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> Democrats: you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad

It's been confusing since the first trump term how many dems held this position. How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?

I made the mistake of debating politics with a then-friend who called all 75 million trump voters "drooling fucktards". Word?

We don't talk anymore




> It's been confusing since the first trump term how many dems held this position. How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?

How is that in any way contradictory ?


It implies that either they themselves are even more reprehensible and irredeemable, or the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates. The latter is probably true, but why would they say that and then continue to run for elections? Why do they want the approval of morally bankrupt people who prefer reprehensible candidates?

Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see". Or perhaps their claims are not actually "obvious", and they ought to be... kinder to the other side.


> Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see".

Fox News. The folks who voted trump watch only Fox News, which has crafted an alternative and immersive world view that appears coherent if you only watch Fox News and reject conflicting information as lies.


There are more people who voted for Trump than there are people who only watch Fox News. So maybe you ought to re-consider the GP's point.


The OP is correct though. If the issue is that their statement is weak when its being reduced to just Fox News subscribers, then sure.

However the issue is about the kind of information ecosystems that drive polarization and misinformation.

Disinfo and misinformation campaigns target right wing / conservative viewers more than they do left wing / liberals.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07942-8

But I can point to research and articles till the cows come home. The fact is that people reject everything negative about Trump and fill in the blanks with whatever they want to believe.

We’re basically playing whose line is it anyway


Who is defining what is misinformation? It would be easy to reframe such that the opposite can be just as “true, “ depending on your perspective. For example: Trump turned out not to be working with Russia, despite the media and politicians constantly saying they had evidence. Trump started zero wars, despite fear mongering that he would start World War 3. He ended the tensions with North Korea, despite pundits saying diplomacy doesn’t work with dictators. Arguably all of that was misinformation, so one could argue the opposite of what you said is also true. Whomever defines “misinformation” can make that statement with full confidence and be correct in their own mind every time.


This is my domain of work, so - Me. If that’s not good enough you can look at the research paper I linked.

If you haven’t looked at the article - this is directly in the summary:

> sers who were pro-Trump/conservative also shared far more links to various sets of low-quality news sites—even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople—and had higher estimated likelihoods of being bots

If you want more - The original fake news, the Romanian ad farm sites, had greater success and traction when they targeted conservative viewers.

To save us both trouble - this is not some cockamamie argument about crud like “he who defines it can be correct.”,or conflation of bad reporting and hyperbole.

This is straight up conservatives being the victims and consistent targets of mis and disinformation.

I also know that this will have 0 impact on changing minds. I know it wont.

That said, I do hope we can agree that people deserve respect for their efforts to understand a topic, subject or field of work. Do read the article, and when I say that conservative / republican information diets are more vulnerable and exposed to low quality information and conspiracy theories, I’d appreciate the honor of at least having your opinion on the abstract and matter of the paper.


I don’t disagree with your points, as they tend to align with my personal experience. Given that most of the people I interact with are conservative, I can’t really compare to the sources used by progressives, but I suspect it would consist more of links to mainstream media. Jumping on a plane, so won’t be able to respond quickly, but I will read the article you linked.

My point wasn’t necessarily that conservatives aren’t exposed to more misinformation, but rather that misinformation is very difficult to define, since the general public lacks so much information. Very few people actually know the truth. Many people fill in the gaps with their biases and then believe they’ve consumed “the truth.” Without an objective view of all facts, it’s difficult to ascertain the truth, therefore it’s also difficult to ascertain what is misinformation.


Thank you, I will come back and engage with your response.


My apologies for writing my response in a piecemeal fashion as I read through the paper. I’m on a phone, which makes it difficult for me to take proper notes and to write a response of proper length.

My initial reaction is that this study seems to delegate the classification of misinformation to a set of fact checkers and journalists. It then uses this to classify links as being either misinformation or disinformation, based on a trustworthiness score. Unfortunately, I can’t open the table of exact fact checkers and journalists because none of the links work on my mobile browser, so I’ll have to just guess at the contents for now.

Delegating classification of truth to these third parties allows for significant bias in the results. Most conservatives consider main stream media and fact checkers to have a significant progressive bias. If correct, this would explain at least some of the results of this study. I haven’t done a thorough analysis myself, so I can’t say either way, but it would be worth investigating.

The study also mentions that many users could have been bots. I suspect this could also have skewed the results. This is mentioned in the abstract, so I suspect it’s addressed later in the paper.

Either way, continuing to read… very interesting study.


Take your time, please.

As for your objection and concern - the study deals with that issue by letting participants decide themselves, what counts as high quality and low quality.

This holds if you look at outright conspiracy theories. Globally, conservative users are the most susceptible to such campaigns.

I will add "at this moment in time". I expect that sufficiently virulent disinfo which targets the left will evolve eventually.

For additional reading, not directly related to lib / con disinfo efficacy - The spreading of misinformation online. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517441113

This is one of the first papers on this topic I ever read, and will help in the consideration of misinfo / disinfo traffic patterns in a network.

uhh - not that you asked for additional reading.


The "fine people" and "drinking bleach" hoaxes objectively showed us what side of yesterday's election is for the large part egregiously gullible.


Less hoaxes and more the least-charitable interpretation of what he said. It's easy to find the exact quotes, in video, with context---different people disagree on what those statements from him mean.

Trump tends to talk in word-salad. It makes it very possible for two reasonable individuals to reach different conclusions about what was communicated.


The "fine people" hoax and "drink bleach" hoax are not open to interpretation, not by a long shot.

Even Snopes, fucking Snopes, confirmed the "fine people" thing is false.

Obama, Kamala, and Joe Biden all pushed "Trump said Nazis were fine people" with complete confidence, this is the literal definition of a hoax.

The original video credited with "drinking bleach", was Trump openly speculating on disinfection approaches. And, the approach he verbalized out loud, disinfecting lungs with UV light, was at the time a relatively new and completely valid medical treatment. Trump was ahead of the curve on that one.

Anyone who interprets his open questions about the UV light treatment as "drink bleach" is either a victim of a hoax (and an irresponsible moron) or has no qualms pushing hoaxes.


Also, his remarks during the Jan6th meandering are indiscernable from MLK's or others, but had the "violent" (no broken statues, no fires, no fatalities...?) "insurrection" been any less "welcomed", then his plagiarism would had likely been spotlighted instead.


Six fatalities, depending on who you ask and who's doing the causality calculus: three natural causes (overstress), one drug overdose, one natural causes next-day (suspected undiagnosed trauma during event), and one gunshot wound fatality.


The Snopes article you reference (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/) contains in itself a clarification from the editor, to whit:

""" Editors' Note: Some readers have raised the objection that this fact check appears to assume Trump was correct in stating that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville incident. That is not the case. This fact check aimed to confirm what Trump actually said, not whether what he said was true or false. For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong. """

Given that the Unite the Right rally was organized by overt white supremacists, white-supremacist-adjacent organizations, and people comfortable with rallying with those groups, it is an understandable inference a person could draw that when Trump claims a set of people is "fine people" and the set is as above described, there is no daylight between what he said and a claim that white supremacists are "fine people" (because excluding the people he overtly says he isn't talking about leaves the empty set... i.e. he either meant to say Nazis were fine people or he made a statement that is a logical contradiction, so if one's benefit of the doubt comes down on the side of "he isn't a befuddled man who contradicts himself with three sentences," one assumes the non-illogical statement supporting Nazis as fine people).

This train of thought is predicated upon how much one buys into the old saw that "everyone sitting comfortably at a table with one Nazi is called Nazis." But if you wish to understand the train of thought that leads to an alternate interpretation of his words, that is the train of thought.

(Similar logic applies to the "drink bleach" comment. He didn't literally suggest people drink bleach. In addition to his comments on UV therapy, he also opined on how effective bleach is as a cleansing agent and whether it would be possible to somehow apply it inside the human body... Which anyone who knows basic chemistry knows is mad. He just says things, which are open to being interpreted in the worst possible light.)

With respect, you seem to be trying to tell people that words aren't open to interpretation when they do not share your interpretation of the literal words they heard, and that's probably a non-starter argument. It is probably not an optimal way to "converse curiously."


I have another take, the democratic party is incompetent.

If they can't convince voters to vote for them given how bad the other side looks then they must be really incompetent.

What's the point of having all the feel good rallies in cities with famous people if you can't reach people in rural areas.

The democratic party is too elitist, too far from regular people.


You are asking why they would say true things.


No, I am asking why they would knowingly desire the approval of those who prefer "irredeemable" candidates. They would either have to lie a lot to get it, or pull themselves down to be more reprehensible. So, what's their strategy? Lieing a lot after telling the "one truth", or becoming more reprehensible themselves? Probably both.


Seeking votes is not like seeking approval in a social context. Someone trying to win a contested election desires votes for the purpose of winning.


You did: "The latter is probably true, but why would they say that" The implication of your comment is that politicians shouldn't tell the truth because that offends voters.


Or educate and persuade?


> Or educate and persuade?

There's a lot of people around me who are actively against education, or attack facts because they don't believe them, or vomit opinions as "facts".

It's practically impossible to persuade people like that.


> the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates.

Well, to make this non political.

Look at how many sports players have a history of domestic abuse; the character of a player is secondary to their ability to play the sport.


Voters everywhere are stupid but in the country of exceptionalism, they lately seem to have become exceptionally stu... tolerant!


