Kamala Harris running a damn near flawless campaign, with just a month 1/2 of campaigning. She’s been holding rallies nonstop with Tim Walz & not making her talking points about her race or gender like Hillary. She’s offering expanded healthcare, reinvestments back into public housing, wants to take on corporate greed, protect reproductive rights and chose a pro labor, pro education running mate.
Yet, she’s either barely leading or ties in most polls with a guy that:
Is a convicted felon.
Liable Sexual Predator.
Gets sentenced in November.
Has several more pending cases.
Increased Drone Strikes by 300%. (Joe Biden dosent use drones anymore).
Illegally killed an Iranian General unprovoked with a missle strike.
Increased tensions in Israel/Palestine with the Abraham Accords.
Wants war with Mexico (his words).
Tried to coup Venezuela.
Will bend the knee for Netanyahu’s potential war with Iran.
Lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% (lowest in history).
Obvious tax cuts for the rich.
Told people to drink bleach during the pandemic.
Is the main driving force for America’s current division.
Constantly attacks marginalized groups.
Tried to steal the 2020 election (Find Me 11,000 votes in GA).
Did Fake Elector Slates to pressure Mike Pence to not certify the 2020 election.
Caused a riot on the capitol that lead to his OWN supporters dying.
Just got washed by Harris in the last debate, was completely unprepared on anything but immigration (“I have concepts of a plan”).
And so much more. So seriously what is it? Is it just the attraction to bigotry/racism? Is it to end “wokeness”. Is it because Kamala is a woman of color? You can’t use the both sides argument like Hilary or Biden, Kamala is the obvious better choice. Could you imagine if Kamala had as much baggage as Trump? The media would lose their minds.
Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?
If the race were between The Literal Devil ® and Jesus Christ (D), the vote total would be 45%-55% just based on the letter they choose to run after their name.
Policy doesn’t matter when people base their entire personality on their political party identification.
Jesus was a socialist Jew. We had one of those run for President, too, but couldn’t make it past the Democratic primary.
But see how evil he looks…
/s
If you completely forget everything about Bernie; who he is, what he’s done, how he speaks, everything; he does look like a CEO who would lay off half his staff for a discount on a sandwich. But thats more because he’s an old white guy in a suit and they all look like that
He has joyful eyes
He got my first D primary vote… but NOT MY LAST.
Amen, preach it!
needs more puppies and rainbows
Jesus is a Mexican name. Check mate.
Closer to 50/50 with the electoral college.
And it pisses me off that people will vote for the dipshit because he’s an R, but i would vote for a half-dead horny toad on the other side.
Like the real Jesus would run as a Democrat. At least with the Devil you know where you stand! /s
Nothing I’ve read has ever explained Trump’s appeal like this article.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
Nothing in there makes a cute soundbite. “They’re racist!”, is far easier than having to digest what the author lays down.
Seriously, read it. It’s important.
It’s a good article. It explains rural America. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in Huntington Beach CA. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in suburban Inland SoCal. It doesn’t explain rich privileged shitheads like Musk and Thiel.
People like Musk are cynical, attention-seeking manipulators and narcissists. They aren’t afraid that their way of life is being threatened, they’re using the fears of others to further their own ends, and consider themselves above it all.
That article was the most cogent take I have seen on this subject. I have a similar cultural background (rednecks and urban, religious Polish-Americans), but see myself as a science-literate atheist. I have seen this first-hand, but wasn’t able to articulate it as well.
Those guys just don’t want to see the US go the way of Europe where scorched-earth capitalism has been tamed and extreme wealth is taxed extremely. They are wealthy beyond avarice and STILL don’t feel they are free because they come up against regulations and institutions.
They capitalize on the rural Trumpism because it is the path most likely to lead to unchecked capitalism. Remember, the US isn’t like Europe - yet. And It will take a lot of work to get it there. All those rich guys need is a government that will do nothing. So not only is tax-cut Trump their friend objectively, he creates chaos. And chaos prevents action. Rancorous divisiveness means a logjammed national agenda. Which is all they want: no action. Look the other way while they rape the world.
I remember reading this and thinking it had some points. Then I remembered that despite having some of the same issues, we have vastly different responses. When I’m lied to and beaten, I don’t look to the person that did it for help.
For instance, the church being the only social space. They could have a community center or a library. Sure funds are hard to come by but what kind of political party would even consider that? The answer is probably further left than democrats but fifty years of red scare won’t let anyone accept that.
