hangover from the pandemic.
The Republican party is also flipping seats in the Senate and the House, yet you seem focused on Harris. It's not that people are voting for other Democratic candidates, the country is simply becoming more conservative as people leaning on left are simply not voting.
The Democrats are somewhat hampered by their focus on facts and rationality ("play fair") rather than spouting bullshit, conspiracy theories, and whatever bigotry is currently hot ("win at all costs").
> ("play fair")
Which is why they forced an unpopular, unelected candidate? I don't see it.
Within the contexts of their written rules…
And maybe you’ve forgotten how the RNC rules were changed to support their candidate?
> Within the contexts of their written rules…
Well these rules surely benefitted them.
They planned poorly with their candidacy; Biden and Harris were the obvious candidates being president and vice-president, respectively, but Biden was too old and they couldn't find a different candidate that wasn't as well known as Harris quick enough.
That said, the Republicans would have the same problem if Trump dropped out or if that bullet didn't miss.
It is some sort of tribalism. Believers can't see it. E.g. we gotta remember that people were gaslighting eachother into pretending Biden is not what could charitably be described as about to be senile.
Refusing to see one self as part of the problem, fundamentally.
Unironically yes. You have to meet the median voter where they're at, even if you find some of their positions dumb or bigoted. That's why Obama spent the 2008 election cycle pretending to be opposed to gay marriage.
The party has evolved an idea that you can do away with those kind of dirty political shenanigans, and construct a rational fact-based proof that will leave voters no choice but to support you, and I think that pretty clearly doesn't work.
Also by the fact that their unwillingness to turn on their capital sponsors, who don't really care whose in power and whose needs are ostensibly better met by republicans (so long as republicans don't start a trade war...)
Dems will continue to make the mistake of coasting deeper into the right wing, picking up 0 voters in doing so (why would I vote for a "tough on immigration" candidate when I can vote for the one who gleefully promises to deport all the browns?), meanwhile disenfranchising any left wing voters left in the USA and creating no new left wing voter bloc by presenting a coherent alternative to the reactionaries.
The same mistake is being made by neo liberal parties across the world.
>why would I vote for a "tough on immigration" candidate when I can vote for the one who gleefully promises to deport all the browns?
I'm always surprised by how bipolar US politics is. There's no place for nuance or third options, it's always one or second extreme. In this case, to answer your question, maybe you want to limit an influx of new people into your country (for ideological, or economical, or whatever reasons) but don't want a full on ethnic cleansing. That's OK, people don't have to only hold extreme opinions.
How is ideological not wanting some level ethnic cleansing?
> ... but don't want a full on ethnic cleansing
That's what Trump's circle wants, though. They want to deport 25M immigrants. Generously, the number of people here illegally is only half that. They don't care if people here legally get caught up in it and deported as well.
Deporting even a couple million people will require mass raids, round-ups, and the construction of concentration camps. It is physically impossible to deport that many people quickly or quietly or efficiently.
They're afraid of losing the white majority, plain and simple. The sad thing is so many non-white people don't see this and voted for him.
> In this case, to answer your question, maybe you want to limit an influx of new people into your country (for ideological, or economical, or whatever reasons) but don't want a full on ethnic cleansing.
As this election shows, then, you would vote for Trump, who is "better on immigration." You would tell yourself, as many Trump supporters demonstrate in interviews, that "he wouldn't actually do that."
Did Trump say that he will "deport all brown people"? Or that he will do a "full ethnic cleansing"?
If you're looking for a quote of him saying that word for word, no. But it is not an unreasonable interpretation of the things he has said he wants to do. Especially when he's used language saying immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" and makes up lies about immigrants eating pets.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/inside-trumps-plan-mass-dep...
It sounds to me that this is crass exaggeration and one of the many reasons why there is such a big divide between supporters of both factions. The whole exaggerated narrative and associations to nazism is definitely off putting.
You don't see any similarity between immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" (from Trump) and "Look at the ravages from which our people are suffering daily as a result of being contaminated with Jewish blood" (from James Murphy's English translation of Mein Kampf?
I didn't say anything about Nazism in my comment.
Those are words Trump has used. He said the eating pets thing during the debate.
What, and Trump repeatedly uttering Nazi rhetoric isn't off putting?
It's not exaggerated. These are literally things he has said, word for word, over and over.
I understand you think people are exaggerating. You probably roll your eyes when people say Trump is a fascist, I imagine?
Can I ask - let's say before 2028 the democrat party gets tea partied and gets a genuine fascist candidate. What would that candidate say? What would their policies be? Can you do the same thought experiment for the Republican party? Or do you, unfairly, believe it's simply impossible for one, or the other, party to become genuinely fascistic? Perhaps you even believe fascism was permanently defeated when Mussolini was hanged? I would admire such an optimistic view!
Just in case you're genuinely curious why people say these things, it's not like we're all just making it up. Trump's rhetoric simply, to one who studies history, sounds very similar to Hitler's. It doesn't mean he's as bad as Hitler, it just means he talks like Hitler talked.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-a...
As for hitlerian policy, there is simply no way to deport the millions he has promised to deport that doesn't involve roundups, trains, and concentration camps. It's a physical impossibility to achieve otherwise. Do you disagree? Will he not follow through on his campaign promise to deport every undocumented immigrant?
>You probably roll your eyes when people say Trump is a fascist, I imagine?
Not really, I don’t even give it that energy anymore.
I just move on to the next lunatic overreacting and stomping their feet.
The majority of Americans are tired of “everyone I don’t like is a fascist”. You have four years to learn that I guess.
I see you're unwilling to engage with the topic, though I try to in good faith. This makes me sad and frustrated. The key thing about British and American political discourse seems to be a disengagement from political education and reality. The reactionaries are actually "moderates," the guy speaking eerily similar to passages of mein Kampf is not hitlerian, center-right are actually communists, etc.
Good thing they'll all cease to exist very soon.
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> "Project 2025" or whatever it is called? a fucking unhinged conspiracy theory.
How is that a conspiracy theory? It literally exists and was created by Trump loyalists.
> who's calling the other camp fascist and nazi on cable TV?
But that's not bullshit. Trump is following the fascist playbook fairly closely (as agreed by experts in fascist history).
Who's calling Trump a fascist? For one, John Kelly, the right-wing Marine General, Trump's former chief of staff.
"Project 2025" may be unhinged, but in what sense is it a conspiracy theory? It's right out in the open and produced by one of the most prominent conservative think tanks.
The argument of the GOP was, Trump is better because the inflation was lower during his term. How are you supposed to counter this?
Right, and economics as a field is difficult to understand for most people.
Presidents can't in reality take all that much credit or blame for the economy. A lot of it is out of their hands, and many economic shifts take longer than a presidential term to play out. But of course presidents will try, and succeed, because most people don't understand this.
On top of that, the GOP complains about how much money Biden "printed" during the pandemic, but Trump did his fair share of that in the first year of it as well. They just make dishonest arguments.
I really don't know how you counter this.
The Dems exist to give you an illusion of choice. This has gone down exactly as planned, or why do you think rich donors play both sides? Do you really think the Dems are this naive and keep messing up without it being on purpose?
The opinion makers know if it wasn't this close there'd be visible backlash.
While I agree there is a UniParty, I also assert that Trump is not in it.
If you think Trump, Vance, Vivek, Tulsi, RFK and the just the same but newer versions of Trump, Cheney, Rove, McConnell, Romney, McCain…
Well… I guess we have four more years to see about that.
My impression is that the current-day Dem's are, in "actions speak louder than words" terms, simply not all that interested in winning elections. Stuff like not bothering to do even the most basic of opposition research on George Santos ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos ). Not carefully checking that Biden's marbles were all still there 12+ months before the election. Their slow and half-hearted (at best) response to the RealPage ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPage ) rent-jacking scandal. Etc., etc.
Impossible to get a group of people that large to behave strategically.
So you're asking the wrong questions.
What about the democrats ideology is unpopular? Because that is what people are voting on, not strategy.
There is the LGBT. Specially the T part. The right thing is to do is support their rights, and it is very hard not to do the right thing when you know what the right thing is. However, the republicans have weaponized it against the democrats. They call them radical left and they campaign saying things like the want to convert your sons in girls and other awful things. It is an imposible choice because it can cost you the election.
Except both sides disagree on the "right thing."
It's same for both sides. Pro-life stance cost them a lot of votes and could easily cost them election.
I think it is because people who think or say "what about me?" hear "what about me?" from others as if it's support of their own view, when really their core issues could be totally different. "Yeah, what about us?"
As opposed to "we need to help everyone, especially highly victimized groups". And then people infight over which groups require more attention vs everyone else.
What I always find interesting is how Democrats insist their failure is due to a lack of sound strategy. That is of course a strategy in and of itself to NEVER admit that it might be a refutation of their policies or (gasp) their values. Telling yourself you just lost because you didn't "play the game" is a cope. It serves its purpose though, as it allows ardent followers to avoid actual self reflection.
Agree. American's hate out groups and want to punish them. This just shows who people really are.
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There is no Democratic Power Play.
There is not the same opportunity to exploit human weaknesses for Gain.
That’s the issue. When Dems control the amygdala they might have a shot.
My theory: people are just hacked off that life is getting worse for most people while billionaires get richer and richer. Every disaster the wealthy get handouts while the poor have to pay for them. Government can no longer afford anything because all of its assets have been sold and rented back at a profit.
I don’t think either campaign made any difference to the outcome of this election at all.
In conclusion it might be an amazing economy on the high level averages but when inflation caused by COVID handouts (I’m reading $16 TRILLION, but that can’t be real surely?) is always going to lose you an election badly.
Since COVID food prices went up around 50% on many items that I pay attention to. (Example: meat & fish) For many Americans, messaging about the "great economy" does not match their lived experience.
This is the answer. When you have one candidate saying things are bad and he will make them better and another saying things are great when things for most people are not great, it should be pretty obvious who people will resonate with.
How did the COVID handouts cause inflation? It was only a small amount. Isn't inflation caused by macro-economic forces, e.g. interest, international policy / stability, and free market somethings?
5 Trillion added to the Fed balance sheet is not a small handout. They didn't o ly hand out money to individuals but also gave to businesses and propped up the bond market.
Let's not forget, though, that Trump is the one who kicked this off: he signed the first COVID-related stimulus package ad the end of March 2020, to the tune of $2 trillion.
Given that he was only in office for the first year of the pandemic, it seems reasonable that Biden signed another $3 trillion away. If all that caused inflation, Trump and Biden deserve the blame together.
And don’t forget all those PPP loans that Congress persons didn’t have to pay back https://fortune.com/2020/07/08/ppp-loan-recipients-members-o...
If you print money to pay for things generally that causes inflation, it’s one of the few clear facts economists will tell you they 100% know.
The reason COVID handouts caused inflation while the '08 handouts didn't is that the COVID handouts went to regular people who spent the money while the '08 was wasted on bailing out the 1%, who spent it on assets that regular people don't buy every week.
Yes as a person you got a modest check. You don’t remember all the fraudulent “loans” than have been prosecuted? Most of the money went to !individual people.
I think this is kind of it for me, I didn't want Kamala to win at all, but I also didn't want Trump to be president.
It feels like we have been on this march for the last 40+ years of eroding working class leverage and handing power over to politicians and giant corporations.
Dems have been struggling because they keep putting out the same lifetime politicians who promise to play ball and keep moving us down this road. They need someone who promises actual change, someone who is a threat to entrenched power structures. Bernie 100% was that guy for the Dems and they buried him... twice... He was the last time I was remotely excited for an election.
Inflation were caused by mass factories shutdown in China and South East Asia. When they reopen they got so many orders that they simply increase their prices.
Do you have any references for that? I think it could be part of the story but I still think printing trillions of dollars will make things more expensive, especially when you consider where this money went!
> people are just hacked off that life is getting worse for most people while billionaires get richer and richer.
So their answer is to vote precisely for a representative of that class (supported by richest guy in the world). And at the same time, the same electors have a strong disdain for anything remotely socialistic such as free health care and education for all.
Cockroaches for Raid®
Life is not getting worse for most people, at least not economically. See for example https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N --- median real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) household income in the USA is at an all-time high, even though we had a pandemic.
I don't know why people believe otherwise. Maybe it's just rising expectations, fueled by rising inequality?
> Maybe it's just rising expectations, fueled by rising inequality?
Rising inequality is entirely enough to explain the whole thing. The bottom two quintiles saw their cost of living absolutely explode, and their salaries not keeping up. Median real income will never reflect something like that.
And that's a lot of people.
Real income (i.e. inflation-adjusted) actually increased the most for the lowest-percentile households from 2022 to 2023. https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2024/09/10/...
Housing isn't any cheaper. Basics like groceries aren't either. If someone is struggling to own a clean and safe home, pointing at averages isn't convincing.
Many people don't trust that math.
Yes, I understand that some people actually are worse off, and a much larger group of people incorrectly believe they are worse off.
Aka “let them eat inflation adjusted household income reports”
Yeah this trope won’t die. You can win an internet thread with data that tells people they don’t know they’re better off, but you can’t win an election when they don’t believe it.
“Nobody likes my product because they are stupid”.
I think there’s this massive negative bias in a lot of our media, by our I mean globally. Social media and news. So I think you’re right, life is generally getting better for most people, COVID was a temporary blip in that trend. However… Inequality is growing rapidly between the middle class and the ultra rich, and the middle class in many developed countries is being squeezed due to cost of living issues, I think that’s a a part of the reason for this result. Also median income alone is useless, it has to be compared against cost of living. A measure of a middle class family’s ability to grow wealth is the difference between their income and their essential expenses. That is what matters.
Again this is averages, tell me what happened to the bottom 40% inflation adjusted?
From 2022 to 2023 they got the biggest real income bump of any group: https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2024/09/10/...
I know that your comment implies that the bottom 40%'s income went downwards, but just because variance (inequality) increased doesn't mean that must have happened. It could have also went upwards (income increased), just slower than the top.
Some data would be good here. I don't have any, but if you want to imply that the bottom 40% went downwards, please show some data instead of insinuating it.
Even if people got pay rises they see the headline price of food (if they are poor) going up by in some cases > 50% as well as rents going up dramatically (ironically caused by increasing interest rates) and even if they got a great raise (and are in theory better off) you are not feeling it, hence the result. Gas prices too.
As ever it's a multivariate problem but the biggest part of it is being promised jam tomorrow and even worse being told things are going great when you see evidence they are not. She should have thrown Joe under a bus.
This isn't just a problem in the US the whole West is ungovernable and we will see most governments getting one term assuming that they don't turn into Victor Orban's Hungary.
The data was provided over the past 24 hours or so: the electorate believes they are worse off due to inflation, and that their wages haven't increased to offset it.
People feel otherwise because sticker prices went up. Why did this need explained?
Sticker prices don’t come down. Deflation is the boogeyman of economists.
I know you're not advocating for it but it doesn't make sense to essentially vote in 2x billionaires into office.
I'm just disappointed we may never know what Russia has on Musk. He went from being an avid atheist Democrat to pretending to be a Christian and pushing for Republican like his life depended on it. What is he hiding? Why was he so afraid?
You might as well empty Arkham Asylum whilst all the pardons for crimes are being dished out.
I'd go with occams razor: in this case, it is just political opportunism. Musk saw a dumb, easily flattered guy who would give him a very powerful position in government, which Musk can wield to his own financial benefit. Musk has already tweeted that Lina Khan's days are numbered. That sounds like it is potentially worth millions to Elon.
> He went from being an avid atheist Democrat to pretending to be a Christian and pushing for Republican like his life depended on it.
> What is he hiding?
I'd go for a more obvious explanation. It's not uncommon for people to adopt more extreme and conservative POV as they get older. Social networks don't help.
I think it's pretty obvious — Russia has ASAT weapons and tested them in 2021.
You would not need much to destroy a whole Starlink orbit.
> My theory: people are just hacked off that life is getting worse for most people while billionaires get richer and richer. Every disaster the wealthy get handouts while the poor have to pay for them. Government can no longer afford anything because all of its assets have been sold and rented back at a profit.
So they support the candidate with the billionares bankrolling him and and doing "million dollar sweepstakes". Give me a break.
the dems don't have billionaires bankrolling them? if two assholes compete, the asshole who's honest about being an asshole is going to be more popular than the asshole who pretends to be such a nice guy.
Trump is the only candidate to advertise himself as a billionaire.
> people are just hacked off that life is getting worse for most people
Yeah that’s my read on it too.
Rather unfortunate that the response was to elect someone that’s more showman/ego trip than leader with technocratic skills
Weren’t most of the COVID handouts done under Trump? I recall people getting up in arms because Trump wanted his signature on the handouts.
Trump signed the first relief package, $2 trillion worth, at the end of March 2020. That wasn't "most", but it was a significant chunk of it.
And yet the US economy is doing great, much better than most developed countries, and most of those countries are not going off the rails to quite the same extent.
Inflation is probably relevant, since even though it's down by a lot, the sticker shock so to speak lingers for a while.
The US economy is doing great for the people already with money. Everyday people who need to buy groceries and gas are getting pinched just as hard as ever.
Doing great for whom?
But... but... Trump's policies are even more tax breaks for the rich and tariffs on everything, do people not understand this?
I'm not sure if you're being rhetorical, but people in the United States generally do not understand this. Even among those who are pro-Democrat, the differences in tax and tariff policy are usually not the top three issues.
Narrator: people did not understand this
It's pretty hard to run a campaign on "change" when you're the incumbent and nobody voted for you.
I think they just assume things can’t get worse so f** it. Most people only vaguely know policies and are voting based on feelings.
Plenty of people have good reasons to support tariffs. Free trade destroyed a lot of industries and adjanced communities and the free trade fans didn't give a damn about them.
Do…people really think that prices will go down when cheap foreign labor is off the table? Do they think we can establish replacement infrastructure at comparable costs in months or a couple of years? Will they want to work those jobs for comparable pay to keep the costs of goods stable?
Probably more like wages will go up when cheap foreign labor is off the table. Higher income offsets higher prices for industries where wages rise. For the currently well paid the purchasing power may drop.
Silicon Valley didn't care about the rust belt, so why should the rust belt care about SV?
The fallacy here is that US industries will even be able to compete with 200% tariffs.
They won't, and they can't, and they certainly can't do it immediately. It takes decades to build up the manufacturing efficiency and processes to compete with China. We lost all of it.
We will continue to buy from China because it will STILL be cheaper. And your goods will be 3x more expensive, and that's the best-case scenario for a lot of goods.
High-paying, secure, union manufacturing job are never coming back. New factories are heavily focused on non-union workers and automation.
Will the wages increase more than the prices?
Aren't most things Americans buy imported or contain imported parts (for example all electronics)?
Won't a decrease in exports, because of other nations ti-for-tat tariffs, decrease wages for many US workers?
In aggregate things will get more expensive, but purchasing power of some will increase. Or at least that's the idea.
That "some" probably won't include most Trump supporters.
Cheap foreign labour is good for rich people but bad for poor people that they compete with, at least in the short term.
Many people in the US believe that the target country is the one who pays the tariffs, and don't understand that they pay for them, at the cash register.
Yes, but voters are forced to choose between the fuckers who screwed them yesterday and the fuckers who will screw them tomorrow.
He gave out money during covid that reasonates.
You mean: "He put his name on checks sent out" - it wasn't his money and it would've gone out anyway.
We'll have to wait and see re: tariffs, but the democrats are no different on tax breaks for the rich.
Harris' plan lowered taxes for everyone making less than 900K per year
https://itep.org/kamala-harris-donald-trump-tax-plans/
Didnt Biden want to raise taxes on those making more than 400k a year or something?
Biden was all in on tariffs too.
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Go look at a chart of income inequality. It hasn’t improved under any administration. So why do they still feel Trump is the answer? Inflation.
Income inequality hasn't increased in the US since 2014, and sharply /decreased/ since 2019. The current administration did an amazing job at improving it!
https://recruitonomics.com/the-unexpected-wage-compression/
(Note this is about wage inequality, which strictly speaking isn't income inequality. The best policy for income inequality would be bringing back the expanded CTC.)
But the median voter doesn't actually like this, because they have above-median income due to being older, and this means service workers got more expensive.
Do you hear yourself? In one breath you agree with me that income inequality is rising, and then say it’s bad for service workers to have higher wages.
No, I said 1. income inequality stopped increasing in 2014. 2. wage inequality is /falling/. 2. median voters (who are upper-middle-class) want it to go back up.
Income inequality is stalled because some benefits from 2020 expired, namely the expanded CTC, and we should really fix that.
"America first" includes economic policies that drive up commerce, even at the cost of our allies. German news is full of VW and other auto executives wanting to leave for production in the US. Trump's tariffs mean companies will just want to produce in the US and export outside it. And it's working.
Do people not understand this?
The idea that you’re going to be producing iPhones or other mobile phones in the US (for example) is extremely unlikely in the next decade. It will be interesting to see the chaos he causes if he goes through with this and the plan to deport 20 million people.
I’m sure there will be masses of folks moving to rural areas to pick up those sweet, sweet agricultural jobs that pay $5/hr under the table, or do repetitive precision PCB assembly all day for $1.25/hr and 80hr 6-day work weeks.
I'm not talking iPhones, I'm talking "luxury" commodities like cars and other expensive equipment where quality counts.
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While I'm also skeptical, production could be moved from the US and other Western countries into Asia thanks to the "correct" economical incentives. There is no reason it can be moved again. But we all know it will be moved to Africa and Southeast Asia, but still.
Who said anything about iPhones? Last time a president spoke about it was Obama and he said those jobs are never coming back.
I thought Trump said putting tariffs on everything imported from China would lead to jobs coming back to the US? So Trump said it not me. It’s just an example of where this policy is unworkable is my point.
Tariffs will make this much worse for two reasons:
1. importing your inputs becomes more expensive.
2. other countries will impose retaliatory tariffs on your exports.
This is not how to do economic development; Asian countries instead used export promotion. (…And wage suppression and currency weakening.)
Tariffs are an unnecessary price increase. To use your example, there will be some modest net growth of manufacturing at the expense of higher prices for everyone, typically dominating any net growth in jobs.
There are no tariff price increases for cars/ other goods produced in the US. Companies will build a manufacturing plant in the US to access the market. They will in turn benefit from low regulation and less strict worker rights.
Correct. Tariffs increase the prices needed to purchase cars generally, not just those produced in the US. Perhaps that is what you're missing in your analysis. If the market rate for a car is P, which is below what America can produce the cars for, P_America, then the only way for domestic production to be competitive at an equivalent quality is for a tariff to balance P_America <= P+Tariff. So while folks prefer to purchase at price P, which a free and non-tariffed market would prefer and would give consumers a better price overall, we instead rely on a distortionary tariff and pay P_America, ultimately hurting consumers. In this Econ 201, this results in dead weight loss. Hacker News would benefit from image inserts here, so indirect you to wiki instead to understand the topic better. This is an inefficiency, meaning that tariffs in imported autos are driving a jobs program without real economic benefit to all (but a minor benefit to folks that are working in an industry doomed to fail after the tariff is removed by a more savvy political party who understands you can't infant-industry your way out of offshored industry).
It's not my analysis. I'm quoting car manufacturing CEO's, as per German national TV.
Ah. Yes. They are kissing the ring and making plans on how to survive.
They are actively leaving and my home state's economy is in real danger of collapsing. I think I'm correct in being afraid.
https://wits.worldbank.org/wits/wits/witshelp/Content/SMART/...
We lack the critical infrastructure and skills to produce a lot of these things, so it won’t just magically restore jobs but it will increase taxes for the foreseeable future.
Anger is a helluva drug.
One of the original predictions that might be entertaining(?) to see would be the US having its first President "run" the country from prison... And the follow-up situation to witness, how different would that look, in the end?
For those who think rather than just react, I guess it would not be as entertaining...?
No chance he gets a prison sentence for the NY case. He will get a suspended sentence or some other slap on the wrist. The Federal cases are dead. There is no chance they can continue while he is in office and they will be killed by the time he leaves.
It will be overturned on appeal
Trying to overturn the 2020 election turned out to be a great move because the Dem institutionalists were too sclerotic to prosecute the case aggressively and wasted massive amounts of time and resources on going after proles while letting the architects of the plot get off more or less scot-free.
Is our current president even "running" the country?
With all of the hacking and newfangled ai tools out there, perhaps hand counting removes some of that element.
Casino slot machines are highly regulated and certified by accredited agencies. They give accurate results. Vote counting machines, not so much.
Extraordinary claims require if not extraordinary evidence but at least evidence at all.
And please not the dominion claims that even Fox settled out of court on because they knew they were lying.
There have been quite a few demos over the years where voting machines are hacked. Now, this does not mean that they were hacked, for real, in a real election.
It does mean that it is possible to do, and in ways that paper ballots are not.
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And when electronic voting was first introduced, it was seen as a step towards reducing fraud in the hand counted voting process.
I suppose that one could conclude that electronic voting simply moved the fraud from local fraud to remote fraud.
Reading through the post is quite depressing. As a lifelong independent, I've never felt more vilified by the Democratic Party than at any other time. Constantly being talked down to, insulted as a white supremacist, nazi, etc. It's this "elitist" and "we know better than you" attitude that really, really puts a sour taste in my mouth.
Yet, reading through these comments, it seems alive and well even after an astounding rebuke. Why? I despise our two-party system, but I'm actually quite happy to see one particular party rebuked this time around for this abhorrent behavior that should have no place in civil discourse. It's sad that HN can't rise above it.
And for clarity, yes, both sides participate in this charade of incivilities, but I am simply expressing my own opinion as an independent in 2024 that it overwhelmingly came from one side towards _me_ in this election cycle.
I hear you (actually not from my perpective, just other people I know). It may sound really superficial but it sounds like a platonist vs aristotelian argument. The former being people who believe abstract theories are the greater good (conventional theory) vs real world experiences. The problem with the former is that if you're afforded to believe it if you're not in survival mode.
IMO in all actuality the best course of action is somewhere in the middle.
I'm genuinely curious - can you elaborate on "constantly being talking down to? insulted as a white supremacist, nazi?" Does this happen to you in personal conversations with family members or with friends who are left? Or are you referring to broader culture in general, like the Harris' campaign, because if so, can you elaborate on the time Harris or Biden "talked down" to you?
As a sidenote I realize Biden made that garbage comment which came across to me as a misconstrued sentence that is common with Biden's speech impediment. But even if not, Trump has said a lot of terrible things about left leaning people like myself. Is your standard as equivically disdainful of Trump's comments, and if not, why not?
I guess I just find it wild you're appealing to civil discourse when the winner of this election does very little civil discourse, by his own admission.
In terms of face-to-face conversations, I've never once had these insults thrown at me. This is somewhat expected, as in my experience, most people are far less confrontational in these situations. I would say a majority of it comes from:
- Group "watercooler" discussions at work where people parrot vilifying language that targets groups I identify with (I do work at a _very_ left-leaning workplace)
- Community events that I have participated in, where people were not necessarily attacking me personally, but were hurling insults at our group
- The media. This one is fairly self-documenting.
As I mentioned in another reply, since I fall in the middle, I often get negative rhetoric from both sides. But only one has stooped to the levels of vitriol that have often left me shocked (for example, that I should forcibly have my genitals removed so as to prevent procreation).
just curious if you think that the rhetoric from trump and his followers is not only hurtful, but also incredibly violent.
like how he said he wishes he had Hitler's generals so he could just have democrats or others who disagree with him executed
Yes, I said:
> And for clarity, yes, both sides participate in this charade of incivilities
Although I'm unaware of him asking for Hitler's generals so he could execute democrats, but I'm also not interested in participating in this back-and-forth exchange, as I dislike both administrations.
Assuming you're arguing in good faith, here is the transcript from someone who was in the room with Trump when he was saying all of this:
> He's looking for obedience. This is the thing that shocks him about American generals and continues to shock him, is that they swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. That's what he's looking for, personal loyalty. And we know that from many other discussions we have heard around him.
The thing is, I'm not trying to argue. What are you hoping to gain from this exchange? I've already said I despise our two-party system and dislike both campaigns and (in another comment) I've been relegated by both sides.
My original comment was simply a personal observation that, in this election season, I received far more abuse from one side over the other, and that I was sad to see this same disdain continue here in HN. You may have had a completely different experience, and that's perfectly OK, but I'm honestly confused at the goal with you questioning me about a comment Trump made.
i think this is the insidious thing about polarization:
people in the middle get caught in the crossfire of harsh rhetoric. and it is hard to blame people for this, an eye for an eye is so easy and tempting.
I've had right wingers criticize me with patronizing "anti-commie" rhetoric, but the worst has been shaming (yes actual shaming and exclusion) from my peers because i (mostly) agree with them in a contrarian way that they dont like or attempt to understand.
i don't really interact with many right wingers day to day, so this difference might just be a result of that bias.
I'm curious if this kind of thing happens to right wingers as well, or if there is less such "friendly-fire" on the right.
P.S I'm European.
Yes, I have experienced the rhetoric from both sides. I have already doxxed myself as a Christian here, so I'll restate it again. I have a tremendous amount of disdain for Christian nationalists and, specifically, the Republican appropriation of Christianity for harvesting votes. This has alienated me from a large number of people just in my own faith.
It appears to be the plight of critical thinkers in this culture. You are not allowed to have a complex set of beliefs that may cross both sides of the culture war.
All i can say is.. f** ajit pai
It happens that an IETF meeting is currently going on. Mic comment at the plenary just a few minutes ago:
"I believe we will need to reopen discussion on the IETF 127 venue."
IETF 127 is (probably soon: was) scheduled to occur November 14th-20th, 2026, in San Francisco.
(Previous US-scheduled IETF meetings during the Trump presidency were moved to Canada, particularly due to Chinese attendees' inability to get Visas.)
Not sure if its clear here to US participants, but the world views this outcome much like we did in 2016: it makes the US into an absolute laughing stock. I don't fully understand: he was voted out in 2020 due to the massive failures of his term and him personally, and now four years later when he has become even more deranged, they voted him back in? What the hell?
Positive outcomes I see is that much like with the US's unequivocal support of Israel, this devastates the US's reputation and foreign influence. Trump wants to abandon Europe and Ukraine, which might grant Europe the independence and the urgency to step up and support Ukraine itself, unfettered by dysfunctional politics back in the US. A third pole on the world power stage would improve things, the US isolated back home in its infighting and staying out of the rest of the worlds business. IF the EU steps up.
The astounding hubris you must have in order to make the comment
> the world views this outcome much like we did in 2016.
You represent the world's view, ey? More than likely you're just repeating what the media told you to think.
They elected a giant idiot who lives in his own, broken world. No one needs the media to tell them what to think, they can just listen to him for half a minute. Hes a joke, and he makes the US a joke that they put him in power. Again.
And how exactly did other countries take advantage of this giant idiot representing a joke of nation?
European here, I do not think that electing Trump makes the US a laughing stock; there were legitimate reasons to disagree with the Biden administration, and, given that Kamala was essentially a continuation of Biden's policies, there was no other real alternative.
It was very much a decision between drinking curdled milk and drinking bleach.
Added to the legitimate reasons to disagree with Trump’s first term too? It’s not like we’re jumping to something new here; we’ve done it before
> I don't fully understand: he was voted out in 2020 due to the massive failures of his term and him personally, and now four years later when he has become even more deranged, they voted him back in? What the hell?
When you don't understand something happening in real life then you might want to consider trying harder to figure it out, instead of feeling smug about it. Just doubling down on the things you believe should matter is not very productive.
Should mention I feel bad for the Gazans. The democrats had already abandoned them (Genocide Joe etc) but they're screwed now - just like the Kurds which Trump betrayed and left for ISIS and Turkey last time.
From far away, it looks obvious.
When he ran the first time, the tactic was "oh easy, we'll say we're not as egregious as that guy".
They even sabotaged Bernie to this effect (see Podesta emails), even though he was polling much better than Clinton. This failed miserably, probably in essence because the Democrats were underestimating the power of clicks to drive reality, which Trump understood, at least intuitively.
This was a historical moment where the Democrats could have reorganised things and refocused on their traditional base, namely, the working class. It seemed obvious they should, I personally really thought they would have to.
No no, it turned out. We were treated to years and years of full on circus shenanigans. They doubled down, blamed others - the Russians, Wikileaks, whoever really. Anything but blame themselves and admit that they were offering nothing which was substantively different enough from the Republicans, in the eyes of the voters.
And here we are again. Will they be able to gut the decrepit power structures keeping the zombie Democrat party afloat this time, injecting new life? Or will they find a new scapegoat, treating us to more utterly pointless pontificating through a series of never-ending media cycles.
In summary, it seems they think pandering to identity tropes will be enough to distinguish them in the eyes of the voters, but that is simply playing on Trump's territory where he decides the rules. He does it better than them. It's one of the quite few things you could say he's "good" at.
The Democrats need to figure out how to recapture the favor of young men. The Joe Rogans/Logan Pauls/Elon Musks/Tiktok/Podcast bros are doing serious damage to that demographic. Almost a +30 swing to the right in the 18-29 M category from 2020.
Seems really simple to me: don't discuss literally everything BUT the concerns of poor white folks? Trump is full of shit but at least he lies TO the majority population. The Dems either ignore, talk down to or dismiss the majority of their constituents. When you make literally every talking point about marginalized groups or the Ukraine or whatever you have no chance of convincing someone to switch to your side because you underline that their concerns are not a priority or even on your radar.
If you spend a quarter of your time discussing transgender athletes or unisex bathrooms 99% of people don't have a personal stake in that. In other words, the Dems aren't doing the fundamental job of politicking, which is to engage with their constituents on the topics that matter to them directly.
Since promoting a secure economic future is clearly not in the Democratic party game plan, maybe trick the Republicans into starting a war and then campaign on stopping it?
I am not sure what could hit at the self-interest of the 18-29M demographic other than the Selective Service.
No, those young men need to stop being losers and get their shit together, they aren't kids anymore
Telling people to stop being losers is a not winning strategy; might feel good, wouldn't do good.
Someone has to tell them.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha keep doing what you’re doing. It’s working.
How did polls go so wrong? “gold standard” Ann Selzer predicted +3 Harris in Iowa and it became +14 Trump. That’s an incredible miss from a pollster.
The polls, in aggregate, were fairly accurate: 50/50 chance for the most part. The Selzer Iowa poll felt like false hope to me immediately.
My guess: Goodhart's law
> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
That’s one poll and there are always outliers, but the averages were pretty accurate - roughly a tossup based on turnout, with error rates around the 2-3% we saw. As with 2016, those correlated in the same direction so the polling industry still hasn’t figured out how to weight Trump’s impact on turnout.
As a foreigner, it seems like both sides are super extremely marginalised. Both sides believe everything will be done and there will be a big change if the other side wins. Reality is really not that radical, people are being lit up by propoganda. Saying this as a Turkish person, this has been happening in our country almost since I was born and it destroyed politics, normalisation and being calm is much better than sensationalising everything. Imho biggest issues are related to economics, like housing, like dark money in elections. Meaningless topics are sensationalised to marginalise people and unfortunately it works every time. Politics shouldn’t be right vs left, it should be rich vs middle class vs poor, as economics is the single most impactful aspect on most people’s lives. But politicians want to rile everyone up and put them against each other.
In the US, it seems the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests were the last time it was really the people vs. the incumbents. Ever since then all there's been are carefully manufactured conflicts with two sides to choose from, which divide the common class and cause them to argue amongst each other.
I think you have a too rosy image of the ineffective and confused Occupy Wall Street protests.
Now now, OP never implied that Occupy Wall Street was effective. :-)
If anything, it points to the stark lack of class consciousness in America that even our biggest protests aren't generally able to create long lasting change.
Personally, I'm reminded of MLK's Poor People Campaign shortly before he got FBI'd. Him and the black panthers were both trying to agitate around this issue in different nonpartisan ways, and they faced extreme prejudice from the state for their trouble.
A lot of whom were paid to be there.
Where did you hear this?
There's no reason at all to say Occupy was "real" whereas current conflicts are "manufactured."
GME was, in my opinion, what occupy wall street should have been. Much more effective even.
You’ll never beat the house.
I agree. American has more wealth than ever but it's not distributed. All these issues that serve to distract people from the one thing that will make the biggest difference in their lives: personal economics.
Elites are really good at doing that. Go pay attention to China, Russia, gun control, birth control, diversity, BLM, transgender rights. Meanwhile, I will continue to disproportionately take more of America's wealth.
As another Turkish person, I find the resemblence between this election and the one we had a year ago rather uncanny.
- election between rightist strongman vs. boring guy whose most important selling point is not being the other guy. Also a somewhat controversial candidacy.
- Deep divide between coastal lines vs. the rest; educated and the rest.
- Polls not being confident on either candidate, but the strongman gets mire votes than expected.
Etc. etc. I find it rather strange. (I do enjoy the memes on the Turkish social media though)
Very well put. I also live in a country where this kind of politics is everyday politics. Nothing really changes for good.
So as a Turkish person do you believe the other side is just as bad as Erdogan? Do you think inflation would be just as bad?
>Politics shouldn’t be right vs left, it should be rich vs middle class vs poor, as economics is the single most impactful aspect on most people’s lives.
I agree but ironically this kind of rhetoric is actually how the American left (not the Democrats) were undermined and now Americans are overworked slaves working two or more jobs to live paycheck to paycheck.
"Right vs left" does matter and it was organized left-wing efforts that created the superior life-work balance and healthcare in Europe.
> it was organized left-wing efforts that created the superior life-work balance and healthcare in Europe
The US economy thanks you for getting out of the way, I guess. Americans aren't flying to Europe for healthcare - it's the other way around (if you can afford it). So it may be "superior" in the sense that you're just paying for it your entire life via taxes instead of at the time of service and through employer-subsidized insurance, but it's not "superior" in terms of care.
Politics shouldn't be anyone "vs" anyone else. It should be "how can we fix what's broken, how can we make what's good even better." Trump's message was largely "here's how I will fix the economy" and "here's how I will fix the border." Harris's message was "I'm not Trump" and "I won't change any policy of the Biden administration."
That "if you can afford it" is an important qualifier. I read people struggle to source insulin in the US.
I meant "if, as a foreign national, you can afford to fly to the US for healthcare." Rich Europeans flying to the US for specialized healthcare happens a lot more than rich Americans flying to the EU for specialized healthcare and there's a reason for that.
So what's the reason? Or why should I care about the quality of life of the richest?
So what, though? Is the US's advantage in specialized healthcare worth the income inequality and multiple-jobs-just-to-survive culture? I think it's not hard to make an argument that it isn't worth it.
So when I'm down on my luck I shouldn't be entitled to healthcare?
Living in the UK I'm more than happy to contribute my way in taxes, knowing I'm always looked after regardless of my employment state or wealth.
Additionally we can also pay for American style (private) healthcare, but aren't paying 10x markup on treatment as is the case for America (see Ozempic pricing for example).
American healthcare is one of the worst in the developed world, it shouldn't be celebrated.
> see Ozempic pricing
Let me just take this opportunity to point out that Ozempic is the product of a European company. So you can tell me how American healthcare is absurdly expensive, and how it is much cheaper for you, all while you are the ones making it so damn expensive for us.
Along the same lines, lets hear more about Norway being the shining beacon on the hill, the hero come to save us from climate change, while behind the scenes they finance the entire country by exporting pollution to the rest of the world.
It's really difficult to stomach the hypocritical arrogance of some Europeans. Y'all seem so nice in person, I am hoping a lot of the online rhetoric is just Putin doing his thing.
Anecdote: my middle school P.E. teacher took her class down to Juárez Mexico for a "school" mission trip.
She left the group on the way back so she could stop elsewhere and get her teeth cleaned. She said it was a common sentiment for Americans to cross the border for dental work like that.
(That trip was odd for many other reasons ...)
> Americans aren't flying to Europe for healthcare - it's the other way around (if you can afford it)
Missing in your analysis is health outcomes for the poor. Maybe you don't view them as human?
My dad is a P.T. and he recounts how after the ACA passed in 2008, his fellow therapists saw tons of people from poor communities going to the doctor for the first time in years. His practice was backed up for a while because there were so many new patients who suddenly had insurance.
Folks missing teeth, folks with broken bones who set improperly, folks who couldn't afford preventative care.
Hard to imagine how you guys lost an election.
I didn't vote for Kamala. Also I'm sorry you feel bad when people point out your callousness. Think about how people must feel when they die for want of healthcare.
So you don't have a substantive reply? In that case you maybe shouldn't hit the reply link.
> Trump's message was largely "here's how I will fix the economy" and "here's how I will fix the border."
I read an opinion piece a week or so ago that sounded just like this. It was even more explicit about the point. Paraphrasing, she said 'I know he says really hateful things, but you guys don't get it, at the rallies everyone is giddy and happy, it's such a joyful place to be!'.
The point being that Trump is about joy. Not that his supporters were giddy about his promises of retribution. Totally honest perspective from someone deep in that bubble. I actually appreciate the honesty.
Dems listen to Trump talk about how much he wants to hurt them. They recall that he did exactly that the last time he was president. So of course the democratic candidate says she won't be like Trump. Her supporters don't want to be targeted by their own government again.
That's the thing the dems just don't get. Saying you'll be president for everyone isn't what sells. It's a high minded ideal, like civil rights. Sounds good, inspires a lot of breathless agreement, but most people don't actually care in their hearts, they just care about #1. Appealing to their basest instincts seems wrong, but it's how you win in politics. Stop trying to take the high road that doesn't exist except in your dreams.
What exactly did Trump do to hurt Democrats in his first term?
We're definitely going to be seeing big changes. Trump and the conservatives are in charge. They are going to execute project 2025. They setup all the ground work during Trump's last term.
Ukraine will be lost. Russia will encroach on Europe. The Republicans will staff Judges everywhere and build a stronger conservative justice system.
The rich will dominate even further over the poor and the US will become an extension of the Kremlin.
Trump may also try to set the stage for more dictatorial control. The only good thing about this election is Trump is so old he probably won't try to create a dictatorship since he won't benefit from it.
But have no doubt the democrats will not be taking back control within the next generation or two.
Next president will be a democrat, calling it now.
You are doing the exact type of sensationalising that OP was talking about
I'm not convinced but I got the popcorn ready.
And it's not sensational ism when it's exactly what Trump has promised to do and was in the process of doing when he was fired the first time.
Demxit (Democracy exit)
The DNC reminds me of the board a formerly successful company with good people - but has terrible management and keeps promoting unpopular leaders.
i imagine the person that can climb the corporate ladder in an major organization to the level of board member with a lot of qualities, being a good person is not one of those
My greatest fear is for America. He undermined it's institutions last time and there's no telling how much he'll weaken it now. I suspect the DoJ will be first to get gutted and then education, health, science. NATO, WTO, UN. I'm sure he'll embed gerrymandering to ensure republican victories. At the end of this we'll have a radically different America, domestically and Globally.
The US was supposed to be destroyed by Trump 2016-2020. That didn't happen at all. The US is now stronger, more powerful, richer. The corporate tax cuts have worked out extraordinarily well, like Ireland on steroids.
Meanwhile the rest of the world has fallen behind the US. China is weaker and sliding (in part thanks to the expansive authoritarianism). Russia is a joke and has been for decades (now a regional power that struggles against Ukraine). Europe broadly is weaker and no longer competitive at almost anything.
US GDP per capita is essentially now double that of Britain or France.
Weakened institutions don't necessarily mean a weakened economy. You can have a strong economy and a high GDP without an independent judiciary or constitutional rights for example. (I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with either of you, but pointing out a communications mismatch between your comment and the GP that you replied to; I think you're talking about different things).
This is the only thing that has me clinging to hope, is that last time it didn't turn out terribly. I have a sense of foreboding about what the supreme court will look like at the end of his term, and the consequences we'll have to live with for decades as a result. And a potential WW3, which seems more plausible on a daily basis. A large scale conflict feels almost unavoidable; I would prefer a cool, calm, collected individual at the helm when it hits.
I share your sense of foreboding. See my other comment about how I'm feeling about last time vs. this time, but I have one other hope: In the US, the states still retain a lot of power. There are still a lot of states that will continue to be governed sensibly regardless of what's happening at the Federal level. I think that state-level leaders tend to be more pragmatic and grounded, less likely to take things off-the-rails on impulse or to score political points, perhaps because they're closer to "the people" and have to live more with the practical results.
There is enough protections built into the system, and enough maturity of the system (the "deep state"), that outside of something like war on our shores, no single president can destroy it in one term. But each time its degraded it becomes more susceptible. We just (popularly) elected an election denier. That means future presidents can run this play and get away with it. The most likely scenario now IMO is we get a more cunning strongman who successfully overturns the democratic outcome when not in their favor. We don't have to speculate, as we've see this play out in several other countries. Of course this line of thinking was never a viable political strategy for running against Trump, because its far too abstract for the average voter.
The reality is we are still benefiting from the leadership of some of our more visionary founders and leaders since; but without being reenforced in some way it won't hold up forever. Most people in the US are still under the guise of America being special, and hand waving those scenarios away thinking the worst can't happen here. Which makes it much easier to then vote for Trump, especially if you don't think the climate crisis is real or prescient.
> There is enough protections built into the system
I'm not even convinced of this. The problem is that that many of these protections aren't really legal (at least they aren't all legal), they're conventions and norms. They require the people in power to believe in them, and believe that they're good and useful, or they can be swept aside. The rule of law is a polite fiction that requires people to adhere to it.
Take Elon Musk, for example, who will now likely be involved in government to an alarming degree. By all accounts, he got his start in the US by working here illegally. No problem; rules for thee and not for me. His publicly-admitted drug use should disqualify SpaceX from government contracts. No problem; what are they going to do, cancel them? Musk was unhappy a Delaware judge struck down his Tesla pay package. No problem; reincorporate in Texas and find a different legal framework and judges who like him.
Musk is constantly flaunting norms and getting away with it, and he'll continue to push and ignore these boundaries with whatever government position Trump gives him. Trump does the same, but with a lot more power, and he and his cronies are actually prepared and organized this time, something that wasn't the case in 2016. He has a SCOTUS stacked in his favor, that has already given him broad immunity against illegal acts while in office. He has the Senate, again, and may have the House as well. This time the Senate will temporarily or permanently change the filibuster rules if they're having trouble hitting the 60-vote threshold on things to which it still applies.
He didn’t have immunity from the Supreme Court, and majority of the Senate and the House back then. Some Republicans working with him still had integrity to prevent atrocities, but they are not there anymore.
The last time he was surrounded by chiefs of staff, generals, legal counsel, agency directors, etc. who would say "that's crazy, you can't do that" against his worst impulses. Now, all those people are gone and people like them will not be welcome. Now, he has a conservative judiciary (thanks to his last-minute appointees) who recently ruled that he will not bound by the law. Now, his inner circle has a plan to rapidly cleanse all non-partisan Federal government positions of anyone who might tell the Trump administration why something he wants can't be done.
There is no reason to expect things to go like they did the last time around.
Well said. Speaking as a registered Republican dating back to the early 2000s, I thought Trump was a clown when he first announced his intention to run in 2015 (you could call me a "Never Trumper"). I was shocked like everybody else when he won, but I took comfort in the fact that he was still mostly surrounded by old establishment Republicans who I figured would keep things on-the-rails or just impeach him within the first six months. I mean, he had some wackos like Bannon and Flynn and his family members, but he also had old establishment Republicans (in his cabinet and congress) and other non-politicians that I (as a career Army officer) really respected like Kelly, Mattis, Esper, McMaster, and Milley. My expectations were sort of met.
But now what? The Republican establishment has been re-made in his image. The people I respect have all gone public against him in the strongest possible ways. Who will serve under him? I really don't know what to expect this time around.
I'd argue that the war in Ukraine was caused by the State Department being weakend and not being able to effectively deal with Russian plans to invade. Yes the US economy has been phenomenally succesful over the last 8 years and thats in no small part due to Trumps deregulation of the oil industry which has become the largest in the world. But in the mean time China is dominating renewables which is the future. People also voted for Trump because they're feeling economically insecure, the distribution of wealth is skewed to the rich. the US middle classes have not been a beneficiary of this economic bonanza at all. Which explains why they voted Trump. So either wages have to rise significantly for them, which means corporates endure lower margins or prices fall because of a massive supply side boom, which can be met domestically because it would be inflationary, and cant be met by imports because he's promised to impose 20% tariffs on everyone. Is a circle that cant be squared.
> That didn't happen at all. The US is now stronger, more powerful, richer.
The proper comparison to make here isn't between America before and America after Trump. It's to America after Trump and a hypothetical America after Clinton.
It may be that we're better off after Trump (though "we" is doing a lot of work in that sentence). But the relevant question to voters is whether we would have been even better off if the other candidate had one.
I wouldn't focus on Trump in terms of per capita GDP.
During Trump's term, per capital gdp went from $58.2k to $64.3k, a 10% increase.
During Biden's term, it went from $64.3k to $81.7k, a 27% increase.
GDP should be medianized or the top 100 most income people removed from it or something. That top echelon money isn't going back into the economy.
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Please don't do this here.
Even without Trump, there are lots of people in the US who have been relatively dissatisfied with the general trend of the US the last 60-ish years. Small-c conservatives have been just as horrified by the available options as small-l liberals have been.
I doubt even the most radical president could do much to reverse or slow that trend. The strong central government permanent war surveillance state seems so much bigger and more powerful than even the highest office. It’s not like breaking up or not breaking up Google is gonna change the fact that feds can read everyone’s gmail without a warrant.
I personally believe that the office of the president’s effect on long term policy or institutions is generally massively overstated. Their main lever seems to be supreme court appointments and Trump has already pulled that one in his first term (to predictably destructive results). I am unsure whether that is because presidents generally “color inside of the lines” and haven’t attempted sweeping and radical reform, or because the institutions ultimately have more inertia than the temporary machinations of the executive office.
I guess we’ll see if the institutional destruction he seems to seek a) is even possible or b) may result in unexpectedly good outcomes. Then again, most of the stuff he says he seems to speak just for the momentary sake of speaking it; only a small fraction relates to things he plans (or is effectively compelled) to do. I lost count of all of the promises he made, good and bad, that not only weren’t kept, but weren’t even ever mentioned again.
I remain skeptical that his fervent drive during the campaign will translate into fervent reformation action, now that he has obtained what he wants. Despite the constant media hand-wringing, his first term wasn’t as apocalyptic as everyone made it out to be, despite his two main legacies both being perhaps the most destructive things he could have wrought: the supreme court appointments and the insanely massive mismanagement of a deadly pandemic.
His more hardworking and ideologically-motivated support staff have had a lot more time to plan on his behalf this time around, however. Perhaps his weaponized ignorance will be deliberately wielded this time around and his second term will turn out to be massively more destructive than his first, but that is a very high bar to clear given the outsized effect that mismanaging the pandemic response caused. Not many presidents can have that much preventable death in their legacy, even if they explicitly try.
> Their main lever seems to be supreme court appointments
The President has far more power than that.
What goes along with that is ability to get people elected (or not) by backing them, both actually and monetarily. Trump killing the immigration bill during Biden's term is a good example, and he wasn't even President (yet) at the time. I expect he'll focus on more palatable legislation during the first two years, to keep the senate majority through 2028, but we'll see.He only realistically has two years to get any legislation through, the last two years he won't have the house with him so either he is on the defensive or just doing appointments (he will start the term with negative approval rating, and probably will never get above that, so the house definitely flips in 2026 like it did in 2018).
The question is how much damage can he do in two years? If he goes full loco and starts a global trade war with everyone via high tariffs, while at the same time juicing interest rates via a politicized fed, we will be in a depression within a year or two. If he uses his political capital more wisely, we might avoid that economic hit but have longer term damage to worry about. Thankfully, Trump is pretty impulsive, and he doesn't have a long list of good advisors to choose from (not that he would listen to them anyways), so I'm really just worried about the first scenario.
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From my perspective, Harris mostly failed to convey what her agenda is.
The way I inform myself about politicians is by typing "<name> interview" into YouTube and listen to a few hours of interviews with them.
With Harris, nothing stuck except that she is pro taxing the rich.
With Trump, what stuck is that he is pro border, pro Bitcoin, pro tariffs and pro Tesla.
If you had actually done this you would’ve realized that Trump has “concepts of a plan” for childcare and healthcare. Despite promising us his plans for 8 years now.
This seems to be a misunderstanding.
With "stuck" I mean information about the candidate that stuck with me.
Ranked choice voting.
Approval voting!
“It’s the economy, stupid” has never been truer. People will trade their rights for more basic needs being fulfilled and most people simply aren’t happy with the one sided economy that has prevailed since the late 80s. Interest rates were too low for too long beginning circa 2000, and the massive flood of QE led to an explosion in house prices, car prices, and food. This is what the world gets for poor monetary and fiscal management for more than two decades.
> the massive flood of QE led to an explosion in house prices, car prices, and food.
That's not really the case though.
We had a similar QE in '08 with pretty much no effect on CPI [1] or Housing [2]. As well as the increase in pricing has occurred _when the money printing stopped_ and not _while the money was printing_ [3].
The current inflation isn't caused by money printing. It's caused by pricing power by conglomerates. We've allowed energy companies to join together and they've agreed with OPEC to cut production to lead to price increases. We've allowed rental companies to join together and raise prices. We've allowed meat companies to join together and raise prices. The lack of anti-trust enforcement along with a trigger (Covid) is what caused inflations, companies realized they had a talking point (supply chain problems) that they could pin price increase on regardless of if it was true.
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDCPIM158SFRBCLE
[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIEHOUSE
[3]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MBCURRCIR#0
> The current inflation isn't caused by money printing.
I'm not sure that is fair. Nothing is ever caused by just one thing, of course, but it is unlikely that money printed and given to average Joes was not a significant contributor. COVID relief saw money flow into the hands of regular people, which was quite unlike 2008.
2008 was different as it only went into the hands of the rich. You can print money endlessly and give it all to Jeff Bezos and inflation will never occur. It's just another number in his bank account, so to speak. But if you give it to poor people on the street, soon they are going to start buying things with it, increasing competition for goods and services and thus driving up prices.
Although I would say the biggest factor was the devastating crop failure in 2020 with a dash of COVID problems on top, followed by the EU shutting down their fertilizer plants in 2021, and then Russia invading Ukraine in 2022 which both complicated access to Ukraine food production as well as denying trade with Russian fertilizer. This left food stocks in a precarious situation and thus sent the price of food to the moon. Everyone else followed as best they could to ensure they could continue to eat. Now that we're getting our food house back in order, the inflation panic has started to subside in kind.
Saying that the current drive of inflation is a monetary expansion must demonstrate that there's a significant component of the inflation to be attributable to monetary expansion. M0 has been stable, M1+M2 components as whole have also followed a stable route.
When you consider the slow reaction of the economy, the money supply and inflation do track fairly well. It is not like if the money supply goes up today that inflation will also go up today. If the money supply goes up today, you wouldn't expect to see to see an inflation reaction for quite some time.
Hell, look at how long it took grocery stores to react to the aforementioned food crisis. Us on the farm saw the price of food we were selling double (or even more) from the price norm early in the crisis, but it took another year or so before the consumers of that food started complaining about how much grocery stores were charging. Things happen very slowly.
Indeed, the money supply has been stable for a while, only veering of track for a short time, but inflation is also now stabilizing and only veered off track for a short time.
> Us on the farm saw the price of food we were selling double (or even more) from the price norm early in the crisis
Because conglomerates (ex. Tyson Foods) were upping their prices as shown by gross margins of 10% increasing to 15% [1].
> but it took another year or so before the consumers of that food started complaining about how much grocery stores were charging. Things happen very slowly.
Uh. More like immediately people complained; just throw a max date on a web search [2] and you'll find them readily.
I can't speak to your own personal anecdotes. But the price of eggs has been talked about ad nauseam since start of covid.
[2]: https://www.google.com/search?q=rising+food+prices&tbs=cdr%3...
[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSN/tyson-foods/gr...
> Uh. More like immediately people complained;
Did they? You seem to only be able to go back to 2021, whereas I was seeing substantial gains in the price of food I was selling on the farm as early as 2019, thanks to another devastating (albeit less so) crop failure.
It is not like the price was $x one day and then $x*2 the next. It ramped up over time. Just like the price of groceries did, albeit on a later timeline.
I mean all you have to do is change the 2021 to 2020 [1] and you immediately get an article talking about 4.8% increase in May 2020 [2].
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=rising+food+prices&tbs=cdr%3...
[2]: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/rising-food-prices-means-rising-ne...
Right, which is in line with the approximately one year lag I spoke of. Thanks for validating my earlier comment.
Exactly. The Harris team made a key mistake by responding with, ‘No, you’re wrong. The economy is doing great—just look at the stats.’ They needed a concrete plan to address people’s concerns directly, but that was missing.
Personally, my issue with the Democrats is how they mishandled the electric vehicle charging network initiative. [0]
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger...
Regardless of the causes, Harris should have acknowledged that things have been bad for a lot of people, and presented a plan for how to make it better.
Instead, she insisted the economy was doing great, and the millions of people whose wages have not risen enough to offset inflation just didn't know what they were talking about.
The economy has been doing great for some people, but not for the voters who ended up mattering to the election outcome.
Voting for lower interest rates to come back will certainly fix that. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/trump-heaps-pressur...
> People will trade their rights for more basic needs being fulfilled
Seems like people got the best of both worlds - they will be able to keep more rights than they otherwise would have and they will enjoy a better economy. Win-win!
Can you elaborate on how there will be more rights under the GOP, which just spent significant energy reducing women’s rights to bodily autonomy, and Trump threatening the free speech of media companies he doesn’t like?
Interesting unrelated fact, but at 6745 comments this page lags a lot on my phone, even typing this is difficult.
Not on my phone.
(Pixel 8 Pro, Firefox)
Reddit is finding out that if you block everyone not inside your echo chamber, but are still in the smaller echo chamber, every election will shock you
It unfortunately sits on the shoulders of progressives seeking change to convince the conservatives not seeking it to do so. By choosing not to do this asymmetric work, this is the consequence
I'm not a Reddit user (or any social media user unless you count this) but one of my big takeaways from this election is how out-of-touch I am, apparently, with the majority of Americans; I've been shocked for months (years?) that Trump was even still a contender.
I guess I've just been living in heavily blue places, and working alongside highly educated people, since 2016. I thought that everybody could see Trump and Trumpism for what they really are, but I guess not, and I'm left wondering: "Who are these 70M+ people?"
“Highly educated” - told on yourself pretty quick
Highly educated ≠ intelligent.
You can be quite highly educated and still sit inside an ideological bubble and have no clue that anything is wrong... until it is.
"Heavily blue" is definitely an ideological bubble, because, as it turns out, and this may shock you (!!!), no political party has a monopoly on truths. There are bad things about Kamala and good things about Trump that you would literally never encounter if you only read "blue media". If you only read blue media, you will also consume a lot of BS (good things that are untrue about Kamala and bad things that are untrue about Trump). Same is true about red media, except with the poles reversed.
And echo chambers just reinforce all this BS.
Intelligent people question the sacred cows, and the most intelligent question the most sacred cows. James Damore was intelligent, wrote an intelligent paper, and instead of engaging with him and his ideas, he got eviscerated. And that was at Google, a supposedly "highly educated" place.
If you just can't say certain things, you are in an oppressive society, or sub-society, end of story.
I got eviscerated on Facebook 2 days ago merely for saying "so I investigated this claim that Trump is fascist, found the attributes of fascism, tried to rate him along those attributes, and he got a C (where F is Fascist)" (for comparison, Kamala got a B somehow, Putin an F, H__ler an F of course). Were there actual counterarguments to it? Nope. Someone asked for evidence, and I cited 3 links with a total of 20+ experts in them who on average said "no, not fascist enough to be labeled it". Then they attacked me for using ChatGPT to help put it all together (genetic fallacy). They kept attacking me and not my analysis. One was a fairly smart individual, but in this case he did not use it.
Since they were mainly attacking ChatGPT at that point, I asked ChatGPT to eviscerate every one of their arguments, defending us both and speaking as itself, which it did, with aplomb, and was amazing.
> Highly educated ≠ intelligent.
I didn't necessarily intend to say that it was. I'm just saying that support for Trump has been inversely correlated with education level, so I ended up in a bubble by virtue of working alongside people with advanced degrees (even more so than just living in a blue area). When ~90% of people in one's real life, day-to-day social circle are not Trump supporters it starts to feel like everybody must be of the same opinion, and it's shocking to find out otherwise.
I agree with you about the importance of engaging in independent, critical thought and allowing real discussion.
On a side note: thank you HN team for fixing the large-number-of-comments issue.
Things that most people care about:
- Will I still have a job in 6 months? If I lose my job, can I get by?
- Can I continue to afford groceries, rent, utilities at the current pace of inflation?
- If I have a major health problem, will I be ok?
During an election, you can either harness the fear voters have around these issues and turn them into hateful energy against the other side (Trump tactic) or you can calm people's nerves by acknowledging the problems and providing a path to deal with them (Obama tactic). Obama was able to confidently appeal to voters on these issues and he brought them to the fore-front throughout his campaign. Obama was charismatic as well, so when he talked about these issues, you got the sense that he could competently provide that protection. He was reassuring.
I voted for Kamala, but I didn't want to. She possessed none of those positive qualities. She didn't instill confidence. Her voice and demeanor made her sound annoyed. Her fake smile made me cringe. I wanted an authentic candidate that could make me feel safe. She was not it.
Lastly, those primary issues were shrouded by gender politics. I would like transgender people to feel safe and have access to resources they need. I would like women to have access to abortion when it's necessary. These are not things to run a campaign off of though. EVERYONE feels the pain of a bad economy; that should've been the primary focus all along and we needed a STRONG candidate to really drive a strategy for addressing it. I just don't think Kamala was able to make any headway in that respect and I think that's why she ultimately lost.
Donald Trump had 74 million votes in 2020. As of right now, he's nearly at 72 million. To me that says he hasn't necessarily gained new followers. That's a good sign. It seems the Dems have lost millions however. That's a very bad sign. It's pretty clear then that Kamala did not represent what voters really cared about during this election cycle.
Well, we gonna have 4 years of amazing memes.
For some people, the consequences won't be as benign.
For the world the consequences will be horrible
What examples do we have where US interventionism has been positive?
South Korea.
Ukraine is arguably in this category as well already.
Because the world ended the last time Trump was in office?
The way that Trump mismanaged covid resulted in tens or hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/11/trumps-pol...
Trump faced comparatively more headwinds in his first administration.
yeah, they will now scream for 4 years and have sore throats.
And others will die in wars they want no part of. So… yeah.
Trump did not started any war in his last term... cant say much about the last 2 democracts that where in the White House.
So just like the last four years then?
I wonder how mr musk will handle and use his (unfortunately correct) bet.
If you invest millions and your entire time it's not a "bet" it's a business plan.
Enrich oneself, obviously. Funnel public funds through companies via inflated contracts. No accountability.
A classic kleptocracy.
Gut sec and fcc. That is his motivation.
The more interesting thing to consider is that Trump has said Elon will have an active role in his administration. How is he going to do that on top of everything else? How are Tesla investors going to feel about this?
I think for most of his business he already have other peiple he trust in charge of them. Its impossible to manage so many companies and he seens to spend more effort in Space X than Tesla, starking, etc...
It will cut into his Diablo playing time.
It'll be interesting to see if he's able to become an effective beurocrat.
The CEO of a company being one of most powerful people in government is excellent for Tesla investors. Much less so for the general population, as the conflict of interests is obvious.
Perhaps, but a lot of potencial customers will be pissed at him.
I mean, arent they already? Remember all the crying when he brought Twitter? (fuck I will not call it X).
Especially outside US - if next government will ignore world or start doing some serious harm (ie by being too friendly with putin), tesla drivers will be frowned upon universally and very few new sales can be expected, more like a lot of vandalism on cars.
I guess China is a gone market for tesla at this point.
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This. Do people honestly think that Mike Johnson, who was planning to attempt to not certify the election and have the House try to overturn the result if Harris won, will really cede control EVER? Who’s going to force them now that they’ve captured the judiciary, Congress, and the White House? He’ll pardon himself on day one and never face his classified documents / espionage / treason charges, and die in office, however long they can prop him up for. I’m not even joking when I say that I doubt we’ll have federal elections in the future, as he’s said as much already.
The template these autocratic personalities follow is not to abolish elections, but to make them pointless exercises full of blatant corruption, coercion (violent or otherwise), and manipulation.
It's counterproductive to make claims like what you're claiming, because their supporters and people on the fence will turn around and point out how you're wrong in 4 years, or whatever.
There's still elections in Russia, Turkey, etc. And those leaders are very popular.
But they're not democracies. Opposition is not really permitted. Where legal repression isn't in place, mob violence and the like is employed.
That's the template you can expect to see followed.
He's quite old and no other Republican figure comes close to his popularity or cult-like following (assuming Americans aren't crazy enough to actually support RFK Jr). I'd imagine he'll do one term and then the next Republican candidate will be a more conventional politician.
I think he chose Vance for a reason. I think he wnats him to be his sucessor. I dont know much about Vance, but I saw his interview in the Joe Rogan, and he went very well there. Seens to have a good head above the shoulds and can be this more conventional politician you are talking about
You don’t imagine the next candidate will be an anointed successor, or at least somebody doubling down on the same approach? Why wouldn’t it be?
I don't think anyone else currently in the party has anywhere close to his charisma or pull, and you can't artifically generate that.
I dont know, 4 years are hard to predict. I can see the current crisis in the world deepening and people search for a more traditional politician for that reason, like somoone more predictable in times of uncertain?
Not that I think the next 4 years of Trump will be bad for the avarage american. I think I will be troubled for the whole world because things are already walking in this direction.
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The scariest thing is the Peter Thiel connection.
Thiel paid for Vance’s successful Senate campaign. Now his made man is next in line for the presidency (behind an overweight 78-year-old with memory issues). An amazing ROI for his money.
Both Thiel and Vance have expressed their admiration for Curtis Yarvin, an extreme reactionary who advocates for a monarchy. Thiel has publicly said that democracy was a mistake and it all went wrong when women got the vote.
Musk’s Tesla job title is “Techno-King” which is also a Yarvin reference. These people have a plan, and old Donald is a tool for them.
If readers of this thread aren't familiar with the Thiel connection, you need to hear the journalist Whitney Webb's work. She's brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMYdu-vTuPI - "The REAL Reason Behind J.D. Vance’s VP Pick; Marty sits down with Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin to discuss the partnership of the private tech sector with the surveillance state."
It's a two hour interview. Discussion of JD Vance and Palantir connection is at 12:30ish. A lot of "tin-foil hat" things seem pretty real.
> A lot of "tin-foil hat" things seem pretty real.
Yes it's tragically ironic that the people who believe most in outlandish conspiracy theories vote for the people who are openly involved in the most outlandish conspiracies, none of which said conspiracy theorists care about.
Interisngs. Now benig old and have memorues issues is a problem to being a president?
Yes - you may have noticed that the current president didn’t seek re-election for those reasons. His successor is just as old and not significantly better equipped mentally (judging by the way he talks and conducts himself).
Vance may become president much sooner than 2029, and Thiel and Musk will be the greatest beneficiaries.
The current president was ousterd by the part because it was becoming hard to pretend he even have a clue of where the hell he is. Last election he talked all type of absurd shit during campaing, and democrats didnt even bat an eye. Actually he was the perfect puppet for them. Do you really think it was not Kamala and the resto fo the people in charge of the democrat party thhat really rulled in place of Biden?
Didn't your candidate refuse to publish his medical bill of health?
He must've gotten confused with his tax records which he also never published.
> Last election he talked all type of absurd shit during campaing, and democrats didnt even bat an eye.
Both of them had issues. And both of them got much worse since.
Eyes were batted, but there's no reason to change your vote because of a problem that both choices have.
And then it became an problem that only one choice had, but it feels like almost all the Trump supporters that were being loud about age issues were disingenuous...
Nick Land!!!!
Demos rulled 4 years with total support o the sillicon valley and you did not get nervous? Facebook and google have way more reach than Thiel and gave full access to govermnet to their tech and data.
Vance is even more dangerous since he won't go off script, he'll stay ON SCRIPT to the point of absurdity (just see any of his interviews).
Donald is harder to control, he doesn't like homework and will ad-lib and improvise at all times.
and people say americans that followed Q where paranoids...
I dunno, pretty sure he tops the donor list and would be getting a transplant in less than an hour.
Yeah, sure. This is no better than all the "left is deep state" bs. This is what caused the loss.
Yeah, the conspiracy theories about this assassination atempt alone, gave a lot of votes to Trump.
I think its a crazy assumption to assume that over 200 years of political precident (4 year presidential terms) will be overturned by someone who got less votes than biden.
Every 4 years the same stuff happens, and yet every 4 years there is a so called "paradigm shift" or "rubicon crossed", when actually, nothing has really changed. It's getting really cringe and predictable.
US is the old democracy in the world. I live in brazil and there a bunch of reporters histeric people here assuming US will be a dictatorshio soon. Bitch, we where a dictatorship like 35 years ago, Time to worry about our own problems here.
Switzerland is, by some definitions, an older democracy than the US, if we neglect the short period of time when Napoleon conquered it (as we would similarly neglect the US Civil War). The Haudenosaunee have also been, in important senses, democratically governed for centuries longer than the US has existed, though possibly not as long as Switzerland. And presumably many small tribal peoples have remained democratic for millennia, though it's hard to tell in the absence of written records.
It does seem very likely that the Republican Party will govern the US for decades to come, like Perón's party has governed Argentina in between the military dictatorships, or Chávez's party governs Venezuela.
> It does seem very likely that the Republican Party will govern the US for decades to come
Either you're a troll, governed by recency bias (i.e. today), or not very competent in US politics. If the Democrats could get their act together even just slightly, they should have won 2016 and this election as well. How? It's simple demographics:
More and more people move to cities -> cities are typically blue -> easy for dems to get elected.
There should be absolutely no reason democrats lose so often and yet due to their incompetent antics they lose far more than they should.
Oh, I was talking about some other dynamics that are coming into play (the Supreme Court, perhaps mass deportations that 'accidentally' include some US citizens, discrimination against immigrants, changes to the Civil Service, etc.) I admire your simple faith but do not share it. I saw a lot of Venezuelans who did on the Venezuelan election day.
yeah man, us is not Brazil. This shit dont fly there. You americans are to worried when your institutions are way more solid than the resto of other democracies around the world. If he wanted to performe a coup, he had 4 years for that already,
Just stop being stuborn, start thinking about solving us real problems, and not demonizing the other party, and maybe the democrats will have a chance in the next election.
> If he wanted to performe a coup, he had 4 years for that already
He already tried to perform a coup and failed, I don't see why he wouldn't try again
mandm that capitol thing is a weekend where I live. That was a case of mass histeria.
Just a bunch of morons who went too hard on the joke.
> They didn't look to come for fun during that coup, they looked pretty serious.
They wherent even armed... what a shit coup.
"They were not really clever" isn't a good moral defense against a coup isn't it, even if it's true.
They didn't look to come for fun during that coup, they looked pretty serious.
He literally didn't, it was a minority of his supporters who he specifically told to be peaceful and respectful. I'm so sick of seeing this lie shat out by everyone who's been manipulated by dem propaganda.
I don't support Trump. I can't vote in any country. I have no horses in this race, but seeing the lies and propaganda (from both sides) actually working is insane - the propaganda isn't even that good guys.
Look in to the false elector plot.
He claimed that the election was stolen and provoked the event, he knew his supporter base.
I also don't have a horse in the race, I'm not american and this is me exposing some of the lies around his presidency. He did it once and he will do it again. I don't see why I should belive that he somehow changed.
The media coverage around this guy is so insane that he can do whatever he wants and you'll still have people who will deny it.
Well, be assured, the rest the world see the fact that americans vote via mail and dont demand id cards to vote as a joke.
He tried, but Mike Pence wasn't onboard with his plans. Mike Pence was literally the safeguard to democracy.
Trump has learned from his previous presidency, though. This time there will only be yes-men that show absolute loyalty.
And another 4 years of mass hysteria begins with this post
I sure will watch MSNBC news today.
REmember the lady screaming the sky in Trump inauguration? That gave us 8 years of amazing memes.
“Every [democratic] country has the government it deserves.” ― Joseph de Maistre
It's getting sort of ridiculous how much each party is stuck in an electoral strategy where they have to pretend to be on one side of an issue which is objectively against the interests of the people they pretend to be representing.
Dems have to appear to be pro-immigration for reasons (honestly I don't know why this is like this, historically). They are genuinely less xenophobic than the Reps, so they respect the rights of recent immigrants much better. But when it comes to preventing more poor workers coming in, they are just as tough as the Reps. And I believe that's because ultimately they are slightly less captured by capital and therefore more amenable to balance the economy in favor of workers.
Reps on the other hand have to appear xenophobic once again for reasons that aren't super clear to me, but when it comes to actually preventing immigration, they always manage to torpedo their own proposals. And arguably that's because if they passed effective anti-immigration laws, that would negatively affect the interests of capital, the very obvious reason they're in politics for (and Trump is certainly no different).
Maybe now we can resolve this apparent paradox and simply accept that the Democrats are first and foremost the party of the educated, metropolitan and utterly disinterested in matters of material conditions. Whereas the Republicans are the party of people who are bitter towards the first group. Which leads to the conclusion that exceptionally few people in the US are voting according to their own economic interests.
From an outsider's view (and many of my friends hold the same view), the two parties are not that different. They are different in some minor issues that grab eyeballs so that to create drama, but for the big ones (foreign policy, economics), they are not that different. I mean look at those bi-partisan issues, they are all big ones.
This is a common, but fundamentally incorrect, assessment.
I think this is sort of the result of looking at any country’s politics as an outsider. For Americans, most of us are in between the parties and so they point in different directions for us. Also, because the specific policies impact our lives, we are more interested in the details (where the parties actually do look pretty different) than some aggregation or big picture view.
In terms of some big issues being bi-partisan… I mean, it would be sort of weird if the broad strokes weren’t somewhat bipartisan, right? Like if we actually switched between having a capitalist and a communist economy every four years… that would not be a feasible way to run a country, haha.
But I mean we’re going to see some pretty big differences: support for our allies in NATO will look different (I don’t think we’re pulling out or anything but the relationships will change). The parties seem to have different visions of how we should try to get semiconductor manufacturing back over here (an industry that basically… determines what a lot the overall economy will look like). Abortion access will probably be determined by states (which will be a life-altering change of circumstance for some folks).
These are big differences.
One of my "friends" bragged to me this year about how he threatened to replace one of his underperforming programmers with someone from Pakistan for $10 an hour.
Say you're on the receiving end of this threat. Do you really care what country your replacement is from? Is my "friend" really all that benevolent to fire someone for less money?
What is the political salience of this anecdote, in your view?
> Reps on the other hand have to appear xenophobic once again for reasons that aren't super clear to me,
It's not complicated. It's the Christian Nationalist agenda for the last 50 years. They don't want white people to be the minority and most immigrants don't fit that profile.
> but when it comes to actually preventing immigration, they always manage to torpedo their own proposals.
Because they have to win elections. They do this by declaring something bad, doing nothing about it, then blaming democrats so they can get re-elected. Look at Florida. They've been republican for over two decades, they have a super majority and they don't solve any of the problems they run against the democrats on.
This is in no way a shot at the Latino population. But they are unfortunately a group that are stuck in a hard place.
On one side, they have a very religious population. Some of their core values align with republican values - i.e., freedom of religion, pro-life, and what have you.
But they're also voting for the very same people that vows to deport them.
And before anyone tries to argue "But they only want the illegal ones deported!" - we all know damn well that the most vocal part of the republican party couldn't care less if thousands of legal immigrants are deported by "accident".
In the end, people vote against their own interest, and rationalize it with "But it wouldn't happen to me!" (or anyone they know or love).
Same goes for the "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" crowd, and what have you.
> the Democrats are first and foremost the party of the educated, metropolitan and utterly disinterested in matters of material conditions.
This is absolutely true. Though most people on the Left are terrified to face this fact.
> Whereas the Republicans are the party of people who are bitter towards the first group.
This was true in 2016, probably 2020. But definitely not this election. Just to use myself as an example: I'm an Obama ('12), Clinton ('16), Biden ('20), Trump voter ('24).
I'm not motivated by animosity against Democrats because I was voting for them. Trump's message now is way more positive. It's a message of peace with Russia, making America healthy again, getting competent people in government (Musk), etc.
And that's actually also what a lot of the most influential Trump supporters (Musk, Rogan, RFK, Dana White, Nelk boys, Theo Von, etc) have been espousing too, pretty much all of whom used to be Democrats.
> Trump's message now is way more positive.
I feel like I've been listening to a very different Trump than you have. Most of what he says involves demonizing various groups of people, becoming a dictator, or putting his political opponents in jail. (And no, I haven't just been listening to sound bites or the most inflammatory short clips.)
> It's a message of peace with Russia
At the expense of Ukraine's sovereignty, appeasing a dictator and emboldening him to take other territory in Eastern Europe. (I bet China is happy with this, too.)
Is peace with Russia going to look like what happened with Afghanistan? The withdrawal plan and timeline was Trump's, not Biden's.
> making America healthy again
Every concrete proposal of his (not that he has many) that I've heard will bring us back on the inflation train, and increase the deficit. And on top of that he'll even further paralyze the federal government. Which is of course the conservative agenda in a nutshell: dismantle the federal government and let the states decide their fates, except where they want to impose their "values" on blue states.
> getting competent people in government (Musk), etc.
I see Musk as a deranged man who has succeeded through luck, timing, and rhetoric, rather than skill or talent. He can't even focus properly on the important things anymore (Tesla, SpaceX), and would prefer to spend his time making sure no one says mean things about him on Twitter. If he were a family member I'd be worried about his mental health. I don't say that to be flippant or cruel; I'm dead serious.
> Trump's message now is way more positive.
I feel like I've been listening to a very different Trump than you have. Most of what he says involves demonizing various groups of people, cozying up to dictators, or putting his political opponents in jail. His rallies are about stoking outrage and fear.
> It's a message of peace with Russia
At the expense of Ukraine's sovereignty.
Is peace with Russia going to look like what happened with Afghanistan? The withdrawal plan and timeline was Trump's, not Biden's.
> making America healthy again
Every concrete proposal of his (not that he has many) that I've heard will bring us back on the inflation train, increase the deficit, reverse our declining reliance on fossil fuels, and increase income inequality even further. And on top of that he'll even further paralyze the federal government. Which is of course the conservative agenda in a nutshell: dismantle the federal government and let the states decide their fates, except where they want to impose their "values" on blue states.
> getting competent people in government (Musk), etc.
If you think Musk is competent and should be anywhere near government, our fundamentals are so different that there's probably no point in discussing it further.
> I feel like I've been listening to a very different Trump than you have. Most of what he says involves demonizing various groups of people, cozying up to dictators, or putting his political opponents in jail. His rallies are about stoking outrage and fear.
It sounds more like you've been listening to what the news tells you Trump is.
"cozying up to dictators" is exactly the language used by MSNBC, CNN, CBS, et al. Putting his political opponents in jail is what his opposition tried.
The withdrawal plan is different from the execution, especially when only the high-level is followed. That is on Biden.
> Every concrete proposal of his (not that he has many) that I've heard will bring us back on the inflation train, increase the deficit, reverse our declining reliance on fossil fuels, and increase income inequality even further. And on top of that he'll even further paralyze the federal government. Which is of course the conservative agenda in a nutshell: dismantle the federal government and let the states decide their fates, except where they want to impose their "values" on blue states.
Again, this just sounds like what certain media tells you. I have never heard Trump say his goal is to "paralyze the federal government".
> It sounds more like you've been listening to what the news tells you Trump is.
I've been listening to the literal words that Trump says, by watching videos of his rallies.
Regardless, I'm not really interested in engaging with someone who's going to argue that "I'm listening wrong" instead of presenting a coherent argument.
Thanks for actually getting this
Lot of comments about the economy and inflation but I don’t think that explains all of it. Trump grew votes in demographics across the board including traditional Democrat strongholds. Something else was working for him that didn’t work for Harris.
To the people that are very upset about this, I'd like to offer some silver linings.
A blowout in either direction was necessary here. A clear result is better for everyone.
The press can go back to being adversarial to power (Although straight faced bullshit like the Cheney firing squad thing will probably only be more common, so thats a double edged sword).
The dems will likely stop anointing people.
We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.
The first woman president will likely be a much stronger candidate. Kamala could have potentially really ruined it for women going forward.
> The dems will likely stop anointing people.
I thought that after 2016...
1. The margin of victory does not matter—If Trump won, the Democratic establishment would have largely accepted the results and if Harris won, the GOP would have fully rejected the results. Everyone knew this was true. There is a fundamental asymmetry in respect for democracy between the parties.
2. Harris actually did just ruin it for women going forward. The Democratic party has now put forward two women against Trump that arguably both failed in spectacular fashion. It's not really clear to me why they did this, but they did it, and I don't know why we'd see a woman secure a major party's nomination for president in the next couple decades as a result.
1. Maybe. I am happy to not be testing this hypothesis.
2. I think the problem is inserting women that the voters aren't asking for. They could try asking who to run instead of telling people who to vote for, and they just might get a woman into the office.
There are women out there that have their own real following that could probably get there with the machine behind them, but the machine doesn't want any of them.
Depending on how things go, Tulsi could be the next best chance, if people stop making up shit about her being a Russian asset. But shes on the red team, so the dems will tear her down if she tries.
Regarding (2), I agree, but I don't think the electorate is in for such nuance. Two women failed to win the presidency, and that simple fact is all that matters. I agree with the other commenter that we won't see the dems put another woman up for president for decades, and that's a damn shame.
We might even see the GOP successfully get a woman into the White House before the dems do it, which is just embarrassing.
> We might even see the GOP successfully get a woman into the White House before the dems do it, which is just embarrassing.
That happened in the UK with Thatcher.
Amy Klobuchar is probably the Democrats best example—she just once again significantly outperformed the other national Democratic candidate (Harris) in Minnesota. Personally I wouldn't trust Tulsi Gabbard to win anything. what the Dems need is someone who is a strong political force that has a track record of winning elections and winning over people who voted for Trump. I don't think gender is necessarily important but I do think that the results of Clinton and Harris against Trump should rightfully scare Dems away from that idea going forward.
Tulsi Gabbard is a Republican now; the Democrats won't put her up for anything.
This was not at all a spectacular failure. This election was an uphill battle from the start.
Mitt Romney did not fail spectacularly when he couldn't beat a popular incumbent. It was impressive that he got as close as he did.
The fundamentals here were similarly harsh for Harris, just for different reasons.
Why was this election an uphill battle from the start? This was the dems election to lose as far as I can see.
And isn't Harris the incumbent in this situation?
Because of the pandemic, the aftermath of which was awful inflation. This has been the pattern globally for a few years now. And US-specific, because of immigration.
Yes, Harris was treated by voters as the incumbent, and the incumbent administration was unpopular. That is usually an uphill battle for the incumbent.
It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative! Plenty of people wrote about the possibility that this would be a pretty bog standard "reject the incumbents" election.
> It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative!
I find this baffling. With the dems tying themselves to biden and then Harris, it was absolutely an uphill battle. But that was an unforced error.
If they had a robust primary, you have to assume there was someone on the blue team that could beat Trump. If not, then they deserved every bit of this anyway.
No, it was an uphill battle regardless of the candidate, is the point. The fundamentals were always difficult for Democrats in general, for non-candidate-specific reasons. Primarily this was due to inflation, which in my view Biden actually handled about as well as he could have, it just still sucked and pissed everyone off. But also because of immigration, which was indeed a policy error, but one which happened years before the campaign began and was not fixable at that point.
Yes, and that's one of the problems: the DNC defers to tradition and "politeness" rather than what will win elections and keep the party in power. Right up front they should have told Biden he was not going to be the presumed nominee, and that he would have to fight it out in the primary like everyone else.
IMO the fact that Harris is a black woman meant this was always going to be an extremely uphill battle. Someone like Harris winning would be completely unprecedented. I'm not surprised she lost, but I am disappointed.
I think the results demonstrated that it would have been an uphill battle for a white man as well. I think this result was pretty much a foregone conclusion after the 2022/2023 inflation surge.
Edit to add: I now think that. It isn't what I expected to happen until the results actually came in last night.
I see, the past becomes a forgone conclusion after it happens.
Well ... yeah, of course. This isn't some unusual thing.
Lots of things are foregone conclusions for a long period of time before you have the data to know it.
Think: A competitor is working on a product that massively outcompetes yours, but you don't know that until it is launched. Or you have cancer that is progressing but you don't know until it is diagnosed.
I think this turned out to be like that.
Hillary Clinton still complains about the election being stolen by Trump (there were riots by Democrats back then too). Democrats still complain about Bush beating Gore in 2020. To say that Democrats would simply accepted the results if Trump won only the electoral college defies past history.
Election denialism is found in both parties in large quantities.
> better for everyone
This is a guess or a bet, and one I'll take the other side of. Let's check back in in a year.
Trump has said he will be a dictator on day one. Trump has said that after this election we won't have to vote anymore. Trump has suggested we give the police "One rough hour" like the horror movie The Purge and that would solve crime.
I expect that people are going to die because of the policies that Trump enacts during his presidency. And because of the hate and bigoted rhetoric that he subscribes to and legitimizes. Better that we go down fighting than willingly be party to America becoming another authoritarian regime that commits atrocities.
But it appears that the American people value their wallets more. I'm sympathetic to that, even if my values are different. And TBQH I hope I'm wrong. But
> When someone shows you who they are, believe them
> I expect that people are going to die because of the policies that Trump enacts during his presidency
This comes with the job. His actions or inactions will have all sorts of impacts, just like every president before him.
> Better that we go down fighting than willingly be party to America becoming another authoritarian regime that commits atrocities
Forgive the snark, but what universe have you been living in? We have a pretty strong record when it comes to committing atrocities.
> But it appears that the American people value their wallets more.
That's a pretty dismissive way to put it. Food and housing and medical care being increasingly unaffordable is an existential issue for a lot of people. Of course Trump presided over some of that decline, but this sort of blind spot towards what the lives of common people are like contributed heavily to this election IMO.
Sure, rephrased "die unnecessarily, again," https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/11/trumps-pol...
I haven't said that America is perfect or innocent. And past problems don't mean we shouldn't work to prevent future ones.
Ok. It's dismissive. I don't understand. This is deeply confusing and disheartening to me. I find it unconscionable to put my own quality of life above others living at all, and am having a lot of trouble processing why so many people have. I could ask you how bad it is exactly but I wouldn't vote for Trump even if I was homeless. So maybe I can't understand.
> The first woman president
And that's why the blue folks lost, all about identity politics rather than realpolitik.
> The dems will likely stop anointing people.
You assume the dems will learn from this loss, which is a big assumption.
> We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.
If Trump is alive and well in 2028, I'm sure he will try to run again (ignore rules or change them). But, he also said you'll never have to vote again after this one, so we'll find out what he means by that.
We really should fund an anthropological study in the people who overreact to every little thing Trump says. I'm sure there is an entire media niche to go along with these overreactions too. I would read that.
You don't need an anthropological study, friend. There's already an apt slang term for it.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bitch_eating_crackers
Personally, I absolutely despise Trump but he's been firmly in that realm for quite some time now.
> We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.
I wouldn't count on that. There is a chance that he'll abolish term limits.
There's also a chance that you're right, but only because we've installed a monarch.
How likely do you think either of those things are? 2% chance? 20% chance?
I think hes too old to have to worry about that. And I don't think the republicans would try to weekend at Bernie's him after hes gone too far.
I also think its more likely someone succeeds at assassinating him during his term than he tries to overstay his welcome.
3rd term of Donald Trump seems very low percent chance, but appointment of Donald Trump Jr. to president (through some means) seems much more likely
His son will run I'm sure
> We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.
He has children who are very much like him and popular in the "MAGA Movement", Donald Trump Jr. specifically. Political dynasties exist in America. Just sayin'.
Trump is a fuck-you vote from the economic losers of globalisation. They know he won't do anything for them, but they also know the other side won't either. All the pearl clutching about trumps characteristics from inner-city relativists fell on deaf ears because it rang hollow.
A women of the luxury belief professional class from an academic family and an uninspiring bureaucratic life story was never going to be able to talk to these people and she didn't really try too either.
The specific policies don't really matter to people when they are exhausted and angry. Revenge does.
Hopefully there is still time to give Edward Snowden a well deserved pardon, before he becomes a bargaining chip to be extradited in exchange for something (less sanctions, etc) in a US-Russia, or better, Trump-Putin deal.
I'm not American. I feel sad, not because Ds lost or Rs one. A nation, which happens to wield so much power in the world, has chosen to elect as its president, a deranged, indecent, man, with dictatorial tendencies, who cares for nothing about democratic--or any--institutions, who never believed in peaceful transfer of power, who called for an insurrection. I'd have thought that alone would have been a reason enough to say, "not that guy, no way". But here we are.
The first time he got elected I had a woe is me, what does this mean for our country perspective. These days I'm better informed and I know that America is nothing special here. Brexit, Orban, Berlusconi, Alternative for Germany, Le Pen, Netanyahu, Modi -- feel free to throw stones, but I guarantee you have an anti-immigrant group in your country that is doing better than they ever have.
IMO that makes it scarier. Seemingly the whole planet is taking a sharp rightward turn.
It’s a populist movement by a population that has felt ignored by government.
That, of course, doesn’t make it a good movement, or a smart one.
But, imo, it’s important to understand why populism is popping off right now.
Absolutely. There are solutions to the problem of neoliberalism and the right wing doesn't have them, but I guess they're gonna get a chance to try anyway.
Doesn't mean we have to follow them though. Brexit is turning out to be one of the worst self-owns in the history of democracies.
To be fair, Brexit is the only thing that might keep the UK in the AI race given the EU's draconian anti-AI regulations.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with being anti illegal immigration.
My parents had to wait ten years to get their citizenship, do a test, etc.
Meanwhile we let people hop the border and download an app these days. It's a disgrace. Thousands of children missing or trafficked across the border, city culture completely upended, businesses getting cheaper and more desperate labor.
I'm going to go out on a (thick, short) limb and say your parents weren't picking crops in a field or washing dishes at the back of a restaurant. Immigration is a complicated topic and neither party has a plan that will do anything to fix it.
> neither party has a plan that will do anything to fix it.
This seemed like a reasonable "common sense" starting point: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/new-immigration-as...
Turns out voters hate when you tell them "you can't vote for THAT guy"
In a true democracy, you cannot vote your self a dictator. So even if people end up voting for THAT guy, the democratic institutions should prevent him from using his powers in a dictatorial manner. This includes upholding the rule of law, equal rights, and human rights in general, and conceding power under popular (or legal) demand, in the territory he controls.
So even when voter hate when you tell them you can’t vote for THAT guy, THAT guy should not become a dictator ones elected.
You now see the exposed heart of our country: folks who have very little, being sold lots by people who will give them very little. A nation of grifters and grifting.
None of those are true.
Those are lies spread by the mainstream media (which is mostly controlled by leftists) and you are a victim for believing them.
I know that the HN crowd are left-leaning and I'm going to be downvoted like hell. Maybe even flagged, because apparently leftist platforms like censorship.
But I don't have to prove my point nor there is a need to argue.
My point will be proven in the coming months because as time goes by you guys will see that nothing bad will happen to democracy nor women's rights or anything else important. Economy and public health is going to improve among many other things.
You will see. Just pay attention.
Then maybe you will remember and regret downvoting me.
Oh, also: Listen to what the man is saying himself. Not what the mainstream media says he is saying. Try to see past merely Trump & his public image as well. Pay attention to what the people on his team are saying. Great people like RFK Jr, Tulsi, Vivek, and JD. Maybe you will find yourself to be enlightened.
Peace.
I wouldn't be so fatal about what he's like. He is clearly astute, maybe just has some narcissist/sociopathic tendencies in front of an audience. Even if some of what he says defies reason, the entirety of what he says is maybe more reasonable than the other side. And that's who was voted in by millions of people.
Said as a UK resident who lived in North America for a bit.
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Being on the winning side today is absolutely zero excuse for attempting to subvert a previous election.
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And that point is stupid. because there are audio recordings of Trump saying that he just needs 11 thousand votes.
Sure, and that doesn't change the truth value of whether or not the 20 million extra votes the dems got in 2020 were real or not.
If you're looking at the current popular vote totals, you understand that California still hasn't report _half_ it's votes, right? Washington a third?
We will see. My guess is that he's improved his margin in California. I visited my brother in the very Hispanic town of Santa Maria, CA, and the trump support amongst my in-laws (hispanic immigrants) was through the roof.
Please don't do that.
I live in a country where one of the insurrectionists wrote a famous book while in prison, then became leader on a platform that explicitly stated democrats were bad, cancelled elections when gaining power, and ended up shooting himself when the soviet army rolled in.
I live in a country where we saved your guys asses from that in no large part because we had a general policy of isolationism, which I hope we go back to.
You live in a former Soviet state?
'Cause it was Soviet tanks that rolled though these streets, not the American, British, or French ones.
Soviet war memorials aplenty around here, despite all the other evils that passed since then.
Good luck with Russia my friend.
The Soviets, not specifically the Russians.
Soviet puppets here got kicked out in turn back in 1989, and not obviously due to any help from the Western side of the Iron Curtain.
My commute takes me across the old line of the Soviet attempt at enforced isolation.
Enjoy. Hopefully America at least will go back to friendly with all, enemies to none.
"Back" implies you ever were so, and that you didn't get a surprise delivery to your Pacific fleet while they were in harbour.
When I was a kid, I wanted what you now hope for; sadly, experience taught me I can't be everyone's friend, that some will hate me no matter what while others are simply mutually exclusive.
If the US becomes friends with Russia as it is today, it can't be friends with half a dozen east europen countries; friendship with PRC precludes friendship with ROC; with Israel excludes Iran; with North Korea precludes South Korea, etc.
> If the US becomes friends with Russia as it is today, it can't be friends with half a dozen east europen countries; friendship with PRC precludes friendship with ROC; with Israel excludes Iran; with North Korea precludes South Korea, etc.
I don't want to be friends. Just friendly. Only friends with American interests
There are over 5000 comments here.
So it's odd that every time I read a (fairly rare) bait comment, it has the same username: yours.
To be clear I don't generally track or pay attention to user names, you just seem to be making a clear and persistent effort to kick off arguments in bad faith.
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You'll need to provide credible sources for that wild claim.
which claim? Almost everyone agrees that people across the political spectrum believed the election had fraud in 2020.
As for evidence of actual fraud. I'll just wave my hands towards the fact that democrat turnout in 2020 is way out of line with national trends, whereas 2024 is exactly in line with past trends.
Now you're making two claims, neither of which you're providing evidence for.
If "everyone agrees...the election had fraud", I'm sure you can provide multiple reputable polls showing this sentiment of "everyone". (I'll be generous and lower the bar to just a majority of Americans, but I'm not going to accept polls that show -only- a majority of Republicans, since your claim is "across the political spectrum")
Second. Even if, as you've admitted elsewhere, every single court case was lost (or denied due to lack of standing) in 2020, you do realize that evidence can be presented outside courts, right? Where is this evidence? They've had 4 years to collect it. If it's widespread and, as you said elsewhere is a statistical anomaly, then it, almost by definition, should be obvious to spot. Hand waving to vibes and feels and "sure seems obvious to me" doesn't mean jack.
Now, I'll grant you, that vibes and feels certainly mean a lot to the animal natures of all of us. But feels and vibes are not proof of anything.
> Where is this evidence?
So for me, I saw the evidence with my own eyes when thousands of ballots came in for Joe Biden, and my immediate thought was... oh so those must certainly be fake. That's evidence enough for me. We all have our own bar.
> If "everyone agrees...the election had fraud", I'm sure you can provide multiple reputable polls showing this sentiment of "everyone". (I'll be generous and lower the bar to just a majority of Americans, but I'm not going to accept polls that show -only- a majority of Republicans, since your claim is "across the political spectrum")
I will restate. A significant (not a majority) number of democrats believed the election was fraudulent. Enough believed it was fraudulent, that this should concern anyone bothered about democracy and legitimacy. Here are the polls:
First, across the spectrum:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/1f428bba-56ee-4800-... (30% of people in 21, 33% in 2023)
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/01/15/voters-refle... (34%)
https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/axios-january-6-revis... (only 55% of people think Biden legitimately won!)
Independents:
https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/almo... (42% of independent believe there was fraud... easily enough to swing a future election)
Democrats:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/axios-january-6-revis... (1 in 9, ~ 11% , believe there was fraud in 2020... so again, enough to swing an election).
Look you probably think you 'won' because I mis-spoke about a majority of democrats, but these numbers are .. not great. 45% of the country, 11% of democrats? The results have stayed stable across time. Guess what, they get to vote too? You have to convince them. One easy way to do that is to share their incredulity that 1000s of ballots come in 100% for Biden in the middle of the night.
You know, you can approach this like a scientific hypothesis testing, or you can approach it the way everyday voters do. I think this is a choice that democrats need to make. By and large, the 'social sciences' are not very good at understanding human behavior because they don't understand what drives people. They're the 'men without chests' that CS Lewis talks about.
Your edit demonstrates exactly what I mean by bad faith: you're intentionally itching for a fight in all your comments, you're not focused on conveying your points in a way that invites level-headed discourse.
Are things ok with you in general? Could there be some non-political reason why you're resorting to inflammatory techniques to get people to talk with you?
I mean I've been doxxed before several times for 'level-headed' discourse with various people on the internet. People make fun of Trump supporters far basically embracing all the various insults that get hurled at us, but I would venture the vast majority of us don't really care anymore. We're tired of it. If the level-headed discourse gets us violence, might as well just say what we really think.
As for my claims:
1. The United Nations bankrolled UNRWA and has for the last few decades, which has funneled money to Hamas. They have consistently voted against Israel, and they stood by silently in their peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and Gaza while Hamas, Gazans, and Hezbollah literally raped and massacred people on live TV. Yes, they need to go. They've not given us anything that American leadership has been unable to provide.
2. The election. The election turnouts between 2016 and 2024 are in line with each other but are extremely at odds with 2020. There was massive last-minute rule changes (like in PA) by executive action (which have now been undone by the supreme court). There were many instances of poll watchers being blocked (videos in fact) in 2020. Counting would suddenly stop and restart. Then there would be thousands of ballots in ballot dumps 100% for Biden. This is not normal. I have no hard evidence. I've freely admitted that elsewhere. But the totality of evidence points to some really fishy business going on here. I mean, Putin wins his elections too, and 'won' a referendum in Crimea.
I'm not sure what other takes are in bad faith, but as I've said many times, happy to discuss
So your answer to discourse getting out of hand in the past is to take an approach that starts it out of hand, seems counterproductive no?
Although now that you're presenting those takes with some more surface area, the rationale doesn't feel all there.
After all, for how massive the UN is and its mandate, I don't think the UNRWA or ill equipped peacekeeping forces avoiding entering a full blown engagement justifies the extraordinary claim they're actually a terrorist organization.
And the voter fraud rationale is similarly light: most of what you mentioned was covered in numerous lawsuits, and the vast majority were lost or dismissed. The remaining few don't account for any significant gap in the election process. Is there a case that would have materially affected the outcome of the election that wasn't dismissed or lost?
> After all, for how massive the UN is and its mandate, I don't think the UNRWA or ill equipped peacekeeping forces avoiding entering a full blown engagement justifies the extraordinary claim they're actually a terrorist organization.
They're either a terrorist organization or useless. Either way, the need to be disbanded and investigated. They should not be able to hide in the USA under the guise of diplomatic immunity. They are not a state.
> Is there a case that would have materially affected the outcome of the election that wasn't dismissed or lost?
No but that never happened with Kennedy/Nixon either. American history is weird. No court is going to touch an election. Why would they. It's national suicide.
I find it laughable that the average American can choose to 'believe' something that is simply and provenly not true. That's why there are so many flat earthers, q anon believers, climate change deniers, and all kind of supporters of provenly wrong ideas. I think this is because of the (wrong) notion that an ideology or a stance is better than facts.
Well, the Earth is not flat, there are multiple easily accessible proofs, the q anon conspiracies are demonstratably false, and the 2020 elections had multiple investigations which uncovered 0 voter fraud, and as much as you might want to believe the opposite, it's simply not true. Believing in something doesn't make it true.
> Believing in something doesn't make it true.
Perhaps not. But believing in something does make your preferred candidate win, if you go and vote.
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history repeats itself, and there are no perfect people or perfect sides.
Yesterday's terrorist will be tomorrow's heroes, and those deemed visionaries today will become despicable in the eyes of those to come. Such is the way since the beginning of human civilization.
I'm not American and not taking sides.
Have you listened to the latest the latest Joe Rogan episode with Musk. The Harris camp seems to be guilty of many of the things they accused Trump of.
Echo chambers happen on both sides and are a real issue.
> Have you listened to the latest the latest Joe Rogan episode with Musk.
Because those two don't have an agenda at all...
And the mainstream (leftist) media doesn't?
I listened to both and JRE definitely pointed out some fucked up and verifiable systemic issues with the Democrats that you wouldn't have even noticed if you only listened to MSM.
I haven't. Any good examples that you can remember?
"Seems to be guilty" is a very different thing than a Fortunate Son who is an adulterer who was found guilty on 34 charges relating to the hush money, his two defense suits against Carroll are under appeal and who knows what sort of things happened when he hang out with his buddy Epstein. Jack Smith is still fighting to get the insurrection case going. America voted a criminal into office.
Anything real or just made up things?