> It implies that either they themselves are even more reprehensible and irredeemable > or the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates

You dont need to go that far. You just need to create an information environment that is beyond the ability of the average person to navigate.

At that point, the other side is just evil, and your team, even if they are convicted for crimes, have ties to Epstein or anything - doesn’t matter.

——

I mean, you can have privatized thought policing, there aren’t any laws or regulations to prevent. Everyone reads about Big Brother and worries about government control.

So you can create enough of FUD shared till it’s believed.

Don’t forget - we had to deal with Creationism, and that was wildly successful for a completely unscientific argument.


> why would they say that and then continue to run for elections?

Are you suggesting that the USA should have a single political party? Anyone that cares for democracy would be against that, regardless of their other political views.


My guess would be what they meant was that they should quit. Ie either you respect the intelligence/morallity of the people who you want to vote for you, or maybe you shouldn't be trying to represent them.

And not quit as in leave only a single party, but quit as in leave a vacuum for another party/candidate/etc to step in.

Note these aren't necessarily my personal views, just trying to help clarify what I believe the commentator meant.


One side has good marketing and the other has bad marketing. That simple really.


> Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see".

I think this is the correct options.

I mean, look at the people who worked for him in the last administration:

> So how do we explain this near-universal rejection of Trump by the people who worked with him most closely? I guess one explanation is that they’ve all been infected with the dreaded Woke Mind Virus. But it’s unclear why working for Donald Trump would cause almost everyone to be exposed to the Woke Mind Virus, when working for, say, JD Vance, or Ron DeSantis, or any other prominent right-wing figure does not seem to produce such an infection.

> Of course, not everyone who worked for Trump has abandoned and denounced him. Rudy Giuliani, who is now under indictment in several different states, is still among the faithful. Michael Flynn, who was fired by Obama for insubordination and then removed by Trump for improper personal dealings with the Russian government, is still on board, and is now threatening to unleash the “gates of Hell” on Trump’s political enemies. Peter Navarro, the economist1 who served four months in prison for defying a Congressional subpoena, is still a Trump fan. And so on.

> You may perhaps notice a pattern among the relatively few people who are still on board the Trump Train from his first term. They are all very shady people. I don’t think this is a coincidence; I think it’s something systematic about Donald Trump’s personality and his method of rule.

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/trumpism-is-kakistocracy

The GOP party has changed:

> As many people have noted, Trump’s movement is a cult of personality. Since Trump took over the Republican party in 2016, essentially every tenet of modern conservatism has been replaced with belief in a single leader. Trump appointed the judges that killed Roe v. Wade, but he constantly goes back and forth on the topic of abortion rights. Trump didn’t cut entitlement spending, but whether he wants to do that in his second term or not depends on which day you ask him. Trump has flip-flopped on the TikTok bill, on marijuana legalization, on the filibuster, on SALT caps, and so on.

> But these flip-flops do not matter to his support at all. His supporters are sure that whichever decision Trump makes, it will be the right one, and if he changes it the following week, that will be the right decision as well. If tomorrow Trump declared that tariffs are terrible and illegal immigration is great, this would immediately become the essence of Trumpism. Trump’s followers put their trust not in principled ideas, but in a man — or, to be more accurate, in the idea of a man. That is what Trumpism requires of its adherents.

* Idid.


> or the majority of US voters are so morally bankrupt that they prefer reprehensible and irredeemable candidates

Correct, yes.


Maybe 4th time is the charm with this kind of divisive messaging?


something can be true but not politically advantageous to mention


So you expect progressive voters to simply politely ignore the awful things Trump has done, and the fact that his supporters don't seem to care?

Short list: Trump has been adjudicated in court as having sexually assaulted a woman, and has admitted to doing more. Nearly every person who has worked with him has described him in the worst possible terms. Stories of him celebrating Nazis [1], sexually fixating on his own daughter[2], horrifying things like that.

The man is a convicted felon, and has only escaped punishment for various other crime by virtue of his own appointees in the court system.

If a reader accepts these well-supported items as facts, what should they think about somebody who votes for that?

Should they lie and say "a reasonable person would support this"?

Or should they tell the truth even when it is "divisive"?

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-...

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/trumps-lewd-talk-a...


Yes. I think having a healthy community and successful future political campaign will require reframing this rhetoric.


So we can't call a rapist a rapist because it upsets conservatives too much?

We can't call a failed businessman what he is? Or correctly point out that he idolizes dictators and Hitler specifically? Or that he is so fucking stupid he said he wanted Hitler's generals even though they were 1) Not very good 2) several tried to assassinate him and 3) fought like middle school girls?

Why do we have to abandon reality? Why do we have to treat conservatives with kid gloves?

I seem to remember something along the lines of "Facts don't care about your feelings" and "Fragile Snowflakes"


Did I say any of that?

> rapist

Source?


Trump was found in court to have sexually assaulted a woman in a fashion that would fit the layman's definition of "rape", although not the legal definition thereof in that venue.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-rape-carroll-trial-fe68259a...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/07/donald-trump...

> Kaplan had already outlined why it was not defamation for Carroll to say Trump raped her.

> “As the court explained in its recent decision denying Mr Trump’s motion for a new trial on damages and other relief [in the New York case] … based on all of the evidence at trial and the jury’s verdict as a whole, the jury’s finding that Mr Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally – in other words, that Mr Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”


> civil trial

So not a criminal case than? Trump didn’t even attend.

The article says the jury did not find enough evidence of the rape claim even at the lower requirement of the civil court.

> Carroll “cannot produce any objective evidence to back up her claim because it didn’t happen,” he told jurors.


You're quoting Tacopina, who is Trump's lawyer.

I'm pretty sure OJ's lawyer also said he didn't do it.


Yep. And the Jury seemed to agree, even in the CIVIL TRIAL.

But I’m not here to be trumps lawyer. I’m here to tell you that you that this scapegoating and conspiring is giving you nothing but anger and not helping you understand the events this week.


But the jury found him liable


Of a lower charge. Not rape (and reminding you for the 3rd time of preponderance of evidence standard)


this is pathetic and embarassing


No. That would be being unable and unwilling to build a theory of mind to understand 80 million people from all walks of life.


The "grab them by the pussies" comment should have been enough to show everyone that he's a morally reprehensive little clown. I originally typed out a long comment to further elucidate why he is despicable, but it actually takes away from the message. An SA advocate shouldn't be president in the 21st century.


My goal isn't to sway trump voters, they've already demonstrated time and time again, and again, and again, and again, that they have no intention of meeting liberals anywhere, let alone "in the middle", and that there's nothing, ever, ever that anyone could ever do to pry them away from their GEOTUS, so there's no real reason to try to appease them. So I'm left with just calling it like I see it.

Trump supporters blaming liberals' rhetoric for their decisions is a troll tactic: It's a way of trying to bait liberals into paying more positive lip service to Trump. And it works, all up and down the media organizations are terrified to say things that offend trump supporters. All for some vague belief that if they coddle his supporters enough they get some "centrist credibility" or something.


So your opinion is that elections are a referendum on the moral virtue of the candidate, or that you shouldn't run for office if you think the electorate is morally bankrupt?

I'm sorry, but I have to be blunt. That is an extremely narrow view, and a single second of critical thinking should present a million other possibilities. The former is obviously untrue, considering Trump's long list of vices. The latter is a complete non sequitur. Power is power; the electorate's morals only matter insofar as they're willing to check the box next to my name.

Trump can be reprehensible and irredemable, and still win if he's more believable on the issues Americans care the most about. He could be a fraud, a cheat, even a traitor, so long as he's persuasive. That's how democracy works, how it should work.


It's like being a pastry chef and mocking someone's cake as if it's the worst cake ever, but you can't even make a better one even though it's your profession.


Or you do make a better one but still lose because people did not actually care about the cake but about the messaging.

Or in meme form:

https://i.redd.it/g0r0x1ldi0e71.jpg


I think it’s more about taste being subjective. So if my “better” cake is actually less preferred, then it’s not actually better.

Making an objective statement about subjectivity is kind of silly in the first place. Then losing shows it to be stupid.


So the election was about nothing objective?


Definitely not. It’s the weighing of the population’s subjective preferences. It’s quite literally each voter’s perspective and choice that matters.

Hopefully, subjective preferences are based on objective facts and reality. But who can really know.


It's more like making an edible cake but the customers preferring the one containing rat entrails because they'd rather eat rat entrails than let anyone else eat an edible cake.


No, it isn't. And the fact that you think it is, is the problem.


This kinda of argument is the crux of your issue. "no it isn't" vs "this is why I disagree:"


User above hasn't really given any points to disagree about.


You're saying "the Turd Sandwich is inedible. Everyone should order the Shit Burger instead."

Maybe you could leave the Poop Cafe and have something that's food instead lmao


The median person is pretty dumb and half of the population is dumber


It's always amazing what a biased media/social network can do to the perception of otherwise rational and intelligent people.


Just remember how rational and intelligent the average person is. Then realize that half the US population is less rational and less intelligent than that.


Original quote by George Carlin, not US-centric: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”


I take it confusing the arithmetic average for the median is part of the joke?


Intelligence is not inherently quantifiable. IQ is an arbitrary way to quantify it, but there average and median is pretty much equal by definition.


IQ roughly follows a Gaussian distribution, so median and average are the same here.


IQ is normally distributed, so the two are the same.