The “writing them off” part comes from their willingness to not ostracize evil people when they get something they want. We can all be bullheaded or blinded by bias from time to time but accountability and decency shouldn’t be political.
I feel like this is just gift wrapping being a dumb racist hick in prettier paper. They are scared of cities because their full of black people, gays, and Mexicans. They like assholes who show the same level of hate as they do - who will keep the black people, gays, and Mexicans away. And they like someone who justifies hiding behind religion so they can tell themselves that God made them this dumb and rascist. So they can delude themselves into thinking they are really the good guy.
Funny how you made exactly the comment the article predicted within itself xD
Great read. There’s 70+ million people out there choosing to vote for Trump, why? Even if the answer is complicated you can’t dismiss them all outright.
I see a decent amount of comments painting all republics with one brush. I think it’s low effort and unproductive.
Good read thanks
Good read. Thanks!
Good. Read, Thanks!
The problem with that argument is that 80% of people live in cities. There are not enough rural people for them to be a majority of the Republican party.
In america, land votes more than people. We have the electoral college, the senate, and gerrymandering. Rural areas by design have wildly outsized power. This was done intentionally to preserve slavery
We have the electoral college, the senate, and gerrymandering.
The outsized effect of the EC and Gerrymandering have a very simple fix. I wonder why Democrats never talk about it?
I mean it’s definitely an interesting read. I’m just not sure what to actually do with this information. The fundamental problem feels like a generally small bubble, and at times a specific disinterest in venturing outside of it. If anyone’s whole worldview is shaped entirely by their tiny rural hometown, it’s easy to understand why others with radically different backgrounds feel scary.
But at the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like a good enough reason to drag the rest of the country through rigid christofacist moral dogmas and support the industries that prop up those small towns at the expense of the planet as a whole. But as long as those people aren’t interested in venturing outside their communities and meeting other different people, im not sure how to convince them of this.
Maybe if the cost of living becomes too untenable in major cities and work from home continues in certain industries rural areas will see more growth and this will improve somewhat? Idk
What to do with it is to act understanding and empathetic with people like that instead of standoffish and hostile. You still insist on the better way of doing things, but there’s no actual need to attack anyone that doesn’t support the better way of doing things, even if their reasons aren’t rational or even morally questionable/bad. It only serves to further entrench them in their positions, while the opposite might have a chance to happen in a more cooperative approach.
That was from before we knew better. We’ve seen since then that it is indeed racism and hatred that powers the Republican base. That’s why the GOP doesn’t need to have any real policy laid out anymore. They just have to promise to hurt the “right” people this time around. Any sane Republicans that existed then are voting Democrat now.
This explains a demographic analysis without explaining anything meaningful or unique. The article could be about any post-Regan Republican campaign (such demographic analysis is used by all modern campaigns, on bith sides), so it wasn’t a satisfying article. Combined with all the pop culture references, it comes off as quite immature and an unextraordinary explanation. Mediocre.
Jason Pargin is a goddamn hero.
Fun piece. I don’t know about best explanation ever.
It starts out talking about how movies idealize simple honest people from the heartlands (Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Braveheart) but then says:
the whole goddamn world revolves around them. Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes
So which is it? Does pop culture feed rural America’s sense that it is “Real America” or does it make them hillbillies?
As if explaining politics through TV and movies isn’t reductive enough, it can’t seem to keep its own story straight for ten paragraphs in row.
That was an amazing read. My hometown was really similar, though maybe not as desolate. Lucky there was a college town close by so we could shop at some place that wasn’t Walmart. This really does sum it up, though, the appeal of Trump out of these smaller rural communities. I like the message at the end, too. Thanks for sharing. 🙏
That’s an interesting point of view.
I would love to but the amount of ads on that article make it absolute cancer on my phone.
An add every other paragraph. It’s fucking gross. And yes. I am using addblockers.
I remember the summer of 2016, when I was playing Pokemon Go in the parks and people I had never talked to and that lived nearby were playing it next to me. We were all celebrating when we caught a pokemon when we were after, and comparing which ones we’d caught with each other.
At the time I thought…who would buy Trump’s conman routine? Who actually thinks that the country is in a terrible enough place that we need to elect this person who seems to actively hate the country and seemed to want to set the entire thing on fire?