Harris and Biden did not incite an insurrection. Harris and Biden did not get impeached for withholding funds from Ukraine as Trump was impeached for doing. Harris and Biden are not convicted felons. "The Harris camp seems to be guilty of many of the things they accused Trump of," is nonsense.
It'll be interesting to see what this will mean for European dependence on US tech companies. I'm not personally against companies like Microsoft as such, in fact I think they are one of the better IT business partners for non-tech Enterprise. Often what they sell is vastly underestimated by their critics within the EU, not that I disagree with the problematic nature of depending on foreign tech companies either. With the proposed deregulation of US tech and their "freeing", however, I wonder if a lot of organisations will be capable of continuing using US tech services or it'll move in the direction of how Chinese (and other) services aren't legally available for a lot of things.
I work for a European company and we already have strict rules about what data we’re allowed to remit into the US. Typically we’re only allowed to use cloud products hosted within UK + EU. It’s actually causing problems for us now with some of the generative AI stuff since the Azure offering doesn’t match fully the APIs of OpenAI for e.g.
It's similar for us. Since I work in the energy industry we're required to have plans for how to exit Microsoft if the EU deems it too dangerous for too much of the energy industry to be reliant on Microsoft. Which is part of why I worry, because we honestly can't. We can leave Azure, but we can't easily leave the 365 platform. By easily I mean that we may not survive as a company if we have to do it. It can obviously be done, we just don't have the resources required to do it.
I'm genuinely curious to hear why it would be so hard to leave the Office 365 platform, to the point that it could mean have to shut down the company. I know it isn't something that can be done overnight, but this is on a whole different level than what I assumed the case to be. To make my question more concrete, let's say the EU gives you two years to move away from Office 365, why would this jeopardize your company?
Most corpos and banks are basically built on Excel, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, etc.
If you pluck that out it completely freezes 50%+ of their operations, people really don't get how much stuff in modern companies is reliant on MS stuff (and thus why they are one of the richest companies on the globe)
Yes, but there are comparable alternatives. Sure, the transition requires resources and effort, but to the point of making a company bankrupt?
In some cases I would say yes if there was a hard limit (even few years) to migrate. Again, most people that didn't work in many really big corpos and banks don't comprehend how reliant those businesses are on the MS office stack.
> Office 365 platform
Moving away from that would be a massive change management undertaking, but it's not the "Office" part which is our primary challenge. To be fair, I'm not sure we could actually survive the change management required to leave the Office and Windows part, as it would be completely unfamiliar territory for like 95% of our employees, but the collective we at least think that we can. We have quite a lot of Business Central 365 instances, the realistic alternative to those would be Excel (but not Excel). SharePoint is also a semi-massive part of our business as it's basically our "Document Warehouse".
I guess maybe I'm using the 365 term wrong?
I didn't know about business central, a quick Google search tells me it's an ERP. There are alternatives, but migrating an ERP is definitely more problematic than changing document storage and the applications you use to read and write documents. But if it's an ERP, I wouldn't say an electronic sheet like Excel would be an alternative. Or am I missing something?
At enterprise scale migrating to SAP is a 2-3 year project. Most of which is planning, discovery, business analysis and process modeling.
One very mundane reason a company I had worked for switched to Office365, was that emails from our own domain would often end up in the spam filter. It can cost a lot when that happens.
I see this being a problem in the current situation, where most businesses use either Google or Microsoft for their emails. But in the case of an EU-wide change, I think the situation would be different. Plus, there are other providers that could be used that aren't blocked by MS' and Google's spam filters.
yeah, the real selling point of the google mail is that they have the power to just remove mail from other providers. Or the risk of removing is enough motivation of using gmail only. And as a major mail provider, they could change the ways we handle mail (to make it more reliable), they just choose not to.
It is really f up but there are so many worse things that I just dont have the energy to feel angry about this one.
They just mean that they would have to do real work and not just sit on their ass goofing off on the internet all day. Real work is something the last few generations are "allergic" to, it gives them the "ick". They somehow got it into their head that doing work is bad and that you should only rely on other peoples work, I blame Gates and public education.
I don't agree with this view. Saying that new generations are lazy compared to the previous ones is a complain as old as humanity itself, there are ancient writers that made the same complains centuries ago. Either you know their situation and you can provide some more detailed argument, or you are just assuming things you don't know.
Which is a nonsensical policy of course, since the US made clear in the past that regardless of where the server is located, US companies have to give access to data. See the CLOUD act.
My experience is that most companies in Europe just don‘t care about data privacy and continue to use whatever Microsoft sells them. Vendor-Lockin is a huge issue.
European wise I think we're really failing to build significant homegrown tech companies. I'm not sure of the exact reason although I've heard that startup support it low and too much regulation / diversity of regulation are issues.
America is a single massive low-regulation market. And a wealthy one. Tech products require high fixed cost to write the code/build the product, but then low ongoing cost to provide a service. Less regulation means lower complexity in building a product. A big market without a lot of regulation is a great way to amortize the high cost across a lot of people, while a wealthy market can support a lot of products. And of course a lot of investor cash to push around. Even using a single language and having mostly overlapping customs means that one product works for millions of people.
There are plenty of European customs and views that make developing these companies unpopular (eg data collection and privacy) but the single-massive-market is the economic reason why the US is so powerful.
That's not the only reason in my opinion. It's way easier for European graduates to find a job and cruise on to retirement. The govt takes care of them for life and so the do or die attitude needed to start a company just isn't there in most countries. This is a consequence of the welfare state most of Europe has become.
Actually I think it's more that Americans just have a higher cultural tolerance for risk. It takes a certain unusual kind of person to jump off a cliff and try to assemble a plane on the way down, and for some cultural reason, America generates more of those people.
To even have a shot at getting a successful startup off the ground, you need to a assemble a whole team of those people, which is still much more difficult in Europe (though things may be starting to change).
Also USA gets best of the talent from entire world, USA is almost always the first choice. But rest of the world gets what's behind mostly. So a lot bigger talent pool.
I see this as oversimplification. US Tech faces hard regulations too (fintech, healthcare etc...). Also Regulation is not that big of a bump in EU. GDPR simplified rules across 27 different national laws and forced new innovations in privacy. Also Spotify, SAP, Adyen all started in small markets, as counterexamples. The main reasons why USA is ahead I think are the historical advantages (internet, personal computer), the network effects created by the historical advantages and the VC ecosystem. Also the culture for risk tolerance.
Diversity of regulation and different languages/cultures. The US is a single, huge market with a largely shared culture and the same language. By contrast, an app that takes off in Germany has no guarantee of doing so in Italy or Slovakia.
My experience is that it's much simpler than that - all the money is in the Bay Area. Follow the money.
There is just no upside to founding your tech startup in the EU. You'll just be at a disadvantage. And as long as we have a unified US/EU market, this is not something that can be fixed. This has always been the downside of any kind of trade agreement that opened up the markets to foreign competition. Typically, the two parties pick winners and losers. Europeans export cheese and wine and Americans export Google and Facebook.
Other than the fact that I don't want to move to the US, I completely agree with you.
Yeah, many successful startups regardless of where they start become Bay Area startups as they scale :)
And for the most part it doesn't matter, nor should it.
It's quite simple actually: - many different regulatory policies to follow in order to sell accross the EU - different languages / culture - risk averse culture in investments and business (Americans go all-in and do not fear to fail fast) - lot of lobbying from already established compagnies (which are often state-backed which doesn't help) - no start-up culture basically. Contrary to the US, regulatory entities expect the same from a 10 000 people org and a 15 people start-up. It completely kills most startups.
In the end all these regulations allow Europeans to have access to "safe" products but it kills most of our innovations in favor of the US or China.
Overregulation and taxation is the major issue. I can only speak for Germany. Low worker rights in the US make for healthy companies that can grow and shrink as needed. You can't just fire people in Germany, even though you pay horrendous amouns for social security.
It's a like a paradox of tolerance issue.
You have countries that are willing to turn a blind eye toward their tech companies when those companies ignore laws to grow.
In some ways it's "obvious" they'll outgrow companies from countries which have a culture of corporate adherence to laws.
>I'm not sure of the exact reason
Left wing politics doesn't promote economic growth.
What European country would you describe as having a left wing party in power over the last decade?
Germany just suffered 3 years of a left-leaning coalition that is just now imploding.
Germany was who I had in mind - you can't blame the lack of eu tech boom over the last 16 years on the last 3 years of a centre-left coalition.
Yeah, I agree. However, I can blame them on making things worse when I specifically elected them to make things better. Instead of solving Germany's issues, they are infighting and spending money on social programs and on illegal migrants. Next year, every single tax, healthcare, and social security rate is going up.
Furthermore, the Greens are blocking real progress in the name of NIMBY-ism. The current government is actively killing markets by introducing harmful policies.
Spain has had a left-wing government for a while, and the current German one could maybe be described as centre-left.
Agreeing with you though that the EU as a whole isn't really "left-wing".
GDPR et. al. does not fit for the US big tech since you need to respect the user.
I'm more curious about the NYT tech union strike. They went forward with the strike and.. it doesn't appear anything bad happened. That might completely undermine the union's arguments...
Europe is still very much pro-American: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinio...
However, the numbers are much worse than before and on the previous Trump presidency they crashed(recovered with Biden but crashed again): https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/appendix-a-fav...
The anti-establishment movements in EU are also predominantly anti-US, leftists are often anti-US too.
I got the impression of many Americans online believing that Europeans are tech and progress loving, bureaucracy hating people under tyranny of EU which is a building in Brussels that churns rules and regulations.
However that's not true, most Europeans love the big government hate new tech and prefer the slow and worry free life over the daily hustling.
If Trump follows up with its promises, I only imagine EU parting with US on more stuff. I also see many Americans apparently believing that EU is mostly museums and there's no technology. Also not true, EU is made of countries that are traditionally tool-makers and Europeans are anti-tech and anti-change only when it comes to adoption of tech into their daily lives, not when creating tools and machines. ASML is not a coincidence, all kind of precision tooling and machinery is the bread and butter of European industry.
So, if EU parts with US, I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff. The dominance of American tech in the daily lives is mostly due to network effect, a forced change will result in what resulted in Russia and China: local alternatives.
Europe is worse off than the US only in Energy and demographics. Two massive issues but there are no quick-fixes for those, so they are European realities with or without the US.
> I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff.
I am in the process of (very slowly) decluttering my life. One weird observation that I had, is that I have very few hardware from the USA, even when I think liberally about "from" as designed and not just manufactured. I found a (crappy) HP printer, (wonderful) Apple hardware and two Zippos. There may be more, but it's not obvious labelled.
Software and some online services on the other hand are different.
From this European perspective the USA is very much a service export and not a stuff export economy.
I agree. The software is also possible to replace if forced.
US invested huge piles of money on the computer age and they cornered the web and software markets and now extracting grotesque profits from it mostly because its a winner takes it all industry. It's not that Europeans don't know how to write software, it's that it doesn't make business sense to go after the established American companies. Linux is invented in Europe, just as the Web but the American entrepreneurs were those who turned these technologies into great businesses. If forced by blocking, it wouldn't take much time to create European alternatives as the hard work of discovering what works and what doesn't is already established. In fact, during the internet age there were many European alternatives for most of it, there's still local alternatives to many.
Take Uber for example, it's not anything special. In places where it's banned, local entrepreneurs quickly made local alternatives.
There's of course industrial software, gaming etc and that's also plenty in EU. It wouldn't take much time to replace everything.
There are plenty of examples from the last 10-20 years where embargoes simply propelled local alternatives even in the most improvised countries.
Americans will have to be stupid to ban software to EU, so it will have to be the EU who bans American software and that probably wouldn't happen until things get really bad.
If Trump goes through with his wide-sweeping tariffs, there will be trade wars. That goes for tech, too.
And keep in mind, if he installs nothing but loyalists and sycophants, who's to stop him from these half-baked ideas?
Are you aware of the tariffs other countries have?
Try importing California wine into France or Spain as an example. Try importing American cars into China or South Korea.
There is also the de facto tariffs from Chinese currency manipulation.
Hard to be intellectually honest about tariffs without looking what much of the rest of the world already does.
Tariffs can work well. Sometimes you want to have tariffs, depending on the functionalities and industries you want to keep domestic.
But imposing all-encompassing tariffs is just plain nonsense. It is dangerous nonsense. Replacing federal taxes with those tariffs is even worse.
Again, Trump is fixated with tariffs. At least his idea of it. The last time he tried, ask farmers how that went.
The EU beaurocracy is into self sabotage.
They don't promote a climate where European tech companies can grow and they hamper the usage of US tech companies products.
Absolutely undeniable. I wish those 'not liking' your comment would say why they do not agree.
I'm not innocent of knee-jerk down-voting but I would like to cure myself of the habit. I wonder to what extent the extreme political and cultural polarization that prevails in the West results from a general reluctance on the part of adherents to engage in debate. At least that's my impression.
The first time Trump was elected was a shock, but now we understand. It wasn't a simple mistake. I have only few customers who use Google Workspace for their emails and only one who uses Dropbox for files. Initially (about 2002) companies moved away from U.S.-based cloud services. However, now I have an increasing number of customers who want to cancel cloud services entirely. But for my customers, there is no alternative to Windows.
I get really tired of this narrative that people are pushing that trump voters are somehow ignorant, stupid or simply don't care.
We're not ignorant, we care a lot and we're not being duped. We're really tired of the high gas prices, the moral hypocrisy of the left, the domestic law fare going on attacking political rivals and most of all, we want to afford our groceries and experience a better economy.
Telling us, that the entire base that voted for Trump is either heartless, naive or stupid just isn't going to cut it in reality. People that voted for Trump believe that the President is the diplomatic representative to the world for the American people. He literally got shot and stood up pumping his fist in the air. Joe Biden can barely walk down the stairs without tripping. Kamala had a "phone" call with an undecided voter just yesterday and when she showed the screen it was the camera app. Our choice this election was either the badass who after being shot wanted to show the crowd he was alive or two bumbling idiots. He's not my first choice, but he's a lot better then the Democratic Party offered as alternatives.
We want an American who will fight for business and fight for America to win. We want lower gas prices, which will then make it cheaper to transport goods across the nation and help lower prices in the grocery store.
Trump is not the best person, but he was the better option out of the two party system.
You elected a rapist. This is just a factual statement. You can introspect on that as you want.
A fascist rapist.
Russia had a similar election where the populace enthusiastically voted for a "badass". That was in 2000, back when it was still a functioning if flawed democracy.
You can look and see how well that turned out in the long run.
As a European, I don't get this. You frame it as a choice between two people: a badass vs a bumbling idiot. Why should it be about the personalities of the candidates and not be a choice between the kind of policies that are being proposed and the ability to reason about them?
While I concede that subjectively, Trump can come across as badass and Harris might have been "phony" at times, when it comes to the policies both sides are defending during debates and even the way they express themselves verbally during debates, Harris comes across to me as someone who has better ideas and can explain them far better.
I think that the difference between politics in Europe vs the US is that the latter is based much more on cult of personality. And sadly that mode of operation is becoming more common here in Europe as well.
I personally don't care for the personal attacks and mud slinging. Let's bring back intelligent debates.
Joe Biden can barely walk down the stairs without tripping.
Which is why he left the race back in July. Did you miss this fact?
Kamala had a "phone" call with an undecided voter just yesterday and when she showed the screen it was the camera app.
Actually this anecdote, and your touting of it, showcases just how naive Trump voters really are. The story has already been debunked on multiple fact-checking sites -- not that it needs debunking, because every single one of us knows how flaky phones are these days, and if you just brush them the wrong way you can set off all kinds of random apps. We all know this, because it happens to each and every one of us multiple times a day. (To add to this, it almost certainly wasn't her own phone, making such a mixup even more likely to happen). There's just absolutely nothing of substance here. Any reasonable person hearing this story would just roll their eyes and say, "Yeah right". They wouldn't even waste more than a second or two thinking about it, because it's so obviously bogus.
But what kind of reactions do Trump supporters have, when a story like this pops up on whatever website or newsapp they're addicted to? A variety we might guess, but judging by your own, for some reason it doesn't even occur to them to second-guess or fact-check the story. They just believe it, because a website told them it was important and they probably read other comments on that article page or social media feed with all kinds hyperemotional reactions indicating that it was a valid and important story, too, so by gosh, I guess it must be, right?
And then they go on the internet and share it with their friends, and they tell 2 friends, and so on, and so on, and that, in so many variations about other completely baseless rumors and smears, like Kamala's alleged drinking problem, her "hearing aid", about her "turning black" and so forth ad nauseum -- exactly as you've done right here, right now.
Not surprisingly, they also have no problem believing that a guy pumping his fist in the air means he's a "badass" or that this is demonstrative of the key qualities we need in someone to run the most powerful country on the planet. Instead of being yet another indication of the obvious shlockmeister and con artist that he is.
Which is what brought us to the outcome we got last night.
This has to be satire.
But you don't even blink when Trump hammers on about the trade war he's going to start with everyone?
Musk even had to re-iterate his point, and make sure that you'll embrace for "hardship" in the near future, should they get elected.
I mean, good luck with those gas and grocery prices. You're gonna need all the luck you can get.
Solution to your problems is not Trump. I lived in totaliterain an authocratic regimes. He has similar tendencies. He is going to screw not only America's economy but also the whole world's economy. He is not going to solve your problems but his own problems. Just like Erdoğan and Putin he doesn't care about ordinary people. When you think that it cannot get any more bad it will get more bad. I lived in totaliterian an authocratic regimes.
>We want an American who will fight for business and fight for America to win. We want lower gas prices, which will then make it cheaper to transport goods across the nation and help lower prices in the grocery store.
Do you think the President has anything to do with all that? The USA pumped more oil during the Biden administration than at any time in history. How is a President going to fight for business? Seriously, your comments come across like you have no idea what the President can or can't do. Do you understand where the power lies in the USA? It lies with Congress and massive corporations, the President is just theater for the masses.
Here's a European perspective that is somewhat pro-Trump, surprising as it may sound. I am Dutch and if someone would come along and promise the following:
"We're gonna lower your taxes so you have more money to spend" "We're gonna take a sledge hammer to bloated policies so everything will run smoothly. Then we will build a million houses per year"
I would very much consider voting for that person. That said, Trump is a madman, he lies all the time, is a danger to institutions etc. At the same time, I am so disgruntled by the current system and by not a single politician tackling or even speaking about relevant issues that I am easily swayed.
And this is the problem we have with democracy, and why it's doomed to, eventually, die. People tend to believe words. I guess it fine when words are the only thing you can rely on, but in this case, we have history and past performance. And as someone who is not that interested in US politics, from my understanding, his past performance is terrible by all measures.
But I guess this is something that will never change. The older I become, the more apparently I see that it does not matter WHAT you do, it only matters how you SPEAK about what you (will) do, whether it be in politics or in a corporate environment. I'm not the kind of person who regrets things in life, but if I could travel back in time and give my younger self one advice, it would be "focus on becoming a great orator", as this opens any door regardless of the level of experience.
Edit: to clarify, in order to not reply to each comment individually, I might have used the word "terrible" harshly. The thing with politics is that as a complete outsider to the US, I don't have a reliable way to know what policies were proposed and what were adopted/rejected, nor the long term effect of them on the country. The only thing I can rely on, is information available online. His track record is not covered in a good light online.
Sure, you can say that information online is skewed in one direction, but this is true to an insider, as some comments have demonstrated. The results of a particular policy and its application are subjective rather than objective. My entire premise was to demonstrate that actions are meaningless in the eye of the public.
Theoretically, this means that you get a "get out of jail" card no matter what you do in life, as longs as you can articulate your words properly.
> his past performance is terrible by all measures.
Which was partially a good thing, since he failed to dismantle Obamacare or build a wall at the Mexican border, even though those were two very explicit campaign promises.
Who knows what he'll do or not do this time around.
Hopefully more golf that taxpayers pay hundreds of millions for just like last time: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/31/fac...
Remember when he campaigned on criticizing Obama for playing so much golf?
We do know what he will do. It’s pretty much guaranteed he will pick even more Supreme Court justices, making it even more right wing than it currently is. That will have a lasting multi-decades impact. He will nominate more federal judges. He will cancel any investigation in his own crimes.
Remember that Obamacare was saved by a single vote from McCain, who is now dead.
This is precisely why the word stupid is thrown around. It never helps to call a stupid person stupid, because they invariably double down.
This is what the election is teaching me: people don't care a lot about what you do, they care much more about what you say. You just have to make people feel good.
Abraham accords. Isis. Tax cuts. Booming economy of 2018-2020. Remain in Mexico. Far lower illegal immigration. People remember the actions too.
“From my understanding, his past performance was terrible too”
Depends on what you focus on. If you listen to soundbites it sounds like a circus. There’s a lot of drama displacing and stepping on toes of the entrenched players in the system.
Trump raised taxes on the middle class. The economy was substantially worse under Trump - he spoiled the opportunity Obama gave him. He killed a lot of people with his COVID response. Our debt and deficits spiked under Trump as he drained tax dollars into the wealthy’s pockets.
It’s not so much that people remember the actions, it’s that they remember the right’s white washing of those actions.
> ISIS
Are we remembering the same 2010s?
Also, all of what you’re quoting stemmed from the Obama era (except the moving of the US embassy)
> Isis
Isis was already losing in 2017 after they lost Raqqa and Mosul. Trump played no part in it.
> Tax cuts
America is already stacked with an insane deficit and debts. Tax cuts don't see like a good thing in that situation.
> Booming economy
Yes, the economy he inherited from Obama and perpetuated by spending ever more public money and increasing the deficit.
> Remain in Mexico
This only concerns 35k people which is a laughable amount.
> Far lower illegal immigrantion
Not if you compare to the end of Bidens term.
We're also still waiting for that wall to happen. Another lie of course.
Republicans also voted against a bi-partisan bill to reduce immigration.
> If you listen to soundbites it sound like a circus
Fucking a pornstar while you're wife is at home with your newly born kid that might also play a role. But somehow the party of the nuclear family doesn't see a problem with that.
> his past performance is terrible by all measures.
What was terrible for you? He didn't start new wars, he did the abraham accords. He put in a policy of -2 regulations for every new regulation. He was much better on spending UP UNTIL COVID than Biden was.
What was so bad? He might speak like a crazy person, but his policies weren't that bad.
His policies were terrible. He broke off several key international treaties. He instituted the family separation policy. He broke down federal institutions that could have helped fight COVID.
In what way was he better on spending? He managed to increase the deficit every single year, even before COVID.
> He might speak like a crazy person.
He does speak like a crazy person. He advocates for crazy policies. People from his administration are crazy people and advocate for crazy policies.
He spoke simple slogans at a 3rd grade speaking level to a crowd of people with similar intelligence.
It's simple marketing and if there's something he's good at is that.
Harris was trying to appeal to people's intelligence with complex answers and arguments, they just tuned out and went "lol, weird laugh".
I think this is highly relatable, especially in the Netherlands where the housing situation is beyond bonkers. The protest vote is strong and/or gaining strength in many countries across the world to reflect this fact: the quality of life for the average person has either stagnated or fallen in many places, and that's a very strong rally point on election day.
Yeah but whose fault is that? A vote for the right is a vote for the rich, the very same that hovered up and concentrated all the newly gained wealth because any taxation has been dropped or they found ways to avoid paying taxes altogether, thus preventing the redistribution of generated wealth.
But this is the doublethink that the right-wing is somehow able to pull off. They aren't promising that people will be better off, that wealth will be distributed. Instead they're pointing at even poorer people like immigrants and saying "they're taking your jobs".
Yeah the quality of life for the average person is stagnating, but that's down to politicians and the rich, not to whatever boogeyman they're pushing.
I think this misses the point entirely. It's not about blame, or promises of this or that, it's about hope for change. Whether that will be a positive change or not remains to be seen, but if your life is shit, any change can feel better than no change, because at least there's hope that it might be better.
I do think catering to nimbys was the democrat’s original sin in some respects. Housing unaffordability makes everything else worse and blue areas are especially bad.
Especially in CA where the Reagan Tax Revolt lives on in CA Prop 13, where boomers sitting on $2m+ properties that they bought in 1978 for $40k pay <$1k/year in prop taxes while their new neighbors pay $40k/yr in addition to their 8% mortgage while the boomers vote down any new housing developments or zoning changes.
That's the thing, though. If you hear someone say those things -- attractive as they sound -- and then blindly believe them without asking how they intend to accomplish those things, then you are an irresponsible, ignorant voter.
> Then we will build a million houses per year
He actually promised the opposite of this last time, because suburbanites don't want any new housing built. I haven't checked what he said this time around.
“ I wanna do infrastructure. I wanna do it more than you want to do it. I’d be really good at that, that’s what I do.”
And then his party reminded him that that is specifically NOT what they do. They like to let the private sector handle everything, because that’s who funds them and how they get rich too.
Actions, not words. He has shown what he does as a president.
Watch TV, drink diet cokes, eat hamburgers, rage at minorities, foment insurrections, raise taxes, and just generally crap all over the place? Those are the actions I saw.
Turn the supreme court partisan and overturn principles that had been valid for decades.
I remember an interview at a large evangelical event about how they could vote for the decidedly un-Christian liar, fraudster, etc.. Their answer was that a "deal with the devil" is okay as long he delivers on supreme court justices. That was their literal phrasing.
He's had a "concept of a plan" for over 8 years regarding health-care reform.
What makes you think he'll have anything ready this time?
This is not in any way a description of Trump's platform...
Yeah but you're speaking as someone who actually pays taxes (I presume) and feels like you're not getting any benefits from it. But when you (or I) were growing up and enjoying an education paid for by the government, or when you lose your job, or when you retire, or when you need a doctor / the hospital, etc, you'll be grateful that there is a system in place to keep it affordable.
But this is another example of a string of selfishness in modern politics; it's a "got mine, fuck you" line of thinking. Whereas post-WW2 there was much more of a cooperative mindset, collective national or european-wide trauma, and a drive to cooperate to help each other out, regardless of their employment status. But WW2 has been forgotten and both Europe and the US are shifting back to the right-wing, because there's immigrants after your jobs, benefits and women apparently.
The main question here is:
Did they include into the prediction the fact that in many state mail in ballots have to be counted after normal ballots and that for a lot of reasons Democrats are way more likely to vote by mail.
EDIT: Not that it matters anymore by know.
My impression is that that is not the case as it was 4 years ago. Many of the swing states seemed to be committed to having all the results in within a few hours of polls closing, with some small exceptions. I believe that was the case in NC and GA, and with PA being expected to be closer to 4 hours after polls close.
It's definitely still a thing at least in some states.
And takes up to 3 days as it's more work then processing the normal ballot votes (especially if the normal votes are done with voting machines).
but is quite unlikely to change the outcome with how things look by now.
Ah, so Twitter had the more quality real-world signal; who would have thought? It seems "hate and disinformation" are just what people were feeling, and what they were thinking.
How so ? This is Brexit all over again.
I wouldn't know about that, I was not on Twitter when Brexit was being campaigned. What I do know is that, unlike possibly every other platform, on Twitter, it always felt like Trump would win.
I'm convinced Twitter single-handedly won the election. Everyone that are pro Trump seems to be coming from Twitter, with the same talking points as Musk. Elon sure got it's money's worth.
Is it surprising ? Twitter is owned by a guy* who fully backed Trump and thrown a ton of money behind.
*Which also happen to be a guy that needs a 'get out of jail free' card, that Trump can offer
In 2020 it also looked like Biden would win after Trump botched America's Covid response.
Due to how Twitter works I think it generally better reflects how people are feeling, especially these days with many filters removed.
Don't think so, the Tory leadership at the time did not really want to leave, but it was a useful rabble rousing position to energize their base. Ideally just falling short was the best scenario they wished, so they could keep blaming Europe for everything but not really face the consequences of the exit they are facing now.
Trump voters are not casting a protest vote, how much ever now it is going to be retconned as disinformation, stupidity or anti Gaza vote, the reality is they fully expected to win if not democratically then by force.
What's the best way for someone from one of the groups that Republicans hate to move to a Western European or Nordic nation where they are less likely to be marginalized or threatened? I'm sure there will be plenty of time to analyze exactly what happened, but right now my only concern is getting out.
The number of republicans in a fifty mile radius of you, or even across the country, did not change between yesterday and today. What happened during your local government elections yesterday? State government?
There is nowhere to run to. When the Right felt like they were losing the soul of their country, they stayed and they voted. When Democrats feel the same, you want to run? I hear this everywhere and its literally the sensibility destroying America; not because the right is going to destroy America, far from it, but because any unchecked side will.
>When Democrats feel the same, you want to run?
They want to run because the right is using violent language and saying they are going on a revenge tour. Why is that weird to you?
Do you have examples? I'm genuinely asking. Just started reading online after going to bed last night.
At CPAC, Michael Knowles said:
“for the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely”
Trump banned trans people from serving in the military. More broadly, trans people routinely lose their jobs.
Trump has repeatedly called for socialists to be destroyed. For example:
"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections...”
Trump has called for socialists to be deported:
“Today I’m announcing a new plan to protect the integrity of our immigration system. Federal law prohibits the entry of communists and totalitarians into the United States. But my question is, what are we going to do with the ones that are already here, that grew up here? I think we have to pass a new law for them.”
They're saying their plan out loud on TV and people still don't believe it. It's maddening. It's not that your Republican neighbor is going to bust down your door and string you up, it's much slower and subtler than that. Institutional subjugation is much easier to pass and for people to quietly ignore. Elimination from public life was literally part of the Nuremberg Laws! And Florida right now has a law on the books that on paper bans transgender people from being in public if they ever felt safe to enforce it.
Calling Trump Hitler gives Trump too much credit, but the political conditions of 1930's Germany and economic anger giving rise to a desire for national purity and scapegoating minorities is pretty dead on. And it's not like Germany is unique, we're really not much more advanced than ritual sacrifice of people taken by demons to bring about a good harvest, err economy. This has been a persistent bug in Human we keep hitting.
Not sure why this is being downvoted, also curious
I don't perceive this to be happening in any systemic way. I think (in fact, I know) that social media is really good at magnifying the extremes, and the extremes of the right are scary, mean, and evil. That doesn't remotely represent the majority of people in the country. Less than 28% of US adults voted for Trump this election, its a single-digit percentage of even those individuals who would even consider acting out the rhetoric, and let's be real: They're mostly in those very isolated parts of the country like the west or apalachia which does have internet but, sadly, not much else (least of all, good public education).
Trump himself has said these things, and he's now going to be president. How much more systemic do you need?
Roughly the same level of support that allowed the Nazis to rise to power. Even if it doesn’t end up happening in a systemic way - (a) there is no way to know that right now - powerful republican factions have clearly signaled they want to go in that direction; and (b) it won’t be any comfort to those targeted, because there is quite a bit of non-systemic discrimination inherent in another Trump term.
When the right felt like they were losing the soul of their country, they weren't being told they would be exterminated. They were afraid they wouldn't get to hate other people the way they like to.
Who’s talking about exterminating people?
If a visibly armed convoy of folks that oppose your vote and your existence slow-rolled past your house, you might consider options other than staying and voting.
Has this happened in a non-isolated fashion? Please cite examples.
It's okay to rely on feeling and vibes alone. Feeling and vibes are real, important and precede outright indiscriminate violence
Your feelings are within your control. So: be an adult and control them. In this case that oftentimes means: Do research. Consume media from as many sources as possible. Do research. Try to find the good. Do research. Channel your feelings into improving the world, not retreating inside yourself or to somewhere else.
It's also okey to not share the feeling that the other person on the internet is having. Just saying. I would even argue it's mildly impolite to dispute the feelings of other people when your have a different vibe about the situation.
You're misunderstanding my motivation.
I am a progressive. I'm obviously dissatisfied with the results of this election. But I'm even more dissatisfied with the reaction I'm seeing from the left. I cannot and won't respect the "vibes" of "we're all gonna die, there's roving gangs in F150s in the streets, I'm leaving for Canada, the country hates me". I won't respect that. It is not indicative of any reality outside today, or in the immediate future (and I live in an extremely right-leaning place).
The reality that I want the left to adopt is: Its not that bad. The world isn't going to end. Both Trump and Kamala received fewer votes this year than in 2020. Progressive policies are majority-popular in the United States. Kamala was just a (very) bad candidate. Don't let that energy you're feeling go to waste by planning your escape to Thailand or laying in bed all day wrapped up in a cocoon. Educate the people around you. Be out in your community. And prepare for an even more important election in 2028.
I think you misunderstand.
A number of people from marginalized groups literally fear for their lives right now. That's based in reality, coming from Trump's bigoted rhetoric and the people he allies himself with. Whether you think they should feel that way or not, it's the way that they do feel and it's valid.
It's a reasonable reaction when you believe your life is in danger to try and get yourself out of that situation. You saying "it's not that big of an issue" and "where's the evidence" is both tone-deaf and beside the point. This person is scared. They have bigger problems than your opinion that they should stick around and vote. Help or stay out of it.
You are deluding yourself. This country is finished. Why on earth would they allow there to be legitimate elections in 2028? You know they have "elections" in Russia, China, and Hungary, too.
The people who voted for Trump want people like you and me to die. (And fair enough, I want THEM to die!) You can choose how to respond to that, but you cannot deny it. For me, I don't think I have good prospects for leaving the country, but I am investing in a weapon. "Be out in your community" -- fuck that. I am acting for me and mine alone at this point, EVERYONE else can go to hell.
We're talking about the right to life here and you're trivializing that.
I remember when Obama won, plenty of Republicans expressed an interest into moving to Australia. We don’t want them.
As someone who researched this, you have three options: Golden Visas (expensive and being phased out, but good if you have ~$500k sitting around in cash), Ancestry (a recent direct relative who was a citizen of that country), or asylum.
For LGBTQ+, asylum is the likely option, but one that cannot be exercised until you have demonstrable proof you’d come to harm here in the States. That’ll be easier for folks in Red States whose policies are already openly hostile to our mere existence, but you’d likely get pushback since there are other states to move to and the Federal policies remain unchanged at this time.
Right now, your best bet is to sit, analyze, and prepare. Get your passport and make copies of any identity documentation. Be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, because we don’t have the luxury of believing that man, his party, or his electors are just joking around or otherwise not serious.
EDIT: one other thing you can do is get the hell out of a Red State ASAP and move into one of the “Blue Fortresses” of New England or the Pacific Coast. Equality Map has a good breakdown of states’ laws and protections broken down into LGBTQ-specific categories, and that’s going to be of critical import if Federal protections are tossed out. Those areas also have the added benefit of plentiful immediate transportation options out of the country, either by land, sea, or air if need be.
You forgot work visa completely. Many places have a skilled-worker visa, where if you have higher education AND a job offer you get a work visa.
I didn’t forget work visas, I just opted to exclude them given their typically steep requirements and how they’re typically sourced through the employer. That takes it out of your direct control, as opposed to the others I mentioned.
My intention was to empower readers to take charge of their outcomes, something work visas aren’t reliable for in most cases (though in HN readers’ cases, it could be a valid one; I will be curious if any big tech employers offer relocation and visa assistance in the coming years).
To be honest I think that Ancestry and Asylum are about as much "out of your direct control" as you can get, the latter especially (as in, unable to work, or leave that particular country, until the application is decided upon)
Remember that 'the EU' is around 30 individual countries each with their own work visa issuing procedures and rules - none of which are really at all comparable to the US system.
Seriously just choose a country and apply for a job with a company that doesn't explicitly state that they need you to already have the right to work in that country and see where it goes.
Not sure what you mean by "sourced through the employer".
Usually you need to have enough qualification and a job offer to apply for a work visa that is bound to the employing company for two years. Switching jobs requires reapplying. Afterwards, you can usually get a work visa that is not bound to a specific company, and less time limited.
Normally it's you applying for the visa, but in some cases the company hiring you can file the application, which can drastically reduce the time you have to wait, but cedes some control.
Of course, all this depends on your nationality and the country where you are applying.
For the HN crown I think you should consider skilled work-visa if you want to move, and I don't think it's unrealistic. You will probably need a job wherever you move anyway, this just means you need to find that job before you move. Without doxing myself completely, I know several North-Americans with that kind of visa here in Europe.
You need to apply for a position and get it. Then you need to apply for the visa. That can take a couple of months to process, which sounds like a lot, but remember that in many European countries this is on par with, or less than, the notice period for changing a job. So for the employer it won't make a big difference.
You will probably have to pay for moving yourself though.
What requirements? The only real requirement is to have someone sponsor you.
Everything else, including having passport and no previous history of war crimes, raping and pillaging for 5 years also applies to other visas anyway.
It's also not H1B type of slavery, there are not quotas, you can change employer whenever your want and not even lose fancy tax ruling. Work visa is the easiest way.
> For LGBTQ+, asylum is the likely option
Do you have any data points on this, I remember reading that some Americans have tried applying for asylum in Canada, but no one has ever been accepted.
I do not, because there haven’t been sufficient points shared reflecting US -> Elsewhere asylum seekers outside of High Value Assets (think Snowden). That said, I have heard anecdotally that the Canadian government would consider LGBTQ status for asylum - though again, a US Citizen seeking asylum is a relative novelty in general, so I have no concrete data.
As with all plans, this will not withstand enemy contact. You will need to adapt it to survive as required.
I just honestly hope it doesn’t get to that point.
What do I do with no degree and very little money? I feel so trapped here.
If you have little money and no degree and are incapable of making it in one of the most prosperous countries in the world, where software engineers are better paid than anywhere else in the world... you will be trapped literally anywhere else, especially in a foreign country where they are under no obligation to speak to you in english.
Not everyone on HN is a software engineer.
Asylum is an option, if you can prove harm. In the meantime, work on your qualifiers: education, income, etc. Unfortunately, no country is going to willingly take someone they feel cannot contribute to their society, so you need to prove to them that you will.
You can look through my recent post if you want, but I can contribute if given then chance. It's just hard to prove to people that I'm worth taking that chance on.
You don't need a degree to get working visa in the Netherlands (source: I don't have a degree). You can even use Dutch-US treaty to basically hire yourself.
(Honest question) Can you share how to use Dutch-US treaty to basically hire oneself?
Official source: https://ind.nl/en/residence-permits/work/residence-permit-se...
I'm not privileged enough to have first-handle experience and have the normal knowledge worker visa, but I worked with a dude, who had this setup.
Look man, nations don't have any obligations to the citizens of other countries. Why would any other country want to take in another uneducated and poor individual?
Yeah, I'm aware. I don't need my own demotivating sentiment reflected back to me, thanks.
Having done this the first time Trump got elected, there is actually another alternative.
Girlfriend and I ended up moving over to Morocco on a temporary visa. That didn't end up working. However, I ended up then moving by myself from country to country for about a year, becoming a nomad and mostly living out of a backpack and sleeping bag. Basically walking and hitchhiking across portions of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Admittedly, this is rather challenging. However, many areas of the Earth are "ok" with 30-180 day stays, and the experience itself can be rather life changing. Got to go and teach children in Palestine because of that choice, which felt like at least contributing slightly to solving the issues in the Middle East. Here's the list as far as how long they'll allow legal stays per country (for Americans, since American perspective).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_S...
The other issue though, is if you're looking now, you're already kind of behind. Google says the numbers have doubled since 1999, and I've heard much larger numbers (like 17 million in the last three years). If you believe World Population Review, then there's about 8 million registered expats existing abroad.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/american-...
Here's another table from Wikipedia that "mostly" lines up with similar population percentages. Notably, those who have declared residency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_United_Sta...
I'm sure Morocco was fun and there are loads of really beautiful spots to visit, but I don't think it's a place that rates very high in democracy or in personal freedoms. Furthermore it's extremely sexist and somewhat racist.
It would definitely not be my choice if I was actually persecuted in my country.
Being from the USA, you cannot get asylum in the EU, no one is in danger there. Try Russia.
You'd be surprised how many hard-core xenophobic Europeans are there in Western Europe and Nordic nations...
Voting intention (%) for LGBT people in France during the 2022 presidential election
Source: https://www.ifop.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/118851_Rappo...I'm well aware that the world in general is taking a hard right wing turn. However, it's not like I have a lot of other options.
Canada is closer, why not there? Just curious. I'm from a Nordic nation but don't know how easy it is to immigrate.
It's really difficult unless you're in tech, in tech the immigration system melts away at your feet
Idk which Nordic country you are in but for example in Denmark there's a scheme called fast track quick job start that can get tech workers (among others) a residence permit the same day someone applies, often within an hour of the application being filed assuming you go straight to their office to get fingerprinted.
SIRI puts a lot of work into making moving here easy if you're a net tax benefit (and imo that's a good thing)
Outside of skilled work and tech though I've heard getting a visa is pretty much impossible for non EU citizens
For me personally as a person of Indian descent raised in the US, the anti-Indian sentiment that seems to be rapidly growing in Canada makes me feel uncomfortable with moving there (and I'm sure many Canadians are just fine with me staying out.)
That's not to say that Canadians are right or wrong in having issues with the levels of Indian migration to Canada, I just don't want to end up on the bad side of that.
Canada is famously difficult to emigrate to.
> I'm well aware that the world in general is taking a hard right wing turn. However, it's not like I have a lot of other options.
yes you have. Unless you are in US illegally, you have 50 states to chose from.
The USA is probably one of the countries that is most tolerant of illegal immigration. I doubt there is a good alternative in Europe.
Who said anything about illegal immigration? Presumably they hope to get a work visa.
We (Americans) are so used to just picking up and moving within the country, and seeing so many people move here, that we just assume we can pick up and (legally) move anywhere in the world.
Moving somewhere is very different than being a tourist, or an extended stay.
The main group the Republicans were hating on this cycle is illegal immigrants, so maybe GC assumed that's what OP was.
in the last two months leading up to the election, the GOP spent more on anti-trans lies than on all other issues combined, including immigration. at least in so-called battleground states.
Do you have a list of the anti-trans lies they were peddling that I could peruse? Also how do you know how much they spent?
i'm sure you can do your own homework because i'm guessing nothing i offer will be good enough or that you are not living in a battleground state...
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-goes-all-in-on-anti-trans
"In the past five weeks, Trump’s operation has spent more than $29 million on TV ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting transgender surgeries for inmates and illegal immigrants in detention, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. That makes the topic, by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending"
https://michiganadvance.com/2022/11/11/michigan-gop-finger-p...
"There were more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread and butter issues that could have swayed independent voters. We did not have a turn out problem — middle of the road voters simply didn’t like what Tudor was selling."
https://www.wmur.com/article/chuck-morse-kelly-ayotte-debate...
in NH, ayotte wanted forced outing of transgender individuals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TSoTOuo9L0
in ohio, moreno ran ads saying brown “would allow sex change surgery for young kids.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E73kKnbpAVw
in WI, hovde said his opponent (baldwin) supported 'castration' for minors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl1Y2dTzvAU
and in PA, mccormick said his opponent (casey) wants to “force hospitals to perform sex change surgeries on kids.”
Yes but many European countries process asylum applications. For software engineers, you may be able to just migrate legally using a work visa anyway — even the notoriously picky New Zealand has a special program just for us, though it’s limited to Auckland de facto.
Sending love and can relate, original commenter. I wouldn’t pick anywhere in Eastern Europe, that’s for sure. Get prepared for lots of “it’s just a little fascist rhetoric, he doesn’t really mean it when he says all trans people are pedophiles and he’s gonna deport legal immigrants who seem illegal” comments
Don't do asylum, asylum is the worst thing ever to do in Europe now.
Reading a lot of these comments it does feel like the Michael Scott "declaring bancruptcy" approach but with asylum.
For starters, you'd be quite limited in your personal freedoms until the application is processed [years], unlikely to have the right to work, or the right to leave the country you just landed in without the application being automatically cancelled.
If, and really I can't see this happening, as a US citizen, you were to be granted asylum; then you ever travelling back to the US for any reason would make it likely that you would immediately lose the status (hence right to work, etc), likely with a future entry ban thrown in on top.
Work visas in the European countries I know of are not at all like the US H1B/Green Card style system. There are plenty of Americans here who just did it the 'normal way' and got a job offer and filed the paperwork for that [weeks]
Yeah, asylum isn’t great. But Fascism is serious stuff. I recommend reading the stories of the great scientists who left the third reich as it was ramping up—who faced discrimination, loneliness, poverty, and severe career setbacks-and comparing them to stories of the scientists who stayed… I know which side I’d rather be on.
Regardless, I don’t think “coming back to the US to visit family” is on our radar. That’s what makes this election heartbreaking. Asylum or no, moving overseas is effectively abandoning your extended/older family forever, unless you’re rich and/or a climate change denier.
Why…? In all of Europe?
Being asylum seeker is not cool at all, as you don't have agency.
If you are asking for worker's visa, you will get it (or very unlikely not get it) and be done with it in a few weeks. Then you just live your life normally, have access to job market, pay taxes and all that. Maybe even have a nice tax deal.
If you submit for protection, then government will consider your application in maybe 2 years, but no promise (subtext: we don't want you here anyways, you are not a priority). While it's not approved, your access to labor market is limited (because they take your jobs!).
If you are a tech worker with a visa, you may learn the language or not, do it fast, slow and decide yourself. If you are a status holder, you have an obligation and a case worker. Generally speaking you have a case worker and government wants to know you are still in the country and how you are doing.
Now since you can't have a job, you will also have a problem finding a normal free market rent in a place that suits your vibes, so you will be at the mercy of the government as well. Happening be happening in places where a lot of people with no access to labor market are concentrated and conditions will be, lets just say cheap. Once you are processed you may get social housing. There isn't a whole lot of it sitting free in the center of the capital 5 mins aways from the you dream tech job.
Now as to all of Europe? Probably not all of it, but affluent tech worker probably wants to go to a nice part of it, where everyone also wants to be, including all the actual refugees from the previous three wars and people who joined them on the way and put the foot into the door and don't want to be kicked out. System can handle it in case of emergency, but then the flow has to subside and thing have to be back to normal. Well having constant inflow is a new normal, so what does political body do with it? Downscale and slow down to throttle it.
On the off chance of picking the place that isn't nice for everybody's liking, the burueacracy may be specifically optimized to reject everyone and not speak languages. Bureacracy is also very local and doesn't always match political speeches of the supreme leader whenever you agree with them or not.
Do the normal tech visa, it's fine.
If you are serious about it, which I must at this point assume you are not, you need to at least tell us what is your education level and what are you good at.
You might also want to take a look at the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty.
I have a masters in CS and ten years of work experience in software engineering.
Ireland is a solid democratic European, English speaking country with no significant hard right presence in government.
Culturally I think an American would find it easier to adapt than eg France or Germany. The anglosphere individualism is present but watered down from the American extremes. Bureaucracy is low compared to the rest of Europe. People are superficially friendly, but it can be hard to penetrate social circles as an outsider. It is a more high context society than the US - you will be seen as a loud annoying yank, at least at first, but people can forgive, and you can adapt.
There's a functional social welfare system, free education and free Healthcare. All three have their problems, but are ultimately doing way better than our neighbours in the uk.
If you're black you will experience some racism, but not on the same level as in the us. When people hear you speak with an American accent a lot of that will probably evaporate. If you're hispanic, I don't think it will really register as an issue. Spanish speakers in europe are generally spanish, and are considered European, not some other lesser race the way they are in the us.
With a career in cs it should be easy to find a company willing to hire you, and sponsor your visa. Alternatively there is a special visa system (very badly advertised) for founders to move to Ireland and open a startup. Regardless, once you've been resident for 5 years you have the right to get citizenship.
This is all my opinion as an Irish developer who has been living in mainland Europe for the last 6 years or so.
>If you're black you will experience some racism, but not on the same level as in the us. You have no clue what you're talking about.
> Ireland is a solid democratic European, English speaking country with no significant hard right presence in government.
This is of course anecdotal, but my partner spent a couple weeks in Dublin and a couple other Irish cities recently for a work thing, and was surprised to feel unsafe there. One of her co-workers was physically attacked by two drunk men, completely unprovoked, and several of her LGBTQ colleagues had disgusting things shouted at them in public, multiple times.
Depending on what group the toplevel poster is in that makes them feel wary about remaining in the US, I'm not convinced Ireland is a good choice.
> free Healthcare
It is not free for all.
Awesome! This is the list of companies that are registered by the government to employ highly educated migrants: https://ind.nl/en/public-register-recognised-sponsors/public...
A lot of them are looking for software engineers. Just go through the list one by one and keep applying.
However - the salaries in Europe are significantly lower than in the US. Be prepared for that.
You can probably walk into Ireland with that resume.
Netherlands is very friendly for tech worker immigration. I've known a person who did it, and heard quite a bit about it.
Or you could come here to Canada.
The problem is you're going to find the same attitudes outside of the US, just a few years behind.
If you want to move to Belgium, send me an email (cf site on my profile) and I can help you with the decision and the integration. We need more good software engineers and especially founders here.
Be ready to take a paycut. Salaries in Europe aren't what they're like in the US. But we make it up in many other ways.
(Offer applies to anyone else who sees this)
It's kind of a best kept secret, but for US talent (bay area, EX-fang) there's a great market in Europe. 95% comp what you'd make in the US. Virtually unlimited leverage when negotiating.
High school. Am disabled, too. ;-;
I'm not sure how many immigration paths are available without a University degree.
Maybe look into Dutch American Friendship Treaty?
You don't need a degree for kennismigrant thing.
I think people get ridiculed for thinking like this, but as a gay man married to a EU citizen, I am 100% ready to pull up stakes. We spend months at a time in the EU and have several favorite places we’ve talked about returning to. Western Europe has a progressive, pro-worker culture that the US will never have. I live in Florida and am financially independent. The moment the mood darkens, I’m off to greener pastures. I think the key here is that political stability is the icing on top of a great lifestyle we are already enjoying for part of the year.
Europe is the next target. The people who got Trump elected will be spending a lot of time and effort into reshaping European politics now.
I’m European and most likely the overall effect you’d have, unless you went to a high income country where your impact is minimised, is likely to be net negative by raising housing prices in some poorer country like Portugal. Don’t be too surprised when their own Trump gets elected.
American expat living in Portugal here. The chega party is indeed on the rise here, but politics are less about personal identity and more focused on issues. A lot of chega’s rise has been attributed to dissatisfaction with the status quo and a warning shot to the incumbent government. Time will tell which direction things go, but the affordability of housing and low wages top the list of concerns.
Chega will win soon. Sorry.
The fact that there are so many expats blowing up the cost of living doesn't help.
Enjoy it.
Howdy, neighbor! Am also an American expat living in Portugal. We've been living in Lisbon for about a year, and so far I really love it here. People are friendly, the vibe is relaxed, and life is peaceful with a glass of inexpensive wine never far away. Highly recommend anyone looking for an exit plan to consider sunny Portugal.
So far, there are no indications of the far-right gaining any amount of power with which they could govern. In a broader sense there have been a number of rightwing victories across Europe, but thus far Portugal (and Spain next door) don't look poised to join that trend.
I am Portuguese. You are delusional if you think the far right won't be in government soon.
Of course you are an American expat in Lisbon, so I assume you are living a life that's likely not very connected to local concerns. I assure you, Chega is growing like hell. I am not a supporter, I just see it.
Expats and the ballooning cost of housing is a part of it. The fact that you moved to Lisbon will have the victory of the far right here as a second order effect. Think about that.
Hey, if you are a tech worker, UK has a very good tech worker visa called Tech Nation. Happy to answer questions about it, look it up online and email me!
It's trivially easy to get a knowledge migrant visa to the Netherlands. Just find a tech job. There is also Dutch-US friendship treaty, so you can found a company, employ yourself and do the contract type of thing too.
You will not get your SV salary ofc and maybe even less than 100k, but hej, you flee the opressive regime, right?
Now if things are bad and you are targeted personally and have a paper trail, there is also asylum thing. You don't want to do that thing, it sucks. Just get a job in whatever country you fancy and they will move you.
You mean a country that is more white?
You are in tech? EDIT: Heck even if not, just come over.
Come work in Berlin.
Very LGBTQ friendly.
The current gov. reduced the path to citizenship down to 5 years and allows for dual citizenships.
Get a permanent residency earlier, go live and work in the EU.
I think progressive American women are generally welcome in The Netherlands?
If you wanted to move, that information is freely available with a simple Google search. What you are doing here is feigning disgust, but you won't move or you just would.
No one is out to get you. You are a victim of propaganda.
It's smart to explore your options.
If you're a software engineer email me for referral to Uber Denmark, email in bio
TLDR of work: We write the global platform
Stay in the U.S. It not much better elsewhere.
Not so 'much better' elsewhere, rather, not as bad as there.
Not being a sore second-hand loser much, may I offer my sincere congratulations to Presidents Putin, and Xi on their successful re-elections.
go get em tiger
> one of the groups that Republicans hate
Illegal aliens? Criminals in general? Trying to think what else
Transgender people
Hate is a fairly strong word. I think a more accurate description of the Republican stance on transgenderism at the moment is "don't want to support it at all". And even then, that is almost entirely in reference to children. But it sounds like OP can perfectly well support themselves, so not sure that would be an issue as a member of that group.
This is just not accurate.
Feel free to expand on that.
again, the GOP in the months leading up to the election spent more on anti-trans rhetoric than all other issues combined, including immigration and the economy. if you saw any of these ads and the literal hate being spewed, you maybe would understand better.
I haven't seen these ads, happy for you to link them (as I said in my other comment).
linked them in a reply to your other comment
For most of the right, as I hear it: if the trans community left the kids alone and trans women didn't insist on playing sports (especially contact sports) with biological women, they really wouldn't care.
I don't know if you saw the "Kamela is for the/them" ads, but they stoke a much more general fear and hatred of trans people than the issues you are referring to. Those issues are picked because they are most popular amongst a broad swathe of the electorate, but they are couched in a deeper hate and distrust.
I probably did see them and just forgot about it because it's a political ad. I can tell you, living in a fairly red area, these are the only concerns I've heard from friends/family/people in my church and community. They don't _care_ what trans people do to themselves but have strong opinions on that they're being forced to not only accept but agree with that lifestyle.
A central tenant of the mainstream LGBTQ community is to "live authentically". That tenant cuts both ways, in that nobody in the trans community is going to force someone to be trans — they wouldn't be "living authentically" if someone were forcing them to be trans. I've seen this point expressed in the LGBTQ community countless times outside of political discussion, usually to someone who is self-questioning, and asking someone else if they're gay/trans/etc., which is community, more often than not, will respond to with "we can't decide that for you."
As for hatred of trans people: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cpac-spe...
The last political ad I saw, and it was endorsed by Trump, featured a segment furthering the conspiracies around Imane Khelif, implying she was a man, etc.
Every piece of evidence revealed so far points towards Imane Khelif being male. Two blood tests from independent labs showing an XY karyotype, a member of Khelif's coaching team describing problems with chromosomes and hormones while also mentioning that Khelif has been on medication to adjust testosterone levels to bring this closer to the female range, and most recently, a leaked medical report showing that Khelif has a male-specific disorder of sexual development: 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD).
We can ascertain from all this that Khelif went through male puberty and has the male physical advantage in sport that is caused by male sexual development.
Interestingly this is the same DSD that Caster Semenya has. Semenya is another male athlete who competed in a women's category at the Olympics, for the 800 metres track event, and who also won gold.
Individuals with this condition are sometimes mistaken for female at birth due to internal testes and an underdeveloped penis. And are then issued identity documents erroneously stating that they are female. This is what happened with Semenya and almost certainly is the case with Khelif too.
They don't hate either of those. They cheer them on.
Parsing this for people that didnt get that it was a clear joke: Musk worked without a work visa and Trump is a convicted felon.
As a European, I’m trying to see the positive side of this situation. Here are a few thoughts:
- It appears that Democrats are often seen as part of an "elite," which makes it difficult for people at home to relate to or understand their message. A full reset might be needed to bridge this gap.
- Europe has long been under the shadow of the United States. Perhaps this could be a good start toward greater independence for Europe.
There is no positive for Europe. Only bad to worse. Globalization is dead. In Africa hunger and mass migration to Europe. Europe needs to militarize: Defense budget >5%, deportations, conscription, nukes and a fully functional independent army against expansionist Russia who now will have Trump's acquiesence. America must be seen as possible enemy. I am not being hyperbolic. It's parabellum.
But that’s precisely the point. If there are new adversaries, new obstacles, it’s essential to work toward becoming stronger, more independent, more prepared and building greater unity among states.
I agree with you, things are looking bad... Today, I'm just trying to be positive. Tomorrow, maybe not ...
I mean, all other things being equal, it would be better if we didn't have to do those things, no?
Imagine we could spend those resources towards more constructive endeavours. Not just for Europeans, but also people in the US and Russia. Take a look at [1] – they could be doing so much better.
It's all just so sad. And pointless.
Also then there's the entire business with global warming.
[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN?locat...
Thanks for the link. Interesting graph! Do you know what caused the increase in 2021?
The dip is probably COVID; it's not really an increase, more return to norm.
Are there actual efforts or will to make a stronger Europe? Honest question
Currently, It is the opposite, I think ..
italian, greek and french prime ministers and presidents have spoken on their proposals for a european army
The end of the war in Ukraine suddenly got much closer. I can't think of something more positive for me as an European.
Maybe it’s a signal towards the end of flags.
Europe did (mostly) nothing during and after the previous Trump presidency. I don’t see how it could be different.
And it’s not like Europe was currently in a good state politically speaking.
There were a couple of moderately sane people around him during his first term. There will be less of them this time around.
> Europe has long been under the shadow of the United States. Perhaps this could be a good start toward greater independence for Europe.
I wish this were true for so long, but so far we have seen nothing. Not even Draghis recommendations were really introduced.
For me, the most positive outcome is the EUR to USD exchange rate. It's gonna be at least 1:1 pretty soon.
The elite comment is so funny considering the biggest sponsor of Trump aka not elite (?) is Elon Musk the richest man ever (?!).
Right-wing demagogues have been playing this game for years. Imagine being the party of billionaires and pointing to the other side and shouting "elites!"
I've never understood it, but it's an impressive party trick.
It worked. Putin now is on top. And Europe must prepare. America now will be hostile.
[flagged]
Ossobuco, the Italien defender of (checking their comment history) Russia, the Cuban government, the Iranian government,... (probably something else but I stopped checking)
Yes, the proud Italian defender of world peace and cooperation. What do you defend?
Wanting "World peace" alone is dumb. Imagine if everybody just let the Nazis win WW2 to avoid wars.
That's a false analogy. We're not fighting the Nazis, and Russia has no intention of dominating the world. If waging war was enough to be like the Nazis, I believe the USA got there a long time ago.
and wanting to fight over nothing is worse unfortunately, it's not even principled it's just arrogance
Checking comment history and judging a post not by its content but by the history and association of the poster? How reddit of you
End of war in Ukraine, start of war in Poland?
You need to get off reddit.
Russia has no interest in going to war against NATO, or Poland, or other European countries. Their only goals, which are obvious to anyone who looks into the situation, is to take the eastern provinces of Ukraine, prevent Ukraine joining nato, and stop ukraine from having nuclear weapons.
They have similar ideas about Moldova and the Baltics. The intense militarization within the Russia is not going to end anytime soon - we've seen this play out in Germany 90 years ago, why do you think this time will be different?
No they don't. Why didn't Russia do anything when the Baltics were in the process of joining NATO? If they had plans for them, they were going to do it before they joined the biggest defense alliance.
If you think this is like Germany 90 years ago, I recommend you read up some history.
The Baltics joined NATO in 2004 when the Russian economy was less than 1/4th the size of what it is now and Russia had just come out of the economic chaos of the 1990s. Their armed forces were also deeply dysfunctional and underfunded back then and struggled against pockets of Chechen separatists.
So, their march on Kyjiw was just a lapse? They realised half way and this is why they turned? Ridiculous.
Even then they were ready to sign a peace deal that was what I said: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/15/world/europe/...
And the march on kyiv was an attempt to strongarm them into that deal, yeah.
I can only hope you're right. But I fear that the reality will be closer to simply a withdrawal of US support for the defense of Europe and NATO.
It is ignorant to believe that Ukraine's capitulation would mean that everyone lives happy in peace forever after. Russian officials and national TV have floated the idea of invading Baltic states and other countries more than once. Is the plan to just let them take whatever they want, and condemn any resistance? What happened to defending allies and democracies?
The end of the war on Russia's terms is not positive for any European.
It will be positive for the thousands of Ukrainian men that get drafted and sent to die.
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Mate, we tried that for 20 years. And in especially in the later years, against better judgement and forgiving of A LOT of bad faith behaviour from the Russian government. And an outright dictatorship in the EU? lolno.
The EU wanted to embrace Russia, desperately so.
Many Europeans live with this notions "it's better if we all stop fighting and get along". That was certainly the prevalent attitude when I was growing up in the 90s in a post-cold war world. And they're right too, it is better for everyone. But some people aren't interested in what's better for everyone or even their country, they're only interested in what's best for them. Very sad a small group of assholes can just mess things up for so many people, but here we are.
I think that's the hard lessons many Europeans have learned over the last few years, or are in the process of learning (myself included).
>Mate, we tried that for 20 years.
We've been doing everything but sustaining neutral relations with Russia. Our foreign policy has been explicitly anti-Russian for decades. The Ukraine war is the blowback.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1ghs32...
Like every dictator before him, Putin has fashioned a victimhood narrative. Trump does the same, as did Castro, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc. etc. etc. All these people always claim to be the victim.
There are so many things to comment on in that video and I really don't have the time or interest. but I will comment on one thing: the US bombed Yugoslavia to stop a campaign of genocide.
"Never again" also applies to the Balkans.
Europe and the US did everything they could to NOT intervene. If anything, I think it's an embarrassment we didn't do more sooner. You could argue a little bit about whether it really should have been NATO (rather than the EU or US) that undertook the campaign, and details like that. But I don't think it's very important to the of it.
Of course, that is left out by Sachs. He's repeating a fake victimhood narrative stringed together by half-truths, exaggerations, strategic forgetfulness, and outright nonsense.
Your comment really underscores the issue with the NATO project as a supposed defensive alliance. You think if there is a moral reason for doing something, then that renders all other constraints moot. But because intervening in Yugoslavia was deemed the moral course of action, that shouldn't indicate to Putin or anyone else that NATO will act offensively if they deem some act moral coded. But NATO doesn't get to decide when its actions are precedent-setting and when they aren't. NATO's own history undermines the claim that it is purely a defensive alliance.
That you outright ignore that there was an objective real genocide campaign going on says a lot. The notion they attack nations for all sorts of dubious reasons is just bollocks. This is no better than "remember when the Americans invaded Europe in 1944?!" The context matters.
I'm not ignoring it, it's just that it doesn't alter the calculus for every other nation who might be the target of NATO at some point in the future. NATO only needs to engage in an offensive action once for the precedent to be set permanently. How justified the action was just doesn't matter.
It also underscores the point that there is no objective moral standard to which we can appeal to simultaneously allow an intervention without also permanently altering the power balance in relevant regions. The US right now says genocide is beyond the pale thus warranting intervention. In the future they may say cracking down on political dissent is beyond the pale thus warranting intervention in Russia. Moral impetus tend to be subject to scope creep at the behest of current national interest.
That’s ridiculously naive. This WAS the path we were on. But EU didn’t reject Russia. Russia rejected EU. EU liberal democratic culture was a threat to Putins power. He did not want Russia or their immediate neighbours (which could influence Russia) to get any ideas about liberal democratic values.
I agree that bringing Russia into EU - or at least being a good friend of EU - is the path to peace and safety. But EU can’t do this if Russia doesn’t want any part of it. In hindsight Russias economic integration was mainly an attempt to make EU think twice about responding when Russia harasses its neighbours.
Russia is an imperial state with imperial ambitions. Every day on Russian state TV (with Putins implicit approval) they’re talking about how they will bomb and or take over Germany again. That the Baltic states and Ukraine rightfully belong to them. That Ukraine is full of nazis. How can you just ignore that and think everything will be all right if we just asked Russia very kindly to be friends again?
And no, this has nothing to do with NATO expansion. Russia has nukes. NATO is not a credible military threat to Russia. Putin knew VERY well that his actions would push Finland and Sweden into NATO which completely invalidates the idea that he cares at all about NATO. You know… except that getting Ukraine into NATO would have removed the option of annexing Ukraine territory which was obviously unacceptable.
Lol. Yeah well if we are willing to trade our last shreds of integrity and capitulate that dictatorship is the winning strategy then sure. I mean, not to bring WW2 in the discussion, but back in that time people thought giving them what they want would lead to peace.
These things also span decades or centuries so I think there will be time when Russia and the West will be closer again. It's just they have to stop their imperialism and grabbing land. Think they have enough already.
Giving big Chamberlain energy.
Giving big history ignorant energy.
Yeah right, no sane person in the EU wants to be in any union with those thugs.
Why not? We're already in union with the US, which also invades other countries when it feels like it, and nobody sees that as a problem. If anything, we should get along better with Russia because we share frontiers.
You’re getting there! If we were independent from the US right now, we would not be calling for a union right after they invaded a country on our doorsteps.
> and nobody sees that as a problem.
Actually, many many people see that as a problem
The US does not want to conquer Europe. That's evidenced by the fact that they basically conquere and re-conquered (from the Germans) France, Italy and most of Germany in 1944-45, and then left, leaving those countries be. In the same time, Russia re-conquered Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, East Germany - and never left. They were happy occuping those areas.
> and most of Germany in 1944-45, and then left
Then left? Well, considering the US has like 40 military bases in Germany, like almost 50.000 stationed personnel there, and there are still some restrictions on what Germany can or cannot do, I won't say they left. Heck, they can also bug the chancellor's phone for decades or blow up their energy infrastructure and nothing happens when it comes to light.
I'm sure Russia would be more than satisfied if they could have kept all of that in their former satellite states including Ukraine.
I do! I'd much rather see that than a general war with Russia, thank you.
Only the insane believe this war could end in anything but extinction or decades of misery and conflict.
They're large by territory, but small in terms of economy. Russians put a lot of weight on the former, but it's not very relevant in this day and age, especially considering how uninhabitable a huge chunk of it is.
In any case, I'm surprised this is an issue for you, considering this war revealed how inept Russia's military actually is.
I never felt the need to become friends with the biggest bully in high school. Why start now?
OK, so we fight until there's nobody left alive for what exactly?
Most of the Russian proposed peace plans are basically. "Leave it alone and stop fighting".
Hardly the demand of Kiev on a silver platter and would save a lot of resoruces/lives.
Is Ukranian pride worth it's economic destruction, worth lining the pockets of the war merchants or worth the continued spiraling death toll?
It's a little less David vs Goliath and more aknin to Davids little cousin tommy with a waterpistol vs a flame thrower...
You do realize that Russia's imperial ambitious won't just suddenly vanish away after the war in Ukraine? Russia will keep being Russia if we meet their terms.
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I can see and hear its rockets every time Russia decide to target cities in Eastern Ukraine.
We simply don’t believe there’s a positive scenario for Ukraine in sight.
Not sure it has. It depends on European reaction.
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Here's a hypothetical situation for you, arguendo in a world without nukes: China invades the US, takes over a couple of states, then a new leader of Germany is elected who will push to reduce any supplies coming in from Europe and will negotiate with China to end the war. Of course China gets to keep the few states they've gotten since they have a large Chinese population, fair is fair after all, we just want peace. Also China's demands include the US to demilitarize except for a small force, so they don't feel threatened by it, after all the US could invade them in the future otherwise! Oh well, all for peace I guess.
Republicans did a great job mobilizing voters. They’ve learned from the tactics the Democrats pioneered and it worked well. Things like early voting, etc. This election will be a landslide but looks like and I believe in large part because of how they exploited the early voting opportunity.
It's been an incredible campaign this time around. I'm a bit of a black sheep as a voter, I voted for Obama twice, I voted Hillary in 2016, Trump in 2020, Trump for the primary, and now again Trump in 2024. Having a multi-ethnic coalition behind him really sealed the deal for him IMO, as well as a coherent platform of deregulation, immigration reform, and putting American workers and businesses first.
Wish I'd bet more in the election markets and crypto, but hindsight is always 20/20 as they say.
> as well as a coherent platform of deregulation, immigration reform, and putting American workers and businesses first.
Deregulation and immigration reform is inherently at-odds with putting American workers first. Apple didn't send their manufacturing jobs to China because of too many regulations and immigrants in America - they did it for the opposite reason. It happened with automotive manufacturing, it happened with silicon fabrication, and it's going to continue for every consumer good America cannot export competitively.
Why doesn't this violate HN's rules about politics?
See these links—they contain lots of explanation about this:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Totally off-topic but I'm noticing that these comments load reasonably quickly without any paging. I remember some popular topics in the past had problems loading even after the number of comments per page was limited. Don't know who deserves it but wanted to offer kudos for the optimization work!
Impact?
a ban on newly created anon and throwaways would slow these threads down. Also, too many Elon fanbois.
The economy, cost of living, no meaningful or high-paying jobs, the crackdown on Cryptocurrency, the way mainstream media and other mediums treat the right lead to Trump's second Term, in my opinion.
the biggest problem is the climate. with trump winning, most/all of the climate policies will be revered irreparably damaging our planet bringing us to the brink of extinction. ofc it won't be all trump fault, current trends are gloomy enough yet those are the very last few years to actually do something..
The biggest problem is gradual deterioration of the rule of law and functioning of the civil government
The biggest problem is the legitimization of bigotry and hate in America.
Dang, how many biggest problems is it okay to have? I can still think of a couple more.
*gradual and accelerating
Isn't "bringing us to the brink of extinction" rather hyperbolic? As far as I know there is no indication that climate change will be an extinction-level threat? What it will be is hugely damaging for all sorts of other reasons, both to humans and other life.
Beyond that, I agree with you, and it's one of my major concerns as well.
> As far as I know there is no indication that climate change will be an extinction-level threat?
We are currently living in an era of mass extinction. It's not something that's coming, we are in it, it is measurable. 75% of wild animals, insects and trees have disappeared. That is a fact, and it is not related to climate change at all: "just" to how we humans organize the world (mostly habitat loss).
Climate change will bring famines, natural disasters, and global instability (that means wars). This is yet to come.
It is fairly likely that at this rate, we will reach 4 degrees of global warming. At 4 degrees, a large part of the Earth (around the Equator) becomes unlivable for humans (it's too humid and hot, we can't regulate our temperature by sweating, we die). Which means that billions of people will need to relocate. This is not just normal wars: think entire countries that decide to leave their territory and go somewhere else, together with their army.
I don't know what the definition of "extinction-level" means (maybe you only care about some individuals of the human species surviving), but in my book that's as bad as it gets.
I agree with much of that, but I don't think that will really bring us to the "brink of extinction". That said, I'm not keen to find out as we don't really get to reload a save game if you mess up. Sadly, not many seem to agree :-( Or maybe they found a cheat to load save games, idk.
> I agree with much of that, but I don't think that will really bring us to the "brink of extinction".
I think that it was a figure of speech. Whether it brings the human species to the brink of extinction or makes life unbearable for 90% of humans and destroys civilization as we know it is a bit of a technicality, if you ask me.
In any case it is one of the biggest problems of our time.
> I think that it was a figure of speech
Maybe. But in the face of a malicious misinformation campaign, I think it's important to be accurate and careful with our words. Hyperbolic statements are not really helpful as it adds just the right ring of truth to the "it's all a load of bollocks by climate alarmists" claims, so it ends up just helping the misinformation campaign.
Right. I understand your point, but I think it's important to understand that if the risk here is not "extinction" in the sense that the human species will disappear, it is actually the end of the world as we know it. And I mean it in the catastrophic way.
If you imagine a big stripe around the equator where people can't survive (it's basically mars) and have no other choice than to "invade" the rest of the world that may already not have the capacity to feed its population anymore, with oceans rising and pushing another couple billions inside the lands (so you can't just build walls as a country, you have civil war).
That's pretty much where we are headed now, and the data seems to show every year that we are actually getting there closer than we thought we were (because when our models "forget" something, usually it's something that made it worse). Not only that, but we are accelerating in that direction.
I personally think we're way passed the point where we can call anything "alarmism". The most conservative scenario I can find without us making drastic changes are all "equally bad" (as in: I don't really care whether or not the human species survives if all my relative and I die in very bad conditions).
That's what I mean with "it's as bad as it gets": between extinction of the human species and the most conservative scenario if we don't change, none of them is acceptable to me.
> in my book that's as bad as it gets.
In the book of world history things have been way worse[0].
In the book of world futures things could get way way worse[1].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust
> In the book of world history things have been way worse[0].
Has it been way worse, really? I think that the climate change that ended the dinosaurs happened slower than what we are expecting with ours (but I didn't check it and I am not completely sure).
I am sure of this, though: the mass extinction we are living now is the fastest we know. Let me rephrase it: we human have made 75% of wild animals, insects and trees disappear faster than it ever happened in the history of Earth.
> In the book of world futures things could get way way worse[1].
"Way way worse"? Do you realise what "20 degrees around the equator becomes uninhabitable" means? It's like half of the inhabited world becomes mars, and the people living there have no choice but to move where the other half is.
Entire regions of the planet could very well become uninhabitable, which would affects hundreds of millions, potentially billions of people. Migratory flows of that size would almost certainly lead to armed conflicts. It's hard to tell how this would end, but it is certainly not going to be pretty.
It could easily lead to the end of civilization. We’ve been seeing global production disruptions for years now. (Currently, quartz for semiconductors. During the pandemic, climate events knockout out PVC production, which meant a global disruption of construction work.)
We’re at the beginning of the exponential ramp on this sort of stuff, where the changes are barely noticeable. For example, until last night (so, assuming best case greenhouse projections), there was roughly a 50% chance that some people reading this will live to see the northern half of Europe turn into a glacier.
Anyway, without modern civilization, we probably won’t survive 10,000’s of years of such stuff. The global population bottlenecked at a few thousand the last time this happened.
I’m sure you will agree that for most people, the difference between extinction level and civilization ending is academic.
Unfortunately, it will get really grim and bad that even if literal extinction is improbably (humanity seems to have already bounced from less than 10k people) it seems to be bad enough to warrant this hyperbole.
Like, if most of the tropics reach wet-bulb temperature and more than a billion people live there - that will be grim.
If we had a functioning congress, laws could be set. The president really is not _meant_ to have a lot of power here. Administrations have been trying to do more, as congress really won't pass laws any longer. However, each administration just throws out the policies of the last administration. Actually passing laws in congress does not necessarily have this same problem.
Precisely. Regardless of your political leaning, Congress has been playing hot potato for a long time. Instead of actually creating rules or regulations, they do nothing and let the administration or courts decide. That way they can go to their constituents and beg for votes or contributions to fight the same branches that they relinquished power to by not doing anything.
let the courts decide
A large part of the Republicans' strategy is to appoint partisan judges & let them legislate from the bench for the rest of their lives. Talking up thread about "the biggest problem", this is probably it. In the context of climate change, recently we can see SCOTUS shooting down environmental protections. This happens in lower courts too, but those don't make national news.
The problem is that trump believes the president is king of America, and that a dictatorship is the best form of government. Even bigger problem: far too many Republicans seem to agree with him and will try to hasten the descent into a fascist authoritarian dictatorship. I have no idea if they will be successful, but it doesn't look like there will be much to stop them.
I think the problem is that when the Democrats are in power, they also attempt to inflate the power of the executive branch. Both parties have been doing this for a while, and are AGHAST when the opposing party gets elected. No one seems to want to take back the power the executive branch, which makes each new bad president more and more of a disaster.
Congress has also flipped, so even if the system was working as intended, we’d end up in the same situation.
I don't think the president does have much power over this? The most important things are indeed enshrined in legislation. I think it's pretty unlikely they are going to spend any political capital on undoing any legislation in this space.
Though to become a law, the president would need to sign it.
Not necessarily:
"The President might not sign the bill, however. If he specifically rejects the bill, called a veto, the bill returns to Congress. There it is voted on again, and if both houses of Congress pass the bill again, but this time by a two-thirds majority, then the bill becomes law without the President’s signature. This is called “overriding a veto,” and is difficult to do because of the two-thirds majority requirement."
https://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_law-html/
I am not sure that's the case. The main supporter is a guy who produces e-cars with all the interests to sell more of them.
The way I see it, he will continue with the transition whenever it benefits him/the country. Which means some programs might be canceled, especially if they go against such interests.
> The main supporter is a guy who produces e-cars with all the interests to sell more of them.
Sure Elon might have an impact on CO2 emissions in the transport sector but I don't see him moving things that don't directly benefit him, say, electricity/heat production or agriculture.
Tesla literally has a massive (electrical) energy storage business alongside solar. There are huge battery installations that are helping regions like Hawaii and Australia pivot to renewables.
Transport is the 2nd sector in terms of CO2 emissions. If we solve that alone, I am happy.
Actually it's only 16% https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-global-breakdown-of-green...
That visual shows that road transport is 11% , making it the second highest category, as the poster said. This is a great graphic though, thanks for sharing!
Edit: actually in the graphic it's the largest sector! My bad
I found it here: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Not sure how reliable all this is... Yet it seems "road" is nearly 10-11% which is big enough to solve and to have already an impact in everyday life. Then it cascades to other sectors too.
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An e-car is still a car and a more environmentally friendly public transport or bicycle.
He’s also the rocket guy with private jets.
Musk does seem to have gone bonkers in the last two years or so, but I agree. I suspect he might end up being a surprisingly moderating, rational influence on Trump. He might have (at least publicly) aligned himself with conspiracy theorists, outrage merchants and general grifters for now, but I think at heart he's still pro-science.
You know you're in trouble when Musk of all people is considered a moderating influence compared to your president.
I'm not convinced Musk cares all that much about the environment anymore, if he ever truly did. EVs were a bet that car buyers (and governments) would care about the environment.
Musk just wants to go to Mars and leave Earth behind.
True. The world is certainly in trouble. I’m just saying it might not be as bad as it immediately looks.
I guess he is pro science indeed. And opportunistic too. He might also morally align with Trump more than with Dems, who knows. These elections were just an unfortunately ridiculous show.
Why wouldn't we take his public rhetoric and actions at face value? Why is this possibly a good idea to simply say 'well in his heart he trusts science' when he is demonstrating the contrary?
I don't want to live in fantasy land here. Based on observable actions, Musk isn't brining any positive force to the table
Isn’t that obvious? He knew he could only get to the position he’s now in (or at least have the best chance of doing so) if he joined in with the MAGA brigade.
He clearly does align with the movement in some ways, but he also is responsible for SpaceX, for example. Don’t you think that marks him out as being a bit different from the others?
Also, there are observable actions. If you listen to some of the podcasts he’s been on recently (as painful as they can be) you’ll hear him very flatly rejecting suggestions of quackery and ‘vaccine scepticism’. He’s so obviously not stupid, even if he’s degenerated somewhat, as many of us have, by constant exposure to poisonous social media.
He had some wins (SpaceX, Tesla) certainly, but that doesn't mean his bizarre behavior and clear display of bizarre beliefs aren't concerning or he's somehow immune believing other nonsensical things.
You can't predicate the fact he has had success with those companies and somehow say his actions are some undercover operation to gain a position of power that will help average Americans or moderate the administration or whatever you want to say with that.
We should be focused on public actions and as it sits over the last 4 years in particular, Musk's actions are very concerning and there is serious cause for concern.
You haven't proven he isn't fully bought on MAGA bullshit with this. Its fantasy thinking running contrary to available evidence. He's broadly bought into Trump and the policies that brings, that much is clear.
> You haven't proven he isn't fully bought on MAGA bullshit with this.
Have you listened to his interviews? I don’t think you have.
By the way, I’m saying has bought it to some extent — just not fully.
Yes I have, he's broadly comfortable with MAGA ideas. Taken together with rhetoric and how he acts, it seems like a rationale conclusion.
Just because someone does a sit down interview and nudges around the edges about things they disagree with doesn't mean he's not fully bought in. There is zero evidence he meaningfully disagrees with Trump on anything of consequence
He donated at least $132 million dollars to the Trump campaign and GOP allies[0], for god sakes. Do you really think anyone donates $132 million dollars to something they aren't fully bought in to?
When someone shows you who they are, you should believe them.
[0]: https://fortune.com/2024/10/26/elon-musk-political-donations...
He's not bought in to the anti-vax movement, and he doesn't deny anthropogenic climate change. Aren't those both quite MAGA?
> There is zero evidence he meaningfully disagrees with Trump on anything of consequence
What I just said above is evidence, I think. There certainly isn't zero evidence.
> Do you really think anyone donates $132 million dollars to something they aren't fully bought in to?
Yes — absolutely. People make compromises all the time, and employ strategies that exchange short-term (even reputational) cost for long-term benefit.
> When someone shows you who they are, you should believe them.
He has shown us who he is, so far, by his actions in building companies and promoting rationality and science. Yes, he's also recently gone down the rabbit hole of nonsense on Twitter, but for now I don't think that fully represents his underlying nature.
I have no particular dog in this fight. I'm not American and nor do I have any particular love of Musk. However, I think you're overreacting.
As for your source: I know how much he's donated, and it is a shocking amount. However, in the wake of Trump's re-election, the share price of Tesla has just gone up 15% making Musk $15 billion richer. Makes that $132 million seem like pocket change. At worst, he's a self-interested opportunistic capitalist. But he's not a moron or a religious zealot as others are.
I expect he will either indeed be a moderating influence on the administration (remember this is in the context of Trump; I'm not saying he counts as a moderate in the usual sense) or will quickly lose favour or otherwise become disenchanted with Trump and Trumpism and vacate whatever position he's granted and move on.
Also remember: I'm not arguing he's particularly sensible or even acts like a grown up (he doesn't). I'm arguing that he's not 'literally Hitler' as some seem to be insinuating.
What makes people think Trump is going to run the show? I have a feeling he's going to be the rubber stamp while Vance, Thiel and Musk and gang will run the show behind the scenes.
It would appear that neither party actually does anything to change the rate of CO2 emissions.
https://x.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1854161121193714102
That's CO2 measurements taken in Hawaii so it's global measurements. Do we have a USA only emissions graph?
What a subtle exponential curve!
as someone from eu - doesn't us now/under dems extract top amount of fossils from all the time? I mean it's not like it was good now. It looks like it'll get worse but the current path wasn't good either...
The US has been on a strong downward trend for CO2 output per capita for decades now [1]. The IRA is expected to significantly accelerate this trajectory, although it's unclear how much of that will now come to pass.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...
Im excited too, I also hope they stop with the EV mandates in various states by removing their ability to override the EPA.
It does, thank goodness. Otherwise it would come from Saudi and other despots. We should be producing as much as we can in the US to quit funding horrible regimes.
There is the short term reality that we are dependent on gas and oil and, decreasingly, coal. The difference between the two parties is the long term vision.
Dems want to have international treaties to address the problem and are willing to spend money to move away from fossil fuels. Republicans downplay the science (or outright deny it) and think international treaties make the US less independent and therefore weaker, and they would much rather cut taxes for Elon Musk than spend money on energy infrastructure.
When someone's grocery bill exceeds 40% of their total income, they're not going to worry about the climate.
These things are not disconnected
How are they connected?
Unsustainable practices lead to exhaustion of resources and subsequent spikes in prices. Prices today will be nothing compared to the prices we face when the earth exhausted of topsoil, the sea is exhausted of fish, and the water table exhausted of clean water.
Voting against the environment in favor of lower prices will ultimately lead to higher prices.
Global energy prices are high because of wars in Europe.
The rise of right wing forces globally and anti immigration forces, is a consequence of immigration from regions that are not only crushed by wars, but also by climate instability.
Since solutions are too complex and require global cooperation, its easier for governments to not do anything.
As this keeps up, and larger areas of the world become uninhabitable, more migration will occur, leading to more power to demagogues and dictators.
That seems sufficiently disconnected.
Alternatively, if the fed didn't just print money to pay for unnecessary vote-buying schemes then the inflation rate would have been only minimally (if at all) impacted by the points you made.
Sure.
If you want a straight line drawn in markers for something like the global economy - I mean, sure?
Given the forum though, I hesitate to place you amongst such company. I am guessing you know what the Fed's remit is, and therefore WHY they are printing money.
shame they’re either unwilling or unable to trace the source of the inflation.
also, it’s going to get worse for that person’s grocery bill under trump. the middle class will come under even greater short-term pressure over the next few years as trump’s “concepts of a plan” begin to materialize.
but hey, at lease my kitten is safe. just wish someone would do something about all the geese here.
> most/all of the climate policies will be revered irreparably damaging our planet bringing us to the brink of extinction
The valid policies will remain. I've been hearing the rest for decades now.
Climate change won’t bring us to the brink of extinction.
It will cause huge amounts of human suffering though.
We can't be 100% sure about that. We know that agriculture can't survive a constant rise of temperature. At some point the roots are unable to grasp water from the soil, and then everything dies at the same moment.
What about the threats to civil liberties, especially for women and LGBT+ people?
Trump already was president before. What “civil liberties” did those groups lose?
Well he appointed Supreme Court Judges that overturned Roe vs Wade, and he's promised a rollback on trans rights.
Its increasingly difficult for me to believe that climate change is a critical issue when the attendees of World Economic Forum + Al Gore + Bill Gates + Leanardo Dicaprio all fly around in private jets while lecturing me on why i should be not be eating meat.
I was of the impression that US contribution to global emissions was relatively low for our population size and per capita energy usage thus making domestic climate change policy relatively small potatoes. Is that not true? Is there more to it than that?
The United States is ranked 16th highest in the world for emissions per capita.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
Per capita energy usage is an interesting choice of metric.
Thanks for the info!
US is 12% which is second highest. But you’re right that it’s too small a percentage to have enough effect on its own.
He already pulled the US out of the Paris accord his last presidency and the US is producing all-time high oil.
I guess another angle is that he is best buddies with Elon who could potentially do some interesting things there.
> I guess another angle is that he is best buddies with Elon who could potentially do some interesting things there.
Elon is comoditizing space. If that's profitable, he will get SpaceX to a point where people go on holiday in a rocket. That's exactly going in the wrong direction in terms of climate.
Until Elon falls out of favor.
In reality we are dealing with Putin having effective control and is now basically unrestrained.
Emissions in the US are pretty much negligible compared to China and India. It would have to be a radical shift that is going to take way more than four years to make US climate policy even relevant to the planet as a whole.
In emissions there is just China and then the US as a somewhat distant second. But to be honest the whole world is using China as their factory.
Europe and India are the regions that are actually surprisingly negligible. Africa and the rest of the developing world doesn't make a blip.
You need to account for indirect emissions. Because all the factories are in China means that China emits more, but those iPads are not being sold and used in China.
When you import goods, you import their emissions. It's just super hard to measure (and we like to blame it all on China).
The solution there is to create tariffs based on emissions so that the costs of the emissions get accounted when people import goods.
I don't understand the word "tarries", somehow even after looking it up :-). (Not my first language, sorry)
I meant that in practice it's very difficult to track, because it involves a lot of actors in a lot of countries.
US is not negligible. They are number 1 per capita.
China just had an astronomically high population. They will always be higher overall due to this.
An actual measurement of this needs to be performed capita.
Trump is going to reduce the USA's proxy-emissions in China if he pulls through on tariffs at least I guess.
If prices go up Americans will buy less.
No, the reverse. Tariffs Trump style mean that final goods get imported not intermediate so production moves away especially for the global market.
If the issue is emissions per capita then the solution is simply to increase the population faster than the increase in emissions.
Similar, countries with aging population will see an increase in emissions per capita regardless if they are actually decreasing emissions, as long the population loss is greater than emissions decreases.
If the tariffs are as agressive as promised china may drop its emissions? I don’t know what hope to hold onto anymore.
God, this stupid tariff thing again. All tariffs are going to do is raise costs, so we'll go back to inflation being insane.
I think you might be in agreement with the parent. Increased costs (due to tariffs) will reduce consumption and therefore emissions.
It will just make solar more expensive and increase the attractiveness of US oil and gas to the US electorate further entrenching Trumpism.
We currently have a lot of tariffs. Should we remove all of them, some of them, or do we have exactly the correct amount?
And if the economy starts to turn (or maybe even if it doesn’t) say good by to the relatively apolitical Fed and rate-setting. Which’ll bring a boom, more inflation, and a hard crash on the other side.
Or maybe people stop buying crap they cannot afford
If we ship all our jobs overseas we can increase profits significantly. The poor and middle class will suffer in our country, and so will our economy.
What are you talking about? The US has the 2nd heighest emissions behind China, almost double India's. The only countries higher than it per-capita are Canada, Australia and petro-states or tiny countries.
And China is already leading the world in moving to renewable technology, they are moving in the right direction (not entirely for altruistic reasons - it fulfils their ambitions of energy self-sufficiency).
Another example of Democrats being really poor communicators on specific important issues—they could easily frame renewables as a protectionist issue and make it relevant but instead they don't know how to talk about it so they just avoid it whenever possible.
That exact message has been tried and energy independence/stick-it-to-OPEC remains fairly common way of trying to sell it. Actual measures to onshore renewable industry were successfully demonized as corrupt, didn’t go over well.
I do wonder whether democrats will shift to post-conservative messaging. "Let's preserve what we have left of our beautiful American forests" might be able to resonate. Idk.
I'm sure in some meeting somewhere someone floated that exact idea and then got promptly laughed out of the room by a bunch of people who live in a filter bubble in which protectionism is too politically close to populism to be palatable.
Why cherry-pick per-capita when what matters to the climate is actual output, not output per capita. Lets take Australia, as an example, their total co2 output is around 1% of the world's co2 output. If Australia ceased producing all of its co2, it wouldn't make much difference at all. Per capita figures are just a waste of everyone's time.
As someone from a smallish country (UK), I don't think I agree. Per capita is the only-) way of measuring emmissions that doesn't wind up a proxy for just listing the biggest countries.
Almost 1/5 people are in China, if tomorrow the country divided itself up into smaller nations would thay change anything about the pollution bring emmited?
Great, let's just move everyone to Australia! Or wait...
Unless you have policy recommendations to change the total number of people on Earth (please don't) then global emissions per capita are the only stat that matters.
I always try to convince people the best metric is CO2/land area. It actually adjusts for the size of your country without the silly idea that having more people means your country is doing "better" from an emissions perspective.
Per-capita is a hint to the capacity of reduction or a measurement of the inefficiencies of a country.
The biggest problem is the climate to those who profit off this agenda.
And for Floridians also. I doubt that they will be happy with more natural disasters.
Fear mongering doesn't help create change
Was Milton an illusion?
At this moment it does not matter anymore. In the next decades Mar-a-lago will be hit, either if Trump likes it or if not. He just can make it sooner and worse.
What could Trump do in that respect? Bring back coal? Coal isn't coming back. The economics aren't there short of literally paying for the burning of coal. And while Trump seems to lean into the AGW deniers, he does seem to at least respect reducing the classic "silent spring" sorts of pollution that obviously dirty air and water.
US oil production is the highest in the world, the highest in its history, and is so maxed out that there are loads of drilling rights that aren't even being exercised as oil companies all realized that it was pyrrhic with current low oil prices.
On the climate position I don't think things can go back. Wind, solar and evolving nuclear just make it a silly thing to do.
He can, and has basically promised to massively subsidize fracking. Fracking is still not profitable, never has been, probably never will be. It's existence is purely political.
This is intriguing and I've actually never heard this take. (Not disagreeing, to be clear.) My laymen's understanding is that domestic natural gas production has gone way up in this century and I lazily assumed this was why.
Yes, there is strategic value in being able to extract fossil fuels domestically, and fracking allows this, only at great economic (and environmental) cost.
Source? Searching on this I'm only finding evidence that fracking has been extremely lucrative
Opening up coal mines just to bring back jobs in the rust belt does not make any sense. Start mining silicon and other minerals used in solar, batteries and chips instead. It makes a lot more sense even though the initial investment is higher.
Wasn’t a large part of his platform „drill baby drill“? If he’s lowering cost of fossil fuels, guess what will happen to consumption.
That promise played upon the listener thinking the US had somehow suppressed oil production. In reality oil/gas production has gone wild, now with a large surplus over domestic consumption. There are huge numbers of rights that have been granted but not exercised because the world is so awash in oil that the price makes most non-conventional fields unprofitable.
There just isn't anything to really be done there.
“ That promise played upon the listener thinking the US had somehow … “
this is the summary of trumps entire campaign platform. i’m honestly not even sure he expressed a concrete policy on anything. he said he wants even more aggressive tariffs and will start deportation on day 1 (and was relatively nonchalant about some “legal” immigrants being caught up with “illegal” ones). cut dei.
there’s honestly no plan or policy, just a nebulous wish list that appeals to the base impulses of humanity.
the only real expectation that i have is that justices thomas and alito will retire early in his term to allow him to appoint new ones early enough to not allow democrats to stall like mcconnell did.
The same thing that happens when you subsidize EVs - we just use more. If you lower the cost of consumption, consumption goes up. If you lower the cost of alternative means of consumption, total consumption still goes up.
It goes up either way, you might as well have the source be here instead of from a foreign adversary.
Maybe the real solution would be to move to renewable energy sources instead of making fossil fuels cheaper.
He could take away government subsidies and incentives for clean energy production. And subsidies for converting consumption to electricity (like EVs, heat pump furnaces, water heaters, and stoves).
He could target research into clean energy technology, ending government initiatives and taking away research grants.
He could remove regulations on energy efficiency.
He could put giant tariffs on anything made in China that is used in clean energy production (like solar panels, batteries, and electronics).
He could make it harder to get approvals to install clean energy production, siding with NIMBYs who oppose solar, wind, and battery projects.
He could cut federal funding for public transit.
I don't know how much of that he would actually do, but in the past he has expressed support for a lot of it. So I think he will try to do some of it.
It's possible we have already reached a tipping point where the total cost of clean energy production and consumption is cheaper even without all of these subsidies and so on. If so, then the transition might continue anyway. But if so, I think it will still be a slower transition.
I think this is doubtful, and it's a testament to the way the IRA was written. There are now bipartisan constituencies who support different parts of it. And there was no real chance we were going to get anything new on the climate regardless of the outcome. I think this issue will just be status quo for this term.
World War 3 is clearly a bigger problem than the climate.
Climate policies were already getting gutted under this administration due to reversal of Chevron deference by SCOTUS (packed by previous Trump/Pence administration).
EPA and other regulatory agencies have been stripped of their regulatory powers. Any “vague” law which was interpreted by agencies can now be challenged in courts.
We don’t need climate policy any more. Solar is by a wide margin the cheapest electricity and will continue growing at a wild pace.
Until the tariffs hit[0] because the reason solar is so cheap is due to cheap Chinese panels.
Not to mention, this is a very naive take, at best.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-solar-industry...
I think solar is only cheapest at point of production. Once you factor in transmission costs, grid congestion, intermittent supply, etc. Solar is still expensive at point of consumption.
It's not to argue directly against your point but just that we still have a lot of work to move over to a sustainable electrical grid. And that will be helped by favourable policy
For me the biggest problem is Ukraine, the country I live next to. Trump is more than happy to pull out of NATO
Congress already passed a law requiring Congressional approval to pull out so he can’t do it unilaterally.
The EU can pay for their own defense now I guess
And they almost certainly will. In fact, I predict military spending is going to rise exponentially.
Can you imagine what the world might look like if all of the EU spend as much on the military as the U.S.?
Be careful what you wish for.
I absolutely hope the EU ramps military spending and negates the need for US support. Sometimes, you need a catalyst, and clearly another nation should not be beholden to US defense agreements.
Decoupling globally continues.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/368528/us-military-army-n...
https://indi.ca/the-us-military-is-in-a-death-spiral/
https://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/NDS-commission.html
> Trump is more than happy to pull out of NATO
Why, what's the idea behind it? Isn't he big on military and showing power?
Trump doesn’t want to leave NATO, that would be dumb. He wants those not “paying their fair share” to pay more or the US will leave. It’s a negotiating tactic. So if you don’t want the US to leave NATO and you’re in a NATO country then get them to spend more on NATO.
You probably know this, but just in case: NATO is not a club you pay 2% in to for protection. The 2% is the required spending on YOUR OWN defence. In practice this benefits USA as a major weapon producer, at least it has until now. I have a feeling Europe feels less certain that they will buy American next time.
OK? how did this statement change anything I posted?
I guess you didn’t know this, the idea is strength in numbers. If you can’t provide for personal and collective defense, gtfo.
Doesn't strength in numbers contradict your idea of kicking out the weak?
When I hear phrases like strength in numbers, I think of elephants. When a herd of elephants watches lions circle their community, the strong ones stand around their young to protect them.
That's analogous to "strong" countries subsidizing ones who can't provide for themselves, because having an allied presence is helpful.
It’s not that they can’t protect themselves, it’s that they would rather spend the money on their own social programs.
Your wording, both the use of "paying their fair share" and "get them to spend more on NATO"-part made it sounds like countries actually pay money into NATO. Trump also makes it sound like that, and he certainly gave the impression that if other NATO countries started "paying more" (aka spending more) that would mean more money for the US. The fact is that as long as the USA wants to be able to win two world wars at once, they still need their astronomic millitary budget, and what tiny European countries spend makes no difference. My comment was not about "changing your post", it was to make sure nobody else is confused about this after reading your post.
When that is said, its good that most NATO countries are hitting and exceeding 2%. It's clear that Europe can not rely on USA to be the "world police", we need to be be able to defend ourself.
Also, friendly reminder that article 5 has been used exactly once, and that was to defend USA. Soldiers of my country has died defending USA.
> In practice this benefits USA as a major weapon producer, at least it has until now.
This feels like a club you pay 2% for protection…
I disagree with the guy you are responding to as well. But I don’t think he’s saying that Trump wants people to pay the 2% like it is a subscription fee. I think he’s just saying that Trump is using the possibility of leaving as a threat in the hopes that countries will meet their 2% obligation.
As to what Trump actually is saying, I have no idea, he’s hard to parse.
And by 'pay more' he means 'buy more US weapons'. NATO is a conveniently captive market for the US arms manufacturers, and no way they're going to want to pull out of that while they still have stock to sell.
you’re free to make your own weapons, plenty of NATO countries do.
Turkey bought Russian weapons and wasn't kicked out. They were barred from buying more US weapons for a while.
Before 2020 elections John Bolton said that Trump doesn't see the point for NATO and will consider withdrawing if he wins in 2020. Because of that a NATO Support at was passed in Congress to block the president from single handly withdraw the US from NATO. That was over 4 years ago, hopefully he changed his mind.
Reminder that Bolton is an insane person, so who knows if what he says publicly about Trump’s intentions are true.
He was very correct in calling out EU countries on Russian gas reliance (which is still somehow an issue!), and also on the EU being way too comfortable with letting the US pick up the slack when it came to our defense.
The EU SHOULD be spending the agreed upon 2%, all this weasley shit the EU gov'ts are pulling is a complete joke considering the massive Bear in the room that is Russia.
Maybe EU countries should be those that leave NATO so they won't be blackmailed. They have some nuclear capable countries already. It would be much weaker alliance but with nuclear warhead one just need to press the button. Since EU states are getting more and more populists leaders this can happen eventually.
My theory is that we will leave Nato because he won’t want war when Putin pushes into Europe. His base doesn’t care frankly. The direct cost is too high and they can’t see past grocery prices.
That will all depend on how worn down the Russian military actually is and how long it needs to rebuild. And at any rate the threat of Russian military action will be used to punish any European country that doesn’t accept Russian influence. It will be used on former Soviet republics.
The only thing that may stop Trump and saving Europe is his ego now that he has effective immunity from prosecution as Putin is no longer a threat to him.
We will see who the bigger narcissist actually is. Putin is probably smarter though.
We need some seriously smart republicans.
Countries with right wing Russian aligned puppets may prevent direct conflict by appeasement but nevertheless they will be under Putin’s control.
China will continue being China. Where semiconductors fall will be interesting as will access to battery tech.
Trump will print money to appease his base and we will see exactly how economic forces evolve beyond control.
Buying crypto now seems like a good idea.
Not an American issue
Reagan saw the Soviet rise to power as a critical American issue. The cold war was _the_ defining foreign policy issue of his era.
Just like 9/11 and the fake thread of Iraq WMDs weren't other-NATO-contries' issues, but we still stepped up to help.
Have you considered what happens if someone decides to bomb an ASML factory?
Until it is. But statements like this are why the world as a society is backsliding, countries putting up walls and isolating themselves instead of seeing the benefits of cooperation in terms of stability and economy. Just look at the economic downturn that happened in the UK when they withdrew from the EU, or how Russia was shunned, excluded and sanctioned for starting an unprovoked war.
Any benefit the US thinks they get for the policies that Trump and his ear-whisperers wants to enact will be short-term. Which is not a problem for Trump as he won't be there to see the long term consequences.
States like New York and California can become Carbon Negative on their own if they wanted to.
The Federal government is not needed for liberals to take the lead on this, but the mediocre center left Democrats who run everything in Blue States refuse to lift a finger.
I also expect Trump to roll back many of those policies and create new, worse ones like opening up more federal land for drilling and mining.
That said, you must have a lot more faith in the current policies than I do. The sole focus on limiting carbon in the atmosphere has been woefully misguided in my opinion. We need to focus on reducing our total impact on the planet, not just trying to mitigate it a bit while we continue to consume more resources and use use more energy every year.
If human impact on the planet is going to kill us all with Trump in office, it was going to happen either way.
> opening up more federal land for drilling and mining
I'm honestly not sure how much a difference Trump will make in this. The US greatly increased oil and gas production under Biden.
It seems that policies that supported an energy transition were generally working. If those get rolled back, hopefully things are in a good enough place that more sustainable energy continues dominating.
