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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, for starters, a response that would have worked won't involve both of these contradictory positions at the same time:
Position 1: That's not how inflation works. Just because inflation is low doesn't means price is low. In fact, prices will never go down unless inflation is negative. That would actually be "deflation." Now, I know none of this makes sense, but "deflation" will actually cause this terrible thing called a deflationary price spiral, which will cause the economy to implode completely. So, for this technical reason that you couldn't possibly understand, 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. We will just force stores to lower prices and reverse inflation and it'll work this time. All good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
>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.
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.
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?
>> 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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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'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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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".
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.
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.
> 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?
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).
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.
"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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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?
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".
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.”
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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?"
> 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.
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?
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)
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
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.
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).
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 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.
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."
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.
Good. We don't need more of wasteful policies such as the FTC trying to block Microsoft from buying Blizzard because it would supposedly "create a monopoly on videogames". The FTC should _only_ intervene into essential monopolies such as water supply or electricity supply companies, not random tech stocks like Adobe buying Figma. Adobe having a 'monopoly' on software for designing websites is... not a big deal, such software is not essential.
Lina Khan's policies were very harmful for the tech sector and I think we should all be happy that her ideas will not have space in the upcoming administration.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FYI, the map looks horrendous for democrats after the 2030 consensus. Estimates give Texas +4, Florida +3, and various other southern states +1 for a total of +12 on solid red states.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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
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.
In 2016, the Democratic voters chose Clinton by a double digit percentage margin (55.2% to 43.1%). If you think there was any interference by the party above 2008 when Obama defeated Clinton, you've been had by Russian propaganda.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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…
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...
> 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.
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.
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.”
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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'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”.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>There is nothing inherently special about Americans that makes them more democratic.
There are many aspects of America that make it uniquely more democratic than any other country could possibly be.
We can start with basic biological factors: almost every nation on earth has its sons and daughters here. There is no monoethnic familial factor, meaning there is no easy way to establish "us" vs "them" to the degree that would created extremely united collective aggression (which is most susceptible to authoritarian rule.)
The other is the basic founding and engineering of the country at conception to be a democracy.
Your choice of using the Weimar Republic, which barely existed for a decade or two is very odd. Germany was aristocratic up until then. Meaning they are much more likely to align with authoritarianism.
Society is paradoxically always democratic in the sense that if a society choses an authoritarian form of administration, _the society is democratically allowing for that._ It becomes more important to focus on control of the media, which shapes the desires of society to begin with.
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.
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.
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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)
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".
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
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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%
> 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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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'
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.
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
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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'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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
>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.
> 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.
"[picking strawberries] needs a specialized skilled workforce"
wow, this is probably the most ridiculous (i.e. funny and retarded) thing I've read on the internet today (and it's a special day, with tons of ridiculous takes!)
<< 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.
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.
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
"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?!
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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%).
> 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.
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.
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.
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]
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'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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
<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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> It would be easy to reframe such that the opposite can be just as “true, “ depending on your perspective.
No it isn't. Facts still matter.
> Trump turned out not to be working with Russia,
He was and still is. Not only has he privately talked to Putin while outside office breaking foreign law policy. But before his election multiple events happened, from his son admitting to Russian funding, to some of the initial findings of the Steele Dossier being proven to the findings of the Muller report which concluded without hesitation that there was coordination betwen Trump campagin officials and Russian officials and known spies for the Kremlin.
Reality does not stop existing because the Congress decided to not impeach someone who had inexcusable evidence against them
> Trump started zero wars, despite fear mongering that he would start World War 3
Trump exacerbated drone strikes in the middle east (with more in 2 years under him, until he stopped reporting the numbers) than in 8 years under Obama. He also gave Iran causus belli which no american goverment had done in decades to a foregin nation despite them not retaliating for Soulameni death. He allowed the expansion of Russian troops in the western front which later became the invasion of Ukraine and he moved the US embassy to Jerusalem one of the many reasons cited by Hamas in regards to their Oct 7th attack.
So all in all a pretty succesful military record of losing geopolitcal importance for america left and right and causing conflicts everywhere he touched.
> He ended the tensions with North Korea, despite pundits saying diplomacy doesn’t work with dictators.
He saluted their generals, thats not diplomacy its ass kissing. And no tensions where ended. They launched multiple missilies over Japan while he was president...
> Arguably all of that was misinformation
None of that is misinformation, you just deny reality
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.
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"?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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, 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.”
>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
> 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 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?
>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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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”
> 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 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"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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...
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.
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?
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"?
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.
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).
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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!
"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.
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].
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.
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.
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 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
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.).
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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?
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:
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 that 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
incumbents all around the world have performed terribly post COVID. UK, Canada, Japan, have all had landslide 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.
Obviously not to excuse the dems, just something to consider
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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].
