I still cannot believe I'm living in a timeline where the US president is emotionally a 3-year-old and throws a temper tantrum in the public when his parents don't get him a shiny thing he has done absolutely nothing to deserve.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” - Jefferson, 1816.
This is neither a particularly contemporary problem nor an American one.
Even if the elites are the only ones funding political campaigns, we expected more from regular Americans to vote on facts, rather than ads.
The real issue of our media landscape (information feeds controlled by the elite), probably could have been nipped in the bud some years ago but it may be a little too late for that.
Can we do something about it? The winner-takes-all Electoral College certainly contributes to two-party system [1] and to narrow margins [2]. There are two states who don't do winner-takes-all (Maine and Nebraska), and we can force all states to split their electoral votes.
[1] https://www2.law.temple.edu/lppp/electoral-college-two-party...
[2] https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/108/3/727/11948...
I truly believe we're here because of Facebook.
Asserted without proof.
There's a statement about reporters having to look through their own windows when reporting on someone who claims it is raining.
If it not Facebook, it would be some other medium. What's the alternative, prevent people from talking to each other unsupervised?
I think a lot of it has to do with the young and idealistic clashing against the old and jaded and both groups yelling at strawmen of each other.
"It's shortwave radio"
My mom is 76 and absolutely believes the most pressing issues are trans high school swimmers and illegal voting and the biases of the Kennedy Center.
Sure, I have my opinions on those but I’m not saying as a society we aren’t allowed to debate those issues. I’m saying that in some news sources, they’re pure ragebait and completely drown out much more pressing and existential topics we should be solving. They’re simple distraction tactics and a continuation of the culture wars from the 80s and 90s.
How important is it right now to a very vocal group of people that you attach the word genocide to gaza?
"Fox news has done to our parents what they thought gangsta rap would do to us". This applies to Facebook as well. I wish they would have stayed in their "I don't know how to use the computer" phase.
The right has seen Democrats (and "leftists" in general) as communists and degenerates for nearly a century. Literally nothing about Trump or Trumpism is new, it just wasn't normalized. There was a consensus reality around politics and culture that had to be maintained which no longer does.
Also donated to Bernie, once – then ShareBlue gave it to a Clinton.
This political whoredom works best against our own interests.
The threat posed by Trump to the USA was evident from the day he announced his candidacy. That his whole presidency would one way or another be about his awful approach to immigration and to Ukraine was evident by the time of the Republican National Convention.
That he would try to overturn an election that he lost was evident before he ran for one.
If you cannot see that this man’s essential pathology is dangerous, I worry you cannot see dangerous parallels in several current tech CEOs (at least two, fairly arguably four or five).
There are many bad and crooked politicians; there are many their colleagues hate. Trump is not a crooked politician except as a side effect.
He’s not the same kind of “bad person” at all; most of us never meet anyone as dangerous.
I think you do need to recognise that you (and don’t get me wrong, millions of others!) voted for someone who is essentially evil (in the literary sense of evil). And really you should have been able to see it, because it wasn’t that hidden.
It shouldn’t stop you voting again because genuinely so few people are like him, though he has found fellow travellers in this administration. (Notably RFK Jr — a shockingly awful man)
But it would be healthy to look at what it was that let you look past his evil.
We will know this only if The Next One reverses all his policies.
Because it isn’t about his policies (and because it’s actually quite like turning an oil tanker, especially stuff like undoing tariffs).
Trump is a malignant narcissist. He’s a deeply unusual man.
The Democratic Party had one perennial fringe candidate, Lyndon LaRouche, who was dark-sided in a way Trump is. A really nasty, scary, creepy dude who fairly arguably ran a “business cult”, the LaRouche Group, who was held at arms length by the party.
It has had a few charming “political sociopaths” in the sense of driven people who can make arbitrary choices. It recently efficiently ejected a repeated power abuser (Eric Swalwell).
But nobody like Trump. People like him are rare (and dangerous when they achieve power)
But I hope I'll be proven wrong.
Dear SCOTex Brother:
Your brothers are ashamed of you ("right now").