I'm still not actually clear how an energy transition will even work unless its paired with a huge reduction in how much total energy we actually use.
Moving from fossil fuels to renewables or even nuclear is all well and good, but it takes a huge amount of natural resources to pull off. Nuclear may be easier, renewables require a lot more resources than we currently have.
> unless its paired with a huge reduction in how much total energy we actually use.
This is very unrealistic IMO. That will never happen. It flies against the whole idea of civilization and the development of human history.
Energy consumption will rise on larger timescales. Best you can do is to tame the growth by efficiency and using more renewable, greener energy generation.
If you want to keep bees on your apartment roof that is fine, but we are not all going back to being subsistence farmers at this point.
Defeatist? Perhaps, but I don't think so.
While I do agree that its unrealistic to this people collectively will learn what it means to have "enough", I don't see another realistic solution.
We're not only increasing total energy consumption every year, we're increasing energy consumption per capita. It may be one thing if the argument is that energy use will rise or fall inline with population, but that's not the case.
This is the main crux of why climate change debates have always felt hollow to me. We can argue about plastic straws, diesel engine emissions, or what an acceptable level of parts per million in the atmosphere is but those are all surface level problems. Assuming the science linking human impact to climate issues is accurate, we're screwed no matter what we do on those issues if we continue to demand more power from whatever today's preferred energy source is.
I fully agree that all these things don't _solve_ anything and it never will, it just delays the inevitable a little bit.
But it is not completely out of the question we could solve abundant nonpolluting energy. Failure there is not inevitable.
> people collectively will learn what it means to have "enough"
Maybe I am too cynical, but I think the problem with this is that means, in practice:
"OK, everyone. Let's stop accelerated technological progress, and the level of civilization we have today, that's where we're going to stay at from now on, with maybe some smaller bugfixes rolling out once every 50 years or so.
The quality of life you have today? That's it.
Oh, and all you guys still in poverty [there are still billions of people who use very little energy], you're also going to have to stay there. Sorry."
That will in turn cause civil unrest and even more unhappy people than we have today, which means increased totalitarianism, oppression and violence to quash that to keep societies "stable". For all the ills of consumerism and aspirationism, it _is_ serving as an opium to keep people distracted from the harsh realities of the world.
We'd go back to the Middle Ages, in terms of the rate of improvement of the quality of life. I don't think many people are OK with that.
> But it is not completely out of the question we could solve abundant nonpolluting energy. Failure there is not inevitable.
I am pretty cynical and skeptical, so that may be tainting my view here for sure. This idea of abundant, nonpolluting energy feels like a perpetual motion machine to me. Energy systems require control to be useful, from storage to transmission to heat dissipation. Energy systems are inherently lossy and though we could one day find a cleaner or even truly clean energy source, that energy still has to be stored, transmitted, and used.
> OK, everyone. Let's stop accelerated technological progress, and the level of civilization we have today, that's where we're going to stay at from now on, with maybe some smaller bugfixes rolling out once every 50 years or so.
The opposite side of the coin is interesting to consider as well. We will always think things could be better, and maybe we even can make them better. We need to know what "enough" is though, and that would mean that we could get to a point where we have consumed enough resources and we should slow down or stop. "Progress" as a goal always sounds great on the surface, but it has to be directional (we need to know what we're progressing towards) and it must be bounded when goals are reached.
This is really where my cynicism steps in though. I just haven't seen many examples of people who can actually find "enough" and stop there. We tend to get used to what we have now and imagine ways things could get better. If energy were better used today, for example, I strongly believe that everyone could have the basics of food, water, shelter, and community covered and we wouldn't be stuck hating our jobs and always stressed out. We just collectively don't seem to want that.
> The US greatly increased oil and gas production under Biden.
And critically, I think, the Harris campaign failed to highlight facts like that, and emphasize how she will be different. Instead she completely bungled the messaging and went for "I'll do nothing different from what Biden did except add a Republican in my cabinet".
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/06/politics/harris-campaign-...
> “What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” co-host of ABC’s “The View” Sunny Hostin asked Harris, looking to give her a set for her to spike over the net. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said.
Talk about a monumental failure.
Her campaign, and the democratic party more broadly, made a lot of mistakes. Her failing to distinguish herself from Biden was one of them, but I don't actually think it was the worst. They believed that Biden was going to win and waited way too late to swap in a replacement, it kind of makes sense that they wouldn't try to differentiate if they honestly believed Biden was a good candidate with a viable platform.
That's fair, they definitely waited too late. I guess I also wonder, what if they just left Biden as is. They believed he was going to win, heck he got 80M+ popular votes when he ran. Why risk swap him out. But then, I think, once they did swap him, she could have boosted her position by emphasizing how she will do things better. But perhaps she was also honest and didn't want to lie and she didn't really plan on changing anything.
The only conclusion I could make from the DNC dropping Biden so late was that he was so clearly slipping that they couldn't hide it, or ignore it, anymore. I have to assume that if they kept him on the ticket we would have seen a few months of campaigning that could look an awful lot like elder abuse.
Really? Are you still buying all your stuff from China where they are standing up new coal plants every day? Just because the pollution doesn't happen here doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
I feel like they were not only the most useless policies, with decades away targets, but also had the most damage on labour, see car manufacturers all in crisis cutting jobs
Maybe Elon can do something about that once he’s on the cabinet.
Ah great, we can pin our hopes on elon-fucking-musk.
It's fair to say that we're "cooked" in ever sense of the word.
Elon knows his shit. The media sensationalizes his antics but he knows his shit and is very capable.
The only thing bad about Elon is business interests he will make policies that promote his own businesses. But trump will likely do the same.
> Elon knows his shit
I’ve been saying since the hyperloop in like 2014 that he doesn’t, and he’s done nothing to convince me otherwise.
Elon who's company SpaceX are firing large quantities of Methane-powered rockets into the sky?
Rocketry is not exactly a field that lends itself to battery power.
No, but the volume of hydrocarbons SpaceX are burning to provide a broadband network by cluttering low earth orbit with shiny things is hardly an obvious win.
Climate policies have failed. They're all either empty signaling exercises (carbon offsets, CAFE standards) or economically ruinous proposals to deliberately impoverish people (degrowth). The Paris accords penalize developed economies while giving developing countries a pass on emissions and an unfair advantage in trade. This idea that we can just sit down in a room with all the world's leaders and agree to just reduce emissions is a fantasy.
The real climate policy we need, and one we might just get from the incoming administration, is support for startups that explore new geoengineering technology. We've on our way to being Kardashev type I civilization, and as such, we should establish explicit closed-loop control over our climate.
[flagged]
I think it more likely this election was rigged in favor of trump
Adding comments favored or tailored to one political party or another should not be allowed on HN.
Clicked on this thread for insightful discussion/debate, I’m just reading people talk about how trump was not a good candidate, and how kamala campaigned incorrectly and so on so forth
Talking about the faults/triumphs of some campaigns or candidates does not favor a party, IMO. I supported one party, but even I can notice and address the problems in that campaign.
I don’t have an opinion on your first sentence but happy to try and engage in the second one…
As a Brit looking in from the outside, it’s hard for me to understand how choices have been made in this election, but if I were to attempt a charitable take, did Trump win because he tunes in to some sort of low level anger/resentment/frustration felt by a chunk of the population?
Whereas the Democrats, more polished perhaps as they are, have failed to make that connection sufficiently?
And that connection - or whatever it is that the population picks up on from Trump, outweighs the “obvious flaws” that his detractors may point towards?
Ie they don’t vote for him because of his hyperbole and “questionable” behaviour, they vote for him in spite of that - for other reasons.
I can see the Democrats didn’t help matters by pushing Biden to run when he clearly shouldn’t have, though perhaps it was the lesser of two evils at the time (from their point of view) given his proven record of being able to actually beat Trump.
Happy to be corrected if this is a bad or naive analysis!!
1) It's very hard for a woman to be elected president.
2) The electorate demographic without college degrees is more likely to make an emotional decision that is more easily manipulated with Trump-style bombast.
Not in a battleground state, I didn't see any advertising, but the Dems should have pounded Trump as a criminal sex offending lying hypocrit draft dodger loser felon bankrupt self-obsessed asshole (note this is not snark it's literally how they should have gone at him).
> 1) It's very hard for a woman to be elected president.
The UK voted for Margaret Thatcher three times (1979, 1983, 1987). I'm sceptical about claims that the 2020s US is somehow more sexist than 1980s Britain.
Maybe, it is easier for centre-right female leaders to win than centre-left ones? Maybe the first female President of the US will be a Republican?
Aguably, using only bad female candidates makes electing a female candidate difficult.
Arguably, Hillary 2016 was the best candidate by far. Nobody thought Trump was better until he won. If you say she had baggage, it was nothing to Trump's baggage, but there's a huge double standard based on gender.
They literally did if you just call everyone you don’t like a Nazi over and over again eventually they stop listening to you
Nazi didn't resonate, besides he isn't literally a Nazi. All the other faults I mentioned though are literally true. Need to find the thing that makes him look weak to the demographic you are targeting and hammer on it.
This is going to be the "snake ate my face" situation real fast. Republicans push class divide so to keep their voter base uneducated and poor. Seems like they've reached the critical mass necessary. I don't understand any other way they vote someone in who has demonstrated time and again he'll work against their own interests. I understand short sighted single issue greed for the mighty dollar but it is a nonsensical vote for anyone else.
Are you interested in talking to people to understand, or do you prefer to just pontificate as to why people would engage in "nonsensical" behavior?
This is the part that blows my mind consistently. The number of people screaming “WHY would ANYONE vote for him?!” and then not even considering trying to find out is a true bummer.
We know why. They are ignorant, don't care, or duped. There is no reason to vote for a person morally bankrupt and doesn't have any reasonable solutions to problems. A person with felonies can't even be on a Jury in this country, and people elected him President after his attempt to overthrow the government? I would struggle to hire him to mow my grass let alone run the country. This whole "You need to talk to us" is ridiculous as the positions.
I'll give it a shot, just maybe to help one person understand.
They voted for him because 15+ years of government + federal reserve policy has led to massive bubbles in all US capital assets while impoverishing a wide swath of the population. The people who voted for Trump are those who've "lost" in the giant crypto+stock Ponzi scheme.
The reason people on the winning side of this have such a hard time seeing it is that, en masse, they've turned away from any semblance of traditional valuation measures for capital assets. I assume they've done this because it's too emotionally uncomfortable to consider the notion that their entire wealth isn't because they're geniuses but because of deranged government policy.
And somehow Trump is going to reign this in? Him? How? Did you see both crypto markets and stock "ponzi" scheme reaction to his election? If this is their reasoning, it is flawed, to avoid using terms that are much less charitable. It feels that this kind of justification is trying to fit a narrative to the deed that makes no sense, somehow justify it.
I personally think it's a culture war thing that caused this. And it is probably going to get worse.
Of course he won't. But, see, no one will. Both parties are equally culpable here. People are just doing protest votes at this point. What are they even supposed to do? No one can even buy a house. The only actual solution is to put interest rates up to 8% and trigger a revaluation and a recession, but the odds of that are zero, no matter who is president.
Isn't Trump the pro-"crypto Ponzi scheme" (as you called it) candidate? Asset prices of both crypto and stocks seem to think so.
Yep. It's ironic and shitty, but people just did a protest vote. They aren't looking at the specific proposals. They don't care anymore. You're absolutely right, but honestly both parties are completely in on the Ponzi scheme. So it probably doesn't matter.
Not only pro but going to put your tax dollars in:
>US Senator Lummis reaffirms Bitcoin will be become a national reserve asset following Trump's victory
Read my other comments. It's a protest vote. They don't care what his actual policies are. No one is willing to pop the economic bubble, so voters are just going to burn the whole thing down.
I'd bet a dollar this is 100% incorrect, and that cryptobros voted overwhelming for Trump/Vance/Thiel/Musk.
It's probably split. But it doesn't matter. The important question is who the people who have lost in the lottery voted for, not who the winners voted for.
> They are ignorant, don't care, or duped.
That's what a lot of Trump voters believe about people who don't like him. He used to generally have good public opinion (prior to his ascendance in 2015). A lot of people believe that his bad press is primarily due to intentional smear campaigns and lawfare by the powers that be.
In that sense, for many people, a vote for Trump is like apes in /r/stonks buying and holding GME. It's less about what they want in a positive sense, and more about what they don't want: namely extreme leftism and the current ruling class in Washington, the media, billionaires, and everyone else who attended the WEF in Davos -- all the folks who care nothing for the average Joe.
He may not fix it, they may not even expect him to be able to, but voting for him is a way to have a voice. At least he really upsets all those powerful people! And he did get some stuff conservatives liked done in his first term.
They didn't want the rich guy, so they voted the rich guy in? I think you need to work on your argument.
It's not the riches per se that they take issue with. In fact, they admire and celebrate rich people who got there by hard work, luck, and good business (just like apes in /r/stonks celebrate how rich DFV got on GME options). What they take issue with is how certain powerful people use their riches and power in ways that benefit only themselves and hurt everyone else (who isn't rich) -- particularly the power establishment in Washington, New York, and Silicon Valley.
To give one specific example, private equity firms have been buying out small local businesses on a massive scale (like veterinary clinics), jacking up the prices, paying the workers less, and giving customers a worse experience.
That's not the sort of thing they perceive Trump to be doing with his riches and power. In fact, I don't see any way Trump is messing with the macroeconomy in his own business practices (do you know of any?).
Not trying? It was all the media did for like 2017 through 2018. “Venture safari-style among the rural or flyover-state-suburban white“ was practically its own genre, and it was everywhere. You couldn’t turn on NPR without hearing a devout rural white Christian relate how they prayed on it then held their nose and voted for the unrepentant sinner because of abortion. It’s why Vance’s weird, insulting book was embraced by the Left(!) as “real talk” from an actual member of the group they were trying to understand.
> voted for the unrepentant sinner
Kind of a silly point you're making, considering that Kamala's views and most Christian denominations are completely irreconcilable. Not that she has ever repented for anything - or even admitted to any mistakes of any kind.
This is the kind of thing the people they interviewed were saying.
[edit] I mean it was my shorthand for “I know he’s a serial adulterer, and his business dealings are shady, and he says some really awful things… but I prayed on it and…” which is closer to a direct quote of things I heard multiple times. Other demographics had other reasons but that was a common one from the pro-life set.
To be fair, most Christian denominations establish inflexibility at the outset by claiming to be a worldview that is "true", "unerring", or similar attribute, despite lacking any epistemological introspection -- meaning of the 5,000 or so different denominations in the world, at least 4,999 are sorely disappointed that not only do they not reconcile to each other, they also don't reconcile to reality.
Whereas a person can review an idea, try it on like a coat, see how it fits, and then keep or discard if it's found amenable and improving to their views of the world.
Vice President Harris' opponent also professes and acts on a worldview wildly deviant from most, if not all, Christian denominations.
Well, objectively, only one religion can be true if any religion is true, just as the existence of gravity is irreconcilable with the existence of no gravity; but go on. We haven't grown up as a nation and collectively decided which one it is yet, but I have preferences. Not that preferences even matter - if I'm falling off a building, my preference for there to be no gravity won't make a difference.
At most one. Kinda. Does depend on the beliefs, which are by convention basically unrestricted. Also how we’re defining “true” could easily admit partial truth for a whole bunch that might be incompatible if any were entirely true.
Oh, a big whopping plurality hits the "Nones" just fine. As it is not a religion, it avoids the plaguing morass of inchoate morality claims justifying a grift altogether.
> plaguing morass of inchoate morality claims justifying a grift altogether
And claims like this are why you lost this election, will never win elections, or win anyone over to your side.
> And claims like this are why you lost this election, will never win elections, or win anyone over to your side.
Interesting!
1. I didn't run for an office
2. I am a political independent
3. I am not a political party in a first-past-the-post-system defined by the reverberations of the 3/5th compromise.
I'm genuinely curious why you paint more than half the nation (though not half the presidential 2024 voters) with a broad brush of negative antithesis regarding a relatively different claim ("Nones" exercise morality individually, rather than externalizing their moral decision making to an inchoate morass of morality-derived alleged religious authorities).
> I'm genuinely curious why you paint more than half the nation (though not half the 2024 voters) with a broad brush of negative antithesis.
Simple. The only lesson people who despise Trump have learned, and are learning, is that they didn't call Trump supporters every brand of -ists enough. Huge surprise, this generates broad negative anthesis and it's well deserved, as well as completely backfiring. The name calling is useless now.
https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1854242284952519158
Oh, I think I get your point, you want people to simply ignore folks that gleefully transgress social norms and exercise sexism, racism, and other bigotries against people who, by your definition, are mentally ill and thus a worthy target of mockery and conduct unbecoming christianity's moral standards, or by most normal people, are guilty of being women, of being men, of being gay, of being lesbian, of being queer, of being trans, of being of light pigment, of being educated, of being uneducated, of being homeless, of actually being mentally ill, of being disabled, of being children, of being elderly, of being generally unwanted by a heaving horde of hate.
Do you believe the same for people who violate religious taboos?
Regardless of the answer, we're far afield of the original discussion, and I'll not pursue this thread further.
Though, I do empathize -- it must be highly embarrassing to have racism, sexism, and other bigotries noted as being offensive to people in public. Triumphalism, often a result of religious fervor, masks that in an echo chamber, so social media can be jarring for folks in such a situation.
---
PS
>> If that's not sexist, I don't know what is.
This fact is quite apparent that you don't know what sexism, and somehow think it applies in a situation where a trans fem wants to be in a situation more protective than forcing a locker room share with her sexual assignment at birth. What your assumed resolution, coached carefully by pollsters no doubt before being coached through formal and informal propaganda channels, actually is is transgressive and probably unnecessary. Though to redefine sexism as "not respecting of gender norms my religion requires me to prefer" is quite a stretch
I believe my religion, and the religions of other people, is more deserving of protection than your self-proclaimed ability to transgress social norms; and voted accordingly.
> Though, I do empathize -- it must be highly embarrassing to have racism, sexism, and other bigotries noted as being offensive to people.
Reminder that Kamala Harris believes 15 year old young men who suddenly identify as female, have the right to compete with similar-aged young women and be in their locker rooms to see them naked. If that's not sexist, I don't know what is.
> Triumphalism, often a result of religious fervor, masks that in an echo chamber, so social media can be jarring for folks in such a situation.
So many platitudes, so many assertions, so many nuggets of delusion, so little reason to believe them as true.
> Though to redefine sexism as "not respecting of gender norms my religion requires me to prefer" is quite a stretch
Dude, even Richard Dawkins said this was insanity ("I object to the statement that a trans woman is a woman. This is a distortion of language and science.")
I look forward to the day it returns to that categorization. I am merely agreeing with one of the most prominent atheists in the world on this subject.
> transgressive and probably unnecessary
More dishonest name calling, and what a retarded perspective to assume I must be an idiot, or I would agree with you. We've had that for 8 years, and we don't give a darn, because you don't give a darn understanding our perspective either. Sticks and stones. I also will stick to the term "sexist," because to accept this view is to degrade women to the level of being completely interchangeable with men.
I object to the statement that a Black woman is a woman. This is a distortion of language and science.
Apologies, Dang. I wasn’t trying to spawn an instance of the Internet’s Oldest Flamewar by choosing as my example of Trump voter interviews in the late twenty-teens a paraphrase of the ones I remembered best, which happened to be the statements of pro-life evangelicals.
I think it points to a real lack of humility. Why would you try to find out how your thinking might be flawed if you start with the assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot?
And I say this as someone who did this exact thing in 2016.
I did, partly out of curiosity, partly because I'm in a progressive town literally surrounded for a hundred miles by a sea of red.
They like Trump because he appears anti-establishment and they fear/dislike the establishment. They don't feel the establishment in place is good for them. They truly, truly struggle with finances. Many are in the military and on food stamps. Some are farmers who can't make farming work anymore. They fear immigrants because they might take jobs or bring crime (and drugs). They fear they cannot protect themselves so the want access to guns.
One common thread was the stimulus checks. They really liked the stimulus checks.
Another thing is pining for the good ol' days. Lot of that, too. No issues like pronouns muddying things up.
Generally, not racist, not sexist, but some are, just like any rando person.
Seemed to me just like regular folk who are scared and can't make ends meet like they used to, well, a long time ago. The grocery store prices that are annoying to me are truly a decision point for them.
Then when you take three steps back, and look at it objectively, it's often of their own doing. A lot, I mean a lot, of disparagement of education, even of K-12, so the means to get better employment is more of a struggle. A whole lot of drug and alcohol abuse on top of it. They are the only people I know who smoke. Lot of broken relationships and marriages. Family chaos. The image of solid salt of the earth isn't what my Trumper acquaintances (friends?) are experiencing. They are pretty desperate and really wish there was some way to get back on top of things.
So, in desperation they vote for a person that promises to make it better. And really they don't care about much else. If you want to win elections, do the chicken in every pot line.
This is all anecdotal of course, but I went to the effort, this was seven people, all of whom I'm on good terms with and converse with on a regular basis. And they were respectful of my position - that you need both conservatives (to keep what's good of the old ways) and progressives (to find new ways that are better) in the political arena to make it work. That's not a popular position, though.
This feels close enough to my experience that I believe you actually do speak genuinely with these people.
I think a huge part of it is also that they feel seen by someone, finally. Trump did a great job of making these people feel like the spotlight was finally on them, and honestly it’s true.
Many of us have, and that's how we know their stated reasons are just nonsense. There's a video of the creator interviewing a Trumper about how tariffs work....
You think you're going to get a solid answer interviewing some random person on the street? That's what an intelligent person would call a strawman. Do you want me to point you to the video of well-educated coastal elites calling the assassination attempt a Hoax?
There are of course more than one reason why people voted for him, but there's literally tons of comments in this very thread explaining why with no nonsense and under no uncertain terms.
Ironically, a lot of those comments get flagged and are no longer visible.
No, I think there needs to be a culture of talking to and respecting people with different opinions.
And before you jump to the extreme of “but they don’t want me to EXIST!”, that’s not the point. The point is that we temper each other, partially by negotiating, and partially by simply making the “other side” more used to our ideas.
That just happens with repeated exposure. If something is scary, but generally not bad, people can get used to it, but only if they’re exposed to it regularly. You get used to public speaking after the ten thousandth time instead, because you’ve likely already confronted every fear you had in real life by now.
Ironically, this is extremely easy to fix. Politicians can simply get along in public. We’ve got studies showing that political extremism can die almost overnight when the opposing politicians simply explain that they do respect their opponent.
As for the people here explaining themselves clearly - that’s because dang has done a good job of fostering a community of high quality commenters. You won’t find this kind of discourse anywhere else, and it’s the main reason I treasure this site.
> No, I think there needs to be a culture of talking to and respecting people with different opinions.
Absolutely.
> As for the people here explaining themselves clearly - that’s because dang has done a good job of fostering a community of high quality commenters.
Hard disagree. The level of political discussion on HN is barely a step above r/politics. This is a forum for 110 IQ codecels who think minor domain expertise means they are smarter than everyone else in all aspects.
The contempt for ordinary people in this very thread is nauseating.
holy fuck this was the most based fucking thing i have read in a long time
> You think you're going to get a solid answer interviewing some random person on the street?
Yes. We educate the population for good reason. People _should_ understand that a tariff is a tax imposed on consumers, and if done with reasonable intent it is to prop up a key industry despite the distortionary effects with a particular goal in mind, such as national security, improvement of the populace, etc.
"Bringing back manufacturing" is not a coherent goal, it just sounds like one, because as soon as the tariffs are removed the US is back to offshoring again OR the purchasing power of the dollar is so low that it doesn't matter.
"Establishing manufacturing in key industries" is a completely reasonable goal -- which Biden did (solar, among others).
So once again, the Trump policy set is not actually good policy.
I am eternally grateful that my MIL is an unironic trumper from an unbelievably small town in the Midwest, specifically so that I don’t need to listen to a “creator”. It’s an eye-opening experience to hear what their true, heartfelt concerns are.
If nothing else, surely we can empathize with being frustrated for ages and finally feeling seen.
They’re literally trying to find out when they exclaim that question.
To me this seems a pretty clear case of inflation=“punish the incumbent” and also Biden spread out the pain of covid recovery instead of making red states bear the burden. Kamala promised more of the same, including lots of investment into rural and red areas that aren’t gonna vote for her anyway. Result? 10-15 million blue voters stayed home this cycle. Trump turned out his entire base.
Just pontificating…
> They’re literally trying to find out when they exclaim that question.
I've seen these conversations happen thousands of times in political communities online, before you know it, the person trying to understand starts getting angry at some point, and both people are calling each other names. Very few people truly want to understand the other side. If you want to understand the other side, the first step is to listen, and not say anything (don't try to defend your viewpoint, this isn't part of your goal, and it will derail it), ask questions, and agree to disagree politely.
Because those discussions go like this:
(to a C programmer) "Why are you using C?"
"Because it's memory-safe."
"But it's not memory-safe."
"Yes it is. Your program will just segfault rather than getting hacked."
"No it won't... see these examples of C programs getting hacked without segfaulting."
"You're using it wrong. See look, if you write with spaces instead of tabs, your program is memory-safe."
Do you remember "MongoDB is web scale"? Would you not get angry when trying to find good reasons to use MongoDB? That's what it's like talking to the average Trump supporter, except it's about the removal of human rights instead of just which database you should use.
Why do people vote for him? America is a closet racist country and the education system obviously doesn't produce critical thinkers. The south is poor and Trump will make them money again some how - they believe that. Trump will make grocery prices' go down and create many magnificent jobs. Trump will make interest rates go down and loans cheaper. He will deport all the Mexicans so the black or white people can fill the jobs.Trump is a populist con man who conned his base. No public company or start up will ever hire a CEO like him. I call this political entropy. This is the decline in America in my view. It's a sad day and I will just stick my head in the sand and hope we make it through.
Yup all my comments offering to explain and explaining have been flagged. Even ones with no sarcasm. Just because waiting for someone to doxx me again and dang to do nothing.
HN just flags all comments that seem to support Trump in any way, even with good arguments. So no idea why comments are even open anymore when some points of view are obviously not allowed here yet 52% of the country seem to supported them to a degree. Obviously HN users just want their own groupthink eco chamber without wanting to hear other opinions. So in that regard I'm enjoying watching lib woketards having a mental breakdown for the second time since 2016. Stay ignorant, stay foolish.
Hell, I'm not even from America and I saw it comming from a mile away. Calling half of their country "nazis" and "fascist" was the worst campaign move I have ever seen in my life.
The user base here seems to be just as close-minded and condescending as it is on Reddit.
Very disappointing to be honest.
Ideally the new economic policies will break the stranglehold of Silicon Valley. Already with the arrival of Musk, oracle, etc in Texas, there's a balance beginning to shift.
Yeah, I've been threatened and doxxed on this forum... no action. So brave. Stunning.
Disclaimer: left wing European voter.
It's clear from the message what the grandparent post opinion is, there's no need for understanding the right, the conclusion is there already and it's that the right wing voters are:
> uneducated and poor
This narrative about the right voters has been there since at least the nineties, only for the left to wonder why dialogue dried up.
Then the left drops the ball on big ticket issues, and people move more and more to the right, while fringe right positions become normalized.
Oh well, if it weren't for those pesky uneducated voters!
The reason it doesn't make sense to people like him (and me) is that we look at all the times he promised to release the health care plan, the January 6 incident, the calls to states to "find" votes, the constant complaining about rigged elections, the constant complaining about basically EVERYTHING he doesn't like, and more, and we don't see how anyone can overlook that. He never answers policy questions clearly. He doesn't understand tarriffs will raise our prices. He thinks RFK should be in charge of HHS. He wants to shut down TV networks that criticize him.
When I ask folks why those things don't matter, I either get "what about So-and-so," or "I don't believe that," or they just blow off the question without an answer. I even went to the Ask a Conservative sub on Reddit and asked why people think millions of noncitizens are voting in elections, and I got yelled at, called naive, and told that some local municipalities allow non-citizen votes in local elections so therefore they can vote federally too.
That said, I'd LOVE to know why none of the things Trump says or does dissuades his voters. Truly, because I really do not understand. I don't want to argue, or to try to convince you you're wrong, I would love to know why those things don't matter and you think Trump is a force for good.
> we look at all the times he promised to release the health care plan, the January 6 incident, the calls to states to "find" votes, the constant complaining about rigged elections, the constant complaining about basically EVERYTHING he doesn't like, and more
Have you considered the possibility his supporters know something you don't? A lot of what you mentioned is either debunked or is fraught with misinformation
Yes, I HAVE considered that, it's why I keep ASKING Trump fans. I even stated in my comment that I never get real responses. I get responses like yours, which is "you're wrong, it's been debunked" but I'm never let in on the debunking evidence.
I'm dead serious and 100% sincere: Please show me the evidence. I REALLY want to see it. I don't believe people, I believe data. I don't even believe MYSELF without data.
I live in Georgia, I heard the tape with Trump and Raffensperger, but if you have evidence that call is somehow not true, please share it.
I heard Trump say he has "a concept of a plan" on Healthcare 8 years after he told me he already had a plan. If he's got an ACA replacement, I'd love to see it. I don't understand why it has to be repealed before it can be replaced, usually we just pass new laws that supersede the old one, but whatever, I'll look at whatever you have.
I don't think you can provide evidence that he doesn't complain about everything he doesn't like, every rally comes with a list of grievances. But again, if you have evidence, I'll look at it with an open mind.
And even if you don't have evidence for those things, show me what evidence you DO have, I'll be happy to examine it. I even looked at the stuff Mike Lindell released. I'll always look at evidence, but I just can't do the whole "do your own research" thing any more.
> A lot of what you mentioned is either debunked or is fraught with misinformation
Why do you believe this?
What a great skipping-record case-in-point. I almost think this is satire.
> Have you considered the possibility his supporters know something you don't?
They literally considered that, it's a main point of the post you're replying to, they got answers that lacked actual details or hinged on hyperbole.
> A lot of what you mentioned is either debunked or is fraught with misinformation
See what I mean? "A lot" meaning what number of things? Either debunked or is fraught with misinformation? What does that even mean? Which things? Jan 6 is "debunked" or "fraught with misinformation" or both? Trump didn't release his health care plan, Trump called GA to find votes, Trump constantly complained about rigged elections. Those are sincere and unarguable facts. What are you speaking about in rebuttal?
> They literally considered that, it's a main point of the post you're replying to, they got answers that lacked actual details or hinged on hyperbole.
I appreciate that someone actually read my post. I'm not happy to say that's the usual reply I get from Trumpers, just an angry "you're wrong" and no discussion. I'm out of ideas on how to get them to engage in a conversation. I hate arguing. I really, really just want to understand their point of view but I just get yelled at.
And I'm NOT trying to denigrate anyone with that statement, it just feels like there's so much anger between Americans that it's hard to get someone to believe I'm sincere when I don't agree with them. It seems to immediately cause them to shut down and go into anger mode rather than just explaining to me why they feel I'm wrong.
He's got them convinced that people who disagree can't be trusted, and it fucking *hurts*.
explain how him saying for over two years that he would have a healthcare plan in some number of weeks (changed several times) is debunked or misinformation. Because we all watched it.
His supporters realize he is a blowhard and adjust accordingly. Shut down a TV network? Lock her up? It's BS. I don't like it much, but for him it's a rhetorical device.
By contrast when Biden calls me garbage, I'm pretty sure he means it.
First, Harris isn't Biden. Second, when Trump calls immigrants criminals, I'm pretty sure he means it. How many generations do you have to look back before you find an immigrant among someone you call friend or family? We are a nation of immigrants, a country less than 300 years old. And who does he mean when says immigrants? It never seems to be that nice German couple down the road who _look_ like the other European folk that happened to immigrate a few generations earlier.
I'll bite on this because I really don't understand it. I can understand why people relate to a lot of the messaging. For example, if you say that government institutions are broken because they're filled with waste and corruption, I think there's some truth to that and I can see the appeal of agreeing with that sentiment. There are many things that all politicians say are broken and they right.
Where it breaks down for me is when you move into the plan for fixing those problems. You can't just reduce the funding of government institutions and assume there's some motive to re-optimize for efficiency. That might work to some degree in the business world where there's a profit motive, but on the public side of things the people that are abusing the system for personal gain aren't going to optimize to provide services more efficiently. They're more likely to optimize for more personal gain as the expectation of failing institutions becomes normalized.
Eventually, I think you end up with government services and institutions that are even less efficient per dollar spent because the solution for trying to improve them doesn't seem to have any plans for accountability. So I think people are voting to effectively de-fund government services and institutions with the misguided promise of reduced tax burden and increased efficiency, but what they're going to get is equal spending, less services, and more people benefiting personally from the shift in policy, especially if services start using more private sector vendors.
For example, some of our education funding in Canada has been cut massively due to the perception of waste, which is true to a point when you look at administrative bloat, but the cuts always impact the front-line people providing services and miss the administrative layer where the waste is occurring. That makes the ratio of waste even higher and people are left wondering why nothing works.
I might be wrong, but I think all you're going to do with a broad mandate to "gut everything" is to create an opportunity for self-interested parties to usurp government funding for personal gain when the goal should be to increase accountability and efficiency.
Loosely related, a massive problem we have in Canada is that front-line workers have been completely eliminated from the decision making process. Everyone I know can look at things done in their workplace and identify mistakes and inefficiencies that are the result of administration that lacks real world experience. For example, they built a prison in the city where I live where they put (sewer) drains inside the cells. Every single prison guard that you'd ask would tell you that's a mistake because the prisoners can plug them and flood the cells. That's the result of arrogant administration thinking they know everything.
My last point is also part of the reason I think people voted for Trump. I wouldn't because I don't think his solutions are going to improve anything, but a lot of people believe the system is broken because they personally see mismanagement on a daily basis and it's done by the people getting paid the most.
So I get why the messaging is appealing, but I don't understand why people think some of the proposed solutions are going to work. Maybe someone can explain to me how having Musk "do what he did at Twitter" to public institutions is going to provide better services to the public.
interested, but I looked all through social media for that. Reddit, Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, Bluesky. Pretty much everything but Facebook.
I really couldn't find much reason. So many Trump supports were just interested in "salt mining" from Harris supporters. The few issues I could find were
- he'll fix inflation/the economy (he absolutely won't)
- he'll mass deport immigrants (not a sympathetic reasoning for me. Also mass deportations are expensive; see the above point)
- Racist remarks about Harris (that's not even worth talking about)
- "This is a response to identity politics" (to put it in the least racist/Sexist/transphobic way).
- Oddly enough, nothing on Gun control. Maybe I didn't look hard enough.
So there's maybe 2 legitimate reaosns (no matter how misguided I feel about them) and a lot of hate. And then dismissals of any worries from opponents. It was honestly tiring how many "but Trump doesn't support Project 2025" I've heard.
The most legitmate dismissals of Harris came from "she wasn't voted in". Which yes, I actually do agree with and did not support at all. But we're well past the point where general elections are "pick the least bad candidate". Some issues about Israel, but I'm not going to pretend that wasn't always a bipartisan issue up top and that both sides in government are walking on eggshells about that issue.
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So yeah, my experience trying to find some truth below the ocean of feelings came down to "There's nothing inspiring about trump except that he didn't fuck up like Harris". There's no platform, just chaos and hate.
Maybe there are some smart conservatives offline that have actual legitimate points, but I don't have access to that and I suspect many of their arguments are simply economical (they want tax cuts for them and will vote that way. Selfish, but a very honest and reasonable point in an individualistic society).
I'd love to hear otherwise, but I'm not convinced HN will be much different from the dozen other platforms I checked. It seems to be all "vibes". vibes in weird ways and very dangerous ways.
>Republicans push class divide so to keep their voter base uneducated and poor.
Dems almost exclusively Lord over academia as something so valuable that the people that do jobs that keep the lights on, water running, and the floors steady are tired of hearing how much knowledge they lack. They say this in the same breath as they accuse republicans of keeping the sacred university knowledge from trades workers
That is contrarian to democrats giving more support historically unions and putting laws in place to raise the wealth and social support of lower income citizens. Think of Medicare in 1965, Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, and the Low-Income Housing Preservation and Residential Homeownership Act of 1990
The most recent example you're citing is from 34 years ago...
"Historian gives ‘Union Joe’ a higher grade than any president since FDR" https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/05/bidens-labor-repo...
That's one article that seemed a good summary, but there are a half dozen different things that could be cited as ways Biden has supported unions.
I'd disagree, after all a democracy is one vote per person. And it surely looks like they've voted against what you thought was the better choice.
In that sense, you have to have some pretence about why you disagree. You mentioned it was something along the lines of people thinking about a 'mighty dollar', but that seems conflationary.
Saying it's a nonsensical vote in a two party race is a bit off.
I suppose a democracy could elect a leader that promises to destroy it (hypothetically). The voters have no obligation to protect it.
Yes. In Scotland where we have devolution from the UK government, there is a party that wants to dissolve the parliament that campaigns to be elected to that parliament. Just democracy.
Because trans people. And immigrants pouring through the border. And abortion.
In other words: culture wars.
Ten million illegals allowed to enter in 3.5 years, plus God knows how many "asylum" seekers is more than about "cultural".
Yup. He lied for months about forced operations in schools (seriously?!). And immigration is the lowest it's been since Biden took office after Trump botched the pandemic response and no one wanted to come here.
If Trump follows through on his promises, the US will be in bad shape.
> If Trump follows through on his promises, the US will be in bad shape.
Might be a good learning experience for the Red states.
One huge issue in the US politics is that the Red states are largely insulated from the consequences of their decisions by the Federal budget transfers. Nearly all deep Red states are net receivers of the Federal funds, especially when Medicare/SS are taken into account.
All that culture war nonsense, CHIPS act, and so on do not make any tangible difference for a voter in Alabama. All these amount to peanuts compared with the overall Federal spending.
Trump is poised to seriously change this.
> Might be a good learning experience for the Red states.
There's been plenty of opportunities to learn, facts don't matter apparently.
The most recent opportunity was 20 years ago when the housing market crashed. It did work, Democrats got 60 seats in the Senate.
Nothing since that time has really affected the Red states fiscally.
> Trump is poised to seriously change this.
Couldn't a Trump administration rework the distribution of funds so that states that voted for him got even more money, and states that didn't got none?
Red States are the biggest leaches off the federal government. Out of the top-10 states that take in more subsidies than they pay out in taxes, only 2 are blue states, 8 are red states! The Red States never learn because the social welfare programs from the Democrats coddle them ...
Bold of you to think the red states are capable of learning.
Everyone learns when they're punched in the face. The question is what less will be taught? So far he's been able to tell them everything is someone else's fault, but when he's in the driver's seat, who will he blame? And will they believe him?
Oh, they will. Culture wars only go so far when your wallet is _truly_ affected.
Wasn't that the alleged reason for continued escalations in Germany in the 40s?
Not really.
Hitler got entrenched in power because his economic policies _worked_ in 1930-s. They were broadly Keynesian: state spending to stimulate infrastructure (for the military) and manufacturing (also mostly military). This led to economic growth that people really felt in their wallets: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Economic_development...
And so it resulted in a huge upswing in Nazi support, enabling Hitler to stay in power. People really _loved_ him.
This doesn't work all that well backwards. If peoples' lives keep getting materially worse, it's hard to keep blaming it on "the others".
How do you reconcile "short sighted single issue greed for the mighty dollar" with "poor" and staying that way?
It's much more nuanced than people are giving credit. See my other comment below for a fuller analysis. I have some military Republican-leaning friends. To give credit where credit is due, Trump successfully switched the Republican party away from the being the party of expansionist war. This plus the economy (whether or not you agree with people's interpretation of the economy) swayed a lot of votes.
Ultimately, I think Trump won because a lot of key independent voters cast votes against the Democrats. It's a referendum on the way Democrats have been running campaigns for the past 20 years. See 2016 Democrat Primaries [1] where Hillary Clinton's campaign pulled some shady deals to get Bernie Sanders out of the race. Hopefully, we'll get a legitimate 3rd party one of these days to properly give a referendum on both leading parties. Doubtful, but one still has to dream.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presiden...
Elections are basically controlled by the media. They publish the news you consume, filtered through their editorial stance. They control the narrative. It’s all headlines, clickbait and eyeballs, only in this century it’s done algorithmically through social media too. You are never getting an unfiltered, unbiased opinion of the state of affairs, you are getting a carefully curated snapshot.
While there is still more nuance to it than that, there is still truth. In the UK, one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers The Sun likes to boast about their political influence on voters. “It’s The Sun what won it.” This is a bare faced statement that The Sun basically decides on their candidate of choice and voters go with that.
So it is when you depend on a so-called free press to give you the facts in nice, bite-sized form.
I honestly feel like the media was covering Harris quite a lot. Her message needed to be more than "he's a fascist" and while some might say, she had a stronger message than that, as an educated person who consumes news from all sides of the spectrum, I didn't see it.
Edit: In fact, some say she lost the election because of her performance directly in front of the news media on TV and whatnot.
Absolutely agree. Until we restore a proper and trusted free press, all political bets are off. Americans are living in isolated bubbles of information with little agreement on actual ground truth.
The media gets too much flack. Harris was more favorably covered in the media than trump was, but he still won.
Depends on what "the media" is. Fox News has been the most watched news channel for 22 years.
If this was the case then it seems that Harris would have won the race...the vast majority of the media I saw here in the US was going on and on about how Trump was a grave danger to democracy and in general just a terrible person and candidate. In regards to the media, I think this election shows that a large majority of the population simply does not believe them at all.
You don’t watch Fox News or listen to talk radio… it’s a nonstop drumbeat about how Kamala is a communist who will forcibly trans aborted prison babies. And “migrant crime” is up 10000000% and they’re lazy but also taking the jobs.
you're right I don't...but people that listen to that stuff were probably never going to vote for anyone other than Trump (anymore than listeners to MSNBC were going to stray from Harris). My primary sources are relatively centrist sources like WSJ and Economist as well as a variety of independent podcasts and the NYTimes. With a few exceptions on the podcast front all of these outlets were unabashedly anti-trump.
Do you argue that Trump was elected because the media supported him more than Harris? Although Fox News and X are fully pro-Trump, of course, my impression is that the majority of media did not support Trump. So, I find that media control thesis hard to believe.
Fox News has been the most watched news channel for 22 years.
Given how often the media would uncritically repeat upside-down nonsense like "Trump supporters say they're concerned with inflation" without any kind of analysis, yes, the overall media did tacitly support Trump.
I've no idea whether this was from the ownership class pulling strings to cut any real objective criticism of ZIRP corporate welfare, democrats uninterested in economics being blind to the fact that inflation actually has concrete causes, or from the writers having their brains steeped in things like racism-everywhere orthodoxy and thinking that referencing those narratives makes for a neutral objective article. But regardless of why, with friends like those...
When trump enables a war in the middle east that's bigger than the dems would have ever allowed, will you take that credit back and say it was a mistake to believe that republicans are no longer a war party?
They're both war parties, but the Democrats are actively courting Dick Cheney and his progeny[1]. We already know what Dick Cheney thinks of war in the Middle East - it's not something we have to wait to find out about.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/cheney-gonzales-harris-endorsemen...
Agreed. Republicans used to be the party of war. Trump substantially changed that as a perception within his voting base. Talk to active American military service men and women or veterans. Their attitude towards blindly trusting the government in new wars has substantially shifted. I don't think Trump actually caused the shift. I think he tapped into this growing sentiment and ramped it up to the point of significantly influencing the Republican voting base.
As for the left and Democrats, the shift is equally noticeable in public perception. But instead of the sentiment being "oorah let's go to war for American glory" it's instead being heavily influenced by emotional appeals. This was most evident in Democrats support of the Russia / Ukraine war on social media. Once the leaders of the Democrat party, including President Biden, saw the overwhelming public support, they implemented policies that ultimately led to the expansion of the war. Refer to Anthony Bilken's visit to Kyiv during early peace talks. And again, I'm not making a claim as to who's right or wrong. Just trying to provide some context on how public perception is being leveraged and manipulated on both sides.
It's not a matter of my personal belief. It's just the public perception. But public perception does play an important role when a government is actively trying to start a new war like when the US invaded Iraq.
You're not meaning the same thing by "pro war" or "anti war".
So long as the war in the middle east or Ukraine does not involve US soldiers on the ground, Trump can finance or equip one of the side - for the average voter in the US, there is no "war".
Maybe the the young men in the US were more concerned about the war in Russia escalating to a conflict that would involve US soldiers on the ground.
We know how Trump will behave with Putin (he will offer half of Ukraine on a plate in exchange for pinky promises.)
We can suspect that Trump will not move a finger when those promises are broken and the Baltics are invaded.
What is still a mystery is how Trump will deal with Iran - here, there is no clear policy that will please both Israël and Russia, so someone will have to give.
Both the Israel and Ukraine wars started under Biden. It's hotly debated how it would have all played out under Trump. An no, I'm not a Trump supporter. But context and public perception is important. And understanding how and what Trump did to radically shift the Republican party is important to future predictions and restoring balance. This is my primary claim as to why Harris lost. Democrats have drifted too far from the truth on the ground with large swaths of Americans. And yes, Republicans have done the same, but not to the same extent which is why they won. I hope the Democratic party can recalibrate and learn from the mistakes for next time.
I'm absolutely certain that if Trump was in the White House the full on invasion of Ukraine would not have been started. Not because he's some exceptional negotiator or because he brought peace, but because he was doing such a great job of undermining US influence that Russia would have been dumb to distract them from it. As soon as that stopped happening, they pulled the trigger on something they have been planning for quite a while. It's probable that now, Russia will try chomping as much as possible from Ukraine in the short term and then just sue for a respite of a couple of years until they deem the opportunity is ripe to finish what they started.
Yeah the "no new wars" talking point doesn't make sense. Trump's solution for peace is to just give into Russian demands and let them take over every previously soviet-union country. And let's not forget all the drama that came out of Trump moving the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem which sparked even more tension between the Palestinians and Israel. Also the talks he had with Taliban behind the Afghani Government's back which is why we had to pull out like we did.
The reason is that Trump was giving Russia everything they wanted without the need for a war. Why invade Ukraine for resources when you can just call up Trump and say "make Ukraine give me resources"?
And Israel invades Gaza every year, under every president. It's just that in 2023, someone decided they had the propaganda power to make it seem like a new thing and that it was Biden's fault.
Trump didn't do that, the US becoming the largest oil producer did. If you want names then George Mitchell, Harold Hamm, Bush and Obama. And those last two did a great deal in making war very unpopular across the aisle. Maybe Clinton would have put a few more regulations than Obama, but I'm not sold.
> To give credit where credit is due, Trump successfully switched the Republican party away from the being the party of expansionist war.
That's mainly because Trump is a Russian asset and it's in Putin's best interests to manipulate the US to yield and capitulate to his demands to betray allies. So under the bullshit excuse of being isolationist and pro-peace, you'll see Trump ultimately ensure Ukraine ceases to exist, NATO is dismantled, and war ravages through eastern and western Europe.
I don't think we agree.
Trump likes to win. I have a feeling he wants to "win" over Putin. The man is shallow, it isn't rocket science.
When people feel unhappy with the way things are currently going, they vote for the other guy.
I think it's really that simple in a lot of cases. There are of course many other layers and nuances, but I think trying to dig into the specific policies, rhetoric, and character of each candidate can miss the forest for the trees.
I could be wrong but I don't think 72 million people went out and voted for Trump because they carefully compared both candidates and decided that they preferred Trump on all of the key issues, or because they like or approve of Trump as a person, character, or candidate.
In fact his approval and favorability polling is still below 50%.
People held their nose or stuck their head in the sand on the parts of him they find unfavorable, and pressed the button for "change things" because they don't like how things are currently going, real or perceived.
Just like they did in 2020 when they felt like things weren't going well and voted to switch things up.
People who follow politics a lot more know that "let's try the other guy" comes along with a lot of other baggage and issues and policy, but that's a lot to think about and try to parse through in a world full of people yelling opinions, and I think a lot of people just look past them.
>Republicans push class divide so to keep their voter base uneducated and poor.
And you claim the democrats didn't push class divide by basically deriding and ignoring a huge part of the American population that supports Trump or might vote for him? Note that he made massive gains with latinos and even with the frican American community. That says a lot about who felt which party was ignoring them and pushing its own sort of class divide with rhetoric that didn0t take many of the things these people really give a damn about into account.
Pray tell too, what exactly are the specific interests you think they voted against? And how were the democrats addressing them?
After such a high popular vote in his favor, saying in effect that he won only because those who voted for him are a bunch of ignorant fools is exactly the sort of foolish tendency that made his opponents lose.
Groceries and housing are unaffordable, and any voter who complained about the issue to the incumbent party were ignored, or were outright told their experience with high prices wasn't real (which is called gaslighting). So people went with the alternative, who acknowledged their issue and provided very bad, very stupid solutions, but solutions nonetheless. This is the exact same situation that happened in 2016 on the issue of jobs being sent overseas (remember when out of work coal miners were told to "learn to code"?). Really, this outcome was very easy to predict.
> Groceries and housing are unaffordable, and any voter who complained about the issue to the incumbent party were ignored, or were outright told their experience with high prices wasn't real (which is called gaslighting).
Almost every single Harris ad I saw was about how groceries and housing was too expensive. Two of the 3 pillars of her campaign were about price-gouging on staple goods and increasing access to home purchase. How was the issue not acknowledged?
> I don't understand any other way they vote someone in who has demonstrated time and again he'll work against their own interests.
Isn’t it possible that the educated elite are incorrectly perceiving what is in the interests of the “uneducated and poor”?
Perhaps it’s possible they have a different utility function and set of preferences than the elites perceive?
It’s aways funny when the left who claim to “save democracy” go from 0-60 in a split second toward totalitarianism when they have decided the masses simply aren’t educated enough and don’t know what they need.
As a final point, since this is HN, would you mind sharing some examples of what Trump has done or policies he has that are “against their own interests”?
Here I'll bite:
Didn't fill existing positions for monitoring pandemic diseases arising in China that were put in place by Bush then strengthened by Obama, allowing for a slower response to what would become covid[1].
Huge corporate tax cuts that lead to stock buy backs, which enriched the wealthy while doing little to nothing below (buying stocks back and raising stock value generally does not help the average/low income individual beyond maybe their 401k).[2]
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/how-whi...
[2] For just the tax information later, there are plenty of articles about stock buybacks at that time if you don't trust the org. https://itep.org/one-legacy-of-the-trump-tax-law-big-tax-bre...
0-60 in a split second toward totalitarianism? Care to give an example of that, or just throwing stuff against the wall?
I'll give a policy example against the average person's interests -- his 20% tarrifs across the board will cause approximately 20% inflation and a trade war that will ruin our export markets just like it did the first time. Trump brags about giving billions to farmers because he had to after his policies decimated their markets.
Agreed on the tariffs. It's a significant concern if all the tariffs get implemented. However, I doubt it will happen due to political opposition from both Republicans and Democrats as well as legal concerns.
The US president has limited authority to unilaterally implement tariffs. He would have to claim national security concerns or retaliation to unfair trade practices from other countries. Trump previously imposed tariffs on China due to (well documenented) unfair trade practices. Biden then extended the China tariffs. But Trump would be legally challenged and most certainly lose if he claimed unfair trade practices by every country on earth.
Here's a good video explaining the problems with tariffs. They have lots of unpredictable long term outcomes and are hard to remove once implemented. Apparently there's still a chicken and truck tax on trade between US and Europe that dates back to WWII.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eHOSq3oqI
The comment I replied to has an undertone that the masses don’t know how to evaluate what is in their interests. I can guarantee terms like “failure of democracy” will start being used by democrats if they haven’t been already today. All totalitarianism is horrible and it comes from both right and left sides, however the left is very often the source of it, and the logic to justify that is often much like the comment I was responding too - “for their own good”.
Regarding tariffs this is a complex issue and he has said repeatedly that it’s a negotiation tool. The records reflects that in he expanded US overseas market access with heavy handed negotiations. Most countries are much more protectionist than the US.
Industrial farming with massive soybean exports to China, who can’t even produce 50% of the calories their population needs domestically, is again a very complicated topic.
China is not in good shape and Trump’s first term was a clear inflection point in their trajectory.
> China is not in good shape and Trump’s first term was a clear inflection point in their trajectory.
So you believe it had nothing to do with a global pandemic and propping up their real estate markets until they popped?
No I never said that but Trump’s policies were certainly also a factor.
I think their own failed fiscal policy and the pandemic had so much more to do with it than anything Trump did it's not even comparable. I guess we will see how he and his policies do over next 4 years.
Which part of the republican plan is in the best interests of the uneducated and poor?
Restricting immigration.
https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-bulletin/ris...
Except even that isn't in the best interest of anyone. Immigrants increase the health of the economy, even for the working class.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/immigrants-contribute-greatly-...
https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/north-american-century/b...
It's possible for immigrants to both increase the health of the economy in the medium to long term and to cause localized economic pain in the short term. For those living paycheque to paycheque it's the short term that matters because they don't have the luxury to wait for the longer term effects to play out.
I say this kindly, you must have never worked a labor-intensive job and watched your friends(co-workers) get laid off for cheaper labor.
I would say it was the part where Elon Musk was giving out a million dollars a day . . .
Closing border, halting illegal immigration, mass deportations - these are massively net positive for US citizens who are uneducated and poor. Migrates are competing with them for jobs, housing, social services, all resources.
Lowering taxes especially payroll and corporate and overtime taxes has a massive benefit to them. Lower income tax rates are actually very high once it’s understood that any tax or regulatory cost that is a head tax is a tax on them - “employer taxes” is a fairy tale economically, all taxes are on the employees if they aren’t paid if you are fired, if they are still paid then they are on investors/shareholders/capital and those are also negative for growth and employment.
Ending forever wars will allow shifting of budget priorities. A reduction of just 10-15% of defense and intelligence budgets and cutting funding to Israel and Ukraine can pay for childcare for every child in the US easily.
The list goes on …
Better question is what policies did Harris propose that help the uneducated and poor?
> Closing border, halting illegal immigration, mass deportations - these are massively net positive for US citizens who are uneducated and poor. Migrates are competing with them for jobs, housing, social services, all resources.
If that was really the case how come you just elected the very same guy who killed the border deal?
> Ending forever wars will allow shifting of budget priorities. A reduction of just 10-15% of defense and intelligence budgets and cutting funding to Israel and Ukraine can pay for childcare for every child in the US easily.
There is no "funding to Israel and Ukraine". For Ukraine there's transfer of outdated weapon systems reaching the end of life and already obsolete, which in turn is creating jobs in the US to restock and replenish the US's arsenal. If anything, you're seeing money go into the US defense industry which ends up being the US's take on welfare and social security program with all the pork programs.
Whoever fooled you into believing people are handing over cash to Ukraine, fooled you very well.
The border deal provided amnesty that is clearly NOT in the interests of uneducated and poor citizens.
> The border deal provided amnesty that is clearly NOT in the interests of uneducated and poor citizens.
You should inform yourself about the bipartisan border bill that Trump killed at the last moment. The "amnesty" thing only exists as a propaganda talking point. The bill tightened up requirements for asylum and imposed automatic deportation rules.
There is a link in this thread that I'll never find that refutes your point. It quotes the bill even.
> can pay for childcare for every child in the US easily.
It can also pay for unicorns and rainbows, what makes you believe "paying for childcare" has ever been a part of Trump/Republican agenda?
Immigration is a net good. Even if there's now suddenly a bunch of unskilled labor vacancies, what makes you think American workers even want those jobs in the first place? What makes you think those companies can afford American workers? People aren't out of a job because some immigrant took theirs. We know this through hard data, not vibes.
We don't need to cut foreign military aid to fund childcare in the US. Reforming entitlements would get us there with more leeway and without ripping the rug out from under our allies.
Lowering taxes is a good thing, and that's about the only area you would find me in agreement upon.
This is what a lot of us here on HN see. The site guidelines say no snark and our comments get flagged but this whole snark is ignored and elevated.
Maybe it won't be a snakes ate my face moment. Trump is hardly an unknown. People voted for 2016-2020. That's what they want. No snark needed
I don't get the focus on Republican votes, when a major issue is the lack of Democratic votes.
As someone who leans quite left (and voted 3rd party in a deep-blue state), I can completely understand why many traditional Democratic voters didn't turn out (and why many Republicans despise the Democrats enough to presumably vote against their interests as you pose).
The largest issue for me is that I cannot support genocide. The "I'm speaking" (to protesters) was repulsive. The culture of "if you don't get on board it's your fault if democracy dies" attitude of the Democratic party was just as fascist sounding to my ears as anything they claimed the Republicans have in store for the future. I personally can't fathom how any person that aligns with my view of the world would basically take the stance of "genocide doesn't matter, toe the line". For me personally, two parties that aggressively support continue apartheid conditions and genocide are both against my interest so profoundly that where they differ on issues is irrelevant.
Furthermore the Democratic party has increasingly come to represent a very anti-democratic institution. Biden was promised us as a one-term president to get things patched over while new leadership was established. Then the fact that he was clearly increasingly incompetent was hidden until it was embarrassingly too late. But oddly, it was not too late for a primary, where Democrats could choose a candidate, but we didn't get that. And yet, when mentioning any issues with the mass murder of children you are told to "shut up and get in line".
Finally, Biden didn't deliver on any of the meaningful promises he made. Nothing happened to improve abortion issues while he was president, his track record on climate was just as meaningless and awful as any Republican, children still sat in US detention centers separated from their parents, corporate interests still take precedence over the rights of workers just as much as with any Republican.
While I am nervous about another Trump term, I fail to see how the world was so much brighter under Biden. The Democrats have become the party of "shut up and do as we say because we know better" with no objective improvements in the issues I care about when they are in office, which is impossible for me to get behind.
I'm sorry you feel that way but not voting for Harris is a vote for Trump, and now we have a guy that is worse for Palestinians than Harris ever would be.
That's precisely the logic that allows these atrocities to happen, and frankly anyone supporting this type of thinking is supporting genocide.
The idea that one particular party is owed my alliance no matter what atrocities they support is fundamentally authoritarian which in-itself is a principle I do not abide by.
Given your logic, all is permissible so long as we have one party we can point to and say "they're worse". Which is what leads to as situations where both parties continually move away from the interest of the people. I have far more respect for people who deny there is a genocide, as opposed to those that see it and actively choose to ignore it.
Also what is "would be"? Harris and Biden have been presiding over and supporting the current genocide. I have a hard time imagining it being truly worse during a Trump administration. At the very least mainstream Democrats can allow themselves to oppose genocide now that it no longer interferes with the aims of their party.
It continues to boggle my mind that liberal Democratic will endorse and support genocide without a moment's hesitation or reflection.
> I have a hard time imagining it being truly worse during a Trump administration
Trump's encouragement to 'let Israel finish the job' seems worse.
[dead]
There might be a cultural issue here for the Dems. Many of the canvassers I met who were not retirees tended to be young women, often college-aged or a bit older, very liberal and very much benefitting directly from the economic status quo. To them, voting for anyone besides Harris was just completely insensible and they did not even bother to try and understand the views of anyone they spoke with (from what I could tell), they were just pushing "get out the vote" but no substantial reasons as to why. I suspect that many of these young women are fairly out of touch with the sentiments of most americans and the daily hardships of those without college degrees, especially young men. I suspect that many of these young women will be forced out of the party for that reason, and if they aren't, then they will have to learn to actually talk to people with opposing viewpoints and figure out how to get along with the so-called "deplorables." But most likely they will just end up working somewhere else; not all at once, but the dems will be forced to change their platforms, new candidates will get elected who will change their staffs, and an entire cohort of well-to-do liberal poly sci majors will be gradually shifted out of Washington.
Well, can you think of any reason why those young women didn't want to consider and understand the "opposing view"?
Their rights are literally being stripped away, with threats of more. Even without that, the "opposing view" is voting for a convicted rapist, known pedophile, weirdly incestuous with his daughter, incapable of forming a coherent sentence, complete lack of understanding about any complex topic such as economy, admitted to spreading lies on many ocassions, started an insurrection, and on and on and on.
For literally anyone sane, any of those reasons individually would be totally disqualifying in a candidate. Let alone for people such as young women who have a lot to personally lose from a misogynist rapist promising to strip their rights. (If you haven't being paying attention, abortion restrictions have resulted in women dying of preventable reasons because doctors are afraid to do anything which might be interpreted as an abortion, even if the pregnant woman is dying in front of them from sepsis due to an unviable pregnancy; add in the threat of removing non-fault divorces, and it's genuinely scary).
Most men care. We have wives, mothers, daughters, friends. But it becomes very hard to vote for a party (mind you, I'm not American, but this is showing up everywhere) that airs too many radical sentiments that men are shit and useless. You lose your support. You can't build a majority that way. Keep the sensible people in the middle in the loop.
> ... that airs too many radical sentiments that men are shit and useless.
Are some people on TikTok saying things like this? Sure. Was this part of the campaign's messaging or the party's platform? No. Not in the least.
If the average "CIS white male" feels this way and is checking out, you've got a problem, whether you're the cause or not. It's perception more so than truth that's costing "the left" the elections.
If people are rather loudly letting you know they feel left out, you'd better come up with a strategy that somehow resonates with them, rather than saying "we never said that" and continue to lose their vote. Whether you think that's justified or not is not really relevant, not if you want to win, at least.
The same thing goes the other way 'round, if the democrats would win because too many women would have felt left out from the Republican party stance, something I can easily understand too.
> the average "CIS white male" feels this way and is checking out, you've got a problem, whether you're the cause or not. It's perception more so than truth that's costing "the left" the elections.
Yes, you have a problem, and it's called disinformation.
> If people are rather loudly letting you know they feel left out, you'd better come up with a strategy that somehow resonates with them, rather than saying "we never said that" and continue to lose their vote. Whether you think that's justified or not is not really relevant, not if you want to win, at least.
This is some ludicrous reasoning. What do you want them to do other than say "we literally never said that"? How exactly do you picture them campaigning against strawmen and imagined threats? If people are too dumb to realise they're being lied too, that's really unfortunate, but you can't fix stupid. Ultimately that's why populist politicians with empty words are on the rise. You really cannot fix stupid.
Thank you for eloquently expressing the knee jerk version of what I was going to say, which is _that sounds like a you/them problem_.
So, reading between the lines, it sounds like these "CIS white males" (I am one, hi!) are being triggered by discussion of inclusion, bias, systemic misogyny, etc. It's not always pleasant to have a light shown on your biases but how else do you expect to grow or for society to ever change? Imagine if abolitionists or suffragettes had kowtowed to people who did or threatened to "check out" because of their work? By GP's (implied) logic, they should have and worked to overtly deal with those issues at. ... some indeterminate point in the future?
Give me a single instance of a Democrat criticizing men in general, I'll give you 10 of Trump/Vance justifying rape or abuse or pedophilia
Don’t bother. It only goes so far as the democrats are demonizing men but there are no examples. The fact is the democrats did not run on demonizing men, the republicans ran on the democrats demonizing men.
And that’s why you have to appeal to them all the more. You have to be able to understand and counteract messaging like this. Proof is in the pudding
do you remember a time when the republicans were even keeled and tempered and the democrats kept calling them hitler, nazis, facists, and so on? I certainly remember.
The only way to counter this message is to stop with the hate speech. Like the parent above said. Even independents are tired of it now.
Of course likely the left will again ignore the warnings and continue on so I’m quite anxious to see what 2026 and 2028 bring.
I don't know of a time in recent memory with "even keeled" republicans (at least beyond the Primary). Romney and McCain would be the last I'm aware of.
I'm confident that I've heard both sides saying exactly what you're saying though... and I remember many times that "the end of democracy" was around the corner.... and if such-and-such wins a race war is going to break out etc.
The rhetoric and post-election-dooming is always the same regardless of which side wins.
I pretty firmly believe that things like the economy, incumbents tendency to remain in power, and a party switch after hitting the term-limit are the biggest factors. What people actually say once the primaries are over just doesn't matter to most people. People will cherry-pick what they want to hear.
I have no clue what you're talking about? Did Gore call Bush a fascist? Obama?
Ultimately, I see the world this way: people want good things for others. Most people who voted for Trump aren't directly fascists. Trump himself I wouldn't even qualify as a fascist. But he espouses fascistic policies. Immigrants polluting the blood of America, stuff like that, those are fascist ways of talking about immigration. So at some point we have to talk about things, and denounce them. And no, Trump himself is not Mussolini. But the shortcut of calling him a fascist is ultimately okay.
Same thing with racisms. Most people aren't fundamentally racist, but they'll espouse racist opinions. So they're racist.
if you believe the left hasn’t ramped up the vitriol against their supposed enemies then you’re living under a rock. have you already forgotten this same hatred almost got Trump shot twice? the rest of us haven’t.
trump is running at least partially on a revenge-tour platform. his rhetoric is unlike anything else I've personally heard from another candidate on any side of the aisle.
I understand that we don't agree here and that we all view things that are said through a distorted lens... so you may feel that certain speech from one person isn't violent, but said by another person is.... and I clearly would flip that around.
Its a shame that things are the way they are, but hopefully we can all understand each other at some point and things are less polarized. Its pretty miserable to have calm and reasonable conversations about anything even broaching politics. Its just contributes to the echo chambers.
Trump is literally a convicted rapist. Mounted an insurrection. Pedophile. Serial cheater. Mocked disabled people and veterans. Literally stole money from a children's cancer charity. You can literally, no exaggeration, pull out tens of those indisputable facts, which in a normal world, would be immediately disqualifying. You wouldn't hire someone who has said any of the millions of things he has said. Do you remember grab them by the pussy? Would you be friends, or hire, or tolerate anyone speaking like that?
Pointing them out and how fundamentally unsuited that man is for any job, let alone the presidency of any country, is not "hatred". If you have a problem with people being shot at, take this up with your local representative to get better controls on who can acquire a weapon.
Exactly. If, as a non-American who is non-political and didn't follow the elections at all, that's the only thing that I've heard, I guess there's your problem (assuming you lean democrat).
What I wonder as a complete outsider: how bad must the image of "the left" be that a shady right-wing populist megalomaniac businessman with sexist tendencies wins the election a second time?
Are the democrats associated with a handful of radicals and idealistic goals that don't apply to the silent majority, or is there a perception that they can't handle the current political and economical challenges?
I'm not American. This is not a moral or political statement. I'm pointing out you (as in "the left") seem to be losing men. This costs you support, and well, victory. Clearly enough people felt "the left" were not on their side.
I can't speak about justifying rape or abuse or pedophilia or reproductive rights or religion or immigration or not being able to afford food. I don't live in a (that) polarised two-party system country. Though I fear we're all sort of heading that way for one reason or another...
I'm not American either, but I don't believe the problem is with the American "left" here. If half of America has really been brainwashed into thinking Harris is a communist, I'm afraid this country is lost.
If anything, my advice to democrats would be to start playing "dirtier", I haven't seen anyone take advantage of the recent links established between Epstein and Trump, for example.
Maybe you're right, and that makes me sad.
> If half of America has really been brainwashed into thinking Harris is a communist
Well, are they wrong? Once you get past the stupid rehtoric associated with the word, the goal of communists is to usher in an age of post-scarcity.
The United States is clearly leading that charge. Food production is the closest thing we have to post-scarcity, and that's almost entirely thanks to the efforts of US innovation. I even dare say that US innovation in general is doing more for bringing us closer to post-scarcity than anything else seen in the world. Harris seems/seemed on board to see that continue.
Trump may be too. He appears to also stand behind American innovation. Although, perhaps to the determinant of innovation elsewhere, which does set him apart from Harris, and, to be fair, you might argue that leaves him unaligned with the communist intention.
> Well, are they wrong? Once you get past the stupid rehtoric associated with the word, the goal of communists is to usher in an age of post-scarcity.
So, if you ignore what a word means, and redefine it, yes, anything can mean whatever you want it to mean.
Communism has an element of post-scarcity as a sort of a prerequisite, but that's neither the main goal, nor the means. There is nothing even remotely communist in anything even remotely mainstream in US politics.
> So, if you ignore what a word means, and redefine it, yes
Go on. What does the word mean?
It is oft associated with "member of the Communist Party", of which Harris clearly is not. Perhaps that is what you are thinking of? But that usage is like calling a member of the Democratic Party a liberal – something that is also often done. But to be a liberal does not automatically make you a member of the Democratic Party, even if members of the Democratic Party are often liberal.
> but that's neither the main goal, nor the means.
What is the main goal, then?
The means is undefined. Different communists have different ideas about how to achieve post-scarcity. The Communist Party has a particular stance about that, certainly, but as before, while members of the Communist Party may be communist, not all communists are members of the Communist Party.
Yes, they're wrong. Democrats are very much pro-ownership, and have no interest in weakening the capitalist class in any ways, shape or form. Communism is not about post-scarcity, to the contrary. It's an economic system that seeks to distribute finite resources equitably, and get rid of the owner class (In theory at least, in practice, well...).
So arguing that any of Harris or Trump have anything to do with communism is either very dishonest or coming from a place of deep ignorance.
> Democrats are very much pro-ownership, and have no interest in weakening the capitalist class in any ways, shape or form.
While Marx believed that was necessary to see post-scarcity, it very well could be that he was wrong. This may come as a surprise to you, but he wasn't an all-knowing genie, just a feeble human. At this point in time we seem to be going down the right road without needing to do that. As before, I think we can agree that American innovation has brought us closer to post-scarcity than anything else the world has ever known.
If you are trying to say that Harris isn't a Marxist, then sure, that's fair. But we're clearly talking about "communist", not "Marxist". That these words happen to share the same last three letters does not imply that they are the same word.
If you are trying to say that Harris isn't a member of the Communist Party, as an earlier poster seemed to mistake, that is also fair. Clearly she is not that either. But, again, we're talking about "communist" not "member of the Communist Party". It is possible for a communist to be a member of the Communist Party, just as a liberal may be a member of the Democratic Party, but being a communist/liberal does not imply alignment with a political party. For our Canadian friends, being a liberal does not imply support of the Liberal Party either. Ideologies and political groups are quite distinct from each other.
> Communism is not about post-scarcity, to the contrary. It's an economic system that seeks to distribute finite resources equitably
Perhaps you just phrased it poorly, but communism is more of a lack of a system. It doesn't even have a state to administer a system! Those things go away when you have post-scarcity, naturally. Communism is not about post-scarcity, but you need post-scarcity to allow it to happen. You fundamentally cannot go stateless, classless, and moneyless without post-scarcity. Hence why communists seek post-scarcity. It is the change that ushers in communism.
> So arguing that any of Harris or Trump have anything to do with communism is either very dishonest or coming from a place of deep ignorance.
Or just boring old semantics. That is what you seem to present here, offing that Harris is not a communist simply by redefining communist (granted, it appears as though you may be struggling to get out what you are trying to say, so it might just be that).
Regardless, I spelled out my definition. Even it is not the same as your pet definition, it is the one that was given. The context is set. Under that definition, how is Harris not a communist?
Youtuber ShoeOnHead has called the lack of care for young men might bite the DNC during elections. 6 days ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSw04BwQy4M
You have many examples of left not being really nice towards men in the video and in other videos on her channel.
That's not an example. Give me a policy, or at least a promise of a policy, literally anything coming from a democrat's mouth that would prove that the left is actually antagonizing men as a group.
Meanwhile, Trump has said that you should grab them by the P-word, Vance has criticized "childless cat ladies" as if being a single woman should be a crime. I can go on and on, it really is that simple.
This lack of evidence thing is old and still doesn’t work.
I certainly remember hateful women lambasting men, including myself, for things like saying a woman is attractive.
Also Obama just said: "[P]art of it makes me think, and I’m speaking to men directly… that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that."
I wonder what he meant? That men are sexist because we don’t want a woman president? Or maybe that they wouldn’t vote because they’re heading to the grocery store or something?
Do you seriously actually think that Obama acknowledging that sexist bias exists when it comes to electing the president is an "attack on men"?
I love how whenever someone on the left says they're offended by something outrageous and awful, the right says "grow a thicker skin, snowflake", but whenever someone on the left calmly asserts an obvious truth, that bias exists, people on the right whine that they're being attacked and their way of life is being destroyed.
I'm a man and I don't think the Democratic party "hates me". Maybe Republicans need to grow a thicker skin and stop being offended by every little thing. (See, I can be an asshole and argue in bad faith too!)
Kamala being a woman absolutely had a negative impact on her results. That is probably not the main reason she lost though. Again, do you have any real proof that the left is systematically antagonizing men, or can you only provide anecdotal evidence?
It's really easy to find instances of right-wing politicans or pundits saying abhorrent things about women as a group (refer to my previous comment), but no one seems to care. On the other hand Obama makes vague implications that sexist bias may negatively influence their candidates and now half the country hates men.
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I don't get what you're trying to prove with Obama's quote. Is pointing out the existence of a sexist bias the same as taking an anti-men stance? Is being anti-racist the same as being anti-white? If some believe those things then right-wing propaganda really has succeded into making their brains impervious to logic, and I'm afraid nothing the democrats can say will undo that.
the point is dems are a hateful group that attempt to force alignment via name calling and other childish tactics. men in this country have been demonized by the left repeatedly. people try to point it out, and the response is the same, “show be absolute evidence that i still won’t believe”.
stop the hate, stop looking for evidence and just freaking listen to people’s perspectives. that’s what this entire voting thing is supposed to be about.
Yes, sorry, I in fact require you to provide me some evidence before I believe your insane take of "the left is demonizing men".
As a cisgender heterosexual white man myself, I can't recall any piece of legislation, passed or proposed, that would discriminate against me based on those adjectives. I have never felt any kind of animosity toward myself coming from democrats.
If you really want examples of hate, go listen to literally any talk from Trump and cie. on gays, lesbians, muslims, blacks, puerto ricans, transgender people, jews, single women, atheists, political opponents...
So, I don't require absolute evidence, just any evidence that the democrats have an anti-men agenda. Like the Republicans have an overt anti-lgbt agenda, through laws like "don't say gay", bans on same-sex marriages, redefining sex (a scientific term) in the law...
The video linked at the top of this thread is the evidence you asked for, have you even watched it? It doesn't matter if you consider that person a viable source or not, it has clear examples of men being demonized by left leaning sources. So much so that it leaks into pop culture/media. Men clearly feel like they are no longer welcome in many spaces, or are lesser/undervalued. I'm not here to comment on whether thats deserved or not, but it has consequences.
You seem to be under the opinion that there has to be a legislative policy or that it needs to have been said by a politician for it to affect someones sentiment, opinion, and voting choice. It doesn't.
This said as somebody who did not vote for Trump, not that I liked the other candidate that much though either. There is clear evidence of blatant hateful rhetoric towards men to the point of being considered okay to just openly talk hatefully about men that by nature of cause and affect has also led to growing blatant anti-female rhetoric, and it is driving younger males towards the right by simple gender divide. The right is just better at capitalizing on it.
To be clear, you can find people hating on any group you could come up with. But let's be real here, the hate is largely coming from one side, and that one is not the dems.
I know of no mainstream liberal figure that have spoken hateful words against men as a group, while I can rewatch the latest RNC and find many instances of abhorrent speech towards minorities.
They are still plenty of white men on TV and in the movies, I have never been insulted because of who I am. I have plenty of LGBT friends who could not care less about my "orthodoxy" and are perfectly happy to spend time with me.
> men in this country have been demonized by the left repeatedly
Again, fucking cite a source. You can't feel you're being demonised if nobody ever said anything against you. Stop and try to think for a second or two. (And no, me telling you you're stupid for victimising yourself with no proof doesn't mean "the left" is demonising you, because I'm not American).
> stop looking for evidence and just freaking listen to people’s perspectives
What? Stop looking for evidence and listen to people's feelings? How about people grow a brain and start looking at facts?
> the point is dems are a hateful group
Why do you do these broad generalizations where you demonize an entire group, when it's exactly the problem you have (or, perceive you have..) with how "the left" speak?
That is totally the pot calling the kettle.
When Trump is being a bully (which he does often) you say "grow a thicker skin, you fragile flower!"
When people criticize Trump you say "you are being hatful bullies!"
It is just ridiculous that you guys can dish it out but can't take it. Grow up.
From my outsider (non-American) male perspective, I never heard anything from the Democrats. Somehow I ended up hearing a whole lot from the Republicans, without looking for it (or wanting it!). Whatever they did, they seemed to do a better job getting into the channels where men are found. So while I expect the Democrats haven't criticized men, I can understand how it is easy to buy into the rumours when that is all you have to go on.
I think people don't realize that it doesn't need to be directly said by a politician to create sentiment.
If you look at the online sentiment which greatly affects young voters, it is very much anti-men in general. In fact you even have instances of this being seen in popular culture entertainment and slipping into mainstream at times. Especially for CIS white males. And guess which population overwhelmingly both voted for Trump, but also gained voters for the Trump camp? Men.
Anti-male rhetoric is at an all time high, and has given rise to male spaces being dominated by accordingly anti-female rhetoric.
This is in part what the parent comments are mentioning. That many of the most outspoke people for Dems (i.e not necessarily politicians themselves) are women who just entirely dismissed even trying to capture male voters who were on the fence. Yes, I get that it is difficult to resonate with people who vote in favor of taking away womens rights, but the problem is that you just aren't going to win if you don't capture at least some of those voters.
I don't dispute that a lot of republican voters bought into the propaganda that dems were anti-men, but what are the democrats supposed to do? This is completely baseless. I can't recall a single mainstream liberal figure having problematic words on men as a group.
Republican speakers on the other hand spew non-stop hate toward every minority I could name and no one cares. If the median voters can't see that (wether he lives in a bubble or simply refuses to acknowledge it), then this country is fucked.
I detect a double-standard among Republicans in this regard, but at any rate, I think this is a case of culture-war/DEI resentment and conflating people on Twitter with the DNC. And here they'll usually point to some policy or other that gives credence to some of that (DEI for federal workers or something), but it's a weak connection.
Did that really happen though? or did the right just amplify those messages because they're very effective to campaign on? and now everyone just repeats them. Maybe even making a lot of young men feel even more despondent and useless in the process.
Kinda funny how the moment real progress is made on trying to give anyone other than males a hand up, they start crying like babies about how they're not getting enough attention. Meanwhile, those same men are literally stripping away women's rights to their own body.
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This doesn’t happen in real life, outside. This happens on Twitter. I know it’s difficult to understand the difference for some people.
I have never had anyone tell me as a white male that I should be ashamed of myself, not least from the left.
What I have been recently is very impressed by female talent in all sorts of industries, which makes me ponder how much we've lost holding them back all this time.
Likely because you’ve sheltered yourself from it. I have been told on HN even that I’m privileged (implying I should be ashamed or aware of such privilege). Also all that recently about how racism is alive and well and it’s our fault.
If you are a white male (I am) then you almost certainly ARE privileged at some level and imo should be aware of that.
This is a completely separate matter from being ashamed of said privilege (I don't think this is reasonable or productive), or being held responsible for racism in general (obviously ridiculous unless you are right now a bona fide racist). But that level of nuance doesn't fit neatly in a 30 second inflammatory commercial.
yea see you doubled down.
i’m a military veteran from a poor family with no college degree and have made my own way my entire life.
we are done with identity politics. keep it up and be left behind.
Who's done with it? The right? because no one loves identity politics more than them. Every single word that comes out of trumps mouth is about someones identity.
"done with identity politics"
"military veteran from a poor family with no college degree"
okaaaay.
I'm an informed, white, male Democrat and I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
It’s not always in the news but I’ll share an article by a democrat that summarizes a lot of the positions: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ideas-that-are-resh...
those opinions (your privileged) become “shut up” and “you should be ashamed” in public discourse (I’ve seen it)
Your welcome to search for the reverse racism and DEI lawsuits if you think this does not impact people in practice
That's a random journalist, what the hell does he have to do with the democratic party and "the left"?
Another ad hominem attack vs addressing substance
Because to them people on Twitter and the DNC are the same thing.
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> Most men care.
I don't think so, caring means doing something about it, if men weren't deeply misogynistic there would have been a woman president decades before. The behavior of men is not surprising however and is expected.
What is shocking is half the women in this country also don't care about their own interests either.
It is one thing for immigrants or working class to be voting against their own interests, economic and border policies are abstract and people historically have failed to attribute links to the administration responsible. Abortion is not abstract however, the linkage to right-wing policy is straightforward.
I'm not American, and we've had a female president. Clearly we're not misogynistic over here, then. Maybe it's something in the water.
> What is shocking is half the women in this country also don't care about their own interests either.
Aren't you just assuming for women to care about just one political issue here?...
It is not abstract political issue like the economy or immigration.
Every woman between 18(and sadly lot younger but they cannot vote ) and 45 is affected directly personally by reproductive healthcare . It is an issue they get reminded about every month physically.
—-
Electing women heads of state , is an exceptionally low bar on misogyny scale, that only the Middle East, lesser developed parts of Africa and United States have in common .
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_and_appointe...
Even non Middle Eastern Islamic countries like Pakistan or Bangladesh where stoning for accusations of adultery is still a thing have democratically elected women leaders .
——
People aren’t voting for trump for his policies, neither he nor his supporters can articulate what they clearly.
2016 was explained about how it was an anti-establishment vote , Hillary had baggage .
2024 the discourse is already it the economy
record numbers voted for him in 2020 when he had the by far worst possible economy of any president ever. Biden only scrapped through by thinnest of margins .
It is disingenuous to then argue that people were smart enough to understand the reason behind the economy then , but cannot comprehend the economic consequences of 2020 policies and the trends of today to attribute to Biden .
It is always something else, we should own who we are as a society.
Or maybe she was a bad candidate?
Who in their right mind votes based on the sexual organs a person has?
So many times I have seen women say "we aren't ready for a woman president, they're too hysterical"
The misogyny is so deep that women experience it from other women.
many women I asked are absolutely ready, but every single one of them were depressed at the idea of Harris being the first. given she can’t put a sentence together they didn’t want the shame.
When there are life or death issues at stake regarding those organs , which organs they have absolutely warrants consideration
>Well, can you think of any reason why those young women didn't want to consider and understand the "opposing view"?
Sure - but we're talking about pragmatic considerations. In hindsight, preservation or expansion of abortion rights was not enough to get men to turn out to vote for Harris in sufficient numbers to swing the election, so another kind of message should have been crafted for that voting block.
> Sure - but we're talking about pragmatic considerations. In hindsight, preservation or expansion of abortion rights was not enough to get men to turn out to vote for Harris in sufficient numbers to swing the election, so another kind of message should have been crafted for that voting block.
My stomach dropped when I heard a young men claim that Trump would be better because of his economic policies. To which I reply which ones? Followed by stumbling silence.
This is a young university educated 25 year old men raised in a Social Democrat European developed nation, claiming that Donald Trump would serve American interest and a world economy the best. We are absolutely underestimating the effect of people's world view being shaped by information wars on social media.
Adam Curtis 'Hypernormalisation' now feels like a Nostradamus level prediction of the decades to come.
Crazy idea, if you’re confused and can’t figure out why the brain washing didn’t hold then maybe they’re seeing something you don’t? Maybe you’re wrong?
Not confused. Perhaps impressed, surprised, worried.
Surkov will be proud I guess.
Yea look more into the Russian disnfo BS. The campaign has been running likely since before you were born and the intent is to destabilize the country not pick a particular candidate. If you pay attention to the flip flopping from them you’d notice the same.
> the intent is to destabilize the country not pick a particular candidate.
Him being a rapist and pedophile should be enough for men not to endorse him. They’ll put “shoot your local pedophile” decals on their trucks then go and vote for a notorious pedophile. Therefore supporting pedophilia. It’s such a weird cognitive dissonance thing I can’t wrap my head around. Implicitly or explicitly supporting a pedophile is a no go for me one and done.
The idea that there are only two "opposing views" and we must choose one of them is kind of the entire issue here imho.
That's what you get when you stick with a voting system that has been obsolete for a century.
Well, this is why I've voted third party for every election I've ever participated in.
That’s not going to work, but at least you’re sticking to your principles. We need to abolish political parties altogether. I’ve been trying to get traction on this for years with no luck.
Us third party voters need to work together for change to the voting system, no matter how different our politics might be from one another. In fact, us working together despite our different politics would underline our point: democracy is about everyone having their say, not about agreement.
>For literally anyone sane, any of those reasons individually would be totally disqualifying in a candidate
Sorry, but this is not how it works.
People have fear, prejudice and many other things that worry them. Their fear may or may not be baseless but it is there and if you are sane and more or less logical you have to take it into account.
When people fear or do not understand something they tend to turn to someone who offers them a solution.
Some times it's a doctor, some times it's a drug dealer. Why? Well, many reasons (I'll excuse myself and won't start listing those because you can write a few books about each of them)
You want people to stop turning to mafia\drug dealers or some kind of charlatans for help? You have to do something about their fears.
This is sane and logical and any therapist will tell you something similar.
Yes, it might be hard to accept, but it is quite possible you have to fix this shit to be able to fix the "their rights are literally being stripped away" part.
edit: misprints
> abortion restrictions have resulted in women dying of preventable reasons because doctors are afraid to do anything which might be interpreted as an abortion, even if the pregnant woman is dying in front of them from sepsis due to an unviable pregnancy; add in the threat of removing non-fault divorces, and it's genuinely scary
I'm pro-choice, but this idea that pro-life opinions are not equally popular with women is just wrong and not support by polling on the subject. I'm more pro-choice than my GF.
> convicted rapist
nope, misinformation (which why? it’s his last term..). he was NOT convicted of rape and instead of a LESSER crime called sexual abuse.
> Well, can you think of any reason why those young women didn't want to consider and understand the "opposing view"?
consider and understand =/= agree and support. Regardless of the Harris' or Dems' views, you win elections by getting votes. If we assume everyone who voted for Trump is a sexist asshole, then Harris was running for president in a country where half the electorate are sexist assholes. If you're not gonna extend empathy and try to build bridges with them, then there's no point in running.
Can you clarify what rights are being stripped away from women?
It’s right there in the last paragraph of the comment you’re replying to.
I mean take your pick: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/women-paid-price-tr... or just listen to his words... "I'm going to do it, whether the women like it or not".
I did in my comment already.
Abortion restrictions are being implemented, which result in women being forced to carry feti which can be unviable (literally killing them), from rape or incest. Even if you don't believe women have the right to choose for themselves if they want to carry to term (I do, it's about bodily autonomy way before there's any other life in the consideration), this is egregious. Again, women are literally dying in hospitals because doctors don't want to save them out of fear of performing something which might be an abortion. This has happened in Poland, and in the US, and it will happen again.
The Supreme Court, majority appointed by Trump and similarly minded individuals, has already questioned no fault divorces and interracial marriage too.
Project 2025, sponsored by a big conservative think thank which is supporting Trump, and on whose support Trump relies (he has appointed lots of judges vetted by them, so to think they're not related is naive and delusional ), is against no fault divorces.
Most divorces are initiated by women. Most victims of domestic violence are women.
If that's not enough for you as stripping of rights, I don't know what will be. And I'm not a woman, nor American - I care because I'm capable of empathy, which seems to be a foreign concept to many Americans.
> Most divorces are initiated by women.
No having non-fault divorce doesn't stop divorces if you have an actual reason for it, a "fault" that caused the divorce if you will: Domestic abuse, cheating, abandonment, etc. Considering that men often lose the most in a divorce but don't initiate divorces indicates that women have a privilege here.
Marriage rates aren't only decreasing because of anti-social people: many men are starting to view marriage as a legal institution which benefits women exclusively - allowing them to extract resources from a man with the backing of the state and very little effort.
> Most victims of domestic violence are women.
Most reported victims of domestic violence are women. If you take into account unreported domestic violence, emotional abuse, and non-deadly domestic violence men are actually ahead of women in this particular stage of the oppression olympics.
Maybe if you could share some of that empathy with the men affected by these laws you'd see why they get pushed through, and why women also support them.
> Considering that men often lose the most in a divorce but don't initiate divorces indicates that women have a privilege here.
Or men don't initiate divorces because they have the most to lose?
> Most reported victims of domestic violence are women. If you take into account unreported domestic violence, emotional abuse, and non-deadly domestic violence men are actually ahead of women in this particular stage of the oppression olympics.
You can't make a claim like that without even a hint of a source. Yes, most female on male domestic violence and abuse goes unreported and hell, many men get mocked for "letting a woman do that to them". It's of course horrific. Is there any indication this is happening at a rate similar to or higher than domestic violence against women? I have never seen any, but feel free to share.
> Maybe if you could share some of that empathy with the men affected by these laws you'd see why they get pushed through,
Which laws?!
>I care because I'm capable of empathy
Women are a reactionary element for a reason. Now they've finally been pushed to radical extremes and you see this as a bad thing?
> doctors don't want to save them out of fear of performing
then perhaps they should leave the profession if they’re so unsure of themselves. they’re supposed to be among some of the most educated people in society and they can’t read and understand a law? or hire a lawyer?
also have you asked the women what they want? because my wife for instance is against abortion. both of my sisters as well.
> they’re supposed to be among some of the most educated people in society and they can’t read and understand a law? or hire a lawyer?
Yes, that's the biggest concern for a (probably overworked) doctor, read laws and hire lawyers to make sure if they're allowed to perform a medical procedure.
> also have you asked the women what they want? because my wife for instance is against abortion. both of my sisters as well.
And I hope neither of them is dying while pregnant, willingly or not, and the doctor has to chose before doing the right thing and going to prison. If all three of them cannot realise this and why it's important to have a fucking say on the matter, they're either absurdly dumb or absurdly heartless. If they're willing to let women die of sepsis or be forced to give birth to unviable feti because they think their version of a diety tells them so, there is something wrong with them. (And I'm wording this as politely as I can, believe in whatever shit you want, but if your shit means letting people die of preventable causes because of your beliefs, you're a terrible person)
they are required to follow laws in their normal every day job. for instance they must also be concerned when they prescribe narcotics or other controlled substances but that doesn’t paralyze them.
so again, if they can’t handle the job and know when it’s appropriate to give an abortion and when it isn’t then they need to quit.
The myopia here is crazy. As though the dems and their candidates aren't equally bad - except all of their actions are against young men rather than women.
Also what rights are on the line here exactly? Free speech? no, thats what the dems have been attacking. Suffrage? Nope no one is trying to remove this. Even if you want to say "Roe v Wade": it's not a right to get an abortion, and its not even banned just not regulated at a federal level.
I like that anger! Now that you can't postpone the inevitable, maybe you'll actually have to do something about it instead of wasting your time and energy whining about it.
I, thankfully, don't live in the US. I know women who do, and they're terrified. What do you want them to do, mount an armed insurrection? Murder Trump? Firebomb the Republican-majority Capitol?
What do you want them to do, have a panic attack and kill themselves? It seems that I have more hope in women's collective power than you do.
um…you think it’s smart so say such things?
i live in the US and i don’t see any terrified women. please stop speaking for our country thanks.
This comment is disgusting. Voting is what they did about it, and they still have their rights at risk.
Turns out voting is not enough! Damn, if only those Black Panthers got out to vote, we would've fixed racism in America. Shame.
Maybe they should simply refuse to give up power like your candidate did the last time no?
Because that’s what happened. We didn’t just finish a Biden presidency did we?
The left can’t admit they’re continue not understanding voter IDs, it doesn’t mean we’re going to shut up until they’re implemented nationwide.
You're on to something. I think Scott Galloway got it right in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzLmznS91kM
The Democratic party has a problem communicating to young white men why they should vote democrat. The party doesn't speak to them at all. I don't think there's much wrong with the policies. It could perhaps use some more policies targeting men's rights. But it's mostly a communication problem. Young men don't feel seen by the democratic party, and the democrats need to realize this and fix it for the next election.
Looking from afar, the dominating far left elements of the DNC have been actively hostile to unmarried white men, and completely disconnected from young men (who don't fit into a very narrow mold of acceptability) in general.
> actively hostile to unmarried white men
Feel free to name these policies you think are specifically hostile to white men.
Today men represent 42% of 4 year college students. The gap between men and women enrolled in 4 year college is higher than it was before Title IX was enacted, but in the opposite direction this time. Wages are falling far behind inflation, and home ownership feels entirely out of reach for most young people due to skyrocketing housing prices. Additionally young people are more single and lonely than ever. Most of these issues do not exclusively affect men, but there are lots (millions) of young men who are unsure if they will ever be able to find a partner, own a home, and work a job that can help support a family. There's a reason toxic hyper-masculine, conservative influences have grown hugely in popularity; they are tapping into these insecurities a lot of young men are facing. Only Republicans are bothering to address this demographic with claims about how they're going to help them start their own business, improve own a home, make a decent living, etc.
Telling young men today that they actually shouldn't care about any of these things because they had it so good 60 years ago has done nothing but alienate people who might otherwise have supported Democrats.
Well I'm just glad so many men will be happy and feel in control of their own lives now!
have you gotten the impression that this tactic doesn’t work or you need more time?
White men were the peak of society. Every policy, improvising the rights of all other people, especially women, is chipping away from their Throne. Naturally, some will see this as a threat and a loss, especially when you are regularly feed with misinformation. That society as a whole is becoming better, doesn't help the groups who are losing from it. And this is showing for a while now.
> White men were the peak of society.
Most white men are not at the peak of society. When they are told how good they have it, they think about how their paycheck barely/doesn't cover their needs, or the needs of his family. They think about how long their car will last before breaking down. They think about the amount of crime in their neighborhood. And then they are told that this is the good life? And they discover that the government is giving people who just got here handouts (which is made from their taxes, money that could have improved their own lives)? They won't stand for it.
> Most white men are not at the peak of society.
Today. This was different 60 years ago. This is different today in more conservative countries. At least that is the perception of those people.
> When they are told how good they have it, they think about how their paycheck barely/doesn't cover their needs, or the needs of his family. They think about how long their car will last before breaking down.
Everyone has those problems, it's not limited to men or white people.
> And they discover that the government is giving people who just got here handouts
And here we have the prime example of manipulation. The reason why all those young men fall to this delusion.
You'll be waiting a long while, unmarried white women are too busy having their body autonomy taken away. Poor men.
The sad thing is that there isn't anything "left" in that "far left". It's just misandry without the socialism.
The sad thing is calling anything in the Democrat party 'left'. Historically, right means pro-power, pro status quo, and left pro reform and pro-distribution of power. At first it was political, then it was more generalized (far right is getting back to full monarchy/empire/whatever, basically going back in time).
Do the Democrat seems left to you?
It actually mirrors what is happening in South Korea.
Women are becoming more liberal as they push for equality and bodily autonomy. Men are becoming more conservative because they feel that women's rights are coming at the expense of theirs and that no one is addressing their concerns.
And so there is a large cultural and political divide.
Which then has all sorts of side effects e.g. men becoming more 'incel' in their behaviour because women aren't interested in dating them, birth rate dropping because woman don't want to be stay at home moms etc.
What's missing is that men in South Korea are expected to spend 2 to 3 years of their life in the army. This was a reasonable tradeoff when women would spend as much time being pregnant - I risk my life to protect you, you risk yours to give me something to protect.
At this point with how quickly South Korea is falling apart socially the young men may well welcome an invasion by the North since they have nothing to fight for - what happens if we have a war and we don't show up?
So many people forget that men are expected to fight wars or register to be drafted on the sole basis of being born male. Many are circumcised for the same reason (born male). Where is our bodily autonomy? Where is our choice?
That is a horrific and dystopian trade-off.
Pretty sure most women would just prefer to fight than be forced to carry a pregnancy.
>Pretty sure most women would just prefer to fight than be forced to carry a pregnancy.
And people get upset when liberals are called a death cult.
When she deliberately chose not to go on Joe Rogan was where I started to seriously doubt her chances.
It was all Beyonce, Michelle Obama and Taylor Swift.
You can say everything you want about Rogan, but I still really, really wish she'd done one interview with him.
There will be a lot of second-guessing for what she should have done. The fact is they need to nominate candidates who would do well in such a situation and it's not clear that she would have. I think Walz would have done well on Rogan, not sure he didn't do it.
Galloway has been harping on this for awhile. Check the Democrats website and it lists who they are for. All groups are there including women, but nothing about men or young men. I heard a blurb on the news last night that college aged men broke heavily towards Trump.
The "tolerant" left has become the intolerant blind block I've been raised to fear the far right for. As a typical European middle-aged (I guess) male, mostly apolitical, I don't really feel anybody speaks for me anymore. The failure of the left is what is driving the growth of the right, by losing those people who very much were reaching out to minorities, female and other "left" interests. Tune out the radicals and work with the "sensible" people in the middle, and that goes for both left and right...
Why are we letting pure simplistic tribal emotion take over in this age of science and rationality?...
> they were just pushing "get out the vote" but no substantial reasons as to why.
That's the focus of any canvasser, not just the young women you did not like.
It’s a waste of time for canvassers to try to change anyone’s position; people’s political positions come from their lived experiences.
Canvassing is all about ensuring that the people who already agree with your position know how to express that on the ballot, and do.
Curious what you mean by benefitting directly from the economic status quo? Non-American here
Roughly half of Gen Z men believe men face anti-male discrimination at the hands of feminists, and a quarter say they experienced it directly themselves. That's a huge number and the latter number can only go upwards by the nature of the question. The numbers are also rising very fast. The primary place they experience that discrimination is their workplace or university, i.e. places that affect their economic wellbeing.
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/why-young-me...
Nearly one in four Gen Z men say they have experienced discrimination or were subject to mistreatment simply because they were men, a rate far greater than older men.
In 2019, less than one-third of young men reported that men experienced some or a lot of discrimination in American society. Only four years later, close to half (45 percent) of young men now believe men are facing gender-based discrimination. For some young men, feminism has morphed from a commitment to gender equality to an ideology aimed at punishing men. That leads to predictable results, like half of men agreeing with the statement, “These days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.”
It has morphed. Or at least the algorithms are pushing militant feminism far more prominently nowadays.
All these guys see on their social feeds, day-in, day-out, is 'feminists' stating that all men are just rapists-in-waiting and how they should have their rights and/or autonomy restricted, or from the most extreme examples, be physically mutilated or outright murdered.
You don't have to look hard to find this stuff on social media, and once you do find it, that's all you'll ever be served.
I wonder what they perceive as "acting like man". I'm a 22yo guy and living in a sketchy area in italy I always have a friend who's a woman living near me that asks to walk her at home to feel more safe. That's something very manly indeed, and God if it's nice. Hell, one day I drove some burlesque performers home and when I saw one of them was scared I proposed to come at the door of her stay if she would have felt safer with me. That's again quite good for my perception of being a decent man, doing something that's tipically relegated to men.
I wonder what discrimination they face day to day, whether it is phisical or online
There are so many layers to your comment.
Aren’t you now asking yourself, “who are they scared of?”
Let the answer sink in.
I know what women are scared of in that area, God damn I'm autistic but not stupid. I'm slightly on the edge as well, that's understandable. What I'm trying to grasp, is how men perceive they're being discriminated against. If you feel like you're being discriminated because women are scared of men at night in a bad lit sketchy area, that's not discrimination, that's just survival instinct, and I have it too, be it some guy walking his dog on a leash or a woman in her fifties walking alone
>What I'm trying to grasp, is how men perceive they're being discriminated against
For example, there are scholarships and conferences specifically for women, even in spite of college numbers now drastically already favoring women.
I feel as though as a white male I am very heavily discriminated against in the academic job market. I'm certain that if I had a vagina, and all else were equal, I would have 1000x the job prospects in academia. No, I can't prove this, but I know a lot of other men feel the same way.
I created this throwaway account to answer your question because I'm afraid of potential future employers looking at my posting history and seeing the above comment, which I think would instantly disqualify me from the majority of US academic positions.
I showed this to a friend doing a PhD - in italy tho - and she laughed and shrugged saying that she's in academia not because she has a vagina but because she had the right recommendations from the right people
I think the academia world is broken not in the way you think it is
Although not in the US, she says that when doing something in the academia world being a man or a woman makes no difference (here)
> I wonder what they perceive as "acting like man".
As late as yesterday a woman I need to listen to had opinions on something as basic as how men are supposed to pee, telling that how most men feel comfortable peeing is wrong.
That is just one.
But I think it goes all the way from kindergarten up in some places.
All the opinions I've ever heard on how to do something we're mostly said by another men. I feel truly sorry for the men that have to endure this shit, many more times I was deemed gay (jokingly, of course, but still it happened) because I dressed with silk clothes or eclectic outfits (that aren't even so electing) or the way I behaved, and all this was said by friend who were guys as me (the type of guys that would joke about gays and trans and say they have no issues with them but then have to argue about the bathroom trans people use), yet it's silly to berate the entire man-slice of society for this. Stupid people are everywhere
Just the way it is. Most of the "growth" in the last 4 years went to top-wage earners; the bottom (that is, the majority of people) did not see their wages grow faster than inflation. The US has a very particular class of highly educated professionals who live in very specific neighbourhoods that tend to be fairly closed off socially from the rest of society; they have all benefitted tremendously from the Biden/Harris presidency and are her strongest supporters. On the other hand, many Americans who never went to college or never got a Bachelor's at least make much less money on average and have seen food prices and rents skyrocket over the last four years and if they had any savings they've essentially evaporated. These two groups of people don't generally talk to each other.
And those top-wage earners are college aged liberal women and not old rich conservative white dudes?
The old rich conservative dudes are the top brass and the incumbent but they often dont earn high wages, they exist outside the earning a living categories. Their income is gaining from their capital in ways that arent classed as income. The top of the upper middle classes are who he is talking about. The difference between the top middle classes and the bottom is larger than it has been for a while
Kind of? https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/28/young-wom...
