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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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, 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.
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.
“Obama was fine” ???
Did you not see his tan suit? The humanity…
Yes, he took all our guns, too. Look, there’s none to be found anywhere.
Are people forgetting his Dijon Mustard scandal? Unforgivable.
Dijon? Sounds like socialism to me!
Don’t forget his terrorist fist jab.
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.
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.
This election was special, cause the candidate who got the most votes actually won.
This election was crazier than the last election. On the other hand it will be less crazy than the next election.
That’s cute that you think there’ll be another election… If you think for a second these Nazis are going to let the chance that they could be voted out of power ever occur You’re a fool
There will probably still be elections, but the outcome will be predetermined. Honestly that’s just doomerism. It might happen, it might not. There’s a lot up in the air right now.
2000 was bugfuck insane.
This election has the same dreadful feeling as 2000.
Nevermind the crazyness, it’s the certainty that something worldwide bad is going to happen due to the incompetence of the American government.
It’s easy to forget all the shit Ashcroft said he was going to do, like misinterpret existing laws to go after porn producers, harrass gay folks, all kinds of other Christofascist shit. Then 9/11 happened, and this is a pretty good summary of what happened:
he sought to sweep away any meaningful restrictions on his power and use the fact of September 11th to do so.
But this is an attorney general who treated dissent and criticism as if it was treason, who launched the largest campaign of ethnic profiling we’ve seen in this country since World War II, who sought… who treated judicial review and congressional oversight as inconvenient obstacles to getting the job done.
And I think ultimately he’ll be seen as a disaster, both from a civil liberties perspective and also from a national security perspective.
I’m thinking worldwide. George Bush paved the way for a lot of populistic right wing politicians in other countries, showing that reckless incompetence is fine as long as you put on a suit and pretend to know something about economy.
He then dragged the entire ensemble of headnodding clowns into a war in Iraq on a false premise. Yes, Saddam was an asshole and needed to go, but he did not have chemical weapons. The entire war was about taking full control of oil, that Bush’s croonies had planned long beforehand.
Then there was a little financial crisis called “the great recession” in 2007 and onwards, and of course history has a tendency to point backwards, but I think it’s fair to say that the complete lack of oversight of the financial institutions was the main cause. The cause of this crisis was G. Bush Junior and all the other conservative government leaders in suits claiming to be “fiscally responsible”. If only they had been “financially conservative” that would’ve better, but they didn’t even attempt. It was pretty much as irresponsible as it gets.
I don’t think Trump or the USA as a whole can litteraly destroy the environment, because they’re not that many, 300k people of 8 billion worldwide, and I also don’t think Trump will initiate any wars directly, but they’ll do nothing to stop the existing wars, and we will see a worldwide financial crisis as soon as the next budget doesn’t get approved or earlier.
US presidential elections have been approximately this way since at least 2016, actually I think this one may have been less crazy than the last two.
The hanging chad would like a word with you.
I wrote “at least”.
I am older than OP, but not old enough to remember the 2000 election very much.