I left my Californian home and went back to my original state to visit my family. We went to several different areas of the state in fall of 2016 because my wife was from a rural area and I originally grew up in a slightly more suburban area. I saw the signs in the yards, I saw the discontent, and I saw how people did not seem to be reacting the same way to his craziness. I saw how casually they would put on his rants in the background while talking about other issues. I saw how some of them were amused by his antics. It had been a couple of years since I had last been back and it once again struck me how much worse the area appeared to be from the last time I was there. I was in a rural area when the “Access Hollywood” tape dropped. People seemed to visibly shrink at even the mention of the news. I thought he was done for, and that this was a bridge too far for his supporters to cross. That people would vote third party, or not vote at all. I did not get the sense that my thoughts were shared by those around me.
When I came back to California, people were talking about the debates. It was sunny and nice out, and people would talk about the projects they had going on in their houses, or they’d talk about work related affairs. People were sometimes amused by Trump’s antics, but everyone uniformly thought it was impossible for him to win the election. Having seen what I had seen in the weeks prior, I was no longer one of these people. “They’ll never let him win”, one of my co-workers said. I was stunned…who are “they”? Does the rest of the country actually believe this?
It turns out quite a few of them did. Many people thought there was just simply no way that Trump would win, because either the system was already rigged against him and would not allow him to win, or because the country was just not in dire enough straits to elect such a madman (as I once thought).
Hindsight is 20/20 but when I thought it was bizarre that he was even a viable candidate at one point in 2016, and I saw the decaying state where I grew up, I thought “if he wins the election, then we are in a much worse state as a country than I thought”. And we undoubtedly are.
Of course he won, but the reason that I have this somewhat rambling response to this question is that the answer to “why is he still in the race?” ultimately comes down to the overall state of this country.
He is in this race because this is where we are as a country: barely able to imagine a possible future that is brighter than the present, because we are still caught up in degenerative non-sense that keeps us thinking that our broken down towns, and our poor social bonds are caused by some horde of “others” instead of their true causes: our ever-widening wealth inequality, our ever-decaying moral responsibilities to each other, and our national instinct to absolve ourselves of our responsibilities by claiming that not only is it correct to be forever self-serving, but that even the idea of altruism is a lie.
even the idea of altruism is a lie.
Wow. You’re right. Helping others is as politicized as abortion. One of the tribes can’t even fathom uplifting their neighbors because that could be equated to socialism and it would get them kicked out of their in-group.
I rmember stephen colbert’s face lol
Elections in America are all about vibes. People who care about facts are nerds.
I’m actually curious.
Are there countries (ones that have a voting system) where it isn’t all one big popularity contest?
I’d say here in Germany it is mostly a unpopularity contest.
Ireland uses a variant of ranked choice voting. In essence, voters get a list of candidates for their voting district, and rank as many of them as they want in order of preference. When votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated, and votes of those who ranked the candidate first are distributed to their second choice. Rinse and repeat until only as many candidates remain as there are open seats in the constituency.
There is still some inertia, especially in rural areas (“my dad always voted for this candidate, so I’ll vote for his son”), but the system still lends itself to more informed voting. From what I’ve seen in other countries, on average Ireland does a better job at electing more reasonable candidates than the US or EU countries.
No
Yes, but we’re taught that those democracies don’t count because they’re non white.
As I understand it only the US, UK and countries like Russia use first past the post these days.
I live in Taiwan and met a guy yesterday who is moving to Taiwan because Austin is a “liberal hell hole”.
When pressed on any issues about Trump, his answer was that Biden is worse than Trump. When I asked about Harris, he just mentioned she will just copy Biden.
The funny thing is that Taiwan is by far more liberal and more progressive than Austin Texas. He seemed to like the universal healthcare and the many social services. He didn’t mind the high corporate taxes companies have to pay.
My assessment is that he is only basing his vote on vibes and feels alone. Judging from the conversation, he is more of a Bernie supporter.
I know they say don’t judge a book by its cover but your friend sounds like he ate glue sticks in elementary.
This guy has a master in mechanical engineering and is self teaching himself Rust l. Dude isn’t dumb. Just misguided and brainwashed.
True, I’ve met my fair share of smart people who end up falling off the deep end. I think it has something to do with generational trauma. Some people seem to have a much easier time recognizing the faults in how they were raised than others.
Very true.
Have you considered that you actually found a tankie in the wild?
I’m going to give this guy the benefits of a doubt. He sounds more misguided and brainwashed wrapped into a heavy dose of tribalism.
I watched a bunch of YouTube videos of a psychiatrist talking about Trumpism and how to undue the brainwashing. I’m going to continue to hang out with him to see if I can wake him up.
他會說中文嗎？
他一句都不會講
Many Conservatives have been conditioned to stop looking for facts and believe what the TV tells them. Trump admitted as much during the debate. When challenged on the cat thing, he dismissed the reporter’s research and said that he believes it because he saw it on TV. His voters will, too.