"The average person" typically means the median person.


Carlin had no father and you can tell.


> just remember

I don’t and you shouldn’t. Mocking others intelligence only shows that you lack enough to understand them. As I understand it, this is precisely the point of GP


I don't think it's a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of ignorance/knowledge.

I read a statistic that 50% of grown up Americans have only 6th grade education. Which means that what? 60%-65% may have 9th grade?

The vast majority of people is uneducated and only responds to simple thoughts: as someone said: they see their wallet shrinking, and they decide to voté for the alternative. Other more complex issues don't matter, they don't care about them.

The same thing happened in my country (Mexico) where we have also tons of uneducated people. The people voté for the sound snippet, for the demagogue who told them what they wanted to hear.

And similarly, the other parties in their smugness didn't understand why people didn't vote for more complex issues.

It's sad, but most of us (highly educated people) live in a bubble.


> How can you call trump obviously reprehensible and irredemable... and then lose?

because not being any of notorious lair, repeatedly make comments you normally only would expect from fascist, having systematically undermined various check and balances in their last term, having lost sexual assault cases, shamelessly abusing the reach of a president for deformation etc. seem to no longer matter even through any of this points where believed to be reliable carrier killers

now "reprehensible" that is a much more personal non objective judgement so arguing around that is pointless

Irredeemable seems obvious, but if the things you need redemption from don't matter anymore it really doesn't matter either.

I think the main problem here is that politics in the US are fundamental broken due to way to much polarization in a 2 party system and no good way to fix it.

If Tump wins I personalty think it's hardly avoidable that in the next 20 year there will be a point where you won't be able to call the US democratic anymore at all (based on a objective standard) and the question is if the US will then realize they fuck up and fix it or not (if not autocracy will mass spread even more and likely also take over the EU and given past history of how autocrats tend to cooperate while fighting democracy but then turn onto each other quite reliable the moment their power stabilized we probably should expect WW4).

Naturally I would love to be proven wrong, I really would.

And I think it's best to always stay polite.

But I can understand why someone gets angry with a lot of people voting for someone who comes with such a risk. Especially if a deep dive analyses into their positions show that 1) he lacks concrete (public) plans for most of his positions and 2) they likely will end up making live worse for many potentially the majority of the people voting for him.

But then people voting more based on "feeling" and "popular"/"populist" believe always has been very common. It's also kinda funny how close the words "popular" and "populist" is, sometimes just a change of perspective apart.


> because not being any of notorious lair, repeatedly make comments you normally only would expect from fascist

Kamala's rhetoric, especially around the military and border security, seemed almost specifically designed to be "1% less fascist." Some of the lines wouldn't have been out of place in Starship Troopers.

If you triangulate yourself into 98% fascism, it's hardly surprising that people who don't like fascism aren't excited to go out and vote for you.


From your choice of candidates, it’s obvious that you don’t mind coarse language or a tell-it-like-I-see-it attitude. I wonder what about your friend’s comment bothered you so much.


He wasn’t wrong


You have put the point on the entire issue. People use party/candidate affiliation as the barometer for all future interactions, and when they don't like something about the other party, they use that as judgement of the whole person.

That is a person's right, but it is also failing to recognize that they are two sides of the same coin. So long as people hate one another for who they are voting for there will never be societal cohesion.


How is this different from what Trump supporters were saying about Democratic voters? Genuine question - I'm not in the US and from my perspective the vitriol was pretty universal.


The right gets to hate, the liberals don't. Basically the media let Rs play on handicap and the electorate basically buys it.

You're right it's unfair but if you're not American and thus stuck in the political media stew then you can see it clearly.


This is a deep insight. It's a reactionary vs. establishment dynamic where the reactionaries get a free boost because they're fundamentally more provocative from a content perspective. I think it's more like "the reactionaries get to hate, the establishment doesn't" and R and D may swap those positions.


I'm not so sure about that, I've seen plenty of hate from both sides.

Covid was a great example, anyone who disagreed with the main narrative or even just wanted bodily choice was blasted by many liberals, including the president, with all kinds of hateful speech.

Since 2016 many liberals also have used hateful speech to describe anyone willing to vote for Trump. I personally didn't like either candidate the political machine offered us, but in many of my discussions with anyone liberal Trump voters were often held as something like a second class citizen, that's pretty damn hateful in my book to consider anyone "lesser than."


Of course your comment is being downvoted. Hackernews is an echo-chamber of Trump haters. I'm only here for the cope today.


If both sides spouts vitriol then you pick the side that doesn't pour it on you, that is the problem described by "one side is 1% less bad than the other". If you want voters then try to welcome them instead of blame them for all the problems, goes for both sides.


Sure, but then shouldn't the universal vitriol cancel itself out somehow? Democracts have been on the receiving end of a lot of name-calling too. This doesn't feel like a good enough explanation. It feels much more like the Democrats ignored (or were perceived to have ignored) a lot of substantive issues for a large section of the population.


> Sure, but then shouldn't the universal vitriol cancel itself out somehow?

It does, both sides got about the same amount of votes as you can see.

> It feels much more like the Democrats ignored (or were perceived to have ignored) a lot of substantive issues for a large section of the population.

I don't think so, it doesn't matter how much you try to do for people if you also namecall them at the same time, they will assume you aren't on their side even if your policies are better for them. Vitriol ensures the vote becomes tribal instead of rationally inspecting both sides and picking the better option.


I realised through hearing through channel 5 and average Americans that they don't really get it. They don't want to think, they want an easy solution to complex problems and anyone coming with a pre made thing is seen as the Messiah. The other part don't care because they saw a lot of screaming and failed to grasp what was so bad about Trump. If he was so bad why was he still nominee? If he was so bad why wasn't he arrested? If he was so bad... You get the picture...

This can be seen as the democrats also not understanding the average person and this is where Bernie was actually hitting good points, his message was consistent and he was never demonising Trump on his name but explaining what they could do better by explaining policies in a way that people understood what they would get from them or lose if they didn't get implemented...

Of course the issue is a bit more complex, but they exacerbated the people that were unseen instead of helping the healing and some actors of course were way too happy to fan the flames.

This is a very bad day that is marking the beginning of a very bad period for everyone...


That is assuming half the country are Democrats and the other half Republicans. But the most important voting block considers themselves to be neither one nor the other, and then it becomes strategy to spit fire at your opponent.

And I don't know about other people, but I consider any rhetoric against a political party to be directed against their politicians, not against their voters - unless explicitly stated.


Well the Trump camp was mostly blaming illegal immigrants in this cycle, and illegal immigrants can't vote, so seems like that strategy works ok.


I think Trump and the Republicans did actually succeed in welcoming in a truly diverse base of new and former voters: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/06/us/politics/p...

This is the Red Wave that was promised in 2020 and 2022 but failed to materialize.

Why didn't Harris and the Democrats pull it off? Well, they could start by not playing identity politics or calling Americans deplorables, Nazis, and garbage. Godwin's Law was in full swing for them.

I'm Japanese-American, demographically I should be a bleeding heart Democrat, but truthfully I can't stand their constant victimizing and divisive rhetoric and is why I voted for Trump and the Republicans in 2016, 2020, and 2024.


As someone who pays attention to politics exceptionally closely, I wonder what you would call Trump's rhetoric if not divisive.


I call it practical, on point, gruff, and charismatic.

Practical and on point because Trump talks about things that the common American actually gives a shit about in a way that the common American can understand and relate to. This also has a side effect of uniting people under a common cause despite outward appearances.

Gruff because that style of speech appeals to most Americans who don't like being sophisticated, or worse: Being politically correct. Remember that being politically incorrect was one of the reasons Trump won in 2016, and it's still one of the reasons he won again today.

Charismatic because, well, I think everyone has to at least admit that the man draws people in despite any and all odds.


> uniting people under a common cause

If the common cause is being against other people, that's still divisive.


"They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats"

Is that gruff or on point?


Don't worry he will fix the economy.


So when he calls the other side names and makes threats, he is practical and gruff.

His practical message was incoherent; it was more of an erring of grievances, conspiracy theories, and wild policy ideas that he seemed to have come up with while speaking.

I can't argue with the fact that it appealed to people, but you can't say it wasn't divisive because it was practical and gruff. Those two things don't rule out divisiveness.

BTW, I voted Republican in every election until Trump, and the reason why I didn't vote for him was due to how divisive he was.

I think you just happen to agree with his side of the divide.


> erring of grievances

I don't know whether this was deliberate or a typo, but it's funny and apt.


You literally voted for a guy who said things 1000x worse and this is your take?


I recall a vox pop in the Washington Post that included a woman who was voting for Trump because she thought he'd be better than Harris at standing up to Putin. Trump seems to attract a combination of low information voters and voters who are reluctant to give their real reasons for voting for him. Either way, don't expect the given reason to make a lot of sense.


He doesn't have a reason to hide why he was voting for him, so I'll chalk it up to the low information voters who vote on vibes.

In low-information voters' defense, it's been amazing to me as a non-American how Trump's literal dementia was not in the front pages of the media every single day. The complicity of the news media in normalizing a senile candidate should't go unnoticed.


>Trump's literal dementia

Nope.

I watched that now infamous three hour marathon podcast he did with Joe Rogan. That kind of performance is not something a demented man can do, full stop. To say nothing of his utterly crazy rally schedule, I legitimately don't know where he gets his energy.