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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...".
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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 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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
~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?
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.
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.
> We are not willing to agree to abortion free for all where you can just kill a fully formed baby at nine months like you can in Walz's Minnesota.
See? Ignorant, and I say that not as an insult but as an absolute statement of fact.
No woman 9 months pregnant can just go get an abortion at 9 months. The only reason that is allowed is for cases where it is medically necessary, that's it. Even in those cases, the doctor would do everything possible to save both lives wherever possible.
This is the inverse of laws like in Texas where women are dying due to not being able to abort a baby that isn't even viable at 5 months or so. Take some time to read up on these things, PLEASE.
We really have people voting because they think women can just voluntarily terminate a pregnancy a few days before they are due to give birth? What in the hell has happened to the average ability to think critically in this country?
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.
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.
You are correct, but bizarrely working class people still think the GOP is the party that works in their favor. Despite literally increasing taxes for them and giving tax cuts to the rich.
Tonight's election flat out showed that democracy doesn't work with an uneducated population.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bluntly, because trans activists are intent on forcing non-trans people to accept a fiction (people can change sex), deny biological reality, and overturn rights that women have fought for (no men in their private spaces). Not to mention influencing vulnerable children into harmful and unnecessary medical procedures. Stop doing that and almost everyone will happily leave you alone to dress and behave however you please.
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.
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.
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.
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]
> 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.
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. :(
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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'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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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]
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So much of the discussion here basically boils down to:
"Working class Trump voters are stupid and vote against their own interests"
If you assume working class Trump voters are not stupid, and genuinely explore that. You will understand why Trump won handily. And maybe you will be hopeful for the future :) MAHA!
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.
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.
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
> 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".
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.
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.
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?
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...
> 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?
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 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.
The left has been telling every white male they should be ashamed of themselves for the past 5 years
The Dobbs case made a compelling point that Roe was not accurate interpretation, such “rights” should never have been there. It’s the states decision, and now the states are giving it to voters
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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?
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 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.
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 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.
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
He's likely going to die from a heart attack or something soon (fingers crossed), but both he and Vance are sock puppets for a more nefarious movement (the Heritage foundation & co) that want to end democracy and install an autocratic government.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
Maybe. That doesn't answer my question though. I don't see how anyone can assume that just because someone won an election, they are therefore the best option. I hate to pull this card, but Hitler was elected too
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
“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?
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.
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.
> 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, 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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 indirection-layer of sober statesmen would stop a patently unqualified demagogue, and it spectacularly failed.
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?
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.
- Israel given carte blanche and a lot of support to bulldoze Gaza, strike at Iran, possible Iran war
- Ukraine defunded and demilitarized, probably going to sign over the occupied lands over to Russia under some "peace deal", pull out of Kursk, wait for Russia to gather its strength and come finish the job
- Russian sanctions lifted
- Elon looking to cut government spending - healthcare, subsidies, defund EPA, OSHA, FBI, other federal agencies
- Anti abortion law possibly being implemented on a federal level
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
The only people I've ever heard talk about project 2025 were those that were voting for Harris. When I've brought it up with Trump supporters I know, they've mentioned that Trump has distanced himself from it.
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
'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.
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.
- 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.
> 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?
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"
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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%
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Pretty much. The country loudly said a few things. The economy is shit for me. Women do not belong anywhere near power and her place is in the home. No one is buying any of the trans ideologies. LGBTQ is acceptable if you keep quiet about it.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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!).
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".
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.
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.
"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..
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Republicans perhaps have got value, Trump has got enormous real world value/benefit because of Musk's ownership. However unless Musk is actually able to capitalize using the Trump presidency enough to recoup the $44Billion cash he spent he hasn't got his money's worth it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Total failure. As an european, its truly AMAZING how you could vote for someone like trump. The poor will get poorer, the dumb dumber and womans rights? Out the window. Leaopards will eat LOTS of faces in the coming 4 years.
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!
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
From outside the country. No it’s not what the dems did. This is not some wisdom of the crowds lesson.
You’re debating a higher level of Maslows economic and social hierarchy but are risking lower levels. 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.
You break it, you bought it. This is not dem leadership’s fault, it’s your choice. Own it. This is the rule of man over law and it diminishes you.
After 9/11 we were all Americans. The shining light to be defended. Our best. Now, I’m sad. It’s not the dems. It’s you.
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.
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 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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"Drooling fucktards" is being polite. "Fascist scum drooling fucktards" is more accurate. On the right they literally think that all democrats are worshiping Satan. To believe that Democrats are worshiping Satan requires someone to be a "drooling fucktard", but to vote for someone like trump means you have to also disegard every bad thing he's done, and also history and how fascists have come to power in the past, or they are just into fascism and prefer that kind of thing.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.