–Insanely yours, –halfTwin
Admittedly they did not hear about Paul Manafort’s connections to corrupt pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, or his debts, or that he was mysteriously working for Trump for free, or that he successfully weakened the RNC platform language on providing weapons to Ukraine. They heard very little about the “adoptions” meeting. Fox didn’t cover that. But then it only got a little bit of coverage in mainstream US TV media because it is incompetent.
The majority US voter demographic is geriatric – same demographic grew us up on televisions, then never turnt them off.
Fortunately, Fox News' own demographic cannot live forever...
Can't wait to see 24/7 curated news disappear with the landline coax networks.
A lot of his voters saw the cruelty and crassness and liked it. Trump was their vessel for vengeance, as one disappointed Florida voter complained during Trump I "he isn't hurting who he is supposed to be hurting"
Why?
Both Democrats and Republicans equally seemed to hate him.
Like there was numerous government shutdowns in his first term because nobody actually liked his agenda. Why was it obvious that eventually both parties would agree to enable him?
Both parties did not enable him. The Dems did not fight him adequately but they did not enable him. He wanted the shutdowns, but the only way not to have a shutdown would have been to make unacceptable concessions. And then he'd have increased his demands and the whole thing would have repeated. Whereas what he got out of the shutdowns is less than he went in with.
You could argue that the left-leaning parts of the media spent a bit too much time laughing at Trump and not enough time worrying about him, but from day one it was obvious who he was and that he had media clout.
The minority’s partys job is not to be looking out for the majority. Sure you shouldn’t sandbag but i mean not even republicans liked what he was doing.
If they had shown how bad he was then he’d be a negative endorsement like he is now.
31.6% of all eligible voters.
36% of eligible voters didn't even vote in 2024.
I'm guessing you'd have a different opinion if you personally had to wait in line for HOURS because the Rs in your district closed down voting stations specifically to make it nearly impossible to actually vote in precincts that are predominantly liberal or people of color. And it has only gotten worse and more widespread since 2020.
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924527679/why-do-nonwhite-geo...
They always can take the matter in their hands. Worked wonders in Europe the last fifteen years.
I live in Washington State where we have universal mail-in voting. Unless you're homeless, every registered voter gets a ballot delivered to their door, they can fill it out at their leisure, and leave it back in their mailbox.
Turnout is only like 5%-10% higher than the national average. 30% still don't vote in presidential election years, 45% in midterms.
That said, there are clearly far more people not voting than there are homeless people who unable to reliably receive ballots.
Maybe. I live in Switzerland. Here even the poor can afford to vote.
Nevertheless, do these poorest really account for a third of all voters?
25% of all eligible voters work jobs like service, retail, or construction where it is very hard if not impossible to get time off work to vote.
Although many states even have laws allowing people to have time off to vote, it's often 2 hours or less, which in many localities is not nearly enough to get through the line.
There are no real blanket voting protections across the country.
Some mail you ballots automatically. Some require you to request a mail in ballot by a certain date. Others will only allow you to vote by mail if you are a senior citizen, have a critical illness or disability, etc. It's a mixed bag, and it's intentionally difficult in some states.
This is why they are so against mail voting. It levels the playing field.
Given that many of us here have helped the latter emerge and dominate the entire societal discourse, we should meditate somberly upon the law of unintended consequences. It certainly did not look this way when it started, but social networks are a major channel for hate and allow the worst of the worst to set standards for everyone else.
Frankly if AI can mitigate this, it would be a positive development and I would tolerate all the sickly-sweet sycophancy if it also steered people away from hating one another with passion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_on_...
Even now, it seems like more time is spent on his looks or his health or his pettiness than on his crimes and his destruction.
Most of those things are internal US politics anyway and while certainly unpleasant to observe as an EU citizen, they just aren't salient on this side of the pond the same way that his international diplomatic efforts are.
I can believe that the head of state of a powerful industrial nation is a massive crook, criminal, terrible human being, what have you. But a toddler who shits his pants with liquid excrement and thinks it's an assertion of dominance? That's beyond my suspension of disbelief.