Moderating:
Attack the posts, not the posters.
No more of these types of posts.
Panicking now would serve no purpose, other than to waste the energy needed for the battles to come.
Or, to put it another way, many of us busted our asses trying to persuade people; to point out the lies and disinformation and bad faith actors. Can’t we just pause for a moment before resuming this for the next 4 years?
I think Biden is playing this right – help as many people as he can before the handover.
There’s still the Senate filibuster, you know.
very off topic.
I really hope Biden resigns on January 18 making Harris the next president if only for a day.
Moderating That post is off topic.
Stay on topic.
The o.p. spent months before the election telling us that that was election was “game over at this point” in August, that it would be a “total blowout”, and that “this race was always going to pull toward Kamala in her favor in the end” so I don’t know that I’d place much credence in his perception of the voting public and politics.
Biden is very much a conventionalist who isn’t going to dispute the results of an election that the Democrats have been insisting is as secure and transparent as any in the history of US elections. His most radical action was issuing pardons for his son and other political figures, openly expressing concern that they would be targets for persecution under a Trump regime. The response of other Democrats is more varied than the o.p. describes but it is mostly a “wait and see” just how bad things are going to be, because there aren’t really any legal or legitimate actions that can be done at this point, at least in public view.
Stranger
For perspective from eight years ago:
That was back then. Where are the massive protests this time? Any sort of protesting this time around seems far more muted and reduced in numbers than last time - again, despite Trump’s 2nd term widely being expected to be much worse than his 1st.
If the second term will be much worse, then the protests should correspondingly be much more intense. But it’s…crickets.
Protests didn’t work so good the first time. I think people are waiting to see what he actually does this time, and then figure out a way forward. Just taking to the streets to protest is fine, but it won’t solve anything, and in the short-run, might make it worse.
I don’t think Dems were lying when they said the 2nd term would be worse. But they perceive themselves to be in a weaker position now as opposed to 2016. So, there’s a little bit of fear, and some introspection going on right now, I think.
Throw in the fact that we have no power in government, there’s a lot more head-scratching by the Dems right now. But that’s not indicative of us thinking that everything will be normal. We know it won’t be.
And part of it is, this time around, no one is hoping that he’ll ‘pivot’ to being ‘presidential’ after the ‘weight of the office’ settles onto him. This time around, everyone knows he’s never going to listen to ‘the adults in the room’, so there’s no point in even trying to get him to listen.
Combine that with legitimate uncertainly as to which of his crazy ideas he’s actually going to try to implement, and it’s better to just sit back and wait to see what actually happens, and then react accordingly. Running around like crazy now just wastes time and energy.
And, based on his cabinet picks this time, as well as Elon Musk being involved, there’s not even a shred of pretense of having adults in the room: it’s all MAGA suck-ups, narcissistic billionaires, and the batshit insane.
That’s right. That about sums it up. He’s not in office yet. I can organize a protest. But I’d look like a fool at this point. Better to wait until he’s actually done some of the stuff that he’s threatening.
I think (personally) that his strategy will be to try to do massive roundups of “illeegulz” in blue cities and states, and try to provoke protests, which he will use as a pretense to unleash the military against our citizens in those blue cities/states…and then pretend he’s the voice of law and order.
I think any protest movements this time need to be much more careful during Trump 2.0 than in 1.0, because I think he and his minions are going to use them as a stage-prop for an authoritarian beatdown.
I think the consensus in this thread (such as it is) is spot on.
Liberals, including elected Democrats, made the argument throughout the election that Donald Trump was a threat to liberty and the established democratic norms of the country. They argued he would impose authoritarian policies and damage the economy. They argued he would roll back reproductive freedoms, and support federal attempts to limit women’s bodily autonomy.
Conservatives argued that none of those things were true. That Trump would crack down on illegal immigration only, boost the economy, reign in the politicization of the Department of Justice and the FBI, remove bias in the media (including social media), and leave reproductive rights to the states.
Given those two arguments, the voters elected the conservatives.
So now we have to wait and see who was right. Will Trump actually respect the rule of law, promote an effective economies policy, limit himself to legal methods of restricting immigration, and oppose federal efforts to limit abortion rights?
Then mix in quite a bit of self-preservation (particularly in the media and social media companies), and you can see why folks are more muted in the public response. We are in the “wait and see” period. But based on private conversations, I don’t think Democrats have many doubts about the direction things are heading. They are just largely in the “keep my head down and hope things can’t get too bad in only 4 years” mode (maybe only 2 if the midterms go well).
I was at those protests in New York. Huge protests nation-wide.
And they achieved fuck-all.
No reason to think they’d do better now. People have no interest in wasting their time.
Oh, you have cites! Hey look, I have some of those, too:
Stranger
Sure, and I appreciate the cites. But the scope and scale and intensity still seems significantly less than 2016, when it ought to be significantly more, given how much worse the second term will be than the first.
A country having an election with opposition party candidates on the ballot is not a guarantee of democracy. The Republican party has proven that time and time again.
No, we don’t. Look at who he’s appointed to key positions (or tried to). It’s a clown show of incompetents, extremists, and certifiable lunatics. The question isn’t whether Trump’s administration will reflect far-right ideology. The question that should be asked is whether he’s capable of rational governance at all. And the answer is “no”.
Like this?:
I don’t mean to completely undermine your point, because it is true that the sense of outrage in 2016 has muted to more of a dirgeful reluctant acceptance that this is what the electorate has decided they want and unlike the election in 2016, Trump won both the Electoral College and at least a plurality of the popular vote, so there isn’t a real basis for claiming the election to be illegitimate. And despite the fact that Trump won the election and nobody is really contesting it, what I’ve seen from Trump supporters I’ve come into contact (and especially MAGA boosters) isn’t celebration but this bizarre amplification of resentment and anger, as if they don’t realize that they got what they ostensibly wanted; almost kind of a rage that they don’t really have anyone to blame if things don’t go as expected. That, frankly, is the most frightening thing to me because they don’t have an Obama or Biden to lash out at, so they’re going to double down on scapegoating and manufactured threats, and that is a straight-line route to autocracy.
But with respect to Democratic politicians, all of the kowtowing by business interests toward Trump means that any Democrats that want to see campaign funding better grin and bear it because if they shout too loud they’re going to find their ‘war chest’ barren. I suspect that the strategically minded Democrats are just sitting back and waiting for this administration to fail to deliver (and by all evidence it will fail in many aspects, and be unpopular with many Trump supporters in other ways) rather than agitate now and just be seen as sore losers.
Trump himself doesn’t have an ideology, and certainly many of his desired appointees are completely inept, wholly unqualified, or just constitutionally incapable of even focusing on a job. But some of them are certainly coming in with an agenda and backed by particular interests. For all that Trump (and the GOP-dominated Congress) fumbled the ball during his first administration, he did accomplish a number of odious things from separating immigrant families, imposing pointless and damaging tariffs, disrupting and reducing confidence in the NATO alliance, and appointing three Supreme Court justices (as well as filling vacancies in the lower federal courts that McConnell and Grassley had been holding open), so it isn’t as if we can just expect to see four years of null activity, even assuming the ever-more distractible Trump isn’t going to go on a permanent rally tour and leave off the job of presidenting to whomever has the brass balls to stand up and grab the ring. There is no obvious Dick Cheney archetype in the wings but given a vacuum someone is going to seize the opportunity, even if it means Peter Thiel sticking his hand up JD Vance’s anus and moving his mouth parts while doing a ventriloquist act.
Stranger