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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

The interesting thing is how easily a democracy can be abused. In some ways, though in a more limited manner, it reminds us of Germany in 1933 or 1930s. Now the orange mafia in charge is, of course, not 1:1 comparable; ICE kills citizens willy-nilly style but they are not as systematic in their overthrow of the US democracy as the N people were in the 1930s. But many elements are very much comparable, such as the orange mafia trying to stifle critical journalism. That's a transition to a more authoritarian system.

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It's not unique to democracy, any power structure can be abused by those who manage to seize the reigns. It's possible that a democracy could produce a system with limited power structures and diffuse responsibilities if its constituents desired such.

About the tested in less than 1 month. I have my doubts about democracy surviving.

It much more like (imho) the period of time around the Gracchi brothers in the Roman Republic. Lots of corruption, where the corruption is "tolerable" by the masses and elites. One or two people pushing the corruption as far as possible and being reprimanded but not punished. The masses groaning but not buckling. It tracks even the politics of the time. Trump is a populist in his political platform. His supporters do believe he is draining the swamp. The same way the Gracchi brothers rode on a tide of populism while not being populists.

how his supporters genuinely believe he is ridding the government of corruption is a contradiction so plain and bare that it begs a psychological study.

It's amazing what a little bit of propaganda can do to a system of government.

I mean, the simple explanation is that they aren't being honest with the rest of us. The next simplest is that they are incredibly fucking stupid if they thought that this was the lesser of two evils.

It's motivated reasoning, he's hurting the right people and that is all that matters to them. They will sacrifice anything to put the "Other" in their place.

It's no different to when impoverished white men insisted that letting black men be "equals" in a philosophical sense was worth dying for. When you are so pathetic, so stupid, so inept and impotent and just unspecial, sometimes you will do whatever it takes to pretend to be special.

Projection is what they do all the time. Remember when they kept crying about "Identity politics"? They can't process their self consciousness.

America is a mental health wasteland.

A lot of these people are to this day holding a grudge about that black man. It's taught to entire generations of southerners still that the south didn't revolt to protect the institution of slavery, despite every document of the south stating such in plain english, because the alternative, as the confederacy plainly stated and feared publicly during the close of the war, was to recognize how awful a person you were to be willing to die to keep human beings as some other random white mans property and believe that god wanted that to be the case and to believe that you were inherently better than black people for zero reasons.

People in these worldviews have to start inverting reality at an extremely young age, and so they are well equipped to continue that in adulthood. These are the people that are desperate to have an external reason to be failures. To have something to blame. It's funny, because I don't get that. I'd rather things be my fault, because then I can change that. But these people genuinely struggle to accept that being wrong is normal. People like my brother who insist "I am never wrong" at the age of 40 as an alcoholic who blames not getting into a good college on "affirmative action", as if he could even compete with the average black kid in college. He's as smart as me at least, but because learning requires you to accept your own fallibility, he refused to engage with it, or he refused to accept that he struggled from ADHD, which he refuses to treat because he wants to believe stupid anti-mental-health stigmas despite direct evidence from family members that it fixes problems. He flew a confederate flag on his truck in high school, insisting "Heritage not hate". In fucking Maine (Woo Chamberlain!). As a Frenchman who had his culture erased by the literal KKK. Who shares family names with black people in Louisiana because of the previous time his culture was erased by the British before the US existed.

When I was 12, his young son was first getting into public school. He knows very little about the world, so he didn't realize how shitty school lunch had gotten since he paid attention to it in the 90s. So he blamed poor school lunch on Michelle Obama. This led him to assert that "All Democrats should be shot", to multiple family members who are democrats. In front of his house with more firearms than kitchen utensils. At least he takes gun safety seriously with his kid.

They just want to be proud but the only way for them to do that is to utterly reject reality and ensure there is a strong enough underclass for them to feel superior to. It's pathetic.

> At least he takes gun safety seriously with his kid.

Thank goodness for the little things.

As for the rest, I feel you. I'd say this is at least forgivable though. Trashy people have always existed, and it's understandable that they're trying to rationalize their situation rather than doing the work to escape it. You get the same thing in the blue tribe, of people externalizing their locus of control and embracing the blue-flavored victim narratives.

What I find unforgivable are the people who don't actually live their lives that way, who do have better access to information, who aren't stuck in the shit end of society - but yet still take up the destructionist banner because they want to be edgy, or because it's lucrative, or because they have legitimate problems with things like "the woke" but are too lazy to do anything but lash out. People who really do know better but yet still insist on back-rationalizing a whole fictional extended universe is how this self-defeating perspective ends up being legitimized. The entire red tribe has thoroughly destroyed their own culture to the point that they don't even try proposing constructive solutions to problems any more, rather they seemingly just want to watch the world burn while pointing and laughing at everyone else for caring.

Where it gets worse is about a month ago he literally sat giving an interview at the WH where someone asked about insider trading and he said "My kids are insider trading all the time now".

Not even denying it, admitting it and proud of it.

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