They're both? But the upper-middle class is far larger than the legitimate bourgeoisie, so they're class interests count for a lot more in politics.
College aged women often benefit financially from old rich dudes.
How did these respective groups fare in the 4 years prior?
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If that happens then the economy will collapse since a large amount of the growth in 20th century was due to integrating women into the work force. All I see from the Trump campaign is a policy so chock full of contradictions it won't lead to anything but a political explosion. And then they'll be an opportunity for some real change.
If Musk runs the government the way he is running X, a political explosion is all but certain.
Yeah, what he doesn’t understand is that the government bureaucracy that’s been created is the only reason many of the departments of government work as _quickly_ as they do.
While we as engineers see what appear to be obvious slow inefficiencies (like: “I could build a system to replace all that the DMV does so people won’t need to sit in that waiting room!”) the reality is we don’t even understand all that the DMV does.
I feel that’s the trap Musk falls into, and it became blatantly obvious when he took over X.
Aside from liberals boycotting X for political reasons (a completely non-technical issue), technically the site seems to work perfectly fine even after Musk drastically reduced the bureaucracy behind it.
Most of the “bureaucracy” came from the non technical side.
Which is why X is under multiple investigations by the EU and advertisers have left the company in droves.
I’m boycotting X because I think Elon Musk is an ass and I don’t want to support him in any way. Twitter died to me when it became X and I’m totally fine with that.
X is a cesspool now anyways
Excellent
My mom canvassed for Harris in PA and she’s 64…
Nobody who has time to travel from all over the country to canvass needs to work everyday to support themselves and/or their families.
Very well said sir. They also don't understand the regular American. Who has to put food on the table without a college degree.
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As I understand it, in the US, "get out the vote" efforts don't count as campaigning, so they aren't subject to campaign finance laws. Attempting to persuade voters to vote for something or someone in particular, or even trying to understand their views, would likely put them in a different organizational category.
Do you see the irony of complaining about them not "understanding your views" while you generalize a huge swath of young women? And why the hold-up on them being women at all?
> they were just pushing "get out the vote" but no substantial reasons as to why
Perhaps. But that's not their fault. Anecdotally, 100% of my left leaning friends and colleagues were pro-Harris but with no reason other than "not Trump." That's not a "message" the undecided independents can believe in. Imagine Pepsi's key msg to be "not Coke".
Frank Luntz just said on ABC News that Harris began to lose ground ~6 wks ago when she resorted to name calling. Didn't HRC make the same mistake? How do undecided independents build trust in someone who was so guarded (e.g., zero press conferences)? And wastes time with name calling instead of hammering home her vision?
It's gonna be another four yrs of left-hate for Trump. The DNC leadership won't own their failure (again). The Harris campaign won't own their bad decisions. It'll all be Trump's fault.
Their incompetence is Trump's fault? That's lack of accountability isn't working. Again.
I dunno, seemed pretty obvious to me. I wanted Harris because I wanted her to finish what biden was doing, and keep people like Lina Khan in. I wanted to see more investment in infrastructure and all that jazz. Seems like a nobrainer.
You saw what you wanted to see, which is fine. However, for others her set of benefits wasn't as clear. For most, her closeness to Biden was a negative. For me her adverts were too abstract. "I'm going to stop the price gouging" but never said how.
I get it, her campaign didn't have a lot of time. That said, the DNC should have a pulse on what voters are looking for, etc. As it is, this is the third candidate handpicked by the DNC and 2 of 3 lost to an inexperienced politician. That's not the victor's fault. Tho I'm confident there will be little to no accountability owned by the DNC. It's going to be four more years of blame the winner.
"not Trump" basically worked for Biden in 2020. I don't think Harris lost by name calling. Name calling works great for Trump. She just wasn't that strong a candidate.
Well, given the fate of Clinton and Harris, it might be safe to say Biden got lucky using the tactic.
Luntz is widely respected as a political pollster. He said, the focus groups he worked with showed she lost momentum when the name-calling started. Is that why she lost? No, there were plenty of reasons. But if Luntz said that didnt' help then there's no reason to think otherwise.
> then they will have to learn to actually talk to people with opposing viewpoints
Why is there a different standard applied to one of the sides?
It's an observation on what it takes to win for this particular "side", not a moral comparison of the two.
Because OP is talking about the side that lost. If you want to win, you probably need to change. This isn't about standards, it's about what works.
Dems won't change their strategy and probably won't have to, because after Trump is past his term limit the Republican party will be back to offering up wet noodles like Jeb and Romney, who won't be able to persuade the working class to vote. Against weaker less charismatic opponents, the poor strategy of the DNC will matter far less.
And everything will continue to suck for the working class. Trump won't actually succeed in fixing much of anything for them, even if he tries, and nobody else is even going to pretend to care. The DNC will continue to be the party for yuppies that sneers at uneducated working men while the RNC takes off the mask stops pretending to care about anything besides the managerial class and Christian/Zionism issues.
Yes, wet noodles like JD Vance who completely wrecked Tim Walz in the debate.
That seems like a partisan take rather than an objective one.
I wouldn't say the BBC is partisan...They called it for Vance: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y0863ry88o
Overall though do agree it was a fairly close debate not particularly one-sided.
Will say if guys like Vance & DeSantis are the future of the GOP that a significant upgrade over Trump.
I still don't quite understand why DeSantis fared so poorly w/ the GOP for this election. He appears to be far more competent/palatable than Trump but here are.
DeSantis has made a few mistakes that have shaken previous supporters and infuriated others. I've mostly scratched my head at most if it, but one that I couldn't ignore was the adorable plot to turn our State Parks into sports facilities. I simply cannot trust or support anyone who views our priceless preserves as untapped resources in need of strip malls and golf courses. Florida is already at or past a sustainable threshold with the diseased variety of "progress" that prevails here.
For me, once we altogether lose the quintessence of this state (this isn't Disneyland or Lennar), it'll be little more than a Skinner Box with perennial cyclones, bad traffic and pestilence, surrounded by cement embellished views of red tide.
Nobody voted for Vance (or for vice presidents generally.) I've seen nothing to suggest he has the kind of popularity or RNC establishment support that would make him a viable presidential candidate. The only way he gets there is if Trump dies, which is possible but not relevant to the DNC's strategy for the next election.
Vance was pretty good at talking on Rogan.
What makes you sure the GOP will revert to the pre-2016 era? I believe that unless MAGA-style politics somehow gets repudiated before the general election in 2028, the future of the GOP is MAGA. The next presidential nominee will be in the mold of Trump, maybe less bombastic, but will follow similar policies on social and economic issues.
I think a fatal strategy for never-Trumpers is to assume that Trump and MAGA will go away. Every gaffe and every scandal seems to strengthen Trump. It hasn’t gone away, and we will have to live with the consequences. Perhaps a better strategy is to accept that the GOP these days is the MAGA party, and we need new strategies for competing in future elections.
> What makes you sure the GOP will revert to the pre-2016 era?
MAGA just lacks the charm without the Orange Man at the helm. Trump is mortal and his successors are lacking.
That said, the Chamber of Commerce Republicans will probably stay Democrat. It'd be at least 2033 before it's clear that MAGA only lasted with Trump leading.
Trump politics without a Trump personality doesn't work. The closest they'll get to emulating Trump is getting somebody like Jeb to awkwardly cuss a few times.
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The impeachments and conviction were perceived by his voters, rightly or wrongly, as cheap political acts done by a corrupt administration. And his opponent, elected in the primaries, was pulled away for actual dementia. If you want to win people over, this is the exact opposite of the way to do it.
So you don't have a way to win if you play by the rules, as long as you can make voters think that whatever you're doing is right and whatever the others are doing is wrong, am I right?
Like it or not, that's how politics works, stretching back millennia across many cultures.
That's like insulting millions of people. I don't think it's that. Trump has to have some appeal that rest of the world is missing. It's not possible to win otherwise.
From the (preliminary) numbers I'm seeing it looks like Democrat turnout dropped back to normal levels, while Republican and independents were higher.
It's not insulting millions, it's absolutely factual. All the comment you replied to was describing is Trump himself, and millions still voted for the guy. As to WHY they voted for him, I'm sure journalists/analysts/pundits will overflow us with reasons.
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Pedophile means to be attracted to girls that are pre puberty - not girls that are 50 yrs younger but still over 18.
Yeah, I don’t support Trump but calling him a pedophile is disingenuous. Calling him a name that hasn’t been proven just alienates people further. What we should be calling him is a convicted rapist, because he is literally a convicted rapist.
Not a convicted rapist either.
> The jury, which deliberated fewer than three hours, opted not to find Trump liable for rape but rather sexual abuse that injured Carroll.
Also civil case not criminal.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230512234952/https://www.usato...
Why not? I'd argue a racist or misogynist would make it worse for society than a pedophile (mainly because I think there is a very strong notion of protecting kids in society, but a less stronger notion when it comes to minority groups or women).
Do you think a president would make bad policy choices because they are secretly attracted to minors?
In this case, the pedophile is _also_ a racist, misogynistic, violent, person, but pop off.
wtf?
This is satire right?
The numbers shows the dems screwed this one up in the worst way possible from top to bottom.
I'm gonna be honest, this is much closer to the future that humanity deserves than the AI utopia many of you were dreaming of. Look at the entirety of human history and all the evil things people have done, and look at your own consumption of factory-farmed meat/dairy/eggs. Look at how few people donate kidneys (less than 0.1% in USA, and even lower in countries like Japan). And of course people would rather spend their 1st-world disposable income on enshitified creature-comforts than donate it; about $3500 is enough to save a kid's life from malaria, or go on a family vacation to Disney World.
People will say "I'd be a better person if only I were rich!", but predictably, the number of rich people willing to do those things is almost a rounding error.
>> I'm gonna be honest, this is much closer to the future that humanity deserves than the AI utopia many of you were dreaming of.
My diverse opinion: "this is much closer to the future that humanity deserves, the AI and surveillance dystopia we have been so intent on getting."
Children aren't dying of malaria due to lack of funds. They're dying due to terrible governments in those places. Unless you're advocating for regime change and colonization, no amount of money is going to fix that.
The data are unequivocal that liberal democracy, civil rights, and economic freedom lift people out of poverty, but this message is toxic in many parts of the world, and thus many countries live in unnecessary poverty, dependent upon donations from rich countries that follow the straightforwards, simple advice to be well off.
You can donate $3.5k to a relevant charity and save a kid's life.
Debating how much better things would be with better governments doesn't change that.
There's a moral calculus where you have to determine if the money is really going there and if any of the money is instead supporting a despotic regime. I don't disagree. I do donate to missions where I know the individuals personally.
Get off your high horse. Humanity has been like this since the beginning and we’ve made it quite far. Have some humility and entertain the possibility that you’re wrong.
"Humanity has been like this since the beginning and we’ve made it quite far." Agreed, we've made it all the way to the precipice of nuclear annihilation by Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, or Xi. Kim could probably get it started too.
"entertain the possibility that you’re wrong" I would absolutely love for the world to prove me wrong.
I find it ironic that the word capitalism appears only 13 times in this thread, which has 7112 comments at the time of posting. This isn’t surprising, though, given how unpopular the topic of class warfare is in the USA.
Regardless of who you vote for, many would argue that a lot of the USA’s (and most countries nowadays, really) socioeconomic issues stem from unregulated capitalism, which -- quite simply -- prioritizes profit over people.
Well.. the last time he won, many people were literally expecting a nuclear holocaust. I remember a season of American Horror Story where the main part of the premise was that Trump became president.
We survived the first time?
I want to believe that somehow having Musk involved will help? I think there are a few people who feel encouraged by that based on how effective some of his companies are, and others think he will just call in a political favor for his own profit.
There seem to be two alternate realities. Either we are on the brink of a horrific fascist cyberpunk dystopia, or we have dealt a massive blow to the war-profiteering drug-profiteering establishment.
I don't think either is the real world, but the extreme divergence in predictions is confusing. I dislike this guy quite a lot but I also don't think the Democrats are trustworthy or honest.
There's two alternate fantasies and they are both increasingly detached from reality.
In reality, the war and drug profitiers will be fine and the facist cyberpunk dystopia is still approaching at roughly the same speed.
If this is what America wants, then it is what America deserves.
Political parties and candidates may sway the public one way or another, perhaps even deceive them. But in the end, it is the populace that ultimately decides.
The first time may have been a mistake, but the second time is a definite intentional.
I'm just not sure if the world deserves this.
The man was given the choice of what to eat: manchineel bark or feces. The man made a choice. “Ah”, said the offerer of two choices: then that is what you deserve.
Don't worry, in 2028, you won't even have any choice, you will be force-fed forever and there will be only one thing on the menu
I'm a little bewildered by this sort of prediction. How will you update your priors in 2028 when this doesn't happen? What will be the excuse for why this didn't happen?
I dunno, to quote the new top dog "in four years, you won't have to vote again"
I'd say if it doesn't happen he failed to deliver on an election promise.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tells-christians-they...
This is just taken wildly out of context. And that’s coming from me, who can’t stand DJT. You’re literally fishing for a retort that doesn’t even make sense.
I am having a heard time reading his exact words and understanding them to mean something else. When he says to 'my beautiful Christians' that in four years you won't have to vote again, what is he trying to say? What is the missing context?
The full quote being:
> "in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote."
One can reasonably interpret that as meaning that in the next 4 years, Trump and his party are going to fix the country so much and so well that Christians won't have to go out to vote next time.
Not only is that the most reasonable interpretation of the words, it's the one he explicitly gave when asked [0]. The only way to arrive at the alternate interpretation is to be coming from a place where you already assume Trump is a threat to democracy.
I think there are reasons to have arrived at that place (Jan 6th), but this quote is not evidence for it unless wildly misinterpreted.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/30/dona...
> where you already assume Trump is a threat to democracy
You know, the people who see him as a threat to democracy are not just putting words in his mouth. Maybe they just listen to what he says, and believe him. Is that unreasonable?
Well we've already covered one quote that was grossly misinterpreted. What others have you got that implies he's a threat to democracy in America?
The only people arguing it was misinterpreted are people who support him. Not by providing any context that actually supports it meaning something different.
How about the innumerable times he claimed the election was rigged despite lacking any evidence to support it? Does denying that free and fair elections exist not count pretty specifically as being a threat to democracy?
I totally get that he has an artful way of making alarming statements over and over, but doing it with just a hint of humor, so that his supporters can claim it was all just a joke. In your view, at what point do we get to take a politician at their word?
> The only people arguing it was misinterpreted are people who support him.
Bullshit. I'm as anti-Trump as they come, but I don't let that blind me to reality. What he meant is obvious to anyone who isn't already looking for proof of their preconceived ideas.
I'm not even arguing that he's not a major threat to democracy—I think he is! I disagree that that quote is useful as evidence of that fact, and I disagree with the tactic that the left intentionally adopted of twisting the truth to make a point. People saw through that tactic and it contributed to Trump's victory.
The facts about Trump are scary enough, there was no need to twist his words.
Everything he said and continues to say about the 2020 election, and the attempts he made to overturn said election
Makes me feel like I'm on crazy pills that this guy was electable after this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_memos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_...
What you are doing has a name these days, they call it sanewashing. Had Harris or Biden said anything even close to trumps comments the maga crowd would have yelled bloody murder, but somehow for trump everything is excusable and can be explained away.
So the most favorable interpretation of his words is that his supporters are delusional? What is their interpretation of "fix the country"? Because if it does not involve changing the constitution (a very tall order) then every single thing he does can be undone with the same effort by the next democratic president. Surely these people know that, right? How could they possibly believe that he will magically "fix the country" so they don't have to vote any more, unless they anticipate that he means something permanent?
Because they don’t take things so literally.
I’m not trying to be flippant, that’s genuinely the answer to your question. Trump is literally being dramatic and funny by putting it like that. And you’re taking the bait and missing the joke.
I know I sound like the enemy and I dislike including this paragraph: But keep in mind, I can’t stand Donald Trump and didn’t vote for him.
Come on. We all know Trump effing talks weird, that's just part of his weird personality that no one likes. I don't like it, think it's confusing and winding around requiring much mental parsing to understand even for normal stories/sentences. But to take this tiny little sentence as definitive proof of some giant plan that's coming to end democracy is just... mental gymnastics in search of meaning for a narrative that they've already decided it means.
Here is the Full quote so everyone can see it. He even explains in the end what he means.
> "And again, Christians: Get out and vote! Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians, I love you Christians, I'm not Christian, I love you, get out, you gotta get and vote. In four years you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not gonna have to vote."
From Snopes:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vote-four-years/
I'm just listening to his words and assuming he means what he says. He is either insulting his followers, or he is telling them he will "fix" the country in such a way that they won't have to vote any more. You can interpret this to mean he will try to subvert the electoral result again, or you can interpret it to mean that he plans to make some kind of permanent change so that christian voters will no longer be required to vote to achieve their goals.
Which is it?
> I'm just listening to his words and assuming he means what he says.
That's not how language works. There's a whole field of linguistics called pragmatics that is about how context contributes to meaning [0].
You're taking a few seconds of his words, joining them to all of your priors, and interpreting them in that context.
His original listeners were taking his words in the context of the whole speech, joining them to their priors, and interpreting them in that context.
It's entirely expected that your interpretation would be different than theirs given that disconnect, and the most reliable way to interpret meaning is to look at who the audience was and how they would have interpreted it, because the speaker chose their words for that context, not for yours.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics
Okay, I'll bite. You make a plausible point. Now tell me, what did his supporters think he meant?
Exactly what he said he meant [0]:
> It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.
Basically "the country is screwed up right now because ${reasons}, if you get out and vote I'll fix it for you for good and you can go back to not voting again". It's more or less the same line that politicians say every election to try to motivate the less-likely-voters in their base, just said in Trump's classic meandering way and with explicit permission to vote only this once if you want.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/30/dona...
So a couple untruths, and something ambiguous. Evangelicals have been a key voting bloc for years (I don't want to say Christians, because there are a huge number of Christian democrats too). If anything they're key to GOP success in the recent past.
But you kinda skipped past what I was asking. How and what do those voters think he was going to fix for good? And do they perceive themselves as being politically inactive except for just this once?
It sounds like you're just giving him a pass because hey, all politicians lie to get people to vote. At that point, why do we even care what a politician says, whether we agree with them or not?
I'm a "supporter" and I know exactly what he means. Means he'll fix all the voting shenanigans so that illegals can't vote and so that democrats can't "rig" and stack the election like last time. See? Not so much a hateful whistle as it is understanding your supporters, what's important to them, and appealing to that with your own words.
Thank you for the actually plausible explanation.
It does not even matter than there was no rigging, no illegals voting, no shenanigans. The truth has never been an effective counter to rhetoric, I get that. But it's an entirely plausible explanation for what a supporter would think.
But after yesterday, maybe we will all agree together than the elections are rigged? ;-). You guys can't put that genie back in the bottle. Everyone thinks it's totally cool until the other side uses it right back.
We’ll have it fixed so good could mean the system will be fixed, as in rigged. You are sanewashing the words of an unstable man
the missing context is that the Christian groups he was speaking to typically have low turn out/don't often come out to vote. He's asking them to please come out to vote, it's important this time. It's exactly the same rhetoric democrats use "this is the most important election, you really need to vote this time, this time it really matters"
“You know, FDR 16 years – almost 16 years – he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/19/trum...
he has vowed to be dictator on day one
https://apnews.com/article/trump-hannity-dictator-authoritar...
On February 27th-the Reichstag in Berlin was set on fire. 4 weeks before, Hitler was appointed to chancellor. Hitler placed an urgency regulation to ban all political activities. He destroyed democracy in one month. Trump can now do it one day.
he is definitely signaling something, whether it will come true or not is another question.
That will never happen because there are too many other power-hungry people in the GOP who are not going to just let Trump sit in the White House indefinitely, if for no other reason.
He's 78. I think there would be plenty of people willing to enable him to sit on his throne indefinitely because they know that's really only ten years or so at best. And then, once he's gotten it warmed up and did the hard job of making it the norm, they get to take his place.
Well said.
That is the same kind of thing people have been saying since the day he rode the escalator down. Ten years later, why does this argument still get made? Trump has power for one reason, and one reason only -- because enough voters love him. Many people on the conservative side loathe him and want nothing more than to see him gone, but they kiss his ass and fawn over him anyway, because why? The voters love him, and hate anyone who does not kiss the ring. Over and over and over this plays out.
If Trump wants to stay in office after this term is finished, all that matters are what the voters think. The supreme court will likely side with him and find an interpretation of the constitution that makes it work. But even if they don't, so what? The court doesn't have an army. Even if they did, if the voters want a king, that is what they will get. The republic is a reflection of our collective will and we can destroy it if we so choose.
Are you sure you know exactly what he meant by that?
That was the line the news media took for the first year or two - "we can't read his mind, so we can't call it a lie!" It's a mistake not to at least credit his own words and the logical conclusions they result in.
https://apnews.com/general-news-domestic-news-domestic-news-...
Exactly how many times can "nah you're not getting what he meant" be repeated? Is anything he says anything he means?
As many times as people deliberately twist his words to mean something different than he meant?
I despise Trump, but it's really disheartening to see how the elite doesn't realize that they actually lost the election in part because they lost credibility by fighting dirty. The ends do not justify the means, and the means were deliberate distortions, out of context quotes, and politically-motivated prosecutions.
I held my nose and voted KH because I think Trump actually managed to be even worse, but I can hardly fault other voters for deciding that the Democrats had it coming to them after all the intentional distortions.
How is it twisting words when the context is Trump refusing to say he will accept the results of the election every time he's asked, "joking" about staying more than two terms, and actually trying to overthrow the Republic on Jan 6th?
I'm a citizen of a country where the authoritarian leader captured the state and mostly destroyed democracy. So we managed to find out whether he was a danger to democracy or not (he was). What sucks, is that when it is proved, then there is already too late to do anything about it (because by definition you can not send them away in an election). So my 2 cents: if there are any signs that someone is a risk to democracy, it is better be safe than sorry, and just choose a different candidate. Everything else can be corrected in the next election, but not this.
> if there are any signs that someone is a risk to democracy
All due respect, I'm curious as to what these signs actually are for Trump. Everything I've seen and heard has been horrifyingly taken out of context -- "dictator on day one" and "you won't need to vote in four years" and "he'll prosecute his political enemies", or exaggerated past the point of recognition, like "he tried to steal an election" or "he wants to put journalists in jail".
Under the Biden administration, we have seen actual criminal charges against Trump. Not theoretical, not threats, not innuendo, but actual criminal charges for trivial administrative offenses. We have seen extensive media collaboration with the administration (and the opposition when Trump was in office) in an attempt to distort Trump's words to portray him as being dangerous.
I do not agree that the US, under Harris or Trump, is at any risk of becoming an authoritarian nation. The "signs" here from both sides are all imaginary trivial things and political rhetoric. But if the watchword is "any signs" then I've got to say that I don't see how you can vote for anyone but Trump.
My forlorn hope is that people who think that Trump represents a threat of authoritarian backsliding can, in four years, revisit their assumptions and realize that the markers they have chosen to represent that threat are all wrong. They're just incorrect. Update your priors.
The most important sign is that he already tried to keep the power when he lost last time. And he still does not accept that he lost. This alone is more than enough reason to never vote for him.
It's insane, exactly the same slippery slope fallacy as "the left want to make your kids gay", people completely lost their mind on both side of the spectrum
What was insane was Jan 6th. Both sides are not the same.
He literally attempted a coup, it's pretty amazing people are still trying to act like this is exaggeration or unreasonable.
It's not guaranteed, no, and I sincerely doubt we are going to see Trump literally cancel elections, but it's a very reasonable assumption that they are going to do what they've said they'll do and tried to do: install judges that will swing things their ways, suppress voters who don't support them, punish anyone who opposes them, inspire and promote political violence against anyone who opposes them, and gerrymander as much as possible. That's enough to functionally end US democracy if they do it well.
That's not some wild prediction or unlikely outcome, it's the logical continuation of their previous actions. Someone attempting something they tried before isn't unexpected. He actively tried to subvert democracy and the public have rewarded him, why would he not?
> He actively tried to subvert democracy and the public have rewarded him, why would he not?
That's the key observation.
> I sincerely doubt we are going to see Trump literally cancel elections
The logical path here is for red states to cancel elections and appoint electors to send in January 2029. The feds cannot do it themselves, but they do not need to.
The elections clause of the constitution does not apply to presidential elections, and all the constitution says about that is that the states may choose how to appoint electors, as long as it all happens on the same day.
The USA uses a gerrymandered, two-party, first-past-the-post system with electoral college to boot. I for one would stop short from calling that a system that accurately reflects the will of the populace.
I agree but in this case he won the popular vote and took the senate and house taboot.
Where is any evidence he actually attempted a coup?
Here is evidence he told the protestors to be peaceful: https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1346912780700577792
He never said "Storm the Capitol!!" or anything like that.
It's a fact he attempted a coup, the evidence is in the public record, the Trump–Raffensperger phone call was literally recorded and we have it. He was calling around everyone certifying the results pressuring them not to do so, and asking people to "find votes" for him. The mob storming the capital was a part of the whole, not the coup in its entirety, focusing on it as though it was the whole thing is absurdly misleading.
A big problem in general is that most people who do not oppose Trump have grown a little inoculated against accusations about his behavior. The first time I was exposed to a misleading Trump meme (the "fine people" comment) and I did the research to see what he said, I was astonished to find that the meaning of this statement had been distorted beyond all possible recognition.
After a couple more of these, my priors switched -- I assume that accusations about Trump are always misleading unless I get the full context.
The Raffensperger call seemed pretty bad from the descriptions, even by Trump standards, so I went and listened to it and read the transcript. I was unsurprised to find that the portrayal of it, as "find me votes" meaning "create fake ballots to elect me" is entirely inaccurate. Yes, he did offer a number of bizarre conspiracy theories about why the election outcome was fraudulent, and Raffensperger did an excellent job, for each one, of both acknowledging the theory and showing that he had taken it seriously and investigated and found no evidence or outright disproven it. The call ended not with Trump saying "make up those votes or else" but with Trump saying, essentially "I'll follow up with more evidence for voter fraud".
If you have listened to the call or read the transcript and come away thinking "wow, Trump really tried to rig the election" then I don't know what to tell you. It's just plainly obvious that he did not do that, and I struggle to even comprehend how that could be a reasonable conclusion.
> If you have listened to the call or read the transcript and come away thinking "wow, Trump really tried to rig the election" then I don't know what to tell you. It's just plainly obvious that he did not do that, and I struggle to even comprehend how that could be a reasonable conclusion.
This is probably just sea-lioning, but I went back to re-read that transcript on the chance that this was an earnest comment and my previous view was colored.
There is no other way to read this transcript than Trump trying to strong-arm them into refusing to certify the election results. He says "find me this number of votes" multiple times, and the direct context was "you're facing criminal charges for this if you don't do as I am saying".
Here's a few of the relevant snippets, with context, for anyone reading this far:
---- > Trump: But I won’t … this is never … this is … We have some incredible talent said they’ve never seen anything … Now the problem is they need more time for the big numbers. But they’re very substantial numbers. But I think you’re going to find that they — by the way, a little information, I think you’re going to find that they are shredding ballots because they have to get rid of the ballots because the ballots are unsigned. The ballots are corrupt, and they’re brand new and they don’t have a seal and there’s the whole thing with the ballots. But the ballots are corrupt.
And you are going to find that they are — which is totally illegal, it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk. But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I’ve heard. And they are removing machinery and they’re moving it as fast as they can, both of which are criminal finds. And you can’t let it happen and you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
> Trump: No, but this was. That’s OK. But I got like 78 percent in the military. These ballots were all for … They didn’t tell me overseas. Could be overseas too, but I get votes overseas too, Ryan, you know in all fairness. No they came in, a large batch came in and it was, quote, 100 percent for Biden. And that is criminal. You know, that’s criminal. OK. That’s another criminal, that’s another of the many criminal events, many criminal events here.
Oh, I don’t know, look Brad. I got to get … I have to find 12,000 votes and I have them times a lot. And therefore, I won the state. That’s before we go to the next step, which is in the process of right now. You know, and I watched you this morning and you said, uh, well, there was no criminality.
But I mean, all of this stuff is very dangerous stuff. When you talk about no criminality, I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffenspe... ----
You really 'struggle to comprehend how that could be a reasonable conclusion'? There's no hint of a threat anywhere in there, in your opinion?
He attempted a coup? It is obvious you do not do third world country much. This is not how it is done haha. The problem is will you admit you were dead wrong and potentially spewing propaganda if democracy survives Trump’s second term?
Attempting it and failing doesn't mean he didn't attempt it. He actively tried to stop the results being certified, he tried to get people to fraudulently invent votes for him. We have the Trump–Raffensperger call on tape, the evidence is right there, it's an indisputable fact by anyone who cares about reality.
And no, I wouldn't be wrong, because it's a fact he did try to do that, and even if they did—for whatever reason—decide not to try it again, that doesn't change it being what any reasonable person should assume they will do.
>The problem is will you admit you were dead wrong and potentially spewing propaganda if democracy survives Trump’s second term?
The answer to this question is the same as the answer to "what if climate change is a hoax", and that is that I would love to be wrong and would gladly admit it rather than live under a dictator or on a dying planet
Yeah, I agree.
If Trump had actually attempted a coup, he would have had no shortage of participants, and they wouldn't have walked into Congress with empty hands.
Jan 6 was very poorly handled. The majority of that is on Trump. Many people - though not even close to "all", or even "most" - present committed crimes. All in all it was on the level of civil disobedience, not revolution.
... And then you have Trump refusing to say he would accept the results of the election every time he's asked, "joking" about staying more than two terms, calling bog standard politicians "internal enemies", wishing total obedience from generals and dreaming of using the military to crack down on civilians...
Brown shirts are just civil disobedience in your book?
He failed at a coup, but it's hard to pretend he didn't make the attempt. You're right that the failure was inevitable.
That time. Neither of us can read the future, here.
“You know, FDR 16 years – almost 16 years – he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/19/trum...
he has vowed to be dictator on day one
https://apnews.com/article/trump-hannity-dictator-authoritar...
On February 27th-the Reichstag in Berlin was set on fire. 4 weeks before, Hitler was appointed to chancellor. Hitler placed an urgency regulation to ban all political activities. He destroyed democracy in one month. Trump can now do it one day.
he is definitely signaling something, whether it will come true or not is another question.
This is hyperbole.
His words: "in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote." - explain! - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tells-christians-they...
Trump already explained [0]:
> It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.
It was stupid phrasing and might have been a Freudian slip, but his explanation also makes sense. "The country is on the brink of {insert terrible fears here}, but we'll fix it up this term and you won't have to worry about it for a while." The man isn't known for his well-thought-out speeches, his entire schtick is speaking off the cuff, and most voters don't hold that against him.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/30/dona...
So even when the Christians don't vote in 4 years, they still get the things they want?
What do the people who are voting get?
I'd guess they get a government that via the Supreme court, gerrymandering, voter suppression, cowed media, doesn't represent their democratic interests.
Which is a bad thing.
There's abortion votes that passed the other day at state levels that will not be put into practice because Republicans don't want to.
TLDR: In different context, but same feeling: "I need to vaccinate yourself when you are around me, but when you are no longer, I don't care". I dunno. That doesn't sound very presidential tbh...
It is a deliberate attempt to scaremonger people into voting for Kamala.
And hyperbole like this is why democrats lost in such a devastating fashion.
+ the fact that they had no brand power and marketing. Trump in a garbage truck is great marketing.
Ah, yes. Trump won because of his well-known ability for measured and rational speaking.
That's not what they said. "Measured and rational speaking" is usually terrible marketing. It barely works on college-educated adults and certainly doesn't work on the mass market.
The example they gave is Trump in a garbage truck, but that's just one way in which Trump made himself enormously appealing to the non-elite.
They can not even understand that 80% of the country does not talk like a rich, educated liberal. It is so frustrating.
Worse, they don't see that a near-majority of the country is actively put off by someone speaking like a rich, educated liberal.
The #1 exercise Democratic politicians should do over the next 4 years is to spend hours and hours and hours actually listening to working-class people in flyover country and trying to really understand them. They just don't get it yet.
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Remember when all the brown people, gays, trans, blacks, and women were imprisoned in 2016? /s
Remember the Muslim ban?
Remember the children in cages?
Remember that a crook will cultivate your trust and lower your defenses before pulling a fast one on you?
I remember when he constantly inflamed a nation in turmoil and divided.
The difference was one of symmetry, not magnitude.
Biden (and Harris) have been no more "inclusive" of other political positions than Trump was.
Sure they were. Biden actively sought to pass bipartisan immigration legislation. Trump blocked it because it would hurt his chances at reelection. Neither Trump nor Vance denied this during the debates(they had multiple opportunities to do so).
We are not divided though. He overwhelmingly won the popular vote. Sure there is an opposition, but the truth is that the majority of American voters agree with Trump (currently winning by margins of 5 million according to NYT).
Yes, there's still work to be done, but the real inflamers of the nation are the mainstream media. Luckily they're slowly going away, and uniting figures like Musk, Rogan, etc are taking their place.
Also, he overwhelmingly wins with hispanic men (55-45). He is walking away with hispanics overall in many swing states. Black men are now 25% in his favor. Basically every single minority margin has shifted towards president trump (Including women). At this rate he will succesfully unite the country in a few more years as the remaining stragglers come over to see common sense.
We have never been more divided. Neither side can even agree on definitions or facts.
I'm glad the great uniters of Musk and Rogan can take the reins in delivering high-quality information to our nation. Maybe in a few years, we will all agree on which conspiracy theories we should all believe.
> Maybe in a few years, we will all agree on which conspiracy theories we should all believe.
One man's conspiracist is another man's freedom fighters. You can't honestly tell me that mainstream outlets were free of conspiracies the last few years? Remember Russia?
See, we can't even agree on a starting point. Instead of admitting Rogan and Elon pedaling in absolutely insane conspiracy theories, you pull out your whataboutisms and think we are back on a level playing field. We aren't.
Don't be coy, please enlighten us as to what this conspiracy is involving Russia that you think the MSM peddled, and what evidence you have that disproves the narrative.
The Steele dossier, which purported to contain evidence of the Trump camapign's links with Russia, turned out to actually be a Russian plant. That's what I'm talking about. People still peddle its contents as if they're anything other than fake news. That's a major problem. Same with Trump's 'very fine people' comment. You can accuse Rogan of spreading misinformation until the cows come home, but the mainstream media has also peddled its own share.
I haven't heard any mention of the dossier in years, other than as an artifact of the past. A quick search, and I can't find sources trying to claim its truth (or evidence of smoke, for which there might be a fire) in years.
I certainly didn't mention Rogan—I'm aware of his existence, but I've actually never heard him speak nor seen any transcripts of anything he's said. But trying to minimize the flood of absolute obvious shit that comes from right-wing outlets by choosing to point to Rogan specifically is a bit telling.
Anyone and everyone should be called out for lies they manufacture or spread. This includes lies on the left, lest you think I'm granting one side a pass.
Now, let's tally how many just one of the prominent right-wing figures has pushed since 2016. It should be fun.
I don't think HNs database has the free space to contain such a list.
How many have you been doxxed for or impeached for or censored from spreading. as far as I'm aware, all your conspiracy theories have been promulgated by everyone and allowed to spread everywhere. I think that's the major difference. You should create your list. Twitter/X is a great way to spread such information to the public at large! No one will censor you. You are free :)
Thanks I feel much better knowing that I am free to squash the thousands of untruths spread and believed by the masses.
I guess there isn't a problem.
Hey dude, you may be overdosing on those pills you’re taking when you start saying things like Musk is a uniter. The red ones are fine, just limit it to one or two, okay?
Of course he is. He and his companies are well loved by the American populace writ large.
I remember when he pushed the lie that Pelosi's husband was attacked by his gay lover. Or when he pushed the lie that Democrats are stuffing voting boxes with illegal immigrants'votes, or that brown people are replacing white people.
Such a uniter, that South African emerald mine owner.
The only thing he wants to unite are the dollars in your pocket with his wallet.
That makes him a uniter?
I remember when trump tried very hard to weaponize the justice department against his "enemies" (https://www.justsecurity.org/98703/chronology-trump-justice-...) but people stood up to him and refused, or just delayed acting as long as possible. Trump was very much "handled" by people all levels of government who tried their best to clean up after him, distract him away from his crazy plans, or obstruct him. Even in the the military. In the beginning it was the so-called "axis of adults" that kept things sane.
That's all changed since he's spent a considerable amount of time removing anyone who disagrees with him, threatening those who would dare to, installing people who will do what he wants including the judges who have granted him total immunity which he didn't have before. I think we can expect things this time to be very different.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/30/dona... from the man's lips to your ears.
Did you even listen to the video clip in the article?
> It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.
I hate Trump as much as anyone, but deliberately misconstruing every word he says is part of what cost Democrats the election. People saw through it.
I think that given the context that he illegally tried to retain power after losing in 2020 that many people infer something into his words about reducing the need to vote
No, I think lolinder is correct.
People don't like being told "here is what was said, here is what was MEANT because you're not educated enough and can't possibly understand" did Harris zero favors.
I'm not sure in what respects you are disagreeing with me on, since I didn't mention anyone's level of education or intelligence -- I didn't mention anything about the people who interpret the statement in a benign way at all.
I added my thoughts on why people would take that statement and infer some other meaning than his literal words, since those words are said as part of a broader context. This says nothing about the people who didn't do so.
So, you starting a comment with "No" but then not addressing any point I made is confusing to me.
Cheers.
No, what cost them the election was the fact that Kamala ran a campaign of "I'm actually just a republican so you can vote for me". She dumped any sort of policy or position that'd scare away the mythical disaffected trump voter. She paraded around Liz Cheney FFS. WTF likes the Cheneys?
> She dumped any sort of policy or position that'd scare away the mythical disaffected trump voter
We just saw a national rejection of progressive politicians. To the extent she screwed up, it was in having a numpty VP instead of Shapiro and declining to be more specific on policies that would offend the left wing of the base. We’ll probably see a midterm backlash, however, so the message isn’t “everyone tack right.”
What policy?
The only leftwing policy she adopted was abortion. Otherwise, she ran on being tough on the border, upholding the 2nd amendment, and being an awesome cop. Her platform silently dumped policies like the death penalty.
One was conciliation on Gaza, an issue inflamed by the protests and that was material in Pennsylvania, the tipping-point state she lost in. She also wasn’t “tough on the border” in any specific way—Trump channeled that anger effectively.
Another was student loan modifications. This transferred wealth from non-college taxpayers to college graduates.
Good luck with your Health Insurance: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/31/politics/aca-trump-repeal...
Shifting the goal posts much? Grandparent says democracy will end, parent says that's hyperbole, you bring out healthcare?
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I am on disability and use Medicare. My health access has diminished to almost zero over the last four years.
What has any Democrat done fro me, the poor and suffering?
Give me a break. Obama Pulled a Lucy with Medicare for all and I hate him for it.
Obama wasn't a candidate since 2012 or president since 2016.
Presumably the person you’re replying to knows these things? Try and respond to the best interpretation of a comment instead of assuming they’re an idiot.
What's the "best interpretation" of a non-sequitur look like, to you?
A specific example for this particular comment would be ideal, as even their reply doesn't illuminate the value of mentioning Obama despite referring to it and attempting to justify it.
Obama is a Democrat. Neither Biden, nor Harris, nor AOC pushed for Medicare for all when it was probably the easiest and most helpful time to do so; during a pandemic.
I brought up Obama's actions because it was just the ongoing legacy of neoliberalism that started under Clinton. They thought they would win elections by "going to the middle", and this is what happened.
Obama was also campaigning for Harris.
The Democrats are now the part of war and corporations and I was just done with it all.
> The Democrats are now the part of war and corporations and I was just done with it all.
So you voted Green, or Libertarian?
Because if it was Trump, I have bad news on all that stuff, including healthcare…
Yes, I voted for the green party.
> What has any Democrat done fro me, the poor and suffering?
That is a very good point
Is it conceivable that Republicans will be any better?
The hold big business has on the mechanisms of state in your country, that is the problem IMO
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I am 100% sure there will be an election in 2028.
Yes,just like there are elections in Hungary, or Venezuela, or there were elections in the Soviet bloc.
You will have your banana elections for your banana Republic all right.
As opposed to what the mass media has been doing and will continue to do ?
Ah, the self-proclaimed mass media critics! Everyone else is somehow badly influenced by the nasty mass media but they see right through it with their superior intellect. They don't need correspondents and professionals to actually go where something is happening, they know the truth intuitively, perhaps even a priori.
It's not about superior intellect, it's about incentive structures
Looking at how the incentive structures are laid out, it's clear there's no incentive to be honest to normal people. They need the advertising dollars to exist, and we are suppose to trust big pharma's enormous advertising budget doesn't impact the business decisions at media companies? That's just big pharma, who else is playing the game?
There's no medical test to diagnose depression, all you can do is observe behavior and talk about it
Seeing bad behavior and lies over and over, decade after decade erodes trust and reveals the kind of people they are, if it was some radical group with no real power there would be less concern, but they have a tremendous amount of money and influence
Equally bad incentives apply to smaller ("alternative") media outlets right wingers consume.
Most right winners are listening to podcasts at this point, I don't think Joe Rogan's incentives are as equally bad when comparing to an industry that manufactured the opium epidemic or ones that constantly lie
Fox News is by a huge margin the most popular news outlet. Throw in the New York Post (huge presence on the internet) and the WSJ, and conservative media is the mainstream media at this point.
They also shilled for Trump relentlessly, without pretense. But that's beside the point. The left should accept that they no longer represent the aspirations and priorities of the mainstream or even of ethnic minorities, and the right should stop with the underdog charade. They've swapped sides. Of course, neither side will make that admission anytime soon.
Mainstream media is Joe Rogan and whoever else your favorite comedian, business leader, scientist, or political analyst is
One role of the media is to set the Overton Window. And to more generally set the confines for reasonable opinion. Have you been living under a rock?
You can defend the ministry of truth as much as you want. There has been too much deception in recent years, people simply stop believing it. The meda were always there to steer "democracies", they even outright admit it by saying they are an integral part of the democratic process. People start to see through this deception.
Given that Trump is a well know career crook and got a lanslide, I would argue that people are just even more gullible than ever.
You're right. The media has been corrupted. It's only logical, over time the media is corrupted as an outgrowth of the Pareto principle applied to politics. Eventually all political systems are corrupted because those with power use their advantage to accrue more power in a self-reinforcing cycle. The media, as an obvious lever of power, is subject to this, just as are regulatory agencies, congresspeople, social media sites, etc. I don't understand how such an intelligent userbase can be so willfully blind and naive. What began to open my eyes was the pandemic and the Ukraine war. Not that the establishment positions were necessarily wrong, but I felt the manipulation was easy to sense.
You won’t get much traction on here but you’re right, I think democrats often project issues actually happening on their own side
Meh, you can watch MSNBC or Fox for quite different messages. Of course, the fascists are not complaining about the media because there is actually something wrong but to justify the eventual censorship.
Give it some time; this hyperbolic election rhetoric will wear off and eventually you'll be ashamed to admit you ever fell for it.
Given that this is a repeat of 2016, it wont wear off and they wont be ashamed. Yeah the crowd that touts itself as highly intelligent and techno-savvy apparently cant learn simple lessons.
Given the voting trends, many who initially fell for it eventually recovered over the next 8 years.
The way I see it is that Trump’s policies, if acted upon, will have a delayed effect. I see it as a major event contributing to the rebirth of authoritarianism in the 21st century. I think selfishly doing Trump’s America for four years by pumping money into oil production, cutting back on contributions to global stability, and creating distrust in alliances could have disastrous consequences over the next couple of decades. I believe the current structure of techno-feudalism will only become more concrete with the erosion of science and education. Whether there are immediate consequences to this leadership or not, I’m very pessimistic for the future.
What are some other perspectives or predictions regarding how things will go under this current Trump admin; namely foreign policy, global stability, and school system reform?
I suppose it depends how much you take Trump at his word.
Does he really intend to do the things he says he will or it just fun rhetoric for the base?
Part of the reason why Harris lost is because this line about democracy ending if Trump wins is about all she could offer as a reason to vote for her, and the average voter doesn't believe it. I guess now we'll all get to see if the dire warnings were at all founded in reality, but it was a critical mistake to turn up the rhetoric so hot and not realize that it made the moderate voters take her less seriously.
It was just a bad strategy in every way: it reduced their odds of winning the election, and if they were right it won't matter because there will be no election. If they were wrong, then they burned a whole bunch of credibility pushing what turned out to be a conspiracy theory.
And if both parties are conspiracy theory parties, the moderate voter can't use that as a razor.
So many reasons to vote for her and you remember only the democracy ending part? Also, the moderate voter would not take her seriously because of her saying that? Did you wipe out your memory about what happened when he lost not so very long ago?
To me this all feels like a far fetched tv drama became reality. It goes beyond any human understanding.
I want my taxes to go down, I want illegal immigration to end, and I don't give a shit about identity politics.
I didn't vote for Trump but these are the fundamental truths the democrats keep on missing. This is what Americans care about.
When you blather on about the other guy being Hitler instead of presenting real policy that people want, people are just gonna ignore you.
I want my taxes go down and want illigal migration to end as well! I want illegal drugs and illegal weapons and all wars to disappear as well. I want everything to be great and florishing for all Americans and the world. Still I would never vote for Trump because he just shouts he will 'fix' it, as if he would be some kind of Messias with some magic powers, without explaining realistically how that it can even work. A lot of people seem to believe it just because they 'want to believe' or maybe because he says it in such monotonic (hypnotising maybe?) way.
Ironically, the Democrats had a much more comprehensive policy position of course. But what matters to voters is what they _perceive_ and "what will you do for me". It's a propaganda war, and not yet clear to me whether we should blame the party or "the media" for losing it.
The 13 Keys to the White House model finally failed. I don't think it's because of the subjective keys, but rather the objective keys don't match what people actually believe about the world. Again, Democrats lost the marketing battle somehow.
> Ironically, the Democrats had a much more comprehensive policy position of course.
Given all the buzz around Project 2025, thats certainly not perceptually true _even to democrats_.
If Trump really had less comprehensive policy positions, then why did the media go on for months about this 1000-page policy document?
You cant have your cake and eat it too.
That's a fair point. I guess Democrats should have focused more on the "real policy" aspects of Project 2025 (besides abortion?) rather than the "completely reorganize the Executive" (implement fascism) parts.
Of course, Trump did distance himself from Project 2025, right? He clearly didn't like sharing the spotlight. How do we get to a situation where a candidate disavows knowledge of their presumptive policy paper, yet all the voters still believe that's his policy? Seems like an even more absurd example having your cake and eating it too.
An underappreciated reason why Harris lost is that Democrats tried to switch candidates just a few months before the election. I'm not on one side or the other, but when I heard that Lorraine Jobs was pushing for a different candidate last July, I thought to myself, this is the dumbest idea I've ever seen. Indeed, it was.
The whole artifical limitations on discourse and topics is a poisoned chalice the democrats seem not to be able to let go of, no matter how much depends on it. Ad to that a aristocratic inability to even perceive problems and a getting high on their own supply of virtue signaling and you get a recipe for disaster.
Compared to Trump the Democrats are amateurs at messaging who seem to have no clue how to talk to the average Joe or Jane. Instead of using the Jan 6 riot to attack Trump's "law and order" image, they choose to frame it in terms of "democracy".
Given the generally high regard that the US has for service people - military, police, emergency services etc - it always puzzled me that Trump was never held to account (in a political, rather than legal sense) for the harm caused.
Is there a reason why this has been glossed over? I thought that would surely be a red line for many of his supporters.
There were many ex-police and ex-military amongst the Jan 6th rioters.
"Law and order" was clearly a dog-whistle for 'treating suspects and minorities badly will make you feel safer' from the start . As evidenced by the blazing hypocrisy in a fucking felon running on "law and order" from a straightforward interpretation.
Given the complete discrepancy in voter turnout for dems in 2020 v 2024, I think the core claim of the J6ers, namely that there was fraud that affected the 2020 election, is becoming more and more likely. Especially since the only person to be killed on that day was a regular American (no cops were killed), I think, based on the voting, that most people see it as justified. I mean they just elected the guy who lost with huge margins in the popular vote
If you want to know what Trump really believed about the 2020 election rather than what he wanted his supporters to think, look at the allegations that he and his election lawyers were actually willing to present in court. Since there would have been legal consequences for making stuff up, the court filings were far less sensational than his public PR.
I don't know and don't really care. When I vote I don't rely only on evidence admissible in court. Most of the country does not follow politics as closely as some of the people here. We see what we see and vote on how that seems it will affect us.
"I don't know and don't really care"
There. All is said. No need for further debate.
I also like to keep my anti-tiger rock on me at all times. I don't really care that there's no evidence that it works. All I know is what I see, and I haven't seen any tigers.
Roseanne Boyland was arguably killed by the police that day as well. Her death was ruled an amphetamines overdose to cover this up, she had a prescription for ADHD.
It is not a conspiracy theory when Trump actually already tried to do a coup.
I don't think it would hurt their credibility if they're wrong. It's not like they created that idea, they were just pointing out Trump's words and actions.
It wasnt just Harris but the entire media and entire democratic establishment fabricating claims of Trump doom.
The best thing Kamala could have done is to downplay that rhetoric and focus on issues. If she did that, I believe she wouldve won. But you can hardly blame her to go with the grain.
Nah, she was an utterly normal Obama era democrat, which is basically it same as an Obama era republican. She offered normal and reasonable level-headed leadership. Welcome to the FAFO era.
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You do realise that economic policy takes on average 2-3 years to take effect?
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According to the exit polling, voters most concerned about democracy voted Trump.
My guess is that the worries on democracy have nothing to do with regular Americans getting riled up when their candidate lost (jan 6), and more to do with the entire political machine coming down on Trump after his loss in an attempt to take his wealth and imprison him in politically motivated lawsuits with made up charges.
the reason Harris lost is because the Democrats are soft on everything. Soft on immigration, soft on crime. Even though I dislike Trump, I wouldn't vote for Democrats ever.
"The cruelty is the point"
Their “Trump is a dictator, literally Hitler, who will take away womens right to vote” didn’t work the first time in 2015/2016 and it didn’t work this time either. The U.S.A knows what a Trump presidency is like and they voted to have it again: it was that good.
Democrats got their chance the last 4 years and instead of making the lives of U.S. Citizens better, they made it much worse, and shoved social justice issues down their throats that they didn’t want.
Cop on.
> Cop on.
This sounds British. Are you American or British?
I think your view is also largely hyperbole. It is a nice vote winning narrative to suggest that democrats did nothing but shove social justice issues down people's throats, but like you, I'm not American and I suspect that is just as much hyperbole as "Trump is literally Hitler".
You're part of the division of hate that you seem like you're raging against, using messaging like that.
I’m British and that phrasing jumped out at me too. Few year old account, no surprises… Probs a bot.
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Those classified documents did not put themselves in the Mar a Lago bathroom. If you or I did that we would be in jail pending trial.
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> this line about democracy ending if Trump wins is about all she could offer as a reason to vote for her,
This is a lie.
> I guess now we'll all get to see if the dire warnings were at all founded in reality
So, if he was lying or telling the truth?
> If they were wrong, then they burned a whole bunch of credibility pushing what turned out to be a conspiracy theory.
No they didn't. Republicans run the same claims every election and they win off it.
> the moderate voter can't use that as a razor.
Any informed voter would now Kamala offered more then "this line about democracy ending." Anyone who thinks this was "all she could offer as a reason to vote for her," you are really just saying "I was not informed."
It's not a conspiracy theory. Trump literally tried overturning the last election via fraud and violence. It's incredibly well documented.
In any case we're entering the find out phase.
It's literally a conspiracy theory, the question at hand is whether there really is a conspiracy.
My point is not that they're wrong and Trump won't successfully end democracy (I think the odds are low but non-zero), my point is that the strategy blew up in the DNC's faces and should have been identified as a terrible plan from the start.
Being a Cassandra is not a winning playbook. Being able to say "I told you so" is small comfort, and that's the package they chose when they decided to make themselves look crazy to the electorate. If they believed democracy to be in danger the correct move was to nominate an electable candidate last year, not wait until Biden turned out to be unelectable and then start screaming about the end of democracy.
Now Trump in 2024 is even older than Biden when he assumed office in 2020. I doubt Trump will be calling the shots for all four years.
Casual age discrimination.
Have you read an actual transcript of Trump's words? Not the "sanitized" summary you find in media: the actual transcript?
https://www.instagram.com/billpascrell/p/C8DljJURzmv/
Have you listened to Trump's recent speeches? In 2016 he was very articulate and persuasive in his own way, but in 2024 his brain is clearly on the way out.
It's not, but, you have to ask a question - if democrats believe this, and this is the correct messaging, why did they do practically nothing to prevent things like this from becoming a reality? Or even propose a plan going forward as to how to prevent this again? Nothing came of Jan 6, nothing came of any of this, no matter who won, and it was very obvious that the plan was just "well as long as we're in power we won't slide into authoritarianism," but even if it wasn't Trump, eventually someone else is going to come along and beat them and begin wherever Trump left off.
It's not very good messaging at its core. You can't say something is an existential crisis, and then spend 4 years doing absolutely nothing about that crisis other than to say "vote for me again so that won't happen this time."
They impeached him. Counter to Republican's rhetoric, the Democrats can't force the DOJ to press charges in a timely manner, but the DOJ eventually also pursued charges. So they attempted to fix this with:
1. Impeachment 2. Congressional Acts 3. Independent action from the Department of Justice 4. Individual states attempted to get him off their ballots for treason
How about you describe what they should have done?
They have tried to do things, but they are not omnipotent and the House was under GOP majority.
> why did they do practically nothing to prevent things like this from becoming a reality
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1139951463/electoral-count-ac...
This is like using a squirt gun in a forest fire. A meaningless change to a meaningless procedural "loophole" that had no chance of working whatsoever.
> why did they do practically nothing to prevent things like this from becoming a reality?
You mean like passing "The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022"? That was literally written to support democracy and prevent another Jan 6.
Obviously you can't write legislation to stop Trump winning democratically while still supporting democracy.
Dems have at least shown they're the party of supporting real democracy.
This is fiction, and we should not persist in describing politics in this term, since it doesnt help us see whats going on.
It does sound harsh, and it is. We (people on HN), tend to talk about both candidates as if it was some equal comparison.
However, this is adamantly not the case. Trump is not like any candidate America has voted for in living memmory. He is SO outside of bounds, that frankly we collectively fail to understand him, and have to substitute some "default republican" candidate in our minds to deal with it.
Even in your comment - "it was a critical mistake to turn up the rhetoric so hot", even you will agree that Trump is incredibly toxic and out there in his comments.
Yet, you will genuinely feel that Harris/dems turned up the rhetoric. Not just this, there are a million places where blame is placed at the feet of Dems, for things that Trump or the GOP has done.
Nothing the dems can do will make a difference, because the Republicans have the superior model. Republicans can focus entirely on psychology, without having to worry about being called out on it, because Trump is simply causing an overflow whenever anyone has to deal with him.
We all just end up "ignoring" whatever new incendiary thing he has done, and instead deal with the office/position of either "candidate" or "president", because those make sense.
The dire warnings are literally founded in documents that are going to be enacted, based on what people are actively building teams for and recruiting.
However, there is no measure of evidence, including action that has happened, that will move the needle. It simply wont, because its not what people care about.
Some group will go to Reddit, to console themselves, the other group will go to Fox and the Consvervative bubble to reassure themselves. They will be given the same info that sells, and then they will learn to ignore everything that causes cognitive dissonance.
The man must be reminded that he did not demand more than two options. He did not demand a system that guaranteed more than two options. He allowed the Excrement Party to bring forward feces as it's candidate, and he allowed the Bark Party to bring forward manchineel as it's candidate.
The man is entirely responsible for this situation he finds himself in unfortunately. Also, if the man selected feces the first time round, and suffered for it, then maybe the deadly poisonous bark is the only other logical choice, if only to stop the torture?
The offerer of two choices then makes the man choose between his daughter getting shot and his wife getting shot. “Remember now”, he says, “whoever I shoot will not be killed by me but by you.” The Offerer cackles. “You could have prevented this from happening if you had only worked harder to thwart my first supervillain move fifteen years prior. You are entirely responsible for this situation.”
The fact that someone like Trump was given as choice is a result of a failure of "the man" from the start.
It's just too easy to pretend it is not your fault if your society, the one that you are building with your neighbours, ended up giving you bad choices.
Now that the man made a choice, what do you think will happen next time? This election just demonstrated that lying and using fear and hatred is working very well. Do you think that someone "normal" will invest in this knowing they will lose for sure?
> lying and using fear and hatred is working very well
Counterpoint: R's perceive (sometimes not incorrectly) that lying is a "both sides" thing, and it's indisputable that the D's ran largely on fear/hatred this time (which clearly did not get the D voterbase out where it counted).
> which clearly
There are plenty of theories of what happened. For example, Harris did target the center and the not-convinced-by-Trump republicans a lot, which is probably what alienated her voter base more than saying something that was already said during Biden election and did not alienate them.
I really doubt you can seriously pretend that the Democrats would have done better without their share of lying. Maybe yes, but maybe no, and concluding one of the two is just as valid as the any other conclusion. One may can even argue that they did not lie enough, as the lies on the Republican side did helped them a lot (unless we consider that republican voters are intrinsically more morally bankrupted than the democrat ones, and that republican voters like lies while democrat voters don't).
As for the fear/hatred, it's a funny thing. If you put one liar and one honest person in the same room, one will say "the other one is the liar" and the other one will say ... "the other one is the liar". It's funny that if you put someone who want to use fear and hatred for their own profit and someone who don't, the first one will say "if you vote for my opponent, it will be very dangerous because their are pushing for fear and hatred" and the second one will say the same.
> R's perceive (sometimes not incorrectly) that lying is a "both sides" thing
Lying is a politician thing. Anyone who thinks that any one politician or political party has a monopoly on lying is deluding themselves. Trump lies through his teeth, Biden lies through his teeth, Obama did, Bush did, Clinton did, etc. Honest politicians simply do not exist.
And to be clear I think we should absolutely criticize our politicians for it. What I object to is this framing like only one particular politician is a liar. Bullshit, they all are liars to the same degree.
I would not say they lie to the same degree. Trump can not own up to the truth. The man took a Sharpie to a hurricane map to "prove" that he was not wrong. He has never and will never admit that he is wrong.
To some extent Trump is a singular figure. No-one else has quite the same charisma he has and his experience of getting shot makes him into even more of a legend.
Daniel Boorstin observed the Kennedy administration and predicted in 1963 that it was just a matter of time before TV stars would dominate conventional politics.
The charisma of an old, demented moron? He failed as a public speaker even before he got this old, I have heard non-native 5 years old speak better than him.
Plus he is spineless, lying, rapist.. well, sure it is a kind of a charisma. One fitting for some video game villain.
What he says comes across as emotionally true to many people.
I do remember that debate with Kamala were Trump came across as unhinged with that "eating cats and dogs" thing but I think one reason why he might have won was revealed in Harris's waffling around the issue of climate change where her answer was "drill baby drill", pandering to the Pennsylvania market.
People who want to see climate action are discouraged by this but people who want "drill baby drill" don't believe she in sincere and think that she is pandering. So talking that way she just loses people she doesn't win them.
Except the Haitians really are eating dogs and cats. I have seen the video and photographic evidence. They see it as free food. You think cats and dogs wander Haiti in massive numbers? No, they eat them. They’re starving.
> This election just demonstrated that lying and using fear and hatred is working very well.
All I heard from anyone left leaning (on this site or otherwise) in the last year is that we have to stop Trump because he's going to literally destroy democracy. That, too, is using fear and hatred. Don't act like only one political faction does it. We are trapped in a vortex of shit where both sides are using fear and hatred, and we need to criticize everyone for it.
yeah, that's my point.
You are making it even clearer to demonstrate that all is reduced to framing "you are either democrat or republican".
It demonstrated nothing of the sort. The better candidate won and that’s about it. Even in the republican primaries, the best candidate won. What makes you think your opinion is above the system?
At least he was the choice by people. Someone else could have been choice, if they had more pull. Unlike the other side where no one voted for her to be the canditate.
What makes you think the system always chooses the best candidate? Most voters operate on very little or false information, they just vote on vibes or for whatever party they've always voted for
Why do you think you don't. It could be you who is deceived. Everyone thinks they are the person that sees things for what they are but it can't be true for all of us.
Better doesn’t mean good. A lot of people say that the choice was between bad and worse. Both the Economist’s and the NYT election advice wasn’t vote for Harris because she is great but because Trump is bad.
When you observe a system like that it’s reasonable to ask if you can improve the system. Imagine this was a football game and not politics. It would be reasonable to talk about how we can make the football league more interesting.
> It's just too easy to pretend it is not your fault if your society, the one that you are building with your neighbours, ended up giving you bad choices.
It’s the man’s fault because We Live in a Society? Maybe you ought to evoke the Butterfly Effect as well, it’s all connected. The butterfly in Africa is probably also complicit in this Trump win.
The Donor Class decided that this was the two options you had. I hope that I don’t have to explain that the Democrats and Republicans are not grassroots, democratic institutions.
Trump seems to be a refutation that the candidate is only chosen by "The Donor Class". He was nominated twice despite efforts of monied interests, not because of them (it's my understanding the money didn't go to him until it was inevitable that he'd be the candidate).
It’s a refutation of the literal phrase “chosen by the donor class” because there are more players that have an effect.
Trump is the candidate of the reactionary petite bourgeoisie.[1] These are not part of the Donor Class but they have enough power to, when times are “bad” for the lamestream candidates, elbow in their candidate.
[1] The mainstream media likes to say that he is the “working class candidate” without any seeming basis in reality
How are you defining the "petite bourgeoisie"? I'm not sure your thought fits with my (perhaps incorrect) understanding of the term as sole proprietors and artisan workers. Is that term being used liberally to refer to the property-owning middle/lower classes?
After a quick lookup, it seems like roughly 10% of Americans own a small business. (I'm assuming a relatively large portion is a side-hustle.) I don't know that I would say they have enough power (by themselves) to select a candidate.
I define it however all socialist writings define it.
IMO it seems like you’re trying to make the situation fit your thesis and not the other way around.
IMO same for you.
Where’s your refutation? “I don’t know that I would say”… okay.
You think 10% is too small? What percentage of the country is the Donor Class?
It’s hard to get clarity when you aren’t even willing to define the words you’re throwing around.
My refutation about the “donor class” stems from the fact that Trump raised relatively little money compared to his rivals in 2016 yet still won. If the donor class wielded all the power, that couldn’t happen. “Big money” actively supported his opponents in the primaries. I don’t know the stats for this year, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a similar dynamic happened.
Trump crushed his primaries, he is absolutely the democratic choice of Republican voters.
Exactly
Oh no... Insult the voters yet again. That'll work this time!
It seems to have worked for Puerto Rico....
I mean if Biden called everyone garbage as humor, I would actually think it's funny. But he actually meant it lol.
EDIT: MY guess is Biden is smarter than he lets on, and secretly supports Trump / hates the dems for what they did to him. I wouldn't be surprised if that comment was purposeful. It seemed a bit contrived.
Biden is sunsetting a bit, but is he "put on a MAGA hat, bust out a big smile, and give a thumbs up for the camera" sunsetting?
Did Jill Biden wear a red dress to the polls on accident? Do we credit the idea that she, the First Lady, didn't look in the mirror and think about the political implications of primary colors in the USA?
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One candidate was a normal functioning human being with policy positions other normal functioning humans can agree or disagree with. A better analogy would be a choice between blue cheese and poison.
As a moderate who voted for KH, the biggest problem with the DNC candidates in recent decades is that they do not, in fact, appear to be real human beings, but instead curated facades composed of politically desirable traits.
I can see your point in the presidential race. For down ballot candidates though, I'd say exactly the opposite. So many GOP politicians who sing praise of Trump publicly have been caught calling him a moron privately. Or in the case of his VP, calling him Hitler publicly. The scent of insincerity is just rampant through the GOP.
> I can see your point in the presidential race. For down ballot candidates though, I'd say exactly the opposite.
I agree, however, most people separate one from the other sparingly.
Totally agree. Thankfully, democracy ensured that Poison lost.
Tell me then, what are Trump's policy positions aside from keeping himself out of jail? Do you think he is actually going to impose across-the-board 20% tariffs? His big donors and the market don't because that would result in other countries imposing 20% tariffs on all US exports and trading with each other instead. That was just a story to tell his poor uneducated voters so they wouldn't think he would raise their taxes, reduce their benefits, or explode the deficit. There's no more build a wall rhetoric after he failed to do so in his first term and then blocked a border control bill. What he will support is cryptocurrency speculation, which he has personally profited from and his Silicon Valley donors hope to continue to profit from.
If we want to be optimistic, he will cut regulations and probably also funding to our military-industrial complex. For the wealthy, he will transfer an immense amount of resources to us.
> For the wealthy, he will transfer an immense amount of resources to us.
People complain about people not hating Trump on this board. Ostensibly forgetting that some people here are very rich.
For one’s 24h capital gains to exceed the median American wage only requires a few million at play in almost any asset. That is a fifth of households [1] and I’d guess around double that fraction of likely voters. (If you’re in crypto, you could have done it with less than a million.) That will influence how folks think about Trump, at least in the short term.
[1] https://www.fool.com/retirement/2024/05/27/heres-how-many-mi...
The policies were laid out in Project 2025. Of course, Trump didn't endorse it. But they have the power now and that's the blueprint they're going to follow. They have said they will destroy democracy in the US and they will do it.
That's just my personal opinion and prediction. I hope I'm wrong but in any case it makes no sense to discuss it now. We'll have to wait 2 years or so and see.
Calling the "blue cheese" a "normal functioning human being with policy positions other normal functioning humans can agree or disagree with" tells me that you've been eating rotten cheese all along.
are you saying the orange (70 something years old iirc?) was better?
take the politics back to reddit!
The "orange cheese" has a brain and can talk without the need of a teleprompter. And more importantly, it wasn't a warmonger that put the lives of Euro cheese in danger.
Have you ever heard him speak?! Quite literally asking, are people just voting/liking him based on static images and deliberately cut to look somewhat acceptable videos? I swear his speech is worse than Biden's has ever been.
As best I can tell, he speaks at the level of someone with about a fifth-grade education. I believe that to be intentional, as it means he's easily understood and not perceived as demeaning.
More importantly, his speech is consistent and has been his entire political career.
Biden's problem isn't that he's not able to speak at a collegiate level; it's that he's very obviously getting worse over time. The man is currently President of the USA - when's the last time you heard him speak publicly and take questions?
It's not. You're just incredibly biased.
Yes, I've listened to him speak many, many times. I listened to him speak for 3 hours on an unscripted podcast. I've listened to him speak (unscripted) to many other interviewers. Trump is charismatic, real, and genuinely funny.
The media has been so unbelievably unfair to this guy. I feel sorry for him.
> If this is what America wants, then it is what America deserves.
It's not really "what America wants". You are drastically overestimating how democratic the US system is if you think the fact that a very narrow majority picked one of the preselected candidates means that candidate has any kind of broad popular mandate.
It's probably what a double-digit percentage of Americans want, but certainly not the majority, and only barely the majority preferred it over the other extremely unpopular candidate.
How is ~8% (eyeballing) of the popular vote a narrow majority in politics? It's a pretty substantial majority. Apathetic non-voters don't really count because they don't care.
> Apathetic non-voters
An important thing to keep in mind in American politics is the massive amount of voter suppression. Not voting doesn't inherently mean you were lazy or apathetic. It may well mean your vote was suppressed by any of a hundred tactics. Closing polling places in blue regions, requiring in-person voting on-the-day, restricting early voting, restricting vote by mail, failing at sending people ballots, spuriously dropping voter registrations...
> requiring in-person voting on-the-day
Exactly three states don't offer early voting to all voters [1] and none of those three were battleground states.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/map-early-voting-mail-ballot-st...
It would be a tall feat to suppress close to a third the population from voting!
All that is true, and to a great degree the reason why the concept of "swing states" (or rather the "non-swing states") even exists.
It does not explain however why almost all the swing states aligned with Trump this time.
20M is too much of a number to be attributed to voter suppression alone. I think the main issue here is still apathetic non-voters.
20M ballots is not the same as 20M voters. I don't understand where those 20M people went. Kamala checked a lot more boxes than Biden.
Is apathy the only explanation for the non-voting?
I'm seeing 3.5% -- where are you getting 8%.
Trump is at 71.8 million votes compared to Harris at 66.9 million votes according to AP. That's somewhere between 7% and 8%
OK, you're doing Trump has 7% more votes than Harris. Which is valid -- I think that's not the way most people report it though. I think most people say that Trump won by 3.5%.
You're probably right, but I think the popular vote stats tell a more realistic story of how the population actually sees things.
What you forget, or may not appreciate, is that (for example) Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Red may stay home, because their vote won't really count.
I've voted Dem all my life (since 1988), and while my preferred candidate has won several of those races, my actual VOTE never helped them because I voted in Mississippi (88), Alabama (92), and Texas (96 & thereafter) -- all of which have been GOP strongholds for a long, long time. (Texas, for example, hasn't gone for the Democrats since Carter v. Ford in 1976.)
It's easy to imagine that a feeling of despair about the efficacy of one's vote would drive someone to stay home.
For some reason I’ve not heard this argument 8 years back when Clinton lost. At that time the fact that she won popular vote was used to critique the electoral college. Maybe at that time republicans stayed at home in the blue states?
As a foreigner it seems like the electoral college is obviously stupid. No matter who wins why. It is pure conservatism to keep it like doing something because the Bible says so. Given that it mostly helps one party it will never be changed but it cannot be argued from first principles in the 21st century.
Honest question, Is it not somewhat similar in effect to a parliamentary system? My understanding, is generally a parliament is divided into districts, then after parliament is elected, the government is formed and the prime minister is selected by a majority of the members of parliament?
Not saying it's great, but maybe it's not too dissimilar from some other systems?
It can totally be argued from first principles. If you acknowledge that USA is a union and not a single state then it makes sense that the votes do not necessarily reflect the population distribution and there is some form of rebalancing. Then its a wuestion how much and whether the current balance is the right one.
The US is a federal system. It serves the interests of the states, not the People.
The electoral college - and the Senate - were intended to explicitly put power in the hands of the states, as equals, without regard for population. The House of Representatives was intended to be the counterbalancing voice of the People.
I can totally understand disagreeing with the concept, but to say it's stupid tells me you likely don't understand its purpose and how it fits into the overall system.
This is circular reasoning -- "the system is the way it is because that's how it was set up".
US States are not meaningful cultural units -- people in Philadelphia are much more like people in NYC than either are like those of the rural hinterlands of their respective states.
> The US is a federal system. It serves the interests of the states, not the People.
Indeed, and that's a bad system that makes no sense in 2024. Disliking it doesn't mean one doesn't understand how it came to be this way.
(Tangentially related aside: plenty of federal systems have much fairer systems for election to federal office than the US does. For example Germany.)
> This is circular reasoning -- "the system is the way it is because that's how it was set up".
Maybe it's my lack of sleep from staying until until 7am watching election news, but I honestly can't see how this is applicable. My comment was explicit about why the system was set up that way.
> US States are not meaningful cultural units
I very strongly disagree.
The next time you meet a Texan, ask them if they think they are "meaningfully" culturally distinct from Californians.
> The next time you meet a Texan
Texas is a cherry-picked example of one of the states with the strongest specific identities. Most states are not like this.
Ask someone from Phoenix to explain how they are meaningfully different from someone from Denver and they will struggle.
The same could be said for Germany and Austria. States - as in "nations", not necessarily US states - can have shared culture and history.
Texas is the one that comes to mind as the strongest, but it's far from unique in that regard. Louisiana pops to mind next. Other examples of states with very strong cultural identities off the top of my head: Oregon, Utah, Tennessee, Florida, West Virginia, Michigan, Maine, Vermont, New York, Illinois... you get the idea.
I'd say about the half the states have a strong, unique identity. The remainder are similar to their neighbors but the farther you travel the more apparent the differences.
I mean, I'll take a stab at it... the electoral college can be argued from first principles if you consider that the U.S. was supposed to be a federal union of sovereign states. There are certainly reasonable arguments for federalism and devolution of power.
The U.N. doesn't directly elect the general secretary.
The US is not, in practice, a union of sovereign states today, regardless of whether it was in 1789.
Is that an argument against the electoral college, or an argument for re-devolution of power? Because the latter is probably easier to do than getting rid of the electoral college, given the requirements to pass a constitutional amendment.
It exists to give outsized influence to small, rural (and, at the time, slave-holding) states -- which is also true of the Senate.
It's not a partisan argument. It's a fact of the mechanics of US Presidential elections.
If DJT ends up with a final popular vote advantage, though, it'll be the first time that a Republican has taken the Oval Office AND the popular vote since 1988.
How does the exact same argument do not apply to Republican voters in e.g California, New York or Oregon?
Why doesn't this apply both ways? Red voters in Blue states are just as likely to stay home because they think their votes won't count. And ditto the other point, Red voters in Red states may not feel like it's worth the bother to vote when they already know their state is going their way.
> Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Red may stay home
Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Blue may also stay home.
> It's easy to imagine that a feeling of despair about the efficacy of one's vote would drive someone to stay home.
That's true, but I don't think Democrats had a feeling of despair before the results came in. It seems like most Democrats are shocked that the election turned out this way.
If it helps, the right seems shocked it turned out this way, too.
Personally, I realized last week that I had no reliable way to know what to expect. There was ample data to support predicting any outcome.
If true, their media diet betrayed them. This outcome was obvious.
That seems like an insane assumption to me. Maybe there’s nobody worth voting for. If you don’t interpret a non-vote that way what’s the point of democracy?
I wish people would probe this question a little more. It certainly seems to me, what with the party-based system (and all their rules, requirements, and other methods of disincentivizing non Republican/Democrat participation), the point is not democracy at all, but political power brokering. That's not a system I'm comfortable interacting with.
Because there was never a real choice. Put it this way: someone could give a choice between drinking arsenic and fertilizer. One of those options will win, probably by a wide margin. It doesn't mean it reflects the will of the people because, hey, people would rather drink neither.
2016 had the DNC force a terrible candidate down our throats because the establishment was more concerned in measuring offices in the West Wing that listening to voters. It was a spectacular failure and we got Trump as a result. The DNC did their utmost to ensure people didn't get a voice in the process.
2020 was unique for many reasons. Many, including me, said choosing Biden was a bad idea. He was even then so old that the DNC was giving up the incumbents advantage in 2024, partly driven by Biden alluding to him not wanting to run for re-election. Did the people choose Biden? Well, not really. Jim Clyburn did [1].
People didn't choose Biden's "bearhug strategy". Biden, against all the cries not to, decided to seek re-election despite showing signs of cognitive decline a year ago. So there was no real primary process, no chance for the people to have a voice. The people also didn't choose for the DNC to burn to the ground young voter support (eg college protest response), the Arab-American vote (ie Gaza) or the Latino vote (with an immigration policy to the right of Ronald Reagan).
If the DNC had listened to the voters, Bernie Sanders would've handily beat Donald Trump in 2016 and we wouldn't be here.
[1]: https://archive.is/qSpNF
Bernie Sanders is your answer to Trump? Thankfully Trump can’t run again because that kind of thinking would have him winning elections into 2030.
> Thankfully Trump can’t run again
Yet...
> only barely the majority preferred it
If true, this is not really a democratic country and should stop lecturing the world about democracy.
Okay? I don't think this contradicts anything I said. Practically every country claims to be democratic (even North Korea). Doesn't mean they are.
It's because the primary system favors candidates who pander to narrow slices of the voting public.
Primaries have low turnout: Most elections are between two unpopular candidates who are chosen from vocal political minorities.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Republican_Party_presiden..., there were ~22 million voters in the Republican presidential primary, ~17 million voted for Trump. (~17 million voted in the democratic primary)
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia..., there were ~139 million voters in the main election.
So roughly 12% of voters got Trump to be the candidate. What if the other 72% showed up to the primaries and got different candidates?
Why do people keep stating that the choices are somehow not Democratic. Who else beats Trump? Seriously. It's not like there were some great candidates out there that just didn't have the party machinery behind them. These were honestly, IMO, two of the best that the country had to offer. Sure, I personally would've loved to have Pete Buttigieg as President, but I also realize that he loses to Trump 10 out of 10 times.
The fact is America would be happy with no one. But we got who America wanted -- even if its not who I wanted.
> Why do people keep stating that the choices are somehow not Democratic.
Because they're not. It's virtually impossible to start a meaningful new party in the US due to the FPTP system, so you are stuck with whoever the two legacy parties decide to nominate according to their own rules.
Compare Germany: nine parties represented in the federal parliament, a proportional system ensuring that getting 50%+1 of the vote doesn't mean you get 100% of the power, and relative ease of splitting and fusing parties making it so that previously unrepresented political views can easily gain representation (e.g. the socially conservative Russophilic left-wing party "BSW" recently splitting from the standard left-wing party).
> Who else beats Trump?
Most people selected out of the telephone directory at random could have beaten Trump. No, this probably doesn't include Pete Buttigieg.
> The fact is America would be happy with no one. But we got who America wanted
These two sentences contradict each other.
> Because they're not. It's virtually impossible to start a meaningful new party in the US due to the FPTP system, so you are stuck with whoever the two legacy parties decide to nominate according to their own rules.
I just see no appetite for a 3rd party, much less nine in the US. It was amazing how people would complain that Harris provided no details about her plans, when 15 minutes on her website provided more detail than most people would care for (although certainly not at the level of detail any wonk would want). Do you think people are really going investigate nine candidates?
> Most people selected out of the telephone directory at random could have beaten Trump. No, this probably doesn't include Pete Buttigieg.
Given that every Republican can't seem to beat him there must be some odd bias in the phone books you have.
> These two sentences contradict each other.
They don't. We got who we wanted -- we just aren't happy with it. And wouldn't be happy with anyone. No contradiction.
People don't really do deep policy research in any country, but, to continue the example of Germany, I think most people have at least a vague idea of what each party stands for, something like:
* CDU - center-right, active everywhere except Bavaria
* CSU - permanent ally of CDU, active only in Bavaria
* SDP - center-left
* Greens - center, ecology
* FDP - pro-business, what Europeans call "liberal" and Americans would call something like "fiscally conservative" or "moderate libertarian"
* AfD - right-wing populist, socially conservative, anti-immigration (closest analogue to Trump)
* die Linke - Left (originally evolved from the totalitarian ruling party in East Germany, has since become much more moderate and accepted democracy)
* BSW - Left on economic issues, conservative on social/cultural issues
* SSW - Tiny regional party, irrelevant at the national level
The current governing coalition is SPD - Greens - FDP although there are severe tensions between them currently and they will probably break up soon.
I think it's relatively easy for most people to understand at this level of detail, and if the US had a working democratic system where getting X% of the vote roughly translates to getting X% of the influence and power, we probably would have at least the following:
* "Trump party" - Right-wing populist, skeptical or openly hostile to democratic norms
* anti-Trump right - Bush, etc.
* Centrist mainstream liberals - Biden, etc.
* Left-wing - Bernie, AOC, etc. Possibly split into two parties, one that cares more about economic issues and one that cares more about progressive social issues.
* Maybe some random minor parties like "Texas independence party" or similar.
In such a system I really doubt that the "Trump party" would get more than 30% of the vote.
So I think it's unfair to say that "Americans wanted Trump" when under a fairer political system he would not come close to a majority.
> Given that every Republican can't seem to beat him there must be some odd bias in the phone books you have.
No Republican has ever run against Trump in a fair democratic election. They ran against him in the partisan Republican primary, whose voters do not come close to reflecting "Americans" in general. I very strongly suspect that e.g. Nikki Haley could have beaten Trump in a head-to-head nationwide general election.
I think you're double speaking here, the majority of the population who were eligible to vote, voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
Less than 1/3 of eligible voters voted for trump in this election.... how did you come up with your numbers???? 78/244 (millions) https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/10-things-to-know-202...
The majority of the population who were eligible to vote, and actually decided to vote, voted for Trump, yes.
That's not "America" for two reasons: "the majority of the population who were eligible to vote, and actually decided to vote" is not the same thing as "Americans", and choosing which option you prefer in a binary choice (where you have no influence on the two options) does not mean you like the choice you made.
Trump has had a ~43% approval rating from basically the beginning except for a very brief dip around Jan 6.
Nobody picked Harris. She hasn't won a primary even once. Trump won it three times. The primary is the only step in the whole election process where the actual "democracy" can even remotely happen.
Fine and true, but setting aside the principle of the matter, did anyone actually prefer Biden over Harris?
I held my nose as I voted for Biden in the primary, but I don't even recall anybody else being on the ballot. I was elated that he stepped down and endorsed his VP.
Admittedly, it sets a scary precedent, I certainly won't disagree. But setting the implications aside, was it really the wrong choice? Did Biden really fare better than Harris in the general? I certainly don't think he would have. I think Trump's margin of victory would have been even higher against Biden.
> Fine and true, but setting aside the principle of the matter, did anyone actually prefer Biden over Harris?
Probably not, but does it matter? Biden was also not chosen in anything resembling a democratic way. US political primaries are not democratic.
The general population being presented a choice between two options that were selected by two ultra-partisan entrenched entities is not democracy.
To have a system somewhat resembling democracy you would have to either (1) open primaries to everyone regardless of party registration with no control by partisan organizations over who gets nominated or supported (which would mostly defeat the point of having political parties at all) or (2) have a more proportional system where it is meaningfully possible to create new political parties that gain a nonzero share of representation.
How did the "boot on head" guy run in the primaries? There has to be very little vetting, if any.
Primaries where party members vote seems very much more democratic, than having the party elite decide in some meeting.
> Primaries where party members vote seems very much more democratic, than having the party elite decide in some meeting.
It only seems that way to you because it's practically impossible for there to be more than two parties with significant representation. If anyone could start a party and gain support, you would have enough parties to choose from that it's much more likely you'd find one who matches your beliefs, regardless of how they choose their candidates.
The truth is so painful that I’m not sure people will mentally accept this for a while
Not sure who is downvoting this, it’s the truth and the exact reason dems lost
I don't know why you'd expect any other reaction from a site where 80% of the readership loves to get high on their own supply from WaPo and CNN and reject the reality. The reality is we're 37T in debt, we're on the brink of a nuclear war due to our harebrained regime change efforts halfway around the globe, and your average American is barely surviving at this point. The latter, by the way is abundantly clear from the polls, too, including exit polls. I'm not sure the electorate particularly cares about the right to third trimester abortion or DEI as the mainstream media would like us to believe, especially when the DNC lost the airtight control over the narrative, and its ability to manufacture consent is getting more limited by the day. In 2020 they had enough control to elect a person who can't string two words together without a teleprompter. In 2024 they already could not. And the grip on the narrative is going to weaken from here on out. If they can still learn, they'll have to actually run capable candidates, who might even dare to have their own opinions about things. That's healthy and good. What doesn't seem feasible anymore are unilaterally anointed candidates who go from "nobody" to "our only hope" at the stroke of a pen of some unelected, non-replaceable bureaucrat.
That's not entirely true. In 2020, a lot of states just cancelled their Republican primaries and pledged their delegates to Trump. Mainly because it's assumed that the incumbent will be the candidate.
And all-in-all, that's fair play. The GOP and DNC are private entities and they get to choose who they put forward as a candidate in the manner they choose. Voting in presidential primaries is fairly recent. The DNC picked Harris, as is their right.
[dead]
That's too easy a get-out.
A lot of people voted for the rapist felon, as I write he is in fact winning the popular vote.
This is on the people and the society they live in. It's not "the messaging" from either party - it's simply that Trump appeals to a lot of Americans, as unpalatable as that is.
You don't think "the messaging" of "rapist felon" has anything to do with it?
I'm not trying to persuade you either way. Those are just the facts as assessed by the courts. If you don't like the facts, again, I don't care.
IMHO people vote for Trump because he normalises the hate and jealousy that they feel themselves for their situation and their powerlessness to change it. How he projects his own narcissism makes him look like a kindred spirit to them, and the fact that over 50% of the voting American public can relate to this is a stunning indictment of US society.
Then why isn't he in jail? Why wasn't he been impeached? Why can't they find something that sticks for the most smeared political figure in modern history? If we are bringing up his questionable legal past, then it's fair to bring up the legal past of the opposing side. The truth is the political class has done so much damage and far worse things than Trump.
That's a whole lot of mind reading and guessing of what 50% of the country thinks, it's not simple, no one is that one dimensional and different groups have different reasons
Gen Z, millenials, boomers, gen x all have slightly different social and economic goals
The fundamental christians are not the same as the homeless bernie bros and classic liberals
> why isn't he in jail
In 2020, a Pennsylvania white man illegally voted via mail-in ballot on behalf of two deceased parents.
Also in 2020, a black woman in Memphis voted while ineligible due to a felony conviction without being informed she wasn't allowed, and was convicted and sentenced to 6 years in jail.
As for how this applies to why Trump is not in jail for his convictions, I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.
You're in denial if you think both sides aren't racist, it comes out in different ways but its there
Someone failed that women long before she voted if she didn't know a convicted felon can't vote, at least in my state they ask when you register
He was impeached... twice! (Only president ever)
No
For the first impeachment it was only recommended and then acquitted.
For the second the articles of impeachment were drawn but also acquitted.
> felon
Just a note: a lot of people, including moderates, perceive his felony conviction (in the Stormy Daniels case) as a politically motivated prosecution engineered by his political opponents. Pushing that prosecution as far as they did almost certainly contributed to Trump's victory rather than having its intended effect of making him untouchable.
I don’t think the conviction’s effect on his support was lost on anyone who was paying attention. He was convicted for breaking the law by a jury of his peers. Should the case have been brought to trial? That’s debatable, but he clearly is a felon. Not the first felon to run a country, as it happens.
Btw I would argue the assassination attempt did far more for him than the felony conviction.
The assassination attempt certainly helped, but it just solidified his ability to cast himself as a victim. That started with the politically-motivated prosecutions.
> Should the case have been brought to trial? That’s debatable, but he clearly is a felon.
I do not believe that the case would have been brought to trial had he not been Donald Trump, and that's a major problem. We can't have selective enforcement of the laws against political opponents.
I voted KH anyway because I think Trump really is a terrible person, but speaking from inside a deep red state: it's hard to overstate how much his conviction riled up his base and persuaded moderates to flip.
He’s far from the first person to have been tried for something that is unevenly enforced at best. Talk to any black men in your community, it happens all the time. More relevantly, prosecutors have to decide which cases to pursue and that calculation seems to often involves factors like the notoriety of the individual and the likelihood of obtaining a conviction. Famous people are routinely prosecuted for things that regular schmoes don’t even get arrested for. The latest example is probably Jason Kelce, being in the public eye means you get more legal scrutiny.
Btw I’m not saying I think this is particularly fair, but it’s been happening as long as we’ve had laws and likely will continue as long as we have some sense of privacy and humans running things.
It’s also not surprising to me that it amped up his supporters. As I said above it was completely predictable. Asking Alvin Bragg to think about the election when choosing whether or not to prosecute would be wrong whichever direction you think it should have been decided.
> Asking Alvin Bragg to think about the election when choosing whether or not to prosecute would be wrong whichever direction you think it should have been decided.
It's pretty clear to me that he did think about the election. That's the problem.
Uneven enforcement against black people is unfair and awful and should be fixed. Uneven enforcement against whichever party is not currently in power is a threat to democracy itself.
> It's pretty clear to me that he did think about the election. That's the problem.
I disagree with your analysis. I think it's likely that Alvin Bragg is not a dumb guy. It is well known that a conviction would not prevent Trump from running for President. He also probably had a number of smart people giving him advice that this was going to do a lot to increase Trump's visibility and in general energize his base. If anything, the degree to which he considered it probably acted as a detractor, not the reason he went through with it.
I think Bragg prosecuted because of the reason that all prosecutors go after high profile cases in big regions. He knew it would bring him attention and he thought he had a good chance to win. In Alvin Bragg's world, that's enough to get you over the line.
> it's hard to overstate how much his conviction riled up his base and persuaded moderates to flip.
I don't buy it, tbh.
I truly do not think that is conviction gained him any votes. I just don't think it lost him any. Anybody that claims "I'm voting for him because he's being charged with crimes for political reasons" was already going to be voting for him to begin with.
Moderates that vote Trump are simply low-information voters.
Using lawfare to convict a political opponent is a very police state and unamerican thing to do, on top of the police state activities under covid, on top of a government wire tapping a political opponent
It's one of the many grievances of those paying attention in the prosecution of the political class and administrative state
Several black friends and relatives cited the legal cases as just another thing that got them voting. Mostly it was immigration and the economy, but that specifically resonated.
> Moderates that vote Trump are simply low-information voters.
As long as this is the attitude of the Democratic establishment, Republican populism will reign supreme. This kind of condescension cost the election.
There's a lot of people in the midwest with germanic heritage, I like to think about how it rhymes with the relationship between the "uncivilized" barbarians and rome
Rap music taught me that being a felon is cool.
Crazy enough I've heard from some younger males that him being a felon was good because in order for him to make his life better (being a felon) he would have to make their life better (whether they were felons or felon associated) -- or so their thinking went.
Trump wasn't convicted of rape. He lost a civil defamation lawsuit brought by an ex-girlfriend turned political activist.
Trump appeals to "a lot of Americans", sure. That doesn't mean he appeals to all or even most of us.
An election result wandering from 46.8% to 51% does not indicate a huge shift in American culture in general. It just looks that way because of the flaws in our political system.
Trump is America incarnate and that's something that's only just starting to be properly discussed. We can't reckon with him or avoid him because he is this country, in spirit and in soul. A morally bankrupt opportunist that uses and discards everything it can, and cloaks it all in slick business attire and insipid, empty words. Loud, stupid, ignorant, bigoted, and proud of all four because it has the money enough to make sure it never needs to explain itself to anyone. Believes in absolutely nothing beyond what can benefit him in that moment, and if it changes, he'll turn on a dime. If the phrase "fuck you got mine" was turned into a real boy by some sick wizard, it would be Trump.
Until we reckon with our true national spirit, which is Donald J. Trump, we cannot kill the movement behind him because that IS America, in a very literal sense.
And people who may not be that, and yet voted for him are not very bright. There are a lot of them, women included.
Can you please dial down the patronising sexism? Women have a right to vote, and it is not your call to declare if their decision is OK or not.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be patronizing. I simply said that because, roe v wade didn't bother the women (who are more affected by it) who voted for him.
Look I don’t know how to fly a helicopter but if I saw someone crash one into a tree, I can fairly confidently say he fucked it up.
In the same way as if you’re a woman who voted voluntarily for a man explicitly campaigning on policies that will harm you, you fucked up.
Again, that is your claim and your opinion. That doesn't mean you are eligible to decide what other people in your democracy are supposed to vote. NO, simply no. In fact, this attitude is a reason why liberals are struggling with support of the common man. You're basically implying that these women, that didn't vote like you wanted, are too stupid to realize what they did. This is plain and outright patronisation mixed with a heavy dose of old-school sexism. Stop it, you are making a fool of yourself and your political friends.
While I completely agree with you, I can also understand the reaction of people who happen to be passengers in the aforementioned helicopter.
Full ACK. Frustration is as human as an emotion can be. But that shouldn't lead to patronising sexism. To me, democracy is a life-long lesson. I see it as a pendulum, necessarily swinging from side to side to avoid a particular political party to establish a dictatorship. The USA, as the stereotypical two party system, demonstrates this pretty nicely. Democrats and republicans seem to pretty much take over in an alternating pattern. However, the life-lesson mentioned is, that if you're not completely centered, there will always be times when you have to cope with your political opponent having the reigns. I consider that a worthwhile challenge, to accept that you can't win all the time. In fact, its not acceptance, its the knowledge that you shouldn't win all the time, which goes much deeper actually...
I have LGBTQ+ friends who's lives are demonstrably, objectively worse as a result of Trump's first term. My wife got surgery to have herself sterilized out of fear that were something horrific to happen to her, she wouldn't be able to get the healthcare she needs thanks to the Roe v. Wade decision, which is directly traceable to the "other side." We're about to get a wave of suicides in this country as hopeless minority folks all over the country realize we are entering 4 years of yet more persecution, yet more official policy that will deny them the right to exist as the people they are and they simply can't take it anymore.
All of your comment absolutely holds up when we're talking what should be politics, which is shit like how you organize tax brackets, what priorities we decide are most important to fund, the directions in which we shape our societies. But I am long sick and tired of that same attitude being brought to bear on whether my friends and I have the right to exist as the people we are, whether my wife has the right to decide what happens to her body, and always, ALWAYS with this sardonic tone of "well you can't win em all champ!" as though we just have to accept our differences with people WHO, LITERALLY, GENUINELY WANT US DEAD.
I legit get flashbacks to putting up with bullies in school, where the teacher, bless her and her good intentions, would make you sit and "talk it out" with your bully, as though you in any way whatsoever were responsible for your bullying. As though you and your abuser "just didn't get along" and "needed to work your differences out." And no, categorically, emphatically, to my dying breath, no. The problem between the LGBT community and the Republican party is not a "we just need to respect different opinions" situation. If your opinion is that certain groups of people do not have the right to exist, or should do so with some diminished set of rights, or whatever you'd like to couch it in: your opinion is WRONG and if your paradigm of decision-making cannot see that, then your paradigm is WRONG too.
I wish just ONE of you centrists would have to sit in a public forum as your right to exist is debated, and put on a brave, "rational," calm, and reasonable face and defend that in front of people who would love nothing more than to see you, and everyone like you, ejected from their society so they can freeze to death.
> he is this country, in spirit and in soul.
He is half of this country. That is a very important distinction.
Less than 1/3 of eligible voters voted for him 77/244 million https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/10-things-to-know-202...
It's half of the people, it's the whole country. Our systems, the way we organize society, the behavior we reward, the people we idolize all fall under this. Every major (and minor!) industry is led by Trumps, tech included. Every business has a man at the top of it with not an insignificant amount in common with Trump. That's not a coincidence, it's an ongoing process.
A system's purpose is what it does, and our system makes Trumps on an industrial scale. Almost every boy in America goes through a phase, at least, of wanting to be Trump: to be rich, so goddamn rich that he can do anything he wants and just pay it off, and a distressing number of them never grow out of it, and to be clear, that is a rational response. They have witnessed firsthand with their eyes, in their movies, in the world around them, by virtue of who wins, that Trumps win. All you have to do is talk smooth, accept no responsibility, assert your dominance over reality itself over and over and over, and our system will, far more often than not, reward you handsomely.
I have no idea what you just said. Industry lead by Trumps? You're generalizing and stereotyping far too much.
This world would be a lot better off with less generalizing and stereotyping all 'round.
You have to be an a-hole to float to the top in this materialistic system. Have you never had this realsiation until now?
Berke Breathed captured this pretty accurately before he shut down Bloom County the first time.
Exactly. Nobody waved a magic wand and conjured up Trump, causing people to become cruel and selfish. They are already cruel and selfish, and they simply found their man. It's not like people are just going to just stop being this way once he's gone.
I dont know if I have ever read something as poetic and true to the point at the same time. Thanks for this priceless realisation.
>we cannot kill the movement behind him
You've tried twice. America has rejected your ideology, your violence, and your warmongering.
> warmongering
Republicans calling Democrats warmongers is probably one of those hypocritical things I'm seeing in recent years.
> America has rejected your ideology, your violence
LOL. Red states have the highest firearm death rates:
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/firearms-death-rat...
I think they were talking about the literal assassinations
We don't need to have a system where there are only 2 terrible choices.
if the federal government wasn't so large but rather a looser organization such as the EU, then each state would be a sovereign entity and the presidency wouldn't matter so much. then you would have 50 or more choices (50x2=100)
You look at Europe and seriously want that?
Universal healthcare, strong working class, strong k-12 education, govt mandated work/life balance & child support, abortion, free from a large population of Christian (protestant) nationalism that influences politics at every level... why yes, yes I do.
Universal healthcare is usually not a plus.. ask any Canadian.
I'm Canadian and living in California. I want Universal Healthcare.
Try living in Canada. And experience the healthcare and wait times there. Many Canadians come to the USA for healthcare, or wish they could.
Even if the wait times get bad sometimes, isn't it worth the wait at times rather than going bankrupt? I think it's...a great trade off.
There are wait time problems in US too but maybe not as common.
Meh, I personally like it. It's a bit of liberating feeling to never, ever think about health insurance here in Vancouver. Obviously has ups and downs (especially for non elective surgeries), but it's my personal preference.
I live in Prague but travel often to the DC area for business. I’d choose to live in Prague in about 70000 out of 80000 simulations.
It just feels better to live here for many reasons (safety, culture, nature, walkability, quality of restaurants and clubs and overall you don’t see many poor people around). Europe has economic issues but the quality of life is very high most of the time.
I would also choose Prague over DC. Honestly DC is not a great place to live.
Multiparty representative democracy with a prime minister is a far superior system than a presidential republic.
It has advantages but I don’t see UK, Germany and France thriving.
I look at America and seriously DON'T want that.
Beauty, walkable cities, history, better workers rights? I have never found a reason to go to the USA besides jobs and your national parks, nothing else.
Over the American system? Anyday
This is already the case. American states have a lot of latitude in setting policy and governing themselves.
ranked choice voting!
It's an interesting idea, but it's more or less been tried.
The conclusion of that experiment was that half of the country would gladly go to war to force the other half to stay as one country. I don't think that has changed. Especially given that the primary political divisions aren't between state lines; They are rural and urban divisions.
I won't comment on the validity of this view, but I think the people who hold it miss one very important lesson from his unlikely comeback: the power of perseverance.
The man was basically finished politically when he left office and not very far from actually ending up in jail. Most were pretty sure of that.
So what happened?
Not only did that not come to pass, he's the next U.S. president now. Out of all the detractors, who is still laughing now?
What horrible things happened because of the policies of the first trump presidency?
COVID response seems like the biggest mistake, but that was a never before seen global pandemic, and it isn't clear to me that anyone else in office could have handled it differently.
The pandemic response, the Muslim ban, family separation at the southern boarder, repealing roe v wade, ending DACA. This doesn’t even take into account the policies he wants to enact like mass deportations.
What is the problem with deporting people who are there illegally? As someone who doesn’t live on the border of the United States do you know how incredibly hard it is to legally immigrate there? I don’t see why other people should be allowed to jump the line. There’s a legal way to get in, follow it like everyone else.
Let me see now...
- Forcibly separating children from parents, with no plan to reunite them. There are still children missing, who were spirited off $deity-knows-where. If criminals do it, we call it kidnapping and people-trafficking, but this was official government policy
- Let's focus on those kids, who were locked up in prisons, had any medication they were on confiscated, and we're not just talking teenagers here, some of those kids were under 5.
- The conditions they were held in would make a grown man weep, held in iron cages, kids defecating and vomiting in the heat. Staff wouldn't help small children, it was left to other children to try and keep the infants well.
- Routine use of pyschotropic drugs to act as "chemical straitjackets" on older children, so they would be usefully docile while being caged like animals
- Sexual assault on these unresisting, drugged children. That's rape. Of children - usually girls but not always. Under government supervision.
Personally I don't support the rape of children, but more than half the voting public seem to be "just fine" with it.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? Nothing what you said addresses illegal immigration. Are you saying illegal immigration is something good and if you’re against it you’re for child rape?
Everything they listed was the result of the Trump administration's immigration policies. Do you think human beings should be subjected to these things just because they're living somewhere illegally?
> Personally I don't support the rape of children, but more than half the voting public seem to be "just fine" with it.
They're not just saying they're "just fine" with it. They are enthusiastically voting for it.
We have to come to terms with the fact that very clear, consistent campaign themes of cruelty and selfishness won over a majority of voters. Deep, country-wide introspection is needed.
I think that people really like violence, but no-one will publicly admit it. People want others to suffer. Nobody really cares about making the world a better place, or saving the climate or whatever. People just want a better life. But they have no perspective of getting a better life, so they will settle for everyone else to get worse.
It's the only way it all makes sense. I don't think that all those voters who vote for Trump and Putin and Erdogan and all the other autocrats think they'll have a better life. But they know that all those other people are going to suffer, and it makes them feel a bit better.
The most dangerous man (or woman) is someone who thinks they have nothing to lose.
People feel dispair, and therefore they vote for people who will make others suffer.
Having gone through the legal immigration gauntlet, which took decades of sacrifice, I have no sympathy for illegal immigration either. But the other problem is that the economy is not so much about money as who does the work, and I suspect that cohort does a disproportionate amount of it and would crash the economy if actually deported. I predict the same thing will happen with Trump's deportation threat as has happened with the wall and Mexico paying for it.
You're taking what they're saying at face value. The policy goal of the Republican party is to create a white, Evangelical ethnostate.
Their issue isn't legal vs illegal immigration. It's white vs nonwhite. They make "the legal way" harder for anyone that isn't white, which doesn't stem immigration. It just makes it easier to turn away non-whites at the border.
Just a bunch of nonsense lies. You live in an echo chamber outside of reality. I suggest some introspection.
I am very tired of defending this, because it's so self evident to me from listening to what Republican politicians say and do. The echo chamber isn't telling me that we're months away from concentration camps for brown people, that came from Stephen Miller. That's just one example among many.
Repealing Roe v Wade is a great thing, not a terrible thing. Highly contentious issues absolutely should be left to the states to decide, not forced upon them at a federal level.