Roger Ailes was Nixon’s media consultant during Watergate, and the lesson he learned was that if the media was on Nixon’s side, he could have gotten away with it. Ailes went on to run Fox News. That is no accident.
It’s honestly madness.
The former President, running a multi-million dollar campaign, with access to the best information in the world, has nothing to say but rambling “but the TV said, but the TV said!”
Just an absolute fool.
But he’s always been like this. He had the world’s largest intelligence apparatus at its service, but didn’t believe what they said when it contradicted what his buddies Vlad and MBS told him.
Oh I agree, you just want to believe that even the world’s stupidest person could eventually learn something. It’s not like this is a case of him being deliberately obtuse, which we often see, he truly believes his own nonsense.
My mother in law who’s a staunch Republican told my husband that she shouldn’t have to learn anything new at her age. This is the type of people we’re dealing with. They are willfully and spitefully ignorant.
My older neighbor is like that. He was pouting off some BS he heard on Fox News and I called him on it, that it was lies. When I asked him what he didn’t like about Harris he couldn’t give me an answer. He’s not even going outside his sphere to see if what Fox is saying isn’t true. It’s pathetic and shameful.
People eat that shit up because it’s they same way they’re fed all their propaganda too. They think Trump is just like them and not some NY socialite.
Conservatives who are capable of good quality research, and honest self-reflection barely exist because those two qualities often destroy their affiliations to modern conservativism as it stands today.
So some become neocon-neoliberal hybrids, others become economic Libertarians or Fascists in sheeps clothing, but most, are just as they seem - people who feel betrayed and shut out by the prevailing liberalisms of the day (often personified in the form of an ex-wife, ex-boss, or minority on the street), and it’s something they don’t want to investigate or research honestly.
In fact, most conservatives of this “follower” ilk, are deeply and psychologically invested in their sickness, in maintaining their “honest dogma” as it explains past traumas and the state of their lives in easy and convenient ways.
Get them together in groups and it becomes a self-reenforcing system. Self-propagating. It’s a self-sustaining set of problems and problem mindsets.
Some for conspiracy theorists, gets to be a real problem when they get a platform too.
Removed by mod
That sure is part of it but don’t forget about voters. Even with all the gerrymandering and other sh*t, he does actually have a base of real supporters who can and do vote. Now the question is, how does he have supporters? I think the general answer is for decades if not generations, the Republicans have been systematically destroying public education, presumably because it’s much easier to trick an ignorant electorate into voting against their own interests than it is to trick a well educated electorate. They have been preparing for this for a long time… To really protect our democracy, we must invest in our population - and specifically in education. We need smart, critical thinkers to take this country forward.
We need to invest in our citizens, cause suffering struggling people will pick any easy option to try and make themselves feel safe. Its not just education but work and healthcare and community and local events.
Its just that we have done everything to not bother spending money and steal back every tax dollar for the rich to hold onto.
It’s seen as financially “smart” by all parties for decades now. We need to go back to trying to build society instead of deciding it’s done and getting as much money back from it.
There’s this bizarre assumption that debates shape public opinion rather than sharpen prior biases.
Liberals watched the debate and concluded Harris was normal and therefore won.
Conservatives watched and concluded only Trump is willing to speak The Truth to a hostile media and therefore won.
Undecideds don’t like either one of them for a variety of reasons. But nothing these two said on Tuesday really turned heads. It was classic Trump and classic Kamala.
I know several magahats in my family that are having doubts, not because of anything Harris said.
I think this debate was an unequivocal victory but I’m still telling everyone I know to vote
That’ll fade by election day. Trump’s strength comes from the deluge of right-wing media that bombards people. These debates are going to blotted from their brains - if not completely subverted by talk show re-edits and talk-overs - in another month.
We have the baby boomers on the edge of dying. They are afraid of it, but there is nothing that can be done - so those fears shift to other things that “could” be dealt with.
-Immigrants destroying the culture they grew up in (that culture went away for other reasons),
-Gays and trans people being happy (The closeted Senator Graham saying there is no happiness in real life - why did gays of old have to suffer and hide if it was all for not?),
-The worst economy in the history of the US! (They are in their 80s, don’t have a job, and running out of money, so it is bad for them)
-Small town on the edge of dying (because there is no jobs or amenities because they didn’t want them in their town)
Trump speaks their insecurities and offers a path to fix things that no other politician dares to go down: “Burn the system to the grown and the people you hate will be hurt”. Because modern Republicans care more about hurting the ones they hate than helping themselves, either because of self hate or a illusion that they won’t get hurt in the process.
