They elected Trump and the GOP congress. What do we have to show for that? Attempts to repeal the ACA and pass tax hikes on the middle class to fund tax cuts on the rich.
Guess who is going to vote for Roy Moore in Alabama? I’ll give you a hint. Rural whites.
Rural white areas. White. Rural non-white areas aren’t voting for plutocratic, white nationalistic, morally bankrupt politicians. Just because something is insulting doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Having said that, the dems aren’t perfect. California has one party rule. They still aren’t passing meaningful health care reform because nobody wants to take on the health industry.
Trump is a symptom if the disease and not the disease itself. In the short-term, no, I’m not hopeful at all, because the United States has an illness called conservatism that needs to run its full course. But once our immune system kicks in, once we figure out that we can do better than this, I think we’ve got a good generation or two that can really make this country work. My generation sucks - we were brainwashed by the Reagan revolution so it won’t be us who saves the world. But maybe my nieces’ generation and their children.
OTOH, they have at least some semblance of family leave. It isn’t great, but it’s at least there. And I know there’s at least a push in MA to get it on the ballot next year.
We couldn’t have that if we had more Republicans in our state, that’s for damn sure.
I’m not a fan of conservatism, but a principled conservatism is a problem I’d love to have. What he have now is just bat shit crazy, and it’s not “conservatism” to support it.
I turned 20 in 1968, so I was around as an adult for the upheaval that wracked our country then and in the years after. But I had the sense that enough good people were still in charge that the ship would right itself or at least not crash on the rocks and be lost. Even during Watergate, I never feared for the country. But now I do. Because “the call is coming from inside the house,” as it were. To continue the nautical conceit, there is no one of sound mind and good heart at the helm. The Republicans are in charge of the presidency, congress, the courts (and will continue to pack the federal court system), and the current Republican party has no care for the country, no principles except #MEMEME, and no regard for morality. The fact that millions of people support this government is alarming. Hell, I know some of these people personally and the level of their fucking stupidity is beyond belief.
Maybe in a fifty or a hundred years, the country will be back on track, but I won’t live to see it. I don’t have children or any family, and I feel sorry for those of you who will have to live through the next fifty years.
Absolutely. In Nixon’s day, there were members of the GOP in congress with ethics. Members who would not see their own country go down the toilet just to appease the ego of one crazed man.
Today? Hell, most of today’s GOP house and senate would fellate Putin on television if Trump told them to.
Basically, what we have now is Clothahump styled conservatism; It boils down to “fuck you liberals, I will burn down my own country and sell the ashes to the Russians just to make you angry”
Yes, I still have hope for the United States. The Greatest Country on Earth will eventually make a perfectly acceptable #2 or #3.
I think we will innovate our way out of this. We are the cradle of Democracy, and we take global culture into uncharted territory. We are the home of free speech, free religion, free gun ownership, free to smoke pot, free to scam your countrymen out of a trillion dollars or be a crack-crazed hobo. Pretty much free everything except health care.
What I think is going on is a consequence of our innovation. As we proceed into the early innings of the Information Age, people are confronted with way more knowledge and connectivity than they ever had before. It is coming as a surprise to rural conservatives that, say, gays have been running around off the leash so to speak for a long time, long before Obama or anyone else came along and passed a civil rights law in their favor. City people are surprised to learn how seriously some people take their fundamentalist religion, for one example. Multiply this by 100 or 1000 and people are shocked to learn what their countrymen are up to, what they really think. The nation is becoming self-aware, but the expanded consciousness makes room for a rather schizo national character.
It is a kind of spasm I think, one which will resolve itself. Speaking of connectivity, Did You Know?! lots of rural areas in the US still do not have adequate internet access. So we’re all screaming 100 flavors of bullshit at each other on here, but they are kind of distanced from it. I think a lot of rural people are somewhat jealous of others when they see all the things that are available somewhere other than where they are. So maybe try to be a little nicer to them, I think that a lot of them are dealing with sadness and don’t need it reinforced.
