And let’s do the math on that two hundred year ideal. We didn’t end slavery until 1865 and then it wasn’t until 1965 that we passed the voting rights act, our first real attempt at universal enfranchisement of all adult citizens and the Supreme Court started dismantling that act in 2013.
So we get 49 years. A proud 49 year history.
And don’t forget that the bigots, especially in certain states in a southeasterly portion, will never ever forgive the Democratic Party for putting a Black man into the White House.
Idiocracy is a eugenics movie. That’s more in line with the winner of this election.
This is darkly funny and absolutely true. I never want to hear the horseshit word “independent” used again in my life.
And the President in that one turned out to actually be competent.
I’m borrowing this from the election thread in P&E because I think it’s important here too.
Thank you for caring so much about me and my loved ones.
Thank you for the support. Frankly, I don’t think the world deserves what may be coming. It is hard to be an optimist this morning.
And they sure as shit weren’t going to let blue state America elect a black woman married to a Jew be president.
Hear me on this:
I have lived in a lot of authoritarian countries. When fascists say they are going to seek retribution against their political enemies, take that shit seriously.
[quote=“Spoons, post:26, topic:1009759”]
America stands for democracy, for freedom, for liberty.[/quote]
No, it doesn’t. This is the marketing message that America uses to make itself appear more friendly. America’s true values are greed and unfettered capitalism. If at any time there is a conflict between the propaganda and the true values of America, the true values win out. As they just have, yet again.
Ah, i see you’ve been in a coma since 2016. Let me catch you up on some things… there was a pandemic in 2020, Russia invaded ukraine, and during his 1st term (gag) Donald Trump routinely attacked your stated “american values” before attempting a coup in 2020, and suffered no consequences.
I think a big reason we are where we are is because there is a layer of complacent people who refuse to see the depth of the problem. They believed all the shit that they were told to believe and just never occurred to them to question any of it. America is special and Jesus loves us best.
Yeah, it is.
You know what? There are still a shit-ton of places even worse than America. It’s a fucked up world where that’s the truth.
If American collapses it will take the world economy with it. That will suck for everyone. Which is not to say humanity may not be better in the long run for that happening… but there’s no guarantee. That’s the problem with accelerationists - they don’t understand that in addition to the suckitude they will have to live through there’s no guarantee the other side of the mess will be any better. It could wind up worse.
Just out of curiosity - which countries were those?
Unlike a lot of the more optimistic people in this thread that point - that the fascists are going to see revenge - I absolutely agree with you. There will be purges. Trump has been saying that all along, why doubt him? Project 2025 is all about purging and cleansing the US and instituting a Republican party dominance that never ends.
I am pondering how I should navigate the upcoming years rather than trying to console myself with “we will eventually get better” and/or “it will be different in 2028”.
Bye bye Miss American Pie. We are all on the enemies list now.
I will go into exile as planned now. Draw my SS immediately before they crash it.
The problem is, as I’ve said multiple times before, I’m not sure what conclusion is feasible that doesn’t involve the taking of human life in one way or another, and I guess I’m not ready at accept that (or the idea that not doing so makes me naive) yet.
All of us here wish you well too. Anyway, it rhymes with well.
One of the things that moving overseas has reinforced for me — I had already thought about it intellectually, but direct experience hammered the knowledge home — is that the United States is just another country. It’s not special. It’s just people and an economy and a history and a government. It is not a symbol or a myth or anything other than what it is, one country among many. Yes, it has money and arms, both vast. But beyond that, any appeal to some enduring vision of America as having a higher degree of existential meaning or value is just American exceptionalism wearing a false mustache. It’s not different. It’s not special. The world stage has seen countries come and go. None of them had any particular claim on immortality, and neither does the U.S. This is a fairy tale.
I mostly agree. Our history and founding is kind of unique, but that aside we’re not exceptional.
She simply turned out 13 million fewer voters than Biden did, in all the wrong places while Trump lost only 3 million, keeping the most critical ones in place.
I loved her as a candidate and I thought her campaign was doing a great job of getting out the vote, hitting the blue wall, all the right notes.
But it turns out that there was a very strong force in the form of NYT, Fox, and CNN being willing to bury Trump’s insanity. For every Jeff Bezos suppressing the WaPo editorial room, I’m sure there are a hundred other similar stories we never heard about. Seriously, WTF happened with the NYT.
It’s hard to win in the face of that. It’s the only thing that outright worried me about this cycle. I don’t think it makes sense for us to blame each other.
Judging from this thread, we’re now the leopards eating each other’s faces.
I’ll just say what I said elsewhere, because I don’t know how else to say it:
The United States, having suspended its descent into Hell, chose last night to go the rest of the way.
He told you what he was going to do. You decided you wanted it. So now we are at the end of this great experiment, its flaws exposed and exploited by an authoritarian lunatic and his personality cult.
When the lunacy starts, remember that you had a choice, and the choice was stark. This wasn’t a question of a few minor policy differences. I used to wonder how the Germans ever let Hitler into power. After yesterday, I don’t wonder anymore.
So this is the end. We survived a civil war but failed to kill the ethos that caused it, and it took 160 years but they finally finished the job. Good luck, we deserve everything that is coming to us. And to the rest of the world, I’m sorry. Apparently this IS who we are.
To be very clear, I am referencing the concept of “American exceptionalism” in its original, technical sense. There is a general lay misunderstanding of the term, based on the usual connotation of “exceptional” as “outstanding” or “of high quality.”
But the phrase “American exceptionalism” was not used to argue that the U.S. is better than other countries, and that’s not how I meant it. It’s a label for the premise that the U.S. is different from all other countries, an exception to the rules — that the absolute uniqueness of its founding, its history, and its values makes it immune to comparison, and that there can be no equivalences drawn between the U.S. and ostensibly similar historical cases that could be used to shed light on America’s past, present, or future. Good or bad is irrelevant; “American exceptionalism” means the U.S. stands alone.
“I have faith in America” implicitly rests on an unexamined assumption of this form of exceptionalism. And it makes no more sense than to say one has faith in Guatemala, or the Soviet Union, or the Achaemenid Empire.