Damn TIL, guess we need to roll back desegregation and abolition too cause that was so contentious
Isn't slavery supposed to be a state's rights issue?
Only in the sense that slave-owners tried to take away the rights of other states to not participate and assist in slavery, and then wrote their own constitution which forced every state to have slavery forever no matter what.
... But in the conventional sense of increasing state autonomy, no. :p
Feel free to propose a Constitutional Amendment on abortion and get it ratified.
Until then, it's a state's rights issue.
> Highly contentious issues absolutely should be left to the states to decide
Alas, if/when the Republican party gathers enough power to finally pass a federal abortion ban (or an indirect Fugitive Pregnancy Act) that "principle" will vanish into the memory-hole with all the rest. The minority who sincerely held the belief will be sidelined, again.
Another manifestation would be if state personnel and courts get conscripted into enforcing federal immigration policies.
“Family separation at the border” started with Obama and the Democrats weaponized it to attack Trump. What did Trump do poorly during the pandemic? Operation Lightspeed was a success that the Democrats were happy to capitalize on. He correctly pointed to WIV as the like source of the outbreak, and despite the Democrats attempt to censor this in the media and online, it’s now the widely accepted view among the academics who don’t put politics above science.
Attempted disassembly of the center of disease control which led to less Covid lead time.
Attempted disassembly of EPA and FDA in attempts to raise employment in exchange for consumer safety.
Sale of federal lands that were preserves for future generations.
Picking a Supreme Court based on politics rather than law.
Preferring Totalitarian regimes when it came to diplomacy and snubbing our allies.
Trying to use the FBI as his personal attack dogs.
At least off the top of my head. Last term his goal was to undo a hundred years of progress as a constitutional progress.
This term? I have no clue what his goals are. I just hope he lives because the VP Vance appears to support that project 2025.
Appointing outwardly biased Supreme Court justices who prejudiced USA law against women and many minorities.
Arguably this stacking of the Supreme Court could have been prevented if Justices had retired when the Democrats still had control of appointing their replacements
No, nothing would have changed if that happened. Republicans have no qualms about overtly breaking the law and abandoning their duty and decorum. If they did then Garland would be a sitting SCJ and Gorsuch wouldn't.
If RBG had retired while Obama was still president, it would have been a Democrat appointment, no?
Am I missing something?
Moving the embassy to Jerusalem and the U.S. recognizing illegal settlements as “legal” set the stage for Oct 7
I'm sure that situation be over with trump. And by over I mean that netanyahu will kill any and all remaining Palestinians and annex the strip and West Bank. Then the Zionists will set their eyes on Lebanon.
Nah, the goal of Hamas has always been to unexist Israel. That's been literally in their charter since Hamas was founded.
[dead]
Spanish flu never happened in your timeline?
Well, others probably wouldn't have fired the pandemic planning committee. Another one was created in 2022, but, as of 2024, Trump has said he'd get rid of that one too[1].
[1] https://time.com/6972022/donald-trump-transcript-2024-electi...
This line of defense falls apart a bit when you add further context. It's my understanding that during his first term he was surrounded by many smart and experienced people who tampered down on Trump's worst urges. But for this election he made it an explicit goal to get rid of those people and put in place people who are more likely to be sycophantic and loyal to him.
There's literally dozens of people who worked for Trump during his previous administration that have come out against him since then.
Personally, when I read about the alternate elector scheme and the attempt to prevent Pence from certifying the 2020 election, that was sufficient to convince me that Trump poses a real risk.
Yeah, I'm very concerned it's really only the grade A sycophants and zealots who have stuck around - the experts have fled.
A mistake he didn't seem to learn from, as he's said he'll appoint RFK (who is openly anti-vaccine) as being in charge of public health.
He indirectly ended abortion rights and presidential criminal liability. And while it wasn't a single bad event, he spent 4 years making climate policy worse. More directly he attempted to extort a foreign leader for political gain and sponsored an insurrection to stay in power that resulted in loss of life.
stacking our court with conservative justices, stacking other courts with his appointees who are already working to throw out his criminal cases. the rollback of roe.
it's a very fucking slippery slope and everyone is too concerned with "but muh gas prices!" to think critically about the macro situation.
What makes you think people haven’t thought about those things the same as you or more, and still disagree?
I think every little life saved is an absolute victory, and many people (as demonstrated) share my sentiment.
That is an issue. You posses religious conditioning that makes you believe this. If you disagree with abortion that is fine, but your opinion/stance should not be projected on everyone else in the country. The problem with this situation is religious folks are so brainwashed they can't even comprehend a situation where "live and let live" is possible, because you all think that your way is right and everyone else is wrong.
> That is an issue. You posses religious conditioning that makes you believe this.
Abortion is not a religious issue, it is an ethical issue. Some religious people are fine with abortion, some atheists oppose it.
> If you disagree with abortion that is fine, but your opinion/stance should not be projected on everyone else in the country. The problem with this situation is religious folks are so brainwashed they can't even comprehend a situation where "live and let live" is possible, because you all think that your way is right and everyone else is wrong.
This argument is a completely unworkable argument and I have no idea why people think it will hold water. Abortion opponents believe that abortion is literal murder. You can't simply go "it's fine if you don't want to murder, but you shouldn't stop other people from murdering". I understand you disagree with the idea that abortion is murder, but you need to take that idea on directly rather than trying to paper it over and say "you need to live and let live".
> Abortion is not a religious issue, it is an ethical issue.
Every person I have interacted with in nearly half a century who has expressed support for the criminalization of all or most abortions believes in the existence of souls and believes that human fetuses have souls and that it's the presence of a soul that is the basis for personhood and a right to life. Please direct me to a real person who supports the criminalization of all or most abortions and who does not believe in souls because I want them to explain to me why an unintelligent human fetus that lacks a fully formed central nervous system and any activity in its cerebral cortex has personhood and a right to life while a pig does not.
By the way, it's funny how people who say that opposition to abortion has nothing to do with religion are always religious:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38091407
Another way to phrase it would be as self defense rather than murder. The baby is an unwanted intruder. And the only way to defend the mother is through the death of another person. And like self defense there are different interpretations of what rights each party has. And it is rare for anyone to be absolute in their support of the rights of one or the other party.
I disagree that most people who are anti-abortion believe it is literal murder. More like "murder lite". Just ask them what the punishment for abortion should be for the doctor and woman, and then what the punishment should be for murdering a 1 year old. you'll get drastically different answers from I think 97% of people.
> Abortion is not a religious issue, it is an ethical issue.
Says you. I see nothing ethically wrong with abortion.
Virtually every species of animal is known to kill their own young from time to time. Why should humans be held to a different standard? The earth is already overpopulated as-is.
Also a large number of animals cannibalize the weak (chickens, for example). Now, I presume that you hold humans to a different standard for that behavior - why?
I don’t. Humans are animals, too.
Just because people ate their own children during a siege doesn't mean it's morally acceptable.
> You posses religious conditioning that makes you believe this. > but your opinion/stance should not be projected on everyone else in the country.
Wow. Talk about projection. Roe, a case where the woman involved later admitted to lying about being raped, that case, the repeal of that case moves the opinion/stance back to the states, where it should be.
> they can't even comprehend a situation where "live and let live" is possible
Funny someone in the "I NEED TO KILL MY BABY" crowd would write something like this. You people really have zero self awareness.
I do not value human life over any other life. Squirrels, frogs, birds, babies, they are all the same.
So you are saying given an mutually exclusive choice you would save the life of 2 frogs over 1 human baby?
If you really do believe this you are an outlier, and 99% of the population do not agree with you and would not want you setting any policy.
I don't think that you are qualified to make these remarks.
Because people are morons
This is an ahistorical view of things.
Trump fired national security officials in charge of handling pandemics. Trump repeatedly claimed that covid was not a problem, and that it wouldn't come to the US, and then that it would disappear by April, and then easter, and so forth. He fought the CDC, NIAID. As we know now, he also sent test machines to Putin for his personal use while they were in short supply in the United States.
This pandemic was rightfully and widely compared to the 1920 pandemic, as well as the SARS scare in the 00s. We are very, very lucky that the SARS scare got a lot of the legwork done in advance on the RNA vaccines.
It's hard to imagine any United States candidate handling it worse.
"...anyone else would have handled it differently", yes, and very likely we would not have gotten the COVID vaccine as quickly as we did and hence Biden would not have been able to set us out on the road to the pandemics end (and been able to come out of his bunker). Who knows how much longer the pandemic would have lasted and how many more might have died had Trump not cut out the red tape and fast-tracked the pharm industry on the road to a cure.
What red tape did Trump cut?
you realize that Trump cut the CDC branch that worked in China (and other countries) to look for and contain novel diseases before they become pandemics right? if Trump hadn't been president, COVID probably would have been like Ebola or Sars1 where it kills a couple thousand people without becoming a pandemic
> I'm just not sure if the world deserves this.
As someone who is part of the non-USA world, I'm fine with it.
He says on a US made phone and computer, visiting a US website, using a currency tightly correlated to the US dollar, in a country which imports most of its services from the US, and he works in the services sector, or he works making goods which US consumers buy, speaking English out of necessity not just courtesy, in a country with a small defense budget, in a US military alliance, whose defense is ensured by US government institutions.
I don’t know which country the OP is from, but:
> He says on a US made phone and computer
All phones and ~all computers are made in China.
> using a currency tightly correlated to the US dollar
Many currencies in the world are strong and independent of the US dollar.
> in a country which imports most of its services from the US
[citation needed]. What sort of services? I’ve never heard of offshoring to the US, but I have heard of offshoring to places like India.
> speaking English out of necessity not just courtesy
Well, those guys from England surely have done a lot of conquering.
All the software on your phone and computer is made in the US, and that’s what you are paying for.
I’m using a Samsung phone. A lot of the software on my phone (especially the software I paid for with the phone) is made in South Korea. I don’t pay for a lot of apps, but the apps I paid for were made by developers from France, Spain, Japan, Austria/Germany, and the US, one each.
My computers are running Windows, sure, but my most used software would be Firefox, built by people from all over the world. Second place would probably belong to JetBrains Rider, made by a company headquartered in Czechia.
LOL his phone and computer were NOT made in the US. Also US is a net IMPORTER not exporter...
As someone who is part of the non-USA world, I'm mostly disappointed in humanity.
Promoting hatred & violence, justifying fraud as being normal, neglecting environmental damage for our children to solve, has won.
> what America wants
It doesn't represent what 'America' wants. Elections are dispute resolution mechanisms so people can move forward and get something done, but the dispute remains the same today as it did on Monday.
You mean the world does not deserve 4 years of no wars? Or you mean the world does not deserve free press to the point that the president didn't do anything other calling the news organization "fake news" for their non-stop hoaxes? BTW, is it even normal that dozens of organizations used exactly the same peculiar language like "sharp as a tack"?
On the other hand, do you think the world deserves that doctors like Jay Bhattacharya was blacklisted for simply raising questions about how school lockdowns might affect the nation's children.
I'm not so sure.
Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.
Maybe for America, but then you can reasonably ask why the world is subject to American rules, yet only Americans are allowed to vote over those rules.
Any American who doesn't live in the states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, or Georgia can also ask that question.
Because that's how power works.
Why blame the Republicans? After all, the Democrats did pass a referendum on Trump 4 years ago and Trump lost. Since he wins now, I can only point to disarray on the Democrat side. Just look at NY State. 60% to Joe Biden in 2020 and 55% to Harris in 2024. Thats a big move.
Thank god Biden legalized weed. Oh, wait, nope, they didn't even bother to do that.
Looking at the numbers, it seems like apathy decided. Trump's numbers are equivalent to last election, but the Dems didn't show up by over ten million people.
Yes, it was the non-voters who actually decided the election, and in only a few states too.
> Dems didn't show up by over ten million people.
It is a peculiar lack of votes, isn't it?
Not really. The lack of votes seems to be in the younger “social media” generations. The lead up to polling day was very pro-Kamala and on polling day itself, sites like Reddit were a stream of “I voted Kamala” posts. Whether that was propaganda influenced or not is beside the point.
What it seems to have done is convinced a subset of Kamala voters that they didn’t need to go and stand in a 2 hour queue to vote because it was already won, which of course now we know to be very untrue.
People assume that the bot armies are only pumping out pro-Trump propaganda. However, they only need to convince the Dems not to vote.
They are still counting votes. Prediction markets have turnout at about 64%, which is more like 5 million less.
That's still historically high
Sure, but Harris won’t come close to the 81M Biden got four years ago.
> I'm just not sure if the world deserves this.
That's the problem. Lots of people who don't have any say in this are going to get hurt. Ukraine first. Possibly the Baltics next? And then there are things like climate change: Trump's going to "drill baby, drill" and basically defund anything to do with climate change.
I watched the Joe Rogan podcast (well 90% of it) with Trump - he talks about this in an intelligent way, which is, 3rd party candidates don't really have a chance in national politics. There are 2 choices and the system as currently set up, only allows there to be 2 choices.
Did you watch this too?: https://twitter.com/i/status/1493519145144655873
Not sure if I was clear that I was referring to Trump speaking about the issue, not Joe Rogan; sorry if there was any confusion.
Did you also listen to, or just watched and imagined something else?
“Now there’s one thing you mighta noticed I don’t complain about: politicians.
Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from some other reality.
They come from American parents, American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses, American universities, and they’re elected by American citizens.
This is the best we can do, folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces. Garbage in…garbage out.
If you have selfish, ignorant citizens…if you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re gunna get selfish, ignorant leaders. And term limits ain’t gunna do ya any good. You’re just gunna wind up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans [leaders].
So, maybe…maybe…maybe it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here. Like…the public. Yeah, the public sucks! That’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: “The public sucks! Fuck hope! Fuck hope!”
Russia has 30 percentage points more tertiary educated people than the US does. 60 versus 30. Huge, huge difference in education levels. Better PISA scores. Better in many OECD measures that relate to measurements of "ignorance." How would George Carlin rate Russia's politicians?
Oh the salt and hyperbole.
Unsure what planet you live on but I would love to visit. Here on earth in the US it has been absolute hell incarnate the past 4 years with non-stop tech layoffs since 2022, soaring prices on everything(housing, food, insurance etc), crime/lawlessness on orders I have never seen and huge wars that have spawned in the middle east and Russia/Europe. Lets list all of the things that have happened since Biden/Harris and then tell me why people are flocking to Trump:
- Forced vaccine mandates that have workers fired from their jobs if they do not comply even though it was obvious at the time that getting a covid vaccine does not prevent the spread of the virus(9/2021).
- Huge payouts to illegal immigrants on the order of $450k per family(11/2021)
- Homelessness at record high (12% increase from 2022 to 2023).
- Botched rollout from Afghanistan that humiliated the US and led to 13 US service members deaths and lasting shame for the country on the world stage. (8/2021)
- Housing affordability hits record low in 2023 - 98.2 (only 15% of homes for sale are affordable to the average household. (2023)
- Biden shocks the nation and viewers and says behind a blood red facade that republicans are a threat to democracy (9/2022)
- Colorado and a few other Dem states try to get Trump taken off the ballot in what is deemed a affront to any reasonable democracy and is swatted down 9-0 by a united supreme court (12/2023)
- Legal warfare with anyone who disagrees with the sitting administration see Eric Adams Dem NYC mayor who complains about immigrants "will destroy NYC"(9/2023) and then the FBI then launches a full scale investigation into his administration(9/2024). Also see a myriad of accusations against Trump by Alvin Bragg who when running for office is running on the platform of "getting Trump"(12/2021). This is stuff that is typically seen in a totalitarian regime and it has shocked Americans from both political spectrums.
Your judgment won’t endear Americans to vote for someone they believe is a worse candidate.
We saw firsthand what a Trump presidency was like. He wasn’t Hitler, despite what many in the political establishment would like you to believe. We saw firsthand what a Harris vice presidency was like, and for most Americans, it did not inspire confidence in a Harris presidency. More broadly, the Democratic Party has become weirdly fixated on policies that are more in tune with Reddit than with the average American, and that’s a losing strategy.
The Democratic party indeed got entrapped by its fringe but the same thing happened to the Republican party. It's the result of the system incentives that favour such polarization.
I think what's going on is that trump supporters don't quite take him literally on the details of what he says.
Now, as to whether Trump will or won't do more damage in this term, that really depends on whether this time the people around him will stop him or whether he will choose people who will be more loyal.
> We saw firsthand what a Trump presidency was like. He wasn’t Hitler.
This is something that I don't understand coming from the Trump camp. Concerns about Trump are dismissed as unsubstantiated despite the fact fact that Mike Pence, Mike Esper, John Kelly, and Mark Milley have all called Trump a threat to US democracy. These are people who held positions of power in his first admin and they warned us that the second one would be worse. Maybe you could reasonably dismiss the opinion of one, but all four? When does the weight of the evidence tip the scales?
Trump was fairly inept in his first term, making lots of mistakes and pissing off his advisors and allies. He wasn't Hitler because he just wasn't very smart, which was a saving grace to all of us.
I've had a great 4 years, economically speaking, and I'm worried about the future a lot right now just in case Trump actually gets the competence to go along with his rhetoric. Hopefully he will be just as ineffectual as he was in his last term.
The Hitler comparison is just so lazy and I don’t think you can honestly believe it, unless you solely listen to the out-of-context sound bites used by his political opponents to attack him (ex. the Cheney thing recently).
Hitler was a competent autocrat, really evil, but he had the brains to back it up.
Trump is just...he says a lot of bad stuff, but he doesn't seem to be in Hitler's realm of competence. My beef with Trump is his simple non-understanding of economics, wanting to tariff everyone and expecting that they won't tariff us back, and wanting to juice interest rates by politicizing the fed, and then claiming that this will somehow reduce inflation, rather than cause it to explode. Trump, in that regard, is more Gustav Stresemann than Hitler.
> I'm just not sure if the world deserves this.
So, I'm right and the other party is wrong? No questions asked.
A more useful thing would be: WHY did people vote for Trump? They are surely intentional as you observe. What gave them this intention? Was it DEI? Did they like Trump's hair?
> They are surely intentional as you observe.
I share exhibit A: a BBC interview with an "undecided voter". Excerpt:
"I have no freaking clue man. It's so hard. When I voted for Trump, it came down to who would I trust with my kid alone and it wasn't [President Joe] Biden.
I'm still undecided.
All of my family is voting for Kamala and my friends are voting for Trump.
I'm going to vote for one of them. I've got no idea which one.
I'm still super-duper undecided. I think I'm leaning toward Kamala over Trump, if I think about who I would trust alone in a room with my daughter.
I'm going to make up my mind when I go into the ballot booth."
I share this, not to lampoon this human being, but to correct any misconceptions that human voters always have a rational model of who to vote for, and why.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7484kwl55qo
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Why didn't Dems schedule Peanut execution after the election?
Because they're stupid
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You're being downvoted because people don't want the truth. As a lifelong Democrat, I agree with you.
Dems were playing too much identity politics.
Example: A local "progressive" Democrat Supervisor (in SF) was quoted as saying that she would support the most progressive candidate, UNLESS it was a straight white male; in which case she would support the Black female candidate, Black male candidate, Gay candidate, etc. (this is going from memory, but you get the idea).
I feel like the Dems totally ignored the "white straight male" demographic. Democracy is a numbers game; you self-select a smaller pool, and your chances of winning go down.
They downvote you, but you're absolutely right.
Illegal migration is what moved most people on the fence.
Turned out not many people support open borders.
Something tells me the many bills will be slid under many doors in the Roosevelt Hotel come next year.
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The US told the world in the 19th century that South America was not to meddled with, except by the US. I fully blame America for structural failures in South America that trigger illegal immigration. The US refused to enshrine stable countries that prevented their best and brightest from leaving.
Yes, yes you do. Having 10 mil illegal immigrants is as much a result of American policy choices as having rapist in president's office
For the majority of the existence of the USA there were no such thing as a border. You could immigrate simply by traveling to the USA.
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Could Biden have actually changed the Afghanistan thing? That was actually Trump's decision--and my favorite one he ever made--but he put the timetable into the next presidency just in case of bad press.
Honest question, couldn’t Biden have just changed it, as president?
I don't believe that's true. He wanted to start orderly withdrawal sooner so that it'd be well underway before the election, but his generals postponed it (and then hightailed out of there in a highly disorderly fashion leaving the Taliban in charge and giving them billions of dollars in materiel).
Biden is the commander-in-chief, yes he could have changed anything about it that he wanted to. He could have gone back to the Taliban with modifications to the terms. They were not in a strong position to resist, frankly. If the US had said they needed three more months to do it effectively, the Taliban would have agreed. Also Biden was making choices along the way related to the time table (Wikipedia covers this fairly well).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_U.S._troop_w...
You realize Trump was the one who set up the deal and the timeframe for the Afghanistan pull out right? He even bragged about sticking Biden with it. The Taliban were upset when it went over the date and upped their already regular attacks.
And in fact to your last point about trusting America, Biden was trying to stick to the agreed upon deal.
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal...
Wrong. Biden welched on the deal Trump made. The same day he did that, Taliban began attacking.
The fustercluck withdraw from then on was all Biden's fuck up. All Biden had to do was honor the previous terms and use the previous plans, then the pull out would have gone off without much drama.
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The economy is broken. Facism rises. History repeats itself.
And it was just high inflation (albeit still lower than the inflation in other countries). Not the depression Weimar Germany had experienced in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
I strongly feel Harris lost because she did not connect with white voting women in the swing states. The exit poll numbers show this. She had about the same percentage voting women as Biden, but lost votes with white men. So to make up for that gap, it had to be white women. She did great with non-white overall.
I think it's easy to say "Harri needed more votes" but to go about this strategically, there needs to be on-target messaging.
Step 1: Blame people who don't look like you
Step 2: Become dictator/king
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit
---
History repeats itself.
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Taiwan being abandoned to its mainland neighbor, maybe?
But what about all the semiconductor industry that US companies, esp now with AI advancement rely on so heavily?
Trump will make a deal with Xi to give him access to the industry post-takeover.
He won't need one, because Taiwan's semiconductor industry will be destroyed during the takeover and require a decade or more to rebuild.
"make" => "try to and fail", as some people are harder to maneuver than, it seems, the American public
The UK thought they had a 50 year agreement with China to guaratee Hong Kong's democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-British_Joint_Declaration
Turns out if the other country decides they are altering the deal, and you don't have any leverage - the bit of paper isn't worth all that much in practice.
Would you repeat the same feat with Taiwan, if you were in Trump's place?
Nah
If Ukraine falls then the Baltics will be next - I can see Poland, France and the UK attempting to help but I suspect this would ultimately fail leading to the breakup of NATO. EU either breaks up or becomes much stronger...
Moldova first. The Kremlin have already refused to recognise the new pro-EU leader, and they've been making noises about Transnistria for a while (a similar situation to Crimea and East Ukraine).
There's a huge difference between invading a NATO member and invading a non-NATO member. And ultimately I don't think Russia has the capability to continue invading more countries with or without the US' opposition, this war has been a nonstop embarrassment for them.
If Poland France and the UK are more invested in opposing Russia then one would think that the Ukraine wouldn't be entirely reliant on the US to support it. This is the fundamental problem with the proxy war in the Ukraine, the people pushing for it talk about it as if the fate of the European continent rests on the fulcrum of the Ukraine and yet the other European countries hardly seem to care.
What do you mean? Europe has contributed twice as much to Ukraine compared to USA. Yeah, in plain military spending USA has given more, but a war isn’t won with just guns. This has been a strategy that has made sense given USAs military industrial complex, and EUs geographical proximity to Ukraine.
If USA pulls out it’s likely that EU will shift some of its aid over to military. This is already happening: European countries have started setting up arms production within Ukraine which gives Ukraine more guns per dollar spent than what donations of western built weapons does. So don’t think the dollar amount donated tells you everything about the amount of military support given.
"There's a huge difference between invading a NATO member and invading a non-NATO member."
In practise, doesn't that depend on what the US decides?
It does insofar as the US can "decide" to betray all of its allies by ignoring its obligations under a military alliance. We've already publicly proclaimed to the entire world that the American military will come to the aid of any NATO member which is invaded. We've never had such an agreement with the Ukraine and thus owe no obligations towards them.
Russia has plenty of meat for the grinder. Being embarrassed isn't gonna stop them.
They aren't even going to be embarrassed - Ukraine will get a peace deal forced on it and Russia will declare a glorious victory and that will become the history that everyone remembers.
It'll take multiple years for Russia to recover and have the means to target the Baltics, by then Putin will likely kick the bucket, as he's getting up there in years and who knows what the succession would look like.
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- Anti abortion law possibly being implemented on a federal level
Curious what do you base that on?
Isn't this a tentpole Republican/MAGA desire?
Why overturn Roe otherwise?
Why not implement it now when they'll control all branches of government and have a 6-3 favor in the supreme court?
> Isn't this a tentpole Republican/MAGA desire?
No, it's not.
> Why overturn Roe otherwise?
To let states decide how it should be handled, rather than a federal mandate. Allowing different possibilities to be tested - maybe in some states it will become completely illegal, maybe in others mothers will face pressure to terminate a pregnancy.
I hope you don't really think that being pro choice is about pressuring woman to terminate pregnancies.
Why do I think that's much more probable for abortion to become illegal than for women to be pressured to terminate pregnancies?
Your comment feels so innocent, but different possibilities to be tested just ends up in women being denied abortion
I think it's about as likely as it becoming illegal. There's too many good reasons to keep abortions even in a restricted state - even though it does open up a very messy moral can of worms.
There already are states where abortion is very restricted or illegal. There aren't states where terminating pregnancies is forced
Forgive my ignorance but I didn't realise there were states it was illegal in.
> There aren't states where terminating pregnancies is forced.
I personally don't think this could ever come from a mandated level (same as outright bans), I think instead we see it in the form of social pressure: and we can already see it across the US. An estimated 65% of abortions in the US are unwanted but the mother was heavily pressured by peers, family, work, etc. You can also see this in the downstream effects: getting an abortion raises your chances of suicide by 6x and depression by 4x.
Clinics also do not screen for coersion, the same way organ donations, adoptions, loans are all screened.
Again, should abortion be illegal because of the above? No. But it does indicate it's not as innocent as making sure women are ready/able/willing to have a child.
The only sources I can find about what you're saying is gutter something and lozier Institute, and by searching for them a bit it looks like they're catholic founded research. I'm gonna take what they say with a huge pinch of salt
I'm gonna trust more a study by the university of San Francisco which finds that most women don't regret having an abortion or are happy about it https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/01/416421/five-years-after-ab...
Thank you, I'm re-evaluating some of my opinions.
> To let states decide how it should be handled, rather than a federal mandate. Allowing different possibilities to be tested - maybe in some states it will become completely illegal
Why should one get to play Laboratory of Democracy with women's lives?
> To let states decide how it should be handled
If that's the case - why are states criminalizing getting an abortion in another state?
Some states decide for all states, that's the sort of thing that has to be decided on a federal level
Ballots across the country voted on various degrees of abortion and passed.
Fear, rage, and entitlement. Trump has been very clear he just doesn't want it regulated at a federal level.
He has also been very clear he wants to imprison his opponents and violently deal with immigrants. What should we believe?
> He has also been very clear he wants to imprison his opponents
When? He's gone out of his way to *not* imprison his opponents. Why do you think Hillary is still running around?
> violently deal with immigrants
*Illegal Immigrants
Not so sure about the violent part either, but let's just say that that's true.
Yet all the people he associates with do. I wonder what the most likely outcome from that might involve...
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I’m old enough to remember 2016 elections and the “rip usa we are doomed” predictions then. The fact is, we were ok that time, it’s gonna be ok this time too.
We ratcheted several notches farther toward high-level corruption being normal—multiple family members in high level positions, no divestment from direct control of business interests—Carter gave up control of a peanut farm to be president because to do otherwise would have been unacceptable, that’s how much has changed. Even on just that front it was extremely damaging, and that’s one thing.
> The fact is, we were ok that time, it’s gonna be ok this time too.
Trump has always wanted to be a tyrant; he has always wanted to run the country like he runs his businesses -- he says something and it's done, he makes decisions for his own personal benefit, he rewards his friends and punishes his enemies.
In 2016 he wasn't expecting to win and didn't really know what he wanted, so he appointed well-respected people from the Republican establishment. Those people believed in the constitution, the rule of law, the rules-based international order, and so on, and pushed back and refused to obey him when he wanted to act like a tyrant.
This time is different. He knows what he wants: People who will be personally loyal to him. The Republican establishment has been destroyed. The Supreme Court has officially decreed that nearly anything he does is immune from prosecution. He will have a much easier time getting his way this time than he did in 2016.
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Complete chaos. Retribution. Whatever the goon encounters. RIP USA
My biggest fear is that Trumps deterrence of CRINK countries will cause XI to miscalculate. Other than that I think this is manageable. EU will get a boost as the internal awakening materializes. As an European I had difficulty understanding why Trump was even an alternative, but I have come to realize that the Plutocratic nature of the US was causing more suffering for the people than was easily observed from here.
The US is currently in proxy war with Russia on two fronts: Ukraine and Israel/Iran. Conceding Ukraine would help Iran, which is probably not what Israel wants. The idea that Trump would be friendly to Putin -- lift sanctions, give him Ukraine -- seems like a strategical contradiction.
Sadly, he's never indicated anything to the contrary
RFK Jr. in charge of or heavily influencing FDA and other health related policy. Dismantling the Department of Education Mass deportations Tariffs
Quite possibly the most devastating thing for the country, if he follows through on the crazy health policies. It will be felt for decades.
Ooooh, that's gonna be real interesting to see. An anti-vaxxer in charge of healthcare.
Taking fluoride away from drinking water. Weakening vaccine research and development.
Looks like most Americans will be in for a long suffering in the coming decades. Combine that with privatisation of health insurance and weakening Medicaid, this heavily points towards a Brexit moment for the USA.
This seems like a reasonably good analysis, but Trump's frequent campaign promise to deport all the "illegal immigrants" seems like it might deserve a prominent mention, even if only to explain why you don't think it will happen. During the campaign, Trump often defined "illegal immigrants" as 20 million people or more, some of whom have US residency visas that Trump thinks they shouldn't have gotten and therefore aren't "illegal" in the conventional sense.
If it does happen, it will be the largest "ethnic cleansing" in human history—bigger than the Yugoslavian migrations, bigger than the Armenian genocide, bigger than the Holocaust, bigger than the Holodomor, bigger than the US's previous forced removals of Native Americans. I say "ethnic" because it's primarily directed at people who are dark-skinned because of their Native American ancestry and driven by racism against them. It isn't directed against white illegal immigrants like Elon Musk and Melania Trump were.
If the US drops support of Ukraine Putin might try to take Kyjiw again.
I kinda expect the EU to go collective defense if the US pulls out, to see if the US can still be trusted to honor its words, of if they have to write it off entirely (honestly, they should have done that before, but…)
I don't see that.
Netherlands, Austria predominantly leaning right now, joining Hungary, Slovakia.
Germany and France are both with very unstable governments.
Pretty much leaves Poland and the Baltics
I don't think they see an unilateral suicide as more tempting than a bilateral suicide.
>pull out of Kursk
This is happening any week now with or without Trump.
Mainstream (safe!) vaccine scepticism?
You forgot trade war against Europe and China. Also, if economists and investors are right, massive inflation. I also personally predict total war with Iran, directly or indirectly.
Sadly neither candidate was going to substantively stick up for Gazan citizens. I just hope Trump's wildcardness spins the geopolitical roulette wheel to land on peace.
Lots of wrongs you got there.
"- Israel given carte blanche and a lot of support to bulldoze Gaza"
I agree, both parties are way to big buddy with Isreal, war with Iran I am not sure sure.
"- Russian sanctions lifted"
Ah yeah that is why Putin endorsed Kamala for that EXACT OPPOSITE reason that Trump put heavy sanctions on Russia and he did not like that.
"- Elon looking to cut government spending - healthcare, subsidies"
Any evidence of this claim? Of course not. Making government more efficient does not equal to your doomsday fears. Has Elon ever public-ally indicated and of this? I do not know his positions on this honestly but I doubt your claims. Elon is for UBI, he says the world needs it because Robots will take over, and I doubt he will support a UBI where people can not effort to pay their doctors and surgeons with. So I am calling straight BS on this.
"- Anti abortion law possibly being implemented on a federal level"
Any hint about this claim? No of course not.
"What else am i missing?" A lot actually:
- No more stupid DEI BS that is already on a downwards trend even during Biden/K
- No more castrating kids, chopping their breasts of pps of.
- No more hiding from parents that they supposedly changed their gender/pronouns or whatever they latest trendy woke sh1t it.
- No more indoctrination in education like things that you are more oppressed/valuable the more "minority" checkboxes you check. Hopefully the DEATH of wokeness.
- Less of the PURPOSEFULLY pushing illegals to vote (for dems of course). BY LAW in California they can not ask people for ID to vote. Total insanity, not sure if they can required ID federally but I hope they can and will.
- Securing the Border. Kamala flipped on this btw, as she did on plenty of others things b4. But as she noted the people actually WANT a secure border, including all the people she thought will vote for her, she suddenly claimed she wanted the same thing that was always Trumps thing and she railed against.
- Free Speech online and offline, something the real left once was championing but now they are all pro censorship of all the opinions they do not like. Simply call everything they do not like "hate-speech" and call everyone who dares to have a "right" opinion on something a nazi.
- Less regulations more economic opportunity. Something that ties into Elons government efficiency endearment I guess. What they will cut it bureaucracy and the burden to start and operate a business.
- I am sceptical of this is just a lie but Trump at least claims he is anti-war. While the left openly the war mongering 24/7. You very typically put "deal" in quotes and make it sound like a peace deal is something bad. Peace deals are incredibly good and if Trump can actually make and negotiate deals with countries instead of starting WW3 that would be great. The US needs to stop invading counties and getting involved on the globe with 700 military basis across the world ... it needs to end. And I do not think Trump will end it, but a president that will start 1 war less then the other side is still a win. And Trump is hopefully that guy. The Israel Gaza situations is bad and Trump is 100% wrong so far on this.
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Us is not involved with boots on the ground. Now, try to imagine what you just said, but shift it to your country being invaded and imagine being told you're weird because you want soldiers to defend your motherland rather than giving away land
How naive of you to think that native Ukrainians stuck under ruzzian occupation won’t become casualties after such “deal”.
Would you be okay signing over your country’s lands to Russia right now? Assuming you aren’t in Russia already.
We would prefer less soldiers dying today than more soldiers and civilians dying in a year, after ruzzia recovers, restocks and attacks again.
Would the US give up Alaska if Russia attacked from Siberia? I'd say the US wouldn't. Ukraine has more support from EU countries who I think will step up more now that the US has become a Nazi theocratic state.
If you stop and think a little longer you should realize that if you give after to Russia you prove that aggression works.
And now they'll get to rebuild their military to attack Ukraine again, or maybe another country, leading to many more civilian deaths.
Russian apologists are not just weird, they're dangerous.
> If you stop and think a little longer you should realize that if you give after to Russia you prove that aggression works.
It's already proven that it works for the USA. Why shouldn't it work for Russia? Except, at least in this case it's not aggression.
> And now they'll get to rebuild their military to attack Ukraine again, or maybe another country, leading to many more civilian deaths.
You mean like USA does all the time.
> Russian apologists are not just weird, they're dangerous.
USA apologists are even weirder.
Russia is waging a war of conquest to annex its former colonies and restore its empire. There is zero reason to believe this will stop unless it is stopped.
Is there any reason or source to anything you said, or just saying because you hate him. Specially regarding the last one, he clearly mentioned that he is against that.
I am as much against Trump as the next guy, but let's don't degrade HN conversations to this level.
You’re missing a lot. War is not good and signing peace deals is not a bad thing.
Dems lost this election because they’ve become the party of warmongerers. You need to understand that played a big role.
> War is not good and signing peace deals is not a bad thing.
If Russia invades Alaska, do you think the average Republican will take the same sentiment? Just give him that land because otherwise lots of people will die.
Signing peace deals to give over lands stolen by Russia is a good thing?
> War is not good and signing peace deals is not a bad thing.
The logical conclusion of this is that we should always just surrender whenever some other army comes knocking at our door. Let Putin walk all the way to Portugal, let Kim Jong Un walk to the south tip of the Korean peninsula, because any peace deal, no matter how bad, is always better than firing a single shot.
Putin invaded Crimea and then said "I'm done". Then by proxy he invaded the Donbas, and said "I'm done". Then he invaded Ukraine. Why do you think that if we sign a peace deal with him, that he just won't build up his forces in another year or two and invade again -- either Ukraine, or one of the other Baltic countries?
At some point you have to say, "It stops here".
EDIT: Furthermore, you have to think of the knock-on effects. If we settle now in Ukraine, that won't stop war with Russia: Putin has learned that invading your neighbor is fine, and he'll do it again and again. Xi and Kim will learn the same thing, and there will be wars in Taiwan and Korea.
On the other hand, Russia is almost defeated -- another 2 years and they'll be completely out of materiel. They're already resorting to pulling in North Korean troops. Support Ukraine for another year or two, and the war will end for good -- and Xi and Kim will learn that invading your neighbor is a losing proposition, and war in Taiwan and Korea will be avoided.
> You need to understand that played a big role.
Do you have any support for this statement? I haven't heard many people bring up Ukraine as a major reason for voting Trump or not voting Harris.
Ironically, there were Arabs and progressives who failed to support Harris because she supported Israel too much, and there are Zionist Jews and Christians who support Trump because they think Kamala didn't support Israel enough. On that particular conflict I don't think there's any winning position for the Democrats.
>>>Do you have any support for this statement? I haven't heard many people bring up Ukraine as a major reason for voting Trump or not voting Harris.
Its a bad look when many citizens are hurting economically and you send billions and billions to a foreign government and then gaslight them the economy is indeed fine.
This doesn't get enough mention.
Assuming you are not dealing with despots who will strike again.
You need to read the basic outline of WW2.
I don’t completely disagree with you (I mean, I mostly do, just not completely) but do you have reason to think the hawkishness of the Biden administration (a lot of which was inherited from the hawkish first trump administration) really influenced people? Like polls, or even surprising anecdotes?
Americans mostly don’t seem to care about foreign policy at all.
No we do get it. It’s these modern democrats that are so disconnected from the reality of the American people which is why they lost huge in this election across all racial and demographic lines. Look at NY how does it get that close?
The American people cried that the economy was bad for them and the democrat message was no it’s better than ever.
The American people said why are we sending billions to Ukraine when we need the money here. They were told we were supporting dictatorships. Just look at some of the responses to my comment here.
The American voter was concerned about the huge crime waves in the cities and the biden admin told us crime was good and made up.
The Democrat response to COVId was to shut up and take the vaccine or lose your job.
I’m surprised she didn’t lose more with all the pain biden Harris caused.
Reasons I think why Trump won:
- Biden's Inflation
- Fortunate timing
You know also immigration, price at the supermarket which yes is part of Biden inflation and also the assignation attempts. How quickly we forget.
Trump also campaigned as firmly against progressive causes.
> Biden's Inflation
An international perspective is useful here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/15/in-the-u-...
Bernie Sanders just put it perfectly:
>It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.
>While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.
>And they’re right.
Anyone here who is still confused about this election result need only unplug their fingers from their ears and open their eyes.
Don't move to Canada; move to a swing state.
As an expat, you can vote as a resident in the last state you claimed residency before leaving the country. So, if you're headed out for a bit, establish residency in a swing state before you go, and remember to vote while you're out of country.
https://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/content/what-state-do...
It's quite funny how people talk about "immigrants", but when they are themselves the ones living in another country, then they are "expats".
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170119-who-should-be-...
> The difference between an expat and an immigrant? Semantics
> “Immigrants are usually defined as people who have come to a different country in order to live there permanently, whereas expats move abroad for a limited amount of time or have not yet decided upon the length of their stay,” he says.
Now that you cite the BBC, there are quite sizable communities of UK citizens living in Spain after retirement (ie permanently, without a short or medium-term intention of going back) and they consistently refer to themselves as "expats".
Not to mention that temporary seasonal agricultural workers have ever been called “expats” either.
It's never used that way in practice. No one calls Mexican seasonal agriculture workers in the US and Canada expats. No one calls Filipino maids and nannies in Singapore expats. No one calls Indian construction workers in Saudi Arabia expats. Regardless of the dictionary definition, expat is only used to refer to people coming from rich countries (US/UK/Singapore/etc.). Terms such as "migrant worker" are used for people coming from poor countries.
There still is a double standard though.
People from the wealthier first-world nations enjoy more international privileges — visa-on-arrival, stress-free travel, higher rates in currency exchange, dual citizenships, better societal structures and support for assimilation into foreign cultures.
Immigrants are either fleeing persecution or leaving their countries seeking a better life, requirements for visas and security checks, usually with not enough money, little privilege, and defacto distrust from foreign societal structures.
Relatively speaking, the typical expat can move around the world as they wish. Immigrants can't. So yes, immigrants, when they move, often do so, seeking to live elsewhere permanently.
Migrants then because Trump told you it's the last time you have to vote.
Trump says lots of things. Too early to tell imho if the authoritarianism and populism is going to stick.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-fa...
> Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years
Trump 2016 got reasonable republicans into his cabinet that prevented worse, his new team (anyone seen his old VP Mike Pence?) will be unchecked and unhinged.
But in this case they're talking about rights in your origin country, so "expat" is the only term that makes sense.
Expats typically aren't immigrating permanently to a country, or even trying to establish new citizenship, only residing to the medium to long term, with the option of returning to their home country where they have citizenship. If they do renounce their citizenship, then they are just immigrants.
Well it's a question of perspective, isn't it? You're an expat to your birth country and an immigrant to your country of arrival.
This feels like a very disingenuous way of participating in a democracy, and sounds like the kind of strategy that people would be up in arms over if MAGA voters were doing this.
It's the bottom-up variant of gerrymandering, and GOP/MAGA heartily embraces the top-down variant of gerrymandering.
Sure, I guess that's fine if you're okay with playing dirty because the other side did.
Personally that feels like a great way to make sure we ruin things, rather than just arguing that those GOP members helping gerrymander might ruin things.
Absolutely. "I'm going to leave America but participate in its elections anyways." Sounds like foreign influence to me.
US citizens are required to pay taxes on global income, regardless of where they live. The US is unique in this regard. Why would US citizens not continue to have the right to vote while out of country? Certainly, if they renounce their US citizenship (and hence, the ability to be taxed as a non citizen non resident), they lose their right to vote.
"No taxation without representation."
>"No taxation without representation."
So you're in favor of exempting minors from federal taxation?
After all, their income is basically a rounding error economically and most don't make enough to pay net federal taxes so it might even be a net loss. There's no real reason to tax them unless it's some perverse Cartmanic exercise in making them accustomed to it.
America dictates that you have to participate unless you fully give up citizenship. America makes it difficult to do so.
It’s not foreign influence when America more or less demands it.
How is it more disingenuous than any other way of participating, I wonder?
What difference does it make where you vote when you're an expat? You're still taxed and represented.
It would be a different matter if taxes were not involved, at least in my humble opinion. Other countries have revoked voting writes when you're no longer a tax paying citizen.
Well for one thing, the aim is for those leaving the country to change their last registered residence to an area where their vote may have more impact. They never lived there and have no ties to that jurisdiction. You don't see anything wrong with voters that have nothing to do with your area casting votes there on everything from federal elections to local elections and ballot measures?
To me this feels like the kind of strategy that leads to us removing voting rights for expats. If the rule is meant to allow expats to still participating in voting in their hometown, and people abuse that to impact elections they have no real business voting in, eventually that right will just be removed.
Lib migration really hasn't worked out well for Democrats. Texas is their white whale and a big reason they haven't won it is because they just change to another version of their same bubble and bring center-right people with them.
I live in a pretty red state, but there are only 9 or 10 states swingier than mine. Progressives I know are moving to solid blue states and feeling virtuous about it. Two of my friends moved to the west coast, and I can tell they're looking at me like if I can stand to live here, I must not feel as strongly about politics as they do.
This despite the fact that we're all old, white, and economically privileged enough that we're for all practical purposes immune to the awful policies that are being put in place.
The sad thing is, the idea that moving away is a constructive political act comes straight from Atlas Shrugged. It's right wing logic. Express your consumer preference, and through the magic of the invisible hand, that becomes political power. Making yourself happy is the only form of political engagement you need.
> the idea that moving away is a constructive political act comes straight from Atlas Shrugged
Heh. I read Atlas Shrugged in college, and at the time I liked it pretty well. I was hungry for a book about The Big Questions.
But now, I see the protagonists saying, "these leeches keep taking advantage of me! I'm going to move to a secret town in the middle of nowhere, and deny them my genius!" And it's the most teenaged, self-important thing I've ever heard.
I would love to move to Galt's Gulch. Sadly, I'm not worthy enough to be selected for inclusion. It's an enticing idea of just moving away to live with all the other smart people. The trick is being smart enough to fit in.
What's the alternative to refusing to work without just reward?
As a progressive in a deep red state, there is a certain amount of exhaustion that comes with feeling like an outsider.
I like many things about where I live, and I've become practiced at getting along with people that I have deep disagreements with on politics.
But particularly this morning, I can sympathize with the urge to move to a place where I'm more likely to share a common set of values with the average person in the grocery store, and those values are more likely to be reflected by the institutions around me.
I wouldn't feel any virtue moving to a deep blue area, but I would feel a bit of relief.
we're for all practical purposes immune to the awful policies that are being put in place.
this is probably not going to pan out. Trump's become the figurehead for an organized and motivated movement to completely dismantle the administrative state. nobody's going to be immune to the effects of that. Project 2025 includes shutting down the weather service, even to the point of privatizing tornado warnings. he's also talked many times about replacing the entire income tax system with hefty tariffs, which literally hundreds of economists say would be a disastrous move.
they're also talking about a national abortion ban. you might indeed be old enough for that not to affect your life any more, but if you have extended family, it will affect someone you care about, guaranteed.
last but not least, Trump's stated goal of mass deportation would require intense surveillance, broad leeway for law enforcement agencies, and drastically reduced civil liberties protections. once you've got that, you can target a lot of people. a site like Twitter is going to have a lot of data about political inclinations, and cultural factors like sexuality or race that can get you targeted politically.
the real problem that got Trump in office was normalcy bias. what we're dealing with is so bad that if you tell people who don't already know, they assume you're exaggerating.
> the real problem that got Trump in office was normalcy bias. what we're dealing with is so bad that if you tell people who don't already know, they assume you're exaggerating.
This is understated IMO. In almost every other democracy in the world, 1% of the mess that comes out of Trump's mouth would deem him utterly unelectable on account of how crazy he sounds. The US seems to lap it up though.
This is true, and it's probably because he now operates in an altered context — the narrative of persecution, especially by those perceived to be 'elite'. Without that, all Americans would see through his nonsense just as the inhabitants of democracies elsewhere do.
His opponents have done a very bad job of not making it look like everyone's simply biased and out to get him, and he's capitalised on that.
that's also partly because of Fox News, which was explicitly founded to ensure that the next Nixon would survive his Watergate.
> they're also talking about a national abortion ban. you might indeed be old enough for that not to affect your life any more, but if you have extended family, it will affect someone you care about, guaranteed
I do care about the people who will be affected. But it won't be people in my social class.
There's a lot of hypocrisy built into the social conservative mentality. I've seen the world they want to go back to, and it was never about eliminating, say, abortion. Progressives think that right wingers want to eradicate abortion the way progressives want to eliminate malaria and poverty. There are a few extremists who do, yes. But most right wing people just want to institute social rules that stigmatize abortion. They want people who get abortions to be discreet about it, and they want to shame and punish anybody who gets caught. They want abortions to be a crime for the poor and a scandal for the rich. That's all they want. If they get that, they don't care how many abortions people get.
My friends are sophisticated enough and have enough resources that they would be able to get an abortion if they needed one. They would find an anonymous way to get a pregnancy test. They would not share knowledge of their pregnancy with anyone. They would schedule a holiday in an abortion-friendly place and Instagram every step of it. In this way, they would respect the taboo, and that's all that most right wing people care about. Rich people being able to break the rules is very much part of the plan.
The burden of punishment will fall on people who weren't wealthy or sophisticated enough to navigate this hypocrisy, or who belong to disfavored groups (racial minorities, etc.) who are specifically targeted for enforcement.
Think of how Alan Turing was punished for homosexuality. The nature of his sexual behavior was obvious to the police, but he was not going to be punished for it. All he had to do was deny it. Show respect for the taboo. But he didn't deny it, he didn't participate in the hypocrisy, so he was punished.
> last but not least, Trump's stated goal of mass deportation would require intense surveillance
You're thinking like a progressive technocrat. You're thinking, how would I institute a fair, efficient, and effective program of mass deportation? Trump doesn't care how many people he deports, or even whether he deports the right people. He's not going to be surveilling rich white people to catch people like Elon Musk who overstay their visa. Any mass deportations will be like his wall: a half-assed, purely symbolic stunt that makes his supporters happy and confuses progressives because of the blatant lack of ambition to accomplish anything.
Again, the victims will be people that right wingers consider fair game because of their economic status and their skin color.
You're thinking like a progressive technocrat. You're thinking, how would I institute a fair, efficient, and effective program of mass deportation?
I'm really not.
Trump won the popular vote this time. The swing states were still where all the action was, but I hope this spells the end of the Democratic Party blaming the electoral college for their losses. This time, they just screwed this race up badly.
This was not just a screwed up race. The far left and identity politics have made the democratic party unelectable and they'll continue to do so until a strong leader can evict them from the party.
I really hope this clear loss without the excuse of the electoral college leads to a total reformation into a sane party. I just wish that had happened to republicans first.
The idea that America has a far left party, let alone that the democrats are a "far-left" party, is hilarious to the rest of the world.
The democrats, by european standards, are about as centrist as it gets.
Sure,but this isn't Europe and neither is Europe a gold standard of any sort.
The US is the outlier here though. I don't think any other country's political norms would describe the US Democratic Party as "far-left".
Describing any policy of the dems as "far-left" is just nonsense. It's used as an insult rather than to further actual political discourse.
Let's see
- Decriminalization of theft (now overturned via prop 36 in California) - Wealth redistribution via wealth taxes, unrealized gains taxes etc (Kamala policy proposal) - Support for anarchist movements (support for Jihadist elements, 2020 riots etc)
> Decriminalization of theft
Take all the issue with prosecutorial discretion that you want, but don't pretend that an adjustment in the misdemeanor/felony threshold by $450 means theft is no longer a crime.
maybe I should call it petty theft instead of theft.
Far left is when they appropriate property from the ownership class and hand it over to the workers. Not increasing taxes, lol.
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It absolutely isnt, democratic party social policy side wouldn't fly even in the most liberal parts of Europe.
All the pro EU social left democrats would be horrified if they looked at abortion policy of the noridcs.
What policy are you referring to?
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> This was not just a screwed up race. The far left and identity politics have made the democratic party unelectable and they'll continue to do so until a strong leader can evict them from the party.
This is a really interesting analysis that differs greatly from how I'm seeing it - in particular your characterization of the democrats as "far left." What policies of theirs would you describe as "far left?" Specifically ones that don't have to do with identity politics, since you categorized that as something else.
In my opinion, leftists in the USA are effectively disenfranchised and there's votes on the table for a leftist voting bloc. The democrats this election turned hard right (immigration, law enforcement, Israel weapon sales, etc), which is a strategy that has never really worked for them but remains their favorite thing to continually try. If someone didn't want immigration, why would they vote for the candidate that's light on immigration when they could vote for the guy promising to deport (somehow) millions?
I saw another interesting chart that showed that something like 4% of registered republicans voted for Biden and 3% for Kamala. Capturing right wing votes seems to be a fools errand for the Democrats that they simply won't give up. Meanwhile there's a whole entire political spectrum unrepresented in the USA - and it's not like there's no historical precedence for demonstrable popularity of leftist candidates, one of the most popular and consistently reelected senators is an out and out socialist.
> What policies of theirs would you describe as "far left?
Student debt cancellation
I agree that in general, democrats are not far left, and it's a small minority of the party. But democrats are beholden to them, and can't bring themselves to disavow and condemn their fringes.
> The democrats this election turned hard right (immigration
After 3.5 years of scolding everyone for being racist for being against uncontrolled immigration, they tried to pass a weak compromise bill that acknowledges the problem, while continuing to advocate allowing a "first come first serve" border policy to the tune of thousands of people a week. That failed, then after years of saying their hands were tied, suddenly decide that they actually can do something, a few months before the election.
> If someone didn't want immigration, why would they vote for the candidate that's light on immigration when they could vote for the guy promising to deport (somehow) millions?
It's clearly not a binary issue. That's exactly why Democrats need to reform themselves into a party of sanity, instead of e.g. this: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-reopens-asylum-a.... The idea that a local domestic violence issue becomes a case for asylum is insane on so many levels.
> law enforcement
Again, too little too late, and after too much scolding about racism.
> Israel weapon sales
I won't comment on Israel "weapon sales" specifically, that is missing the big picture. I'll just give a few perspectives on how I reached the conclusion I posted about democrats.
Biden's diplomacy in the middle east has been just totally pathetic. Every week for months we got the headline "Cease fire coming tomorrow - Biden". Biden's desperation makes it crystal clear to both sides that he has zero leverage and can be ignored. And why is he so desperate? Because he has to entertain the demands of the far left of the democratic voter base.
More generally, this is an issue where Democrats have allowed their weird obsession with colonialism to cloud their judgement. At the end of the day, the middle east is almost exclusively theocratic dictatorships that have ethnically cleansed their populations of jews over the last 50-100 years, or failed states controlled by Iranian proxy militaries. And then there's Israel, a secular democracy (for now) with a 20% Arab population, including Arab elected officials.
It's very distressing seeing college students in Iran protesting at very real risk to their lives and freedoms against the very same forces that college students in the US are protesting (effectively, wittingly or not) in support of.
I remember watching the raw unfiltered video from Oct 7 and thinking this was the clearest casus belli for a total war for a regime change and occupation since WWII. Hell, even WWI and WWII still did not have such a clear singular provocation. Yet, democrats find themselves muddled and confused about the issue. Not at first, but democrats proved themselves beholden to their fringe lunatics on this issue.
> the middle east is almost exclusively theocratic dictatorships that have ethnically cleansed their populations
...and Israel didn't? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread
Supporting relatively better theocratic democracy is how the United States ended up justifying weapon sales to Iran and Pakistan. Are we holding Israel to the standards of America, or to the standards of their reprehensible peers? Are we looking at this from a flawed relativist standpoint, or are we willing to identify flaws before they spiral out of hand?
This feels like something we should clear up before the Gaza death toll surpasses Bangladesh. Alternatively, America can also admit that we never cared in the first place and announce that we're open for business to any sufficiently rich nationalists. Israel represents the point at which America can either bring down the hammer or double down hoping this time is different than the other nationalist theocracies that imported US weapons under the premise of fighting terrorism.
I think it is perhaps both inaccurate and, at this point, a trope, to blame the failures of the US democratic party on IdPol or “wokeness” or DEI/CRT, etc.
This is a red herring, and ultimately thinking it had any real effect on the race (beyond being used as fodder for mocking them) is a dangerous distraction.
Despite the fact that the president doesn’t have that many short term economic levers that aren’t destructive/wasteful, the fact that most USians have worse economic circumstances now than they did four years ago is probably the main driver.
The big irony of this is that a lot of it is probably the lingering echoes of the massive economic damage from the pandemic, most of which was not only not mitigated, but massively accelerated by Trump’s policies during the main sequence of same.
I disagree. Pointing to some of the more extreme beliefs held by the left on those topics has been very effective in pushing people away. My wife, active on Chinese social media, forwards me a lot of indignant videos about some of the things the left does. Ignoring the fact that many otherwise moderate people really dislike {IdPol or “wokeness” or DEI/CRT} is a huge factor in the election results.
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> Trump's policies as well as America's general inability to follow rules imposed on them by government (many Americans ignored all covid rules), as well as the inability of American government to actually enforce many COVID rules, is the NUMBER ONE reason why the United States is currently dominating the world economy compared to countries that took stricter approaches to COVID.
You keep telling yourself that but those disastrous Covid policies did nothing to stop Covid. Instead it fucked kids, old people, businesses and communities all around the country. It was a massive abuse of government power.
A large part of this election is a result of those idiotic mitigations.
> It was a massive abuse of government power.
I completely agree with you. Not sure which part of my post made you think I support lockdowns. I don't. And that's my point. GOP governors did not lock down, and even in blue states where they did, many Americans ignored them.
lol. Sorry totally misread you! Carry on!!!
No problem!
>Trump won the popular vote this time.
Do we know that yet? Last I checked, there were still millions of votes not counted. (California alone still has enough to change it, if they all went one way.) They just aren’t in areas that would swing the overall electoral vote, so the people doing the math can call the race overall.
He's up by almost 5 million votes. There are enough votes outstanding to flip the race, but it seems unlikely that they'll break Democrat hard enough to make up the difference.
The leadership of the DNC should be purged. They are clueless idiots.
Most of them are geriatric at this point and will naturally be purged.
Don’t worry, the purges will begin soon enough.
they will purge the token hires to show a return to "normalcy" and thats it. Young grassroot talents will be ignored or marginalized as always. DNC is such a small club, even Gavin Newsom, the most "presentable" dem is an outsider. He left out some snarky remarks on how "the machine" works on pod save america podcast.
No, the purges will take out the entire senior leadership of the Democratic Party. You need to stop thinking like it’s 2020 and start thinking like it’s 1932.
I’m still on team end the EC. It really does cause states like California to have people shrug thinking their vote doesn’t matter. Moving to popular would end swing states period. Elections shouldn’t be decided by a couple states that may flip flop. Campaigns spend ridiculous money in only those places and ignore everywhere else.
These folks are trying to do what you are suggesting here:
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com
It is an interesting idea.
> I’m still on team end the EC.
One (of many) arguments against it: We were promised the costs of the indirection-layer of sober statesmen would provide a feature, protecting against a patently unqualified demagogue. The feature broke spectacularly.
That said, if I had a magic-genie wish between (A) popular vote for President and (B) replacing all our plurality-voting schemes with one of the many better systems, I would choose the latter.
I would rather every American vote and Trump receive 99% of that vote, than what we have now.
I'm more committed to democracy than politics.
There's an interesting heatmap to be made of how recently each state was considered a swing state. Anyone remember 2004 Iowa?
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You’ve been lied to.
the person just elected promised to rig every election
Quote, please?
I believe you're referring to what Trump said about in the future, New Yorkers won't have to vote.
That's not saying they won't be allowed to vote. It's saying that the folks who think they need to vote to defend their way of life won't feel that way anymore.
Of course, whether those folks are right, or whether Trump really would do anything about it, are different questions. But in any case, it's nothing like the widely-reported statement that Trump will (somehow, through undescribed FUD) put an end to elections.
To be fair, it was probably the coup attempt last time that has people worried.
I may be slaughtered here for saying so, but I can't see J6 as a "coup".
There's too much of an underpants gnome quality, with no clear path leading from "unruly mob pushed its way into the Capitol" to "Trump is inaugurated with the acceptance of (at least a majority of) the country".
It follows much more logically if we model it as an irrational rioting mob. This doesn't make it right, but it moves the suspicion from "subverting democracy" to (simply?) inciting a riot.
It was an irrational rioting mob sent by Trump and allowed to continue for hours while he sat on his rear hoping they would be successful in forceably preventing the transfer of power. He and his co-conspirators knew exactly what they were doing. The insurrectionists that he told to stand back and stand by implemented stack formations to breach the capitol.
>It's saying that the folks who think they need to vote to defend their way of life won't feel that way anymore.
Why do folks think that now? Propaganda and lies from politicians.
What would need to happen in order for them to NOT feel that way? The eradication of the Dems and the roughly half the voters that support them, and/or the further rigging of elections to ensure the half of Americans they disagree with are disenfranchised and/or the further entrenchment of the courts in an ideology only shared by half the country with mechanisms to prevent the 'left' from being able to take it back.
To pretend that statement is anything but directly threatening the pillars of democracy is absurd.
Even trumps own explanation shows the above to be true:
>Trump: So with respect to like a statement like I made that statement is very simple. I said, vote for me. You're not going to have to do it ever again. It's true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group. They don't vote, and I'm explaining that to them: You never vote — this time, vote. I'll straighten out the country. You won't have to vote anymore. I won't need your vote. You can go back.
Emphasis on: >I'll straighten out the country. You won't have to vote anymore. I won't need your vote. You can go back.
Why wouldn't he need the vote. What changes could he make that would result in that outcome that are democratic?
Why wouldn't he need the vote.
Ummmm.... maybe the fact that he won't even be eligible to run again? I mean, he literally has no use at all for a vote beyond yesterday's.
Let me phrase that better, why wouldn't they need to vote, since that is what he implied.
Why wouldn't they need to vote?
Why do you vote now? I guess one reason is just that it's your civic duty. But also, I think that a big reason for voting is defensive, to ensure that the other voters aren't screwing you first; or at least to make sure that your way of life isn't threatened. Isn't this exactly what "get out the vote" efforts are trying to do, convince potential voters that there's a threat that they need to address by casting their vote? So people vote for gay rights, or for self-defense rights, or for "pro choice" rights, etc.
So if you've preemptively had some putative Defender Of The Faith like Trump memorialize your values in legislation, then you've got relatively less fear driving you to vote defensively.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vote-four-years/
Thanks. So it was the statement I referred to, and as you'll see in my explanation above, this is nothing at all like saying that people won't be able to vote.
Saying "you won't need to vote because things will be fixed" is absolutely nothing like saying "you won't be allowed to vote anymore".
No one is saying you won't be allowed to vote. Russia has elections and people vote. The election is just "fixed" so the votes don't matter. I also have no reason to give this a charitable interpretation but hey, I hope you're right. You aren't but I hope you are.
>Don't move to Canada; move to a swing state.
Who, exactly, are you targeting with this message? You realize you are in the minority, right?
I'm speaking to the roughly 49% of Americans (and ??% of HN readers) who are unhappy with the outcome. And if that's not you, that's OK; just keep scrolling.
Less than 1/3 of eligible voters voted for trump https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/10-things-to-know-202...
How did you determine this? Less than 50% of the population voted.
Thank you american people for not letting the religion on envy to take power and regulate population's behavior to the last detail.
Make Orwell Fiction Again.
https://youtu.be/X_AUQ-nfifk?si=m-hmvVfxNgHygOtU
Surveillance is a bipartisan interest, and neither candidate would or will limit US surveillance capabilities.
We do this to ourselves, by electing to only use products that are marketed to us as safe or private. Of course, the only businesses successful enough to mass-advertise their products are the ones that acquiesce to horrible surveillance states like China, Russia and FIVE-EYES. So... NSA wins, fearmongers and paranoia-mongering politicians win, international adversaries win, and all American voters on either side of the aisle lose. We're just too dumb of a nation to seriously resist surveillance, no matter who wins whatever election.
Don't really care much about this election since I'm not a US citizen, but I decided to check out Bluesky as the results were coming in and it confirmed my long-time suspicion that roughly 99% of its users are far left American political activists.
Literally the entire discovery feed was post after post of said activists apparently suffering from legitimate mental breakdowns as if the entire world was crumbling around them.
Which is not really very strange, or unreasonable. I felt this was a fairly good article on that: https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/liberal-tear...
That seems very astute to me. As a Canadian I’m not having a breakdown, but the turmoil and conflict in the USA is seriously troubling. I would hate to be immersed in it.
I'm in Europe so I'm not having an "identity crisis" either. My views on the US have long been somewhat mixed, but there's definitely a "I thought you were better than that" feeling. Our friendship with the US was always a bit mixed and there were ups and downs, but this feels like a "I don't know if I can ever trust you again" moment. Or at least, it will take a long time to rebuild the trust.
Basically this:
"A Trump victory will be akin to the moment in an unhappy marriage where the spouses are arguing again and one hauls off and hits the other. It might not mean that the marriage is over—but it’ll never be the same. Both partners will have learned something hard about what one is capable of and that will inform their future interactions forever."
This. It feels like USA just lost the Cold War.
> Tens of millions of people are going to wake up [this morning] to find that they don’t live in the country they thought they did. Liberals, classical and otherwise, will discover overnight that they’re now outnumbered by a coalition of earnest fascists, partisan Republicans who’ll rationalize literally anything, and millions upon millions of less tribal voters who don’t care how corrupt Trump is or which laws he breaks or whether he overturns elections or not so long as they get the results on their pet issues that they’re hoping for.
> That’s an identity crisis. A big one. And a lot of people are going to be having it at the same time.
Hold that thought. HN Commentators, feel free to correct me if I've mis-read the room, but I think there are very few here who do not realise that Trump's presidency will go poorly for the USA and the rest of the world's democracies.
I think in fact you'll find there's been a huge rightward shift in the tech sector in the US and HN reflects that.
Absolutely. This comment section shows it as good as any. HN used to be about intellectual curiosity, now you get people complaining about pronouns.
The rightward shift in the tech sector seems to only apply to executives. ICs seem to be as lefty as they always have been.
Wish I could agree. I've seen a marked shift in tone.
What I'd say is that there is a significant number of "libertarians" whose "liberty" veneer is scratching off and the authoritarian conservative body underneath is starting to show through, as it always does.
Also, most "lefty" US tech workers are "lefty" only on social/cultural issues -- and would not be broadly in favour of socialist or social democratic economic policy... which I guess describes Democrats in the US generally.
This is probably partially cultural. My experience is with the UK admittedly.
800 VCs backed Kamala Harris. There has been some rightward shift, yes, but probably not enough to offset the general vibe.
Should be interesting to see how those folks are treated by the Musk-Vance-Thiel axis that just took power in the Whitehouse.
Yes, yes, we know. Democracy is over, America is doomed, he's going to start a nuclear war and kill us all, etc.
That's what you all said the last time he was elected.
Your hyperbole aside, you imply that his last term was good, rather than poor. I'm asking about HN's collective opinion, which you've contributed to, thank you, but not, perhaps, in the way you thought you were.
> there are very few here who do not realise
Double negatives ought to be illegal, they make muh head hurt
What's "far left"? Communism?
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Its funny. Even after this happens the comments continue to keep the echo chamber going instead of wanting to understand how this happened. Until the DNC has an honest conversation with itself this will just keep happening.
Current DNC leadership needs to go. It's not enough to be on the right side of the issues - you have to also win.
I hope this is a giant wake up call that causes them to clean house. The current leadership and strategists are clearly horribly disconnected from the average voter, and they should be replaced by a team that actually enfranchises its base by pushing for robust primaries (unlike this year), without putting a thumb on the scale (unlike 2016).
You can't win with a backroom of overeducated analysts putting together a "platform" of issues that they feel like will appeal to the median voter, then trying to shove a pre-screened, crappy establishment candidate down everyone's throats.
The best way to figure out what people want to vote for is to hold an actual vote.
Social media upvoting/downvoting that results in comments being hidden is the reason for this. Even a small imbalance in one direction or the other effectively silences one side. Perfectly legitimate, well-reasoned comments will get angrily downvoted into invisibility. Echo chambers get created and enforced. This is particularly bad on Reddit (low karma can get you banned from a sub) but even on HN I'll give anecdotes that go against the "party line" and I'll get downvoted.
Problem is, this is the best way to increase engagement because it gives the most people the most compelling content. So this will never change.
I agree but i think HN does a somewhat Ok job with the upvoting system. Well at least compared to reddit which is in a full blown meltdown because their bubble popped.
Some ideas I'd like to see implemented (in no particular order):
1. Eliminate anonymity by requiring real names and profile pictures attached to usernames. This humanizes users and encourages accountability, as attaching a real name can act as a natural filter for behavior.
2. Introduce a cost for downvoting to make it a more thoughtful action. This could involve a quota based on account age and karma, or my favorite option—having each downvote cost a bit of karma or an upvote on one of your own posts.
3. Discourage bot accounts by requiring a hard-to-obtain token, like a verified phone number, which is straightforward to implement and would reduce low-effort accounts.
4. Higher barrier to entry to join an online community. This doesn't parallel how communities work IRL. You need social credit to join a community.
It seems like what happened is that voters without economic knowledge think the president controls inflation, as opposed to it being the inevitable consequence of price rises worldwide due to a worldwide pandemic.
They don't like that eggs went up in price so they elect the opposite party. They think Trump will bring prices back down because he's a businessman, even though his tariffs will be hugely inflationary.
I'm not sure what kind of an honest DNC conversation would be able to address this.
I think this had very little to do with it. From the people I have talked with and also just looking at the latino vote i think people greatly underestimate how many people actually want our immigration system changed as well as being absolutely sick of identity politics.
Also your view that dumb voters led to this is counter productive and insulting. It is what I am seeing in almost every reddit post as well. “Well people are just too dumb to know what they need”… yeah ok.
I’ve already seen people posting absolutely unhinged comments on Reddit. They think they need to go further left, more extreme, completely ignoring the rightward shift of every group but white women.
They don’t want to understand why so many people see the appeal of Trump but not the Democratic Party. They are so caught up in whatever their personal ideological take on some fringe issue is that they miss the big issues and the popular support for change away from the status quo on those issues.
I won’t lie it’s been really fun to watch. I was so sick of all the self righteous posts they had going before the elections.
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I think the downvotes probably have to do with how you're approaching the topic, at least in this post.
In what way? In 2016 I did have people approach me for being brown. I live in a liberal white enclave in NE Portland, so this is fairly common for me. Yes, it's extremely weird.
and as for the wall. I'm just saying how I feel.
In our current panopitcon, lies work. Turns out if an entertaining man lies again and again into a mechanism (the Internet) that endlessly amplifies and repeats those lies for free (paid for by all of us with our attention), you can win.
The failure of realize how mainstream media lied and covered for Kamala and the Democratic party in mind blowing here. Just one tiny example, "Joe Biden is in top shape" a month before he pushed out.
This so much. Meanwhile hiding true stories like the Haitians eating dogs, Hillary's child sex ring, and FEMA stealing people's houses.
Evidence?
Honestly if the Dems put as much effort into finding a candidate people like as they did into making sure the establishment candidate had as much positive press as possible, they might actually accomplish something.
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If you can't see by now that there were a lot of lies on both sides (as has always been true since the dawn of politics), you need to reevaluate your information diet.
Have I missed the news where Kamala Harris was convicted on a few dozen federal charges or ordered to pay 80+ million to someone she sexually abused? There's lies and then there are lies that can get you into prison.
They were lying to you that a senile man was fit to lead for the next four years. That alone would have been far more consequential for the country than any lie related to sexual deviancy (of which the Democratic party has certainly had its fair share over the years).
Was the 2020 election stolen?
I sometimes imagine what Science Officer Spock would really say to humans to help them understand themselves.
Just saying "highly illogical" is not very helpful.
(The following is all my imagination, any resemblance to reality is coincidental)
So, I think he would talk about how the mind is not a machine designed for rationality. The mind is a holographic projection, a story told by a collection of organs in your head, fed by sensations from your body.
I think he would talk about the dilemma of aspiration. If you aspire to rationality, and you feel that rationality is the best system of thought, then you will be driven to believe that you are highly rational. Unfortunately, in many things, you cannot differentiate between logical consistency and post-hoc rationalization.
Humans know this; so we have things like peer review.
Unfortunately you also cannot trust another person to rationally evaluate your beliefs - humans have a strong history of in-group/out-group dynamics. It is beneficial to signal agreement and trustworthiness; it is harmful and painful to signal disagreement with the in-group.
And so rational thought requires rational communication with people you disagree with - and people in the out-group, because your in-group may have centered on a wrong, harmful or otherwise useless belief.
Rational communication requires an overlap in perspective. Not the same point of view, but at least a minimal consensus in perception of reality and goals. For instance, most people believe that it is good to invest in young people in some way, though they may disagree about what that means.
Unfortunately, in-group/out-group dynamics can make this very difficult in times of active conflict, as humans have a very strong sense of morality, and sending moral signals to your in-group is more important that rational communication.
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No one had a plan that got humans to this point in our story. No one has a plan for humans in an age of worldwide social media. We have to build it together.
I don't like country music, but I can see the appeal. Things are simpler in the country - you have to believe in real things like trucks and cows, not theoretical things like software and commodity futures contracts.
It's nice to deal with things that are simple and real.
Is there some statistical analysis on the reason people vote trump ? I refuse to believe the narrative that Americans are just a bunch of redneck retarded bigots.
Tried to Google it but all I find is a bunch of American news website like CNN and website like https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/the-five-types-t...
I'm trying to look beyond the propaganda, any idea if there has been scientific studies or anything remotely credible ?
You ever stop to think that maybe calling ~50% of the population of your country "a bunch of redneck retarded bigots" could perhaps have some part in it? The media pushing that narrative everywhere certainly doesn't help either.
I'm not a Yank nor do I vote or care to ever vote, but if I were and all I ever saw was every mainstream source of news and media, including sites like Reddit and apparently even HN, calling me a retard (which funnily enough is a pretty bigoted insult coming from the supposed moral & good side) and a bigot non-stop I'd probably say "fuck it" and vote for the guy too.
From where I'm sitting across the pond, the Republicans want stricter border control, smaller government, lower taxes, free speech (which itself is a loaded term that means different things depending on who's saying/hearing it), which is basically what the populist parties across the EU are promising as well.
Yep exactly, this is what won him the 2016 election and the meltdowns were amazing. This time around the dems have also had the economy making them look bad, not to mention the illegal immigration issue finally making it to "big blue" cities like New York.
So it's not really surprising he won, and the margin isn't surprising either.
The us economy has grown at an unprecedented rate over the last few years. I wish my home of Australia had such a dynamic economy.
(I suspect the problem, of course, is that the newfound prosperity is not shared evenly amongst the population.)
You suspect correctly. Its been a great economy for yuppies with college degrees, not so much for everyone else. And everyone else is the majority.
Actually i think it's the bottom fifth that have benefited the most from wage growth, with the low-six figure crowd getting the short end of the stick and having to pay more for burgers with the tight service labor market.
Yes, and it appears the non-college folks in the suburbs (who've been having to pay more for their burgers) were the biggest shift this election, not the burger flippers themselves.
See this is what surprises me. I would have thought voting for a more regular market with higher taxes to the elite would be favourable to the majority non-tech workers, rather than the billionaires which play the puppeteers to trump
Not a single penny of that "extra tax money from tech workers" would go to the average Joe. That's the problem. It would go straight for the lowest classes or overseas.
I would hope you realize that the average joe is a member of the lowest classes; but yes, neaeshoring certainly would’ve continued under Harris.
I suppose but I'm not really sure if the GOP has anything on offer that will actually help. I hope they do because we're gonna be living in it but nothing thus far proposed has been said to be good for the economy.
Can't wait for America to become the coal mining capital of the world. Such a forward thinking strategy.
It's also the (trying to be) misleading mainstream media. Stuff like "he wants to deport all immigrants" being uttered until the last day - without specifying it's just the illegal ones, which is a very important distinction.
And there are many examples like these, where he's quoted WAY out of context, and that kind of stuff. If you believe that for years and at one point learn that it's actually bs and he didn't say that or the context reveals he was quoting someone else, or negates the comment the next sentence, etc, you start to question ALL your beliefs.
They pushed too far, fabricated just a BIT too much, and people caught on.
Just so you know, i wasn't quoting what I think but what mainstream media says 'indirectly' here in Europe.
Obviously I don't buy it, hence the reason I asked if studies had been made.
It surprises me that I see so many different reason here in the comment why people think others chose trump, when it's clearly their own reasoning.
You say they voted trump because they are fed up of being called bigot, just like YOU would do. Well that's the issue, some Americans might have say fuck them I vote trump but I honestly believe it is marginal.
I believe most cared about the election economy first, but I could be biased and that's literally the reason I asked if studies had been done, beyond the usual blablah.
> You ever stop to think that maybe calling ~50% of the population of your country "a bunch of redneck retarded bigots" could perhaps have some part in it? The media pushing that narrative everywhere certainly doesn't help either.
Yep, it's an own goal. Similar shit has led to the rise of right-wing populism all across the world, time and again. Yet they never learn. They never realize that shitting on the average Joe is not how you get power in a democratic setup.
Turns out, the average Joe is a poor, working dude. He is not a sexist colonialist or any other -ism. Yet the Democratic Party will not stop alienating men.
That's not what the said. They said the opposite.
> and a bigot non-stop I'd probably say "fuck it" and vote for the guy too.
And most people would say that would categorize you as mentally deficient. Voting against your own best interests because you feel people are mean to you isn't usually seen as very intelligent.
Namecalling and shit slinging is exactly what Trump and his supporters do and it seems to work out well for them. They love thinking about people crying over their insults and whatnot. But they also complain loudly if anyone turns the same against them.
Trump is namecalling mostly politicians. The Dems are namecalling voters.
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The democrats are not socialist and they don’t call themselves that. Socialists may or may not cast a D vote, but if they do it’s a monumental compromise.
The Dems are terrified of accidentally seeming too left. Republicans have no problem embracing the more extreme right, whereas Dems would rather cowtow to the imaginary swing voter and lose than get called the S word.
Some on the left are proudly socialist or communist, and some on the right are proudly bigoted.
Every far left extremist (which have no clue what communism even means) has an analogous far right extremist (who also have no clue what it actually means), both are idiots and shouldn't be let anywhere near government.
Admittedly the US had a choice between someone unfit for office and a lawfully convicted felon, I don't envy this situation.
What? Kamala would have done great, where is this coming from? Trump for better or worse is about to get Weekend at Bernie'd by his cabinet just like Biden did.
those people don't care, in fact they embrace the identity
You're experiencing an illusion. The few who do embrace the identity of "redneck retarded bigot" will wear the identity openly. The majority who do not embrace that identity will diplomatically avoid discussing their true political opinions with you and you'll just assume their democrats because they're intelligent and sensible, and then you'll be flabbergasted when things like last night happen.
what? plenty of intelligent and sensible people have told me point blank that they're voting for Trump. I'm not surprised in the slightest that he won.
It's not 50% though; in 2020, only ~240 million people were eligible to vote (out of 330 million, so about 72% of people); only ~158 million people actualy voted (48%). Oversimplifying, only 25% of the population of the US voted for Trump, and it's probably even less due to the system of electors.
This is why democracy is broken, because not everyone gets a voice.
I've never understood this argument. When performing scientific studies, there is a sample size of n = x hundred/thousand, and we then generalise the result across the entire population. Having 48% of the population participate in this "study" is likely to be very indicative of the likely voting choice for the remainder of the population, right? You really think that the proportion of votes for each party for those people that haven't voted would be any significant difference from those that did?
> Having 48% of the population participate in this "study" is likely to be very indicative of the likely voting choice for the remainder of the population, right?
That isn't how statistics work. Sample size reduces your error relative to the population you are randomly sampling from.
When you don't have a random sampling, then you sampling method is what determines how generalizable your findings are. A good sample size with a bad sampling method tells us little to nothing about the general population and only informs us about the specific sub population for which the sample can be considered a random selection from.
With significant differences in voting rates across many different demographics, votes are absolutely not a representative sample of the overall population.
You're assuming the population is homogeneous
After seeing this guy become elected for the second time I have come to the opposite conclusion. This is what America wants, and this is what America is. The rest of the world should acknowledge this and act accordingly, and the people of the US, especially the Democrats, should as well.
Pretending like "this isn't us", "this isnt real america" is just keeping them from doing any real introspection.
No, urban areas voted Democrat once again. If anything, 2024 has really showed the widening divide between urban and rural areas, both in the US and in Europe. Probably everywhere else as well.
While it is true that democrats carried urban centers it is worth noting that their support appears to have eroded somewhat in these areas. Republicans picked up a statistically relevant number of votes there.
If I were a betting man I'd wager that switches like that are purely due to inflation. Shit's too expensive and people think that changing the party they vote into the seat of the presidency is going to change that.
Which is incredibly stupid given Elon just said in the last month that Trump’s policies would cause inflation.
Important to note that it's not what all of us Americans want, it's just what a little over half of the voting population voted for.
"A little over half of the voting population" is literally all that matters here! The levels of cope here are astounding.
It’s all that matters in the presidential race. But barely over half of the population wanted him as president. The other side doesn’t disappear just because they lost an election.
Talk about really problems with 'democracy' where 51% decides decides to thrust their views on the rest 49% . The concept is fundamentally flawed.
Well in 2020 it apparently didn't matter so you should try and stay consistent.
> all that matters!
Some perspective is called for.
Half the voting population who chose to vote voted for.
I'm in the UK and I was just listening to Andrew Neil, a political commentator over here, and he mentioned something interesting. There was apparently a 3 to 2 ratio of Hispanic/Black voters voting FOR Trump. A possible explanation is that the border policies have had an impact on minimum wage workers, of which Hispanic and Black voters are disproportionately a category of. The Democratic Party will have to do a post mortem, but there's likely to be many issues found where the Democrats failed their voters.
In particular, I believe the economic rhetoric Trump used worked very well with many lower income people. I don't remember Harris taking any strong stances there, or maybe what she had I store was not communicated well.
I think this is accurate, a big chunk of the vote seems to be "my bills/food/rent went up when Blue in office, Red says they _will_ fix it, so let's try Red"
Of course not statistical, but seems to be a large trend in discussion
Yeah, I think that's it, or at least a large part of it. People were unhappy and when you're unhappy you vote out the incumbent (and in a two-party system there's only one other choice).
I also think that's the same reason the exact same guy was voted out four years ago. Pretty bizarre if true, so it's probably not the whole story.
This is the challenge that the Democrats have; the Republicans have a policy that appeals to a significant enough percentage of the population, while the Democrats have to try and appeal to "everyone else". A two-party system is not a democracy, it's a compromise, and only a political revolution will fix it.
Of course, that's also what the Republicans / Heritage Foundation are aiming for, if they have their way they will do away with democracy. Which isn't exactly what I was thinking of.
Harris had no strong stances. At all. Her only one was "I'm not Trump". Which is kind of a loosing strategy when people seem to like him.
*losing
Harris promised raising the minimum wage and down payment support for first-time buyers.
Americans (with the help of the media) are just plain stupid and vote against their own interests.
Promises from an incumbent can hit differently. If Democrats were willing and able, they should have done it in the last 4 years. If not, then why promise?
The Biden administration did a lot of student debt relief.
But in the end that doesn't matter is the media isn't willing to talk about that. And people keep listening to those media.
Remember age didn't matter anymore once Biden dropped out? If the NYT hammered Trump the same way they did Biden, the outcome would be different.
I have no doubt Harris would have delivered on improving the conditions for the poor. Unfortunately Trumps rhetoric was simply too effective, perhaps because of what you say in the second sentence.
This is what rural USA wants.
What makes rural America so numerous?
They're not so numerous; due to the way the system is set up, they have outsized impact. Wyoming with 500k people has the same amount of influence in the Senate as California with 38 million people.
That said, so far she hasn't won the popular vote either, so that's not what we should be blaming in this election.
My question is, why can't democrats see how bad and average intell. their candidate is? Trump can at least talk, give interviews and all. But other one???
> But other one???
is not a sentence.
OK.
For one, the population is way more spread out in the US than in other countries. There are only 9 cities with more than 1 million people in a country of 350 million inhabitants.
Those are local administrative areas, not cities. Using any reasonable functional definition of a city, the number of cities with a population >1 million is around 50.
I think they just have a higher reproduction rate. Shorter generations and wider ones too.
Hell I'm from a rural family that voted majority trump. I'm a bud not a stem. I'm also 33 with no kids.
It's not that it's numerous (it's not). It's that they have a lot weight because of how the electoral college works.
I think you’re confusing the electoral college with the Senate.
There are two senators per state regardless of population, so low-population rural states have an outsized influence in the Senate.
In the electoral college, each state is weighted by population. It’s unavoidably biased (just by the nature of chunking votes into seats and states) but it doesn’t consistently favor either side.
Each state gets a number of electors equal to their Congressional delegation: Representatives *and* Senators. So the overweighting of small states in the Senate does, to a smaller degree, affect the Electoral College as well (as every state gets two "free" electors).
Good point! I overlooked that. On the other hand, the larger states having large bloc votes plays in their favor.
electoral college
The electoral college for one. Massively oversized benefit, especially since the house size has been frozen. Basically every level of our government is designed to give small rural areas the advantage. It’s no wonder we are the only prosperous nation without universal healthcare and post secondary education. We give the people who contribute the least to our society free rein to run it.
No, basically every level of our country is designed to balance the voices of heavily populated areas with rural areas. It's completely ignorant of the history of our nation to claim it's intended to give rural areas an advantage, when in fact it is an attempt at compromise. And let's not forget: without that compromise our nation literally would not exist, as the large and small states wouldn't have come to an agreement otherwise.
I wouldn't say people in rural areas do the least for society.
This is also what billionaires and the rich want, which is how you can tell rural USA isn't going to gain anything. But they'll blame immigration or some other issue instead of the people swimming in gold coins, making them work harder for less money year over year.
See also this article from 2004:
http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/
>The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”
>But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.
Holy cow, 20 years later and it's all still accurate. You could swap some names and post it today.
This is quite bleak.
That us how i feel as well the US will finally get what it deserves.
Everyone is throwing ideas, excuses and explanations into the mix, but maybe people just want what he’s proposing - strict border control, low regulation, small government, low taxes, free speech etc.
Im not American and barely engaged with politics at all but all of that sounds like a pretty good idea to me without looking at any stats or trying to find out why my fellow citizens were confused into making the wrong choice.
It isn’t about why his promises appeal to some people. The question is why people buy the ”free ice cream for all every day if I’m elected class president!” from a pedophile-rapist criminal. And instead of class presidency it’s real presidency.
I wouldn’t trust literally anything in this guys hands’ and even less a country.
Except they're lies or false promises; low regulation is only for companies, allowing them to infringe on workers' rights, increase poverty, etc, which goes towards oligarchy. Small government means more power to less people, which goes towards autocracy. Low taxes means less money to social programs, which means people will literally die from being unable to afford health care, which is eugenics. Free speech for me but not for thee, it's Musk's flavour of free speech where words like "cis" are banned.
But sure, on the surface they sound good I suppose.
My take is that the democrats are being blamed for the ever higher cost of living.
There are people who vote because they want the insular America and to bring jobs back from China/Mexico/etc, those who vote to burn down 'the establishment' because they feel no hope, and those who just hope that any change means cost of living drops.
Maybe I would like this too but there are still more steps to go to then believe that a proven liar will give it to them.
If you use Twitter you would know. People hate the lackadaisical attitude to illegal immigration, the inflation in the economy, and the idealogy-centered government (yes, this has been a popular sore point).
Yet the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill earlier this year that basically had nearly everything Republicans asked for, and the House wouldn't even take it up because Trump didn't want to lose immigration as an issue.
And inflation is almost down to normal levels, and Trump is promising wide ranging and massive tariffs that it is hard to see not causing a significant rise in inflation.
So its hard to see how people who are concerned about those issues would vote for Trump.
Even if they don't like Democrat approaches to those issues, or really dislike Democrat ideology which might explain voting for Trump now when the only real choices were Trump and Harris, what about during the Republican primaries?
Republicans used to have many reasonably competent people in the primaries. How the heck could they not find anyone better than Trump?
I find it hilarious when people say democrats are "idealogy-centered government" [sic], but Trump isn't. What do those words mean to you? Are you saying that Trump has no ideology?..
As someone who voted for Harris, I’d say trump is less ideologically driven than democratic candidates. He’s insane and erratic, which don’t follow ideology.
Oh, he definitely has an ideology if you've ever read about project 2025
But he doesn't openly argue for that. And that's all politics is. Optics.
Then Idk, he openly says that government agencies should have less power (epa, fda...). I mean, he doesn't sponsor this view, but he openly said he'll make musk give less and less agency to gov. Companies that aren't deemed worth of it, whatever it means
> Are you saying that Trump has no ideology?..
Well, maybe he has, but he aligns his campaign to match the voters' will instead of trying to change the will of the voters' to match his campaign.
Dems: "Listen up: these are the issues that are important to you."
Trump: "That's important to you? Well, in that case it's important to me too!"
You can't expect to win if you are out of touch with what the voters want.
I think this is it. Trump knows how to repeat what people say to themselves
> Are you saying that Trump has no ideology?..
It.. unironically seems so? Not long ago Trump used to be a Democrat. He has often backtracked and tweaked his public ideology to whatever gets the most populist support, e.g. Abortions.
Generally, they mean promoting DIE rather than merit and national interest.
Which of course actually means nothing. Being against DEI is just a coded way of saying, "we don't want to compete with women and non-white people".
Bullshit.
It’s framed as an equality movement whereas it takes as an axiom that society is built on systemic oppression - that’s the unquestionable tenet. And then the prescription is using governments power to impose “preferred” outcomes, no matter the cost.
Thanks, but no thanks - I prefer to live in a meritocracy.
Also my personal pet peeve - having a cultural preference is not racism, god damn it! Not all cultures are the same, and we should be allowed to state and fight for our preferences! (Unlike discriminating on the basis of physical appearance or features, which is actual racism).
The fact that America equates the two is asinine to me (as an immigrant)
> whereas it takes as an axiom that society is built on systemic oppression - that’s the unquestionable tenet
You didn't say, but I think strongly implied, this is untrue. Why do you think so?
FYI the inflation was in large part generated by Trump
Oligarchs owning most of the media has to be a factor in voting in all this.
(Why else would they own such "lossmaking" businesses).
Not just generic oligarchs but specifically Fox.
It really isn't just fox.
You especially see it if you pay attention to framing. On every mainstream platform, social issues are always first and foremost framed as "how can we afford this expensive social program!?!". It's always business friendly and worker hostile.
Have you read the New York Times, CNN, or Washington Post for instance?
It was a major deal that Biden's health was declining and he showed signs of dementia. But when Trump displays similar symptoms there's dead silence.
There's a consistent "sane washing" of the crazy things Trump says across nearly all media and the double standard is unreal.
I swear that has been something that, as an European person, left me quite speechless. We've heard a lot about Biden mental situation, but nothing about the other guy struggling as well
He's nowhere near as bad as Biden. The media downplayed Biden's senility until the disastrous debate made it impossible. Americans got to see both candidates talk without a teleprompter for a couple hours, and Trump was able to handle it easily, while Biden exhibited clear signs of mental decline.
Trump has a rambling oratory style, but that is more of a stylistic affection.
Why deflect towards Biden?
The question isn't if he's better or worse than Biden, the question is if he's well enough for the presidency. And he's shown very clear signs of mental decline the last months.
Neither Trump nor Biden should have been chosen as candidates, yet all the focus has been on Biden.
... and the network formerly known as Twitter.
You know, nothing gives me competence in my incompetence than seeing just how fucking successful Trump and Elon have been despite their lack of competence
You mean the same majority of the major media outlets of all types that has been consistently hostile to Trump for many years?
If it's the oligarchs in the media who were a factor in this second victory, then it was through one truly spectacular mass-scale reverse psychology of getting exactly the opposite of the narrative they almost consistently pushed. That would be one very interesting story if it were at all true.
More realistically: to a very big (and apparently growing) swathe of the American voting public, the kind of shit that mattered most was what much of the media and their progressive political supporters in the major cities derided enough for all those millions of voters to dig in their heels and ignore them. Trump symbolically and often also literally, vocally represents this resistance to that media narrative, and thus he won again.
Musk, Bezos and Murdoch are three that come to mind. Two are legacy media. Between Fox and Washington Post that surely is not even half of the 'mainstream media'. What other oligarchs are there that I'm overlooking?
- Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook/Instagram (issued the statements in late Aug 2024 about Biden administration pressuring about censoring Covid-related info)
- Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of LA Times/San Diego Union Tribune, and other newspapers, LA Lakers, billionaire biotech person
- Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, owner of Time magazine
- Laurene Powell Jobs, billionaire widow of Steve Jobs, owns The Atlantic Monthly
- Masayoshi Son, Softbank CEO, USA Today/Gannet media group owned by New Media Investment Group via Fortress Investment group via Softbank
[edit - added below]
- Michael Bloomberg (former mayor of New York city) owns Bloomberg
- Sumner Redstone owns Paramount/Viacom/CBS
- Thomson family (Canada) owns Thomson Reuters via Woodbridge Company
- Brain L. Roberts, CEO Comcast, son of company founder, NBCUniversal, Sky Group, owned via 33% controlling supershares
- Donald Newhouse, son of company founder, Conde Nast (New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue), newspapers, controlling stake in Discovery Comms.
- John Malone, former CEO of TCI cable, largest shareholder of Liberty Media, et al.
It's anecdotal, but the easiest way to understand them is to just travel to a conservative state and talk to them. Even if you won't agree, you'll see that they exist
Even in Harlem you'd probably don't have to walk more than 50 yards to talk to someone.
It is strange how there is this superficial notion that areas are 'Blu' or 'Red'.
I thought the implicit assumption in their comment was that OP/grandparent isn't American.
Oh. Makes sense.
In the bluest district of the bluest state you still don't have to leave the neighborhood to find them. And visa versa.
To be fair, that is not easy in any practical sense of the word for most of us.
I live outside the SF Bay Area in the hills. I'll vouch for the thought here.
Several of my neighbors wear Trump's mark.
lol...
And I would add, listen. Don't immediately check out mentally because you disagree with what they are saying, don't argue, simply listen and try to understand. It's really hard for humans to do, but it's important. You cannot hope to change minds or appeal to voters if you don't understand what motivates them in the first place.
And when I say you have to understand people I mean truly understand, not intellectually lazy crap like "oh they're just stupid" or "they're racist" like you already see in this thread. Stupid/racist/etc people do exist, but that isn't most people and it isn't most Trump voters either. They are normal people with real concerns and needs, not caricatures of evil.
I do try. The problem is, a lot of times what they're saying is just nonsense.
"The economy is terrible" -- well, no it's not. We had some inflation a few years ago, but so did every other country in the world, and the US has had far lower than most other places. The Biden administration has been doing a great job with the economy. And you know those business people who want Trump to win because they want lower regulations? Yeah, they're not on your side -- they're trying to screw you over. You feel economic pressure, and so you're going to vote someone who's going to make it worse?
"Libs are weaponizing the justice department" -- People who have flagrantly tried to flout laws and undermine our democracy need to be held accountable. I mean yeah, "Always prosecute the outgoing party" is something we want to avoid, but "Never prosecute anything any politician does" is just as bad, if not worse. And at any rate, if that's something you're actually concerned about, why is your solution to vote for "LOCK HER UP!" Trump?
"Biden / Harris are just as bad" -- I mean, no? Trump literally sent an armed mob to attack his own vice president. Nothing you think the alleged "Biden crime family" comes anywhere close (and BTW there is no "Biden crime family").
"Immigrant gangs are invading our country" -- I mean, just no.
Not everyone is like this, but a lot of people are just living in a fictional reality constructed by Fox, Newsmax, and now Musk.
Try to listen to why they are saying these things. Find where you are similar not where you differ.
Often I have found the same fears, desires and hopes in my opponents as myself. For example: "I want my children to grow up happy"
From that level of similarity we can reach people. It takes effort.
Yes, this. If you really listen to people, both sides care about the same things they’re just drinking different flavors of kool aid.
> "...so did every other country in the world, and the US has had far lower than most other places..."
And you fail to see why that might be uninteresting and unconvincing to a low income voter struggling even harder to make ends meet? Maybe even infuriating enough to vote against whoever said it?
I'm trying to treat people like adults. They're suffering because of worldwide macroeconomic conditions that are out of Biden's control, but Biden's administration has managed to make the suffering less than in other places. Other sources of suffering include policies which the Republicans themselves have been pursuing.
Imagine someone buys a Kia hoping to reduce how much they pay in gasoline; but then the price of gasoline doubles, and they end up paying more than they were before anyway; and so they say, "Kia is a terrible car, it's so expensive to fill up, I'm going to buy a Hummer instead".
That's what voting for Trump in this situation is like: at minimum he's going to enable rich oligarchs to squeeze low-income voters even harder, and at worst he's going to trash the economy by raising tariffs, deporting working immigrants, and politicizing the federal reserve (lowering interest rates and triggering even more inflation).
I think normal voters are perfectly capable of understanding this. It's you who seem to be saying that low income voters are incapable of understanding this and should instead be lied to.
> "I think normal voters are perfectly capable of understanding this. It's you who seem to be saying that low income voters are incapable of understanding this and should instead be lied to."
I offer in rebuttal the election results (which, to be clear, I myself am not happy about).
The Democrats could have promised a lot more programs and initiatives to relieve the pain of the working class than they did. They could have made economic relief a lot more central to their advertising. People want their pain acknowledged and sympathized with, not waved away with an airy "it's not so bad".
I think we basically agree then. As far as I'm aware, the Democrats didn't attempt even to make the "making the best of a bad hand" argument, much less make a case for how they were going to address the situation.
One thing that Trump is incredibly talented at at is getting everyone to talk about him. I've always thought that the way to get him beat wasn't to trash him, but to talk about the great things about the alternate candidate. So I made it a point to avoid talking about Trump on my social media. After the DNC, I thought we were going to get the same thing from the Harris campaign -- but it seems like in the last few weeks, Harris went hard on attacking Trump, hoping to get women out to vote for reproductive rights, leaving me nothing really to share or talk about on FB.
Trump, on the other hand, went hard on getting young adult males, who typically don't vote at all, to come out and vote for him. Both efforts had their effect, but Trump's bet seems to have paid off more, and put him back in the white house.
Well that's all wrong. You don't need to travel to find a Trump voter. And merely talking to them is not going to be sufficient to truly "understand" them. If only.
Talking to a person should be at least one thing to try to do to understand another person.
It's not wrong to try to understand another.
Maybe it's just cope for the massive disappointment I'm feeling about the state of my country, but I'm somehow also disappointed that you could somehow read my comment and misunderstand it so badly. Of course I wasn't arguing that people should not talk to one another.
If you have access to the Economist this selection of reader's letters in response to their endorsement of Harris is quite enlightening.
https://www.economist.com/letters/2024/11/04/letters-to-the-...
I just did. Unfortunately I did not learn much. The first few letters were pro-Trump, but with for me unconvincing reasoning, I think OP asked for something better - and I read it because I too wanted to hear something with more substance. Most letters were even against Trump.
Most pro Trump arguments seem to be some vague statements about freedom of speech and "weaponizing of the Justice Department", which I find unconvincing given the things Trump said several times during the last few months, indicating he would do exactly that and worse.
The letters are as vague as this example:
> My concern is that Ms Harris will at a minimum continue the leftist direction of America that has been pursued, or at least tolerated, by Joe Biden. Not to mention the violation of basic constitutional rights that the president tried to introduce with his vaccine mandate during the pandemic.
or
> Mr Trump will cut bureaucracy and regulations to unleash creativity and productivity in the American economy, especially manufacturing. Ms Harris will inflict taxes and spending that will spur higher deficits and inflation.
or
> You overlooked the unacceptable risks posed by the Democratic Party and Vice-President Harris. These include support for censorship, political correctness, selective prosecution and soft totalitarianism. The Republicans spend more, impose tariffs, and obsess on immigration whereas the Democrats tax more, regulate more and censor. Neither party confronts the hard choices required to limit monetary expansion, deficits and entitlements that gnaw at the dollar. I choose the Republicans because I value freedom of speech and oppose the totalitarianism implied in weaponising the Justice Department.
and that's most of the pro-Trump statements already.
I have no doubt the arguments exist, and those I wanted to hear, because I too share OPs question.
I think you're dismissing their points too easily.
You may think they're wrong, but I find it entirely plausible and convincing that that is just exactly what they believe.
Wrong? I made no such statement! I was talking about the quality of the argument, not about the direction.
I'm not "dismissing" anything either. I have no opinion on Trump vs. Harris, as strange as that sounds to those with strong believes.
I merely observe that OP asked for arguments, and that link points to opinion letters that don't even attempt to make one. Which is fine for them - this is about this sub-thread's context. OP asked for arguments and the link does not provide them, this is not a dismissal of whatever is going on in that linked page itself, only whether it serves to satisfy OPs request here.
> My concern is that Ms Harris will at a minimum continue the leftist direction of America that has been pursued, or at least tolerated, by Joe Biden.
Well there's this sort of thing:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/colorado-baker-lose...
If you think there are plenty of places out there to get a wedding cake or a gender transition cake, and people should just leave people alone whom they disagree with, who do you vote for?
Non-paywalled link: https://archive.is/QRAyX
Time and time again, polls have showed that "economy and inflation" was the leading cause. After that immigration.
In school back then I learned about the American melting pot of people from everywhere. Is this no longer the case?
Recently there’s been an influx of illegal immigrants from Venezuela including some associated with Tren de Aragua that have been highly publicized and politicized. While most people do want America to be a melting pot of people from everywhere, whether you want your borders so wide open to allow criminals and gangs to sneak in is another question, and also probably something we all agree on, but in this case one candidate has been in power and has appeared to have not solved the problems.
Yeah, but you have to be somewhat deranged to trust a multiple bancrupt and proven grifter with that — especially since the economic record of his last administration hasn't been stellar at all.
But if you are lucky he will allow you vote for the other side in 4 years again and then you will vote republicans after and back and forth we go.
What‘s most striking is that a sober dialogue on opposing views/ideas has been replaced by partisanship and hatred of the othet side, whatever the subject. What do we need to do to get out of this mess?
> What do we need to do to get out of this mess?
Ban short form media.
I can give you my anecdote:
I worked for Best Buy. They fired us and hired an Indian offshore team. They had H1B representatives in the U.S. that I had to spend three months training to do my job.
H1B is supposed to be to fill critical shortages. There wasn’t a critical shortage because I existed and my entire team existed.