I think virtual reality has the potential to be an almost revolutionary technology once it becomes widespread. The potential for people anywhere in the world to have such immersive experiences of pretty much anywhere or anything else in the world can potentially assuage a lot of the isolation that leads to so many other problems. I think the experiences are still going to be fragmented more than they were during the era of 3 major TV networks, but they will be far more immersive and I think there will be a move back toward at least more common experience among the general population. I think there will be increased common understanding, even if not perfect understanding. I think people will simply process and get used to the information that is already out there.
I think things are pretty discordant right now, and people who have been left out have finally gotten a voice, and maybe don’t even know what to do with it yet. But I think there will be more harmonious times ahead.
Although there is a whiff of logic behind this pungent deposit, and I understand the thinking behind it, it’s still a bullshit thing to say.
Not only are there plenty of honest Boomers of all shades earnestly trying to make the world a little better, there are enough mean-minded Gen-Xers and Millennials of all shades currently working to screw it all up that you will be greatly disappointed if you think waiting for all the old white dudes to die off is the solution to your problems.
That said, as a proverbial concerned neighbour peering through the window, I offer my genuine sympathy to those currently suffering the anxiety of being plunged into the Bizarro World of Trumpmerica. And a hearty “damn you” to the mean-spirited and willfully ignorant wretches who take delight in mocking your concerns.
The US has survived some serious shit; while the current situation has shown some stark internal divisions and some people are happily taking advantage of them, realizing you have a problem is also the first step to solving it.
Will the country change? Yes, but that happens to all countries all the time. It’s up to y’all to get the change to be for the better.
It’s a second gilded age, tens of thousands die from lack of healthcare every year and even more go bankrupt, the infrastructure is falling apart, the rich are looting the place, and the Earth is dying, but it’s OK because Silicon Valley will fix everything and definitely not usher in a cyberpunk dystopia.
When liberals use this sort of classist, welfare shaming language to describe red states sometimes they’re trying to by-your-logic conservatives (like that ever works) and sometimes their inner reactionary is coming to the fore. I used to indulge that impulse, born from a mix of hopelessness and spite, but blaming the poor is a terrible look. Any popular resistance will require recruiting red staters en masse.
Dead people don’t come back to life, the environment is not so easily healed, and nations shattered by war carry those scars for generations. Europeans are still killed and maimed by WW1 munitions.
To some degree, what we’re experiencing is cyclical and somewhat predictable, though I would stop short of saying that it’s necessarily inevitable. My parent’s generation grew up during the WWII and Great Depression era and lived through an America that overcame long odds through cooperation, rather than just brutal, zero-sum competition. In overcoming these odds we created a very prosperous society, and in many ways, produced the highest standard of living enjoyed by any society in the history of humankind (there were exceptions of course). The WWII generation left their posterity with a comfortable material world. But subsequent generations have identified less with the kinds of cooperation that helped create this society. We’ve become consumers. We buy stuff, which is a behavior that seems to have a disproportionate influence on our identity. We’ve become more and more segmented in this way, and so it’s not surprising that we’re at each other’s throats because our differences have been increasingly accentuated over the years. This is why I’m pessimistic, because I think it will unfortunately require a shared common hardship to force us to understand ourselves and to make us reflect on our values, not just as Americans, but as humans first.
I do still have hope, and I do believe the country will survive, and maybe even thrive, after this administration and its codependent party of hookers are done with it.
What concerns me the most is that, as a country, we’re not learning from our mistakes. We’ve tried unregulated markets before … it didn’t work out well (except for the super-rich). We’ve done the tax cuts for the corporations and “trickle down” theory … didn’t work. We’ve have periods of little to no regulation and even less enforcement of environmental laws/education requirements/consumer protection laws … not great. We’ve tried the “fuck you, we’re awesome” way of handling foreign affairs … not a win. We’ve been down this road before, and yet, here we are again, with the Republicans happily driving the van into the ditch. Again.
It’s not unsalvageable. But unless some people put aside their blinders and start learning from history, we’ll be back here again in another decade or two.
Urbanites didn’t vote for Democrats who’d oppose the farm bill, rural highways, etc. but rural dwellers voted for Republicans who begrudge the urban states infrastructure and even hurricane relief. Urban politicians didn’t imply in speech after speech that rural dwellers weren’t “real Americans,” but rural-state politicians have thus slandered patriotic urbanite Americans. Like many other issues, this is not a “both sides do it” thing.