Hate him if you want, that's your right and I will respect that. But Trump is terrifyingly sharp, especially for a man his age.

>The complicity of the news media in normalizing a senile candidate should't go unnoticed.

The media dumped Biden right quick after his old age couldn't be hidden anymore. That debate he had was straight up elder abuse by the media.


> I legitimately don't know where he gets his energy.

Drugs. Incoherent hour-long rants are the product of stimulants, the kind that give you the sort of terrible judgement that no one would ever want out of a presidential candidate.


>Incoherent

Nope.

That three hour long podcast was a very coherent conversation, and it was quite enlightening in what Trump actually means when he says he has "good relationships" with people like Putin and Kim Jong Un.

Specifically in regards to the impact of that on the election, neither Biden nor Harris can talk their way out of a 1st grade reading class due to his age and her inability to orate respectively.

Communicating clearly and with conviction is among the most basic of required skills as a leader of a country, and neither could do even that much.


Rogan pressed him on a number of topics and trump simply couldn't answer. He had no solutions, he had no ideas. He was empty-headed, and it really showed.


> Well, they could start by not playing identity politics or calling Americans deplorables, Nazis, and garbage.

Why not, though? Clearly, it is a winning strategy for the Republicans. So why not adopt it as well?


I can't stand their constant divisive rhetoric and is why I voted for Trump and the Republicans in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

I'd be curious what your gut reaction was to the comedian that Trump's team hired to open at his rally at Madison Square Garden, just this past week, who referred to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage" (starts at about 0:16):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNBdYplmKcI

Would your reaction be the same if he had referred to, say, Japan in the same way?


Unfortunately, Puerto Rico is in a pretty bad spot[1] and while I agree the joke is crude I also think it's a fair criticism of the island's state. Note that the criticism is directed at the island and not the people thereof, that would be firing too close to home.

Also interestingly, Puerto Rican and Latino votes for Trump actually increased[2] fueled primarily by economic and governance concerns. That joke ultimately didn't seem to have a negative impact, if any. Contrast Biden calling Americans garbage, which simply added more fuel to the furor behind Trump and Republicans.

As for the hypothetical question: If someone joked Japan is a floating island of garbage and there is actual basis for that criticism, I would take that as a cue to man up and make myself and my homeland great again so I can look at the joker in the eye with results.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percent_population_below_...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze3yr77j9wo


Hmm -- if someone threw that comment at my direction, I'd just assume they were a complete idiot, and not worth a further second of my time. I certainly wouldn't take it as a cue that I need to "man up", or that I should vote for whatever party they were shilling for.

But hey, that's just me.


The difference is whether the criticism is warranted. Puerto Rico is undeniably not in a good spot and the joke was taking a shot at that.

If someone makes a baseless joke then they aren't worth the time of day, I agree with that.

To expand on the hypothetical question: Japan has a literal garbage island (it's an artificial island used as a landfill). We call it Dream Island (Yume no Shima) because of the irony.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yumenoshima


The double standard for Trump vs ANYONE else is mind blowing.


Half the stuff Trump says is some insult to someone. "Owning the libs" and "libtards" has been a thing for a long time. Remember when the tea party said Obama was literally Hitler for trying to come up with a better health care system? etc. etc. etc.

But somehow everyone else needs to be on their best behaviour and as soon as they say "fuck you back" in response to a torrent of "fuck you"s it 's a big deal.

If you want to talk tone and insults then you're definitely starting at the wrong end.


To your point, the Democrats should win every election, especially against Trump. But, they can't get out of their own way. Go all the way back to when the party hosed Bernie, and now this time when they were Hiden Biden.

While the economic numbers are good, they are mainly good for people with already high economic status like existing home owners and professionals. For example, student loan forgiveness sounds great but then leaves every blue collar worker who didn't go to college wondering WTF are they doing for me? They are giving more money to people who are already ahead. When Musk says pain is coming, many of Trumps supporters are happy because they are already in pain and want to see those benefitting feel some of that pain.

Then they go and overplay their hands with social issues. I didn't see it at the time, but all of the DEI rollbacks we've been seeing over the past year or so should have been a signal. One of the middle of the road people on TV last night mentioned he had friends who tried to avoid interacting with people at work because they were afraid of saying something offensive. And these were likely center left people. I have had similar discussions with even my most progressive friends. The almost refusal to message young men is also a problem.

Most Americans want legal immigration, but the Democrats took too long to do something and then Trump was able to kill the bill last minute. It looked like the Democrats wanted to simply ignore it until they no longer could.

There are more, but I think these are some of the big Democrat self owns.


There was no student loan forgiveness.


There has been several hundred billion dollars of it.

https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/biden-harris-adm...


Looks like very recent proposal and the money hasn't been forgiven yet? If they had the power all along, then why wait til the week before the election?


> Looks like very recent proposal and the money hasn't been forgiven yet?

No, look down at the bottom under "A Significant Track Record of Borrower Assistance".

> If they had the power all along, then why wait til the week before the election?

Judges blocked all the other ways they tried to do it.


They tried extremely hard to do it though, and wasted a lot of political capital on the issue. The fact that they tried so hard and couldn't get it done is a good example of what the GP was talking about.


I mean, you can “waste” capital on anything, if the other team is going to demonize whatever you do.

Obamacare was based on Romneycare, and Romney had to disown it. Let’s not have discussions on things that dont happen. There is nothing the dems can do which wont be spun into harm by the republican side of the media sphere.


That goes both ways too. I also don't find political talking points about the other side couldn't do particularly intriguing, but the Democrats did have a field day in 2019/2020 pointing out how little Trump actually did with regards to building a wall.

The most annoying part is that almost every time with an issue that couldn't be done, it should have been clear from the beginning. The idea of the government vacuuming up all (or most) student debt seems completely untenable right out of the gate, just like the idea that we would be able to build a physical wall across out entire southern border and make Mexico pay for it.

Its lazy politics all the way around. And that lazy politics wastes plenty of tax dollars and distracts everyone from issues actually worth talking about.


I mean, it definitely doesn’t go both ways. The repubs made an issue of a tan suit as I recall.

Again - the Obamacare-Romneycare example. One party tried to reach across the aisle, to bend over backwards to build common ground.

The republicans refused to cross the aisle, even when their points and desires were incorporated.

From the Gingrich era, it’s been a clear goal to stop any bi-partisan behavior. That only winner takes all policies and behavior is acceptable.

That dems started to do this, for DJT, is kinda sad. They should have started a lot earlier.

I request, that when policy is brought into the picture, let’s not forget that policy is fundamentally irrelevant to the Republican Party. It’s nice to discuss policy, yes. But policy is a treatment for real world issues in a working legislature. Not one where good policy must be rejected if it’s brought up by the Dems.

At this point, the game theory solution is for Dems to respond by also rejecting bipartisan efforts, and copying the republican playbook.


It's almost as if they're premise is invalid then.

This is a lot like liberals complaining about things Trump didn't do.


The Biden administration attempted to implement student loan forgiveness despite lacking any statutory authority to do so.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...


The problem is he tried to means-test it, which made it a program that had to go through Congress. If he had just waved his hand and done it unilaterally, it would not have been blocked.


> Most Americans want legal immigration, but the Democrats took too long to do something and then Trump was able to kill the bill last minute. It looked like the Democrats wanted to simply ignore it until they no longer could.

You forgot the part where they claimed their hands were tied, then finally did something about it 8 months before the election.


Yes, completely dropped the ball on an issue they could have addressed head on.


Biden introduced a bill for border security on the first day of his administration, GOP nuked it. Wasn’t ignored.


Automatically allowing a specific quantity of millions of illegal immigrants as a "compromise" isn't "border security."


The Senate passed a bipartisan bill earlier this year that had almost everything Republicans have asked for. The House wouldn't even consider it.


Did you read it?


https://youtu.be/oZw7xijmeGM?t=89

Lindsay Graham did!

"Everybody who comes on this floor and says our border is broken. We should do something about it. You're absolutely right. And unfortunately, we didn't get there. President Trump opposed the Senate bill."


It’s fascinating how no one mentions that Trump didn’t pass comprehensive immigration legislation during his first term despite it being core to his platform.

This issue is a mess and has been kicked down the road for literal decades at this point. Maybe finally it will get passed…


He seems quite literally incapable of a “comprehensive” solution to anything. Every solution was the simple one that had the predictable unintended consequences.

E.g. on immigration he prevented courts from deferring certain deportation cases, which meant high-risk immigrants stayed in the country for longer.


> He seems quite literally incapable of a “comprehensive” solution to anything. Every solution was the simple one that had the predictable unintended consequences.

That is because the result doesn't matter, not in "starve the beast" [1] cycle politics - it used to be mostly about money but the model can be used also for general politics. The playbook is:

1. side A rise to power claiming "issue X must be solved by doing Y" (all while knowing that doing Y is useless or counterproductive, but the voter base doesn't care - be it immigration or the defunding of healthcare or whatever)

2. The consequences hit delayed, when the term is at its end and the competitor B takes over (usually in US political cycles every 8 years, but these days it seems like the ping-pong is accelerating)

3. That leaves an opportunity for side A to constantly barge in from the side "look at issue X, vote for us next time and we'll fix it (for realsies this time!)"

