You’re basically describing Nazism. The central point of Nazism is that all the world’s peoples are in perpetual conflict, so the purpose of the state is to wage war to defeat all the other people.
Yes, and far-right thinking more generally. Theirs is a hyper-competitive moral framework. Cooperation only to the extent of strengthening the regime, often submitting to it.
A lot of Americans - even moderates and center-leftists - will bristle at the comparisons to Nazism, instead preferring to view MAGA as a one-off or a nation going through some growing pains, but as others have pointed out, the traits have always been there.
I disagreed with Bush the Elder, but he did know his role as President. As director of the CIA, he knew who our enemies were (and are). He was ‘evil’ within normal parameters – unlike his idiot son, and most certainly unlike the short-fingered Vulgarian. (And, I believe he laughed at Dana Carvey’s parodies of him. Trump’s too thin-skinned to laugh at himself.)
So was Nixon, by current standards.
I don’t think that excuses him.
H. W. Bush was actually…not a terrible president, IMO (could certainly quibble with the specifics of course).
I said George W Bush. We elected him and then reelected him (thus twice). If I had meant George HW Bush, I would have said so.
America is irredeemable.
I was wrong. I stand corrected.
Yeah, I agree. At first it was a marriage of convenience, but the Republican media machine worked too well and generated a cult of personality that they didn’t know how to control.
At some point, they’re all either going along to get along or they’re actively ass-kissing to further their position.
Meanwhile there is a huge contingent of people who just don’t get it. They assume everything still works by the same rules and that it always will. So in the face of what looked a lot like a cover up of Biden’s decline and subsequent substitution of Harris, along with the economic woes we’ve seen lately (I.e. Inflation), they saw a repeat of Trump’s last term as an improvement. The failure on their part is one of imagination - specifically not being able to imagine that Trump 2.0 wants to seriously mess up the federal government and cripple a lot of the institutions we have in place in the name of ideology.
I suspect that many of them are seeing the leopards licking their chops while eyeing their faces and don’t like it.
I guarentee that they will turn around and vote R next election anyway.
Golly, I wish this guy was still in the Senate.
I don’t believe I said I was heroic, AND you are welcome to brag about voting for Kamala because that is what we all should have done. Sorry if I said anything that hit you deeply…I was just speaking to the facts. Being uneducated, under-educated doesn’t mean you are stupid, it merely means ignorant of certain facts,and I should have been more selective when I wrote “bunch of idiots”…I should have said “ignorant”, so I take that back.
Yeah, I mean decent countries don’t elect insane fascist game show hosts to be president. America is a deeply diseased nation full of morons.
That’s true as well, and Reagan made Fox and Limbaugh on radio possible.
I have no recollection of 1980, but 1984 I did vote. Like now, I saw Reagan as a con man selling trickle down. My dad, not the most aware in politics, got conned with the rest. My mom did not vote. I told my dad: “you are not rich enough to get anything from Reagan.” He looked away, and we never spoke politics again. He had a small business in Florida. He could run a business and somehow deal with city and county poltics.
There is a case to be made that the strong-Presidential system is very flawed.
But yes, at some point a populace must accept responsibility for whom they choose to be in charge.
I’ve posted this one elsewhere (, too):
Having two political parties isn’t inherently, or doesn’t automatically have to be, the problem (though I would prefer more viable parties).
Everything really did get dramatically worse when Newt Gingrich brazenly announced that the other side wasn’t a group of colleagues to be negotiated with and have dinner and drinks with; they were enemies to be treated as enemies, stopped at every opportunity, and crushed whenever possible. They were to be painted as evil and an existential threat to all that we hold sacred and the lives of ourselves and our children.
They do that through horrid straw man arguments, outright lies, and dramatic, hyperbolic exaggerations of the other side’s positions. Because their audience lives in a nearly perfect information silo, they are vulnerable to this kind of misinformation and demagoguery. They literally don’t know any better.
They take fearful people, make them ever more afraid, and then give them a laundry list of Bad Things That Democrats Do, and make them thoroughly terrified. And they’re totally made up.
Then, they send their candidate out to say, “I, alone, can fix it.”
It was a very long run of political Mutually Assured Destruction before that, but Newt … went nuclear when nobody else really had.
He’s still doing it today, and his followers have taken pages straight out of his playbook.
I’ve been a registered Independent for decades, but today’s Republican party is simply disgusting.
Recently I saw a list of quotes from Republicans, some with buyer’s remorse some without, but the one that stuck with me was ‘I’d rather be ruled by a dictator than a Democrat.’ SMH
Democrats eat their own.
Yes. I’ve felt for a while the US would be better off with a parliamentary system, but the bigger issue, IMO, is America’s values, particularly the way that Americans venerate wealth and private capital.
From 2018:
The worst of the straw men are Fox News film clips. They show clips of migrants, BLM protest etc and people sitting at home at their pig farm in Iowa are convince the country is going to hell. No facts of numbers are presented, other than a simple number. “50 people arrested” and so on.