I’m 64 with 32 years in County GOV. My wife is the same. We where going to retire at 67, but I just can’t do it anymore. Things are passing me by and I understand that. I’m leaving in about 14 months.
It was not Trump (to hell with him) that made me change. My wife has also had enough. Shit I’ve been working since I was 11 years old. Enough is enough.
In what fucking universe do you live where trans people were a cornerstone of the Democrat’s platform?
This is what terrifies me about the increasing calls for Democrats to not engage in “identity politics.” Because it’s not the Democrats who start those fights! The Republican playbook is to pick some minority that’s unpopular with their base, and lie about them to drum up fear and anger among their supporters. Democrats didn’t make trans rights a core issue in this election, Republicans did - all Democrats did was try to protect a group of people being slandered and attacked. So, when you say, “don’t abandon them,” I don’t know what that actually means, because the only way to follow your advice is to abandon them: to look the other way when Republicans smear them as pedophiles, to sit on your hands when they pass laws stripping them of their rights. Because that’s all the Democrats have ever done for queer people: the absolute bare fucking minimum. And now we’re being told by people like you that even that is too much.
You nailed that. I can’t add anything to your response other than this has been the GOP plan for decades; demonize Democrats (and anyone else they don’t like) as pedophiles, ‘groomers’, ‘antifa’, et cetera that they can count on the general public being repulsed by, and then using any sliver of evidence to justify it or else just completely make up ‘alternative facts’, which they were using long before Kellyanne Conway came around the bend. It is the strategy of grievance-fueled petty vindication for imagined slights, and a perfect transition into more advanced forms of proto-fascism that the GOP was progressing toward long before Trump descended down the golden escalator to our shared hell.
The whole notion that the Democratic party has and does make gay or trans rights some kind of “cornerstone of their campaigns” is given lie by the fact that it was Bill Clinton who imposed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military (and only because driving homosexuals out of the military would have hurt enlistment numbers), and Obama issued a directive for federal same sex protections and domestic partner benefits for federal employees but stopped short of calling on states to adopt same sex marriage amendments for their constitutions. The “absolute bare fucking minimum” of basic human decency and ensuring some kind of legal protections for gay, lesbian, transgender, et cetera is the essential standard of the Democratic Party, and expecting that they somehow do less is like taking replacing fire extinguishers with squirt guns and disabling the alarm system.
Stranger
Yeah, the Republicans tried to make it look like it was by incessantly airing ads showing the time that Harris approved of supporting trans people in prison, but it absolutely wasn’t.
A lot of people are confused (at best) about trans issues, and there is a lot of flat-out bigotry about it, and they tapped into it. That wasn’t the Democrats’ fault.
Trump’s downfall will come over tariffs. One of the two reasons he was elected was the inflation that happened during the Biden administration. Tariffs will lead to higher prices than we experienced under Biden.
People will just blame Biden, the Democrats, immigrants, anyone but Trump and the Republicans.
I don’t think we can underestimate poor media literacy, lack of civics education, and basic fecklessness.
“Groceries cheap under Orange Man. Expensive under Brown Lady. Blue-hair says Orange Man destroy country, but country still here. Me just want cheap milk, no trust blue-hair man-ladies, me think country probably be fine.”
He’s going to build as many tariffs as he built border wall. A symbolic section or two, and then he’ll move onto something else.
Trump is going to do a bunch of bad and dumb things. I think the financially bad ones will get mitigated by the puppet-masters around him. The rest of it, no clue, but I wouldn’t look to what’s written down. It will be like a jazz improv of evil and stupidity.
In trying to put a positive spin on Trump’s election, I’m hoping that Trump ends up being very obviously bad and dumb in a way that causes relatively little lasting harm, and that this helps a substantial number of his supporters realize how dumb they’ve been to support him.
It didn’t last time; it’s unlikely to do so this time.
It might depend on how his term ends (or when it does).
I don’t think a “substantial” portion will realize they were dumb (sunk cost fallacy and all that), but hopefully enough to matter.
Where does the “Trump’s downfall” part come in?
Stranger
It will probably involve stairs, he even struggles with ramps these days.
So…inflation will make the stairs steeper?
Stranger
You’re absolutely right. Trump won it all and there is no scenario where he suffers the consequences of his many crimes or incompetent presidency. Trump will die knowing he won. That sucks, but sometimes the bad guys win.
Possibly?
I mean, it seems obvious that if people elected Trump in large part because they blamed Harris for inflation…
I can’t even continue. There is so much stupidity just typing that, I just can’t.
I don’t know; I mean, I suppose some people voted for him “because inflation”, and somehow believe that is cut takes on the rich and impose tariffs on imports won’t massively exacerbate that problem the way a chorus of microeconomists singing in unison say it will, but it seems like a lot of people voted for him because he’s a racist fucking asshole and they really admire that quality in a leader. I don’t know how you fix that problem. Maybe take the fluoride out of the water…?
But your stairs notion and inflation gives me an idea. If we can just alter the gravitational constant…
Stranger
The inflation caused by tariffs will be blamed on Trump.
Okay. And the downfall comes into this where, exactly?
Stranger
Politician makes grandiose promises to get elected (or voters hear what they want to hear)
Voters blame politician for failing to make good on impossible/nonexistant promises
Voters stay home and let the politician get voted out
That’s the same basic cycle we’ve been stuck in for a couple decades now.