4. Side A wins the next election.

When it comes to anything budget related, replace the campaigning slogan with "look at issue X, it is clear that the government is incapable of doing anything about that issue, let us privatise it".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast


This is all true but I actually don’t think Trump knows his solutions won’t solve these problems. I think he’s actually a simple-minded man who’s saying the simple solutions he thinks will work because he hasn’t ever thought about the problem.

I mean he came into power and proudly declared he had never heard of NATO before running (!!) but was brought up to speed in ~2min (!!). That’s who he is.


Someone like Trump should have access to actual experts able to estimate the impact of his political ideas.


The whole problem with "someone like Trump" is that if said expert tells him he's wrong, then said expert is gone in short order.

This is why autocracies and oligarchies are bad. Not because they're just de facto evil, but because they produce undesirable outcomes, often even undesirable by their own standards (see: Russia's ongoing 3 day special military operation in Ukraine)

Every single person around him is playing a loyalty test. Thank god Fauci was expert enough to navigate that dynamic so delicately, but most others don't have the talent or appetite for it.


"They are giving more money to people who are already ahead." They did that three times in Trump administration. Resulting in the largest deficit increase ever...

The pain ahead is realizing China is the new superpower. Tawain won't make it to 2028.


IIRC, Trump gave it to everyone whether they needed it or not. Perhaps there were more that I’m forgetting. But people who perceive themselves at the bottom rung (and are told they are by media and sometimes dems), will see it as unfair if people perceived higher up get something extra.

Of course the super rich are going to get themselves tons of benefits, but that remains in the abstract for most.

Trump may get lucky for the time being on China. They are struggling economically and may not have the desire to pick a fight right now. IMO, countries bordering Russia are under a more immediate threat.


PPP loan fraud disproportionately benefited already wealthy people who both had the means to navigate the bureaucracy and the lack of morals to steal.


> Then they go and overplay their hands with social issues. I didn't see it at the time, but all of the DEI rollbacks we've been seeing over the past year or so should have been a signal.

Yeah, a signal of large players in economy preparing themselves for a Trump victory - the begin of which was Meta unbanning Trump and the culmination of which was Bezos banning the WaPo endorsement. Big Business doesn't care about any values, all it cares about is money, and so it prepared for Trump possibly taking over again in time and getting into good terms with him.


That's basically it in a nutshell for my experience as well. Elections are won by swaying Independents...the Dem strategy for Independents appeared to be "Trump is a fascist" "Trump supporters are garbage".

Ok well..that's not really an argument?

And yes we can bring up all the terrible Trump examples but if the point is separating yourself from that, how is what they've done any different?

It just feels each side just despises the other and it all ends up like children arguing on the playground.

Where are the adults?

There's going to be all kinds of hyperbole thrown around today on both sides but personally see this as a failure by the Democrats to sway Independents.


One major difficulty with addressing republicans and “low-information” independents (there aren’t a ton of true-swing voters anyway, most are partisans who prefer not to label themselves that but vote as if they were) is that you can’t discuss issues with them. If you try, you immediately get sidelined into dealing not with disagreements on issues, but with having to try to convince them that basically their entire list of concerns is fictional.

We had an R state rep candidate come by our house. Highlighted two issues in her message to us. Both were simply not actual things. The existence of the problems were lies. WTF do you do with voters who consume media that’s made them believe those? It’s like a huge moat around even being able to talk to them about anything real, even if only to disagree about some real thing.


> If you try, you immediately get sidelined into dealing not with disagreements on issues, but with having to try to convince them that basically their entire list of concerns is fictional.

I wish that democrats had spent less time telling republicans that the boogeyman doesn't exist and more time showing them how we're going to keep them safe from the boogeyman. In WI, there was a referendum question that asked if people wanted to add language to the state constitution which would explicitly specify that only US citizens could vote. The democrats fought against that saying that election fraud was basically non-existent and that it would be a waste of time to change anything since it's already illegal for non-citizens to vote.

They fucked up though, because no matter how right the democrats were about the safety of elections the fear republican voters have is very real and it's never a waste of time to ease those fears.

As it turns out, if the referendum passes (and I'm guessing that it has) the result will be replacing language which says that every US citizen gets to vote with language which says only US citizens get to vote. It never said anything about replacing language in the referendum question voters saw though. The fear of illegal immigrants voting has likely been used to remove language protecting the right of US citizens to vote in WI and could open the door for laws that prevent certain US citizens from voting.

Since Democrats and Republicans are in full agreement that only US citizens should be able to vote the smart thing democrats should have done was push to add language explicitly stating that only citizens can vote but without replacing anything else. That would have satisfied the fearful republicans and protected the voting rights of all citizens. Instead they just wanted to lecture republicans about voter fraud statistics.

Every parent who has checked under their child's bed or looked in their closet for "monsters" understands this. When you have people acting like frightened children about something that isn't real, sometimes you just have to comfort them.

This is the same problem democrats have when republicans say they are afraid of small children going to school and getting sex change operations. Trump tells them it happens which is scary. Democrats just want to tell them that they are misinformed and that little kids aren't getting surgery, but they'd be smarter to say "You're right, little children getting sex changes at school is a horrible thing and we are putting forward a law that would ban that practice so that no child gets sex change surgery!". Why do democrats keep letting these issues both sides agree on become arguments that divide us?


When I registered to vote in WA all they asked for was my address and the last 4 of my SSN. No ID whatsoever. I could have got as many ballots as I wanted. Voting system security is nonexistent, and when Democrats pretend like this isn't an issue and fight tooth and nail to keep it this way it just makes them look like cheaters.


Democrats aren't opposed to making voting more secure. They just want to do in a way that doesn't make it harder for poor citizens to vote. Republicans have been using the fear of voter fraud to keep US citizens they don't like from voting. They'd do things like pass a voter ID law and then close DMVs in poor democratic districts so that it's harder for "the wrong" US citizens to vote. They weren't even remotely subtle about targeting specific groups of voters (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...)

Every democrat I know wants elections to be more secure than they are. They just also want them to be fair. There's been a lot of room for proactive measures here that democrats could have been pushing for, but there have been efforts too (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/1007715994/manchin-offers-a-v...)


In Canada Im required to show my ID to vote and things work just fine.


This appears to be province-by-province but looking at Ontario’s rules they appear to allow a lot of documents to count as an ID for voting, and do not require a photo ID, nor do they have multiple tiers of ID that require bringing, say, several ID documents if you lack a single “better” one—any single one of the many examples works.

https://www.elections.on.ca/en/voting-in-ontario/id-to-vote-...

Some US states have voting ID requirements, and they tend to be (though not always!) significantly stricter than that, sometimes requiring a specifically a government-issued photo id, for instance.

I’m pretty sure laws that have much looser definitions of “ID” and/or provision resources to ensure timely, free, and easy access to such an ID, see less resistance from democrats. If the entire pro-ID movement just wanted to do what Ontario does it’d be less of a contentious issue, I think.

[edit] for the record, though, I agree this is a place Democrats could safely give ground—the data do not well-support their disenfranchisement concerns, and 30+ states already have some kind of voter id law.

It is, separately, also true that there is no evidence there’s any actual reason to enact more of these laws. The data also don’t support that, at all. But whatever, it’s probably not significantly harmful, just a minor waste of resources.


Canada also made it cheap and convenient for you to have that ID.


Democrats actively fought against voter id laws. Instead, they should have supported those laws, but with an amendment to make it easier for people to get an id.


I do think trying it is a better tactic than not, but would not bet on embracing reasonable ID laws preventing a push to modify those to unreasonable ones from becoming exactly as big an issue, through the same mechanism, among the same voters.

That’s the risk when the measure is more-or-less harmless but also the problem it addresses isn’t real. They can just keep claiming the problem still exists and running on it.


When the average voter attempts to prove that elections are insecure by doing the things you claim you could easily do, they end up getting caught and facing election fraud charges.

Being able to cast a vote illegally is trivially easy because there are exceptions baked into the system like provisional ballots. Lucky there is an thorough audit process so having that vote actually counted while avoiding election fraud charges is a lot harder.


We would expect the several attempts by Republicans in government with as much access as possible to hunt for fraud to have found more than trivial cases of it, then.

They’ve been beating this drum for what, fifteen years at this point? More? They should at least have found smoke, if not fire, instead they just keep saying they smell a raging forest fire and coming back with single burnt matches when given the reigns of government to go look for it and tell us what they find.


Heh, I have similar feelings about gun issues. Democrats are dead right but I wish they’d just drop the entire issue completely. I mean they already barely talk about it, though, so who knows if talking about it even less would be enough to convince e.g. my dad that his homemade “Biden and Harris will take your guns” sign is definitely wrong and makes him look ridiculous (somehow, this never happening no matter how many times he thinks it will hasn’t convinced him)


The trick isn't to stop talking about gun control. Democrats should be proactive about addressing the fear. They should campaign on a promise to never go door to door and take everyone's guns away and push for legislation that specifically states that the mass-unarming of the public is explicitly illegal while giving them an opportunity to carve out the exceptions that the majority of people, including republicans, agree on like keeping guns from crazy people and violent felons.

The point is that the irrational fear has to be addressed. Making fun of it, ignoring it, or lecturing on why the threat is imaginary won't help.


We are now at the point where tucker Carlson and Alex jones are saying that they are fighting demons - I am not sure how we can make any rational arguments when one side thinks they are fighting against the literal Christian devil!


Sounds like America suffers from a collective psychosis.


