I’m only 20 years old, I’ve never voted or even really bothered paying attention to any other election, and I dunno it kinda feels like I started on one that was really crazy? But I’m not sure maybe every election has been insane and I just didn’t know because I wasn’t paying attention.
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Not normal at all. This was America’s 1932 Germany moment, there’s no going back now. 70 plus million of the dumbest Americans on the planet welcomed the Nazis with open arms.
It’s not Nazis, it’s different. It’s probably just as bad but it’s a weirdo mix.
Trump is a mobster wannabe. He is also dumb as fuck and a useful idiot who is controlled on the one hand by foreign powers, but also by right wing extremist Christians, some of whom actually see him as a Messiah figure. I fully assume he is going to install himself as a dictator fast, as that’s what the past 4 years of preparation were about. He’ll also die, probably. He’s old, fat, doesn’t exercise, eats unhealthy, in a super stressful job and loads of people want him dead.
I can’t remember the time (in my time anyway ) that so many people wanted a US president dead.
Anyway, he’ll die soon and the the christo fascists will start the infighting who can become the next US dictator.
I fully expect chaos in this year with chaos being the sweet synonym for that mass deportation starting, people will resist, people will get shot and die, people will start terrorist attacks. Whenever you work for years to pit one group of citizens against another, it’s not going to end well.
Man this is fun…
Yes, read history or take a serious gov class.
This was almost a 1:1 repeat of 2016 and yet lemmy is still getting spammed with denialism posts with hundreds of upvotes.
Trump is representative of the systemic issues America has left unresolved, not a cause, and the writing has been on the wall for decades; so much so that people think old media (ex: simpsons) was very cunningly predicting the future when in reality it was parodying the same issues at the time.
The one key difference has been the rather recent introduction of the internet. You can often find both much more reliable and higher quality information in less than a minute that what you could get from something like 10 newspapers combined 30 years ago. Especially for the younger generation, not everyone is falling for the same stupid tricks anymore.
Great example is Washington Post. People think it dropped in quality after it was bought by Bezos, but ask any international academic and they’ll probably tell you WaPo was always hot trash.
All this stuff you see being “worse” has been predicted for years on end, so while you can technically say it is “new”, it’s nothing unexpected. Even the next level filthy mouth ramblings of Trump are just something the previous guy did off camera (cough bush).
Trump is representative of the systemic issues America has left unresolved
Him and literally every other politician, so thanks for defining politics for us. The problem is that enough people think he’s the right solution. Oh boy are they wrong.
Please take this shit somewhere else.
Politics under Clinton seem civil now
No, they’ve been getting progressively crazier since 2016.
2000 was fairly divisive, it went to the Supreme Court after all. But it wasn’t even a fraction this dramatic, people mostly shrugged and figured GWB would be like his father, which was unfortunate, but sane at any rate. Nobody was really predicting 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.
2004 was pretty dull. John Kerry challenged GWB but felt sort of like an empty suit.
2008 was nice, Obama was a strong and exciting candidate vs the very known quantity of McCain, who was a moderate repub known for bipartisanship. Sarah Palin provided for hours of entertaining impersonations by people like Tina Fey, but since she was the VP candidate nobody really cared.
2012 was dull. Romney was a strong candidate, another moderate repub. But Obama was fine, he hadn’t broken the country or anything. Brought us out of a recession, even if people were upset about bank bailouts and stuff. Lot of people got health insurance.
Then it starts getting spicy.
“Obama was fine” ???
Did you not see his tan suit? The humanity…
Are people forgetting his Dijon Mustard scandal? Unforgivable.
Dijon? Sounds like socialism to me!
Don’t forget his terrorist fist jab.
Yes, he took all our guns, too. Look, there’s none to be found anywhere.
I actually feel a lot like I did in 2004. I felt sure that Bush’s lousy wars would be his undoing. Then people signed up for more of him and I realized “Oh, he isn’t the problem. It’s the electorate.”
You can say with hindsight that we shouldn’t be surprised, blah blah, but the truth is that a couple of days ago, most of us were saying “there’s no way people would actually RE elect this criminal, crazed, orange clown!”
And here we are. He could take a bullet tomorrow and we’d still share a country with all these deplorable people. Hilary took shit for using that word but she’s a smart lady and didn’t stutter.
I kind of understand Bush vs Kerry. Bush had a vision. It was a crazy neocon vision, but it was a vision and he used it to communicate effectively enough that we still occasionally meme about bombing people into freedom.