Not= naught
FYI
The whole “small town on the edge of dying” bit. Holy shit have I experienced that firsthand.
See, what happened with a lot of these towns is that their industry became a part of their pride and culture. Where I’m from it’s coal. Trucks everywhere have a decal of a coal miner with one of two phrases. “Coal keeps the lights on.” and “6 inches from hell.”
My grandfather was a coal miner, so was his father, and his father, on both sides of my family. My father realized that the industry was dying so he left (and left us here haha). My brother did it for awhile but left it behind because of the drug problems in the mines. There was a whole underground urine market that kept things moving.
Even the poor fools who never worked in the mines go on and on about coal like it’s some kind of idol.
I would imagine the same thing happens in other places. The people fear big changes until their fear backs them into irrelevance. I’m getting older, so I can relate to that, only I vote for my kids, not to make me feel less afraid. Whatever world they grow up in won’t be one that I’d be perfectly comfortable in. It has always been that way as far back as we have been recording history. No sense in fighting where the world is going just because I don’t understand it or relate to it.
Did everyone just collectively agree to forget 2016? The polls were all favoring Clinton by a dramatic margin. CNN famously had a headline where they predicted Clinton had a 99% chance to win off of the polls.
And what ended up happening? 538 (before bought and neutered by ABC) gave the odds 65-35 or so, in Clinton’s favor. Trump ended up winning that 35%. This year, according to polls, Trump’s odds are better than in 2016. Kamala has the upper hand, but
A) lots of things can change suddenly before the election (like the Hilary emails thing)
B) polls are not the ultimate arbiter of who will win an election- actual real votes are
C) Trump more than likely has some “extracurricular plans” in store, much like Jan 6th, that has a chance of working.
Tldr: don’t get drunk on positive news. Keep a level head and you’ll see this election is still very close to a coin flip
Exactly, remind people to get out and vote
I firmly believe he’s going to lose the popular vote, the electoral college, and yet still “win” by having the assholes that filled important election official positions refuse to certify the results and have the election kicked to Congress where the Republicans have a majority of states in their control and so one state one vote means Trump wins…
Every single mother fucker better riot like there’s no tomorrow if they do this
This is what I’m afraid of too. And it’s entirely within the realm of possibility, and likely too because he’s seemingly incapable of accepting public loses. He’s going to do something, anything in response.
lots of things can change suddenly before the election (like the Hilary emails thing)
This is just hilarious to even think that this affected the election outcome after reading about all of the horrific shit Trump has done and has promised to do.
Many good points on here. I’d also suggest watching “Get Me Roger Stone”. In it, Stone basically details his secrets to getting the ‘silent majority’ to pay attention. He says that fear is a bigger motivator than love. He says that the uneducated can’t tell the difference between entertainment and politics. There’s so many lines in that documentary that will make your ears perk up and be like, damnt, this was exactly how they did it.
He says that fear is a bigger motivator than love.
He’s correct in a sense you may not notice.
Those voters fear Harris and what she represents, and love some idea of what GOP could in theory represent.
So the fact that Trump is shit means less for them as it’s on the side they love, while Harris being stronger makes them even more afraid.
That is, the best strategy for Dems to insure victory would be to successfully present Trump as having a potential to win to his own voters. Then they would care about him being a felon and such.
You lost me in the last sentence. I think what you said rings true with an exception. I don’t believe that the people you’re referencing will bother with learning how to care again. It would be a tacit admission that it was willful ignorance.
They’ll just be afraid.
This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.
There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.
To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.
Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.
An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.
The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.
Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.
Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.
A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.
I feel like a common trend is that if people generally showed more compassion for others, quite a bit would much better already. I mean for instance with vaccines, , not immediately vilifying people for not wanting the bacon, but trying to understand why. Also on the other side, antivaxxers trying to not just get pissed but trying to understand the other side. Not sure if I’m now thinking “understanding” or “compassion”, but i guess the later would be a first step to not just giving up on people, instead of getting pissed or writing them off like stupid.
But lol not gonna lie that’s hard.
I think it was easier to interact with people who made poor decision due to being illiterate on the topic because they just did the shit to themselves and that was that. Don’t get the vaccine, that’s fine. But now we are dealing with a world where every single person feels the need to not only speak their mind but scream it as loud as fucking possible.
