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Comment by sleepyguy | Hacker News Reader

50% of Americans will find out if this is what they thought will "Make America Great Again".

Destroying our relationship with our neighbors and embracing Russia, Iran, and North Korea by assisting them in destroying Ukraine and the Western alliance.

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At every step of this increasingly demented reality Ive thought, this is it, this has gone too far, surely nobody will accept this and most Americans shrugged. I hold no hope that anything can motivate the general public to pay attention.

The reason is: It doesn't affect their pocket books.

Meanwhile property prices and 401ks are up, old people (the largest cohort of voters) really just don't care.

I wish people had more empathy for others, but they don't. They mostly only care about taxes and their personal wealth.

This level of personal greed-individualism is partly what makes America great in the good times, but awful when things get bad.

Stocks are down over the last month. Depending on the risk profile of investors, many will find their 401k plans down soon as well.

At least 30% of seniors in the US are living precariously and that is likely to increase as SSA benefits are gutted. The statistics are even worse when disaggregated by race, ethnicity, gender.

https://www.ncoa.org/article/get-the-facts-on-economic-secur...

As militant actions in Greece, France, and places across the globe attest, voting is not nor should be the only sphere of political engagement.

> The reason is: It doesn't affect their pocket books.

I mean, a trade war absolutely will.

> Meanwhile property prices and 401ks are up

The S&P500 is down YTD.

That said, this will probably all take a while to sink in.

They'll be living in the Parable of the Sower type dystopia before they realise they should have done something years ago.

People always cite Parable of the Sower as proof of an inevitable dystopian collapse. They fail to then point out that Octavia Butler’s protagonists constructed Earthseed, a commune that stood in opposition to MAGA.

Ideally we'd get the Earthseed commune without the huge suffering that came before it!

I don't think the collapse is inevitable. I lean towards doomerism but I know I can't predict what's going to happen next week, let alone next decade.

Parable of the sower:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sower_(novel)

The timescale of political events got somehow compressed: every day is a week, every week a month, every month a year.

It's really only been 6 weeks. People need to catch their breath. I'd anticipate a massive escalation in push back.

I wouldn't be surprised if it starts up pretty soon as the gigantic tax cuts were just made permanent - that likely means the folks with money have gotten everything they needed out of this administration.

"It's not the fall that kills you; it's the sudden stop at the end."

Less than 40%. (Plenty of people didn’t vote… They should have, but that doesn’t imply they wanted this.)

If you don't participate in the democratic process you don't have a right to complain when it affects you.

A democratic process being a one time thing every couple of years isn’t really democratic.

It isn’t a one time thing. Voting is the bare minimum and likely takes the least effort of all other types of civic engagement, perhaps only behind signing an online petition.

Parent is absolutely right. Representative democracy plus massive amounts of propaganda is what got us into this mess.

The peoples of the world deserve better, direct democracy.

But direct democracy doesn’t address the propaganda part of the issue

When you don't vote you accept responsibility for everything that happens next.

There is a significant fraction of the US population which was excluded from voting. Deliberately, as a partisan tactic. Sufficient likely to have changed the outcome.

"Voting Laws Roundup: September 2024"

<https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...>

Overall 2024 turnout was below that of 2020, though that itself was the highest since 2004:

<https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_...>

I'd clarify that those people have absolutely no responsibility for the administration and it's an absolute shame that any US citizen is denied the right to vote (including felons - yes even the really bad ones). Populations have a wide range of people in them - and if a society is so close to the razor's edge that it'd only survive in normalcy by excluding felons then it's already lost.

Regular folks who can't afford special IDs being denied from voting is just criminal in my eyes.

I agree that's a major problem - but I hope my original comment was worded clearly enough to be directed at those who had the opportunity and actively chose not to vote... if not, I hope this clears that up.

I understand and share that viewpoint, FWIW.

A key problem with that as a major argument is that 1) that group is unlikely to be persuaded regardless,[1] and 2) the disenfranchised population seems plausibly capable of having altered the outcome.

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Notes:

1. I'm increasingly of the view that political debate is far less about persuasion and far more about motivation and probably even moreso demotivation. At least in the present media landscape. The wrong side's been winning that war of late in the US. Though as many political commentators have noted, the theme in 2024 seems to have been less authoritarian advantage than incumbent disadvantage (see esp. Tory loss in UK). Even given that, a challenge is that authoritarian wins tend to be stickier (through promulgation of further anti-democratic voter exclusion, amongst other means) than nonauthoritarian wins. Reversing that trend will be a major challenge for the next few decades, should it even be possible.

36% of eligible voters didn’t vote, so roughly half of 64% or 32% voted for this shitshow.

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