Best Buy’s CEO preaches “inclusivity” and “the value of each employee” — while simultaneously firing Americans (and permanent residents) to lower costs — while making the vast majority of their profit selling products to Americans.
The other reason I voted Trump was the Covid lockdowns and the attempted vaccine mandates. Blue states such as California had schools closed for over a year, while red states such as Texas and Florida quickly reopened. The type of government that would arrest a person surfing off of Santa Cruz is a government that has lost their mind. And anyone Dr Sarah Cody of Santa Clara county would support, I’m going to support the opposite.
On a more subjective level — anyone that the establishment tries so hard to oppose-arrest-bankrupt-kill is worthy of my vote. When Dick Cheney endorsed Harris, the decision got really easy to support Trump. Also, see the Abraham Accords for why many support Trump on a foreign policy level.
I don’t care about engaging in a debate and plenty will downvote simply because I’m not in their tribe — but while you asked for a scientific study, there isn’t one yet, but there are tens of millions of anecdotes like mine which should give you a good start.
Not that it matters — my wife is an immigrant from Mexico and her entire family in the U.S. (who are all first generation citizens) — all voted Trump as well. Some make the mistake of assuming “immigrants” are all “undocumented.” There’s a huge difference in being anti-immigrant and anti-illegal-immigrant. The left-wing media fails to make the distinction. Also have a look at the so-called “Black” vote — they have a lot more nuance than the media would have you believe.
I agree fully with your points. Covid restrictions were insane and will change my voting habits forever. What happened to "personal responsibility" in that time??
I'm convinced that inclusivity and DEI is really just a way to get cheaper labor as you describe.
This is a great example, and you’re downvoted because liberals don’t like to hear the criticisms of their tribe. They ask why people would vote for Trump, you explain your anecdote, and they downvote you. Classic blue tribe behavior.
> The other reason I voted Trump was the Covid lockdowns and the attempted vaccine mandates. Blue states such as California had schools closed for over a year, while red states such as Texas and Florida quickly reopened. The type of government that would arrest a person surfing off of Santa Cruz is a government that has lost their mind. And anyone Dr Sarah Cody of Santa Clara county would support, I’m going to support the opposite.
Bingo. All of the “my body my choice” rhetoric rings very hollow when you need to show proof of vaccination to sit down at a Starbucks to drink your $4.69 Americano (and still be required to wear a mask, despite being vaccinated twice in a state with something like a 90% vaccination rate).
And calling republicans facist and anti-democracy after closing small businesses, schools, playgrounds, etc. setting up phone numbers to dime out your neighbors?
Saying you are anti-1% when your covid policies directly enrich the 1%? Saying you are anti-racism when your covid policies directly hurt those without?
And then the massive economic fall out after when surprise surprise, doing all that will fuck shit up?
I was a loyal democrat my entire life before 2020. Never again.
A friend of mine just sent me an article from a Danish newspaper where they cover the reasons as to why people would want to vote for someone like Trump. They interview Arlie Russell Hochschild who has written two books on the topic: "Strangers in Their Own Land" and "Stolen Pride".
One explanation from Hochschild is that you have a group of disenfranchised votes, who see "everyone else" get to "jump the line" for help. Not only do they get to jump the line, they see the president (Obama back then) help these other people (immigrants, women, people of color, LGBTQ, an so on) move ahead of the line, while they are left behind to fend for themselves.
I haven't read the books yet, but I definitely plan to. From the article it certainly sound like it would help me understand why some Americans vote the way they do.
> "A friend of mine just sent me an article from a Danish newspaper where they cover the reasons as to why people would want to vote for someone like Trump...."
And this illustrates the problem. Hochschild is a professor emeritus of sociology at Berkeley. Why in heaven's name would you think that good insights will be garnered by reading a Danish article about a book written by a Blue professor about another group of Red people... when you can go on x dot com and read for yourself why people voted as they did?
I can say for certain - from reading and listening to what Trump voters have said themselves - that Trump voters are absolutely done with this kind of framing.
If your own political conviction influence your works as a professor, then you're perhaps not that great a professor, but if you do good work, then maybe you have the tools to write about that work and target it to a group of like minded people, communicating in a why that they/I better understand.
Personally I'm not interested in going on Twitter, or Facebook, because those are going to be the most extreme people, at both ends. I'm also no prepared to do the filtering required to identify trolls or propaganda. My interest is in the vast majority of people who don't really have a voice online. I can't go out and talk to them, I'm on the other side of the planet. I'd still like to know why they vote the way they do, because I'm directly affected by how rural America votes. I wish I weren't, so I guess that's one opinion I share with Trump.
As someone who has listened to both (or many, since there are not just two) sides, I can say for certain there is a severe disconnect between what Team Red says and what Team Blue writes about what Team Red says. If you are really interested in what Team Red says, do not listen to Team Blue at all about it. Not CNN, not Harris, not Blue politicians, not Blue journalists.
> If your own political conviction influence your works as a professor, then you're perhaps not that great a professor
Indeed. This is a major ongoing crisis in academe. And journalism.
As a self check, if you think that Trump's "very fine people on both sides" remark referred to white supremacists as "very fine people", then you need to upgrade your sources. Find the extended original video. It is hard to do! If you give up, let me know and I will send you a link. The search is instructive, however.
Do you hold this standard for Team Red? Do you tell them to use their listening skills too?
I did not say "use listening skills".
If you go back and read carefully, I suggested going directly to the source because we live in an age of unprecedented direct access, and it is no longer necessary to have same-side "explainers" about what the other side thinks and says.
To hear what Team Blue thinks, I'd recommend Team Red simply read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Time Magazine, et. al. Or watch CNN, MSNBC, BBC America, network news... Even Wikipedia.
Bigotry is unpopular with Americans.
Even if you claim it’s noble bigotry because you’re discriminating against people with evil ancestors or who happen to share a sex with bad people.
Get out of your bubble and listen to people. Hacker News is part of your bubble.
The majority of people have picked a side long ago and are sticking to it. You want to talk to independents or people that have changed sides recently.
The interesting thing for me was seeing the blowback from the woke movement. People I know that were raised Democrats and supported gay rights could no longer identify with the party supporting a movement that appeared to be telling them that they are racist (and BTW be careful or you might get cancelled) and that it would be great if their kids changed genders. This led them away from legacy media and towards opposite points of view.
I am not claiming this was the decisive reason- just pointing out something that I don’t see talked about much. Listen to people and you will find other reasons.
Housing prices and rent.
This kind of commentary just boggles my mind. I voted for both Republicans and Democrats in my lifetime and I have never had any problems identifying the reasons why anyone would vote either way. And I consider myself a very casual political observer. The fact that people believe that Trump won because people are retarded bigoted rednecks just tells me you live in a fucking bubble under a rock in a deep forest. How do you go through life living so isolated from anyone who doesn't think like you?
Jason Pargin (author of John Dies at the End et al.) is pretty insightful on the perspective of Americans in dying small towns.
Basically it's this:
- The economy is what ultimately matters to many people, and the impression is that the economy has been bad for the last 4 years under Biden but was better under Trump. The actual data is more unclear and confusing, but the average person has this impression.
- Harris wasn't likable/charismatic enough to many people, and was largely supported for her policies first and her personality second. Trump, on the other hand, went on a lot of longform podcasts, worked at McDonalds for a few hours, and generally seems more "human" to the average person.
- A general sense of rage/dislike/push-back at "elites" in Washington DC, the coasts, the mainstream media organizations, etc. If you google "trust in government" or "trust in media", they will elaborate on this issue. Trump, although a billionaire from NYC, is generally disliked there and is perceived as being an outsider and rebel vs. the elite group mentioned.
- Some protectionist policies Trump claims to support will benefit people in key battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc
Ultimately it comes down to two things, IMO: personal charisma and the economy. Everything else is only relevant in close elections.
Harris wasn’t just unlikeable. She came across as downright incompetent, a mediocrity elevated to the highest positions by the exact sort of identify focused criteria voters don’t want.
> under Biden but was better under Trump.
Rich people getting richer doesn't matter if your rent goes up.
> Trump, on the other hand, went on a lot of longform podcasts,
Harris sure does have the time to go on Rogan now...
> Harris wasn't likable/charismatic enough to many people, and was largely supported for her policies first and her personality second. Trump, on the other hand, went on a lot of longform podcasts, worked at McDonalds for a few hours, and generally seems more "human" to the average person.
I would argue it was the other way round. They both went on podcasts etc and I'm debate and in rallies Trump was verging on incoherent and boring his own supporters. But on policy he was far stronger. I'm not American and I'm left wing but the trade and tax policies he's proposing do speak to traditional left wing, trade union workers: put up barriers to lower cost countries undercutting American workers. I don't know what Harris vision is, it seems she has trouble articulating it clearly.
Trump went on quite a few very popular podcasts like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, but Harris didn't.
IMO the average voter is quite in-line with Rogan and Theo Von culturally (more than they are with Trump or Harris, for that matter) and so for Harris to skip those was a major misstep that just further made her seem like an aloof member of the DC/Coastal elite.
Biden didn't have this problem because he was more of a blue collar/middle class guy from Scranton and despite his gaffes, was more likable by the average person.
Rogan alone has more daily listeners than left leaning news shows have people watching in a week. I think it was something like 11 million per day. Big mistake to not show up there.
Absolutely - if you look on YouTube alone, the view counts on interviews/podcasts between Trump/Vance and Harris/Walz are dramatically different. For better or worse, people increasingly get their information and news from videos, and to skip that was a major misunderstanding of the cultural landscape.
Idk about Theo Von, but Rogan put his thumb on the scale when he refused to interview Harris even though he interviewed Trump.
From what I have read/watched, Rogan didn't refuse to interview Harris and offered to do the same multi-hour interview he does with every guest.
Harris just wanted him to fly to another city and do a 1-hour interview in their studio. To make an exception for a single guest seems unfair and I don't blame Rogan for not agreeing.
https://youtu.be/_aT2grMe1I4?si=jMtsUggT2eaOZdpo
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/29/joe-rogan-ka...
The truth will come out eventually, but this article suggests Rogan stiffed her on purpose.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187601/fox-news-joe-rogan-donal...
Did you read that link? It has no information other than a vague speculation.
> refused to interview Harris
Why spread misinformation?
It's almost definitely the Bidens administration perceived failings to deal with inflation.
Also add illegal immigration. People are seriously pissed off about it. My working theory is that this all stems from fear of foreigners/ xenophobia.
You're asking as if the other candidate is a no-brainer choice. If the other candidate were Kennedy, then sure—but they were not. In this case, many would be undecided and would vote not the best candidate, but the least bad one.
> Tried to Google it but all I find is a bunch of American news website like CNN and website like https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/the-five-types-t...
> I'm trying to look beyond the propaganda, any idea if there has been scientific studies or anything remotely credible ?
Exactly, they "propaganded" so hard that they created a narrative that they are the definitive winners. So you bought into their propaganda and now you are surprised. The reality is that the democrats are not that good and the people voted.
I don't think there's a great mystery - what could possibly be the secret for why people voted for Trump you say? Probably the same reason why people vote for any other political candidate, right? Surely the simplest explanation is the most likely; they preferred him to the other candidate in some combination of what he brings vs. the other candidate? Some people are lifelong affiliates of a political party, sure, and that's less interesting and fruitful TBH, but for the "undecided" or "open-minded" voters I don't see how it's more complex Than they decided it based on the information at hand. Question is whether they were misinformed and how much the positive messages ("This is what we'll do") draws vs. "The other person will end the world" rhetoric. Thoughts?
'm trying to look beyond the propaganda, any idea if there has been scientific studies or anything remotely credible ?
I'm afraid this is the problem - your implication is that Trump voters need explaining using scientific analysis as some sort of aberration.
One day, there will hopefully be an analysis - but it will be of how among huge parts of the media and establishment this ideological view became the null hypothesis to the extent that people - in good faith - thought they were looking beyond the propoganda while asking questions like yours.
> I refuse to believe the narrative that Americans are just a bunch of redneck retarded bigots.
They aren't, really. That's just what a vocal minority calls them, said minority actually deluding themselves into thinking that they are the majority.
My theory is that a good portion of people didn't vote for "Trump", they voted for their party. That's the end of their thought process.
Party affiliation is a huge part of people's culture and personality in the US, "We are a Republican family" is something people outside of the US wouldn't say out loud. They have always voted Republican and will always vote Republican even if it's against their interests.
I mean, I grew up in a conservative state and a small/medium sized city that has always been red. Not every one is a "redneck retarded bigot". I don't think most of them aren't as openly racist as made out to be. Outside of politics you wouldn't even think anything was too out of the ordinary.
That said, I'm not sure stuff like "He's annointed by God", "He tells it like it is/Isn't afraid to speak his mind", "Liberals are evil/devil/<insert literally any reason to hate them> " is stuff you want to hear, but it does represent a somewhat overall sentiment (generalized of course).
More centered around ignorance and perceived old "conservative values". I find very few people actually able to articulate their points.
Watch some long form right leaning podcasts.
"The thing that baffles me is that good and serious people have seen versions of what happened tonight in the US for eight years and are still surprised that people don’t see the world as they do.
1) Voters think “the economy” is “can I afford to live” NOT “we are doing better nationally than others”. Inflation is politically more important than GDP
2) Immigration matters, both the sense of control/uncontrolled and the raw numbers, particularly when money is tight. See 1
3) Don’t take voters for fools: in this case don’t insist a clearly gaga leader is up to the job
4) Don’t try to fight a charismatic opponent with someone who can’t answer basic questions about why they want to be in charge. The ability to communicate is not an optional extra for politicians, it is a core part of the job description
5) Go woke, go politically broke
6) What the metro elites regard as an illogical vote is not necessarily illogical for people who are struggling and angry - see 1,2,3,4,5 Personally I think democracy matters very much and some/much of what Trump says is appalling but until his opponents learn the lessons above, voters will keep voting for someone who manages to encapsulate what they feel"
https://x.com/ShippersUnbound/status/1854055061925560448
> Voters think “the economy” is “can I afford to live” NOT “we are doing better nationally than others”.
They think correct, in the only sense that matters.
Becauase Trump is the champion of the name-calling politics and here we are in your comment, still playing his game.
Why not ask some of the distinguished conservative academics who support the likely (as I write) next President? By the way, how about turning the question round? I hope you do not think that's unthinkable.
> I refuse to believe the narrative that Americans are just a bunch of redneck retarded bigots.
Why would you refuse to believe that? Have you ever been to America or even watched American TV?
This is my conclusion as well. In many other western countries Donald Trump is a badly written movie charagter. In the US he is their best option for a president. "What about those that didnt vote for him" people may ask, but the fact that the democrats isnt able to provide an alternative better than Trump, and haven't been able to provide better politics than Trump says everything.
50% of the voting mass look at Trump and say "that is my president!", and millions cant even be bothered to show up to vote for someone else. This is America.
Trying to apply that stereotype to Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard seems awkward — both of whom endorsed Trump.
I honestly think that Elon Musk is just on a personal vendetta against anyone who bruised his ego. He can't stand that he was called out for his Thai diver "pedophile" comment or that his trans daughter openly disavows him. He specifically blames the "woke mindset" for the latter. So for him, it's probably just a "stick it to the libs" kind of thing.
I don't think it was any of those, Elon and his mother have regularly referenced Tesla being snubbed at an EV Summit, and GM being praised as leading the EV transition in a quarter they (GM) delivered 42 electric cars to Tesla's 300,000. It is still a matter of bruised ego though, I think Elon Musk takes things like this very seriously.
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This is the best that I've seen https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/opinion/election-focus-gr...
Biden is wildly unpopular, Harris is his right hand, she didn't get put up by any competitive process, and she never promised change to a country that very much wants it. The nyt always considered her the worst possible option from day 1, aside from Biden. This shouldn't be a surprise.
That's actually interesting, thank you.
Unfortunately, it seems the article can't be viewed without signing up.
https://archive.is/DFbWQ
DNC really channeling that "don't get fired" energy
> Is there some statistical analysis on the reason people vote trump ?
You could try to ask HN'ers who voted Trump why they did ... statistically speaking, folks on HN do not exactly strike me as fitting the "bunch of redneck retarded bigots" profile.
Oh but wait, that would only be possible if admitting on HN that you supported Trump was not guaranteed to have the following effect:
And turns out HN is IMO a reflection of what happens in US society at large: in the non-"bunch of redneck retarded bigots" social circles, telling people that you support Trump is career/social suicide.Except that more than half of the country supports him, so if you pick 100 people, even in the non-"bunch of redneck retarded bigots" circles, chances are, you know ...
There is something deeply dysfunctional about a society where you have to hide your democratic choice for fear of being socially destroyed.
You have two options. If you listen to the American left and most media outlets, it's because Trump voters hate women, gays, foreigners, blacks, trans people, and progress - and to be fair, some do. If you listen to the people actually voting for Trump, it's because they fundamentally disagree with the basis for Harris' policies (and Clinton's before her) or the outcomes thereof.
Not from the US, but I really wonder: Do you guys got not feel shame if a person with that character and that track record runs your country?
I mean sure: depending on your media diet you might find all his flaws acceptable, but ask yourself if Obama (or any other candidate) displayed the very same flaws if that would cause you outrage. If yes, you might need some introspection.
> Do you guys got not feel shame if a person with that character and that track record runs your country?
The Donald Trump that your media reports on isn't the real Donald Trump, or at the very least the one his supporters see.
Example: Trump talks to a group of people who normally don't vote, and asks them to make an exception and vote this time, noting that this will be the last time he runs, and so they won't need to vote for him again. The media then takes "you won't need to vote for me again" out of context and uses it to claim that Trump will end elections in the US. People who only listen to the media see one thing, and his supporters (who are aware of the context) see another.
> Do you guys got not feel shame if a person with that character and that track record runs your country?
You don't get to be president without being a pathological liar who only cares about themselves and not the people. I'm not saying this to excuse Trump, far from it. I am ashamed to have him as a president (to the extent I'm ashamed of anything outside my control anyways). But I've been just as ashamed to have Biden, Obama, and Bush as the president too.
Many have a very shallow understanding of policy and have also had their perspectives heavily influenced by propaganda from Fox News, etc. Ask the average Trump supporter how tarrifs work for a good example of what I’m describing.
The few policies that were campaigned on are going to be harmful and counterproductive. I'm inclined to agree with the propaganda angle.
Are you implying that the average Harris supporter will fare better against such questions?
I think they're rebutting that an actual understanding of policy enters the equation at all
Correct, most voters are making decisions based on emotions, and those emotions are heavily influenced by their information sources.
You have to understand American politics behind the rise of Trump. Since the 1980s and Reagan, Democrats had broken with their New Deal era coalition composed of union workers. Instead, Democrats have aligned with middle class knowledge workers, and pushed for neoliberal policy that have offshored many manufacturing jobs. This was seen as a betrayal to the working class. That has left many working class whites with high school degrees with low-paying service jobs, that gave them a lower standard of living compared to the union jobs their parents worked.
This continued from Clinton to the Obama era. While Obamacare was a step in the right direction, it was seen as too little too late. It also had unintended consequences. For example, some of my part-time service job colleagues reported that pre-Obamacare, the employer could have them work 40 hours a week, because they weren't forced to provide them health insurance that met some minimum standard. However post-Obamacare, their hours were limited at 29 hours, which made it much harder to make a living.
By 2016, there was an opioid addiction crisis composing largely of working whites with only a high school degree, and the economy was still suffering from the slower-than-possible recovery from the Great Recession. (Economists say it would've been faster with more stimulus, but Obama was cowed by his neoliberal econ advisors). Due to gridlock in the political system, immigration system reform was impossible, and Presidents could only use Executive Orders to try to mitigate (but not solve) the problem of an increasing number of illegal immigrants from the Southern border.
All the pieces were in place:
- Scapegoat: illegal immigrants
- Weak economy: check
- Disgruntled populace: check
Feeling abandoned by both parties, the electorate went with an anti-establishment strongman demagogue who preyed on their hopes and fears. It's almost identical to the political environment that gave rise to Hitler and Mussolini.
The saving grace for the US during Trump's first term has been her strong democratic institutions. Pray they hold up during his second and hopefully final term.
The american academic elite is a tiny minority who think they know best. They received a reality check today.
Biden has been the most pro union president since the new deal though
Totally agreed that neoliberalism is a cancer though
This interview between Elon Musk and Joe Rogan explains — though I’m not sure the timestamp.
Joe Rogan found it convincing enough to endorse Trump afterwards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qZl_5xHoBw
You could also watch the episode interviewing Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBMoPUAeLnY
Or his VP, Vance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRyyTAs1XY8
Presumably the majority are people who agree with the message conveyed during such interviews.
Honestly, Americans don’t like modern feminism and anything related to trans ideologies. High inflation played a role too. It was pretty effectively curtailed but not fast enough to directly affect people’s lives before the election.
> Honestly, Americans don’t like modern feminism and anything related to trans ideologies.
I doubt most people like those two things. The difference is, they get insulted, shamed and targeted for social ostracisation if they let on what they don't like.
Which results in the election results that you see - just because you've successfully silenced someone from expressing their opinion, that doesn't mean that you changed their vote.
> Honestly, Americans don’t like modern feminism and anything related to trans ideologies
Americans (and people in general) do not care about social issues when they are hurting financially.
Oh yeah, but there were plenty of groups on the margins that voted along social lines.
Is not only americans. Is most people, but they are afraid to tell and being labeled as biggots.
Is a lot a things, economy for sure, but the demiocrafts passed 4 years calling half the country nazis and facists, and denying things that everyone could see like Biden health issues. This comes with a price.
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In tons of the non-Trump races the anti-trans and anti-feminist ads have not worked well.
You might find some insight here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/trump-voters-li...
They discuss a paper "The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth About Political Illegitimacy.”
Which asks the Q:
"H]ow can a constituency of voters find a candidate ‘authentically appealing’ (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a ‘lying demagogue’ (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)?”
one A is:
"Trump’s boldly false proclamations—about himself, about his rivals and critics, about the world—are not a bug. They’re a feature. They demonstrate he is sticking it to the other side. To the elites, the media, the establishment, the government, academia, Hollywood, the libs, the woke crowd, the minorities, the…whoever it is his supporters resent, despise, or disregard."
That's also why in 2016, a year's worth of "Trump is terrible" articles only helped him - because the actual received message was "we, the people you despise, really would hate if Trump was elected". It's a sign of authenticity. Trump couldn't betray them, because he very evidently had nowhere else to go.
Aka polarisation. When Trump first won I conceptualised it as him arbitraging humanity/democracy's lack of preparedness for social media and the internet upending established flows of information.
The solution at its heart is to reduce conflict and bridge the gap. I have enjoyed Zachary Elwoods most recent podcast episode showing how Trump is misquoted by traditional media outlets which has the negative effect of furthering the perception of bias.
Your refusal to believe that is apt. People are not nearly as dumb as this narrative puts them out to be. This mindset is at best elitism, and ignores human agency.
In reality every Trump voter has their own reason to behave this way. And their behavior is perfectly rational according to their own beliefs. My personal theory is that we have been grossly underestimating the potency of misinformation and disinformation propaganda on social media. Especially those which weaponizes peoples actual grievances with authority, and directs them in this way. Anybody can be a victim of misinformation (we see this in action with people that fall victims to scam), the misinformation you personally don’t fall victim to was probably not directed at you (see e.g. the Nigerian Prince filter for wire fraud scams).
I think that even though humans are smart, and we have our own agency, there are also number of ways which our intelligence can be exploited. This is the case for scams, but also for misinformation propaganda. I think the real lesson here is in the failures of our democratic institutions to protect us from this exploitation.
You start off by saying these people arent stupid, then go on to suggest they are easily manipulated by (what you think is) misinformation. Just not smart, like you I guess? Honestly, I think the kind of people you are sneering at are actually smarter than you as they would never make the kind of stupid, ignorant comment you've made here.
Being susceptible to propaganda (or a scam for that matter) isn’t stupidity. We are all susceptible to it. It just varies which propaganda and to what degree.
I never called Trump voters stupid. I think there may be a misunderstanding here because traditional discourse has people believe that only stupid people fall for misinformation propaganda (or a scam). I was explicitly rejecting that.
Is it possible that you are the one that has been manipulated by misinformation? Is it possible that people can disagree with you without "misinformation" being involved?
Oh, there is no doubt in my mind that I’m susceptible to propaganda, including misinformation campaigns.
However misinformation campaigns are a fact of social media. There are several documented cases of misinformation spreading. It is possible that I have just been lied to about that the media et.all lied about the scale and severity of misinformation and I believed it (although, wouldn’t that be a misinformation campaign which proofs their existence?)
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Twitter is a biased sample
See this interaction, I would encourage you to try again. I think its more closed to reality than based. People complained about google not showing election sites for trump on google, then goggle came out and acknowledged this. I don’t see this type of interactions anywhere.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1853902675441578146
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The only reason people vote for conservatives is because they're selfish or ignorant. This is obvious because there are 2 things in the economy: labour and capital. It is no coindence then that democracies invariably develop 2 parties. One of those parties ostensibly represents the intrests of labour. As such the other must represent the interests of capital. But how could a party that benefits so few, ever win a majority? Well, a combination of selfish people (those who benefit directly from the policies) and ignorant people (those who have been convinced by any number of falsehoods to vote against their own economic interests).
Looks like he also might win the popular vote. First republican to win the popular vote since 2004. If this is true, then this was a clear mandate that the a majority of voters prefer Trump's policies over the other side. We might not like it, but this is how democracy works.
There is certainly going to be domestic and international chaos in the coming years. But a realignment of the world order and domestic politics was inevitable. It's not going to be end of the world like some are making out to be. Nor is it going to be the end of the United States. There will be opportunities. Buckle up and find opportunities where you can.
>Nor is it going to be the end of the United States
I’m not so sure about that. If it happens I’m not so sure it would be a bad thing either. This country’s system makes no sense. If I was from Texas I wouldn’t want my taxes paying for things I don’t believe in and if I was from California ditto. This country truly makes more sense as several different countries that can choose to cooperate.
Let's re-embrace federalism then.
Let's make the Federal government primarily fund the armed forces, and certain things like airwaves, and flight. Then get it out of things that it doesn't need to regulate.
Half my non-federal taxes go to my local school. I'm cool with that. I also fund my local fire/police, local governments. I'm cool with that.
We need to restrain the interstate commerce clause; which is out of control. But yes, you are describing federalism. Let's make federalism great again.
> opportunities where you can
Guess I’ll become a grifter like the rest of them. Become a parasite on society. Fuck everyone else, I guess.
> Nor is it going to be the end of the United States.
We're looking at the possibility of a 7-2 Supreme Court stacked with activist judges (the new ones will be even more so). Now, it depends on your definition of "the United States" but whatever comes out the rear end of this is going to look different to the point of potentially being unrecognizable. They already have the playbook.
A few bleary-eyed, scatterbrained possibilities: mass deportations, end of the free press/open internet, end of the Department of Education (public school?), end of birth control, bans on vaccines, etc., etc.
we are not going to end public school. Just look at Kentucky where trump and R candidates won easily but the school choice amendment was crushed
There’s lots of blame and anger directed at Democrats, but ultimately it’s the Republicans who picked Trump.
They could have won against the unpopular Biden/Harris with practically any other candidate. Nikki Haley polled well against all possible Democrats.
The party was already done with Trump in February 2021, but then they explicitly decided that they prefer one more try with an old man who doesn’t spare much thought to actual policies but does brag about sexual assault, tried to orchestrate a coup last time he lost an election, etc. etc.
It’s not inflation or Biden’s unpopularity or some other external factor. Lots of Americans really want what Trump is selling.
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That is not what they prefer because that's not the image Trump voters see when they see him.
- They see an outsider who is not lying to them telling them things are great when in their daily lives things seem decidedly not great. - They see someone who says he will stop illegal immigration, not someone who is anti immigrant, but someone who will actually enforce the law that democrats either refuse to or have been incapable of enforcing. - They see someone who says he doesn't want to involve us in expensive long wars overseas like the ones everyone was sick and tired of being involved in for the last two decades. - They see someone who has taken actions that align with their deeply held religious beliefs about what constitutes taking a life (abortion). - They see someone who says he will bring jobs back that all the "swamp" politicians (on both sides) sent overseas in the name of globalization.
I want to be clear that I'm saying that he is or isn't a narcissistic misogynistic billionaire rapist, but that's not who the majority of americans just voted for. You can say that they are wrong, misinformed, idiots, etc. but focusing on that and not why they voted for him is exactly why the democrats lost and will continue to lose.
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Some would say that Trump won 3 times
Yes, we know. Those people are wrong, but the mistake of their opponents is thinking that pointing this out is sufficient in the post-Obama era where things are so focused on retaining power. Most Republican politicians and staffers knew Trump lost in 2020 - we have records of them saying so – but they also recognized that he got a LOT of people to vote and gambled that the Democrats got lucky with the freak pandemic and Biden’s somewhat unique combination of being well-known nationally and white men thinking of him as one of their own even if they don’t agree with all of his policies. They adopted the big lie gambling that he’d do it again in 2024, and it worked.
Congrats Melania!
What a truly amazing series of events
It always amazes me that a country that cares so much about being the 'best', cares so little about what people think of them.
Voting in this guy, and his policies reduces the legitimacy of the US. If Trump withdraws from Nato, then members may not pay so much to US for weapons any more. Protection money only works while you get Protection. Maybe the Visa and Mastercard tribute taxes we all pay back to the US will be less welcome.
Maybe, in the new protectionist world, tax dodging US tech companies will be less welcome too.
I think its time for the EU to distance itself from the US trainwreck
Who's a trainwreck? Volkswagen is closing plants. Siemens chief admitting recently that investments in Germany are a waste because of the high energy prices. EU can continue buying the overpriced US LNG, or "distance itself" and crawl back to the Russians begging for cheap gas that was driving the German economy. Europe is cooked.
The EU is about to crash itself.
We literally never think about you
The DNC really needs to address Trump voters.
They have to figure out their needs there and satisfy them.
Its crucial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxiMrvDbq3s
AP News at this time are reporting 224 (Harris) vs 267 (Trump) [1].
A lot of political thoughts in these comments. I think the important thing going forwards is to figure out how to maximise the opportunity that you find in your environment.
For our team we were looking to relocate our manufacturing from China and get additional investment. One of our objectives today is to figure out how the recent result in the US will affect this planning.
[1] https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024
The AP refusing to call Alaska all night is deeply embarrassing. I respect their right to present an angle but come on, Jack
Well this is going to be a wild ride.
Dreading it on one level but also looking forward to the entertainment of a watch a slow motion train wreck. If he actually follows through on promises like mass deportation and forcing Ukraine peace that could get intense.
We will also blow through any chance of stopping climate change.
https://x.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1854161121193714102
I am pretty sure india is taking more steps than USA. you cannot blame them anymore. They are even pushing more money into nuclear and created a breeder reactor.
And China is producing over 50% of the world's EVs while also having over 50% of the cars they buy be EVs.
You would be wrong. The IRA is projected to remove a California-sized block of US emissions by 2030. The IRA is the single strongest climate action tried by any country since the Paris Accords.
KH was also pro nuclear.
sorry, can someone copy&paste what's on that link? (how are people still on that site anyway?)
Rehosted on imgur: https://i.imgur.com/FxyqTaC.png
Atmospheric c02 has been on a straight line since 1985, i.e. 0 correlation to changes in presidential party.
Can you post the content instead of just the link, for those of us who cannot access it?
It's a graph that shows a steady and consistent increase in atmospheric CO2 for the last 40 years regardless of the elected political party in the US at the time.
In other words, it seems to indicate pretty strongly that no matter how you vote, climate change is going to destroy us.
Image rehosted on imgur: https://i.imgur.com/FxyqTaC.png
> Until China and India take steps to decarbonize their economies as opposed to making empty pledges we all know will never be met, then whatever the U.S. or the rest of the West does will not matter.
This is such a bullshit way of thinking. No one snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche. "But China…", "But India…" is not an excuse for not giving a shit. I hear the same arguments over here in Germany, and they're usually coming from the "I don't want to change" crowd.
It's not an excuse. It's reality, if the US stopped all CO2the 2023 total would drop by 11%.
China is 30% of global emissions in 2023. India is 7%.
You can't get one country to stop all, so you have to get everyone to cut as much as they can.
China is producing roughly all of our shit and like India is 1/6th of the global population.
> You can't get one country to stop all, so you have to get everyone to cut as much as they can.
Exactly, but the US accounts for 11% of emissions for 4% of the population. Maybe they have more fat to cut than others.
> you have to get everyone to cut as much as they can
But the point being made isn't to emphasize the importance of everyone collaborating on cutting emissions. The point being made is that we may as well not cut back because someone else might not. It's especially disingenuous to bring up India when they emit less than the US does (and especially on a per-capita basis).
What do you propose we do about the volcanoes that in a single eruption emit more methane and carbon than human activity does over a span of two centuries?
Well then, the good news is Trump has the guy more responsible for electrifying American cars (a major contributor to CO2 emissions) than anyone else on his team.
Also the state that has more renewables than any other state voted for Trump.
Are you referring to Elon Musk? He also torpedoed a mass transit project in California and built the stupidest version of a train ever conceived in Las Vegas. It's not clear that Elon Musk has a good sense for efficient means to reduce climate harming activity - just that he wants, and is good at getting, government money for his projects.
> It's not clear that Elon Musk has a good sense for efficient means to reduce climate harming activity
I think that this is one of the most incorrect, and, what’s more, plainly and obviously incorrect things I’ve ever read. I am almost at a loss for words when I read it.
Are we going to pretend that people would have adopted EVs anyway in the west without Tesla? Did you think we would just abandon the entire western auto manufacturing infrastructure and start driving BYDs? Did you forget what the auto industry looked like before (and during, in the early years) Tesla?
This is like saying that he doesn’t have a good sense for building orbital rockets. The guy has basically only done two big and meaningful things with his life and attacking the #1 carbon emission source is the bigger of the two.
> Are we going to pretend that people would have adopted EVs anyway in the west without Tesla?
EVs are growing, and will continue to grow, for reasons unrelated to climate.
They are the superior product in nearly every way. Regenerative braking is a huge objective improvement. The acceleration and torque control is a huge improvement. The lack of maintenance is a huge improvement.
The only downside of EVs is range and charge time, and both of those are being actively improved.
Elon deserves some credit for joining on to Tesla in 2004, long before these benefits were clear, and for being at the first company to really demonstrate these benefits in reality with the Roadster in 2008. But I do not think the existence of Tesla accelerated the adoption of EVs by more than a couple years.
The Model S was released in 2012. The Nissan Leaf was released in 2010.
Improved private cars, electric or otherwise, are an unserious solution to climate change or a sustainable future. Simple geometry makes this obvious - they're quite literally the worst solution to moving many people. If I asked someone, "move ten thousand people ten kilometers," and they came back with "I will put each one in a 2x2 meter box with four seats, but only one will be occupied by a person. The box needs to be stored at the origin and destination, and independently operated by every single person," how could I do anything but laugh them out of the room? Addendum: "by the way, the infrastructure to sustain this means the box is required for trips of all lengths greater than 1.5 kilometers, and sometimes even less!"
Attacking cars as a carbon emission source would not mean killing an HSR project on purpose. It would mean building public transit.
Anyway EVs aren't special. Every major car manufacturer has them now, and the PRC makes shitloads too. Elon Musk probably beat the market, but it's not like his designs were genius - they lacked critical, simple safety features for example. Need I truck out the stories of people slicing their hands open on the cybertruck frame?
As for orbital rockets, that doesn't really have anything to do with climate change.
The fact that EVs aren’t special, and that every major manufacturer has them now, are almost entirely the result of his hard work. I think a lot of people forgot what the world was like before Tesla. This is sort of like saying “every phone manufacturer makes touch screen phones”. The foregone conclusion that “this is just how phones/cars are now” wasn’t foregone until someone made it that way, at scale, first to show everyone the better way.
Also, I think your idea that cars themselves are the problem is probably incorrect. Decarbonization isn’t primarily about reducing overall energy use per person, although you can possibly deflect with the argument that it requires both that and also clean energy.
In any case, American culture and cities are car culture and cities, and even if you could do the impossible and magically deploy tons of HSR between every metro in the US it wouldn’t make people stop driving. Any solution that requires first rebuilding the whole country and replacing its whole population with people who don’t want to drive a large vehicle to the grocery store is obviously a nonstarter.
Nah the nissan leaf was released about 15 years ago. Electric mobility was a proven use case years before the release of the roadster or model S. It wasn't the paradigm shift that the iPhone was. (and I don't have any doubts we wouldn't have gotten to an iPhone experience a few years later, either. I used smartphones before the iPhone with touchscreens, less smooth and intuitive, but already had miniaturized mobile-first apps based on touch. Android was released a few months after iOS and had been in parallel development for 5 the previous 5 years prior to iOS being unveiled...)
Tesla accelerated the electric car market several years, that's for sure. But nothing more than that.
The most important development for the feasibility of electric cars has not been automotive innovation (not the powertrain, the motor, the wheels, the interior or whatever), but battery innovation.
And battery innovation (i.e. cheaper, lighter, more capacity, better heat management, better durability) has been ongoing regardless of automotive even existing as an industry.
This has been the driving factor for the electrification of cars, not any one car company but the battery industry. Tesla simply was the best first mover.
https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Battery-cost-dec...
That's extremely short sighted.
It's clear that Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords and famously wants to start up a massive amount of drilling for oil.
Whereas recent democratic cabinets banned certain oil drilling, dedicated the US to the climate accords, installed large subsidy programs including one that prevented Tesla (fully kickstarted the electrification of the entire automotive industry indefinitely) from going bankrupt, and just recently launched the IRA which is the biggest climate change prevention investment ($3 trillion) in the history of the world, prompting the EU to follow with a similar program to compete to attract green investments and innovations.
There is simply a massive policy difference between the two parties here. And showing a graph of world emisions that have kept going up in the decades prior to mainstream climate change awareness, is grossly misleading. For one because it says nothing about US policy. Two because it happened prior significant climate change policy and a divergence between republicans and democrats on this issue. And third because without frontrunner countries there is no way that you can ever overcome the tragedy of the commons issue with climate, because India/China are certainly not going to make investments if the US doesn't and fucks the climate anyway. We can't all use that excuse, certainly not if you're the richest and most innovative country.
Climate change was barely a political issue this cycle because China is the runaway leader renewable energy tech (solar, batteries) and the Biden Admin SANCTIONED them for it.
It's difficult for many people in America to accept that the "climate change" narrative is primarily a propaganda tool and wedge issue to rally votes, and that the DNC doesn't actually care about "solving" it. Just like abortion.
Two things are true: climate change and reproductive rights are genuine issues, and they are also weaponized for political nonsense. People need to be away more skeptical around these debates and stop getting so angry/depressed about them (which is the goal of those groups trying to manipulate you through powerful emotions).
That was going to be the case either way. In fact we have pretty much already blown through that
Well yes but thats not a binary situation, is it. We can fuck up future of our kids a lot, a lot more or way a lot more. And so on.
Anyway, our descendants will hate current generations for what we have 'achieved' with the only place we can realistically live en masse for next 1000 years at least, almost all in in past 20 years, I'd say rightfully.
But as long as their stocks are up many folks here properly don't give a fuck. Tells you something too, don't put automatic morality into folks just because they have above-average intelligence, selfishness is a very powerful emotion from which none of us is completely immune from.
So, screw the planet?
In the words of George Carlin: “The planet will be fine. The people are fucked.”
Perhaps that was the problem with the messaging from the start, it didn’t appeal to people’s selfish nature enough.
"The planet" has always been about humanity. Of course floating rocks in space will be fine for billions of years.
> "The planet" has always been about humanity.
No, no it has not. It has been about a multitude of subjects like the oceans and forests and preserving habitats from human interference. Humanity mishandling those has consequences for humans, but that has historically not been the crux of the message.
It has never been about “floating rocks” either, but the life in it, nature as a whole.
That happened like 6 years ago, now it's just a question of high score
The chance of stopping climate change through politics has always been zero.
There is no other way though. Climate change is not a technical problem, it's political. We've had the tech to fix climate change for long time, we know how to do it, that part is quite easy and obvious, we are just not doing it.
You can't say "other way" when you're comparing to something that isn't a way in the first place.
Climate change absolutely is a technical problem and not a political one. It's about the cause and effect patterns of actual weather phenomena, and has nothing to do with conflict resolution within human societies, or anthropocentric psychosocial rituals.
We don't really have the technology to purposefully engineer macro-scale climate patterns, and we absolutely do not have the technology to secure wide-scale cooperation among vast numbers of people with different value systems and incentive structures. We've never had that.
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IMO, climate change policies directly caused this election. People are very price sensitive. Biden enacted some policies (Keystone XL pipeline) that contributed to higher energy costs.
Sure, so let's vote for the felon who openly wants to become a dictator, makes so much sense...
I mean, that's what 51% of the US decided to do.
Can you knock off this garbage?
Is he wrong?
Yes, they are wrong and it is complete garbage.
Otherwise, why didn't Trump already abolish the entire constitution and voting straight after the 2016 election just to make himself a dictator?
He tried, and failed. I guess we want him to try again though.
Because there were guard rails in place. Now the Supreme Court has said he can't be prosecuted for official acts and he has a VP in place who is on record as saying he wouldn't have certified an election that Trump legitimately lost.
Things have changed since 2016, go ahead bury your head in the sand about it. Don't come crying to anyone else when the leopard eats your face, though.
It's cool when people say things like this so definitively when there's no basis in anything
The Ukraine bit may have absolutely devastating Europe-wide side effects.
The EU can't let Russia "win" as it would set a precedent. If the US withdraws their support, the EU will have no choice but to ramp up theirs, meaning funneling money to the military complex. Double or triple that if Trump goes through with his NATO defunding/withdrawl threats. This could easily destabilize the EU economy, cause internal friction, provide fertile ground for nationalism and, ultimately, lead to the fracture of the EU. Now recall Trump's cordial alignment with Putin, which will undoubtedly encourage this sort of development, and it all starts to look outright scary.
The EU will do nothing if it falls outside of the US imperial mantle because it’s not a proper political entity, it never was, it never will. Maybe individual countries like Poland will try to do something, but they’re too small in the great scheme of things.
If Germany had any strategic autonomy left (which they don’t, they’re just a US vassal through and through) they would do a second Rapallo, maybe this time also involving China, at that point they’d still have a chance to put their economy back on track.
No one (great majority of people) in the EU wanted/wants this war. It was a dish put on the stove put by the hawks in Obama administration. But I think it is way too naive to think US can just pull out. They are far too financially invested. The question is, ia Ukraine too big to fail for US imperialism
Russia invades Ukraine (2014), launches a full scale invasion (2022), talks about fluid borders, and so on... but of course tankies blame "US imperialism". It's everyone's fault, everyone's but the country doing the invading part. lol.
Only naive people can think that the prior government would have been brought down without substantial US support
...
This is not about what Russia is doing. Russia, like the US, is an imperial power that cares little about the rights of other. This is about the US testing how much it can get away with by enroaching on what it mistakenly thought was a much weaker Russia than it turned out. And Ukranians are paying the price in blood, often against their will.
Again shifting all blame to the US without mentioning what Russia is doing... I'd call you biased, but this feels more than that.
The US supports what benefits them, so I'm sure they were supporting the opposition. Russia was supporting the then president Yanukovych because that was the best for them. That's what countries do.
The protests started when Yanukovych decided to cancel the EU - Ukraine Association Agreement[0] to go do a similar agreement with Russia[1]. Now, while the US might be supporting the opposition, this decision was made by the government supported by Russia in a country that was turning to the EU for a long time (the exception was the Donbas and Crimea)... of course people were going to protest. After what they experienced in the 90's and early 00's, with many working in the EU for a while and seeing it as a better option, are you surprised that many would want to be aligned with the EU?
How do you go from a protest to killing protestors? That I don't know. Are you going to blame the US for the actions of the Russia-backed government? Maybe they were also part of the conspiracy... /s
In any case, this doesn't justify Russia's invasion of Crimea or the infiltration of the Donbas which preceded many of the horrors that are now known. Their actions and their president history lessons are examples of the imperialism you blame the US for. As someone that seems to have a problem with imperialism, you should be criticising them, but are not... why is that?
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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Ukraine...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customs_Union_of_the_Eurasian_...
Sure I hate Russian imperialism. But ambitions of Russian imperialism dont scare me as they are confined to areas of their own borders. Those of US do
Nobody ever wants a war.
However the world let the annexation of Crimea slide in 2014 and that emboldened Russia. Let them chop off a piece of Ukraine now and that will embolden them even more. After all Finland was a province of the Russian Empire before the revolution of 1917 and parts of Poland were under Soviet's control prior to 1941. And that's without going back into middle ages. Lots of places to take back.
You (and people like you) are way too bold to allow yourself to speak for "the world" or for "the EU". As a member of the world and the EU, I'll say that I personally never wanted for my taxes to be spent to prolong this war. Moreover, if it turns out, as you suspect, it all can change on a whim of a president of the USA, it logically follows it never in fact was "the world" or "the EU" who decided that in the first place. It definitely wasn't mine decision, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't yours.
In fact, it won't even really be the voting citizens of the USA who make any decisions, because when red/blue splits 50/50 it isn't "tyranny of the majority" anymore, it's tyranny of luck.
I was nowhere close to "speaking for the world". I merely stated an obvious fact - one country chopped off a piece of another and it got off scot-free.
Re: your taxes - it'd be prudent to look beyond short-term effects and consider what different scenarios would lead to in the long-term. The EU had no choice but to help Ukraine to resist. Consider where things would've been now if they didn't.
The EU begrudgingly gives assistance to Ukraine, because the US forces them to
The irony for Ukranian nationalists is that Lenin gave them their state, and another Communist later gifted them Crimea. Today they are fighting for things Communists gave them. Even most of their buildings and homes were made in Communist times. But they tear down staues of their fathers
Yes, their "fathers", that also intentionally starved millions of them to death in one of the worst genocides in world history.
Some interesting facts about that. The guy running the state at that time was Georgian. It was not Ukranians per se that were targeted by government policy of collectivization, it was the land owning peasant class, kulaks. Whether the famine itself was intentional is very debatable ie it wasnt an official policy to kill people
EU does not have money to spare. Their economies are on the brink of collapse. They have committed harakiri by sabotaging their own energy security and industrial might. EU do not have they any clout on world stage and will decline. Without US - ukraine is sitting duck.
>If he actually follows through on promises like mass deportation and forcing Ukraine peace that could get intense.
Peace and enforcing laws are now negatives to Democrats, that's why you lose.
Asylum seekers are here legally.
This is the problem.
But they are not illegal. That is dehumanizing.
Not for long :)
Human suffering is the US conservative platform :)
It's not the peace that is the problem but the compromises that will be necessary to bring about Trump's promised swift peace.
I would genuinely like to see your thought process on this:
Trump promised to deport all the undocumented migrants. All of them. That's roughly 10 million people.
How would you, within 4 years (he is famously a man of his word and we can count on him to accomplish his campaign promises within his presidency), find and then move 10 million people, and to where would you move them?
What does it look like to move 10 million people against their will? What mechanisms would allow for this?
I have an idea, but I'm curious your alternatives:
First, to find them, you could create a federal bounty program. Rat out illegals, get 100$ a head. Well, that might lead to rampant suspicion and neighborly misbehavior... somewhat exploitable too since you can get ICE to kick your annoying neighbor's door down by claiming they're harboring an illegal... not ideal. Maybe instead give NSA blanket wiretapping access to root them all out? Well, now they're listening to everything everyone says, but hey, anything in the name of freedom!
Regardless, awesome, now we've got ICE kicking down doors and dragging screaming families into the street. Part 1 accomplished. They load them into paddywagons and take them to local jails. Oops, those filled up within the first five days of the program. Now what? Stadiums? We're using those. Walmart parking lots with UNICEF tents? Sure, but what's to stop them from simply running away? Fences. We need lots of fences, and lots of UNICEF tents. Cut in some latrines (jobs!), run some plumbing, done. We've got some great staging areas.
Obviously, we should centralize these, right? We don't want to just take over every walmart parking lot in the country. Instead, while we negotiate with mexico and some other countries about how we're going to dump 10 million people over the border, we'll park them in several centralized locations, preferably out in the middle of nowhere because nobody wants a concentra--- sorry, undocumented migrant staging area, in the middle of their town!
That's a lot of people to move, 10 million. A greyhound bus fits, what, 30 people? 50? That's too many busses. We need trains. We can build the undocumented migrant staging area in remote areas with train access, just add an offramp straight into the camp- sorry, undocumented migrant staging area. Fix up some cattle cars, jam the people in there, gorgeous!
Oops, mexico told us to fuck off and won't take these migrants, now what? We can't just let them loose after having stuffed them up in there for a couple months, can we? I guess we can just keep them in there a bit longer while we try to negotiate with a couple other countries...
This sounds like the good version of America, right? With the screaming families being dragged onto mass transit and shoved into unicef tents? The alternative (aka, status quo for decades) is just lawlessness.
The argument that mass deportations are some impossible ordeal is only defended by those that are deeply invested in that they don't happen.
Most illegal immigrants are only in the US for economic reasons. Don't give them any welfare, make hiring them actually illegal and punish the companies that hire them. When this happens, many of them will just go back to their country.
Then if somehow their countries refused to take in their own citizens, they can just be sanctioned, or stop being given foreign aid by the US.
The only reason you believe that mass deportations are impossible and would cause an apocalyse, is because you really want it to be true.
The larger voices on the more milquetoast side of the original "alt right" crowd who are still online and streaming push for two broad ideas to implement as policy: - any business that employs someone who is not a citizen of the federal government and also not a US National, forfeits their business - all welfare benefits for non-citizens cease
They believe that with these two major policies in place, most of the unlawful aliens will self-deport, and just considering human incentives on an elementary level, yes most of them will self-deport.
All I'll say right now is to not focus so much on the half that voted against your rights that you forget about the half that's behind you.
To be fair, it’s not half, and it’s shrinking.
Best bet is to find a way to build up states that can defend those rights and concentrate people there. In response to the evisceration of the federal government, set up equivalent agencies in those states that can do those jobs. The rest of America should be abandoned.
Wouldn’t this just cause progressives to lose every subsequent presidential election, with those rights eventually being federally outlawed? 270 gets harder to reach the more concentrated a mindset is.
Yes. In my opinion, it's clearly been a wasted effort to try to convince the rest of the country those rights are important. They need to be defended where they can, and the states that defend them need to separate themselves more and more from their parent country. Secession is silly, at least today. If what you're saying comes to pass—and it could even without what I'm suggesting—then at that point secession is the only correct answer.
Either way, it doesn't make sense to spend effort where it's not making a difference.
EDIT: Another part of this idea that I struggle with, is that we shouldn't ask people who aren't accepted to stay in places where they aren't accepted. They deserve rights. They should go to places where they can get them, and we should get them out of the places that don't respect them. And doing that, which I think is the moral thing to do, leads to what you're describing.
Good points. I’ve always had negative preconceptions around secession, but I suppose that if the government fails to be productive in adding value to its people and the world, I can see the benefit in being broken up into smaller, more independent or interdependent components.
Appreciate your thoughts.
Also federal government will continue to weaken under Trump. Its primary domestic power is by acting as a big hose of money, if that dries up then what does it matter? EPA, NLRB, all the executive offices are basically gone already anyways, and it's not like they've even had teeth for the last two decades. Strong blue states enacting their own agendas aggressively, independent of and unassailable by the federal government is a way more achievable goal IMO, especially if the alternative is to pin everything on being able to sufficiently turn out the entire blue coalition one day every four years. I can make a difference at the county and state level, and I have lots of opportunities to do so. My heart goes out to people stuck in red states right now, but at the end of the day some things are within my power and some things are not.
Many conservative accounts have been banned. Many conservatives doxxed or threatened, for exactly the sorts of comments you make.
I would not though, because you have every right to want to self-govern. Good luck!
The corporatist warmongers in the DNC represent my rights?
No, the corporatist warmongers in the RNC obviously do.
Cheney and CO. jumped ship and endorsed another party, they fear Trump
Somehow I doubt that those are the half the population GP was referring to. I think they were referring to voters.
Depends on who you are. If you're trans then, unfortunately, they're all you have
As opposed to the republicans, who are famously not warmongers and are also communist or something.
Does that half have any meaningful power? People are more polarised than ever¹ and one half of the choices controls the presidency, the Senate, probably the House… And they have a very public plan to do a lot of oppressive stuff to ensure they keep themselves and their ideals in power for decades. And their fans are cheering it all.
I’m not American, and in theory I appreciate your positive messaging, but realistically it doesn’t seem like you do have half of the voters or the power behind you.
I hope this finally stops blind democrats from saying crap like “this is not who we are” and “when they go low, we go high” and invoking American exceptionalism and crying for God to “bless” your country specifically. Don’t be surprised nationalists won the day, this is who you are. You had an excuse in 2016, but not this time. You made your bed, and the worst part of it is that it affects the rest of the world so meaningfully. You fucked up. Again. Maybe try changing strategies a bit? If you keep turning the other cheek while the other party is punching you in the face, all you’re going to get are more bruises.
¹ I don’t have any data, this is observational, and I would welcome being proven wrong.
Only one of those political parties kept my kid from going to school for two years. Only one of them chained up their playground and shut down their community. Only one of them forced small businesses to close, cheered on when people where getting their cars towed from trailheads. Only one of them forced state employees to get a so-called vaccine or lose their job.
This is fall out from democrats disastrous covid policies. Well deserved fall out.
>so-called vaccine
What?
In what way is that better than to vote for your own rights even if it means voting for the vice president of the administration that provided almost total support for a country that killed 60 000 people in the past year? Mostly with american weaponry too.
(And before you say that the other side would do it too, even Trump, that seems to show total support for Israel at least keeps talking about how the entire thing needs to stop asap. No such urgency from the Biden administration, at least that's not what their actions show as they keep providing even more material support by the day).b
Trump will give them license to completely wipe Palestine off the map, which will make this issue moot in future elections.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-israel-g...
What are your thoughts and level of concern for the Ukrainian people in the near future? Do you believe that Trump is going to bring that conflict to a close agreeably for the people of Ukraine, or will he follow through with his promise to let Russia "do whatever the hell they want"?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/politics/trump-russia-nato/in...
I'm curious, what exactly did Biden do to stop Israel from wiping Gaza off the map? What restraints has Israel shown up until now? So even assuming you were right, what exactly would Trump do that could be worse than what Biden has done (eg. Support for everything, and providing for most of the material that led to almost complete destruction of Gaza and now soon Lebanon too).
And in any case my point was more that it is funny to see people talk about how one side only thinks about their rights and not those of the others and how their side has more compassion and empathy. While actively campaigning for the candidate that has been completely supportive of Israel for the past year. Using the reasoning that hey, foreign policy is one thing but at least Biden is better for "us Americans". That to me sounds exactly like thinking about your own rights first, at the detriment of those of all the people who died and suffer from what Biden's administration has enabled.
This really sucks and is making me incredibly worried. I know we don't discuss politics on HN, and there's not much point in debating this. But seriously... this clown? what's wrong with the US.
Citizens United allows for money to speak. Recent SCOTUS case allows for paths towards legalized bribery.
Neither party offers a real solution, so folks go with the person promising to break everything, even if he has already proven he won't follow the law, enriches himself, and destablizes global politics.
Yeah, it might break a logjam. But don't expect things to be better after a flood.
Bubububutttt he’s totally going to bring back those 6-figure factory jobs in the Midwest and make houses cost $150k again by….deporting large portions of the underpaid manual labor force, taxing foreign goods at 100%, and ending all government programs including public education.
I'm still staggered by the thought of brain-worm being charge of all things health related and potentially (although that appeared to be a joke) in charge of everything save oil profits.
RFK says some wild stuff, but he does have a track record of being pretty vicious with large corporations that threaten public health.
I am scared of him cutting a bunch of vaccines, but I am excited that he will go after food manufacturers who have been maximizing profits at the cost of public health.
He won't.
The US is going to be transactional instead of principled for a long time.
What a shame.
Morning boys, how’s the water?
Congratulations to Elon Musk. Best $44b spent.
This election has been a testament to the complete and utter obliviousness of the American voter, as far as economics goes.
All polls have indicated that economy and inflation was the number 1 issue that voters on the right cared about, and yet they haven't flinched at the proposals that Trump have laid out. Musk even said it in clear language, that there will be "austerity" moving forward.
The greatest grift in modern times - and the people that stood most to lose walked straight into it, cheering.
I guess the only hope is that the economy is fine, and improving - which makes any radical changes much more visible and risky. If Trump and Musk want to set off the bomb and likely crater it, then they'll own that mess. But hopefully they'll just do nothing, and try to take credit for the trajectory they've inherited - for the sake of your average citizen.
But the courts will be screwed for decades.
Harris proposed peacetime price controls, an idea that hasn't been tried since Nixon, and for good reason. I don't think Democrats have the high ground on economics.
Let's see how the trade war of all trade wars will play out for average Joe down in Mississippi. All while social safety nets are disintegrating underneath his feet.
What's dangerous about this is not the plan itself, but that there won't be anyone to confront Trump about his half-baked, or downright disastrous plans.
Maybe? Democrats had the chance to propose something better, but they decided to prop up a geriatric puppet until they couldn't, and then were forced to prop up his widely unpopular VP. I'll take trade war over domestic goods shortages, which is what price caps inevitably create.
This is the core problem:
The economy isn't shit. The economy is booming. Job growth has been good, summer consumer spending was good. Real wage growth has outpaced inflation the past 18 months.
Inflation is going down. Interest rates are going down.
America came out of this victorious, compared to other countries that faced the exact same post-COVID woes.
The problem is that democrats couldn't convey this stronger. Republicans managed to spread the doom and gloom more than facts.
Now it's going to be trade wars, tax cuts for the wealthy, more crony capitalism. Trump is fixated with tariffs, because in his mind, deal-making comes down to strong-arming the other party. Trump seems to be oblivious of the soft power the US has wielded for decades. That's also about to get flushed down the toilet - all countries in the world are embracing for Trump-style "negotiations".
I know it is not good to engage in victim blaming...but maybe the voters do get what they deserve?
Perhaps the economy as a whole is doing great, but the facets that impact the individuals across the nation are not. Many/most people feel that they have less in their pocket AND their refrigerator at the end of the month than ever before.
The economy is great for about 20% of the population, maybe 30%. Take a drive down no-where town anywhere in the US and you'll see the economy doesn't work for most people. All of middle America (geographically) has been absolutely gutted by globalism, among other things.
Peter Santenello has a good YouTube channel where he goes around the country (and world) and interviews regular people. It will give you some insight on the economy for the remaining 70%.
https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello
Based on this video, it seems like the problem there is social security checks given to young people and drugs, and not the lack of jobs.
I genuinely hope Trump's plan works to alleviate this but I don't think even rampant protectionism can put the cat back in the bag for the heyday of American manufacturing. I expect it to go about as well as it did for the Soviet's insular economy.
Maybe another perspective on this is that Democrats were preaching to the upper arm of the K-shaped recovery that everything is fine with their bureaucracy in charge (because nobody actually cares about Biden or Kamala personally), and the people on the lower arm voted on "Hell no, it's not!" This was the Springfield, OH thing, where the media tried to laugh it off as a few racists claiming pet-eating, but a small town was truly stretched beyond its limits through illegal immigration.
What you call victim-blaming may be mixing up cause and effect. Voters aren't stupid. They hear "the economy is doing great!" but they see their grocery bills. Maybe the victims are just tired of being victims and voted accordingly?
For one, hopefully the good folks of Mississippi will get some of their cotton growing and ship building jobs back.
You are severely underestimating the American ability to strong-arm other nations in their economic favor.
Last time Trump tried, it ended up costing farmers tens of billions. That time (2018) the tariffs were under 30%, this time around, he's promised 60%.
You are quite plainly lying.
She proposed controls on gouging, which is already codified in even the reddest of red states.
> This election has been a testament to the complete and utter obliviousness of the American voter,
My reading is "This election has been a testament to the complete and utter obliviousness of the Dems to the American voter".
Seriously, politicians who are out of touch with their constituencies should not really be expecting to win.
This is the attitude that leads to Democrats losing. People were not obvious.
Biden is wildly unpopular. People are extremely unhappy with his management of the economy, immigration, etc.
Democrats could have changed directions. Instead they doubled down on Biden. Harris said she would do nothing different. So people didn't vote for her. That's very logical.
That's not to say that Trump will do a good job or that his policies are better. They're worse and he's a crook. But voters everywhere made this sentiment clear for an entire year and were totally ignored by the Democratic party.
They tried to get a border deal, which was stopped / blocked at the behest of Trump.
The economy has been on a up-swing for a good year now, and things have improved all-over. People can't live under a rock and think that a global pandemic wasn't a huge part of this - most countries experienced the very same economic effects.
But, again, Trump laying out his disastrous tariff plans is the canary in the coalmine - that his voters either don't understand economics, or simply chose to live in a make-believe world where they imagine Trump will just "fix" things.
The border deal was a hail mary 3 years into a presidency. They should have done something about the border years earlier when voters started to complain about it if they wanted to.
It doesn't matter what some economist says the economy is doing. Most people are be unhappy with the economy. That's what matters. Democrats listened to economists instead of voters.
Of course Trump's votes don't understand economics. Why do you think overwhelmingly we see educated people now vote Democrats and non educated people vote for Trump?
Trust us some economist says we're doing a good job was a crappy message. This was an own goal.
Point still stands on the border deal. They wanted something, but through Trump, it was derailed - for no other reason that it was detrimental to his campaign.
Reagan had a plaque at the oval office that said: "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit"
And Truman had a plaque that said "The buck stops here". I don't buy these lame excuses.
Biden should have used executive orders to deal with the border. Just like Trump did. Biden didn't because he didn't care that voters were extremely upset about the border. Now we get to "enjoy" Trump again.
Robert Kennedy detailed how CO2 pipelines have ruptured causing people to die & become sick. And how eminent domain was used to profit companies rather than social welfare. Even though Robert Kennedy seems to believe that CO2 is the climate control knob, many Americans don't. They see Carbon Capture as a scam that enriches Billionaires at the health + wealth expense of everyone else.
This is one example where ideology becomes a mechanism of coercion to transfer wealth from the large majority to a very small group of people.
They misunderestimated him.
For my friends here who are not Americans, here's my take on how the election played out. Please bare in mind I'm neither Democrat nor Republican. The analysis comes from commentators on both sides of the political spectrum. Since Trump won, the analysis focuses on the Harris campaign mistakes. I'll leave critiques on Trump for other commenters, as there are many.
- Harris skipped the traditional primary which reinforced to many independent voters that she was appointed by the ruling class of the Democratic party; US voters are extremely tired of feeling like the political "elites" have more control than the actual voters
- Democrats gaslit the American people for too long, claiming President Biden was not in mental decline; this created a lot of open questions about the inner workings of the Democratic party that were never addressed head on by Harris's campaign; to many independent voters, this left them feeling like Harris might be more of a political puppet than a qualified leader
- Harris's campaign ran primarily on restoring Roe v Wade (abortion rights) which is a false promise; it was clear she would not have the necessary Senate majority to codify a new law; many liberal and independent voters were annoyed at this attempt at emotional manipulation; this was a critical campaign mistake
- When Harris was trailing in the polls, she went on the attack against Trump with ads and chopped up sound bites instead clearly stating her plan for the country in longer form interviews; this left independent voters with a lot of open questions about her policies and plan
Ultimately, Trump won the popular and electoral votes on more of a referendum against the Democrats political playbook. Most Americans are tired of being talked down to and gaslit. And yes, Trump does this as well, but he won the perception battle.
The main takeaways on what needs to change in American politics to restore some sanity in future elections:
1. We need an overhaul in traditional media (or new media) to restore trust in sources of facts; all American traditional media is incredibly biased at the moment, leaving our politics up to the whims and misinformation of social media
2. We need a 3 party system; this is a long shot, but it's the only reasonable way to enforce accountability for the Democrats and Republicans since traditional press is failing to provide a balance of power; for the last 20+ years, elections have mostly been against the other candidate instead of for policy plans or candidates
Shower thought: People vote for Trump because he is actually predictable. You never have to guess whose interests he is protecting. It's always his own. You never have to guess whether he is lying. He sure as hell is but there is also no hidden agenda. It's unfiltered mental diarrhea but it's raw and authentic.
I think a lot of the unease and disdain for the Western political class stems from their attempts to be inoffensive and appeal to everybody. Whatever policy you enact there is always going to be a trade-off, winners and losers, and if you do now acknowledge that, how can I be sure that you are acting in my interest?
“Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid.” ― Captain Jack Sparrow
I think authenticity is being hugely underrated as a factor for why Trump won. People inherently trust someone who is visibly flawed and speaks off-the-cuff. This preference for authenticity has always existed, but is extra strong as a reaction to social media.
He is not predictable, mere selfish interests doesn't make him so, he doesn't have an ideology and therefore very flexible on what he will do, is easily manipulated by anyone and also there are many more dangerous people who will run his administration(RFK is in-charge of health!) while he spends his days on the golf course.
An unsurprising result. There is a worrying global rise in right-wing popularism and this is part of it.
We can look forward to more war, more crime, more suffering, more scapegoating of minorities. This is the start of a long decline that ends in death and destruction.
That Harris and Trump were apparently the best that the US political machine could spew up as choices to run one of the most powerful countries in the world is concerning in itself. Just shows how severely politics is broken in the US.
>We can look forward to more war
Do you really believe the Dems would do less war? They are literally siding with Dick Cheney. They were always very pro-war (eg. Hilary Clinton) but now they don't even hide it and they are embracing the whole "security through strength" and "escalation to de-escalate" in the middle east.
If you look back at the past few presidency (incl. Obama), Trump was far more peaceful. He was the first president in a very long time to not invade a new country. I don't think he does it out of love or empathy, I suspect he just thinks it's a waste of money, but the end result is the same.
Pakistanis in the majority and Muslims in general supported Trump because Biden's govt is alleged to have toppled Imran Khan's govt and supported genocide in Gaza. American Muslims have voted for Trump
Good for them, anyone can see that trump isn't just going to give the zionists everything they want and make it far worse. It's not like he's said as such or anything, and they could have known beforehand.
No US President by design could go against Israel. His SIL is an Israeli American.
One thing for sure, is you're part of the zionist brigade (you're easy to spot from a mile away, showing up in every comment thread to blatently support zionism).
Any US President, by design, can go against israel, because the US is a free nation not beholden to israel.
> because the US is a free nation not beholden to israel.
Google APIAC and how much donations they give to senators and check their recent statements in favor of genocide. Get out of the cave
I know about that, can you explain how that corruption actually makes the US not free to decide not to support Israel?
I'll repeat. The US is free and not beholden to israel. They could decide tomorrow to stop support, they won't, but they are absolutely free to.
Thats not how blackmail operations work...
The compromise is total. Presidents are puppets. They do as told. There is a shadow government, and CoG is still at play. The reality is so crazy most people can't handle it.
Congress is the same. Total compromise. Every once in a while someone tries to buck a bit like Thomas Massie. Then his wife died suddenly...
> They could decide tomorrow to stop support, they won't, but they are absolutely free to.
LOL
They should look up Adeel Abdullah Mangi. Do they think Trump doesn’t support genocide in Gaza?
Trump is antiwar.. what else do we want? Regarding Gaza, there was no escalation during last Trump era
Better luck next time Jack!
LOL democrats really did a number on themselves here!
The majority of the country was telling them "We are having change anxiety after Obama and we are having distrust in institutions after Covid". So what did they do? Cling to the same power structures with a dead man walking, doubled down on gender politics, devolved internally into morality based foreign policy shout match and the cherry on top put an uncharismatic non white woman as the candidate. At every step of the way they very eloquently and academically explained why they have the right solutions while completely ignoring the emotional state of the nation.
All they had to do was bring a calming white man that is not in cognitive decline that would reassure the nation that everything was going to be alright. That the America they know and love is here to stay.
You may don't like that this was reality, that your progressive views are more "right" than that, but it is. So now enjoy being factually, morally, academically correct with trump as the president with control on the congress. What a joke.
It's the limbic system vs the frontal lobe.
The limbic system won.
My take is that people are attracted to fascists and authoritarians for similar reasons as many people are fascinated by serial killers and the evil protagonists in TV shows. Something about watching evil and cruelty appeals to human nature.
Maybe the fascination from people who never actually lived through fascism. Like people who fantasize about BDSM or CNC sex but would never really do it in real life.
I'm from Spain and even to this day we hear old people saying that "life was better with Franco". I think it's more about a need to have a homogenous society with very clear rules and boundaries.
People are attracted to power. It's that simple.
subconscious desire to follow & make one's self appealing to those with more charisma and power than ourself, despite the harm that comes with it
Would you use those adjectives to describe Obama? "People" certainly must have been attracted to those traits if he served two terms.
The best explanation I heard for the appeal of fascism was from someone on the far-right – that fascism is basically an immune response of a nation.
When enough people are hurting from the status quo voting for "sensible" policies of soft reform isn't going to cut it. At some point you need to blow up the existing system so you clear out the rot.
This immune response might be costly to the nation in the near-term but the hope is when it's over it will have also have destroyed the infection.
When it's put in these terms I can begin to relate more with the appeal of Trump, and while I'm not personally convinced he is a fascist, I do get why people say that. I can be nervous and unhappy with the result, but also acknowledge that the US needs significant change and voting in Biden or Harris was never realistically going to bring that.
There's clearly something wrong with democratic party. They're no longer appealing to the working class they claim to speak for and instead their primary supports now seem to be suburban white-women and the college educated metropolitan class. Today they're also supported by the media establishment, war-mongers like Dick Cheney, most billionaires, Hollywood celebs and pop-stars. Given this it's really no surprised we smart well off people on HN don't like Trump and quite like the sensible status-quo Harris promised.
I hope this immune response doesn't kill the host and I hope something positive comes out of all of this. We should take comfort in the fact that the US is the most resilient democratic nation on Earth and Trump probably won't be alive in another decade. Those who worry about an actual fascist up rising probably need to relax a little. The great risk over the next few years is probably just geopolitical stupidity and we've seen plenty of that in the last 4 anyway.
> The best explanation I heard for the appeal of fascism was from someone on the far-right – that fascism is basically an immune response of a nation.
This is some really low-tier fascist apologia, in my opinion. Fascism isn't an immune response, it's a cancer. Once active in the host, it tries to sap it of whatever resources it can to enrich itself. Rooting out fascism has, historically, come at great personal and political cost to the countries that manage it.
The original year 1919 definition was actually a response to an openly belligerent threat.
>The limbic system won.
The limbic system always wins.
"The mind is always the dupe of the heart." (La Rochefoucauld)
It often wins, not always. Otherwise we'd be all monkeys out of control and we're not. We're often capable of handling our basic animal instincts.
Not necessarily. Only when people are afraid or anxious.
Well then isn't the limbic system in charge? Because those are like two major emotions most people feel
>those are like two major emotions most people feel
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." (H. P. Lovecraft)
Not having an unending war with a power armed with nuclear weapons appealed to voters.
The limbic system is a neural net that’s been training for a billion years. It’s probably right.
I'm sure voting sensibly in a democracy, understanding all the consequences it will have on oneself, the nation and on foreign people was definitely part of the function to be optimized for (besides that evolution doesn't work like that)
> You may don't like that this was reality, that your progressive views are more "right" than that, but it is.
This made talking politics with my social circle difficult. Don’t shoot the messenger. This was not the time to run a risky candidate. I actually think Harris ran a decent campaign, much better than I thought she would, but I don’t think she had much of a chance. I remember when Biden dropped out several groups came out saying that if the DNC didn’t give Harris the nomination, that they would consider than to be a betrayal and that they’d lose their support. It was frustrating to see them so focused on what was “right” or “fair” when the stakes were so high.
The crazy thing is that we already went through this in 2016. We had people protest voting against Clinton. It didn’t work. And yet we seem to have been ok letting unyielding idealism sabotage important elections.
That said, I think a huge problem was Biden’s ego and his inability to stick to his campaign promise of being a one-term president. With him dropping with only a few months left, democrats didn’t have many options.
Agreed on Biden's ego being a problem, but when did he ever promise to be a one term president?
>At every step of the way they very eloquently and academically explained why they have the right solutions
Part of the problem is that they didn't explain anything. Even in friendly interviews, the best kamala can answer when asked for specific is a big word salad that can be summarized as "Trump is evil and a danger to democracy, vote for us". Saying you have a plan and shitting on the other party for not having one is not the same as having a real plan and communicating it properly.
In an opportunity economy, you'll have OPPORTUNITY!
I think Harris 2024 is the worst campaign I've ever seen in modern American history.
This self-righteous narrative is way off.
The Democrats would rather lose with a neoliberal+unpopular candidate than win with a popular candidate. Because they serve similar corporate interests as the Reps. Only with a completely different Culture War shtick than the Reps.
That you frame this as being “factually, morally, academically” correct is funny—what justice does the Dems fight for? Not Palestinians. Not the average American. Just well-off women (now white or Jamaican) having “their turn” as the commander in chief.
I did think at the time when Biden had to step aside that it was a shame they didn't try to choose the most competent replacement (maybe Shapiro?) rather than just going with Kamala who I think everyone agreed wasn't very good.
Yup, its hard to claim you are going to address systemic issues when you are unable to get over internal petty politics of your own party system
> think everyone agreed wasn't very good.
Isn't this what people said after Clinton lost in 2016? Hindsight is 20/20
may be Sapiro didn't want to run this time.
> The majority of the country was telling them "We are having change anxiety after Obama
Biden came after Trump.
> All they had to do was bring a calming white man that is not in cognitive decline that would reassure the nation that everything was going to be alright
What motivated people is inflation and border crossings.
> Biden came after Trump.
Exactly, Yeah! He was the white man not in mental decline that said that everything is going to be alright.
> What motivated people is inflation and border crossings.
Yes, these are some of the issues that needed to be addressed instead of gender politics and foreign policy.
What is the disagreement?
The disagreement is that Fox News focused on gender politics, but it was largely absent from both Biden and Kamala's campaign.
I guess congrats to Fox, because focusing on it all day every day worked. The average joe thinks that's all the Democrats care about. It's extremely transparent when someone says "gender politics" what media they're consuming.
Yeah man, the only people talking about gender politics at this point are Republicans.
Have we been following the same campaign? These were at least in the top-5 messages from their campaign:
- Kamala is not only black, but she is ALSO a woman! Please vote for her otherwise you won't only be a racist but a misogynist too.
- If you are a woman your rights are in jeopardy and Trump will put you back in chains or something. If you are a woman and not voting for Kamala you are doing what your husband is telling you to do obviously.
Interesting, those are two things I heard on Fox but not from Kamalas campaign. Weird how that works.
I did however hear some gender politics from the Trump campaign, whether it was accusing boxers of being men or railing against childless cat ladies.
Well you must not have been paying much attention then. It's straight from Kamala's ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaCPck2qDhk
It literally says at the bottom of this ad this is not authorized by either candidates campaign. Nor does the ad even say the things you pointed out. But amazing try. I see you just made an account for this thread
So, when the democrats finally said "hey, we were wrong, here's a boarder bill to limit entry into the US", and Trump said "don't fix the boarder",
Why did Trump then get votes?
Nobody is confused as to why people SAY they support Trump, people are confused that you can show someone who supports Trump objective evidence that he hurts them, works against his wishes, etc, and they will support him harder.
The "backfire effect" doesn't replicate, but boy IDK if we can call two elections anything more than an adequate sample size.
If Gender politics is such a nothing-burger that the president shouldn't care about it, why did they vote in the party who is enthusiastic about hetero-normativity? Why did so many republicans devote airtime and debate time to talking about the double digit number of trans people in sports?
But Trump didn’t do any of things you suggested either. In fact he was barely coherent in his ideas most of the time.
He is barely coherent most of the time, but several of his ideas do resonate with people and are easy to understand:
1 - Other countries in the world have taken advantage of the US
2 - Illegal immigrants have changed the country for the worse and are taking jobs
#2 in particular has been framed as being racist. There IS a good deal of racism mixed in there, but the truth is that low skilled illegal immigrants DO compete for many of the same jobs as lower-skilled Americans.
None other than Bernie Sanders said as much about the subject right around 2007. His stance at that time was that we needed to do something about illegal immigration specifically to protect the jobs of American workers, but then later he changed his tune to fit in with the rest of the party.
If you address the majority of people's concerns and worries, they'll vote for you.
> 2 - Illegal immigrants have changed the country for the worse and are taking jobs
> #2 in particular has been framed as being racist. There IS a good deal of racism mixed in there, but the truth is that low skilled illegal immigrants DO compete for many of the same jobs as lower-skilled Americans.
There is only one group for which that is true -- men without a high school diploma. Otherwise, immigrants are generally taking jobs that Americans won't do.
Case in point, picking produce at farms. The last time they cracked down on immigration, a lot of those farms had to spoil a lot of crops because no one would pick them.
> Otherwise, immigrants are generally taking jobs that Americans won't do.
Because the pay is terrible. Start paying well and plenty of Americans will want the jobs.
Working a low skilled job like fast food should be enough to pay for college so that it is possible to lift yourself up out of poverty.
We have created a two tier system and the educated class just makes excuses about why the system has to work the way it does today.
Taking jobs? Who, is giving them illegal jobs?
Why aren't people talking about this and doing something about it?
Americans. Plenty of business owners happy to pay under the table, steal wages and take advantage of illegal workers with no protections.
People rent out DoorDash and Uber accounts for 20% of the income from people that can't sign up themselves.
It's again our limbic system: it's easier to assign all the blame outsiders
I am indeed very worried about all these illegal immigrants taking our very important jobs.
When I order food delivery, get in an Uber, and drop off my laundry at the wash and fold I want an under-educated American!
Do not insult a person’s honest earned livelihood that they work for to support their families.
There are tens of thousands of Americans who are forced to live in Trailer trucks or from their car who often do those sorts of jobs.
They just want an honest living and do not have the opportunities to get higher college education to land well paid white collar formal jobs.
That uber job is often their way to save up for their truck driving license so that they can move to a decent wage to get his/her kids a nice christmas gift, nutritious daily meals for their kids and other emotional needs.
To them, seeing their jobs being taken up by illegal immigrants for lower wages, no payroll taxes to pay, etc. is a very very very real issue to them and a zero sum game being played against their life.
This is such a goofy response. Are you aware that under-educated Americans need jobs, and in fact vote???
That's why we have surging high unemployment! Oh wait it's still lower than when George Bush was president.
People want prosperous livelihoods not just jobs. Do you think those working those low paying dead end jobs are just completely content with having zero mobility or financial security?
That uber driving might be living in their car but at least they are employed right??
if you are buying delivery food, taxis, and laundry services you are clearly an upper class net worth individual. surely you know what’s best for working class americans
Yes I'm a super high net worth individual with a household income of $60K a year.
It's called living in a city, I don't own a car or have a laundry machine.
A laundry machine today could be a risky investment as you don't know how many years it will last. My old flat had a machine that broke down (It was less than 6 months old) and there was a known problem with the model which was to do with the input pad to set the settings. Luckily it was under warranty, but even still the stop was fighting hard to replace it :/ (I think it was fisher and paykel, they used to be good but they moved the manufacturing base from New Zealand to overseas).
My take away from those kind of exchanges is that most people have no idea how other groups of people live
Yeah this always surprises me when people compare the candidates. OK, Kamala was mediocre. But a ham sandwich is better than Trump's inane incoherent rambling. His positions are a vague protectionism.
It kind of makes sense from a certain angle.
Trump is a known quantity - people know what they are getting with him and have made their peace with him being how he is.
People expect more from Democrats. Harris would get dinged for saying things that Trump says, by the same people who are fine with Trump saying those things.
If that seems irrational and hypocritical, well, that's how people are, regardless of their politics.
Another model of how to think about the candidates is that human beings make decisions based on how the person or thing in front of them makes them feel - and afterward they come up with post-hoc rationalizations as to why. Even smart people do this. To some extent, we're all lying to ourselves about this.
So it makes sense that this time around both candidates ran campaigns focused on emotions, instead of policy specifics.
Ahhh yes, a calming old white man would've solved everything.
I guess we'll see in the next 4 years.
[flagged]
> put an uncharismatic non white woman as the candidate
As a "white" man (no more white than native Americans are "red", Chinese are "yellow", or Africans are "black"), I take offence at the suggestion that skin color or gender should be a defining characteristic to determine who should be the US president (or anyone else in power).
Charisma is a different story, but boy, if Trump is the benchmark for what counts as having charisma, we're in even bigger trouble than I thought.
Think you missed the rest of the post:
> You may don't like that this was reality, that your progressive views are more "right" than that, but it is.
"All they had to do was bring a calming white man that is not in cognitive decline"
They did that with VP Walz, but it did not help. Their policies are the problem.
But surely you can tell that putting him in a subordinate position does not produce the same emotional effect, if anything it amplifies the negative reaction by baking the problem into the ticket.
I've read in a few places that if Walz was the presidential pick and Harris the VP, he would have probably been able to beat Trump.
Purely delusional.
Nobody gives a shit about the VP.
Vance Rogan interview got 15 million views compared to Trump's 45 million. Not overwhelming, saying nobody gives a ship about VP is kind of a stretch.
Especially since we had 3 assasination plots on Trump. It's quite possible he won't live the end of his term and not because of his age.
You imply that Americans are racist. You're making the same sort of mistake that you ascribe to the Democratic Party.
The left and the Democrats has become so far left and radical that their party didn’t resonate with everyday Americans for the past several years.
The Democrats are firmly centre-right when compared against most of the rest of the western world. They wouldn’t know far-left if it slapped them in the face.
Have they? They've been consistently trying to chase moderates for years. Harris had Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney backing her. I'd say their attempt to capture these people has largely failed.
very funny to watch this post go from +3 to -1 as the Americans woke up
this is so wrong. the dems have shifted rightward. they would've won if they were further left.
"America first" (read: "Trump first"). It is going to be interesting to see all the different ways that guy is going to enrich himself and businesses, again..
This is weird because the information I was getting was that Harris was leading the opinion polls and the Trump supporters were dropping him at the last minute. Now this feels like a rigged election.
Or the information you were getting was not comprehensive.
> Now this feels like a rigged election.
As a fellow democrat, lose with some grace.
It is a rigged election, just not in the way republicans mean it. All American elections are rigged to make it deliberately difficult for many people to vote.
It's a joke about mail in ballots in 2020 my dude.
Maybe you forgot to include the /s, but I had my first laugh while reading this thread.
Seriously, the people who voted for him probably didn’t want to defend it to people asking their opinion.
Most of the demographic made out to be a "boogeyman" ie normal people, recognized DEI as "a license to hunt Republicans".
If you're a normal person and some random intern with a 10% non-American accent probably in their early 20s calls you from some random number greeting you by your full name and says they're a part of some polling company you wouldn't recognize even if you'd heard of it before, are you going to confess in the slightest to them you intend to vote for orange cheeto man who is like literally worse than mustache man from WW2?
Probably not.
There was a lot of rallying on the republican side to go vote online. I didn't see a lot of that on the democrat side. Pundits mentioned a lack of Trump's ground game, but I think online networking effects of republicans urging others to vote helped him whereas the ground game helped Harris.
It was a close election. Possibly driven by the echo chambers people are in -- like seeing "I voted for Hilary" in left leaning sources and "I voted for Trump" in right leaning sources. Like when Anna Seltzer's poll came out the left ran with that but largely ignored the +10 poll for Trump that came out shortly after.
I personally try to vary my sources to counter the echo chamber effects. I don't always agree with everything that is said, I just want to try and understand what is going on.
I was seeing commentators on the left decrying the Puerto Recan joke, saying that it would hurt the Trump campaign. Then Biden made his comment about Trump supporters being garbage which the left dismissed. After that the right took it as a symbol, making memes about bins going to vote, Trump arriving to rallies in a garbage truck, people wearing bin bags to vote, etc. The left didn't see that going on, or dismissed things like the garbage truck as a stunt.
A similar thing with Trump's McDonald's stint. Both of these helped connect with regular workers, something that Harris didn't have. Something that the commentators on the left failed to see or understand.
I don't follow things like TikTok, but I heard a commentator mention how that helped women turn against Trump, especially amongst new voters. I suspect that due to the ranking algorithm and bubbles that this predominantly targetted democratic or left leaning voters as there were many women that voted for Trump.
> Like when Anna Seltzer's poll came out the left ran with that but largely ignored the +10 poll for Trump that came out shortly after.
My understanding is that they were a less trusted pollster in the first place especially vs Ann's poll.
Fair enough. Interestingly, that +10% poll was closer to the current +14% that Trump is leading by in Iowa [1].
It would be interesting to see the sampling data between the different polls to see how they adjust for potential biases.
[1] https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/iowa
From what I can tell, the polls were just really bad. Less than 1% response rates. This provided hope for various sides at various times but at the end of the day they basically aren't that useful.
> the information I was getting
What does this tell you?
You still think the news is real?
Is the war with Iran more or less likely with Trump in office?
Good luck to our American friends.
Doesn't seem to be much commentary here on what an axis of Musk/Vance/Thiel (and Andreesen, etc.) influence and power in the US federal administration now means for the technology sector.
Remember it is Musk who began the wave of layoffs a bit over two years ago.
Bezos evidently saw the way the wind was blowing already.
I also see almost zero discussion about climate change policy. For many of us non-Americans, this (the disengagement of the US from even the pathetic half-measures it moved towards under Obama) is one of the key things that was horrifying to watch.
What are your thoughts on it? Why are the layoffs related?
Because among these people there was definitely a perception that we had/have acquired too much bargaining power.
What’s there to talk about: they bought a President. They puppet the incompetent VP. They stand to make billions. The TikTok ban basically sealed the Trump win because its American investors were hellbent on him winning and they paid him to switch his stance on it. That’s just one example.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1gkwo2u/chatgpt_bl...
> In four years, you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote.
Donald J. Trump, 07/28/24
Unbelievable.
People are tired of competing with 3rd-world wages while having to meet 1st-world expenses—especially in a ChatGPT world. It’s no surprise that shutting the borders and capping the visas is a mildly popular platform—especially when the Democrats (with a few exceptions, like Sanders) abandoned their labor constituencies back in the 90s.
New Zealander here. I hope that now with Trump in office that USA will go back to the moon in 2025-2028 :).
Hope more high income manufacturing jobs are created for the working class and they build a bigger middle class.
Rip America. China and russia are gonna love this.
Astounding they have elected a literal criminal as a president. Bonkers even.
China will definitely not love the tariffs.
Criminal? What are you even talking about?
Criminal, yes. He's a convicted felon.
He also sold the entirety of the CIA's intel on Israel's nuclear weapons capacity to the Saudi Arabians in exchange for the Saudis sponsoring a golf tournament at a Trump resort, so there's that too.
Trump is a criminal. I think that is fact. Not sure it matters.
tariffs? the world is fed up with tariffs and sanctions, they came up with the BRICS+
the US will definitely _not_ love the death of the USD, or no longer having access to rare earth materials located in China ;)
It's dissatisfying that he could win, but it's not the first time, so I've already accepted a long time ago that the world is not what I wish it to be.
In that context, I am more curious what his policies will be because even though he rides different waves of general discontent in society, ultimately he doesn't care about anything except the economy and money. So I think he will double down on tariffs, but some things are irreversible - saving the e.g. coal mining industry is a lost cause and he'll throw those people down the drain because it doesn't make economic sense anymore. What I am most curious about is how he'll handle Biden's policies with regards to blocking acquisitions on monopoly prevention grounds.
Also the markets are not open in the US, but over here in Europe they're already skyrocketing. So "Wallstreet" is expecting massive growth in what is already quite an inflated market.
oh lord, I was afraid of it
who would of guessed that swinging to the Right and courting Republican voters while holding no real tangible policy positions that address the pain that people are feeling wouldn't pay off?? (except for literally everybody who follows politics)
I could write an essay on each massive mistake they made after that first week after the swap, but if I had to simmer it down into a sentence, it would be: people wanted change, Kamala Harris made it extremely clear that she does not represent that change. She cozied up to Biden and tried to be a centrist-right candidate, and literally nobody wants that... and the worst part is that they will never learn a lesson from this.
Not a Trump voter so can't say exactly why they vote for him, but my guess would be the rather toxic race/sexism obsessed narrative the far left pushes. Every article nowadays rambles on about it, ever book/tv show also, it is tiresome and self defeating. Also so much negativity directed at males, especially white ones. The trans stuff is also a factor I'd guess, even as someone who voted for Harris I don't care for this level of anti science belief that a guy is now a women just because they say so.
Harris didn't really push this narrative as far as I can tell, but unfortunately some of her supporters do(and the media outlets they run).
Or perhaps the Trump voters actually believe he can somehow lower grocery store costs, though to me this seems like it would require some real mental gymnastics to believe, or deep ignorance.
Look, Trump supporters stormed the capitol. If we're going to hold people responsible for the actions of their supporters, let's start there.
This was in no way the narrative of this campaign. It's a stale talking point.
On the right you mostly have "proper" religion, mainly Christianity (in the western world at least), while on the left you have the church of identity politics.
Everyone seems to be laughing at centrists nowadays, ya know the "enlightened centrist" meme, but it's the only truly secular position today.
The left remains stubborn in persecuting even an ounce of independent thought (or any thought that goes against the established dogma) on topics related to gender/race/identity and dismissing people with different opinions as "bigots". And then they wonder why people simply stop expressing their opinions loudly and opt to express them via voting instead.
And then when the voting results come in, they double down: "I can't believe 50+% of the population is RACIST, SEXIST, BIGOTED, UNEDUCATED, STUPID!"
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, really.
There is no "far left" in the United States electoral system, get a grip.
There is no left either. At least in any meaningful definition of the term. Maybe you could say there always is a 'more left' party. But that is not very usefull.
First I’ll just say that I do agree that the left has a big problem with negativity towards - or just simply ignoring - young men’s problems. I don’t believe in the solutions the right prescribes, but yeah, the left desperately needs to come up with its own productive solutions that young men can believe in. And a world view in which young men feel valued.
It’s not “anti-science” to say gender is fundamentally non-binary. Yes, reproduction is very binary but you don’t stop being a man or woman if you become sterile.
Biologically, gender is determined by a dozen of various factors during the child’s development. All of which can go wrong. Especially now that we are surrounded by so many hormone disrupting chemicals.
How is it so hard for people to imagine even the possibility that the development of the brain can be affected towards a different gender than what your genes or genitalia indicate? Biology is not a perfect machine. Not even remotely.
And is it so incredibly hard to acknowledge that it’s easier to fix the appearance of your genitalia and some letters on some paper, than trying to force your brain to rewire itself to a different gender than what every neuron and synapse of their brain has been wired for during development? If you actually spend a minute really listening to a transgender person it will become very clear that switching gender isn’t something they do just because it’s like.. you know.. kinda fun and exciting to be a different gender. No. Not at all.
Tech people especially, should recognise that “binary” is an illusion. We say that bits are binary but anyone that has worked on chips or read about ECC understands that it’s not how physical bits actually behave. Biological gender is similar.
Honestly, that so many people on all sides still don’t see this is a worrying sign of societies lack of empathy. We don’t want to spend even a little bit of time to understand other people. And yes, to circle back, for the left this means they should truly understand and speak to young men in the working class. Sure they have some nice words about supporting unions and such… but it’s not believable.
So you're saying "be nice to people different from you, otherwise you're a scum" is too unacceptable for half of the USA? Not anything to be proud of.
I can't tell if this comment is aimed at reds or blues...
Both sides are guilty of not being nice to the otherside, and calling them scum. That seems to be the problem right now, we've stopped listening to each other.
I think "be nice" is already the unacceptable bit, you don't have to go any further.
I try to understand why Trump lost the 2020 election and won the 2024.
My reading is that people vote with a punishment mindset. Aka the only way to punish Trump for his horrible term was to vote for Biden. And the only way to punish Biden for his bad financially term was to vote for Trump.
Our political system is dominated by a group of voters who are basically Sideshow Bobs wandering around yards strewn with rakes.
https://giphy.com/gifs/season-5-the-simpsons-5x2-3o6Mbtdd7dh...
Whoever is in charge gets the heat for any problems.
He happened to be at the wheel, when COVID hit, and that did all kinds of damage. His handling of it was clumsy.
Biden was at the wheel when we had high inflation (because we fixed the COVID slump with free money). I think the dems did a shitty job with our borders, and that hit him.
Check back in 2026, to see what people think.
"Kill and eat the others" ideology has won
To all the people wondering why Trump has been elected, the answer is very simple and has been true in all countries that have had elections. When a large section of the voting public is chronically missing out on the benefits of what they're told is a "growing economy", only to observe continued "unfair" extremes of wealth distribution, they become disenchanted with the system that has generated this situation. By definition almost, they become very willing prey for any demagogue that threatens to upend the system, turn over the money-changers tables. It's irrelevant whether the demagogue's policies will work or not. It's irrelevant whether the demagogue is provably lying or not. It's all about repressed anger being unleashed and finding a target. Even if the target is not the cause of their misery. And so every latent form of bigotry finds expression and is easily exploited by the demagogue.
It's worth re-reading Goebells primarily because his understanding of this psychology is what made Nazi demagoguery so devastatingly successful. Any attempt by a party to attack the demagogue without directly addressing the elephant in the room (the growing class of working poor) is not only destined to fail, but destined to fail badly. If I hate you - really hate you - I don't mind copping a few painful blows if it means I get to see you bludgeoned to near death. Vengeance is an incredibly powerful motivator. People trying to lump all of Trump's supporters as Nazi's are making a grave mistake and refusing to see the forest for the trees. Just as most Germans in WWII were not Nazis yet supported Hitler, so too with Trump. Latinos, blacks, gays and women all voted for Trump. Don't assume they're all stupid. When I hate you, I'm happy to burn in hell if you're there with me.
Of course, this is a simple generalisation and there are lots of "sub-reasons" (the bro-vote, the foot-gun Democrat advertising - "he doesn't have to know!", etc). If the Democrats had chosen Bernie Sanders as their candidate back in 2016, they would've had eight years in power. It's no coincidence that Bernie had a lot of support from those that otherwise voted Trump. They felt that he was real and was really concerned about them and would really do something to assuage their pain. Now? Now they're just mad - "enough is enough".
However, anger is not sustainable for too long and all demagogues eventually come undone because once the heat of anger is gone and you look around and realise things are worse than ever - well, that's when things can REALLY get dangerous.
I completely agree and I've been slowly coming to this same conclusion. To this, I will add:
The Democratic party has left a lot of people behind and their only choice is to turn to the other party, in the hope they will help. Yes, it's not logical given the facts on the ground, the other party likely won't help them, but the other party is saying they will help. And that's the important thing.
Why did the Democrats leave people behind? It's the perception of "wokeness" and the feeling men have of being marginalized. A lot of men feel emasculated by the state and direction of our culture. And those men who feel this way are not college educated, so they are looked down upon and they mainly have service sector jobs. In other words, they are being left behind in the great economy they see everyone talking about. The jobs that created the middle class (manufacturing jobs of the last century) have moved elsewhere, and they feel they can no longer support their families in the way their parents did.
A lot of us here are not feeling that pain. I don't. But I see it out there and there are a lot of them. Trump won by a larger margin than he did in 2016.
Think about this: the Democrats avoided primaries in the last 3 election cycles. That told a lot of people: we don't give a fuck about you.
Others have said it here, but I'll repeat it. If Bernie Sanders had been the nominee in 2016, we would have likely had 8 years of Bernie and no Trump. Bernie Sanders was the only candidate in 2016 that resonated with the pain people were feeling, and those people who voted for Trump would have (mostly) voted for Sanders.
Great point, The fact that there are a ton of people who wanted Sanders and who flipped to Trump should have given Dem leadership a clue. People want real change, whether its a Liberal or a Republican they don't care, they are done with mainstream politicians who promise to keep things the same.
> A lot of men feel emasculated by the state and direction of our culture.
Can you elaborate on this, because it's a sentiment expressed a couple times in this thread, and I'm not sure I get it?
It's a good question (I don't like that you were downvoted). I've heard repeatedly that young men feel they cannot take care of their family. They can't afford a house, primarily. But there are other things. Men go to college at a much lower rate than women. Because of that, those men make less than their female counterparts (who went to college). This "the man makes less" is another part of the emasculation, when you add it to all the other things. And one of those things is the dating apps, which for many men is a terrible experience.
Thanks for the answer. I won't lie, I was half-expecting this to be something about trans issues, but I'm pleasantly surprised.
> young men feel they cannot take care of their family. They can't afford a house, primarily.
I don't think this is particularly gender-exclusive, but absolutely one of the largest problems the younger generations face. How are we going to raise a family, buy a house - hell, just live a decently comfortable life?
> Men go to college at a much lower rate than women. Because of that, those men make less than their female counterparts (who went to college).
Men feeling threatened by women who make more than them or are smarter than them seems like something that needs to be worked on individually rather than socially.
> And one of those things is the dating apps, which for many men is a terrible experience.
Well, dating apps were a terrible idea from the get-go, but hasn't dating always been a nightmare for most men for most of history? I don't disagree that there's aspects of using dating apps that could cause some self-esteem issues (for both genders, I will add again) but wouldn't that also apply to dating 20-30 years ago?
Just to clarify: you're talking about the book "Goebells" by Peter Longerich?
I was referring to Goebbels’ own words regarding the application of propaganda and its efficacy when you understand the psychology of the masses as a collective entity (quite distinct from the psychology of the individual). He was a prolific writer (I believe his diaries measured 40 volumes!).
Ah, thank you for the clarification, I'm interested in reading up.
Your description reminds me a lot of a book called "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard, which I recommend as a distinctly uncomfortable read in the same vein.
I get this line of reasoning, but the US economy is thriving, unemployment is low and wages are growing rapidly at the low end too.
Nazi ideology doesn't work well as a comparison in my opinion, because Weimar Germany was crippled by reparations, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, an acute world economic crisis and traumatized from a devastating war.
The US is nowhere close to any of that, it's doing pretty well all in all.
This disconnect is, I think, the point.
There are a number of people who feel they're doing pretty shittily right now, no matter what people's metrics say, and "no you're not" is not a particularly constructive response.
I'm not an economist, I have no detailed explanation to offer for this disconnect, but I personally know a number of people outside of tech who are not fiscally irresponsible, but are struggling to reliably keep food on the table without consuming their savings - most frequently because they have some health condition that necessitates costly things, and their pay at work has not kept pace as cost of living increases have happened.
So I have little trouble believing people in similar straits could vote for someone who made bigger swings about "I know you're hurting".
Well, it's also the effect of Fox News, right wing radio, and right wing leaning podcasts which convince people to focus on issues which can be leveraged for political gain. There are lots of problems, but right wing voters are convinced to stew about a relatively small subset of the totality. And regarding those problems they also are only ever presented with a subset of available rationales and solutions.
This also simplifies things for them. Instead of the myriad of real problems in the world, conservatives can concentrate on only a few, all of which have simple rationales and simple solutions.
The US economy is not thriving for a very large swathe of the population. The extreme disparities in wealth, the non-reporting of under-employment (as opposed to unemployment) all skew statistics.
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/low-unemployment-stati...
> I get this line of reasoning, but the US economy is thriving, unemployment is low and wages are growing rapidly at the low end too.
Many make this mistake. The stock market is thriving. Some people are thriving. Many people are not. They are stuck in low wage service jobs. It’s not about unemployment.
There was a global pandemic. We are in a recovery. The U.S. is doing far better than Europe in our recovery. We are basically most of the way back, and people will start to feel better next year. Trump will benefit despite having done nothing.
Thank you for putting this into words. I have been struggling to articulate the 'why' myself.
Hmm, as someone from Europe I've never heard labeling of trump's supporters as nazis, that's quite a strong claim I haven't seen much evidence of.
Not that you are not correct in many aspects, but wasn't inequality sort of part of whole US setup and 'american dream'? Back to good ol' days when poor were poor and a largely invisible part of society.
For an european eye US is setup on inequality by principle, which does a lot of good and bad. When looking at resilience and strength of economy that Europe can never ever dream of reaching, I'd say bigger good trumps (eh) those evils but I have only very limited view. In Europe even big success is mild compared to how far in US things can grow into. Complex topic this is.
It has literally been a thing for years now. Since he lost the 2020 election he has ramped up his rhetoric and surrounded himself with people that are causing the comparison to be made.
I'm from Europe too. There was a republican rally at the Madison Square Garden a few weeks back, and there were a lot of comparisons with the nazis, with people in social media calling them nazis and so on. This article [1] for example mentions "Several prominent Democrats have drawn comparisons between Trump's Madison Square Garden rally this weekend to a 1939 Nazi event held there.". I don't know if the comparisons were justified or not, because I haven't even read the article, just wanted to add it as reference since I remembered that happening and comments calling republicans nazis on places like reddit.
1: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-allies-...
He does have support from actual literal Nazis. I don't think there a huge number of them, but he has their vote.
America now stands in line with various developing nations and sports a convicted felon as head of state. Bravo!
He's our Sergio Berlusconi.
I predict Trump dies before 2028 and JD Vance is the last American president.
Noway JD has the charisma to pull that off, trump would have to carry out the coup and cement it before another could continue.
He doesn't need to do anything. Trump dies, he's prez. There are no more elections.
> Former President Trump is projected to win the presidency
He has already won. 277 votes
Kudos to Elon Musk and his $44B megaphone, I guess. Money, lies, and misinformation work, folks.
You can clearly see that Kamala won due to all the illegals voting for Democrats. Oh wait.