What’s ridiculous is that we now have concepts like “canceling” someone for something they said. That the natural result of saying something stupid or bigoted. In the past people ignored you if you were an idiot or asshole. But now that people think that others should be compelled to listen we keep having platforms for obvious nonsense to be disseminated.
I think this is accurate. But I’d like to restate it.
The Left (as the apparent big tent party full of literal minorities) has been learning to deal with disenfranchisement and the feeling “that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked” for its entire existence. Because of a huge variety of factors, the Right is losing some of its influence. They are not handling this well. The Left (being well acquainted with feeling unheard) should have been able to help the Right through this transition. Due to deep seated insecurities on both sides, we are no longer able to help one another as a people. Buckle up.
This is actually a very good and nuanced reply.
We’re going through similar problems in Britain. There are a lot of people from deprived communities that suffered during the seventies (Winter of Discontent, high inflation), had their manufacturing/mining jobs and access to social housing dismantled under Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, were ignored by successive leaders (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), then suffered through austerity at the hands of David Cameron.
Meanwhile, the media had been pushing tonnes of hatred towards immigrants and to nobody’s surprise, hate crimes against Muslims and Eastern Europeans have skyrocketed. Things are so bad that we voted to leave the European Union in 2016, voted in a corrupt Tory government that pulled us out of the bloc in 2020, and given the trend of our most recent election, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we are going to vote in a far-right government by 2029 or earlier.
The culture war has been going on for a lot longer than a decade, it’s just only in the last decade or so that it’s been amped up to 11 in terms of how aggressive it’s being fought. Conservatives are almost always on the losing side of social issues that require a culture shift. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, seatbelt laws, anti-smoking laws, gay rights… the list goes on, and the fight is never quite done for some, but they always lose in the end.
The very fact that conservatives are very pro for things like coal mining that liberals are trying to legislate away create strong reasons for some people to hold their noses and vote Republican regardless of how noxious the candidate is. When their livelihoods are literally at stake and the liberal response is “Well you should have gone to college to learn a new skill or trade” it makes sense that they are corralled right into the arms of conservatives. Economic drivers are the most powerful force behind the conservative movement right now, not culture bullshit that deep down they don’t really care about. It doesn’t help that very few people understand the relationship between “the economy” as outlined by experts and “the economy” as experienced when paying for groceries or filling up their car at the pump. It doesn’t matter that conservatives almost never deliver on their promises to fix the economy and often end up sending the nation into a recession, if bad decisions on a national scale lead to temporary relief on a local scale for some, that’s what they will remember when voting next time.
Liberals need to be doing more to bring disenfranchised voters into the fold. Educating them without being condescending or dismissive would be an excellent start. Turning down the temperature in politics is not possible without also lowering the stakes, backing off of hardline positions in the short term might be the most effective way of undermining support for terrible conservative candidates.
Trump was elected in 2016 because he got on twitter and was a birther dickhead.
Democrats ran Hillary and that was just a bridge too far for some Americans.
Democrats ran an old white man in 2020 and won.
2024 Democrats are running a black woman. Is that a bridge too far for Middle Amerikkka?
Running Hillary over Bernie was the dumbest thing ever in politics, she was never going to beat Trump. Bernie would have easily won and was/is still more popular
alsmot like its all smoke and mirrors and they didn’t actually care who won, at the time. Now I think they get it but they did drop the ball, almost did this time trying to push biden.
No they pushed Hilary because it was “her turn”. If they didn’t care then Sanders would have been the front runner easily.
Then it was Bidens turn, because he’s been a career politician his entire life and a VP. That’s how those people think about these things.
Yup corruption straight up really
Obama won before and he was part black. Why would that be a problem now?
Because it nurtured the racism in a LOT of people bringing it out in the open…which led to the rise often hat orange turd in the first place, who went from a reality tv star that nobody gave half a fuck about to spewing anti-Obama shit left and right solely based on race and because he got his fee-fees hurt at a WH correspondents dinner. Large parts of the repub base are still reeling in from “black president” 16 years ago that they can’t fathom “black woman president”. Sadly there are a lot of em, and they vote
The leader of the KKK said he would vote for a black man over a white woman. Sexism has always trumped racism.
Republicans have been taught to ignore reality and give in to their hatred.
Despair is also a key party platform. The more hopeless someone is, the more likely they are to invite catastrophic change like Trump promises.
I would say that all Americans were. Republicans/conservatives overachieved however.
He’s still in it for the fascist coup.
A cult of fanatics who worship him due to his ability to let them display their complete lack of empathy as well as their extremely racist and misogynistic views.