Yup. The folks I know who embraced MAGA were all going through difficult emotional issues. It seemed to give them something they could rally around (i.e., bond with others to blame democrats, migrants, trans people, et al, for their problems)


> We had an R state rep candidate come by our house. Highlighted two issues in her message to us. Both were simply not actual things. The existence of the problems were lies.

This has been a constant refrain from Democrats: "The thing that you are upset about is not happening. Well, it is happening, but it is the exception. Ok, it's happening everywhere, but it's a good thing." No, of course Harris isn't for government sex changes for imprisoned illegal immigrants, except for the fact that she said she was. The truth is that we all know that she would say anything to win, and holding her to any position she ever publicly held feels unfair.

The people who have been kept low-information are the Democrats, because they have been surrounded by media largely controlled by their political party. Republicans often have bad information, but they're constantly out there consuming information and hate-reading what Democrats are saying. Independents, in my experience, are the highest-information of all, because they don't think of political parties as something they can offload their morality to. Independents only see politics in terms of actual issues, and track those issues rather than having parasocial relationships with political celebrities.

In that vein, I'm pretty sure that if I had an experience where a political candidate came to my house and talked about issues that weren't real, I'd talk about those issues specifically, and speculate about their origin. I think you don't mention them because they were real, but a lot of liberals have taken this position of officially denying reality if reality could help Trump. Is widespread voter fraud real? No. Should people be unconcerned about making it easier? Also, no.

If upper-middle class liberals could have won the "stop sounding like Scientologists" challenge, they could have won. If The Democratic party could have wanted to win more than they wanted to avoid alienating any donors, they could have won by taking any popular position on anything. Trump spent most of his campaign actively campaigning for Harris by calling her a radical-left socialist; if she were actually a radical-left socialist instead of an empty vessel to be filled with cash, she would have won. If the Democratic party hadn't chosen again not to run a fair, open, lively primary, they would have won.

With Trump campaigning against radical-left socialist Harris, and Harris campaigning against rapist Hitler, homophobic Stalin, and racist Mussolini, the majority of people looked at which candidate was lying the most, and voted for the other one. Everybody knows who Trump is, and he's already been president, and nobody went to camps. It was a rather sleepy standard Republican presidency, whose few deviations from the norm pleased people. The only reason we heard about Harris is because she (and Buttigieg) pretended to be for single-payer healthcare in order to destroy a popular candidate who was running on an honest program.


> The truth is that we all know that she would say anything to win

While Trump wouldn't do any of that, right? He would say things because they're true :D

> It was a rather sleepy standard Republican presidency, whose few deviations from the norm pleased people

Just a small insurrection at the end, no biggie. Oh, and some international agreements were shattered, but who cares about those anyway. I mean, there was also Corona which jolted some people from sleep, but thanks to Trump's recommendation to get some chlorine you could get right back to sleeping :)


Ensured an R-partisan Supreme Court for the rest of my life, odds are. And I’m only middle aged.


Is that a good thing?


To the 35-40% of the country that’s on board with basically everything they’ve done or are likely to do, who constitute a reliable mega-bloc of Republican voters, yeah.


1) “Local crime in your specific hilariously safe rich town is out of control and rapidly rising, which is why the cops are asking for more money and I’m going to give it to them!” I double checked to be sure, and no, of course this was fiction. So you encounter a supporter of hers and want to talk about actual issues, you get stuck pulling up the cops’ own crime stats on your phone I guess. Good luck with that conversation, we’ve tried it with relatives who are convinced it’s true about their own different rich low-crime towns. Now you’re stuck fighting phantoms.

2) “boys in girls sports”. So incredibly niche that who gives a fuck, and does not appear to be an actual problem that sports conferences and associations aren’t handling just fine on their own. Why does anybody care about this? Right wing news, entire reason. Not an actual issue.


> So incredibly niche that who gives a fuck

And then you're surprised why people vote differently to you...


I’m not, I’m well aware of the boring shifts in policy and law over three or so decades that have gotten us to fighting phantoms instead of trying to decide whether incentives or mandates are the right way to achieve greater healthcare access and lower costs, or what have you.


> boys in girls sports

So why can't Democrats just come out against this insanity and take the easy W? The whole, "well it isn't a really an issue" argument doesn't fly when you still demand your way on it.


1) I don't know where you live, you may be right about crime where you are. It is not specifically Republican or uncommon to run on law & order while exaggerating disorder.

2) Boys are in girls sports, and Biden destroyed Title IX with an executive order. And you've gone from "fictional" to "Why does anybody care about this?" You don't see this as a dishonest progression?

edit: and now edited to "who gives a fuck." Women who dedicate their lives to sports. Men who think that half the population deserves half the medals and half the opportunity. Me.


> Biden destroyed Title IX with an executive order

Oh she mentioned defending title IX and I had zero clue wtf she meant (I mean, I know what title IX is, but figured it was some kind of allusion to something I’d only know if I listened to Mark Levin even more than I already do). A glance at The Googles and this appears to be exactly the kind of thing I mean.


> Oh she mentioned defending title IX and I had zero clue wtf she meant

Feel free to label anyone who doesn't vote the way you do a "Low information voter"


If you believe false things, you are a low-information voter. And if someone doesn't believe the lies you believe, they will disagree with you. Vundercind's point from the beginning was that problem isn't a difference in values or priorities but facts.


Fundamentally, that’s a better way to put it, really. I have two young daughters and the examples that have come up every time I’ve tried to engage on the sports issue as if it might have merit have done the exact opposite of convincing me I should be worried on their behalf—it very much appears to be nothing and quibbling over how much of that one story from Florida that they decided to champion as a key example is demonstrably a fabrication again isn’t really “discussing real issues”. We literally disagree on what facts are. If I believed their facts I might even at least partially agree with them! But I look at what they present and I disagree about the basic reality of the problem they’re trying to convince me exists.

[edit] shit, we can’t even get to substance on issues where we agree the broad category of thing needs to be addressed. Immigration! Yes! Let’s do some stuff on that! “Biden’s open border” ok well congrats we already solved that because that’s not a thing, rhetorically or in fact, zero democrats with any power want an open border and the border is not open, so… “illegals smuggling fentanyl!” wait how much money do you want to devote to that specifically, because that’s a negligible source of fentanyl in the US (citizens smuggling fentanyl, however…) and yeah we’re just bogged down disagreeing on facts again.


Being unaware of an issue that only exists in hard-right media and hadn’t happened to come up in the times I’ve dipped into such—which I do pretty frequently—isn’t, like, a problem. I correctly guessed exactly what it was, anyway.


One of the hardest lessons to learn growing up is that there aren't really any adults, not in the sense I believed when I was a kid. "Adult" is a role people play when they're interacting with kids. Some do it better than others. But inside every adult is a terrified child† desperately struggling to make sense of an uncertain, incomprehensible world. Unfortunately for that child, life always ends in death; it won't be long until you are dead and everyone who remembers you is dead. And our reasoning abilities are not capable of understanding very much of the world, so often nothing we do matters, not even for the purposes it was intended for. Mostly our understanding of the world consists of stories we tell ourselves with relatively little connection to reality.

Our understanding of the world is profoundly mediated by fiction, which is to say, lies.

That's why it all ends up like children arguing on the playground. The kind of playground‡ where my 14-year-old classmate Evangalyn Martinez got stabbed to death for, I think it was, stealing Joella Mares's boyfriend, and nobody leaves the playground alive.

Under those circumstances, what does it mean to live a good life rather than a bad one? Good answers exist, but they're not easy.

______

† This is a metaphor. I don't mean that each adult has literally swallowed a child and is digesting them alive like a python.

‡ Technically that was actually the parking lot. Also, I was already no longer her classmate at the time, and because we were in different grades, I don't remember if I ever met her. She wouldn't be my last classmate to be stabbed; in my high school biology class each student was paired with the same lab partner for the whole semester, and the next year, someone else at the high school nonfatally stabbed my lab partner, Shannon Sugg, now Shannon L. Schneider (ginga.snapz1718). If memory serves, she dropped out from the psychological trauma. You can read the decision in her lawsuit against the school at https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/nm-court-of-appeals/141549..., which says it was Alicia Andres who stabbed her. ”Plaintiff asserts that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment imposed a clearly established duty upon school officials to protect her from this stabbing.” I'm glad violent crime has dropped a lot since then in the US.


Ok, well... that's not really an argument, is it?

It actually is, though.

Sure, it didn’t work—probably because enough people weren’t convinced that it was true enough (and also because they didn’t care)—but it's not unreasonable to think that such an argument should have been enough.


Appealing to insult is not, in fact, an argument. It's a form of rhetoric which doesn't change peoples minds, it reinforces them.


"X is a fascist" is not just a simple insult. Pretending that's all it is is ignorance at best


“You are fascist” actually isn’t just an insult. If you display fascist tendencies then you’re a fascist, and he displays many of those typical tendencies.


There are actual fascists (and not as few as I would like) and they need to be called out, but using the term inaccurately and provocatively on a broad group makes it easier to oppose the usage outright. Optics are important to politics, like it or not.


> the Dem strategy for Independents appeared to be "Trump is a fascist" "Trump supporters are garbage".

> Ok well..that's not really an argument?

Choosing to not put a fascist(-leaning) individual into power is "not really an argument"? So it's okay to re-elect individuals who have tried at least once to stop the peaceful transfer of power?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup


”where are the adults” I mean, the Republican game plan was to create this situation. Once they decided that they will do what it takes to win, they really did succeed.

