People are under-reacting. People think that laws and traditions and checks and balances will save us, but they won’t, because unless both sides operate in good faith or fear that overstepping will hurt them more than it helps, laws are just words on a page. We’ve had a great run, everyone basically agreeing to abide by laws and traditions, but once that stops, it’s evident that our institutions cannot withstand fascism and fox news.
If there were a democrat that were even 1/100th as bad as Trump is, you would be outraged and shitting your pants and calling for doom for the country. If Obama said that he was going to be a dictator, or that you wouldn’t have to vote again, or any of the things Trump had said, you’d be losing your mind. But because you’re an enabler, and you view him as being on your team, oh, it’s just politics. Everyone is being histrionic. No big deal. You can’t take a guy who shows every indication of being a fascist going on a revenge tour seriously.
We had our chance to fight when Trump was president the first time, and we had a chance for a last stand after Jan 6, and we did nothing. We proved that there’s no fight in this country and while Trump’s first term was listless and incompetent, this one they’re going to hit the ground running with a 900 page plan for fascism and Trump extremely motivated to punish his “enemies”, including around half of the American people.
The justice department should’ve gone hard after Trump and everyone involved with the plot. It should’ve been a watershed moment of real consequences. Instead, we got a few slaps on the wrist and the message that they can keep trying until they get it right.
Turns out they didn’t even need to – this country is full of people who are so fucking ignorant, stupid, and evil. But they would’ve executed a second coup if Kamala had won.
But by not going after them, we cemented that idea that there’s essentially no justice for powerful people, that breaking American norms like respecting the law and democracy will have no consequences, and that anyone is free to launch any coup they want without fear of consequences.
They were stopped, and the indictments were ongoing. Note the the Supreme Court ruled that trump had absolute immunity for official actions. And many of the lesser people were convicted and sentenced.
But a few more felony convictions would have done ZERO to stop trump from getting elected.
Go ahead and read that thread, understand what Exapno_Mapcase, Aspenglow and others said, then come back here and explain what the Justice dept could have done that would have “protected us from trump”- becasue if you read and understand you will see the answer is- they did what they could, and nothing they could have done would have 'protected us from trump".
Can’t say it better myself. I didn’t think it would be a landslide for KH, but fuck me, I guess I was in denial over how uneducated and selfish a great deal of Americans are.
We were told over and over that women voters outnumbered the men, they were more likely to vote, and they were really angry about Dobbs. But apparently not enough women were angry enough to vote against the man responsible.
Indeed, that’s probably the most depressing part of all. Trump isn’t the problem, he’s a symptom – a magnet for all the crazy in the nation. I have no patience with analysts engaged in intellectual post-mortem dissection of the American political psyche. Half the population are low-information morons, end of story. As I’ve said before, the reason most other western democracies don’t have this problem isn’t because the population is biologically smarter, it’s because they have a much greater share of responsible journalism and publicly funded quality media. Also to some extent because they typically have a different history, less imbued with racism and violence.
Yes, I thought Harris would win, largely on the basis that (a) American voters couldn’t possibly be that stupid, and (b) the alternative was unthinkable. And here we are. I imagine this is what it must feel like to be happily driving along down the road and suddenly losing control, your shocked horror suddenly seeming to see everything in slow motion as you know with certainty that you’re about to be in a very serious accident and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
As a resident of one of these other democracies, I think your diagnosis here is not quite on point. Yes, the quality of our journalism is better, but that’s a result of other social and cultural factors, not a cause. There is certainly a positive feedback effect: there is demand for better journalism from better educated, better engaged people, and this in turn supports education and engagement. But it isn’t, by itself, a primary driver.
More important, I think, is the political framework that permits and encourages multi-party representation. America’s two-party system causes politicians to gravitate toward the fringes, seeking loyalties among increasingly polarized voters, while leaving behind great masses who perceive no opportunity for representation and simply check out of the process. In a healthy multi-party environment, by contrast, any group that strays too far from reason usually finds itself marginalized as voters are free to switch to any of several alternatives.
This is obviously not guaranteed, as the rise of the far right in Germany and Austria shows. There, we’re seeing consolidation on the right which counterbalances fragmentation from center to left. It remains to be seen whether this trend continues, or if some sort of resistance coalition can be cobbled together, as is being attempted in France. But as a general dynamic, it’s a lot more stabilizing than the bipolar divide in the US.
I also must call into question the assertion that Europe has seen less violence and racism than the US. Until very, very recently, the history of Europe is nothing but violence, sometimes on a terrifying scale, that the US hasn’t experienced since its Civil War. It’s exactly this bloody background that motivated the formation of the EU and serves as continuing incentive for favoring diplomacy over open conflict.
And racism? It is to laugh. The European colonial projects in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere were racist in the extreme, and their echoes continue to this day. I was walking around a regional festival not too long ago and found myself looking at a statue featuring an appallingly grotesque caricature of a far-eastern military figure. And just a couple weeks ago, in Paris, we attended an Asterix retrospective celebrating artwork including representations of African tribal figures that would provoke riots if shown in the US.
I do agree that our democracies, while being imperfect in a range of ways, are, broadly speaking, meaningfully more healthy than the political framework in the US. But I must contest your argument as to why.
