- Trump’s movement to “Make America Great Again” appeals to a deep fear of diversity and social change. That sort of fear is commonplace in all societies, and it has often roiled democratic politics. Yet the threat Trump poses to American democracy has little to do with “populism.” It doesn’t come from ordinary citizens immersed in “culture wars” — even from those who stormed the Capitol on 6 January. They were and are a sideshow. The real threat is from the Republican officeholders who, hours later, supported Trump’s effort to decertify the election outcome. It was not some rush of anti-democratic feeling that threatened American democracy in those months; it was the machinations of political elites determined to entrench themselves in power.
When nazi salutes are being given to cheering crowds in our Capitol it doesn't increase belief in the theoretical power of peaceful change and nonviolent protest. Anybody know what the next steps are when Democrat candidates are removed from polls? Or not permitted on social media?
I don’t think the aesthetics are the problem. The campaign was not really making a huge secret of anything they wanted to do. Trump talked about immigrants eating pers — did you think anyone missed that? He said he’d declare a state of emergency and deport people. Annnd he’s declaring an emergency so he can deport people. People knew what they were getting in this election, so why the pikachu shocked face when they cheer for a Bellamy salute on Inauguration Day? This was all in your face the whole time. I went in deciding whether I wanted cackling Harris or Nazi Trump. Between nothing changing for four years or Project 2025, military deportations, and abandoning Ukraine for the lols. What I don’t see is any serious opposition from leadership. They’re shocked by the salute, but we’ve known the results since November 5. I guess the best we can muster is a day or two of protests, pardons for the important people (not you) and whining because Elon did a dorky version of a Nazi salute. I saw as much outrage over the senator from Minnesota wearing a hoodie. Honestly if this is the tenor of the response, if the best we can muster is “Oh no, not the straight arm salute! Well, anyway…” I don’t see how you actually keep any of our constitutional rights intact. I suspect we’ll still be voting, but it’s like voting in Russia— Putin always just so happens to win in landslide and a lot of opposition leaders fall out of windows.
I think this is correct, especially and most concerningly the prediction for future American elections. I want to talk about intelligent life in the universe with you (btw I recommend looking for planetary magnetospheres with healthy dynamos), but all of the intelligent life inside of me is saying that we actually have to do this stupid ass shit now. We have only each other. The media is almost completely dismantled. I'lll see everyone around I guess. Well I dunno the data says the site owner needs to get way more fascists to retain users, empirically. Hmmm (this is a slash 's'). Rest of the net's a hellscape now anyways (this is true). PS biomass in the lithosphere feeding on radioactivity is an interesting canvas to paint on (idk I think the radiation keeps cell systems limited in complexity, so hmmm, bio is my science weak spot, though), and when I think about the next intelligent lifeform on Earth dominating instead of humanoids, I don't go with chimps, I like to envision the octopi triumphing, for fun. edit: here's two perhaps seemingly opposed views I hold: 1. I think it was more or less an obvious responsibility to vote straight dem in '24 from a harm reduction standpoint, 2. Populist leftism (like the actually good, not-derailed-by-fascist kind of populism, so sort of fantastical, of course) is still very possible (see AOC & Bernie), but it's hard to see the spark of momentum firing off without completely impugning this absolute joke of a corporatist democratic party establishment. Obviously it's really really bad that the dem option was STILL orders of magnitude better. Imagine that campaign... "OK Bill well, fuck 'em, maybe America will be ready for progress the next time we don't have to make it ourselves. I'll take a stand when I'm dead, we always said" two hours laytiuer PSSZTT-Liz Cheney is 15 minutes out of Ann Arbor, things are rolling smooth, everyone. People love this. it's the secret sauce. So many moderates, ripe for the voting. We're not going back.!.. to when.. Kamala was in the admin, just now. And through mid January."Well the focus panels show 53/47 majority 'against' trans Americans..."
"The Harris camp was dragged leftward, mercilessly, and kowtowed (when we didn't come out to pointedly denounce trans Americans in response to a $1 billion dollar bigotry adbuy of lies); all that woke shit (you know! the bad stuff we all hate because we're older than 53) needs to end ASAP, and Trump isn't even that bad, idiots. We ran a flawless campaign!
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Honestly, I think Carl Sagan was right about the USA. We’ve long since abandoned the idea of seeking truth, and very much prefer comfortable lies. A conversation with the average American would have confirmed this decades ago. I’m not shocked mostly because I was watching the credulous news coverage of effing UFOs (okay we’re calling them UAPs now) and there was no real pushback even among people who like to consider themselves rational. If people still credulously believe it’s possible for alien craft to travel through the galaxy despite the laws of physics denying the possibility, I don’t expect us to have rational arguments about more serious matters. And this plays directly into the hands of fascists as their narratives tend to have the virtues of being simple and easy for people to understand. Reading three articles about climate change is work. Calling it a hoax is simple, easy and requires nothing of the believer. Blaming immigration for inflation, lack of housing, and so on is easy. Talking about home investors buying up every house on the market to make rentals is harder. I’ll agree that we’re on our own. What’s worse is that I don’t think most people can understand their times. Nor can we really sustain the attention and the dedication needed to do anything. We’re the society of the spectacle, everything is on screens or as media stories. And thus we’ll be bothered much more by things that can excite an audience— like the salute — over the boring reality of things that will actually happen.
My primary argument against this line of thinking is that credulity and fascism are nothing new. Sightings of UFOs went up right as sightings of angels and ghosts went down. Stuff we don't understand is always going to be magic, and the "skeptics" that adhere to a strictly scientific viewpoint have simply substituted one religious following for another. We'd like to believe that rationality is self-derived but for the most part it's just another kind of dogma. Can that dogma be derived from first principles? Sure. Do more than a tenth of the people ascribing to that dogma understand what first principles are, let alone have the capacity to derive their beliefs themselves? The principle problem is that the two political parties of the United States were formerly aligned over all but economics and are now divided largely by wedge issues. The resolution of this problem is that the parties differed over economics due to economics being the thing citizens care about the most - the two things that got Trump elected were (1) Immigrants are gonna take my job (see: NAFTA) (2) inflation has destroyed me purchasing power. All the Jan6 nazi-ism is a sideshow but it's a sideshow that allows a bunch of unprincipled ideologues to break democracy. Kinda like how they did during the Red Scare.