I mean take everything from the climate crisis, to my favorite - creationism being taught in school at the same level as evolution.

The playbook is literally right there, you get experts to come on stage, ridicule them to your audience, show that they are cartoons and have no real value.

Then you provide you viewers with good sounding news bites and manage the optics, and you can get a convicted felon elected to President.

Yes - it really is just the information ecosystem. There really is no free speech when one side is a regular joe and the other side is a marketing and political speech behemoth.

It is that simple, and we can’t do anything about it, because that would be harming our ability to speak freely.


As a European I have to ask - do you really need another argument? If I stand on a platform for government in Europe with an arguably fascist agenda I will get called out as a fascist and will lose. Never mind if I am a convicted felon, rapist, and probable russian intelligence asset. Seriously, what are you guys thinking here? Americans would actually vote for an extreme right wing candiate just to prove a point to the dems? Just to get one over on the libs? Please explain.


Giorgia Meloni - President of Italy.

Victor Orban - President of Hungary.

The AfD in Germany got a higher percentage of the vote in Thuringen in Germany than any other party. Currently polling higher than any member of the governing coalition nationally.

Geert Wilders - successful in the Netherlands.

Marine Le Pen - possible next president of France.

The Freedom Party of Austria - has been in government.

These parties all sometimes win in Europe.


In italy happened the same "nooo you can't call them fascist"

Freedom of protest was, in fact, restricted in italy in a way that it affects climate manifestations more than lobbies manifestation - we have taxis striking and blocking cities if someone wants to touch their ungodly privileges -

Journalist striked on the public news because news has become unreliable, propaganda spewing news at a level before unheard of

It didn't happen, but Giorgia meloni wanted to abolish the crime of torture to better allow police to do its work (lmao even)

At the season opening of the teather la scala di Milano, one man shouted "viva l'Italia antifascista" (long live antifacist italy). Police was sent to check his documents and similar intimidatory shit


Fascist has become an overused word by the left. Everyone else (the majority of the american voting population it would seem) are tired of the label and tune out anyone who accuses someone of being a fascist. The response from the left has been to double down and accuse more people of fascism.


Trump has called his opponents fascists a million times.


This word really means nothing at this point, like racist, it's so misused that it has lost its meaning.


Yes, and wasn't it silly of him to call his opponents Fascist?


It sure was but you were implying that this was a problem with the left.


So maybe the left should reduce their usage of the word? Especially if they want to win over some of the people that voted for Trump in this election?

Just a thought


Yeah, you all keep making that point. But I don't believe for a second that a single voter went with Trump because the libs had called them mean words.


Well your belief is wrong. The libs have spent years calling people of certain backgrounds, ethnicities and genders as fascist, racist, homophobic, sexist, transphobic, deplorable.

This behaviour culminates in what you're seeing.


I know that they have, but that's not why people voted for Trump. You just like to say that to try and make it look like something the libs brought on themselves.

And as you agreed, Trump does the same, more than anyone. So unless you are openly stating "the left should behave more decent than the right if they want votes", there is a problem in your logic as well.


Yes he has called people fascist in some of his speeches. Now compare that against everyone on CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hollywood, etc etc etc relentlessly calling people names for nearly a decade. The difference is a thousand fold. There is no equivalence in quantity.


If this is really your perception, then you live in an incredibly well insulated bubble. If we are including media and pundits, I can assure you that the vitriol that has been coming from the right for well over a decade easily compares.


I'm asking people who don't like the result of the election to stop labelling everything Fascist. I'm trying to be helpful.

There is no right wing equivalent to the institutions I mentioned: CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hollywood, not to mention schools, universities, tech giants like Google, Apple, Meta etc, all of whom lean left and have shown biases in their actions.

Please try to entertain the hypothesis that maybe I'm not the one in an incredibly well insulated bubble


Perhaps this might help you understand my point: https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-spells-are-spent-beaa675b


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Was America under Fascist rule from 2016 to 2020?


America was under a fascist ruler, but not under a fascist system of government.

Trump tested American democracy by consolidating power and was not successful, so we avoided being under a fascist rule

The fear is that we might get to test democracy again, and most of America doesn't seem to mind that. Maybe it's due to lack of understanding, not caring, or genuinely wanting fascism, I don't know.


The distinctive fascist doctrine of perpetual war doesn't seem to be a MAGA calling cry. In fact isn't the opposite more true?

And then the cult of traditionalism while strong in the NRx movement, is arguably stronger in the Republican side than in MAGA itself.

Ultimately Fascism is deeply spiritual but all I get from Trump is brash 80's boomerism. He's not ideological enough.


They are fighting an alleged "culture war" and also call it that way. I also think that Trump's movement is very spiritual, almost like a cult.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that based on common criteria the term Fascism is adequate for Trump's movement. I'm not claiming that it's strongly related to prior Fascist movements. These occurred in other countries at other times and I leave it to scholars to make comparisons if they must.


[flagged]


It's sometimes written with a capital F because it's a name, sorry if that offends you. I'd like to change them to small letters but can't edit the original post any longer. Other than that, the only argument I can see is an ad hominem, which is kind of pointless. I do have credentials for talking about the topic but I won't bother you with them because it would only lead to more ad hominem attacks.


[flagged]


[flagged]


Calm down Jonathan, I was just trying to get a clarification on your point, it wasn't flamebait. Besides when I asked the question the other response hadn't been posted. I'll now stop talking to you Mr. Strange.


I think there are also a lot of single issue voters who don’t think about the ethics of the candidate or their world view.

How many evangelical Christians just voted for an adulterer and convicted criminal because he’s not pro choice?


I live in a very Republican area and know quite a few people who do vote only on the one issue of pro-life. I don't think many of them would actually agree that Trump is an adulterer or a criminal though. They would chalk it up to Democratic lies or political attacks using the legal system as a weapon.

Heck, I know quite a few people who are very strongly religious and somehow view Trump as a good Christian candidate. That one really blows my mind, unless they've changed the ten commandments entirely since I was growing up.


> I live in a very Republican area and know quite a few people who do vote only on the one issue of pro-life.

it is an important issue.

> Heck, I know quite a few people who are very strongly religious and somehow view Trump as a good Christian candidate. That one really blows my mind, unless they've changed the ten commandments entirely since I was growing up.

What makes it bizarre is not things like adultery (a fundamental tenet of Christianity is that we are all sinners) but that Trump is clearly not a Christian. He does not even know the basics of Christianity - remember when he wished people "Happy Good Friday"?


> it is an important issue.

For sure. I don't take issue with anyone voting based on whatever they care about in general. I don't feel strongly enough about one topic to be a single issue voter, but I get it for anyone that does feel that strongly.

> What makes it bizarre is not things like adultery (a fundamental tenet of Christianity is that we are all sinners) but that Trump is clearly not a Christian.

100% agree. No one is perfect and I wouldn't expect anyone who is religious to always fit the bill, but Trump is an example of someone very far from any religious ideals. I was raised Catholic, if Trump were catholic I don't think he would have had time outside of confession to even run for office.


> was raised Catholic, if Trump were catholic I don't think he would have had time outside of confession to even run for office.

That literally made me lough out loud. Raised Catholic too (been an agnostic since, and some sort of Christian and technically if not theologically a Catholic now).


I wouldn't be so sure about the fascist agenda in eu given some recent results of some parties throughout the union


(Except in Austria, which now has Volkskanzler Herbert Kickl.)

Edit: maybe not, I think they're still in procedural limbo because no other party wants to be in the coalition.


I can't begin to speak for America, my point was about the importance of Independent voters: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/first-us-independent-turnou...


only European but if your choice is binary, you can only make it that way.

Some Americans may well vote for the rightwing candidate because they want to stick it to the left (or whoever the "anti" would be).

Personally, I don't think that alone makes a majority in that binary choice; in Europe, it would mostly end up in the vote for a minor "ultra" party. And less-"anti" conservative voters have other options.

In the US though, as someone with conservative values and views, one always has to choose ... do I want to vote with everyone else who votes for "my" camp including the stick-it-tos (because there's only one option "on my side"), do I not vote, or do I even vote against what feels closer to me because the stick-it-tos vote for them as well, and/or their head on the ticket is clearly one of the stick-it-tos ?

Am I glad I needn't make that choice. And am I sad what kind of asocial extremes are encouraged by the binary, winner-takes-all US political system.


deleted


>In simple terms, in the US no really good student is short on education due to lack of money.

In the south, at least this is flat wrong


In the south, this is flat right, Memphis State University, University of Tennessee.


I am happy to give you a tour of Louisiana.


Get book on high school algebra, plane geometry, trigonometry, solid geometry, and calulus. Study all of them. Then take tests, e.g., SAT, to confirm excellence. After high school, keep living at home, and get a job, even just mowing grass. Take the money and get a bus ticket to one of the midwestern states and apply to a college, not a university, there. Being a good student with good SAT scores, should be able to get a scholarship with $0 tuition. Or work hard, make all As, and then ask for a scholarship, use a work-study program, etc. Go to the available offices and see what programs they have for low or no cost schooling. Then with a high GPA, apply to grad school -- $0, zip, zilch tuition. Get a Masters in something. Let the Masters confirm excellence and f'get about the quality of the high school or even the college.