But your example (reporting on polling data showing black men moving toward Trump) isn’t an example of the media playing up a “minor Harris flaw,” it’s an example of them pointing out a public opinion shift that the Harris campaign needed to pay attention to. It would in no way help Harris for them NOT to report on that sort of thing. We should all have been paying attention to that information!
As for me, I won’t say I thought Harris would win, because it was clear the whole time that it was going to be very close and she was coming in with some significant disadvantages, but I did hope she would pull it out, because I figured people would remember why they didn’t like Trump as he got more and more exposure, and I was having a hard time seeing why he would be picking up new supporters who hadn’t voted for him just four years earlier, especially after J6. I was wrong.
I do indeed think that wouldn’t have been repeated. Because the security around the Capitol would have been 30x more reinforced this time than last time on Jan-6, and Trumpers already saw how the last insurrection went nowhere.
A lot of polls, surveying maybe 1000 people who still answer the telephone, showed Harris with a 1% lead in many swing states. (Trump swept all seven, this means poll was, say, 503 to 497. Meaningful? There were no huge polls. The question pollster asks is very relevant.
Much depended on who came out to vote. Perhaps social media better motivated Trump supporters.
45% of women (?) voted Trump so social issues might be less important than the economy.
If you think the economy is doing well, the Biden-Harris group perhaps failed to articulate why in a way that undercut Trump’s message.
If you think the economy has done badly despite record markets. perhaps you are in the majority with few investments. Inflation and getting by is your economic concern, not stock prices.
Many people are just angry. Trump gives some people permission to rationalize the irrational in a way society does not always do.
It is easy to blame others.
Trolling makes dumb people feel smart. Some democrats believe education or progressive views make you smart.
“I was a lifelong Democrat for years. I put together a local convention and wore my best suit. I’m a middle-aged, middle class father with two kids. Speaker after speaker came out talking about program after program to educate immigrants. For women. For this group and that one. But then I thought, where is the program to help guys like me?” (Some guy in a recent newsmagazine.)
Not enough… humour? Getting out the voters? Winning over the poorly educated? Other influential groups?
It is not true that his base, aware of Trump and his problems yet still sticking with him through the years, would be easily persuaded.
Polls showed the election to be a coin toss. At the last minute The Economist predicted 56% Harris, not high. The change of one person candidate sweeping all swing states was 30% and a similar change was for the Republicans sweeping all three races.
You raise some good points but I think this one quite misses the mark. The two-party system isn’t great but it’s not fundamentally the problem, nor is it unique to the US.
I disagree with your assessment that the two-party system represents ideological extremes that has created divisiveness and left great masses of centrist voters unrepresented. I don’t think that’s what’s happened at all. In the past 50 years, American politics has shifted significantly rightward, and this has accelerated even further in the past decade. The Democratic party has shifted from being left-leaning to being centrist-conservative, while the Republican party, already on the fringes of the far right, has shifted off the scale into complete loony-land. The divisiveness we see today is not a battle between liberalism and conservatism, it’s a battle between reason and insanity, between truth and lies, between rational democratic governance and outright fascism.
It’s true that progress has been made in the area of LGBTQ rights, but that’s a rare exception to the general trend, and it remains to be seen whether that will stand in the current political climate or if it will fall just like Roe v Wade, a stunning example of how far to the right this country has shifted. None of this has anything to do with the two-party system.
To take an example of a political system I know well, the federal system in Canada, there are technically five federal political parties significant enough to hold at least some representation in Parliament, but in modern history only two of those parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, have ever formed a government at the federal level. So if you’re voting for a government, those are the only realistic choices, and it’s produced neither the divisiveness nor the extremism the US has seen. Some European countries have so many political parties that they frequently have to form governing coalitions, but this is far from the norm among modern democracies.
(Aside: The Canadian NDP, Liberals and Conservatives are, by global standards, essentially moderate centrist parties. Their policies and priorities differ. Not by that much, really. So the lack of division in Canada, sometimes more regional than political, but changing, is not surprising.
The left-right spectrum from where people sat down at the Estates-General before the French Revolution is not very accurate at describing current politics. It isn’t unusual for the Liberals to be to the right of Conservatives on many issues or vice versa. No further comments on this will be entertained in this thread though.)
Mine was simple.
Biden got 306 votes
Even if two swing states flip she still wins 270+ EVs
Thing is, every swing state was so damned close but went Trump
This aside actually raises an important point pertinent to US politics and to this last US election in particular. The amount of divisiveness that different ideologies can create is inherently limited if all political parties are reason-based and base their policies on facts rather than self-serving propaganda and scare-mongering.
Trump won essentially on a vast pile of lies that voters were stupid enough to believe – that immigrants (even if legal residents) were a threat even when they’re a net economic positive, that the economy was terrible even when it’s great and the stock market is at record highs, that Biden was somehow personally responsible for high inflation even as the Fed cuts interest rates because the US is managing inflation better than the rest of the world, that coal and oil are the future because global warming is a “hoax”, and on and on. Thus do demagogues always rise – on a platform of lies. I thought Harris would win because I couldn’t believe so many Americans could be so gullible.