Obama had a clear vision, and communicated it well. Hope, prosperity for the middle class, international leadership. Biden had a vision, a less divisive America where we came together and worked on overdue problems. Hilary didn’t really, nor did Kerry or Gore. They were more policy administrator types who focused on specific policies and administration, and the idea of incremental improvement just didn’t resonate with people.
Trump, for all his failings, does have a vision he is capable of communicating to the American people. Harris did too, better than Hilary anyway, but it didn’t really come online until fairly late into the campaign and stayed a little too nebulous. I do think she was hurt in this regard by getting such a short campaign with no real prep time, she was evolving in the right direction.
I think we need a Bernie or AOC, someone with a powerful vision and ability to clearly communicate it, to the point of literally cudgeling people over the head with it. And we need to vote them in during the primary, over any competent administrator types, despite the fact that we are fully aware of how effective and necessary those policy administrators can be. Our valuing of them is a place where we’re out of touch with the broader American electorate though.
edit: MLK Jr was good at this. He had a dream, and it was a simple one that any person could visualize in their head. It didn’t require any policy expertise to understand it. We need that.
And it should be said - politics should not be spicy. It should be boring. Just like investing, if things are getting too exciting you are not investing in the future - you are gambling.
Unfortunately it’s the exciting politics that gets all the attention. Democrats likely lost because they’re just too boring.
as a ~40 year old Canadian looking from the outside at the US election
this one was crazy for sure but the last couple have been kinda out there to say the least. before the internet we Canadians always knew when it coming, but it was never covered in a 24h news cycle like now. other than daily newspaper (that was a physical unit of paper that was like social media, where we could not really choose who to follow other than politically left or right and only updated every 24h) we’d get news at 6-7pm and 11pm. then the noon news showed up. while there have always been issues between right and left, there had never been violence on the scale we see now. like Reagan getting shot, happened just after i was born, so not like it was all sunshine and rainbows but nothing like the scale that’s seen now.
this could be from the mass news reporting and social media, or people have just gone off the rails. I’m guessing option 2.
Nah don’t worry this was your first and last election anyway
To me, what’s different is that the modern republican party seems to think that I’m an enemy of the people. Bush was awful but I never felt like he personally wanted to harm me just for existing. I knew Bush would send emergency aid to a democratic Voting area, no question. The “enemy” was abroad. Now it’s within.
As a nonwhite person who vaguely looks mediteranian, growing up during Bush’s presidency I 100% felt like the enemy. The amount of racism and threats I had just for not being white enough is pretty wild. To be fair it had nothing to do with my vote, but just passing my perspective along.
In my experience mostly yeah. Except my first one, 2012 was a glorious election
No it just depends on the candidates. Most have been boring but Obama, Clinton, Trump, Harris were all controversial.
You might be younger or forgetting but before Obama it was George W., definitely not controversial… And before that there was more controversy. Americans have always had divisive elections, but there’s been a noticable uptick in the elections involving Trump.
Preferring Dijon mustard, or wearing a tan suit are hardly legitimate controversies. There are real complaints about some of Obama’s actions, but there wasn’t really any legitimate controversy surrounding his presidency outside of the pointless stuff manufactured by Limbaugh and Hannity. Those two guys were the canaries in the coal mine, and society and the government alike should pushed back on what they were starting a lot harder than they did. They ushered in this new era of hate and strife.
In former times if one candidate had promised to overthrow the entire system and abolish elections and democracy, then nobody would have voted for that clown.
It just goes to show how little faith people have in the system. They’d rather destroy it all just to see if something better comes out. Morons don’t recognize that the game is rigged. Unless nuclear war breaks out, it will just keep getting worse.
Basically it just gets more and more ridiculous every 4 years.
No
Yes, it was really crazy. In the past few decades our politicians had different goals, but generally still followed the same rules. Trump has shown he wants to dismantle any and all systems that don’t serve him, and the Republican party is happy to let him do so, so this election seems like it might have far greater consequences than the ones in memorable past.
2012 was what felt like a more normal election where the candidates respected each other and it played out a lot more typically. (Same for 2008). Trump changed that up and it’ll possibly stay that way going forward.
Certainly, at the presidential level, however I recall Congress having a bunch of “tea party” nut jobs elected that shut down the government over the passage of Obamacare.