I genuinely don’t understand. I really hope I am wrong, but I believe we are about to enter a post-truth state.
We have been in a period of post-truth. We are entering a period of epistemological breakdown
The terrifying state we’ve been entering for several years now is where people in power believe they both know and get to dictate what the truth is. Unfortunately despite the rhetoric I don’t see that reversing since it’s coming from the uniparty.
Already there since a decade
>I believe we are about to enter a post-truth state.
Who was the last president that didn't lie?
I think people underestimate the impact of misinformation platforms like Twitter and TikTok.
But not Reddit, Bluesky or the MSM? Huh.
It's true for Twitter (I don't use TikTok so I'll take your word for it) but what about Reddit that was very anti-Trump?
Twitter is no way similar to tiktok, I have so much meaningful conversation there with new strangers. You are in a bubble
Really I'm in a bubble because i don't use Twitter? Damn
You don’t use Twitter, but you’re absolutely convinced with religious convention that Twitter is a misinformation platform?
I don’t know about you, but I quite like the first amendment right that guarantees safe spaces to speak our minds.
I did use it a lot. Have you considered Twitter might be an information bubble?
Musk says sensible stuff. But his actions are completely opposite.
"Free speech is essential to democracy" OF COURSE
No one is taking that away. They said the same thing before Biden won. It's just fear mongering and people eat it up.
He talks free speech and then buys Twitter and removes community notes from his account just to push his agenda. It's free speech but it's all fabricated propaganda.
Trump on jan 6th commanded his goons in the bubble to try to steal the election with the fake electoral plot. Look it up. No mention of that on free Twitter. They are literally trying to install Trump as dictator under your nose. While you fight here about free speech. It's ridiculous, and people eat it up.
Speaking of bubbles…
Musk gets community notes all the time if he lies, ever seen this happen on any other platforms?
There is no way "misinformation" caused 80 million people to vote as they did.
70% of Republicans think Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election and that's hardly the only misinformation they have. It's hard to imagine that that wasn't a huge factor in the election.
Obviously not 80m of them lmao. But sure has an impact
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To provide a little perspective on what seems to be an fruitless exercise in Democratic Party political apologetics, let’s remind ourselves that the smart, dumb, rich, poor, wise, foolish, old, young, native born, foreign born, male, female American people have spoken in a generally free and fair election. As they did when they elected Biden in 2020, Trump in 2016, Obama in 2012…. Whether you agree with the results or not, that process is a beautiful thing. Think of the billions on this planet who aren’t afforded that luxury.
There is a phrase that took root in the American legal subculture a while back: “come to Jesus meeting”. It refers to a meeting where a lawyer explains to their client the realities of their situation with the expectation that presentation of the cold facts and current climate will “recalibrate their expectations” and move them on a new path…normally to settlement and no further wasting of the Court’s time. The Democratic Party would do well to consider having such public meetings with elder statesmen types from both sides of the aisle. The US is best served when both political parties are strong and healthy.
Paradoxically, it’s harder for the Republicans to do that now, since they are winning. Normally requires a hard slap in the face…as has occurred for Democrats.
Another country succumbed to a fascist moron, such a shame.
I see Kamala's issues as follows:
1. She's one of the least liked candidates in history. The Democrats haven't run a real "change" candidate that could cross the aisles since Obama. Hillary was already widely disliked and sank herself with the "deplorables" comment. Kamala did exactly the same with "Nazis, Fascists, Dictators, White Supremacists, etc". It's all I heard and it came to a point I started feeling attacked exclusively for my race. It was difficult at this point to listen to what little policy she actually had: most of it sounded exactly like the last 4 years. To put the cherry on top she also couldn't even poll well among her own constituents until Biden bowed out and she was decreed the pick by the DNC.
2. The top polling issues were immigration and the economy. Neither issue Kamala really addressed outside of some feel-good statements like free money for homes and somehow passing a price cap on groceries. She made no statement no immigration and even went so far as to say she wouldn't change anything from the last 4 years. Trump on the other hand did very well laser targeting these issues and pulled moderates and even democrats as a "lesser of two evils".
3. The constant bleeting on about felonies, "rapist", etc made it seem to most average Americans that the court cases were simply lawfare designed to punish Americans for not voting for Hillary. Trump in this case was just a sacrificial goat.
4. The weaponization of the FBI against parents protesting school board meetings, the seemingly intense focus on so-called "right wing violence" even after living through the George Floyd riots, etc was distasteful to a lot pro-police Americans.
5. The media is decidedly left-to-far-left leaning. What this means is the majority of major news outlets, Youtube, Twitch, TikTok, Music, Movies, etc all preach "the message". This oversaturation of the progressive message, paired with many moderate Americans thinking progressivism has gone too far, likely contributed to it. Further, it likely contributed to lower Democrat turnout as they were already claiming victory in August.
6. You can't salvage a campaign by having movie and music stars endorse you when the average consumption of this media is at historical lows. You can't salvage a campaign by bringing Obama out as The Closer.
7. And finally for me, the strong "pro-women" policies are distasteful for me. Not because I hate women, but because there's decades of data showing our school system, government, and policies are failing young boys. I cannot in good conscious vote for a candidate who will not do anything to help men's issues at this point. I can't vote for a candidate who wants to enshrine gender-specific constitutional changes. Particularly, evening the playing field for boys in school, removing affirmative action, and instituting an equal "male abortion" rule that will help tip the family courts back to even. If we want equality we should strive for true equality. I want true equality.
You seem to be regurgitating right wing talking points. I think Fox News, right wing talk radio, and right leaning podcasts are the core problem. They get people to focus on a few narrow issues, give them simple rationales and solutions, and just keep harping and getting people to stew about it.
It's weird that you don't realize how many other problems there are which your media sources are not talking to you about, and which you might otherwise find concerning. It's a big world with lots of problems, but you're presented with a few and told that these are the only ones you need to care about. It makes things simpler, but who knows if you might be worried about the wrong things? I guess you may never know.
Just by polling, Kamala Harris seems to be about as popular as Donald Trump, and it really comes down to partisanship.
>Just by polling, Kamala Harris seems to be about as popular as Donald Trump, and it really comes down to partisanship.
Polls historically lean left and many Trump voters are afraid of retribution and do not talk about their vote. I am one of them - to everyone I told them I'm voting for Kamala. Mostly because I don't want my car tires slashed, job lost, or house or family harmed. Then I walked into the polling both and voted R straight down the ticket. The 2020 riots have shown the left is capable of great violence and the mass media shaming people and placing them into buckets of "racist", "sexist", etc will make polls be decidedly wrong. This is once again a demonstration of the total lack of accountability the left has.
>but you're presented with a few and told that these are the only ones you need to care about.
I don't care about the rest of the world. I care only about myself and my family. If this is controversial to you I'm sorry. I have no intention to be a "good global citizen". I have found the idea to be abhorrent. What goes on some far off land I don't need to care about. I don't need to be constantly aware of every nuance of every microcosm of society. If it works for my family and me I vote for it - simple.
> I think Fox News, right wing talk radio, and right leaning podcasts are the core problem
MSNBC, CNN, NYT, TYT (which should've been demonetized like infowars) have been lying to the public for 8 years. Nearly everything they've said hasn't come to pass and it's primarily just Op-Eds disguised as news. "Anonymous sources" once again providing misinformation and incitements of violence that very clearly had a hand in creating the two failed assassination attempts. There is no nuance, at least no more nuance than Fox or NewsMax, and to say so reveals your own hardlined biases.
> And finally for me, the strong "pro-women" policies are distasteful for me.
Women still face rampant discrimination. I get that it doesn't affect you personally, but to take it so far as to be offended is really distasteful to me.
This is the crux of right wing ideology. It's all about "me, me, me". So, when Trump lavishes praise on you and promises you your heart's every dream, how can you resist? It's all about you, right?
> I get that it doesn't affect you personally, but to take it so far as to be offended is really distasteful to me.
When you grow up in a system that taught you from birth that you are a problem, a demon, a "danger", uncontrollable, etc you'd understand. When you've watched men be destroyed by the lop-sided family court system and divorce law, or have no sexual freedom when it comes to whether or not you want a child you'd understand. Masculinity of any flavor is demonized unless it caters specifically to "raising women up". Men occupy the most dangerous jobs, die earlier, and suffer the most in terms of suicide and lack of proper mental health resources, and are forced into a draft because of their gender. Is this equality you can stand for?
I'm offended the left preaches "equality" but doesn't actually believe it. I am personally tired of it. I am tired of feeling like a demon for simply existing. I am tired of having to uphold obligations that formerly had benefits, but now have at best negative benefit. At the very least with the right-wing I know exactly what I'm getting.
This isn't "me, me, me" it's ~50% of the population being actively railroaded literally from kindergarten to death by far left policy swinging the pendulum all the way to the other side of inequality.
> Women still face rampant discrimination
Is that why they are leading men on almost every happiness, work, and school metric? Or are the men suffering because "patriarchy hurts men too" or whatever nonsense they say now. I can tell you "the patriarchy" isn't the reason men are dropping out of society. Not by a long shot.
We have relevant examples of discrimination against men today. Trump voters are vile, white, male, homophobes and sexists. This is the message our boys are hearing. Does it sound appealing to anyone but a consummate masochist? If leftists continue to drive a wedge between the genders the R's will continue to win.
Welcome to the world social media gave us
You should now assume your sources are compromised if you did not expect this
You just gotta laugh at this point. It wasn't even that close so people have spoken. What hopefully we all have learnt from this is that average American is mostly concerned with themselves and how their lives can get better. For others, boo-hoo. Especially with this economy.
And I wish the politics would move towards less vitriol. It's just sad how both parties are so dug in with their opinions. I'm sure there could have been reasonable discussions with regards to eg economy and immigration where the concerns of the large portion of the population had been seriously addressed.
Being practical isn't a fault, in fact one of the things I think Mr Trump got elected. We'll see does it translate to reality but he definitely has ideas.
Politics is not going to move toward less vitriol until the primary source of that vitriol exits the stage... Unfortunately he was just elected to a new four year term.
>he definitely has ideas.
'Concepts', he has 'concepts'. You'll hear about them in about two weeks time.
I worry that these concepts are actually already fleshed out, but having not said anything about them already, he had free rein to implement whatever he wants since no one voted on a campaign promise.
It's clear that this is actually what the American voters want. It's not a glitch or a fluke or a quirk of the system.
I've never been more ashamed to be American.
People forget that in Germany, Hitler was elected. He was very popular during a time of inflation, and blamed immigrants.
Germans are human too, it can happen anywhere.
I'm not so sure.
The democrats keep throwing up these lame/hated candidates (Harris this time, Clinton in 2016) whom they appear to assume will prevail, because, Trump.
And so faced with a choice of bad vs bad, the result ends up being quite close and unpredictable. As my daughter says, the first female US president should be someone actually good.
Blame the system, not the voters, maybe.
I never get this sort of rhetoric.
Its literally 50/50 split.
50% of Americans DON'T want this.
Ita a quirk of democracy, but talking about 'Americans' wanting this, when the result is entirely a coin toss.
And one weighted towards repiblicans by the way their state system works, giving the smaller states a dispropotinate say.
Same thing happens in the UK. A fairly small percentage of the UK voted for Labour and yet it was 'a landslide'. More people voted for Jeremey Corbyn than Kier starmer, but one is apparently 'out of touch' and the less popular politician is somehow a 'genius'.
It's such a bizarre rhetoric that has no basis in reality, just electoral technicalities.
its more than half so far... not quite as close a split as I would have expected 66,181,515 votes (47.5%) 71,113,511 votes (51%)
But yeah.. roughly half the country doesnt want him
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An open mind is one of the most valuable qualities a person can have. For some reason, most people are unable to fake being open minded when discussing politics so it's a good litmus test.
So consider the following perspective. We've endured Trump once, with mediocre results. The world didn't end, and meanwhile he did not accomplish much of what he promised while putting on a clown show. But this time, I'm optimistic about the potential for our country for the first time. Not because of Trump, but because of some of his likely cabinet appointments. Elon Musk in particular.
Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, our government is headed for a debt crisis. Things will get slowly worse (inequality will increase while the government devalues the dollar to service its debt), but eventually, the crisis will come to a head and the government will be unable to service its debts without a massive devaluation ala Argentina, Weimar Republic, etc. We got a small taste of this after the pandemic response.
There is no conceivable way that an ordinary politician from either party could dismantle or even slow the growth of the immense bureaucratic rot bleeding our country dry. Nor can Donald Trump, as evidenced by his failure to "drain the swamp" last time.
But one of the few people who could is likely to get a major government efficiency appointment.
That's what I'm optimistic about. Not Trump, but the fact that he is now surrounded with competent people with good ideas. Prior to him being elected, a true national debt reckoning was inevitable at some point in my lifetime. Now, there is some non-negligible chance of pushing it past my lifetime or reversing it altogether.
And if the GOP wins the house god help us. Smh.
Well, my hope for humanity is permanently eroded. Half the populace elected a blubbering rapist, felon, and fascist to lead them. Again.
I'm making rapid plans to get the fuck out of this shithole country, and as far as business goes, no known Trump supporter will ever get my handshake.
> I'm making rapid plans to get the fuck out of this shithole country.
I keep hearing people say that sort of thing in my country in similar situations and yet they never do it.
Good for them. My Australian application is presently sitting in the queue, and I've already had extensive conversations with a number of lawyers about UK and Dutch immigration.
Netherlands: can't you just do Dutch/US friendship treaty, live here for a number of years and then apply for citizenship?
Yes. The downside is the wealth tax, and it can also be very difficult to socially integrate into a country where English is not the first language. (I can learn Dutch of course, but it would take many years.)
My wife is American. Judging by her progress learning Dutch well enough to be able to speak would take 6 months.
It will take her years because she does duolingo for 5 minutes every day and speaks a bit of Dutch with me.
But given by how her progress goes, I'd say it'd take 6 months if you go intensely about it.
Dutch is close to English in vocab.
And by the wealth tax you mean box 3? I don't know how other countries do it but as we currently have it, I find this way more chill than the US. You don't need to log your trades, you don't need to care about capital gains. You'll roughly pay 1% about your net income.
If you want to avoid that a bit: buy art in your house that's stable (if I recall correctly, I'm not a laywer) and your house is your primary residence. So any money that you put into that doesn't get taxed.
We'll change soon to a capital gains system probably anyway, a few years tops, so this point is probably moot.
Again, I'm not a laywer or financial advisor. I sometimes read up on these things, but I'm not razor sharp on it.
What wealth tax concerns you?
Most of the tax begins at $80k+ and then $110k+ yearly income but not so much wealth from my understanding.
PS; The Dutch government may reverse the negative expat changes, especially regarding the special status for capital gains from outside the country in the coming years. And check out Germany. They may also shortly set up a scheme.
You're seriously considering UK over US ? Seems odd to me, that's like choosing only downsides.
Even Boris Johnson can't hold a candle to the imbecility of Trump. And a parliamentary system generally acts as a better safeguard of sensible governance. UK might not be doing great right now, but I feel tentatively positive about the next 5-10 years.
Plus, as a self-employed business owner, I need health care, and I'm not confident that Obamacare will survive the next administration.
I would suggest you prepare to purchase private health care in the UK given the waiting lists.
Regardless, it would be far cheaper than anything in the US, especially if Obamacare gets repealed.
Good luck to you then. You might need it.
I didn't vote for Trump, but I would welcome the migration of people with this attitude to Europe or anywhere else.
> no known Trump supporter will ever get my handshake.
This is exactly the attitude that pushes people apart. People on both sides do it and it really brings me down.
I have no other tangible way of making people feel the consequences of their shitty actions.
> Half the populace elected a blubbering rapist, felon, and fascist to lead them. Again.
Your kind of ignorance is so tiresome. It's one of the best arguments for doing away with democracy altogether.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say here.
Why do you assume that any other country wants you?
Because I’ve done the legwork to verify this?
“Ask HN: So who did you vote for?”
It would be interesting to see an anonymous poll of HN to find out how many silent Trump voters there are here.
Judging by the comments here, it will be majority democrat.
> silent Trump voters
If it's anonymous, we might be surprised. I know a number of HNers personally in my life, and they'd never admit to voting for Trump here or to anyone in their day jobs.
> If it's anonymous, we might be surprised.
Fully agree.
Admitting you supported Trump on HN is suicide.
But then more than half of the country voted for him, so I guess ... do the math, even if HN's participants are biased blue.
and on track to win the popular vote with the senate and House all going... Red.
How has this happened and what went wrong?
Discuss.
Edit: Flagged as usual.
Maybe demonising major fraction of voters is not most effective tactic. Maybe you need to show that you actually did something for people in past term. Maybe you need to show that things that matter for many will get better. Say living conditions or cost of living.
I've been voting in the US since the 1990's. We've never had a presidential candidate that won and actually delivered on their promises, all of which have generally hovered around the idea that "things will be better this time." What makes you think this one will be any different?
Can't tell if you're criticizing the Democrats, or the Republicans.
They could learn more from Bernie.
I don't see that anything went wrong.
Running a primary is like checking in code to the build. You learn a lot of things you cant anticipate, without engaging with the real world.
For elections this includes all the things that people think about a candidate that they don’t feel comfortable saying out loud, or even operate subconsciously.
A candidate without a primary is extremely risky.
From what I saw on some Twitter videos ...
People claiming economy was better under Trump's first presidency then under Biden / Kamela's recent presidency. E.g. people mentioning super high inflation.
There were other arguments, but it seems to me this is the major one.
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More than anything I'm very curious to see what sort of people will be emboldened by this victory.
I've just seen pictures of Trump, Elon Musk and Dana White celebrating together (and being celebrated)
The signal being sent is that this is what masculinity and winning looks like.
Very happy I visited Ukraine earlier this year. Won't be much left soon, unfortunately.
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Yikes, we have to ban accounts that post like this, so please definitely don't post like this, regardless of how wrong anyone is or you feel they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Apparently people feel very strongly about visiting Ukraine. I wonder why :)
As a European, knowing Eastern Europe, this is extremely insulting:
Both Putin and Trump will together(!!) -- can't emphasise that enough -- together(!!!) rebuild Ukraine.
Please come back to this comment in a year from now -- you will see it confirmed.
"Putin and Trump will together"
Joking?
So if Trump forces Ukraine to surrender by withdrawing aid, that is a 'working together'? That is peace?
Russia is still the main enemy, right?
shhh, let the russian bot die in peace.
Man. You think?? So easy to get pulled in and think it is a person.
Love him or hate him, it will be fascinating to see if the democratic institutions of the United States can endure this. He has made it very clear he wants to dismantle as much as he can, including term limits.
Time will tell if the US really is the greatest democracy and can withstand a wannabe dictator, or if he really can subvert it all. It’s going to be a wild four years, and I fear more wall building.
It's had a good run to date, perhaps even longer than expected.
~ Benjamin Franklin, Closing Speech at the Constitutional Convention (1787)The pieces are all in place. Supreme Court granted immunity, control of Senate and a willingness to recklessly wield power.
Worst-case we finally find out what Gödel's loophole is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_Loophole
So this guy supposedly found a loophole in the Constitution that would facilitate a legal transformation of the US into a dictatorship, and talked to Einstein about it, but the specific loophole/concern has never actually been published?
Sounds like clickbait was already alive and well in the 1940's.
“This guy” revolutionized mathematics and logic by proving Incompleteness Theorems
He was also completely mental.
Depression as Gödel did suffer from and developed massive anxiety after the murder of Moritz Schlick, deserves a little more respect and above all help. Calling him "completely mental" doesn't help at all.
Jesus fucking christ don't give them ideas.
USA's clear separation of powers is a liability in this case. In parliamentary system, where executive and legislative branches are not that well separated, if the executive branch misbehave, a simple vote from the parliament can disband the government. In USA, the impeachment process is lengthy and hard to apply.
In a typical British parliamentary system, the executive also has majority in Parliament. If the executive doesn’t have parliament, they lose the executive.
‘Impeachment’ in Parliament systems only works when MPs are willing to think for themselves.
Which they are apparently are, given how many chancellors the UK went through. Thinking for yourself is a lot easier if the guy you're thinking about is removed from power when you've finished your thoughts.
> If the executive doesn’t have parliament, they lose the executive.
Not automatically. A minority government of course more at risk of losing the confidence of parliament but it's also a powerful incentive for such a government that want to survive to use cooperation and compromise with the opposition.
In a British system, isn't the head of state hereditary, and in theory has no majority or minority because they have a divine right to be there?
For someone who doesn't follow US politics that closely (yes, we exist), in what way has he made it clear that he wants to dismantle democratic institutions? Any concrete examples?
He tried to lead an insurrection four years ago. Has stated that if elected, you won't have to vote again. Has called for removal of broadcast licenses for the press. Has said he'd be pleased if the press were murdered.
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The Trump-hating FBI disagrees with you.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-fbi-finds-scant-e...
That is a narrow finding.
> Trump-hating FBI disagrees
I think citation needed here that FBI or any law enforcement agency for that matter is anti-trump.
If anything given their deep racial history not that long ago, I would characterize them as very pro trump.
Schmidt, M. S. (2018, June 14). Top Agent Said F.B.I. Would Stop Trump From Becoming President. The New York Times.
Also, whistleblowers within the FBI have come forward in recent years to:
• Accuse Timothy Thibault of running cover on Hunter Biden's laptop.
• Accuse the FBI of manipulating case files to inflate the domestic threat perception towards conservatives.
• Accuse leaders within the FBI of "weaponizing" the agency against conservatives.
• Complain about retaliation when raising concerns about these and other instances of bias and misconduct.
Isn't this common knowledge?
What makes you think the FBI hates Trump?
>He tried to lead an insurrection four years ago. Has stated that if elected, you won't have to vote again. Has called for removal of broadcast licenses for the press. Has said he'd be pleased if the press were murdered.
The rhetoric and lies you've repeatedly said about Trump is exactly the reason your party was so soundly rejected in the landslide electoral college, the popular vote, the senate, and the house. Your lies and hoaxes don't work anymore.
It's not my party, I just think Trump is uniquely unqualified for office.
I hate when people make me defend Trump.
The "you won't have to vote again" was clearly him saying that he didn't care if the people vote again, because it won't benefit him.
He didn't say that he'd be pleased if the press was murdered, in those words. Though I agree that what he said was awful.
This is the thing about Trump. He says things that are dumb or incendiary, then his opponents make it sound 100x. Then people who aren't terminally online see it and think, "is that all there is?" and it makes them think that he's not that bad, ignoring the actual bad things he's saying.
This is exactly what Elon was talking about how so many people still believe the multitude of hoaxes which have been thoroughly and objectively disproved. It’s as if people were OK with just going with the original drive-by media headline and never looking into the details or following up.
None of these are hoaxes. Did you look in to the fake elector plot, which people have pled guilty to?
I think a lot of people give Trump benefit of doubt when he says these things, but he literally said them.
So explain to me how it would have played out if Pence would have gone along with the fake elector plot?
Aside from Trump not many people deny Biden won 2020. How would Biden have become president?
What he has actually been mroe explicit about wanting to dismantle (and what his faction has made considerable progress dismantling in his favor already) is not as much “democratic institutions” as “the rule of law”, though his most dramatic failed attempt to dismantle that was also directed at democratic institutions (the set of schemes including the false electors gambit, attempte to get the VP to reject proper electoral votes, and instigating the mob attack on the capitol when it was clear the VP would not do so.)
Can the President commit crimes with impunity is pretty anti-democratic.
Unless you think Robert Mugabe was democratic?
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Those are only the crimes that have been committed and charged so far. Asking for and being granted immunity, retroactively, is pretty undemocratic. There are more crimes on their way.
Are you forgetting the whole removing classified documents and storing them in your club house thing?
You mean his sports car?
You mean the valid prosecution of crimes Trump committed, for which he was tried and convicted?
In 2020, he told his then vice president Mike Pence not to certify the electoral vote count which gave Joe Biden the victory in the presidential race. Pence ignored this order. Had he not done so, it would have meant a constitutional crisis at the very least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
It's a crazy read
He could try to do something like Putin and extend the limit of 2 terms (just to keep America Great a bit more)and later declare himself dictator for life like Xi Jinping. You could look at Hitler as example how to become absolute dictator. “ news is that at the end of 6 years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House (do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT), both of these horrible papers will quickly go out of business & be forever gone!
“
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1140252528304631808
On the positive side, Americans are nowhere near as politically apathetic as Russians are, nor have they grown up under a single-party rule their whole loves, as the Chinese have.
Not saying that this won't stop MAGA from trying - but at least there's a cultural element to this, that will stop the American people from just folding over and accepting dictatorship.
And they'll do ... what? Keep watching football, scroll their phones? Pick up a burrito at Chipotle? The new Russian model of disaffection can (and is) working just fine in the US.
They'll write several angry comments to social media, then retire to the couch after a job well done.
SCBRG ... you should seriously be ashamed of yourself.
None really. He’s pissed about his court cases and wants to investigate or appoint new judges. People that believe in the dictator narrative don’t appreciate the limits of the Executive branch.
Every executive order can get erased wholesale by the next President, and Trump only has 4 years.
We’ll live.
That's best case scenario. He's a criminal with newly granted immunity. It's going to be worse than last time.
I don’t know, I guess? If you want to, you can hold just about any president under some criminal wrong doing. For whatever reason (certainly not political) we really needed to go after his overvaluing of real estate, and asking of recounts in a close election (why would he ever think a recount is worth it, it’s not like he could win the popular vote and all swing states). In retrospect, one could actually now make the argument that his hunch was right in questioning such a narrow election with an unprecedented voting pattern (Covid era mail in, it was quite new). I do sit here in awe and find myself saying “hmm, maybe he did have 25,000 votes somewhere this whole time, sure as hell found them tonight”. Makes you wonder.
He’s gonna do his tit for tat because he’s a simple man, not a great one, and certainly not an epic dictator.
I’m not defending him, I just think the grand dictator spin has always been nutty.
Kindly review the new definition of “official acts”
Being a traitor working for Russia might be one of them
The things he says he wants to dismantle are bloated executive-branch bureaucracies. If he actually manages to do it (which he didn't during his first term), it would be traumatic for a lot of federal employees, but not exactly the death of democracy.
He's also clearly stated he wants to remove the licences from media companies that have been critical of him.
There's a check list of similar statements he's on record making.
If he removed licenses from media companies that were critical of him, there would be approximately 0 media companies, and yet he's on track to win. One of the biggest takeaways from this election is that the populace largely doesn't trust the media.
Do you support the dismantling of a free press?
If you need a license to operate you're not free.
The license is for the use of the broadcast spectrum (a scarce, shared resource), not practicing journalism.
Of course not. He was president for four years and yet the press remains what it is. Why do you think he would destroy the free press?
Because he said he would. Hopefully that was a lie too, but I guess we get to find out.
He also promised a wall that never materialized so ...
Hey man ... just asking questions, right?
Nobody cares about the free press, their content is, for the most part, garbage. I think this election has signalled the death of the mainstream media, and the rise of independent media. I find this absolutely wonderful.
They definitely trust the media. Otherwise he would have been elected.
Perhaps a sanity check at those media companies would help. They've been broadcasting propaganda non-stop and you've witnessed a colony collapse just today.
False. Did you see what CBS did to the Harris interview? That behavior is explicitly what he was talking about. CBS edited an interview under the guise of their news department to switch answers to questions with other answers. It wasn’t that CBS was critical of Trump, it’s that they engaged in outright fraud using publicly licensed airwaves. That’s against FCC rules. What CBS did wasn’t disinformation — it was fraud.
Like that pandemic responce unit dismantled in 2018?
You mean this one?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/10/fac...
Your link entirely agrees with the statement that Trump disbanded the pandemic response team. What it calls false is that the members were fired from government completely instead of shuffled around into other non pandemic related departments.
So yes, that one. Did you actually read your link? Or did you get duped by the headline?
> Based on our research, the claim that President Trump fired the "entire" pandemic response team is PARTLY FALSE. The Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense was disbanded under Trump's then-national security adviser John Bolton. But Trump didn't fire its members. Some resigned, and others moved to different units on the National Security Council.
Did you read it? It clearly says the team was far too big, and that even members of Obama's team felt it was too large, so Trump shrunk and reorganized it.
He wants to destroy democracy itself. It is literal explicit goal.
What? I would love to hear how that's true (although voting is over), but I suspect it's not.
@mbg721, you seem to be willfully ignorant of anything this man has said and the dangers everyone is talking about. You seem to be completely missing any ideas on his policy and the changes he wants to being to the government and the democratic process.
Please stop commenting "Where?", "What?", "How?" to everyone in the comments here. They do not add any value to the conversation.
I don't see any clear articulation of the dangers, other than that he's a convicted criminal, which I argue is for purely political reasons. Republican candidates have been labeled "HITLER 2" since Goldwater. I'm not cheerleading, but rather am trying to make policy arguments that add as much value as possible.
Oh no, not cheerleading ... just wanting to talk "policy", for purely political reasons. No doubt.
Can you explain why his conviction is relevant? As it stands, the facts are that it was for hush-money paid to Stormy Daniels, but it's clearly viewed as political by voters. I would agree that it was a grave matter if his felony were an unrelated murder or something, but that's not the situation, and again, voters are not stupid.
I believe you'd make the same excuses in his defense even if the conviction was for 'murder or something'.
Everything from quoting Mein Kampf to praising Hitler's generals to using Nazi rhetoric has been done in the last few months.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-im... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/trump-madiso...
But I've come to believe that folks like you will continue to make excuses no matter how low he stoops.
"and again, voters are not stupid." Isn't it?
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1817007890496102490
According to Snopes[0] he claims he was urging Christians specifically (who don't usually vote in high numbers) to vote "just this time", then they wouldn't have to vote anymore for four more years, or something (which they wouldn't anyway...)
He was definitely addressing Christians (he repeats it several times) but at the end of the video he says "[...] we'll have it fixed so good you're not gonna have to vote", which does sound a bit suspect to me, even in context and taking into account the fact that he's often loose with his choice of words and phrasing.
[0]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vote-four-years/
Classic example of how the media and the uninformed combine to take him out of context / in bad faith.
The absolutely true fact is that that statement had nothing, even so much as a hint of a dog whistle, to do with that you’re saying. Like not even a shred.
He was speaking to a populace that doesn’t typically vote. So he’s saying that they can just vote this one election, because it’s important for them to for their own good. Then, he’s saying “just this once” because, again, they typically don’t vote. And again - after that he says “I’ll fix it so good you won’t have to again” - this is in reference to him fixing the government so well that they won’t need to vote again since it will be so well-functioning.
By the way, this was my take originally, on first listen. It was reinforced further my listening to it again. It’s completely clearly the true take, and I think if you have trouble accepting that it’s because you’re disturbingly mislead by bias, probably not your own fault entirely, but undeniably so.
I agree that he probably wasn't talking about getting rid of voting altogether, but I'm still not sure on the logic of him getting the government into such good shape that Christians wouldn't need to vote anymore -- surely it would still be possible for the populace to vote in a terrible government that would undo all his improvements after his 4 years? But yeah, I suppose he could simply be saying that with his improvements, things would be stabilised and the stakes wouldn't be so high for the next election.
How does him addressing it to Christians makes anything better? Like, yes, hardcore Christians are his fans, because they want to get rid of abortions, liberals and generally resent anyone but themselves.
The fact that Christians generally don't like to vote (which I wasn't aware of until just now) is relevant to the question of why he said "we'll fix it so good, you won't have to vote".
Because it's not true that Christians don't like to vote. You're just believing the back spin after he said it and was called out for it.
Christians do vote and see voting as a way to push for the legal restrictions they want. Them not having to vote anymore, because the rest of us cant get abortion, anticonception whatever else allowed through political process anymore is literally definition of "going away with democracy".
Which is actual political goal of radical evangelical christians, if you actually read what they write and listen what they say. It is not about them being allowed to be lazy, it is about them successfully creating religious state.
Just asking questions ... questions questions questions.
He literally said that. He said that if he wins, these are the last elections. He said that he wants to remove license to media that are critical of him. Trump said quite a lot. All it takes is to listen to what he is saying.
And the other thing to listen to what his primary voters - conservative evangelical Christians were saying they want for years. It is literally ridiculous how these people are saying exactly what they want, then they literally do what they said they will do, again and again. But somehow, I am supposed to assume they don't mean it, this time for a change.
> Time will tell if the US really is the greatest democracy
The US voting scheme is far from being the most democratic.
I think when they say USA is the greatest democracy they re speaking of its size, land size.
It's always been a kind of mix between an oligarchy and democracy, just look at the 2 party voting system, extreme wealth required to candidate and the lobbies expenditures.
That's very close to the antiquity democracy, they just need to remove woman right to vote (next one after abortion).
At least with trump we will have a good laugh once again.
> I think when they say USA is the greatest democracy they re speaking of its size, land size.
I would say it's the greatest based on how long it has endured for and the impact it has had on the world.
"and I fear more wall building." - more wall building was instigated under Biden, this is practical reality rearing it's head not the political left/right.
*https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67015137
America as we know it had a good run. But nothing lasts forever.
We’ve had four years of this man as President. This seems like FUD?
You think congressional term limits would be a bad thing?
Op is saying that presidential term limits will be removed/ignored, following Russia's example.
The same thing was done in China a few years back
OP is inventing things. Got it.
He’s 78. Trump isn’t the real threat too democracy. It might be what he sets in motion that is.
JD Vance?
Histrionic, but understandable given how many people have stridently compared Trump to Hitler.
He's not that powerful
The entire Republican party lost their footing against him and were replaced.
Literally, what are these people on about? He'll be out in 4 years chill
Please, don't shoot the messenger.
I'm going to share a tweet with you that is not my own tweet but one that more than 200k people have upvoted. If you want to see a list of topics that motivated Trump re-election: https://twitter.com/wildbarestepf/status/1854026810331365823
It's an interesting list. Definitely something for everyone on there.
Those are a certainly list of ideas which right wingers have about the left. There's probably not much we can do about people who believe that stuff. They need to have a punching bag.
My main issue with right wingers is the derision, mockery, and anger which they direct at their political opponents. People talk about division in the country. I think that's by design. Right wingers have been doing this since the days when Paul Harvey was on the radio, and then later on Rush Limbaugh.
I had to double check if I was on reddit…these are some wild comments lol
Hacker News is a liberal echo chamber not a Tech news site
Welcome, you seem new here
It's extremely gross that I already see Democrats blaming the fact that Harris was a woman. They're going to play that card rather than admit that their message and agenda is falling flat. Trump should not be hard to beat. He has never been broadly popular. Democrats keep losing to him because they refuse to listen to anyone but their own echo chamber. They lost in 2016 and almost in 2020 and learned nothing.
Speaking of... this has firmly convinced me that deplatforming is the wrong answer. All it has done is create echo chambers. All I see is Democrats scratching their heads and blaming and fuming because they can't possibly understand why they lost. That's because they hang out in places like this or /r/politics and they've all moved to coastal cities with left-leaning political environments. If Harris had won in a landslide you'd see the exact same thing on the other side because they, too, are in echo chambers.
I did get one thing I was hoping for: a clear result. I was hoping whichever way it went it would be unambiguous to avoid a bunch of conspiracy theories and fighting.
Edit: one more takeaway: the traditional media is dead. Toast. They had no idea what was happening and all their takes are basically empty hand waving. They're absolutely clueless and out of touch and no longer have any influence.
Trump is transactional. He'll do something for you if you don't something for him. Want an abortion law nationally? Give him corporate tax cuts. Want to fund Ukraine? Give him more deregulation. He's got no political principles. He's anyone's if the price is right. 8 more years of Trump then
4 you mean
no, no, he really meant 8, at least. Laws and constitution don't mean shit no more.
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I'm a single issue voter: 1A, and I voted for Trump. You left label so many things you disagree with as misinformation and hate speech and racism, to the point that the Robert Reich wrote on The Guardian to call for the arrest of Elon Musk and I quote: "Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.". Yet, you left never define what misinformation is and specify who the arbiter is. Tim Walz had the audacity to say that “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy". You left aren't angry at Elon Musk because he censored the left, but because he allowed people who disagreed with you to speak. The list can go on. You guys attacked Trump supporters so hard that so many people were not willing to acknowledge that they supported Trump, especially in a blue city. That's just wrong.
On the other hand, the left media created hoax after hoax that are thoroughly debunked by the left-leaning fact checkers like Snopes. Obama still used the Fine People[1] hoax on national TV last week. The DA in NY charged Trump for "In July 2020, the Trump Organization received an appraisal with a value of $84.5 million, but on the 2020 Statement the Trump Organization valued Trump Park Avenue at $135.8 million."[2] But isn't that what practically every home seller does? We estimate how much our properties are worth, and the band sends out an appraiser? To me, that's just blatant law fare.
For all I know, only evil states like Soviet Union and China (before 1978, at least) used morality, misinformation, and identity politics to control their people. Such states deserve a big middle finger up their you know what.
[1]https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/
[2]https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/tto_release_properties...
Misinformation is false information, such as when Elon Musk reposted a doctored video of Kamala Harris.
You are a one issue voter. Your one issue is the right to post deepfakes.
Enjoy the circus over the next 4 years. It's what you wanted.
Trump may not have deserved to win, but the Democrats deserved to lose - and I'm relieved they did.
Maybe after this rematch the blue team will finally understand the loss was their fault, so they can start moving away from the abominable ideology and spiteful elitism that handed them this result.
This European travels to the US all the time, having probably spent an average of 1-2 months or so there yearly over the past couple years.
With very few exceptions I've never met people there who outwardly seemed like they'd like someone as a leader who habitually lies and tries to usurp democratic institutions for personal gain.
What the hell is going on there guys? Are you just voting for the person who promises the most "interesting" times, for better or for worse?
> What the hell is going on there guys? Are you just voting for the person who promises the most "interesting" times, for better or for worse?
I think the name-calling really hurt them.
Calling half the voting population bigots of some type just makes that half dig their heels in to give you a bloody nose.
If your main priorities, when running in a political race, does not match the main priorities of the voting masses, it's easier to change your main priorities than to change the main priorities of the voting masses.
For a long time now, the Dems have been trying to change the priorities of the voting masses instead of aligning with them.
They are so used to preaching at their voter base ("This is what a real man is, not what you think it is") that they forgot what the aim of running is - to win.
Good on the Dems for trying to change the world instead of accepting the hateful and unfair place it is. Hopefully they will get somewhere eventually.
> Good on the Dems for trying to change the world instead of accepting the hateful and unfair place it is.
You can't change the world by losing.
Their primary goal should have been to win. The primary way to do that is to (ugh) pander to the voters' will.
It's because they are so out of touch that we are seeing the result that we see. Politicians that are disconnected and disengaged from the voting masses deserve to lose.
Dictator on day one in the land of the free with the biggest military of the world — but on the other hand the libs were really mad, so that was worth it, right?
> I think the name-calling really hurt them.
This was also the biggest problem of the Remain camp pre-Brexit.
It was too easy to label Leavers as stupid/racist/xenophobic, and that was a huge mistake.
Not everyone who voted for Brexit was a racist, but every racist voted for Brexit. - Bill Bragg
Pretty sure this would work with "Trump" instead of "Brexit".
> Pretty sure this would work with "Trump" instead of "Brexit".
What do you want racists to do? Not vote? They're gonna vote for somebody after all.
No, they get a vote, obviously. You've focussed on the vote part of the quote when the important information was in the racism. It's racism that must be constantly pointed out, that people must be educated about, and racism should be rooted out when found. I'm not saying you support racism in any way, of course, I really don't think that. I just think you misunderstood what needs doing to prevent these unforced errors (Brexit was an unforced error of the UK government).
> It's racism that must be constantly pointed out, that people must be educated about, and racism should be rooted out when found.
As I pointed out in a different post, trying to shame people into silence doesn't magically change their vote.
Unfortunately, when you are going to call every Rep supporter a racist with no evidence other than who they voted for, they are going to stop answering your polls honestly.
Still not gonna change their vote though...
Racists don't need shaming into silence. They need to understand what's wrong with their beliefs.
Going back to the original quote, you need to see that it's not calling all voters a particular thing. There's a simple Venn diagram, one circle of racists inside a larger circle of a particular block of voters.
Educating people out of racism, and removing racism from your society, will change votes as racism is only one aspect of a person's beliefs.
> Racists don't need shaming into silence. They need to understand what's wrong with their beliefs.
They already know, they don't care, because that specific belief is not rooted in reason or rationality.
> Going back to the original quote, you need to see that it's not calling all voters a particular thing. There's a simple Venn diagram, one circle of racists inside a larger circle of a particular block of voters.
> Educating people out of racism, and removing racism from your society, will change votes as racism is only one aspect of a person's beliefs.
I somewhat agree with the first part[1], but vehemently disagree with the second: I don't think that eradicating racist thoughts will move the needle on who gets elected, as there are, IMO, simply too few racists around to influence an election.[2]
[1] IOW, I don't believe that education will change a racist's belief, but I do see value to society in eradicating discriminatory stereotypes and discriminatory actions, of which racism is merely one.
[2] There aren't even enough racists to form a party of their own, so I doubt that them moving from red to blue is going to be any difference from statistical noise.
Turns out people don't like it when the sitting American president calls them "garbage" or when they are called deplorable.
I've also spent plenty of time there over the years, and while most people I interacted with did seem perfectly fine, there were glimpses of something quite wrong.
A woman who worked at the hotel I was staying at had never visited the centre of the city the lived in, because she was afraid of being "knifed". This was Dayton, Ohio. Downtown Dayton is lovely.
A colleague who appeared reasonably intelligent and competent absolutely did not believe that Evolution occurred. I explained that this while this view might be common in the US - and it is - the rest of the world mostly considers this settled science.
Religion is absolutely far too influential a force in people's lives. This is decreasing, but it's still problematic I believe.
The Armed Forces are idolised. Airports have special lines for service personnel. You get to board early if you're in uniform. This is almost unique in the world, to the best of my knowledge.
He's promising reindustrialisation to a bunch of the Midwest and less competition for jobs to a bunch of poorer people. It's sort of rational, even though I disagree.
He is not trustworthy with either facts or consistent opinions, so voting for him for something he's /said/ he would do is the stupidest thing anyone could do.
I didn't say I thought it was a good idea, but clearly a lot of American voters think this is worth trying.
Biden delivered and he’ll take the credit
The people in cities vote blue, and people in rural areas vote red. I doubt you’re meeting the latter on trips
Around 1 in 5 Americans live in rural areas. It's not enough to win the election
do you have reason to believe you are socializing with a representative slice of Americans?
No, of course not. But my sample seems to be so starkly different from the election results that that in itself is puzzling. He's picking up a sizable fraction of the votes even in blue states, after all.
Representative enough to elect Trump for president, looks like.
"who habitually lies"
More like a Fortunate Son who's an adulterer, felon and burried his ex wife somewhere in the backyard.
Trump says things people directionally agree with, and they forgive the details.
When your border is wide open allowing millions of people in each year, you don’t care as much about the political circus.
When your grocery bills 3x, you don’t care as much about the loose speech.
I think the ultimate answer as an American is that policy simply does not matter. For reference, here's a couple conflicting data points:
* Voters approved measures that would protect abortion in their state (with the exception of Florida, which only got 58% out of the 60%) needed. Said voters did not consistently vote for Kamala Harris.
* Another set of voters thought Kamala Harris was too progressive, and had no opinion on Donald Trump
* But at the same time, in local elections democratic candidates generally sweeped the ballots
I think ultimately the presidency is just an election purely on the basis of 'vibes' and whatever is directly in front of you. It doesn't matter if you can achieve your promises nor do said promises even really matter. And people vibe more with the reality TV president because they've already forgotten 2016-2020. Maybe Trump directly crashing the economy will be the thing to snap people out of it, maybe not.
You're not meeting the people hurt really bad by the system who stopped giving a shit, and a lot of people that vote for Trump had Harris/Waltz signs on their lawns but really want to pay less in taxes and don't like transgender people.
> but really want to pay less in taxes and don't like transgender people.
I think that this election almost definitively demonstrates that trans issues are not important to the voters.
Or abortion, or misogyny, or social justice, etc.
There was a big turnout, after all.
This is really counterfactual.
> I think that this election almost definitively demonstrates that trans issues are not important to the voters.
I don't know about the politics of your state, but in mine over half the ad campaign of the Republican senator who just won was focused on transgender issues. His losing Democratic opponent did not touch that issue.
> Or abortion
Statewide ballot measures aimed at abortion rights succeeded even in many states where Democrats lost.
> Statewide ballot measures aimed at abortion rights succeeded even in many states where Democrats lost.
Then maybe the Dems shouldn't have run on that as their major platform?
I mean, the message "Elect Me Because $ABORTION_RIGHTS" is pointless if the states are going to get their abortion rights anyway.
Running on the portions of one's platform which are not popular is a thing a politician could do, yes.
It can be explained by Fox News. Whatever issue is spouted there is the issue of the day for republicans.
No, just a massive failure by the Democrats who decided too late to run Harris. Any candidate who won a party primary would have beaten Trump today. Harris lost because she wasn't popular enough with her own party's voters to win.
Definitely some merit to this. Biden was obviously too old in 2020 and didn't have the good sense to pass the torch last year.
Trump is older than 2020 Biden.
Yet Trump went on multi-hour podcasts while the current sitting president of the US hasn't been seen in weeks.
Trump will be older and weaker than Biden today in 2028.
JD Vance hopefully can 25th Amendment the Trump before senile behavior wrecks the office. But I'm worried that Trump stays in all 4 years and does irreparable harm.
25th Amendment powers have never been used before. So it's not clear how far Trump will degrade while still holding onto power.
> Trump stays in all 4 years and does irreparable harm.
That's the preferable option to letting Vance near the presidency, sadly.
Yes. Trump was too old in 2016 too.
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This was a self-inflicted wound.
* Weak, deceptive, evasive candidate
* Entitled attitude in the party
* Unknown people running the party. Still.
* Full embrace of cray cray ideologies, rejection of meritocracy
* Disengagement and withdrawal from free discussion forums
* Using X to talk only about sports. Looking at you, Gruber
* Constant ineffective, ignorant, and ill-informed trolling of their perceived opponents while unwittingly creating new ones
* Disingenuously labeling the other side as "garbage" (said by Biden, and he is President, not a jerk racist comedian)
* Assuming and never questioning the assumption, that people voting for a bad candidate love that candidate.
* Taking the low road
* Hiding Biden's incompetence, then, when caught, letting him stick around
* Accepting the notion that one can negotiate a peace deal with Hamas
* All the other things people are pretending were the only problems: the economy, immigration, etc. which genuinely also were problems.
There are a lot of things the Democratic party had going for it. They really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory:
* The Republican candidate is one of the worst people you could possibly imagine for the job.
* He is (I believe) a rapist, for god's sake
* He's nearly as demented as Biden
* He lies even more than Kamala
* Anti-woman is an understatement
Democrats have to ask themselves, who is running our party, and for what ends? I don't think they know. I don't even recognize what they are now.
It's not the economy, stupid. It's the trolling, the disengagement, and the entitlement. They are off-putting.
As a Pole I'm very afraid what this will mean for my region.
With Trump wanting to support Russia over Ukraine and his talk about leaving NATO, yeah.
Sadly, it is time for the EU to develop its own coordinated army. I think in the long term it will be better if we are able to have our own geopolitical interests, instead of having to follow the USA in everything because they are our bodyguard.
Absolutely.
That being said I don't see EU being able to develop a consensus on this - even if just because of Orban and Fico being Trump allies.
Can't mess with them or Trump will raise hell.
The West's drip-feeding of support and arbitrary restrictions on the use of weapons was a disaster.
Restrictions on the use of weapons are reasonable. The non-nuclear proliferation efforts were the real disaster. They clearly failed.
I don't agree it was reasonable that Ukraine couldn't strike airbases when it had the chance. Meanwhile it's Russia that is escalating: targeting civilians on a mass and individual scale, torturing and murdering POWs, using gas. They know there will only be condemnation and hand-wringing but no action.
Avoiding nuclear holocaust was a disaster?
Were nukes launched after the Kursk offensive? That eas a bright red line if Russia ever had one.
That this kind of rhetoric completely devoid of historical knowledge and common sense is so widespread tells me so many people have a completely broken model of Putin's motivations. Unfortunately it is these same people that are pushing hard for escalation. It's strange to see people's opinions be so completely disconnected from reality while also being correlated to such a high degree.
No, the fact that Russia didn't use nukes in response to Kursk incursion says nothing about his willingness to use nukes when the security of the state is actually at risk. Nuclear weapons will change the complexion of this war in ways that neither side can fully predict. It is rational to avoid moving the war to an unpredictable stage when the current stage is manageable in your favor. Not every border skirmish is created equal. They do not all rationally warrant the use of nuclear weapons.
Kursk, while embarrassing as hell, is not an actual threat to Russian statehood in the military sense.
It is not even as embarrassing as some people think.
Ukraine send well trained troops there while they were needed in the east. Now they are loosing the ground there but cant really pull out. While loosing trained soldiers as well.
If anything this played quite well for Russia.
MAD. It actually works. Putin has had his bluff called on this.
We have been very lucky[1]. Do you really want to push that luck?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
Nonsense, there was no call.
Blowing some shit up in the grey zone (or even Kursk) is one thing - his state hasn’t been threatened in any real way (which is their nuke threshold policy).
However, lobbing western made (and make no mistake, western operated) weapons into their internationally recognized territory is an entirely different ballgame.
Reuters [1]. Don't be an idiot.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/has-putin-threatened-us...
That’s a typical drive-by headline. Did you even read the article? Or the first hand sources? Putin never once threatened using nukes out of the blue like some kind of madman - only reinstated their pretty bog standard nuclear defense policy when asked about it. Context is important, don’t be an idiot.
The EU will most likely move towards developing a nuclear force of their own (as opposed to France only (the UK no longer being a member of the EU)).
If the EU declines to do this then the Polish government and possibly the Swedes will do it. It's a toss up whether Germany will in my estimation.
Nuclear proliferation incoming.
> The EU will most likely move towards developing a nuclear force of their own (as opposed to France only (the UK no longer being a member of the EU)).
The EU has no army. NATO (which UK is part of) is still in effect and it is not going to change.
Trump has pushed to extricate the US from NATO, and as De Niro said in Ronin; "if there's doubt then there is no doubt".
If you want security can you really rely on someone who may or may not have your back, especially if they have a policy of transactionalism?
So, the EU needs to look to their own security, and the ultimate deterrence is nuclear weapons. And if the EU doesn't take up the mantle then the Poles will definitely do it, and probably Sweden, and possibly Finland / Germany. And so the EU needs to figure out if they are happy with a fragmented nuclear policy or not.
> Trump has pushed to extricate the US from NATO, and as De Niro said in Ronin; "if there's doubt then there is no doubt".
Nothing is going to happen to NATO.
Hollywood's opinion has been proven worthless and have no influence on elections.
Russia denied there was going to be an invasion of Ukraine even the day before it started.
In 2014, nothing was going to threaten the UK's membership of the EU.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall was going to stay put for another 50-100 years.
In 1938, the UK Prime Minister waved paper promising peace in our time.
Nobody saw the Great Depression coming in January 1929.
The mesh of treaties including the Triple Entente was supposed to prevent WW1.
The southern states were convinced they had both legal right to secede and the economic support and military power that the north wouldn't try to keep them.
The British were convinced that democracy was a stupid idea and that the 13 colonies would come crawling back when they realised they needed some proper aristocrats to govern.
The world doesn't much care about things like this, pro or con.
We Europeans have to start developing our own defense strategy independently of US influence.
It should have been done eight years ago, alas... :|
No, it should have been done over 70 years ago.
What are your thoughts?
Trump will try to strong-arm more NATO countries, but the 2% GDP spending goal is well within reach for most NATO members.
With that said, NATO members (France, UK) have nukes. That's a line Putin can't cross.
He is not attacking them directly though, UK is pretty internally focused and won't really do much if the Ukraine operations expand and include to say other former soviet block countries.
In mainland Europe, France with La-Penne and Germany with AfD and now Sarah Wagenknecht[1] have far-right problems of their own and don't have political will for anti Russia stance so they won't be able do much either, rest of Europe are minor players or far-right governments like in Hungary under Orbàn.
[1] I refuse to call her party far left, now matter how she is described in media.
I guess that's the best case scenario right now. The worst case scenario is Trump pulling out of NATO completely, and (effectively or officially) allying with Russia.
I really hope I'm just not seeing all the pieces, and that such option is not even remotely viable, but it would be bad.
Regarding the last point:
I'm quite sure the US will see a military coup, in the event that Trump tries to ally with Russia and become enemies with NATO countries. I mean, I don't think it is possible for Trump to pull out of NATO. Worst case is he simply decides to shut off all funding.
Politicians are short term, military officers are life-long and ideological.
Eastern Europe countries do have more than 2% GDP - and I don't think Trump will care about that.
As an european how about we take responsibility for our own countries instead of outsourcing it to america?
Indeed an EU nuclear weapons program is now a strong possibility.
Or just everyone joining the French one. They already have supersonic ICBMs.
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Sure, mind telling that to Russia?
I didn't think a joke about Poland starting world wars would need a /s, but here we are.
The "no war" candidate is/was Trump.
He wants Netanjahu to go hard on Gaza and give half of Ukraine to Russia... easy to be a no-war candidate that way.
Is this "no war anywhere", or "no war for us until it comes to our doorstep, other than that I don't care"?
Yes, if you immediately give up and lose you're technically not at war anymore. Trump made the US look like a joke.
So the war has to continue in order to have no war?
Let me put my clown mask on ...
Or, you know, you can win.
The mask goes well with the candidate.
Oh yeah, you're right. I forgot they could just press the "win the war" button!
I'm sorry, are you saying that Trump is too weak to win a war?
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The world's real problems are the climate crisis and global instability and inequality which lead to mass migration. I haven't really heard anything convincing from Trump on how he plans to tackle these (I don't mean the migration itself, but how the reasons for it might be eliminated).
> global instability and inequality which lead to mass migration
I'm not risking much by saying that the world was never as equal or stable. People migrate more now because they can (thanks to tech advances and permissive politics). Before, it was an order of magnitude harder.
I know globalization is inevitable. Where people disagree is on the rate of change: let's speed it up (progressives) or slow it down (conservatives). The average people - the ones who are paying the bill - want to slow it down. Let's just accept it.
To be clear, from American perspective - surely. I'm not saying that in a positive manner or negative, just as a statement of fact. Ultimately besides aliances USA has no real need to care about Europe.
And from a local perspective - a grumpy neighbour that helped kickstart World War II, that enslaved my entire region for ages and raped their way through.
The real enemy is trying to trespass your frontiers with Belarus. That's where we (Polish or Europeans like me) should focus. Platforma is a step in the wrong direction. The rest is just a distraction; fear makes the wolf bigger than it really is.
Europe is going to have to meet the challenge alone.
absolutely bonkers, this is the shittiest timeline
The [flagged] [dead] silenced majority had its day, huh?
As an example of how pushing a message too hard can have the opposite effect: In "The Last of Us" (the series, I haven't played the game) the bad people are white (and are especially bad if they are also Christian), while the good people are generally some combination of black, homosexual, and "neurodivergent". Three of the four groups we meet are led by women. The two good ones are led by black women. The only group doing well is a communist commune. When I feel like I am being manipulated I not only discard the message, but actively rebel against it.
Donald Trump disgusts me, but it feels to me like he at least authentically represents a viewpoint.
The racial composition of characters in The Last of Us series is the same as it was in the game, released in 2013 before identity politics was even on the zeitgeist.
I say this as a straight non-religious white man who is disgusted by Trump and the fact that people support him.
Making the main character and his brother hispanic is not "the same" as the game, especially when the remaining straight white non-hispanic men in the show are absolutely awful.
Or take the US version of The Office, where the one Christian character is a running joke, an awful person with terrible takes not meant to be taken at all seriously. Can you imagine how it would've gone over if the one black or hispanic character on the show was just a running joke?
Democrats made The Last Of Us and that losts them the election?
Either way it goes, all I can say is "Good Luck everybody"
where is "stop the count", "rigged elections" and other messaging like this? it's disappointing that democrats can't call that out
My take (not that anyone will even see it, in a sea of 5000 comments):
Democrats were the party of the little guy - the minority, the immigrant, the working class. That worked pretty well for them.
Democrats were in support of civil rights. That was the right thing to do, even though there was plenty of opposition. It cost them the south for at least a generation. They knew it would, and they did it anyway. Good for them.
Then they saw abortion as the next "civil rights" issue. They keep framing it that way: "a woman's right over her own body". The problem is, the people who oppose abortion rights don't hear anything in that but an attempt to hide the issue. A fetus is not the woman's body - it's a genetically distinct individual, and anybody who's taken junior high biology knows it. The issue isn't about the woman's right over her body, it's about the woman's right over the fetus. And all the "a woman's right over her body" talk, to opponents, looks like an attempt to sweep that under the rug and ignore it. "But they want to control our bodies!" No, most of them don't. They want you to not kill the fetuses. It has the same result, but a different motivation.
The Democrats have always been in favor of immigrants. They became the party in favor of illegal immigrants. But immigration hurts the working class, which the Democrats also claim to represent.
Lately the Democrats have become focused on gay rights and trans rights. Look, trans people shouldn't be beaten up and killed for being trans. No question. But here's the problem: There are a large number of working-class people who at best don't care about trans people, and at worst are actively hostile. There are a large number who oppose abortion on moral grounds, holding the life of the fetus as a higher priority than the woman's body. Now, if you're the Democratic Party, what do you do?
What the Democrats did is decide that such working-class people were moral lepers, and demand that they convert or face cultural extinction. This has been going on for a couple of decades. "Clinging to guns and religion". "Deplorables". "Garbage". The Democratic Party really despises such people, and it keeps coming out.
Well, it turns out that despising the people who are a big chunk of your voting base, and demanding that they convert, doesn't make them feel like you're their party. Talking down to them doesn't make them vote for you. It just makes them feel that you've abandoned them. And you have.
And it makes them angry. And here's Trump, harvesting their anger.
The Democratic Party has always had difficulty with holding the different elements of their coalition together. What they've done lately is assume they could ignore one of their largest ones, that it would always support them no matter how much they despised it and insulted it.
If your reaction is to deplore how horrible the majority of voters are, you're still not listening. If you want to win elections, you'd better start listening. There are people out there, people that you claim to represent their interests, and you're despising them instead of listening.
> What they've done lately is assume they could ignore one of their largest ones, that it would always support them no matter how much they despised it and insulted it.
You were doing OK until you got to this part.
What do you think would be a more correct statement?
It’s absolutely insane to me that someone that literally incited their followers to storm the capitol, has been charged with so many counts of fuck knows what, and has (somehow) survived multiple assassination attempts can come back to win the presidency.
It’s just a “only in the US” kind of thing.
No kidding, I was saying to my partner earlier how friggin crazy the timeline is getting. That 15 years ago, I couldn't have even imagined writing a fictional timeline like this.
The most striking aspect to me is how blatent and brazen trump is with his lies, how fake he is, and how so many can't see it or just don't care for some reason.
He pretends to be religious of all things, he so obviously isn't and couldn't give a damn, but pious people of all people should care about honesty and respect, at least in the public sphere.
Time to gaterade the crops.
Can't wait for the great ideas ol brain worms has for agriculture.
Perhaps it's time for you to reflect on the legitimacy of those claims?
Or maybe the competition is that pathetic
I mean, if all the country votes for is dirty old men, then maybe?
Netanjahu and Berlusconi enter the ring
Just the day before the election a family member asked how anyone could possibly vote for Trump. I started going into the history of the primaries, and the fraud with Bernie in 2016 & 2020. How it's not red vs blue, it's really insiders vs outsiders. Within 30 seconds I was shouted down and shamed.
I then asked: "I can name 10 good things about Biden / Harris, can you do the same for Trump?" They couldn't say 1 positive reason that the ~ 75million voters are supporting Trump.
It's a good self-test of your bubble. Could you make a sound argument in favor of the opponent? If not, then you haven't spent enough time trying to understand the context.
A lot of people have a broken bullshit detector. They think they can tell when someone is lying, but they rely on the other person having a guilty conscience. Trump doesn't have a guilty conscience.
If a person were to read the newspaper, they would figure out that Trump is a pathological liar, but most don't read a newspaper, and even among those that do, a lot of people read for confirmation rather than for understanding.
A lot of people get their information from Fox News, right wing radio, or right wing leaning podcasts. These information sources direct your focus to things which will make you angry about the things they want you to be angry about, and ignorant of things which maybe you should care about.
The most important things which we can all do is to take back control of our own focus and maintain our sense of curiosity and a dash of healthy skepticism. Ask why someone is trying to get you to focus on this or that. Ask why they never mention these other issues which may be equally or more important. Question your own biases and assumptions from time to time.
OK. Why are you trying to get me to focus on Trump being a liar and never mentioning his abnormally pacifist record which is more important?
Never mentioning his abnormally pacifist record which is more important?
Because he's nothing of the sort. He's an isolationist (more or less), which is a stance designed to look like pacifism but in fact is very different, and has all kinds of negative side effects, one of which is that it ultimately leads to war. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_(policy)
> and never mentioning his abnormally pacifist record which is more important?
If Trump's brand of pacifism means negotiating with Russian terrorism, then it's not peace but the cuckolding of a nation and millions of people that lived through a period in time when the Soviets were actually a superpower. Peace when Russia is down and begging for violence would be an imbecile's decision.
Are we supposed to sincerely acquiesce to the demands of a humiliated nation that turned a "special military operation" into a blood feud with hundreds of thousands of casualties?
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As an American living in Europe, it is fun to see the filter bubble Europeans live in with regards to how the US is framed in the media here and even in common coversation. I was talking to my French buddy about it and we were comparing our filter bubbles. Please realize that there is a filter bubble that all of us live in.
I consume a lot of American social media as a European, what about his comment was wrong?
Fox News, Twitter, Facebook etc have really done a number on the US (and the rest of the world to some extent). The lack of regulation of these companies have brought us to the Post-Truth world we're living in now.
Filter bubble or not; it's a disgrace. A fallen nation. A violent dictator. Lies, racism, sexism, violence. People vote for this!
I'm not a Trump fan but the immigration situation was getting a bit out of hand. It was a bit do you want the US to be the US you knew or have the whole of south and central America move in.
And Harris or Democrats couldn't fix this? US had to elect an actual criminal to fix the issue?
Let's vote for a dictator! That must solve it! Last time he was sooo successful.
As if Biden/Harris has set some high standars
Sure, The Dark Lord is evil, but did you notice how the Mayor of Michel Delving failed to do anything about that rabbit plague that decimated the Longbottom tobacco harvest two years ago?
Read my reasoning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42061182
I am not American but my country has suffered due to Biden policies
The Mayor of Michel Delving flat out refused to help the tobacco growers of Longbottom, letting the rabbits have their way. The Dark Lord will surely treat them better! Or at least kind of ignore them. Or, well, he does seem supportive of the rabid rabbit leader, but just as often as not he's just incoherent on the topic of the plight of the Longbottom tobacco growers, and I'll take that as a good sign!
Explain. Did he send their private army to overturn an election? Did they grab them by the pussy? I am glad I have some standards.
Atleast Biden Administration is blamed to topple our Pakistani govt.
You know, it’s interesting that you don’t seem to care what American Pakistanis think. Ham sab gaye tel lene kya? Ham bhi bhugtenge
> Ham sab gaye tel lene kya? Ham bhi bhugtenge
Pakistani Diaspora agar Genocide aur LGBT enabler say hamrdari rakhta tu unsa bara beghairat aur kanjar koi nahi, un k baghair tel ke danda dia jye ga
Yeh Adeel Mangi ko bata do
Do not know who that guy is, just googled and found out he was Biden's buddy hence irrelevant and it does not change my opinion of they supported genocide enablers.
I refused to vote for Hillary in 2016 because of the drones so please don’t lecture me about chitre urana
Tu ab kio Kamla aur Biden k uthate phir raha hay, hain??
Jab yeh han pato Trump saare Pakistani Coney Island se nikaal ke waapas bhej dega tab tum bhaunkoge
Munnay Muslims have already given vote to Trump. Especially Arab due to genocide support by Biden Administration
Tail tu tab lene ata jab tumhare bacha LGBT ghar may late. Shukar karo bach gayae
Leaving policies aside, on purely moral standards, it seems hard to "both sides" this.
The people that attempt this were incredibly bad faith i.e. for example equating Hillary's "[Trump] knows he’s an illegitimate president" which is calling out shady voter suppression tactics and the fact that Trump did not win the popular vote with the staunch denial of the 2020 election result by Trump to this day and the organisation of a (failed) plot to remain in power.
These situations aren't really comparable. Clinton questioned procedural issues and the popular vote outcome, while Trump's actions following the 2020 election (including his continued denial of results and attempts to overturn them) represent an unprecedented challenge to American democratic institutions. It's deeply concerning how many people continue to accept claims that have been thoroughly debunked by election officials, courts, and independent observers. This erosion of trust in democratic processes and willingness to embrace demonstrably false narratives suggests a troubling shift in American political culture. It's a fallen nation.
Dear Salty Dems, downvoting me won't help to hide Harris' incompetency and getting votes
Can you give a brief comparison of the different views? I’m European and watch/read a lot of US news sources from both sides and still think “European” about Trump.
You’re missing the political viewpoint of 45% of the country if you’re not main-lining right-wing radio and Fox News. No, stop—don’t google what they just said, imagine you just believe it and see where that takes you.
[edit] if you want root-cause for how we got here, look into media ownership laws in the US, and into the Citizens United court case (check out the 5-4 podcast for a fun/horrifying take). Single entities can own unlimited reach of media, which didn’t used to be the case, as recently as the very early 2000s IIRC, and Citizens opened up unlimited corporate spending in elections, with exactly the implications you’d expect for e.g. foreign spending on US elections. Er, I mean, the actual root cause is kinda the system of elections the slave states pushed into the constitution, if you wanna go way back, but the proximate cause of the current political landscape is that.
Note: Running out the door, here is a brief summary that hasn't been deeply considered.
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Example: I casually commented at the gym that I thought Trump would win about a week ago and went into a very long conversation/debate with several people in the gym.
I asked each of them to show me their filter bubbles... once I had explained it to them. 2 Spaniards, 2 Andorran, 1 French guy. The general consensus seemed to be that Trump was a major step back socially and would pollute the environment, not care about climate change, etc.
Their information came from traditional news, Instagram/Tiktok and one from Reddit/HN/X. The only one that was even open to hearing my views during the conversation was the guy who read Reddit/HN/X. Everyone else had their minds made up.
Today at the gym, I had the 2nd part of this conversation with 3 of the guys that were there this morning. The general take away that the guy who read Reddit/HN/X summed up is one of: "Europe has yet to reach "peak tolerance" where it appears the US is already there." This realization was came to due to the issues of immigrants in both Spain/France who don't assimilate which was a hot button issue for them.
I kinda agree with this sentiment. I think that Europe (at least the part I'm in) doesn't seem to have a great immune system for people who abuse the system and generally punishes tall poppies both socially and economically. The US is completely different, tall poppies are celebrated and if you fail or get sick you have no safety net.
For me the difference in world views is best summed up by what people are focusing on. Climate, equality, and tolerance are the key issues I see pushed heavily in Europe... I see this as stemming from the "tall poppy" syndrome that is prevalent in both Spain/France. In the US, people care about other things and are generally focused on things that directly impact them. That is what this election was about. Less focus on perceived injustices or injustices of the past and more focus on making the future better with something different.
Is Europe a great place? For sure... but it has wildly different problems and world views than the US does. I think it is hard to appreciate that until you've bene immersed in both cultures long enough.
In general, I'd just say there is more nuance to everything than our brains can handle. My little mission has been to try and bring back nuance into the conversation. Black and white thinking is lazy. Nuance exists, find it and challenge your filter bubble.
I'm excited to see how this casual gym conversation continues.
I'm Italian and the views I have here (left/center left/center friends/relatives) is that he's a crazy nut job that's gonna hurt europe as well as limiting abortion rights and similar things. I'd say there's not much talk about economy because we don't understand shit in our own economy either, let alone a foreign one... Except that we think the rich are gonna get much richer and he's gonna cut social spending (ie, less Healthcare and similar things) and he's gonna crackdown on immigration. Not expressing our own views on it, that's just what i think it's talked about Trump here
Oh, he's also a misogynistic, convicted felon that spews lies. This is partially our view in my bubble, if I had to say it entirely I would get flagged lol
I wonder how it compares to the filter bubble with regards to North Korea. What if it really is a communist utopia?
Yet no-one will ever admit they regret voting for him. They’ll blame everyone else including themselves, but will never criticize their leader. The parallels with religion are frightening.
The parallels with fascism are frightening. We're 8 years down a path of followers being endeared with trumpet, hard to walk that back now and admit mistake.
What you're talking about is already happening. Every fourth or fifth comment in this thread is already blaming the left for making the right what it is.
That’s why religious leaders came up with the concept of a devil. So they can always say someone else is responsible for when their god seems to fall short.
First past the post voting made USA polarized, time to modernise politics!
You can't admit to something you don't feel.
That’s why I never heard an empathetic comment from a Trump follower.
I'm seriously worried about the Ukraine since I live in a country next in line for invasion if Ukraine will get defeated.
I hope EU really steps up, because its looking like the start of WWIII, where the EU will have to defend its border.
We all know Putin is not interested in stopping where he is.
I've seen some articles about Trump admin Minsk III and that he'll threaten Putin with blah blah if he doesnt sign up. Its a long shot but we'll see.
I want the EU to really take this seriously. Ramp up arms manufacturing to supply Ukraine will send a message that Ukraine will keep fighting until Russia implodes.
Which country is that?
I'm Polish and I'm mega worried about it too. If Trump decides to pull US support for Ukraine and be best buddies with Putin I don't think it's crazy to imagine Poland getting pulled into the conflict within couple years, which depending on how things go could mean the involvement of all of NATO.
He wants the baltics back, not poland.
Ironically a lot of the American Right was actually radicalized by the 2015/2016 Syrian refugee crisis in Europe.
Tim Pool went from being an #OccupyWallStreet Berniebro to one of the biggest US conservative commentators after he saw brown people in Sweden. The Ron Paul crowd (who pretended to be "socially liberal & fiscally conservative") posted borderline "white genocide" conspiracy theories about what was happening in Europe.
Brown people in Sweden is "an invasion".
Russia invading Ukraine is merely "self-defense against NATO enlargement".
Don't let them pretend they are just isolationists. They explicitly support Russia because of the "white christian" racial identity politics they actually align with.
Trust me. There are plenty of us Americans — just not enough in the right counties and states — who are just as upset as you.
Just go to Frankfurt Hauptbanhof then see there the real effects of European policies. Make up your own mind then.
What is at Frankfurt Hbf?
Poorer and poorer? Hard fact is that Trump presidency delivered actual (i.e. inflation adjusted) wage growth for people in many years, so your perception of reality might not be accurate as what media propagates and makes people believe. As for "women's rights," I take it as abortion policy in particular, which compared to your baseline of Europe is actually not that far off, depending on the state/country used as a point of comparison. There is a reason a majority of people vote for him.
I can see how Europeans are particularly put off by President Trump. His trade and NATO policy requires Europe to uphold their end of the bargain, right or wrong, as he sees it, and increase trade with their US ally, which is not necessarily what Europeans or globalists want.
> Hard fact is that Trump presidency delivered actual wage growth for people in many years
Do you have a source for this claim? Covid did end up causing salary increase I know, but we can hardly attribute that to the president
BLS data is public and can be crunched from here https://www.bls.gov, but posing the basic question to ChatGPT:
Wage Growth:
Obama: Modest but steady wage growth, particularly from 2015 onwards. Real wage growth averaged 0.5%–1.0%.
Trump: Stronger wage growth pre-pandemic, with real wage growth averaging 1.0%–1.5%, but the pandemic and high inflation in 2021 dampened these gains.
Inflation:
Obama: Inflation was relatively low and stable, averaging around 1.3%–1.5%.
Trump: Inflation was low until 2021, when it surged to 5.4%, outpacing wage growth.
Real Wage Growth vs. Inflation:
Obama: In the later years of his presidency, wage growth generally outpaced inflation (2015–2016).
Trump: Wage growth outpaced inflation until 2021, when inflation surged and surpassed wage increases.
I don’t think ChatGPT should be cited as source
I cited the actual source. You can do the analysis yourself to verify. I'm sorry I don't have time to manually distill it further for you.
That said, I also don't think my specific claim is commonly disputed by the other side.
If only, somehow any failures will still be placed on a different plate. This is the winner of a dying/dead empire.
the left went too far,it forces so many people used to be in the middle to the right.
back in the 80s and 90s politicians strived to be just right or left of center. That's who won. Now its those are furthest away from it.
If Biden’s trade policy pushed you to the right, maybe you weren’t that centrist to begin with.
Simple answer: two parties, there should be more people engaging in politics and less armchair critics.
BTW I don't see Europe in good shape either, even when I would prefer to live there for other reasons that are not connected to business at all.
If your idea of Trump was formed from reading mainstream media, you likely have a very distorted idea of who he is. The amount of misinformation around him is next level.
Buying shares in popcorn here.
Our company, US based, thinks this is bad enough that we have contingency plans for his presidency.
What industry if I might ask?
Finance
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I voted Trump. Biden was an absolute failure. I guess HN is a bubble to the extreme because anyone could have saw this coming but elite leftists
As a European I'm glad that Trump was elected, despite his personality flaws.
Biden was openly hostile toward my home country (the UK), and was a dead end when it came to negotiating the free trade deal we should be aiming for now we're free of the EU.
Trump, and the Republicans have more love for the UK than the Dems have shown, although this isn't reciprocated by the current UK regime, which allegedly attempted to meddle in the US election https://theconversation.com/what-us-election-interference-la...
At the end of the day I want to see a strong and safe USA, because the US is our #1 ally. The markets have responded very well to the Trump victory, and I believe that the world was a more stable and safer place under Trump than it was under Biden. If Trump can complete his Abraham Accords he will be remembered as a remarkable peacemaker in the Middle East.
I suspect most people haven't even heard of the Abraham Accords, because the mainstream media is so weaponised against Trump.
At least they get to vote... Did you vote for Ursula?
No, but yes for the people that elected here. It works the same here in the Netherlands.
Nobody actually voted for the Dutch PM.
The parliamentary systems in Europe are appalling and ensure "status quo" of elites.
After watching it enough at play, you understand.
There's absolutely a sovereignty problem with the EU, which is not necessarily fixed by getting out because the lobbyists can pay the politicians no matter what.
I'm watching it for 25 years now, I'd dare say understand it well.
And yes, the EU has a sovereignty problem. However, that is by design, as the member states wish to keep control. It's certainly not my preference, but with the current political climate it won't change.
Do you notice how nobody in America cares who the leaders in Europe are? Because it doesn’t matter. Which should tell you that you guys are bad at picking leaders.
In well functioning democracy the government policy shouldn't flipflop constantly and president shouldn't have enough power to break everything.
In Europe, president's power is much more limited, there are more political parties and one party winning elections doesn't immediately change the country's policy to everything, even winning parties need to consider opinions of other parties. So overall country's policy more closely reflects the average opinion of the whole population instead of just the currently ruling party. Changes are much more slow and gradual and a single leader change doesn't immediately affect that much.
Politics are boring as they should be.
Yes, a nice boring decline into global irrelevance. Sorry, but being leader of the free world does not allow much room for boredom.
Or it could just be because of the real fear of the consequences of the mindset of American Exceptionalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
The only reason there are US military bases in your countries is because TWICE you idiots started wars that almost destroyed the world.
Are we just ignoring the Bay of Pigs? The Iran-Contra Affair? Vietnam? Desert Shield? Desert Storm?
I hesitate to even mention Kissinger who was effectively an autonomous nation-state during the carpet-bombing of Cambodia.
This is non-withstanding the fact that WW2 was effectively a result of punitive measures and economic destruction following WW1 (a blueprint for the post-Charlie Wilson's Afghanistan if you will).
The causes of WW1 however - bad faith alliances during the right-wing rise of imperialism, militarism, and nationalism - look to be back in play in the North American Continent.
Even people who don't like Trump voted for the man. That's how bad Democrats have become, that even Trump could win. Selecting Chauncey Gardener as their candidate, especially after a term spent under an man who was in no condition to be president (watch old footage of Biden for comparison) was the coup de grace.
Of course, in a general sense, the GOP is the Democratic party on a time delay.
There are deep problems that partisan politics cannot fix, but perhaps it is time to begin taking third parties seriously and break away from the two-headed uniparty monopoly. Ranked-choice voting is one way to help this happen, but of course, the uniparty won't hear it.
smh something is very wrong with the US
Hope and change. That's the message Obama won consecutive terms with. The Republicans have always thrived on fear and insecurity--and hate, which is just ripe fear. To quote Yoda, "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate." The red scare, the Southern Strategy, urban crime, WMDs, terrorism, immigrants, China--since the 1950s, Republicans have monkey-barred from fear to fear.
It's a natural fit for conservativism. What is conservatism if not the fear of change? And when you're afraid, you want a strongman to lead you, someone who takes pride in our military and law enforcement. Someone who shows no fear, who has swagger. It's also a perfect fit for someone like Trump who would as soon lie as breathe. When you're conjuring terrors, truth is just dead weight.
Kamala didn't run on hope and change. She ran on fear, too. She tried to beat Trump at his own game with none of the advantages of his shameless distain for the truth or a Republican Party and media ecosystem at home with fearmongering. She aped his disdain for immigrants and opposition to China, but of course her main bugaboo was Trump himself. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with our nation's current circumstances, she offered only stasis, while Trump offered revolution.
Non-college graduates know they're getting fucked. Trump says immigrants and China is to blame. Kamala has nothing to say. She could point to the billionaires, the tax dodging corporations, the thriving defense contractors, the predatory medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies, the monopolies bleeding consumers dry in every corner of the economy.
She could paint a vision of affordable healthcare for all, an end to medical bankruptcy, an end to college debt, a thriving green energy blue collar economy, free early childhood education, a guaranteed jobs program, a universal basic income.
She could acknowledge the people who feel left behind and say, "I hear you. This is what I'm going to do for you." Instead, her cries of fear just assured those folks that Trump really was going to fuck shit up fighting for them, that the people who sold them down the river are shaking in their boots. Of course, Trump isn't actually going to make their lives better, but he promised he would, and that's more than Kamala could be bothered to do.
Doom.
Doomscrolling, doomposting ... weren't those words born in the social media world?
Negativity attracts attention. Negativity makes money on the Internet. Ironically, here on Hacker News, there is probably a sizeable cohort of programmers and managers who opened this Pandora's Box for the entire mankind.
I don't blame them; they didn't know how the brave new world would turn out. But this is just one of the many consequences. People perceive the world as worse than it actually is. Because all they see on their smartphones are bad news and anxious takes.
I am at work on the mobile phone and quickly checking: does Trump made an incredible election (more than what was expected)?
Keep in mind that "Union Joe" holding a pro-union EV summit in August 2021 arranged by anti-Tesla unions is what radicalized Elon Musk and a lot of the Silicon Valley billionaires to openly come out as right-wing.
The union members ended up voting for Trump.
American unions are a joke and should never be pandered to.
Disagree. We need to build unions back up.
Between a clean sweep win of the Electoral College, the popular vote (by a Republican president for the first time in 20 years!), the Senate, and very likely the House this is an epic, bottom of the ninth comeback victory for the history books. And I thought the World Series Dodgers comeback in game 5 was incredible, I guess we just keep on winning.
I am also absolutely vindicated in my opinion that "journalism" (the mainstream media) are cancers upon society. The polls fucking lied and the "journalism" was the real garbage.
And yes, I voted for Trump and the Republicans as an Oregonian. No, my vote didn't count for his EC win, but I don't care: My vote still helped deliver a mandate that the Democrats and their policies are not acceptable.
Which policies did you find unacceptable?
from https://x.com/brianstelter/status/1851766313279963218
I don't think the polls lied (lied implies intent). I think a few things happened. Pollsters have a really hard time getting hold of Trump voters for a few reasons: folks are scared to admit they voted for Trump, and those who are proud Trump supporters have such disdain for the media (of which pollsters are a part) that they simply hang up / don't engage.
So, Trump tends to get underrepresented in the polls.
At any rate, the polls showed that there was a dead heat, so this really came down to the margin of error which has historically somewhat favored Trump.
I guess they let all the Russian bots vote this time. Oh wait, they weren’t actually bots..
There's a lot of micro-level pieces to the result (which, to be clear, is very very bad - this is an attempt at explanation, not justification). But I think the macro-level piece is simply this:
Institutional trust has collapsed, and the public is desperate.
Yes, "it's the economy, stupid" - but economic perceptions are reflective of that desperation, and of how far voters will go to express it.
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There are a million individual failures that add up:
- An economic and judicial system that protects the rich at the expense of the poor, to the point that no one of any political persuasion is the slightest bit surprise when rich guys get off scot-free.
- The normalization of snake oil, MLMs, conspiracy theories, etc., which enhance the perception of institutional failure even when institutions are functioning (e.g., antivaxxers). This includes deliberate misinformation from a very effective right-wing propaganda apparatus, beginning with Fox and continued through the present day; I think this apparatus is a very important factor but it's one Democrats have no control over.
- The almost naked contempt for the lack of well-being (particularly economic well-being) among the public from many laissez-faire politicians of the Clinton-Bush era.
- The post-9/11 apparatus that led to the Iraq War, which obliterated trust in neocons/hawks as an institution (paving the way for an alternative wing on the right, whereas the left has had no comparable failure [possibly until now] to clean house on the left).
- The 2008 financial crisis, which intensified perceptions that we were getting screwed and generated the Tea Party and Occupy. The Tea Party became MAGA, while Occupy has no similar vent on the left (thanks largely to the fairly transparent sidelining of Bernie Sanders, the heir-apparent of that movement).
- Outsourcing, particularly of manufacturing. Beneficial overall, perhaps, but looks like an institutional failure from the perspective of workers whose towns evaporated. That's part of why the Trump movement started with those towns and expanded outward: they were the nexus of a discontent that has continued to grow among the electorate.
- The relentless enshittification of nearly everything we do, use, or consume. As I was waiting for results to come in, I was watching a YouTuber play video games, and he was talking about how every fast food place sucks now relative to how they used to be. Not election-related at all! It's just so pervasive in the zeitgeist that it's a normal discussion topic. And everyone can name stuff that's gotten worse in their daily lives because someone's trying to milk it for extra cash.
- The increasing alienation of workers from their work, and especially from doing work they feel has any moral value. I wrote more about this a while back at [1]
- A pervasive sense of societal decay, brought on by...well, everyone's got a different theory, but everyone can feel it. Almost no one actually feels better about life right now than they did ten or even twenty years ago, with the possible exception of queer rights (and as a queer person, I can tell you I certainly don't feel like things are going well, and I wouldn't have felt that they were even if Harris had won). I think there is substance to that (see [2]), and because it's vague and nebulous, it's incredibly easy to assign to whatever cause you want.
- A lack of belief that success even can be done without being corrupt. (see [3]) A lot of Trump supporters are fully aware that he's nakedly corrupt and lies all the time, they just think everyone is and that he's at least lying and corrupt "on their side".
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When the public is in this state, it has a legitimate grievance. The social contract between the working class and the elite is, roughly, "make sure my life is OK and I won't burn the place down". Well, the elite failed to hold up its end of the bargain, and failed to listen to many cries for help (among other things, during 2008), until people got desperate. So they decided to burn the place down.
People often wonder how Sanders-Trump voters existed given the apparent policy conflict between the two. Well, I was almost such a voter in 2016 (I would not be now! I'm ashamed to have ever considered him), and I can tell you where I was: it's not (just) about policy, it's about disruption. If you feel like things are going badly for you, and no one will listen or offer you help (and might actively sneer at you when you ask for it), you start asking yourself if you have anything to lose by going nuclear.
And this isn't just a logical judgement, either. To be ignored and suppressed is humiliating. It makes you feel impotent - choice of word very intentional - and that seems to hit male voters rather harder than female ones. There's a reason Bannon found a lot of Trump's initial younger base of support in gaming communities: it's not much different than someone raging in a League of Legends match because someone else is feeding and that's making you lose. Your pride is being damaged because someone else (in your perception) screwed up. You're a great player, it's all their fault, so your pride is unbesmirched.
Voters do care about democracy, contrary to this result. A lot said they cared about it, and a lot of people who voted for Trump said they were concerned about Jan 6. But people won't care about someone else unless they feel like they're taken care of for themselves, and principle comes after basic everyday needs for most people. And that goes double when you're being asked to defend institutions that (you feel) have completely betrayed you.
The same goes for, say, social justice. It's not that voters don't care in a vacuum, it's that it's at a higher tier of their hierarchy. Yes, hardcore racists, sexists, etc do exist, and are a problem, but what makes Trump powerful is that he co-opts populist rage into bigotry. When he talks about DEI, it's not "boo black person in power" (keep in mind, much of Trump's base enthusiastically voted for Obama), it's "that person took a job that you should have had because Democrats care more about diversity than they do about you". That works for the people who are explicitly racist, but it also works for the people who feel like they've been robbed and are looking for someone to blame. And the latter can become the former, especially because it sets them up for being called racist when they feel they aren't (somewhat correctly, in my view, but not in theirs).
-----
Was the inflation of the last few years bad? Yeah. But it was also everywhere, and it wasn't that bad in the US relative to the rest of the world. An electorate that was interested in listening to any sort of explanation would have probably been persuadable on that point. But the electorate has had their problems explained away one too many times.
Was there a problem at the border? Yeah. But it was clearly not a problem of our own making, and not as simple as "put up a wall". And an electorate interested in expert opinions and complex solutions might have believed that. But when you feel like you're being screwed in a thousand ephemeral ways, it's easy to point a finger and say "Biden gave all your money to immigrants".
Despite the fact that I'm probably leaving the country to avoid what I expect to be attacks on people like me, I don't think voters are actually all that much more conservative. The administration will be, and their power will be almost wholly unchecked, but voters weren't. Abortion measures passed last night in some really red states. So did minimum wage hikes. Dobbs has been wildly unpopular.
Harris outperformed Biden by wide margins among the wealthy, presumably because of Jan 6. But she got blown out among the working class by an even wider margin - a working class that cannot own a home, or afford healthcare, or expect a good stable career, and who might be automated away entirely at any minute.
Trump isn't the answer to that (he is more or less a walking institutional failure himself, one that is causing a cascading collapse of other institutions), but Democrats have, so far, largely failed to acknowledge the problem at all. And so they could not present a compelling alternative.
I'm not sure Democrats can actually solve this problem. Institutional failures are being driven by a lot of non-political forces, and if you care about policy, some degree of institutionalism is inevitable. And worse, addressing systemic issues runs fundamentally against American individualist values. But I think that's the nature of the problem they're dealing with, and one they better figure out quick.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41977655
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41872998
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41581119
I can’t imagine what it’s like trying to moderate this thread right now so I just want to say thank you Dang!
Maybe this is the containment zone, an unmoderated section on the front page, one place that is actually about the elections where we can rage a bit and get it out of our systems...
Which doesn't seem too bad in terms of everyone getting an outlet to process things one way or another, and keeping the rest of the front page clean.
Our own Hamsterdam!
Yes! Thank you Dang, we all owe you a beer!
Yeah, I want to voice opinions but I don't want to add to Dang's pile of work even more.
If you don't break any rules you shouldn't be adding any work though.
It will still generate responses that need to be moderated and malicious flags of your rule-conforming comment still needs to be reviewed.
I have nothing nice or constructive to say.
I don't have the feeling it's being moderated at all at the curent time. Plenty of comments calling out Trump voters as Nazi, bigots, fascists and misogynists here are not flagged/removed while other comments explaining why democrats lost do get flagged.
Regardless of ones feelings towards the Orange Man and his voters (over half the country!) you shouldn't be able break HN ToS and get away with it. So either moderation efforts are being overwhelmed (hats off to Dang) or HN is heavily politically biased from the userbase to moderation team.
As a conservative American, I'm...
Cautiously optimistic about: curbing government spending, reducing illegal immigration, protecting unborn lives, restraining Iran + proxies, continuing economic growth
Nervous about: Ukraine, additional inflation caused by tariffs, ongoing political polarization
Economists, a conservatively skewed bunch, are not optimistic about his plans: https://qz.com/donald-turmp-taxes-tariffs-economy-simon-john...
The majority of women are not enthusiastic about his plans on that front either
Economists may be conservatively skewed relative to other academics, but certainly not relative to the median voter.
The S&P 500 is up 2.4%. The only economists you need to listen to are the ones who put their money where their mouth is.
I can't wait for MAGA to experience the 'hardship' that Musk has already promised. If they keep voting red after that, it's beyond stupidity.
Keep in mind that the left has been saying that the right has been voting against their own best interests for decades. I doubt that will change, especially if the apparent realignment along "class" lines turns out to be sustained.
How do you figure that not providing life-saving medical treatment to a pregnant mother and letting her and her baby die is going to protect that unborn life?
Well for one, strawmen are very flammable and fire is bad for unborn life.
I think you're putting words in my mouth. IMO in this scenario the medical decision-making process should weigh both lives equally. Doctors make life-and-death decisions all the time, and I'm OK with that as long as one life is not considered "lesser". I understand that reasonable people can disagree on when life truly starts, though.
Putting aside the general disagreement on the topic, one of the major concerns is all of this isn't really happening, with some of these laws and prosecutions just being so strict. Take [1] for example: when doctors are unable or afraid to intervene even when the baby has already died. It's just so completely unnecessary and purely the result of an overly strict abortion ban. This is hardly the first or only story of its kind.
[1]: https://people.com/texas-teen-suffering-miscarriage-dies-due...
Doctors aren't doing that though, they're saying they won't touch people in case they are seen to be breaking laws, and people are already dying, how can you not understand the nuance?
Which laws, and which doctors?
Here's one recent example: https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-mis...
Thank you for the example, I do hope that they clarify that gray area in the law. It's a tough situation; they were dealing with probabilities (sometimes infections occur, and sometimes these infections lead to death) rather than a clear-cut "we can save one of these two lives if we perform an abortion".
Funny how treatment like this used to be a clear-cut decision made by the only experts who can make it (medical professionals), but now innocent people and babies are dying because of peoples random religious beliefs, that obviously have nothing to do with medicine.
It has nothing to do with medicine because there isn't a doctor in the world who would willingly let a patient die when they could have treated them - unless they believe they will end up in jail for it - which is exactly what is happening - and that blood is on your hands for defending this absolute crap.
Firstly, Roe vs Wade was overturned in 2022 during the BIDEN term.
Secondly, Trump has never called for a federal abortion ban, nor, in fact, a state abortion ban.
Thirdly, there are currently exemptions in ALL states that protect abortion if it is a life-saving necessity for the mother. Trump has never proposed removing these exemptions.
>Firstly, Roe vs Wade was overturned in 2022 during the BIDEN term.
That timing is all about how long it takes a lawsuit to work through the system to reach a stacked court.... not so much who was President when it finally was resolved.
Search the news for mothers and their babies dying because doctors in states which have enacted abortion bans refuse treatment. That's what happens.
Rove vs Wade was overturned because of a right wing stacked supreme court, which has nothing to do with the sitting president. Unless you think the executive has control over judicial decisions?
Trump is enabling all sorts of backward thinking ideology to fruit, directly or indirectly.
Just to be clear I am pro-choice and I support mothers and their bodily autonomy.
I think the Dems will continue to lose elections if, in their hysteria, they attibute bad things to Trump that had little to do with him.
If the Dems and their supporters care more about the Two Minutes Hate against Trump than creating their own positive vision of America, then they'll continue to lose.
Americans are a positive and patriotic populace. That's why Trump's "Make America Great Again" messaging resonates with them.
Why do right wingers think democracy is about beating some other party, rather than improving the lives of citizens?
You're implying that unless the major left wing party kow-tows to the emotional needs of extreme right-wingers, then they should be allowed to destroy the country because mummy wasn't nice to them?
How about actually focussing on improving things instead of crying about every little thing.
What about "If things don't go my way, I don't mind starting civil war?"
I haven't seen that in Trump, myself. It seems to me that a lot of the Jan 6 discussion comes down to "what was he thinking when he did X?", and the tribes either give him the benefit of the doubt or assume the worst intentions, according to their various inclinations.
The only way to curb government spending is to completely eliminate Medicaid and Medicare at this point. If you look at the data there's simply not enough tax revenue to cover those programs with an aging population, and the Republicans were against allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices so I'm not sure they'll give the program any teeth.
Yeah that one has more emphasis on the "cautiously" than the "optimistic" :-) Both parties have largely ignored this issue since the Tea Party movement, but it has been mentioned somewhat prominently in this campaign.
> restraining Iran + proxies
The way to restrain Iran is to put reasonable sanctions on them, then negotiate terms for removing those sanctions. An international group (the US, China, France, Russia, the UK, and Germany) did that over Iran's nuclear weapons program and it resulted in an agreement that would have delayed Iran from getting nuclear weapons for at least a decade.
Then Trump was elected and a couple years later and over the objections of China, France, Russia, the UK, Germany, and the EU unilaterally withdrew from the deal and imposed even harsher sanctions that had been on Iran before.
So we ended up back to where we were before that deal, except with Iran knowing that if you make a deal for sanctions relief you can't trust the US to keep it, and so they have figured out other ways to get by with the sanctions in place. And the US is not Spinal Tap...when sanctions at 10 don't work it can't turn the dial to 11.
> when sanctions at 10 don't work it can't turn the dial to 11
Yea it can. It did that to Iraq.
what are the most probable policies regarding russia ? since russia and iran are in the same bed i wonder how things are going
Lifting all sanctions against Russia. Putin helped Trump to win this election in the end.
Past performance is mixed: Trump 45 used mostly the carrot with the North Koreans, but mostly the stick with the Iranians and Chinese. I think it's pretty clear that Ukraine aid will decrease, but I'm not sure how much carrot vs stick will be applied to Russia.
curbing government spending:
increased taxes, as per evident of the UK government switch to labour
reduce illegal immigration:
shortage of labour for mundane jobs, as evidenced by the UK brexit. We now don't have farmers to do the jobs that we all hate
protection of unborn lives
abortion aided to the protection, so now expect a baby boom crisis. Your daughter gets pregnant, now what? You have to fork the bill of either supporting or child care of others.
economic growth:
You rely on china for everything, when was the last product you looked at that had "made in the usa?
What is there to grow upon? AI/ML? CyberSecurity?
> curbing government spending: increased taxes, as per evident of the UK government switch to labour
Can you elaborate on this one? I don't agree with most of your takes, but this one I just didn't understand.
The Conservative government, right wing-- caused a "black hole" in spending. Where by for the eight years they were in power the conservatives took any income, money for the country for themselves and their bed buddies.
This includes scrapping budgets for Scotland, Wales leading a dominance in the London tax haven and sabotaging anything else progressive.
So, we've finally extinguished the conservative party with a left wing party, labour who are suppose to fight for the people but in return have just released the budget report where by instead of cutting spending they're going to increase national insurance, work taxes from next April, cut public services of schools, healthcare and pensions all in the name to get us out of this "black hole" including draining further Scotland and Wales because with increase spending.
So instead of actually tackling the issue they want the same pie that conservatives had and their slice too.
Thanks for the explanation. But that sequence sounds more like "corruption -> increase taxes", or perhaps "cut taxes -> increase taxes"... not "cut costs -> increase taxes"?
* curbing government spending - elon musk said that he plans cutting about $2T. It includes social security.
* reducing illegal immigration - mass deportation is a fantasy. in reality trump will not do much about it.
* protecting unborn lives - yeah, more women will die instead. good job.
* restraining Iran + proxies - yeah, Putin is a best buddy of Iranian leaders and Trump will be in their company too.
* continuing economic growth - trimp policies will lead to recession.
* Ukraine - it's utterly fucked.
* additional inflation caused by tariff - on spot. companies will not hesitate to gauge pricing more than necessary because of tariffs.
* ongoing political polarization - it's not just polarization. It will be on the edge of the civil war when Trump will order shoot protesters.
> mass deportation is a fantasy
as the grandson of two concentration camp survivors: I'd call that a nightmare and I don't think it's so far from reality you'd hope for.
[flagged]
There is a lot of "Don't believe that Republican voters are stupid" in the comments, but why is that true?
Why can't it be true that many people voted stupidly? As a third party to Brexit, it was apparent that many people voted stupidly.
--
edit:
In my opinion, it's very simple. I became a one issue voter after one of the candidates tried to obstruct the process (violently), the last time. That's antithetical to America. It's ironic because it's the type of thing that happens in the "shithole countries" that we're so focused on keeping out (I say this as a person who thinks immigration reform with strong structure is long needed).
Rewarding Trump by giving him the keys is stupid if you can even muster the courage to say you believe in anything America stands for.
I find it hard to believe that the majority of ~70,000,000 people are that stupid and/or mislead, the only other option is that the majority actually want what is now coming and I do not feel obliged to refrain from passing judgement on that. My feelings on brexit, which far more directly affects myself, are similar.
People who were naive enough to be misled do undoubtably exist (I know a couple of otherwise intelligent people who massively regret the brexit thing) but I don't think they are the majority.
Rough maths. 70 mil votes for Tump out of 260 mil 18+ people in the USA, that's about 27%. Around 21% of US adults are functionally illiterate. There's a lot of idiots out there. https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti....
> There is a lot of "Don't believe that Republican voters are stupid" in the comments, but why is that true?
I’m taking a shot in the dark here but I’m guessing they voted R themselves, we can all portray ourselves to be objective in comments when we really aren’t. This happens a lot on social media, especially the faux-smart part.
I suppose your definition of stupidity doesn't fit their definition of stupidity
Mostly because "they're stupid" is a lazy argument that ignores why you think they're stupid. You can say "Well, they voted against their best economic interests," assuming they're all net recipients of government cash, but they say they don't want to be, and they want to dismantle executive departments they perceive as wasteful. You can say "They're violent," but Trump campaigned on being the peace-negotiator who didn't start any wars, and Harris had no real response to that. You can say "He hates women," but there are apparently enough women who are either pro-life or didn't see abortion as the main campaign issue. Harris's commercials said "We want change," but she's the incumbent! If change didn't happen by now, why would it four years from now?
From what I've seen from Trump supporters on NextDoor you are missing a lot of cases where it is hard to come up with a good explanation that doesn't involve some stupidity or at least willful ignorance.
For example I've seen people saying they were going to vote for him because he'll stop undocumented immigrants from eating pets in Springfield OH. No one has been able to find any evidence of that.
There are also the people who say they will vote for him because he promises to get rid of some specific government service or program, and it turns out from their other comments that this is a service or program that they depend on but don't realize it is the same program.
Going the other way, there are people on NextDoor who I've suspected were a bit stupid long before I saw them in any political discussion. E.g., people going on about contrails being the government spraying us with chemicals or the new electric meters rolled out in this area over the last few years will make us sick because of their remote read capabilities (but the ones they replaced were also remote read--apparently they never noticed that they never saw a meter reader in all the years they had it).
Whenever one of those people later posted something that did say how they would vote it almost invariably was for Trump, and it would be for reasons like the ones above.
This suggests that while there might be reasons for a non-stupid person to vote for Trump, he also captured a big fraction of the votes of stupid people. That I think is one of the biggest difference between Trump and other candidates from both parties. Trump might be the first to actively court the stupid vote.
Brexit was a special case of stupid. There should never have been a referendum with such a stupid question, devoid of any context or potential impact.
Democracy only works when voters are informed.
> Democracy only works when voters are informed.
Since most people in the world aren't informed nor wants to be informed, are you saying democracy doesn't work in the real world?
It sure looks like it, doesn't it. The outlook in Europe is also bleak. The cult is strong and with Trumps victory will only get stronger.
There's actually some interesting context there.
Shortly before the Brexit referendum, Scotland had an independence referendum, where the Westminster government was in favour of the status quo - and they had a great deal of success by deliberately not figuring out what independence would mean.
What currency would an independent Scotland use? What will happen to their military? What about healthcare, and education? EU membership? What share of the UK's national debt would they take on? Who will get citizenship? What will the border look like? Nobody knows! So a yes vote was a scary leap into the unknown with many unsolved problems, while a no vote was safe and predictable.
After the strategy succeeded in the Scottish independence vote, Cameron decided to repeat that success with Brexit - not figuring out what Brexit means was a deliberate strategy intended to boost the remain campaign.
I think there's something to be said about the value of a calculated protest vote.
For young men, who doesn't feel that the Democrats are offering them a world view where they are valued at all, why should they vote Democrat? Maybe at some level they realize that Trumps policies are worse for them in some ways than Harris'. But when Harris loses despite Trump being such an awful candidate it sends a very powerful message to the Democrats: you can't just keep ignoring a huge portion of the population and make them feel like they're not valued in society.
People put self-worth above almost anything else except self-preservation.
I keep seeing this take on Democrat's treatise of men but I'm not sure it really follows. Even among Democrats white people and men are the most valued classes of American society, for better or worse their interests will never not be protected above all others. The Democratic case has been "given that, what can we do to help the rest of you." Stuff like LGBT support, reproductive rights, BLM, and even path to citizenship don't even wiggle the needle of white men's favor in society.
It doesn't change how it feels especially in online spaces where minorities vent publicly where before it has been private, and I can understand that, but that seems to be the only difference. GOP messaging successfully took "everyone is doing worse off right now" + "look at these Democrats throwing inconsequential scraps to minorities" and convinced people it was causal.