A niece got PBK at Indiana University, went to Harvard Law, got first job at Cravath, Swaine, & Moore. Left for an MD, and has been practicing since then. Suspect she spent very little on tuition.

As a first grad student in math at Indiana University, I got paid for teaching, had a nice single dorm room, actually lived well, and saved some money.

There are a lot of buttons to push, strings to pull, to get low cost or free college, then free through Ph.D. Being a good student, good SAT scores, already know calculus well, all can help.


I had to teach a doctor’s daughter from Alexandria who showed up to my physics recitation not knowing what a function was, despite having taken AP calculus AB. And how did this happen in the public schools in Alexandria? Because the gym teacher taught it and everyone got 1s. Furthermore, the school board gets bonuses for kids taking AP tests and teaching gifted classes and then hands the teaching jobs out to their sycophant favorite teachers


Starting with first algebra through my applied math Ph.D., nearly everything important that I learned I got heavily from independent study. (1) Loved plane geometry. Slept in class then worked ALL the more difficult supplementary exercises. (2) For my first year of college, went to a cheap state school, partly because I could walk to it. They put me in a math class beneath what I'd had in high school and would not let me take first calculus. For their class, a girl I knew also in the class told me when the tests were, and I showed up for them. For calculus, I got a copy of the book they were using, not a bad book, and started in and did well covering the first year. For my sophomore year, transfered to a fancy college, took an oral exam on first calculus, then got into their second year, did well, and was caught up. (3) Linear algebra? Sure, went through Halmos carefully word for word. About a fine point, wrote a letter to Halmos and got a nice answer. Also worked through Nering's book -- Nering was a student of Artin at Princeton. Later did a lot in linear algebra applications, e.g., in statistics, numerical issues, etc. (4) In grad school, got pushed into their course in 'advanced linear algebra'. When the course got to the polar decomposition, I blurted out in class "That's my favorite theorem!". Blew away everyone else in the class. Partly intimidated the prof. In grad school took an advanced applied math course then in the summer went over the class notes word by word. Wrote the prof a letter improving on one of his theorems. Back in class, took a 'reading course', and from the study in the summer saw a problem and solved it with some surprising math, two weeks. Later published it -- so, technically it was a dissertation.

Point: Self study can work well. Obviously: Once a prof reading research papers, nearly always have to use self study, and the papers are generally much less polished than good textbooks.

So, I recommended to students short on money just to do some self teaching and show up, demonstrate what learned, and ask for a scholarship.


Now try and add some evidence?


Right. In the US, on politics and the issues, getting the information and "evidence" is a really big problem.

I have and/or have seen good evidence for all that I mentioned, but such evidence is NOT wanted by or common in the media which means that I have no well written, comprehensive, single reference to give.

Uh, YOU try: Write a document with good evidence, details, quotes, video clips, etc., and see how much interest the US MSM (mainstream media) has in publishing it!!! I predict you will regard your effort, no matter how carefully done, as a waste of time.

E.g., so far I've never seen even one credible graph over, say, the last 16 years, of, say, the US CPI (consumer price index). Same for budget deficits, spending bills, balance of foreign exchange, Fed loans, spending on the war in Ukraine (was there actually ANY spending or did we, instead, actually just ship war supplies produced in the US?) -- the actual details are absurdly messy, sloppy, missing, etc.

Clearly, bluntly the details do not SELL -- won't get a big audience.

To give good evidence here would exceed by several times the 10,000 bytes or so limit that Hacker News seems to have on a single post.

US media credibility? Here is evidence of biased, cooked up, gang up, pile on, organized mob attack from 2017:

     https://youtu.be/f1ab6uxg908
With that example, there is less than zero credibility. So, for your "evidence", don't expect that from the US media.

I wish, profoundly wish, have posted many times on social media, that the US news media should provide JUST such evidence, at least up to common standards of high school term papers. All that is no more than a spit into the wind -- the media does NOT want to expend bytes for such writing, documentation, evidence, etc.

So, here I did all I can do to respond to the question I quoted, apparently, from a European. Agree or not with what I wrote, but it is the best I can do under the circumstances. The question from Europe are not very deep; so I gave answers of similar depth. The speeches in the election were not very deep. The Trump statements at the economic clubs in Chicago and Detroit were deeper.

That's my explanation, best I can do, take it or leave it.

But, really for an accusation of "Nazi", etc. the "burden of proof is on the accuser". The rape? He said, she said. There in the dressing room of the department store, did she scream and get some witnesses? Nazi? Just what is the evidence that Trump has done anything like the Nazi stuff Hitler did? Felon? He has never gotten a sentence -- if he does, then he can appeal, win the appeal, and show that he is NOT a "convicted felon". So, no sentence. The papers case, the J6 case, the Georgia case, the "hush money" case -- all are falling apart due to appeals, etc. They are NOT legal cases but just efforts to misuse the legal system to have others, as here, believe he is a felon. But with the appeals, e.g., even to the SCOTUS, ALL of the cases are falling apart. My view is that the wrong here is from low level parts of the US legal system and not from Trump.

And where are the arguments about 10+ million illegal immigrants, the inflation, the attacks on US fossil fuel energy, the Ukraine war, the Gaza war, the Lebanon war, the hundreds of missiles from Iran, the promotion of biological men in women's sports, the lies about abortion (Trump sent the issue back to the states to decide), the bans on gas powered cars and trucks, etc.?


Traditional media generally requires having three different independent sources to publish.

You have failed to provide one.


What???? I'm posting on a case of social media and am not a "publisher" and am not writing a column for a "publisher".

Just what was I supposed to do but "failed" at?


The problem is that it doesn't stick and people see it as desperate.

Trump was very favorable to Israel and has a Jewish daughter. Not typical fascist behavior.

Debbie Dingell said Trump will build internment camps and put her in one. Were were the internment camps in Trump's first term?


Anti-Semitism isn't an inherit trait of fascism. It's an inherit trait of Nazism.

Mussolini was in power in Italy 10 years before Hitler was in Germany and he wasn't very anti-Semitic at all. He was influenced by Hitler towards the end of his reign but even then his anti-Semitic policies were mild when compared to Germany.

Part of the problem with calling someone a fascist is that people associate the word with Hitler. But Hitler wasn't the only fascist or even the first fascist.


Ok but I believe the topic is Donald Trump who has been directly, repeatedly, relentlessly, compared to Adolph Hitler, and he and his supporters slandered as Nazis. Specifically. Directly, relentlessly, repeatedly.

So perhaps this:

> Part of the problem with calling someone a fascist is that people associate the word with Hitler.

Is not making the point you think it's making.


He'll definitely go away without a fuss after his second term, right? He isn't considering what could be done about the 22nd amendment. Putin extended his terms in office in creative ways, but Trump isn't Putin and has a high regard for established political mechanisms, even if they mean there will be less importance for Trump at some point in the future.


In four years trump isn’t going to be able to speak in complete sentences, much less run for office.

We don’t have to worry about him stealing any more elections, he’s far too old for that to be an issue


He'll be 3 years younger than Ali Khamenei is now, and 5 years younger than the pope.


There is already very clear cognitive decline. I don’t think he’ll be able to function as president in a couple of years.


I am less optimistic than you; I don't see how that would matter to the current MAGA movement.


I'm sure Trump will be happy to go into being former president Trump at the end of his term.... if the left let him.


What kind of a veiled threat is that? How would "the left" not let a president leave office?


Is there any source of reassurance about this I can look to, or only your gut feeling?


>Trump was very favorable to Israel and has a Jewish daughter. Not typical fascist behavior

So because Israel is involved in something means that something can't be fascist? What about the fascist things Netanyahu is doing with Israel?


Not all nationalism is fascism.


Yeah that's why I called Netanyahus actions fascist.


> As a European

As a European you don't have presidential elections that matter. Executive and legislative power is in the hands of your parliament and the president is a figurehead (if you have one).

If you want to compare your European experience to the USA, you should look at congress and not the presidential elections. You'd probably find the same dynamics there as in your own country, with the exception that the blocs that you have in parliament have been distilled into two parties.


My home country has 3 major parties each at about a quarter of the seats, the rest split between about half a dozen others. The various parties have very different views, only one of them I'd argue is "right wing" in the US sense, and they've all mostly learned to make compromises and not be too divisive, or they face a more moderate party taking their seats.

US two-party system really is the weird one.


Every European parliament will form into a "government" bloc and an "opposition" bloc after the election. Right wing / left wing doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. The US congress does manage to make bi-partisan bills. Because members of congress can go against their party sometimes. In European parliaments that kind of behaviour usually results in a crisis of government and a vote of confidence.

> or they face a more moderate party taking their seats

That's not right. You cannot lose your parliament seat in any European parliament until the next election. If an MP or an entire party in Europe is too divisive, they might not be able to be part of a majority and they will be in opposition.

In the USA, the executive government is not elected by parliament - so you're comparing apples to oranges. The president builds the executive government after being elected by the people in the states. That's something different.


Okay, but what about the truth?

I mean, if one of Trump's own closest advisors carefully states that he fits the definition of a fascist, is it not fair to call him one? If Trump outwardly celebrates many of the traditional concepts of fascism like attacking the media, attacking minorities, attacking "enemies from within" is it not fair to call him that?

And what do you say about a person who supports fascism? That they're very fine people?


I mean ... if you support that guy. It's accurate.




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