Are you really going on and calling people that have different opinions stupid with that word salad?
They used common english words arranged in simple sentence structures.
Yes.
In my opinion, it's very simple. I became a one issue voter after one of the candidates tried to obstruct the process (violently), the last time. That's antithetical to America. It's ironic because it's the type of thing that happens in the "shithole countries" that we're so focused on keeping out (I say this as a person who thinks immigration reform with strong structure is long needed).
Rewarding Trump by giving him the keys is stupid if you can even muster the courage to say you believe in anything America stands for.
My point precisely. We seem to forget Churchill's famous dictum that "no one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
I am for democracy because everything else is worse, but that doesn't mean I need to delude myself that "the majority is always" right or some nonsense like that. Yet the latter seems to be an increasingly common talking point, I've noticed.
Democracy isn't homogeneous.
There are many democratic nations on earth, many variations on theme.
Churchill today might note that US democracy is the worst form of democratic Government being structurally doomed to spiral into a two party K-hole despite being setup by people largely vehemently opposed to party politics.
Perhaps worst is overstating "old", "tired", "dated", "failed to scale", "doesn't encourage representative government".
It's not a choice between one form of democracy and authoritarian Stalinism. There's a far broader chice between many forms of democracy - some of those that embrace plurity of choice and reject unlimited legal bribery by very small very rich vested interests might be worth a look.
While I agree with you that there are different ways of structuring democracies and that parts of US democracy seem... in need of an update, even "better" democracies can't fully prevent a slide into authoritarianism. It has happened countless times before.
70% of Republicans think Trump was the fair winner of the 2020 election. They are just collectively massively misinformed.
Because any choice in a two party system is stupid to some degree, for most people. Most people’s beliefs don’t all line up exactly with one political party or the other. So every election is a compromise: which of your values must you prioritize? A whole lot of Americans aren’t doing well economically, they haven’t been doing well for decades, and under Biden they saw everything get more expensive. So they don’t like either side, and if you can convince them to vote, it’s only going to be for change. Kamala didn’t portray any change from Biden, so she lost.
Well, half of the population is more stupid than the other half (not saying republicans are, just saying that yeah, hackernews is definitely a subset not representative of the total population)
I think calling it mere stupidity is a little too reductive. There are genuine grievances among his supporters, such as rising inequality, loss of opportunities/jobs and an economic system which is not working out for them. But expecting a narcissistic misogynistic racist billionaire rapist to actually help them is…the definition of stupidity.
At the end of the day though he was the one that spent the time to understand what they care about.
> Literacy levels: 54% of adults read below a 6th-grade level, and 20% read below a 5th-grade level.
This is the reality in America. The education system failed these people. Trump is merely taking advantage of that. He understands that logical arguments aren't necessary, merely emotional ones that appeal to how downtrodden and forgotten these folk feel. If he can make them believe that building a wall and/or deporting immigrants will get them their jobs back or that tariffs will bring manufacturing back to America that is more important to winning an election than truths or reality.
He won fair and square, the election -is- a popularity contest, not a competency contest.
Born in Argentina. Legal immigrant. US citizen for over 30 years. Voter.
Given the proclivities here on HN I fully expect this message will not be well received. I urge left-leaning visitors to read it, stop and think before the natural emotional reaction.
What you lack is real exposure and knowledge of Latin American history and politics. Everything we see the Democratic party push for and do in the US has already happened in Latin America dozens of times over the last century. Pick a policy and you will find a country in LATAM that has done it, if not many.
The result? Utter destruction. LATAM is a time machine for the US. You can rewind history and see how every single policy being pushed by the left will end. And the results are not pretty. My own native country, Argentina, was absolutely destroyed by this ideology. It went from one of the top economies in the world to something like 150 spots down the list.
Poverty, destruction, massive unemployment, crime, intense lawfare, political prosecution, etc. You will find this in Argentina's history and that of most nations in LATAM. And the link to leftist/socialist rule is indisputable.
As things hit rock bottom LATAM has been waking up. El Salvador is one example of this. And Argentina is now on it's way with Milei. Sadly the uninformed masses have to hit rock bottom before they understand that the people they have been supporting them only care about political power and not about their lives.
Eventually reality vs. fantasy hits you hard enough that you cannot react like robot and keep supporting the same criminals that got you to the point of pain, misery and despair you find yourself pondering about. It's like being 30 meters down scuba-diving and your air tank suddenly going empty. There are realities you cannot ignore. And that's how Milei finally got elected.
The problem with the American Left is that you are all utterly ignorant of the history of so many nations where everything your party and politicians do and proposed has been tried and failed. The fact that a Bernie Sanders or AOC are not summarily laughed off the stage says volumes about the ignorance of the people who vote for them.
I am happy that Trump won. Not because he is the most ideal candidate. We can talk about how flawed the US process is that we usually end-up with two choices everyone hates. That's a different discussion. Whether you know it or not, what the Trump win represents is the US dodging the destructive forces of putrid leftist ideology that has destroyed so many nations.
No, he is not Hitler or a fascist. Stop it. You have never lived under such regimes. You don't know what the hell you are talking about. As a teenager in Argentina I was held at gunpoint (as in multiple machine guns, with one pushing against my back) by military police in Argentina. What crime did my friends and I commit? We went to the movies, then to have some pizza at a restaurant and were walking home late at night. That's it. They slapped us around and took our money. Again, don't use terms like "fascist" like you know what the fuck you are talking about, you have no idea. Any immigrant who has actually lived under these ideologies thinks you are ignorant and stupid.
My first-level filter when thinking about supporting a politician is:
Would I hire this person to run a cookie baking operation?
Simplistic, yes, however, it quickly gets to the core of the issue: Most politicians are just that, politicians, and know nothing whatsoever about making even a microscopic economy run. They know nothing about the consequences of their actions and have no exposure to them at all.
A simple example of this was Obama and Obamacare. He passed a horrible law that caused incredible damage. He promised --dozens of times-- that your existing plans and doctors would not change. My family's health insurance evaporated. We were forced into the ACA. Our cost when from $7,800 per year to $28,800 per year. Yes, you read that correctly. Our deductible also went from $3,000 per year to over $9,000 per year. And yet, none of the politicians who supported this abomination have to live with the realities of effectively destroying a family's economy as well as generational wealth.
For our family that represents being robbed to the tune of $210K every ten years. When one considers investing this on an ETF, we are talking about millions of millions of dollars over, say, 30 years. Destruction at this scale should be criminal.
The other problem with the ACA is that it pushed tens of millions of people into programs that, by law, require that their medical expenditures after 55 years of age be recovered. That recovery can include a lien on whatever assets they might have. Once again, destroying generational wealth.
And yet, Obama, a person who nobody in their right mind would hire to run a cookie baking operation, is living large, has suffered no consequences for his incompetence and deceit and is a multimillionaire many time over.
Another example of this is the utter destruction that the artificial raising of the minimum wage has caused. Financially-challenged and ideologically-brainwashed voters supported this. The result was that people lost their jobs, had their hours cut and everything they buy and consume is so unaffordable that their higher minimum wage has less buying power than their status quo ante. What's worse, it is causing irreparable damage to businesses and further losses to outsourcing in multiple industries, including manufacturing. Bravo. Ignorance is sad to behold.
On to Harris.
Incompetent as can be. The worst candidate Democrats have seen for decades. Once again, as a first filer, nobody in their right mind would hire this person to run a cookie baking operation. Race and gender have nothing to do with this. She is utterly incompetent and does not know what she is doing.
Her ideology is putrid and would have damaged the US beyond recognition. The US would not survive another four years of this, much less four years going farther into the putrid left.
You think you are suffering now? Inflation is too high? Once again, you have no clue what the fuck you are talking about. The population of the US is up in arms about 20% inflation. Meh! Try 250% inflation! The US would descend into civil war. Yet, that's precisely what happened in Argentina (along with many years well above 20%. Here:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/316750/inflation-rate-in...
Again, the policies and politicians you support are DESTROYING this nation. You don't know it because you are like the proverbial frog slowly being boiled and you are utterly ignorant about the world outside the US and their various histories.
If we remained on our current path, the US would probably find itself in an unrecoverable position in another four years, certainly in eight. If you actually took the time to study, learn and think about this, you should come out with two conclusions: Trump voters saved your ass and gave the US the best probably for a turn-around (even as late as this is). Second, you should realign your flawed thinking, support the change and perhaps even thank your Trump-voting friends for saving this nation from an almost certain disastrous path.
Well, like I said, I firmly suspect the HN crowd will not receive this message very well, hence the throw-away account. If I am able to make just a few people truly rethink their fake reality, mission accomplished. I do not want to see the US turn into Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador and the dozens of other nations destroyed by leftist ideologies in many forms. That requires a voting population who is educated about how this has affected the world. We don't want the far right either. That is now where we are today. At all. If you care about your life and that of your family, kids, etc., you need to educate yourself, leave ideological indoctrination behind and understand reality. We were 30 meters down and air was about to stop flowing. We now have a chance to surface and live.
If you got this far, thanks. I hope you are the type who is willing to reflect and understand.
Some might ask: Well, if that's the case, why did Hispanics vote for Harris?
Do you know about Evita in Argentina? Probably not. You think you know because you watched a movie or musical. Silly goose.
This goes back to when my parents where young. Evita sent trucks full of bikes, refrigerators, appliances, etc. into poor neighborhoods to buy votes. Vote for her, get an appliance. Where did those appliances come from? They took them from "the rich", causing damage to manufacturers and destroying jobs.
This was one of the many obvert ways in which they bought votes. People fall for this because they are desperate. And people are desperate because the left wants to keep them there, needs to keep them there.
I think this observation is attributed to Gloria Alvarez: The left love the poor so much, they multiply them.
The strategy is simple: - Keep them poor and desperate - Do not solve their problems - Blame the other side for their condition - Toss gifts and promises in the every election - Win elections - Make sure they stay poor and desperate - Ignore them until next election
That's the playbook. This has been done across LATAM history so many times it's sick. And, yes, it works. Because you will always find people in every population who are desperate and uninformed enough to not be able to think past their current condition. Very few people make decisions with a ten+ year timeframe. This just happened in Argentina with Milei because people hit the bottom so hard they had to wake up and understand reality.
Harris promised "appliances" to people in the form of $25K gifts to buy homes, free entry into the US and a path to citizenship and a whole host of horrible policies I don't have time to repeat. So, yes, once again, as the LATAM time machine shows us, these things will drive a percentage of the population to cast votes in favor of the candidate sending trucks with appliances into their neighborhoods to buy their votes. And they will do this without realizing they are contributing to the destruction of their society and economy until they understand they have been in water that is about to boil the entire time.
Oh yes, and, of course, the other thing the left has done throughout LATAM's history (and Evita was no exception) is to control the media. If you control the media you can brainwash the shit out of people, as some of you are here in the US.
Of course, here the media are not officially under government control. This has been accomplished through outright indoctrination at our universities. As a result, a large majority of the people who work at media organizations are leftist ideologs who will happily support someone as dangerous and incompetent as Harris because they can't think past their indoctrination.
The messaging take-over by the left in the US was not done by force, like in most LATAM nations, it was done through shit ideologically-slanted "education" at our centers of "higher learning". I really hope Trump has a plan to slam these organizations (media and universities) hard. We need to fix this problem and do it quickly because it takes years for people who have not been subjected to indoctrination to emerge from university and join society.
LATAM has nothing in common with the Western thinking. You are people of passion, no matter who Argentinians vote in always ended in disaster. Milei if far right, and as big an idiot as your lefties.
Meanwhile, anyone who ever been to developed Europe or Asia can attest, that although far left by American standards, average Joe has far greater quality of live; heck even Canada has affordable healthcare which is such a big problem in the US.
> LATAM has nothing in common with the Western thinking. You are people of passion, no matter who Argentinians vote in always ended in disaster.
Be careful, your ignorance is showing.
On a more serious note, you clearly don't know what you are talking about.
"People of passion". Give me a fucking break. So, Latin Americans are emotion-driven robots. Great. Stop getting your fake facts from movies and leftist media for goodness sake.
> Milei if far right, and as big an idiot as your lefties.
Your ignorance makes me want to vomit.
Go live in an environment with 50% unemployment, massive government overreach and 250% annual inflation (after years of crippling inflation). Then come back and read your comment to understand what you sound like.
Hispanic men voted Trump. Overall Harris lost a lot of ground in the Hispanic vote compared to Biden.
Right. We need more Hispanics to vote Republican. One of the things I discuss with Hispanic friends is that none of us should vote for the kind of people who destroyed the countries we all came from. We have friends from Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, etc. Most are educated professionals who know their history and, in general, very aware of LATAM history and politics. Not ONE OF THEM votes on the left. Ever. Because they know where they came from.
Quite a few of the Hispanics who vote on the left are low-information, low-education voters who can be bought with fake giveaways, not realizing they are shooting themselves in the foot.
At the end it is always a matter of education. In the US, it is a matter of our educational institutions of "higher" learning having descended into becoming centers of indoctrination. I went to university in Argentina for engineering. We studied engineering, not the bullshit socially-twisted, time-wasting courses universities force students to take here in the US.
My oldest son attended a top university back east for CS. He burned a year of his life in the aggregate taking bullshit courses having nothing whatsoever to do with CS. They also forced him to take classes on Marxism where they romanticized the ideology. How? The made it the only class available, and if he wanted to graduate that was the only choice from here to eternity. I don't even want to imaging what they do to liberal arts students. It is truly despicable.
“The government you elect is the government you deserve.” —Thomas Jefferson
OK, but what about the rest of the world that doesn't get to vote for this?
"The rest of the world gets the America they deserve." - Me 2024
Poor Ukraine.
Ukraine might be a proxy of our future selves.
yeah, literally and figuratively.
We kinda need them to keep Russia from going haywire
Easy, the rest of the world gets to watch, and solve their own problems.
That's the problem though isn't it. A lot of the problems don't just belong to the US, or just belong to everyone else.
The problem with isolationism is that everyone else gets to do their thing without your input.
If at all possible, I am perfectly fine with a diminishing role of the US in world politics.
Historically main problem of a large part of the world (from Vietnam to Yemen) is USA bombing them ...
Pretty sure the South Vietnamese didn't share your point of view. Let's not forget it was North Vietnam that invaded.
Pretty sure no one in Vietnam appreciates USA use of Agent Orange.
Yes, all parties did horrible things that nobody appreciated in that war which the SU and China supported North started.
Right now it's Russia bombing them, and Trump threatening to withdraw vital support.
It's called "protecting democracy and freedom".
Because none of the rest of the worlds problems are going to be affected at all by this turn of events…
I'm all for sitting back and watching the leopards eat US faces, I do like a little schadenfreude, but other parts of the world are going to be negatively affected too as is well documented.
You forget that America is the cause of many countries’ problems, see the Middle East and South America for prime examples.
More like the solution - Iraq threatened all of the Middle East. So does Iran. America is a security guarantee to countries who don't make a noise about it all.
As can be seen in Africa now, if America doesn't intervene then Russia or China will - there's no nice safe forum to criticise such actions in Russia. Sri Lanka - poor old Tamils got "sorted" with Chinese help.
Then the US oil price will go up no matter how isolationist it tries to be. That will hit people's pockets.
> More like the solution
… goes on to suggest that the US is getting involved for everyone's good, then…
> Then the US oil price will go up … hit people's pockets.
states one of the few reasons the US political system really cares about these places in the slightest.
All countries do what suits them. Fortunately that's sometimes the same thing.
Tell that to 12 million victims of US in Korea, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I think the South Koreans are extremely grateful not to be part of the North. That's a terrible example for you to pick.
Iraq...well they might not be too happy but I bet their neighbors insisted on Hussein being sorted out.
etc etc.
It isn't noble, it's practical. The US protects countries that supply oil to it. Korea turns out to be an extremely important ally and part of the world economy....etc.
If you cared to ask you will discover that a huge cohort of people "on the right" do not want the US involved in foreign entanglements, including with Israel.
US is not the cause of the problems in the Middle East. It has interests in the Middle East. The problems in the region were created by the people inhabiting the region. If anything, US foreign politics sometimes come as detached from the reality of the problems of the area rather than creating those. I don't know what makes Americans take so much credit for the bad things that they hadn't contributed to all that much.
The US is directly responsible for millions of deaths in the Middle East.
It's supporting Israel's genocide right now, and would have continued to do so whichever candidate won.
It's arming Saudi Arabia to help its war in Yemen.
It killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, and armed the Taliban before that (back when the USSR was also killing Afghans by the hundreds of thousands).
It participated in the coup against Iran's last democratic government (together with the UK), re-installing the deposed Shah (he was later deposed yet again, but this time by fundamentalist revolutionaries, instead of the democracy that had replaced him last time). Before the revolution, they the Shah with the start of nuclear tech, which formed the basis of the current Iran nuclear program. They then supported Saddam and had him attack Iran, before later losing control of him as well.
Now, the root cause of many of the worse issues in the Middle East is in fact not the USA, but the British Empire, which drew most of the insane borders of Middle East states that are causing problems to this day. But the USA proudly took on the mantle of main meddler in the region in the last 50-70 years.
Millions of deaths? Where do you get your numbers from? The bloodiest war in the Middle East, the Syrian Civil War maybe has a million killed... all other conflicts in this area have low two-digit figures. Iraqi campaign, since the very start in 2003 has total killed at around 100k-200k, which, I believe, is the second bloodiest war in that area.
To give this some context: Iran-Iraq war, where US didn't really participate, scored 1m-2m deaths.
And of those killed in the conflicts, overwhelming majority were killed by the locals, in order to further some local ideology, gain some local control etc.
Military, I'd imagine, US may be directly responsible for some couple thousands deaths, maybe dozens of thousands. But that's it. US has absolutely no reason to waste troops and ammo on killing a bunch of nobodies in ME. That furthers no military or political goals. Even if you believe that US is colonial / militaristic or whatever other sticker you like, US is pragmatic in what it's doing. There's just no point in killing many people. It's a waste of resources.
Also, you obviously have never been to ME, and have no clue of what's going on there right now. The idea that Israel is somehow performing genocide is, again, laughable. Yes, they don't care about how many people in Gaza will die. But that's it. They don't care. The Israelis want the deplorables behind the fence to stop launching rockets at them. If that means that the civilians will die behind the fence--so be it. Genocide is when a state kills off everyone belonging to a particular group, no matter what that group does. Israeli military nor police nor any other force has no programs of exterminating Gazans. It's just not useful, there's nothing to be gained from it. And it would've been a huge investment in terms of paying salaries to the force hired to perform the alleged genocide, to organize the logistics around it etc. It's truly bizarre how someone can come up with such b/s ideas and never have a reality check.
The same, I imagine, goes for Saudi Arabia. They don't want the deplorables from Yemen to shoot at their oil drilling installations. They don't care about the lives of the people on the other side of the fence. In fact, they probably don't see them as people at all. But they don't care enough about them to organize a genocide. That's just too expensive, unproductive and wasteful.
As for Iran, you are missing the point: US has interests in the area, that's why they choose to side with this or the other political / social group and support / oppose some groups. They aren't responsible for what those groups want or do. The Iranian revolution happened because people in Iran revolted. Not because US organized it.
The "millions" figure is related to all of the people who died in wars started or cheered on by the USA. I wasn't trying to suggest that the US military has shot millions of people in the ME.
The Iran-Iraq war was supported by the USA, who armed Saddam as long as he promised to attack Iran, to try to take back control of, or at least punish, Iran after the Islamist revolution.
> The idea that Israel is somehow performing genocide is, again, laughable.
This is not just wrong, it's not even debatable today. Every single international organization that has analyzed the situation, from the UN, ICC, ICJ, journalist organizations, NGOs, even medical orgs: they all agree that a genocide is happening there. All senior Israeli officials (president, prime minister, defense minister, finance minister, and others) have said that they intend to punish the people of Gaza for October 7th (collective punishment is a form of genocide). I can find quotes, all from Israeli media or their own Twitter accounts, I had a collection of them once. Plus, they have destroyed every single hospital, university, and high-school in Gaza. They have forced the entire population to move from the North to the South, and then kept attacking them there as well. There is no other name whatsoever for what Israel is doing than genocide.
> They don't want the deplorables from Yemen to shoot at their oil drilling installations. They don't care about the lives of the people on the other side of the fence.
The war is about more than that (those "deplorables" are Iran aligned, a traditional enemy of SA). But it's irrelevant: the problem is that we know they're killing people quasi-indiscriminately (though nowhere near the wanton destruction that Israel unleashed in Gaza, especially in terms of leveling all civilian infrastructure), and yet the USA is still arming Saudi Arabia to facilitate this. So, the USA bears at least some responsibility for the deaths of all of those Yemenis.
> The Iranian revolution happened because people in Iran revolted. Not because US is organized it.
Sure, the Islamist revolution was not caused by the USA. But the coup against Mossadegh, the one that re-installed the US and UK puppet Shah, was indeed organized by the CIA. You had Iran go from a despotic king to a democracy, and then the UK and USA conspired to bring down this democracy and re-install the despotic king. And then proceeded to arm this king, including trying to help him build nuclear weapons. When the people rose again against the despot, the second time they were more radicalized than the first time, which has now made Iran one of the most dangerous countries in the region - including a nuclear weapons program that the USA helped start.
> All senior Israeli officials (president, prime minister, defense minister, finance minister, and others) have said that they intend to punish the people of Gaza for October 7th (collective punishment is a form of genocide). I can find quotes, all from Israeli media or their own Twitter accounts, I had a collection of them once.
People set a database to track those, given sheer amount: https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-databas...
You should read those quotes you linked to. Most are not actually genocidal.
So you admit that even you see genocidal intent in at least some of them. Now remove your bias and you'll see it in the rest
> Every single international organization that has analyzed the situation, from the UN, ICC, ICJ
Every single hand-picked organization you mean? The organizations that act on identity politics of being Muslim / Arabs and wanting to trample Israel for religious / identity reasons you mean? Yeah... that's about right. The rest can be explained by Israel being a US ally, when it's not for the fact that Muslims just want to slaughter Jews if given a chance. The countries / governments that campaign against Israel do it so that they can stick it up to the US, but in the way they don't directly confront the US, because they are too scared of the repercussions.
> have said that they intend to punish the people of Gaza
And? Where's genocide in that? Where are the concentration camps, the gas chambers, the paramilitary force guarding the camps and executing prisoners? Where's all that? Yes, of course they want to punish people responsible for Israelis' death. Why wouldn't anyone? Do they send them in droves into gas chambers? -- Absolutely not.
> collective punishment is a form of genocide
Really? By whose definition? What about riding in a sled and saying ho-ho-ho? Is that a form of genocide too? Gazans are being collectively punished by denying them work permits in Israel. Is that a genocide? If so, then I have really bad news for you...
Ultimately, Gazans are the culprit of Gazans' problems. They started this war. They had dozens of off-ramps to stop it. They could surrender any time they want, and their beloved infrastructure would've been spared. They have a death wish, and Israel doesn't feel like stopping them from throwing themselves on the bayonets.
Please choose one international organization that has had people in Gaza and has declared it's not a genocide.
As for colective punishment, I did make a small mistake. This is "just" an explicit war crime, not a direct proof of genocide. Of course, it easily leads to genocide if you feel that an entire people are responsible for an attack perpetrated by a few dozens of terrorists. After all, if all Gazans are responsible for October 7th, doesn't it just make sense to kill or at least harm all of them, per this deranged logic?
Just like like if someone said "Israelis and all Jewish people deserve to die for the crimes committed by Israel's military against Palestine" would be a demented war criminal and instigator to genocide. This is exactly what Israel's leadership is saying, only it's about Palestinians as a people and Hamas as the army instead. And it is just as deranged and disturbing and frankly disgusting.
> Ultimately, Gazans are the culprit of Gazans' problems. They started this war.
Another historical misguided statement. Israel has been occupying Gaza and not allowing it to be recognized as a state, or to control its own borders, for decades. Every year, even before this war, for every Israeli killed by someone from Gaza, Israel has killed two, three, sometimes even ten Gazans (and the balance is sitting at 45-100:1 for the current invasion, not counting all of the mass rape and torture and other crimes committed by Israeli soldiers against detainees). The people of Gaza are not allowed to leave the country unless approved by Israel, not allowed to import or export anything unless approved by Israel, and not allowed to be recognized in any international organization. The same is true of the West Bank. Additionally, in the West Bank, Israel is taking more and more of the Palestinians' lands and settling colonists, who often attack nearby villages as well.
This "war" did not start on October 7th. It started decades ago, and Israel has been the aggressor throughout.
Edit: same person as simiones for personal reasons, not an attempt at dogpiling or anything like that
> "it easily leads to genocide if you feel that an entire people are responsible for an attack perpetrated by a few dozens of terrorists"
3,000 Gazans crossed into Israel on October 7th. Not dozens. Also not close to the entire population of 2.1 million.
Nobody is talking about killing or harming all 2.1 million. In fact nobody is talking about killing or harming any civilians at all. The only dial the Israelis can turn is how much effort they put into avoiding civilian casualties - and by effort, I mean sacrificing Israeli soldier lives instead of air force munitions and/or missing opportunities to target militants, which then leads to these militants attacking Israeli civilians.
Hamas consistently uses the Gazan population as human shields. Israel is already leads and bounds ahead of any other armed force with the lowest ratio of combatant to civilian death ever in an urban setting. What's happening in Gaza is a calamity, but I'm not sure any other nation would handle it better in Israel's place.
This war (no need for scare quotes) definitely started on October 7th. The conflict may not have, but wars have beginnings and ends, and this one was started, by Hamas, on October 7th.
> "Israel has been occupying Gaza"
Nope. Left in 2005.
> "not allowing it to be recognized as a state"
Not allowing how? All Israel asked was a declaration of willingness to live side-by-side with Israel, without hostilities. Are you saying that's too much for Israel to ask?
> "or to control its own borders, for decades"
There are two sides to every border. Israel controls the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border.
> "Every year, even before this war, for every Israeli killed by someone from Gaza, Israel has killed two, three, sometimes even ten Gazans (and the balance is sitting at 45-100:1 for the current invasion, not counting all of the mass rape and torture and other crimes committed by Israeli soldiers against detainees)."
This is not a game. You don't aim for equal numbers. Israel is going for dead or surrendered Hamas militants, and Hamas is going for dead Israeli civilians. The Israelis are better at it. That doesn't make them wrong.
> "not allowed to import or export anything unless approved by Israel"
Yes, because they kept trying to import arms, explosives, and rockets. Look up the Karine-A affair. Apparently, given what happened on October 7th, the control is likely not strict enough.
> "in the West Bank, Israel is taking more and more of the Palestinians' lands and settling colonists"
Sounds like the Palestinians' top interest should be to get a deal struck as soon as possible that forces Israel to remove the settlers. Like they did with the Oslo accords in 92', until Arafat was found to be straight-up lying to Clinton, negotiating with Clinton and Rabin in the morning and directing terrorist attacks in the evening.
--
Leaders of western nations are not generally allied with Israel because they particularly like Jews. They are allied with Israel because Israel is the historical homeland of the Jews, a full democracy with democratic values (...for now), and the most successful decolonization project in history; and it has from day one strived to make peace with any willing country, while successfully defending itself from numerous assaults by its neighboring countries, the Palestinians, and the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies.
> This war (no need for scare quotes) definitely started on October 7th.
This is not a war, it's a one-sided genocidal invasion, part of a decade-long war. There have been periods of ceasefire in this war, but it is the same conflict that has lasted for decades.
> Nope. Left in 2005.
Nope, they are still controlling the border (see below) and periodically bombing Gaza, keeping records of every citizen of Gaza, rationing power and water, etc. That is an occupation, even if there aren't Israeli troops constantly on the border.
> All Israel asked was a declaration of willingness to live side-by-side with Israel, without hostilities.
This is completely facetious. Netanyahu has been very clear that there Israel will not allow a two-state solution, long before the October 7th attack. He even explicitly supported Hamas's stay in power [0]:
> For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.
> The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Here is a quote from him directly [1] about his vision for a Palestinian state, where he is asking for infinitely more than a commitment to not attack Israel:
> “[A]ny final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would have Israel controlling security – overriding security responsibility in the area west of the Jordan.
> [...] “And I said, you’re right. But – I don’t know what you’d call it, but it gives them the opportunity to control their lives, to elect their officials, to run their economy, to run their institutions, to have their flag and to have their parliament, but we have to have overriding security control.”
I think it's obvious this is not a serious proposal that any state would accept. It also happens to be almost exactly one of the things Putin was asking of Ukraine, widely viewed in Europe and the USA as an absurdity.
> Israel controls the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border.
Israel controls all sides of the Gaza border, including Gaza's border with the sea. Even the USA wasn't allowed to bring in medicine and food to Gaza over boat unless Israel approved it. The Gaza-Egypt border is nominally controlled by Egypt, but Egypt has long agreed to follow Israel's requests on who and what is allowed through there.
> Yes, because they kept trying to import arms, explosives, and rockets.
Which they should be allowed to do, if you are claiming they are not under occupation. Every free state in the world is allowed to import weapons.
> Sounds like the Palestinians' top interest should be to get a deal struck as soon as possible that forces Israel to remove the settlers.
The Palestinians shouldn't need to reach a "deal", since the settlements are fully illegal under international law, as recognized even by the USA.
> Like they did with the Oslo accords in 92', until Arafat was found to be straight-up lying to Clinton, negotiating with Clinton and Rabin in the morning and directing terrorist attacks in the evening.
The Oslo accords were a sham. There is nothing about a Palestinian state in the Oslo accords. Israel's leaders had no intention whatsoever to commit even to a vision that would eventually lead to a Palestinian state under numerous conditions. Arafat kept negotiating, but at some point this became apparent. Was he fully committed to the process? No. Was the process ever plausibly going to lead to any good solution for Palestinians even if he had been? Absolutely not. The Israelis were occupying Gaza at the time, and busy settling the West bank. They were adamantly opposed to any kind of third party monitoring or enforcement of any term that they would agree to: who would be foolish enough to sign something like this? Here is a good article on the overall process and how one-sided it was [2], written by one of the US negotiators who was present.
> They are allied with Israel because Israel is the historical homeland of the Jews
Most Jews that founded Israel had lived for hundreds of years, more than a thousand often, in various places in Europe. Israel is about as much their "historical homeland" as Rome is the "historical homeland" of the Spanish. Calling the most clear modern example of colonization a "decolonization" project is preposterous. There were hundreds of thousands of people who had been living in Palestine for generations, who were displaced to make room for the Zionist project. Initially, this was done mostly peacefully; only later, after the British took and then ceded control of the territory, did the forceful removal of Palestinian Arabs start, to make room for the new state of Israel. And then the colonization of this state by settlers from all over the world.
[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/01/middleeast/netanyahu-pale...
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/13/oslo-accords-1993-anniv...
Collective punishment is not a war crime either. Why do you keep talking about something you have no clue about? I've given you an example of collective punishment that Israel did perform (unlike many idiotic claims made by people who just like to make stuff up). Israel canceled work permits for everyone from Gaza be those terrorists or not. How's canceling a work permit a war crime?
You just keep using the words, but you don't understand what they mean...
Now, were there war crimes committed by IDF during the Gaza war? -- Yes, and some were punished for that, while even more were claimed. This is a nature of any war. Were there more crimes than in any other war? How do you even measure and compare these things?
As I lived through several wars, I can tell that Israeli wars, at least from my perspective as a bystander, are very mild in terms of cruelty towards both combatants and non-combatants. This is not a unique Israeli virtue. In general, wars waged by well-to-do countries are less cruel to the opposing side simply because soldiers growing in well-to-do countries are not exposed to the everyday violence as much as their counterparts in poor countries. They are brought up in an environment where human life has intrinsic value, where critical thought is encouraged and so it's harder to brainwash a soldier into a mindlessly cruel machine.
Now, my childhood in Ukraine had seen this, for example, beside other multiple such incidents: on my way back home from school my mom pulled my hand hard in order to get me to walk faster. Before that, I've heard voices of some youth cursing and taunting someone. I also saw some guys kicking something in the mud, but it was too dark and too far to see what that was. Next morning there was a makeshift fence erected by the police around that place, and the school sprouted rumors that a bunch of alcoholics / homeless people were mauled to death at that place.
This was during peace time. And this would've been a typical fate for the homeless / drunks, unless hypothermia got them first. Very rarely would anyone get in jail for that. Imagine now people like that being drafted into the military. First Karabakh war, for example. Or Chechen wars. These were real torture fests. Both sides deliberately looked for more painful ways to kill the opponent. And they made little distinction between combatants and non-combatants. People who signed up for the military were driven by the idea that they will be allowed to kill and torture legally even more so than by money or status.
The horrors soldiers routinely commit in poor countries eclipse anything you could dream up in your wildest dreams living in the EU, US or another wealthy place. Does this mean that war crimes committed by IDF shouldn't be prosecuted? -- Of course not. But you shouldn't infer from there being war crimes any sort of intention on the state level, nor should this be any kind of supporting argument to claim genocide or any other such wide-reaching policy. Putting things in perspective and in proportion: if Gazans were instead fighting Russians, there wouldn't have been any Gazans left in about two months since the start of the war. And it's not unique to Russians. Bet you, that if they wanted the same kind of fight with Egypt, they'd be similarly dying in much larger numbers.
And this isn't even because of the calculus of achieving military objectives. Poorer armies are both more cruel and more crude, while valuing the lives of their own soldiers less. Poorer army would both need to expend more ordnance per target (accidentally missing / hitting unintended targets) and having more vicious soldiers abuse the population being invaded.
> Israel has been the aggressor throughout.
You couldn't be more delusional / ignorant about the subject.
You speak in the language of the aggressor and yet deny or downplay or invert reality. Incredible mental gymnastics.
It is you who have no idea of what you are talking about.
Here is article 33 [0] of the (Foruth) Geneva Convention (emphasis mine):
> ART. 33. — No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
> Pillage is prohibited.
> Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.
Here is a summary of more international humanitarian law on the matter [1]:
> Rule 103. Collective punishments are prohibited.
> Were there more crimes than in any other war? How do you even measure and compare these things?
> As I lived through several wars, I can tell that Israeli wars, at least from my perspective as a bystander, are very mild in terms of cruelty towards both combatants and non-combatants.
> Putting things in perspective and in proportion: if Gazans were instead fighting Russians, there wouldn't have been any Gazans left in about two months since the start of the war.
This is all entirely wrong. We can even compare directly, as there is currently a Russian invasion in Ukraine in parallel to the Israeli invasion in Gaza. After almost two years, there are approximately 11 500 civilians killed in Ukraine, of which ~650 are children [2]. There are ~43 000 total killed in Gaza, of which at least ~20 500 are civilians, including more than 13 000 children [3]. Note that the population of Gaza is about 19 times smaller than that of Ukraine (~2.1 millions in Gaza, ~38 million in Ukraine).
And these are just direct deaths from the war. While Russia also has an appalling record of attacking and deliberately targeting healthcare facilities in Ukraine, Israel has destroyed every single hospital or clinic in Gaza. Russia has killed ~234 healthcare workers in Ukraine in two years of invasion [4]. Israel has killed ~765 healthcare workers killed in Gaza, in just one year of war [5].
> You couldn't be more delusional / ignorant about the subject.
Look just at the amount of people killed every year in Gaza vs Israel before this war. Please tell me how Gaza has been terrorizing Israel, when in every single year, Israel has been killing many times more people in Gaza then the terrorists have in Israel [6]. Several human rights organizations have called Gaza "an open air prison" before this war, including this UN special rapporteur [7]. In fact, I challenge you to find a single human rights organization that has done work in Gaza who doesn't consider what Israel is doing to be deeply oppressive.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-...
[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule103#F...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293492/ukraine-war-casu...
[3] https://www.ochaopt.org/content/reported-impact-snapshot-gaz...
[4] https://www.attacksonhealthukraine.org/
[5] https://media.un.org/unifeed/en/asset/d326/d3268585
[6] https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
[7] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-occupation-...
Imagine thinking and saying something this parochial and isolationist in an era of massive, evident climate change.
Wow.
My honest opinion is we need a multipolar world. Then the US can do as much shit as it wants but the rest of the world doesn't have to care.
As someone whose regional hegemon in that scenario would almost certainly be China, I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Political solutions for the rest of the world would appear to include increasing the amount of money you spend on your national defense and/or the amount of money you spend renting rooms at Trump International Hotel Washington D.C to curry favor.
They have their own countries with candidates to consider. They should mind their own business and US citizens should mind theirs. The US needs to move closer to isolationist policies for that reason.
Very naive view of a very globalized and connected world.
It was true 2 centuries ago. In the age we are now where each country is interconnected at every level of a society (economy, culture, trade, innovation, research, military…) that’s not possible anymore. WW2 showed it. You can’t play head in the sand and think that everything will be fine. Since then every major economy drawbacks showed the world we live today is all interconnected and interdependent. And that’s the same for any other type of backlash or drawbacks from politics, alliances, society…
As the rest of the world, why would I care about elections results on another continent? US should sort their problems themselves. I don't even want a vote, our countries are independent from each other and we both decide for our own.
As someone with a german passport (federal elections next year) and living in france (next presidential in 2027) I do care. Europe is next. Make no mistake, the money that bought this election will try to get the european power houses at a discount, now that they have an ally in the white house.
The money in this election was mostly on Harris' side. It lost. It's not money that decided this election, it's hubris and bold face lying by a charlatan.
Indeed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Network
Money did not buy this election. Attempts were made on the Harris side, however.
They probably will. The EU is a neoliberal institution; it is not long for this world.
But most of the truly thorny problems aren't "owned" by any one country.
I'm an Israeli who was born in Ukraine and lives in the Netherlands. And I care a lot about the outcome of the US election because of Israeli military partnership that is going to be affected by the new administration and because of the new US administration trying to break free from NATO, which will put my livelihood and that of those close to me in danger due to the looming war with Russia. Not to mention that I don't expect to see a lot of the male classmates to show up at the next class reunion because of how US foreign policies will affect the war in Ukraine.
Migrants in S. American states care!
"It is considered democratic, for example, that state offices are filled by lot, and oligarchic that they are filled by election"
— Aristotle, Politics
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Tell that to the Puerto Ricans.
Sadly, this is not true under neoliberal capitalism. With the correct oversimplified messaging and a lot of money, you can influence a lot of people to behave a certain way.
The quote rings true then - If people are influenced in such a trivial manner then they deserve the outcome.
We definitely had microtargeting ads by the trump team to make Harris look bad with conflicting messages, we also define had a musk PAC collect data in an unethical way to eventually do door to door canvas for Trump, and it goes without saying that one of the biggest social network in the US is skewed towards conspiracies (musk posted a video endorsement of Trump yesterday where the Q letter appeared together with Trump and similar bullshit)
Here's something I did about his PAC data collection https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41148139
Here's about Trump targeted ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887642
There's a story Winston Churchill tells of, of an old man who lived a long life on his death bed surrounded by his family, where one of his grand-children asks him for the dying man's advice about life.
The man thinks for a moment and then says : "I've seen a lot of trouble in my life, most of which never happened".
We can all now think of a million ways in which Trump will be a disaster.
I predict that bad as he will be, most of what we now worry about will not happen.
A lot of people predicted WW3 as soon as Trump took office in 2016.
The reality was that Trump's unpredictability and Machiavellian approach to diplomacy put a chill on many of America's global rivals.
With the Abraham Accords, Trump brought the Middle East a step closer to stability. And despite some rhetorical silliness with North Korea, the situation on the Korean peninsula was more stable under Trump than it became under Biden. Regarding Russia, I feel Russia waited for the election of Biden (a decrepit, predictable leader on the World stage) before invading Ukraine.
I have a rather different view - I thought Trump was so scattered, and his party ungovernable due its internal splits, that he was unable to implement his crazy ideas.
Regarding Russia, I may be wrong, but I think Putin's judgement of the situation was so insular, based purely on everyone agreeing everything would go just fine and no one thinking for one second about what might go wrong and what to do if it did, that Putin's assessment of the situation was not meaningful.
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I wish the people who are frustrated would actually come to europe for once. We do need a dose of american optimism and dynamism , but alas you never come guys. What s wrong
I'm not of that opinion. At all. They should stay and clean up their own house. And I don't know what optimism you speak about: the people who I assume are frustrated right now, are not whose optimism I miss.
I was in Europe for a while recently (Switzerland). Thought about staying but when I realized that even if I naturalized, I could never really be Swiss, and furthermore future children would not really be Swiss (even if they too naturalized), and at best perhaps my grandchildren could be considered somewhat provisionally Swiss... not appealing. Too much old, too much history, if you aren't embedded in it you are permanent outsider.
If you work in knowledge fields, I'd imagine it's not too difficult to immigrate to certain countries. But also those fields pay far more in the United States than any other country in the world, so it's a tough thing to commit to.
I remember a fair few moved after the last go around (2016) to Berlin and the ones I met found German bureaucracy incredibly stifling in terms of business, which was a major fumble of the ball.
Same with Brits moving post Brexit vote, finding the German environment difficult to do business in.
Really, Europe needs to be able to capitalise on whatever amount of talent flight from the US happens, instead of … whatever the fuck they are doing currently.
Thank you for saying so! I'm American, but I lived in the Netherlands for 7 years, and absolutely loved it there.
I think the biggest barrier for young Americans is getting through the paperwork. The EU doesn't make it easy to immigrate (legally). You generally need an offer of employment in hand.
I've considered it many times and I cant afford to make so much less money when I have a family. Presumably we'd end up back in the US at some point basically broke.
It is expensive to leave. . .
You're extremely anti immigrant as well. Tell me how and I'm on the plane tomorrow
Don't speak the local language, not sure where I'd find employment. My Italian passport is ready!
Estonia. Tech country, advanced, lots of startups, in the capital and in tech companies most people speak English, easily understandable tax system, stable political climate, and a good standard of living including public healthcare.
I live there, happy to discuss if there's interest!
Seems like you are not native but moved there. What made you choose Estonia over anywhere else in the world?
Originally, chance. Over a decade ago I was traveling country to country a year at a time, and had never lived somewhere so far north. I booked a ticket and landed with a suitcase knowing nothing about it (no exaggeration, I had no idea.)
Once there I realised it's an amazing place. Lovely people. Peaceful and quiet. Good rule of law and stability combined with kindness (you can trust the police here.) High tech. Beautiful nature. Very clean air. Lots of forest. Big enough to have a big city; small-town living if you want.
It's very business-friendly and I started a company here. Then, married an Estonian, so I guess I'm staying here now :)
I can guarantee that there is at least one country in [geographic] Europe where you do speak the language, and you are likely to find employment. Whether you would want to accept the change in lifestyle and living standards is another question.
I moved to the Netherlands a few years ago. Although my wife and I are independently wealthy I've had a great time consulting over here.
I tried! No country would let me in without a job, and no company in Europe would even interview me from America.
While I appreciate the compliment, I think the issue is mostly that European employers aren't used to paying competitive with the United States for one which helps lead to the flow mostly occurring in the opposite direction. I understand there are also complex reasons behind it making it less viable, like not having as much in terms of private investors willing to fund start-ups and such.
I'm here
idk, Berlin is full of Americans
The US needs a dose of Europe's civility and modern approach to democracy.
Are student exchanges still a thing? Maybe we need more of that.
I can't decide if it's more like a 1930s Europe or the Fall of Rome -type situation
Why not both? We are absolutely an empire in decline. And we just elected someone who spoke about the "enemy from within" and made numerous threats of turning the military on the American people.
Time will tell, but the 30s also ended in the fall of Europe. It's only one economic crisis to the fall of the American empire.
I'm going Fall of Rome because of the potential for the end of Pax Americana
It's not been a hugely impactful country in the way that the roman empire was, so at the very least it's not the latter. I know people like to say "pax americana" was a thing, but let's be real - even when the US was actually doing well it wasn't a force for peace and development.
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No nationalistic flamewar on HN, please, regardless of nation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry dang. Emotions.
The democrats have done many things that are undemocratic.
* tried to remove trump from the ballot on Colorado * triple digit amount of filings from the justice department against a political opponent * refuse to remove rfk junior from the ballot
Is becoming a "political opponent" supposed to be a legal shield against prosecution? Are laws simply unenforceable against politicians who break them to pursue power or abuse their offices?
Absolutely agree. This is like the discussions amongst brits during Brexit.
This is not dems leadership fault. Many of the complaints that "oh they didnt do X or Y outreach" for example, are just strange, given that people OUTSIDE of America were well aware of Dem policies.
Hell, the Dems ditched their candidate, to put forward a better candidate, against all conventional wisdom. A bold and honestly decent move.
They communicated through word and action, and it still made no difference.
> When democracy and the rule of law are considered less important than (insert all the dem ills here), it’s not dems. It’s the voters.
Democracy and rule of law like... covering up the mental decline of a sitting president, foreign leaders lying to the American public saying Joe Biden is fine, only for him to finally expose himself so badly live on TV they jettison the man off the 2024 ticket while leaving him in office? Then imposing a candidate by fiat?
January 6th was absolutely a constitutional crisis, but it lasted less than a day. The cover-up of Biden's mental state was a multi-year constitutional crisis that still has not been fully acknowledged.
When there are two competing harms you fall back to things like who is going to put more money in my pocket. This is 100% the dem's fault.
Noted.
Fuck.
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Like Europe didn't have issues with democracy and general economy.
Regards, an European.
Economically Europe is pretty much doomed.
Source(s)?
(Serious question, not a European)
Fiscally conservative countries (Germany, the Netherlands and others in the Frugal Four) in the EU have for a long time preached countries must "balance their budgets". Now Germany balanced too hard and didn't invest enough, their car companies are experiencing a decline while the Chinese companies are growing, and the rest of their industry got addicted to cheap gas which isn't available anymore. The UK left the EU. And the EU is incapable of creating large tech companies.
One data point is the debt crisis France found itself in.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/10/11/frances-emergen...
- Declining manufacturing
- declining GDP
- higher (st?) energy prices across the board
- dependency on the US for energy and defense
- unelected EU government
Germany is in a slow death spiral. What you are seeing right now is basically the scene from Animal Farm where Boxer, the working horse, has been injured [1]. The burden on the productively working citizens is growing, because money is required to finance the migration policy, oversized healthcare system, the huge pension payments for the ageing population (there is no pension fund) and government spending. Also, tax revenue is shrinking(!). The current government is asleep at the steering wheel, so industry may continue to leave the country, which will again reduce tax revenue, so the government will have to further increase the burden on the productive sector, which will again result in weakening the economy.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xzklsnBTzc
I'm European and I 100% disagree with the characterization that I'm sitting here thinking "America, what are you doing?".
To be fair, you're not a typical European (or Brit). Out of curiosity what are you thinking?
The comment I responded to could be interpreted as "America, I don't understand what you're doing" or "America, I disagree strongly with what you're doing". I was responding to the former.
I am simply unsurprised by the result. It was obvious for a long time that he had a good chance of winning and appealed to a lot of people. The result is likely going to show him winning the electoral college and the popular vote. Sounds like democracy doing its thing.
It wasn't surprising based on the polls, no, but I'm fairly sure the "what are you doing?" was intended as a "what's wrong with you?" (or: "I don't understand what you're doing") rather than "I'm surprised". I'm pretty sure plenty of Americans are also asking "what's wrong with us?" – I believe Obama said pretty much that earlier this week or last week.
I understand. After the assassination attempt I was sure Trump would get an easy win, but then Harris replaced Biden and the polls reversed, and I guess I got my hopes up.
I can't speak for OP, but typically "Refugee Bad" is a stance I see regularly among rightwingers.
We really do need a rebuild of the Civilian Conservation Corp, which built out massive infrastructure in the US. Not Potemkim style infra like ghost cities, but infra that is needed and useful. Bridges, dams, solar and wind, dikes, etc. Paired with effective economic and trade policy and you get a golden age for a few decades.
People contributing to the economy and building infrastructure results in a lot of knock on benefits.
Being incredibly stupid.
Example: I heard the leader of the West Coast Vintage Computer Club remark, recently "Well, the problem is the Department of Education! We need to get rid of that!"
The entire Project 2025 gives me chills, to be honest. I know Trump has distanced himself from it previously, but who knows what will he actually do when given the keys to the country.
The dumber the people, the more they love Trump. It's a legit strategy, but I never thought people who'd benefited from American' education would buy into this shit and pull up the ladder!
We have a war in Europe right now.
Not for long. Some countries now get to be neighbors with Russia instead.
With Trump elected and the Senate changing majority I'm not sure it will go past the three years mark.
Europe is doing the same though.
I don't claim perfect knowledge of the 30-ish countries in Europe, but I've not heard of any of us reelecting a double-impeached convicted felon where the impeachments were for (1) abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and (2) incitement of insurrection; and the 34 felonies he's been convicted for were related to misreporting finances related to hush money relevant to a potential scandal that could have influenced the 2016 election, while also being on trial for another 54 related to mishandling of classified documents.
Even Boris Johnson didn't mange all that mess.
Details might differ, the big picture is pretty much the same. The left-wing are shy and try not to annoy the voter base by being too radical, while the right-wing are getting more aggressive and outspoken. And still the right-wing mostly win the elections. Literal fascists in Italy, right-wing populists in Hungary, Slovakia and Netherlands. And the upcoming elections in Germany is not going to be very good either - we basically get to vote between right-wing traitors and just right-wingers. People en-masse don't value freedom, human rights or rule of law any more, I wouldn't think there are any hurdles to get Europeans to vote convicted felons either.
Hopefully.
In all fairness, as an EU citizen, if I was American I'd vote Trump. The Harris campaign was very weak and built on identity politics that as we saw is a double edged sword. And why should USA care about Europe? I mean, yes, unfortunate for Ukraine, but it's not necessarily their problem, no matter how much people make it out to be. We in Europe need to grow some balls and not be dependent on who is the next US president.
> unfortunate for Ukraine, but it's not necessarily their problem
It seems like it absolutely is the US's problem, albeit indirectly. If Russia gets the outcome it wants in Ukraine, they'll have access to rich mineral deposits, vast quantities of grain, and nuclear power, boosting their economy and their status as a rival world power to the US. It will signal to Putin that he can be aggressive towards other neighbouring countries with little pushback. The war has resulted in a growing alliance between Russia, Iran and North Korea which is altering global military power dynamics and not in the US's favour. Also, China is watching what's happening with eagle eyes to determine whether to invade Taiwan, which would definitely escalate the US's engagement.
It's coming. Left vs right, rich vs poor, socialism vs capitalism, men vs women, LGBTQ* vs straight, immigrant vs native, religion vs religion (amongst those who still have faith, with the rest as collateral).
As an apolitical person, I've been pretty down and worried about the near future for the last 15-20 years in this post-truth society. The more science and data we have, the more we throw away the rational and retreat into our own emotional blind spots and dark psychological hang-ups. Across the board.
But this too shall pass.
It seems that the web/2010+ era is not good at creating coherent information / pedagogy. We have access to a lot more data, but most people end up regressing as followers of tiktok celebs. Internet created an anthropoligical wild west.
The working class is struggling to afford eggs and incumbent party campaigned on social stuff and the opposition's shitty personal history. Things people don't give a fuck about if they can't afford eggs.
Not American, not political, but this. What the hell is the left doing but focussing on a few ideological fringe fights?
The price of eggs has gone up primarily due to bird flu, which doesn't care who you voted for.
How much are eggs in the US? I just did some googling and I assume the sources are wrong because all the prices they quote for eggs are really low.
Commodities in the US are often cheap by European standards. Gas for $4/gallon is considered outrageously expensive in the US, meanwhile in the Netherlands it's close to €2/L, or $8/gallon.
> Eggs US increased 2.22 USD/DOZEN [to 4.41USD] or 101.37% since the beginning of 2024, according to trading on a contract for difference (CFD) that tracks the benchmark market for this commodity. Historically, Eggs US reached an all time high of 5.29 in December of 2022.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eggs-us
Sounds affordable.
You're out of touch. Yuppies without empathy for the working class can't understand why the price of groceries (not just eggs, but eggs exemplify the problem) is relevant because you lot are making north of six figures anyway.
I don't earn 6 figures (sadly); those eggs are affordable.
They more than doubled in price in December, and now they cost the same as in the UK, it's tragic.
Doesn't sounds like they're unaffordable to working class people at all then. They're affordable in the UK and working class Americans are richer than working class Brits.
Wait, what’s this meme? Wasn’t the price of eggs something big in Russia? https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/in-moscows-shadows/id1...
Butter. Prices for butter climed so high we have to import it from UAE.
Hell if I know.
- Wisconsin
My Ukrainian friends want the war to stop at all cost, they are on the brink and all help goes to the military effort... my friends in Lvov can't feed themselves and have to go dig mushrooms... they don't care who wins, they just want peace. NATO sustaining that war just to save face isn't peace. Trump is an opportunity to end that war the democrats have sustained.
Ukraine has the motive, means and opportunity to rapidly develop nuclear weapons. From a military analyst I have reason to trust due to long term accuracy and lack of click bait, "months" rather than years.
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, signed by Belarus, Khazakstan, Ukraine, Russia, the US, and the UK, obliging respect for signatories' borders and sovereignty, territorial integrity, economic security… is also what put Ukraine into the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
> they don't care who wins, they just want peace.
And what happens when Russia invades again after a few years with a revitalized military?
Fellow European here - I think we have different Ukranian friends. All mine were bitterly frustrated at Biden's failure to properly support them militarily, and resigned to having to fight to the death if Trump orders they secede to Russia. There is zero popular support in Ukraine for 'giving up', since it would likely mean mass murder, and the end of Ukraine as an independent state.
I want the Ukraine war to stop, too. However, I do not want it to stop at any cost, if that means that Ukraine will need to surrender its land to Moscow and to agree to being part of Russia (again).
This will send the wrong signal to Putin, and prove his model of acquiring buffer areas around Russia actually works - next on the list are the Baltics, and Moldova perhaps.
I'm going to be in the trenches as soon as they get ideas about Finland - and you do not want that.
European here (French, been helping Ukraine since the full scale invasion started).
We have no business relying on the US anymore. They are too far gone. Their political rhethorics are polluted by Russian propaganda. (Just look at the rest of the comments here...)
It's time to get busy defending ourselves. Time for a war effort that doesn't involve merely wearing flag pins or doing cute street protests.
We need to be funding our own defence. We need to be sending actual troops in Ukraine, not just weapons. No more of this sidelines bullshit.
This account definitely does not represent the Ukrainian community.
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Prediction markets had this a fair few hours ago, which is interesting.
https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-20...
There was a blip with the sweep though which is also interesting - https://polymarket.com/event/balance-of-power-2024-election?...
The prediction markets pretty closely tracked NYT's probability estimate, which seems like the best possible analysis of the available data (partial current results, complete past results, at the precinct level).
Anything else would have been surprising.
And the pollsters were all so wrong. I guess we are in a new era of prediction markets.
> the pollsters were all so wrong
They were wrong by about 3 points nationally, which is a normal error.
Everyone is ignoring the obvious problem: Georgia is a state with 16 EV, and was targeted in 2020 with a scheme that resulted in multiple convictions across multiple states, with members of a conspiracy now serving prison time.
This scheme was in at least 7 states, but focused on Georgia. Although the government was already out looking for a repeat of it, Trump's illegal dealings seem to have been actually effective this time (at least for now, legal challenges in some states are apparently already being filed).
Trump repeatedly discussed via Truth Social and via multiple speeches and interviews that he was planning on doing it again, and had things in place to do it again. Trump also has multiple legal hurdles (a convicted 34 time felon, and facing another 54) that he still has to deal with.
We have no clue if he's been elected President, we don't know if he can serve (the issue with the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment was never handled; the Supreme Court merely ruled that they can't keep him off the ballot, a very narrow ruling), and we don't know if he is going to be serving from a prison cell (since he cannot pardon himself).
What I don't get is why there are so many pro-Trump/anti-American puppet accounts on HN, especially ones that essentially claim Harris lost because shes a woman and/or because her message was one of facts, inclusion, and moving forwards instead of feelings, exclusion, and moving backwards.
She "lost" because people are bigoted, racist, and self-sabotaging and Trump resonates with them. She also "lost" because some states seem to have been lost by merely thousands of votes, and I know for a fucking fact some Democrats did not vote this year because she wasn't a 100% perfect ticks-all-the-boxes candidate for them; somehow Trump being convicted of being a rapist and also the ongoing issue with him having had sex with a 13 year old in 1994 wasn't enough for them.
If Trump becomes the revenge quest protagonist he claims he wants to be, every single Democrat that didn't vote this year, you may not deserve this, but you certainly did this to yourself (and by extension, to all of us).
I'd also like to thank dang for his hard work, I've been seeing a lot of the outright insane comments become dead, and I appreciate that.
"Puppet accounts" meaning controlled by some outside force like Russia or China? I think there's also a fair share of throwaway accounts being used to troll or share very controversial opinions
Yup, and both of those get the moderation hammer around here. Insane anyone tries, this ain't Slashdot/Digg/Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/etc
Sad day for the world.
Speak for yourself.
Putin, Xi, the New Totalitarian World Order: Won A very dark chapter in human history is about to start and all from "our" own free will.
Maybe it's just my echo chamber but people in India seemed more pro-Trump. This is despite Kamala having Indian roots. People usually take pride when anyone with Indian ancestry doing great on the world stage.
> This is despite Kamala having Indian roots
I'd imagine most people can see past origins and skin colors, especially when it's such a shaky argument. You don't support someone just because their mom were born in your country 70 years ago
> despite Kamala having Indian roots.
She hasn't really embraced that, although being raised by her indian mother and presumably closer to her than her Jamaican father, she hasn't her visited her ancestral village or come in her official capacity or been part of any major India - US initiatives.
Indians like diaspora who actually embrace their identity, there is comparable example with Rishi Sunak, his achievements was celebrated because he made the effort to connect, although Indians(in India) would disapprove of his and Tory policies around immigration.
I mean Modi is (was?) the member of a radical nationalist hindu milita from the age of 8. Modi has been popularly elected multiple times so seeing someone similar win the US election is probably what you want to see if you are a BJP voter.
Because Trump is more vocal about having friendly ties with India. He bothered to go out of his way and visit the country, attend public events in it and have diplomatic talks.
Biden and his administration, meanwhile, just conveniently ignored the whole country. He only visited because he had to for the G20 summit, and talks were lackluster.
Of course, India rightly believes that Modi will be able to handle Trump through flattery and appealing to his "strongman" image. This also feeds into the desire and belief that in projecting or using power that is prevalent in India. Trump is the better candidate for all the strongman governments in the world.
This is sad to hear. I guess Trump’s values (whatever they might be) resonated more with them than Harris’s progressive liberal values.
India is extremely conservative due to Hindus being majority. What US considers far-right is considered left-of-center in India. US has gone so far to the extreme left that if Kamala had been elected you would have had full blown Communism next. It had gotten that bad. Too bad you guys don't realize how effed up it all looks from outside your bubble. Especially those countries who have already gone through that Hell (India went through that for 60+ years before we elected Modi). God saved America from total collapse today. That's all I'll say.
What? Why? I am genuinely curious. I am not an American, so can't vote or have a strong opinion. Trump is weird, but does it spell doom?
It probably does in terms of averting climate change. Of course he might indulge Elon and remove all nuclear restrictions and save the world, who knows. But the chance of persuading the globe towards collective action seems ludicrously out of reach in time to avert pretty severe outcomes.
The world needs to build over 400 nuclear plants starting right now to replace fossil fuel energy needs, even with about a 33% reduction in global energy consumption.
That means a new plant starting up every 3 days. Any slower and it's not enough. This was data from a couple of years ago as well. We're never going to get close, even if Elon himself is modern jesus.
Wasn't this number flawed, because it mapped the energy needs 1:1? Like, the efficiency of a heat pump or a battery is vastly better than current motors or burning oil.
I don't know, but I doubt it, and what you're stating is essentially the opposite, fossil fuels are far more energy dense than any other form of energy, you can't run long haul diesel trucks on batteries, not without an insane network of battery swap stations. The grid infrastructure alone needs to grow at least 4x to manage this.
I can't find the source, but it was in a video presentation by Kevin Anderson, a senior research fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
400 nuclear plants isn't actually that many in terms of numbers, but constructing them is an enormous task.
From a European perspective, many here are very worried that Trump is going to end support for Ukraine and that Putin will be allowed free reign.
Leaving aside what Trump can do. It is sad to realize that a person with so many character faults documented in public can reach the presidency of such powerful country. You loose hope on humanity and wonder if liberal democracies can actually last.
The entire world will be affected. Trade wars against China and Europe, the loss of Ukraine, the end of Palestine, war with Iran, potential dissolution of NATO and that's only what's likely. Who knows what other shit is coming down the sewer.
Not talk of basically losing all prospective of doing something against climate change.
Most people already believed climate change won't be mitigated.
I'm not American either, but I see a war going on between authoritarian states and democratic ones, and Trump supporting the wrong side.
It deeply concerns me from a human rights perspective and also on a personal security level because I live near Taiwan.
I've also felt the impact of disinformation and conspiration theories spreading from the US to my country and I fear it's only going to get worse.
> deeply concerns me from a human rights perspective
What should concern you is your singular belief in propaganda that powerful entities care about human rights over their own interests.
I don't find this kind of cynicism accurate or particularly helpful as a life philosophy. I've personally had the luck to meet people and be a member of organizations that do care and have power to make some difference.
>I've also felt the impact of disinformation and conspiration theories spreading from the US to my country and I fear it's only going to get worse.
Examples?
I've received unhinged antivax leaflets twice at home, in Japan.
Blue brain washing. I am not holding my hopes high but with Trump we will probably have less wars, less trade wars, less inflation and a better economy.
He was the one that started the trade wars with China and promised to tariff everything. Why do you think there will be less trade war?
How exactly will tariffs lead to less inflation?
Most economists agree that with the policies he’s proposed, inflation will increase massively.
But a good day for USA. With Trump winning a civil war is avoided.
Civil war is a bit of an overstatement for what would again be a bunch of clowns trying to storm the capitol
And a good day for the stock holders in the USA. The stockmarket likes Trump.
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Do we have any sense of to what extent Russian interference played a part in the outcome?
Suppose Russian "interference" is just business as usual. A long play to undermine the Republican Party and take it over like a parasite.
Strong-arming "The Good Ones" until they play along. Once that happens, the fight is won.
They want to undermine it All and make it irreversible. Utterly.
I don't think it mattered much. It was the will of most Americans to join the Russians.
The sad truth is even if XYZ country "interfered" with a misinformation campaign... they didn't actually manipulate the votes. Enough US citizens voted for Trump.
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Unsurprisingly, "being a woman" is not enough to get elected.
Calling him a fascist would be an understatement
It's true, not all fascists are also necessarily convicted sexual abusers, amongst a host of no doubt other horrible things.
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Grover Cleveland would like a word. He won the popular vote 3 times in a row, but lost the EC vote in 1888.
Edit: I’m amazed all 3 replies to the parent comment used the phrasing “would like a word”.
same initial prompt, different temperature and max_new_token settings.
Grover Cleveland would like a word (also I think that Biden will be harder on Putin than Trump but idk)
Grover Cleveland would like a word
Um, a 19th century Democrat philanderer might want a word from the grave.
Ah OK, so Trump is only the second? And it's been well over 100 years since the previous occurrence, in any case.
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Can you please not break the site guidelines like this? You've been doing it a lot in this thread, as well as in other unrelated threads, and we've had to ask you this many times before.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42059721.)
> fascists have come to power in the past, or they are just into fascism and prefer that kind of thing.
This, right here, has been the focal point of Dem supporters everywhere - doubling down on the name-calling.
I seriously doubt that more than half the voters are homophobic, misogynistic fascists, but calling them that only stops them from engaging, it doesn't magically cause them to rethink their position and switch their vote.
I guess there is no group of people that trump hasn’t name called (dems, gays, hispanics, blacks, you name it, etc.).
It should’ve been disqualifying when president publicly mocks and physically parodies disabled journalist instead of answering god damn questions.
Taking high road didn’t help in 2016, wouldn’t have helped now.
But this trend is obviously not only in USA. Some political groups and their voters don’t care what is said, and other political group must upstand the highest moral standards.
> I guess there is no group of people that trump hasn’t name called (dems, gays, hispanics, blacks, you name it, etc.).
There are a few groups not there, and those won Trump the election, and Democrats has name called those groups. If Democrats didn't demonize those people then maybe Trump would have lost.
Trump got a larger share of the hispanic vote than in 2020. I'm not convinced that voters really care that much about being insulted on the whole. If you go through the archives, which parts of Trump's voter base haven't been insulted by him at one time or another?
Indeed. Mexicans, hispanics in general are insulted by him and his followers constantly, but it seems that this group brought the victory to him.
Who trump hasn’t insulted? billionaires[0] and saudis?
[0] though even Bezos is an exception.
> Who trump hasn’t insulted? billionaires[0] and saudis?
Did Trump insult white men? You see Democrats say white men are the problem all the time, I never see Trump or his supporters say that.
>You see Democrats say white men are the problem all the time
Be serious. You might for some reason think that this is their underlying message, but they don't say this. They even chose an old white man as their nominee, for goodness' sake.
You're right, but boy does it suck when antifa has to not only fight to win, but take the moral high ground and baby the potential fascists so they don't become actual fascists.
Antifa are cosplayers. They would get their bussies blown out in a real fight.
So these people care more about what other people call them than how their nation is governed?
> So these people care more about what other people call them than how their nation is governed?
When it is the people governing them, that's a perfectly rational decision - why would someone who views me with contempt govern me fairly?
It goes both ways though. Taking the high road doesn’t seem to work either.
@whoitwas The point of this comment was that not all Republican voters are MAGA.
I don’t see it as name calling, the word Fascist plainly and accurately describes their positions and strategies. If they sincerely believe this is what is best, why would they see it as an insult rather than a compliment?
It is true that Americans are pretty proud of winning WWII, and label that as defeating fascism… but it is plainly obvious that this current political movement aims to implement exactly what we were fighting to prevent back then. I think this is the main reason it is seen as an insult- people that language implies betrayal of what a lot of Americans died fighting for.
It's not name calling, it's descriptive and neutral.
If you support and vote for a fascist you are a fascist.
This. Its the arrogance of the Dems that is making people turn to Trump. It's getting on the high horse and calling all Trump supporters trash and drooling fucktards and stuff like that. You are making yourself look bad. Imagine someone isnt so politically active, but hears an elitist dem calling people they dont know a drooling fucktard, what do you think they will think?
I don’t understand, Trump has been explicitly, frequently and consistently insulting to almost every group. That’s how it all started, that is also to a large degree his “saying how it is” appeal. If name calling and arrogance are the root of the issue, how come it has worked so well for Trump? This is a bizarre inversion, I would understand if you insisted on other qualities like wokeness or economic policy, but how are you managing to attribute the exact worst qualities of MAGA to the Dems?
Except Trump calls people all kinds of bad things and it doesn't seem to hurt him.
Conclusion: You cannot arrogantly call someone a drooling fucktard. But you can call someone garbage non-arrogantly while also being a convicted felon.
The MAGA snowflakes prefer the felon, their soft skin can't seem to withstand arrogance.
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Maybe, but does it matter? How do you beat fascists? Look at Deutschland before the NSDAP took power. Many people tried to fight the NSDAP, with violence, with writings, with rallies, demonstrations... But all of it didnt work. It only made them more resolute. There must be a better way.
With public education which they fight against or a world war.
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Who is homophobic?
Wow, I knew the comments would be bad. But this is the point where I literally said wow aloud.
Did he say something incorrect?
> literally
I do not think you know what this word means.
This is a confusing comment that I don't think answers my question.
I like how you seem to think no atheists voted for Trump
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Alas, this is everyone's "circus" - you'll see.
Canadians sitting in the front row, hoping they don't get plastered with monkey shit...
But if the acrobats start dropping stuff, we all might feel it.
What happens in that circus has ripple effects on yours
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Agreed. Most people want what’s best for everyone and vote that way from their POV. We all have pieces of the truth. The best way to see the whole truth is bringing those pieces together.
Exactly, and this is true open mindedness that the left used to espouse.
"Walk a mile in my shoes"
Now we love to invent reasons to never do that. "Open mindedness goes too far when it loves fascism" is one example of totally missing the point.
I’m from Canada so I’m missing a lot of information and understanding of what it’s like for people who voted for Trump.
Can you explain how you think a vote for Trump was in your best interest? I’m genuinely curious and interested in this perspective.
Thanks for the genuine interest :)
1. Don't want war with Russia. Trump's presidency was relatively low-war. He's also expressed a great desire to end the Ukraine conflict. If the Donbas and Crimea is the price of avoiding Nuclear war, I'm on board. The moment that switched me to deciding on Trump was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala.
2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
3. Illegal immigration. I lived in South America for 4 years. My wife is Colombian, we just moved back to the States. Legally. It was a long and arduous process to come in legally. That should be made easier (something Musk at least has espoused) and coming in illegally should be made harder. I know quite a few illegal immigrants and they are being abused by the urban elite to build their summer homes. They're not living a better life and they're stuck here.
4. Federal bureaucracy. The federal bureaucracy has become a parasite on our progress. Just look at what's happening with SpaceX. This ties in with the immigration thing. The problems we have with immigration are actually that the lazy and corrupt bureaucracy takes years to process something that should take 2 hours. (and does! even in "third world" countries like Colombia)
5. Trust. Everyone who hates Trump likes to talk about how much he makes stuff up. But he's authentic. Meaning he rarely reads from a script. He talks off the cuff. He's not controlled. I'm tired of having politicians that basically hate half the country and think we're dumb because we don't like to listen to their corpo-bureaucrat speeches
Very well summarised.
If only KH voters had been able to formulate their own top 5 reasons (excluding "because the other guy is Trump") for voting her in a similar, eloquent yet succinct manner.
> The moment that switched me to deciding on Trump was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala
Point 1: you're irrational. Good to know.
> 2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
Sounds like an excuse you make because you don't like the concept. Are you against all kind of medical interventions on kids, or only the ones you don't feel comfortable with? Do you tell kids with cancer to wait until they are 18 before they take their own decision?
> I'm tired of having politicians that basically hate half the country and think we're dumb because we don't like to listen to their corpo-bureaucrat speeches
And instead you vote for a politician who ignores all the country and cares only about himself.
Dick Cheney is responsible for murdering millions of Iraqis. This was indisputable up until the moment he endorsed Kamala.
Gender dysphoria is not the same as cancer. We don't let kids get tattoos, buy a beer, have sex, get married until a certain age, but somehow we let them medically transition at 6 years old? Have you ever met a 6 year old? And yes it's happening at that age at alarming rates [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-tran...
> Dick Cheney is responsible for
I am pretty sure that many bad people voted for Trump. It wouldn't be rational to vote for Harris just because one particular person endorsed Trump. I don't actually think you're irrational, just wanted to note that you apparently felt like you needed an excuse to justify your voting for Trump.
> We don't let kids get tattoos, buy a beer, have sex, get married until a certain age, but somehow we let them medically transition at 6 years old?
You specifically said "18 years old". And now that it is convenient for you, you bring that limit down to 6 years old?
In many countries in the world it's perfectly normal to get tattoos, buy beers and have sex before 18 years old.
6 is less than 18? And I said a "certain age". Nobody thinks 6 year olds should be able to do whatever they want?
My solace is I know yours is a fringe position. Though increasingly less so.
> My solace is I know yours is a fringe position.
I don't actually have an opinion on the subject in general (it's not a question where I vote). I just disagreed with what you wrote. Let me quote it again and explain:
> 2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
You say here that medical gender transition should be forbidden before 18, don't you? It includes 6, but it also includes 17. When I said I disagreed with you, you said "how can you imagine doing that to a 6 years old kid?". You came up with that number all on your own. I was answering to your comment that implied "anything below 18".
You misread their last two comments on the 18 years old remark. The mention of 6 years was a hypothetical for if the age restriction wasn't set at 18.
Correct, they're misreading what I'm saying. But the 6 year old thing isn't a hypothetical. There are plenty of documented cases of 6 year olds being transitioned by abusive parents and doctors. There needs to be a line somewhere. Right now, in many jurisdictions, there is no line.
> Correct, they're misreading what I'm saying.
I did misread the part about sex, tattoos and beer. Doesn't change the fact that you said (and I quote, third time):
> 2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
Which implies "they can do it once they are 18, not before". When I disagreed with that, you gave an example of 6 year olds, which is very different from 18, isn't it?
> There needs to be a line somewhere.
Now maybe you are misreading me. I don't say that there is no regulation needed. I am just saying that I disagree with the "they abuse kids younger than 18 and Trump will save them" rhetoric.
6 < 18
I really don't know what we're arguing about here.
I'll try one last time. You say "I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition until they are 18" (I won't quote it a fourth time). I say that I disagree (because I could totally imagine a 16 year old be able to consent).
Do you understand that?
I said 18 because that's the age I think it should be. You could make an argument it could be older, or it could be (barely) younger, 16 is the absolute youngest I would entertain. But my. whole point all this time is that there is no line in many jurisdictions.
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding his use of English. You seem to be interpreting the structure of his sentences in a way that he wasn't intending at all.
Happy to learn, English is not my language. Would you mind explaining to me what this means?
> I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
He was establishing the age of 18 years old as a reference point for the lower bound for when people are able to make adult decisions. His mention of the age of 6 after this, which your primary contention with him seemed to be about, was separate from this and was him trying to make an example of what he sees as how the medical system can be abused when there are not strict age related regulations. I think that it's clear that you disagree with him on the 18 year age restriction, but wanted to clarify that the 6 years number that he used in his example didn't have any significance in its specificity, but was just some number between 0-17.
As a bystander, I appreciate your openness and willingness. However, I'm not sure if the misunderstanding here is a language issue or the issue about kids.
It seems like you view medical sex transitions as similar importance to cancer treatment? I think that is the disagreement the other person has.
I think it was decently clear that they were disagreeing about the age restriction of 18, but my comments were referencing how the two of them had been simply arguing over the semantics of the mention of 18 years of age then 6 years of age after that. There seemed to be a language disconnect getting in the way of their disagreement, even though it was clear they disagreed on the 18 years of age point.
I was mostly trying to point out that 18 years old is pretty old for something that sounds... existential. If a "kid" has tried committing suicide twice before their 16th birthday, I would feel bad telling them "but you see, you can't really tell us how you feel before you're 18".
> In many countries in the world it's perfectly normal to get tattoos, buy beers and have sex before 18 years old.
Good for them, we don't care. The US puts adulthood at 18 years old.
A Republican president has never made life better for the lower working class. But, that's not the average Trump voter. The average Trump voter is just well enough off that they're happy to stick it to the real working class if it gets them an extra $1000 at the end of the year.
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weird how Harris is so in favour of my body my choice but not like that.
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There are beautiful peaceful and kind neighborhoods in every state. I hope you are in one of them. Take a nice walk and have some tea or coffee at a local cafe. It's the local atmosphere and government that matter most.
> The garbage states have selected the garbage president.
Language and attitudes like this are a big part of how we got here.
No, it isn't. Being able and willing to tell the truth has never been the problem.
The man just elected is a derelict. A twice impeached, incompetent, convicted criminal. A tool of Russian propaganda. This is fact. The people who elected him knew this or should have known it.
Anyone can be randomly abusive-- Trump does this all the time. Literally every day. It's documented. It's fact. That's not what I am doing.
My contempt is warranted.
> Being able and willing to tell the truth has never been the problem.
It is indeed a problem if you want to win an election.
Calling people "garbage" is unacceptable.
I fail to see how 'Trump does it' is supposed to be any kind of ethical argument.
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> In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they'd be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they'd be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less likely.
It is probably one of the factors, but not the only one. Or maybe it's part of the "not a meaningful difference" factor.
Statistically no. Stein has 0% vote in most swing states.
I am also critical of Israel's far-right government and their brutal war, and I was also worried that the protest vote might swing the election. But this narrative is not supported by the numbers we're seeing.
Even in Michigan, Trump has a lead of >100K. Stein is at 36K, and RFK and the Libertarian party have a combined 47K. The Uncommitted Movement mobilized otherwise-unlikely voters.
Trump in MI had more of a lead than the 100k gap that went to Stein
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Please don't be histrionic, this is the last place that needs it.
I don't think Hackernews should multiply the emotions of some of its users.
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Which party is banning books again?
That's a disingenuous argument. I remember when the Anarchist Cookbook was banned from my public library. It has nothing to do with "banning books," it is banning wholly inappropriate content for children. Do we want manuals on the library bookshelf laying out how someone could possibly build a bomb? NO. So the book is banned on that, its content, not just a broad claim of book banning.
There's a big difference between banning books and deciding that some books, some content, is just not appropriate for kids.
i'm curious to hear why you think “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas should be banned from libraries? https://mississippitoday.org/2023/03/16/angie-thomas-mississ...
Go take a look at this list[1] and come back make the same claim. Are all these bans to protect the children? Or is it simply that these books go against the politcal views of these so-called "free speech absolutists"? If you're willing to get out of your bubble, type "maga book burning" in google and hit enter.
[1] https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/more-than-350-books-banne...
What's an example of a socially conservative policy you're looking forward to the implementation of? I'm not usually sure what people mean by that specifically, I definitely can't tell here.
One party bans books and wants the freedom to spread misinformation and disinformation.
The other party wants to let all books be in libraries, and to ban spreading misinformation and disfinformation.
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Are you suggesting that politics has no influence on the tech world?
Especially considering that Peter Thiel, who was a partner at Y Combinator, was fairly involved in the Republican Ticket. This is very on topic for HN and rightfully so, even if the comments are a mess.
I just want to emphasise - JD Vance, from what I have read is a direct proxy for Thiel.
Without Thiel - there is no Vance.
HN is mainly American audience. So it's something rest of the world has to bear.
This affects the whole world though.
The USA is the economic and military hegemon and by a large margin too.
As someone in a small but wealthy western nation, the US elections are far more important than our own. We can't destroy the world, they can.
hear hear
HN is simply following the trend of sacrificing institutional capital for political goals. Trust in media is at an all-time low because they too decided to sacrifice institutional capital for political goals, and now they have neither institutional capital nor their political goals, and that's a good thing.
How is it not relevant? The US election has wide-reaching effects for technology workers across the US and the world.
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Please take a day or ten to think your decision through as emotionlessly as possible. You could seriously affect your financial health if you make this decision based on feelings that may not align with reality.
You should check out Reddit, people are talking about leaving the country, stockpiling weapons to protect their lgbtq+ family members, I even saw one women saying she was scheduling a hysterectomy so she doesn't die due to lack of reproductive care.
They are probably all just temporary dramatic outbursts, but still, everyone needs to take a breath. If you didn't have any media you probably wouldn't have even noticed the Trump -> Biden transition.
The guy literally has never conceded defeat from 2020. They marched in the capitol building with confederate flags. He has an enemies list and a clear agenda to avoid prison. He has compliant congress to back him and everyone is on board with the crazy. He won the popular vote FFS.
Yeah you wouldn't know any of that if you hadn't viewed it through a screen. The capitol insurrection had 0 effect on you other than making you angry when you saw it on TV.
This is a bad take. You're essentially making the claim that you shouldn't care about something unless it happens within your immediate vicinity or you are directly affected. Replace "viewed it through a screen" with "read it in a newspaper" or "heard about it from a friend" and the statement is more bad.
Revolutions have happened over less. The King of France lost his head because a small group of angry women marched on his palace, changing the course of history. Even if the net impact of this event is small, it is still _important_ and worthy of awareness.
Trump almost lost his head when they kept trying to assassinate him. His head almost got exploded on live TV and it was barely a news cycle. Dems joked about how they're mad the shooter missed, then went back to pretending they're saving democracy. That's so much worse than the guys walking around the capitol building and shuffling papers, yet people only remember the date of the great January 6th nothingburger because it's the one convenient to the establishment.
I clearly cannot speak to others. I can say that in my friend circles (very left) the _two_ trump assassination attempts were taken quite seriously and we were pulling up live feeds of it within 5 minutes of it being announced.
I generally don't subscribe to the "this event is more important than the news cycles let it be" thought. Its argument boils down to strawman or quickly circles to "news bubbles are a problem".
> That's so much worse than the guys walking around the capitol building and shuffling papers, yet people only remember the date of the great January 6th nothingburger because it's the one convenient to the establishment.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of the day. Security personnel were _murdered_ in the _capital building_. Six people died. President Trump himself labeled it as the "Save America Rally". The _stated_ goal was to defraud an election. I'm sorry, I don't subscribe to your view that it was an event blown out of proportion. It is very much just as noteworthy as every Revolution Precursor I have ever heard.
As an aside, I find the comparison of the Trump Assassination Attempt and the Jan 6 Uprising as if one is more important than the other is false. Both are very much reprehensible acts of political violence aimed at destabilizing the American institution. Bluntly, they both terrify me. That one seems "overblown" says more about your political beliefs than you think.
The only way to be affected by something is to physically be present for it, right.
Liquidating stock isn't like it's going to "affect financial health" if they're at an all-time high.
Sure, but will it still be considered an all-time high in a year? Will the alternative investment even beat inflation? All I'm saying is be careful. I have experience here, having parked money outside of the market for a few years because of a gut feeling that never materialized. If you don't need in the money in the short-term, the conventional wisdom is "time in the market beats timing the market".
I assume the markets will do great in the short term until MAGA takes power and starts breaking everything. I'll miss the volatility and fade any stress. I've made a bunch of money and have no worries.
Yes it will. Just because the stock market is at all time high now does not mean it must crash down.
Paying capital gain taxes will.
Yes, and after that, buying back the same stocks at a higher price because there is nothing else to do with fiat currency.
Make 4-5% in a high-yield savings account. . .
Like by having money to do things. It might be better to put it into DJT for a couple years, but careful with the risk. I'm sure the markets will be fine short term ... until they aren't. Just as it was before ... and how it is every time modern GOP has power. They crush the economy. All red states are in the shitter. Blue states swim in $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
It's also true that MAGA wrecked our economy from 2016-2020
I hope you're not basing this off of the stock market because it was the exact opposite.
The stock market is not an accurate reflection or proxy for the economy as a whole.
All time highs don’t matter if a significant and growing percentage of the population can’t afford basic necessities of life.
The HN bubble is disproportionately impacted positively when the markets are high.
He spent like crazy to pump the market, it collapsed soon after he was out of office. Dems have fixed it like always and we're at all time highs again.
yeah im perplexed with anti-trump people state sweeping facts that are easily disproven in 5 seconds of searching
idk what you mean. trump wrecked the economy with spending. he created the largest deficit in history and doubled the debt. this caused an inflationary bubble that popped and has been repaired since. now he's back to borrow more money and double the debt again
what powers does the president have to create a deficit? what specifically did he do that doubled the debt?
i ask this rhetorically, because of course the president doesn't have these powers.
i'm not defending trump, i wish he didn't win, i just think hyperbole is contributing to people wanting to support him, because people feel lied to constantly
every single bill and order he put his name on. he literally sent checks to each citizen with his endorsement. he signed off on all the spending again to reiterate. it's all on him, especially the fraud ppp loans.
you mean the checks that both parties voted unanimously for, and the act that allowed for PPP and was also voted for unanimously, is only trump's fault? we're pinning that on him when literally every single person in the senate voted for it?
can you see why this rhetoric is tiring?
He also plans to end social security and medicaire which most seniors rely on. That's terrifying and why I've already donated to charity today.
he's still bragging about the tax cuts that cost a lot. he could have negotiated or not signed the bills and orders. they did increase debt big league.
Maybe it wrecked the economy but all my US stock done extremely well over that span of time, even excluding the big crazy bump a bunch of them had over the first year of covid.
I expect the stock market to bloat like hell for a year or two at the expense of pretty much everything else.
GE did great under Jack Welch.
The Republicans strategy is the same, extract record profits and leave everything a hollowed out piece of trash
Unfortunately I agree. With things like climate policy out of the way US stocks could end up doing very well over the next couple years at the expense of future generations, and probably the world.
Its really hard to parse out why stock prices are higher when the currency has been debased so aggressively through money printing. When adding trillions each year in new money you could easily see prices go higher simply because (a) the dollar lost value and (b) most of that new money ends up in the hands of major corporations.
You can look to CPI and inflation data to say that stocks have out competed inflation, though at least right now many Republicans and MAGA supporters don't trust anything coming out of the federal government so the CPI data isn't a metric they would use for comparison.
In my experience, there's been a surprisingly large number of conservatives the last few years that deeply distrust our monetary system. Stock prices just don't mean anything with that view.
It’s because companies in the S&P 500 have pricing power, meaning they can raise their prices to outpace inflation.
Which means if their revenue growth was going to be X regardless of inflation, it’ll still be X in an inflationary environment if you adjust for inflation.
It’s really that simple. The stock market growth always outpaces CPI growth, unless Big Business is under some other kind of threat.
Since this round of inflation came from printing money, not from extrinsic shocks (although there was a brief energy shock two years ago), you’d expect the S&P 500 to outperform CPI, which it did. It’s not ^too^ mysterious.
While I get the market effects you're talking about, it still hinges on CPI as a goal post. My point was that there's a surprisingly large number of people that completely distrust CPI or any other data coming out of the federal government.
And honestly I do understand many of the technical concerns with CPI. Dig into how the calculations are made and how much room they have to manipulate numbers between changing the basket of goods and adjusting prices to account for various factors that they deem explanatory for a portion of price changes and the CPI begins to look a lot less reliable as a long term metric.
I'd suggest prices are higher 1) because they are printing money creating the illusion of wealth 2) other countries are printing money at a faster rate 3) prices on everything are high so might as well invest in the stock market 4) the next generation can't afford a house so park money in their broker for later.
I definitely agree on the first two, less sure about the later two.
Those with plenty of money may be choosing to park it in stocks, but higher prices mean more people don't have that expendable cash. I'd be really surprised if younger people feeling the most pain from housing prices have a broker at all.
I agree but if you zoom out far enough, it's always up and to the left. Always. Consider when you might actually need that liquid capital available before panic selling everything. Hedge your bets. All that jazz.
I'm pretty much panicking over another Trump presidency, but simply selling every stock you own is almost certainly a bad idea.
First, there's a pretty good chance that whatever else goes wrong the Republicans absolutely care about keeping stock prices up.
Second, even if the market does crash, having an index fund is at least a good way to insure that you more or less keep up with everyone else. E.g. it prevents a scenario where you get dropped into a worse economic situation and then left there when things eventually improve.
And buying etfs? You’re insane if you think any dip will last more than a few months. The powers that be won’t allow it.
Stocks and ETFs are the same. I don't think the markets will dip now. They will soar until they crash.
One of the finance blogs that I read published this stat yesterday:
"Here are the total returns from the past four presidential election dates:
Election day 2008 +675% (14% annualized)
Election day 2012 +400% (14% annualized)
Election day 2016 +207% (15% annualized)
Election day 2020 +81% (16% annualized)"
-- https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/11/some-things-i-dont-...
As he says in that article, "You can believe what you want to believe about politics but those beliefs have no place in your portfolio".
here's a picture of the idea https://i.redd.it/z0ok6udsg5zd1.jpeg
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Regardless of your views on DEI, why should that be up to the government?
Because discrimination is bad and I don’t like to be told that I have to use a x race, gender, sexual orientation in the lead role of “my movie”.
The government sponsors a number of DIE programs.
Also, it can enforce a ban on the discrimination we saw at Harvard and UNC (and which pervades institutions, both university and business).
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Well, I guess that shows our collective feeling toward democracy. Is it too much to hope that USAv2 adopts a parliamentary form of government? Or is it necessary to step through an authoritarian phase first?
For the sake of my kids I’m glad we live in a blue state, so we might be somewhat insulated from the immediate consequences. Even then, I’m glad I’m a gun toting liberal and have the means to defend myself against those who wish me and my family harm.
At least 30% of any blue state voted for Trump. If you actually believed 30% of the walking public wanted to do your family harm, you'd be in another country.
You're just being dramatic because you think everyone who voted for Trump is stupid.
Try taking a different tack. Maybe over 50% of the country is not stupid and don't wish you harm? Your family will be stronger if you try to understand your fellow man.
What about me? I'm gay and they have promised to make this a christian nation - they think God made me wrong so how am I supposed to feel when he wins like this?
I'm supposed to think my fellow man has made any attempt to understand me? I'm not supposed to be afraid after they support someone who has said they want me gone??
I'm a white man in America, the most powerful country in the history of the world and I'm considering fleeing this place like a f*king refugee - it is obscene that I'm in a position to even be considering such a thing.
You're just being dramatic for the purpose of argumentation.
Trump has never said he wants you gone. It's simply not true.
I’m not calling anyone stupid. I’m saying that when they say hateful things about my daughter and her right to exist, I take that threat seriously. When they say they won’t protect me because of how I voted, I need to plan on protecting myself.
I’m just listening to what you say and believing that you really mean it.
My fellow man voted for an obvious sexual predator, felon, and insurrectionist. What more is there to say, really? People are disgusting.
Sounds anti-human.
> I guess that shows our collective feeling toward democracy.
It doesn't, it shows a majority reject major narratives that have been used. Part of that rejection of the idea that an authoritarian regime just came to power.
If you are worried about violence, consider the origin of the assassination attempts.
The desire for Trump to remain a marketable symbol without actually having him rule is one of the only taboos left. I suspect the hardest he has ever listened was when Pompeo described precisely the box he was allowed to think in.
And what of the origin of the violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election by Trump's supporters?
I'd suggest that the majority of people rejected that claim last night.
You say that but then demand we don’t call such people stupid. The actions at the Capitol were very well documented. It’s implausible that people see it for anything other than what it was. The obvious conclusion is that these people support the attempt.
I support free speech, you may call people what you like. As you say, people see it for what it was and voted that way yesterday. I do find it implausible (even radical) that the majority of people in America support a coup attempt and find it more likely that they don't believe what they see on the news any more.
> I do find it implausible (even radical) that the majority of people in America support a coup attempt
Agreed. The winner of the popular vote yesterday had only 27% support of people in America, not anywhere near a majority.
Well the voters were wrong.
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With a straight face and having factual evidence of what Trump did to the Supreme Court, you’re accusing Biden of being authoritarian? Your man is about to pardon himself rather than be subject to the same justice system the rest of us are.
Having bogus lawsuits, especially from politically motivated judges (nyc) ruins our trust in the judicial system. Forget Trump, just look at lawsuits against Elon.
The world we were born into ended yesterday - you'll see how. The world is very likely going to war bc Trump isn't going to do anything to stop them. He said he'd leave NATO - the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world that we own. He is about to dismantle our empire.
I think voting for Trump was in American. I might be arrested someday for this comment.
Lesson from election: too much wars and enabling genocide can cost you the presidency
I genuinely hope every non-racist that voted for Trump gets exactly what they want because I genuinely believe they will rig future elections so that Dems don't get the chance to take office again.
The only choice that made any sense at all. America is about to experience it's absolute Golden Age.
2026 will be the USA's 250th anniversary, we'll put men on the moon for the first time in 50+ years, and we'll land a rocket on Mars. The Supreme Court is secured for decades, immigration reform will now be swift and bipartisan, and we're moving manufacturing back to the US, including 4nm chip manufacturing with TSMC, avoiding escalation with China on that front.
We are truly living in the best possible timeline, I'm literally so pumped and excited for the future of our country and world, and I'm ready to start building for the future!!!
CHIPS act was a democrat program
Yes, and that's great, credit to anyone who supports American industry!
I'm looking forward to how much more manufacturing across different industries that this admin brings back to the States, too!
After Trump was shitting on the act, Mike Johnson said he plans to repeal the CHIPS act, but has since backpedalled.
I agree American manufacturing is important. I don't see how the Republicans voting records align with it.
Yeah, it was really impressive how a law, passed in 2022, managed to travel back in time to 2019 and convince TSMC to start applying to build a plant. It then travelled back in time to 2020 to get Arizona to approve construction. Really an impressive bit of legistlation.
Thanks for the illuminating context
Credit to them, it was a good move.
Just wish more than 1/3 of eligible voters voted for him. He doesnt represent tte country. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/10-things-to-know-202...
All the while pumping more and more carbon into the air and hurtling into bigger and bigger weather disasters.
Since 1950, the US has increased CO2 output by 102%. In that same time period, China has increased by 5,600%.
Since 2005, the US has decreased carbon output by 17%, and China has increased by 93%. They emit 124% more Co2 annually than the US does.
American manufacturing is not the issue when it comes to carbon emissions, China is.
US, stop that polluting! US Looks at China Well they started it!
It’s hard to imagine a golden age being the one in which individual liberty and privacy for the median citizen reaches an all-time low.
> America is about to experience it's absolute Golden Age.
> 2026 will be the USA's 250th anniversary, we'll put men on the moon for the first time in 50+ years
lmao this is exactly everything that's wrong, we keep looking back at the real golden age and want to do things that are now meaningless to celebrate random anniversary numbers, just "because". Putting a man on the moon today won't have a fraction of the glitter it had back then, not even 1%
Look at the future, not the past
Can the doomers relax? He is mentally unstable and egomaniac, but do you really think the US is this fregile? Have you met CEOs and politicians? most of them are egomaniacs and some are mentally unstable. If the system could not handle them in power the country would have crumbled long ago... Will it be better or worse? who knows. but definitely not OMFG ruined everything gone. Have a day off and calm down.
I think you underestimate the guy. Or do you believe that a president that orchestrated a riot on the Capitol is just a minor issue? The guy has learned a lot from his first presidency, he has had 4 years to think about what went wrong and now we're about to experience it.
Obviously, the US is VERY fragile.
Their egos are fragile, they're afraid of women, LGBT, people who don't look like the default Caucasian stock and so on.
This is why they elect idiots who don't educate them and instead play their fears because he shares so many of them.
Or they’re tired of being told their trash because they’re young white/latino males. Trump clearly spoke to them.
I think this short video explains a lot - basically the establishment Democrats look after their donors & don't do much for everyday people who are struggling economically - hence the appeal of Donald Trump who promises to shake things up & generates hope - for many voters this "trumps" his bad qualities
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYGy-Ea7jMw
He never lost. Where are the missing 20M+ voters this time around?
Covid
...missing? They're waiting for their votes to be tallied.
Harris couldn't even address her people last night. That pretty much sums up her ability to be a leader. We dodged a bullet.
No, you shot yourself in the head to spite your face.
Can we talk about how the voter turnout for the GOP and Dems both follow linear patterns in the last few races, except for Dem turnout in 2020? How do we explain the statistical anomaly, other than the obvious?
It was the obvious: Mail-in votes favor Democrats. There were more available mail-in vote systems in 2020 due to covid.
Mail-in voting favoring democrats is well known, and is why the Republican party vilifies it and and anything that may be biased toward Democrat votes.
Except, mail-in voting does not favor democrats. It was about even, and the GOP actually had an advantage in many states in both the mail-ins and the election day votes. This bit of folk wisdom is done. Republicans have embraced early voting, and it only made more GOP voters.
Ah yes, the well known fact that Democrats love using the mail more than Republicans.
Is this a joke? It's widely known by anyone paying attention that Democrats embraced mail-in voting much more aggressively than Republicans, especially in 2020.
People were much more motivated to vote against Trump while he was actively president and his nonsense was dominating the news on a daily basis.
But 4 years later? It's like making decisions when you're hungry versus the memory of hunger...
What's obvious? It was a weird election coming out of COVID. Trump also received a huge amount of votes, maybe more than he'll get this time. Should we investigate him now since Harris is back down the 60s? Where did all her votes go?
Trump is on track to receive about the same amount. Maybe a bit more than 2020.
I'm being downvoted into oblivion for stating "the obvious" elsewhere in this thread. Look, I don't know if they actually stole it, but after last night, many people is having your exact same thoughts. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever from a statistical standpoint.
Right, and once you accept that it's a possibility, the J6ers go from being criminals, to American heroes.
Yeah, I never believed any of the "stolen election" diatribe, but after last night, I'm actually starting to change my mind on that. I now think it's actually very possible.
I don't buy it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There were investigations by the GOP into 2020 voter fraud for the last 4 years, and nothing of note was discovered. To go from that lack of evidence to large amounts of fraudulent votes is a bit much for me.
Other explanations could include things along the lines of unemployed people/people at home (COVID) having more time to get into politics. Or, this election cycle burning them out, or Gaza, or all of the above and more.
For prosecution, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As Americans think and look back upon the course of history in deciding whom to vote for, really their own gut feeling is all that is necessary. I mean, we all know that people like Al Capone tread very carefully to avoid any direct criminal liability. Yet, we all knew he did it, despite the lack of incontrivertible evidence that was admissible in court.
> For prosecution, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I was thinking more along the lines of, for me to believe the claims.
No prosecution would have been necessary outside the court of public opinion. I mean if there is fraud, prosecute it no matter who did it. But Trump hired an investigator for the news cycle, and the guy found nothing.
There have been so many investigations at the state (especially Georgia with Rs in control) and federal level that have surfaced no evidence.
Notice also the lack of sudden 100% Trump vote drops and the lack of sudden shifts. Instead the election went off like literally every other election in our lifetime where most states are called on election night, and those that aren't are pariahs and we're all left wondering what the hell are they doing?
No 'pipe leaks'. No videos of counters covering up windows. No sudden last minute rule changes. It was... unremarkable and normal.
I think this is going to go down like the Kennedy - Nixon election where the allegations of fraud seemed made up at the time, but a few decades later, after we've calmed down about the candidates, we will uncover the truth. Whether it was enough to shift the 2020 election ... who knows, but the truth has the habit of coming out eventually.
I mean 20 million people sat at home? Really? That's an insane amount.
Well over ten million votes are still yet to be counted on the West Coast. Is there a reason why you haven't considered this? If you add uncounted votes then the total count is only 5 million less than 2020. Such swings have certainly happened before between adjacent elections, such as from 2000 to 2004.
As of your post, several millions of ballots have not been tallied (half of California, for example).
I would assume Trump has improved his margins in California. When I visited my in-laws a few weeks ago (hispanic immigrants with a huge family), many had voted trump and trump fervor in the town (Santa Maria) was higher than ever.
You mean 100% Biden/Harris drops.
Yes, in 2020 there were 100% Harris/Biden drops, but I am saying that this election, I don't know of any 100% Trump drops in counties with thousands of votes. That's why there's no contesting here.
That's right, there were no 100% Trump drops in 2016, 2020, nor 2024.
I salute my brothers in Istanbul, the argentinean peso and turkish lira will fall, but they will have each other again.
The game we have now is you win by the most voters, might as well be the most voters to sit on a scale and weigh more, wins. It is Mob rule. A significant portion of the electorate has no real idea of what is being asked, nor if its true, just that it sounds good. And we will never get good governance out of that.
Can everyone acknowledge that this would have been flagged out of existence within minutes if it had been a story about the opposite result?
edit: acknowledging that I was wrong about this.
"Can everyone acknowledge" is such a weird phrase, just like "can we all agree". No, we can't, this isn't how things work, everyone has a right to their own opinion etc.
And it wouldn't have been flagged out of existence, see this post from 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967
Ok, I'll acknowledge that I'm incorrect about this.
I don’t think that’s true. I feel like we get an allowance of one of these posts per election if you go back in HN history.
Ok, fair enough. I was going from the assumption that political posts generally are removed from hn. But, clearly there's just some nuance that I didn't recognize.
I appreciate you acknowledging this. Something not done enough. Thanks a ton!
It was actually flagkilled almost immediately, but was eventually revived. I assume this particular one was picked because it was the first article posted about the topic.
There were posts left up on many divisive issues with a "Be kind" message on them. I think what you are thinking of is a "election stolen, storm the capitol" posts :)
With the greatest of compassion and respect: America - get a fucking hold of yourselves, would you please?
Hijacking this to express my admiration towards the people developing and running HN: 7k comments in a single page. You did it. Normal HTML+CSS+some JS scales insane well.
Removing Lina Khan and Gary Gensler from their positions will do wonders for the tech industry.
Lina Khan has been fantastic imo, even for tech. I think she forces companies to compete where we actually want competition, and not let us rely on insane levels of lock in
Such as preventing Microsoft from buying Blizzard to prevent a monopoly on checks notes... video games? :-)
If you're worried about a 'monopoly' on Call of Duty, then I guess it's great. Otherwise I sincerely don't understand why the tech community would be supporting the FTC policies of the past 4 years.
Her strategy denies liquidity in the startup ecosystem. The very thing that enabled sillicon valley to become what it is. Generations of founders moving on and create new companies in new markets.
If you disagree what are the examples?
Yeah. Tech employees and tech companies themselves are consumers of other tech. Lina Khan was what we needed for a long time, and it's a bad thing for everyone that she will be unable to finish what she started.
Won't be great for consumers though, at least Khan.
He has not won yet. Perhaps there may be a last minute change.
If the results remain roughly where they are now, then that is one important positive outcome.. and I would say exactly the same if the election had gone the other way.d
If it had been as close, or closer than last time, then who becomes presient is nearly random, as WP once wrote, and an enormous amount of drama would ensue. Which it might still do depending how tight the swing states are.
As it looks now it will be a solid win.
The odds of a reversal are so low now, it's practically useless.
Even if recounts or whatever showed the results were changed they would be challenged in the courts until eventually Trump's supreme court would hand him the win anyway.
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There is an "electoral college", whatever that is for.
Democracy keeps giving both sides a chance, meanwhile both sides always complain about the end of democracy when the other side wins.
Another curious thing on both parties, when they lose they always ask "why did the other side win?" instead of trying to understand why their candidate lost.
And the pendulum keeps swinging.
I think Americans should evaluate their personal responsibly for this shameful event. You had eight years to do something about this man.