I’m only 20 years old, I’ve never voted or even really bothered paying attention to any other election, and I dunno it kinda feels like I started on one that was really crazy? But I’m not sure maybe every election has been insane and I just didn’t know because I wasn’t paying attention.
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Please take this shit somewhere else.
In former times if one candidate had promised to overthrow the entire system and abolish elections and democracy, then nobody would have voted for that clown.
It just goes to show how little faith people have in the system. They’d rather destroy it all just to see if something better comes out. Morons don’t recognize that the game is rigged. Unless nuclear war breaks out, it will just keep getting worse.
In my experience mostly yeah. Except my first one, 2012 was a glorious election
2012 was what felt like a more normal election where the candidates respected each other and it played out a lot more typically. (Same for 2008). Trump changed that up and it’ll possibly stay that way going forward.
Certainly, at the presidential level, however I recall Congress having a bunch of “tea party” nut jobs elected that shut down the government over the passage of Obamacare.
No, they’ve been getting progressively crazier since 2016.
2000 was fairly divisive, it went to the Supreme Court after all. But it wasn’t even a fraction this dramatic, people mostly shrugged and figured GWB would be like his father, which was unfortunate, but sane at any rate. Nobody was really predicting 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.
2004 was pretty dull. John Kerry challenged GWB but felt sort of like an empty suit.
2008 was nice, Obama was a strong and exciting candidate vs the very known quantity of McCain, who was a moderate repub known for bipartisanship. Sarah Palin provided for hours of entertaining impersonations by people like Tina Fey, but since she was the VP candidate nobody really cared.
2012 was dull. Romney was a strong candidate, another moderate repub. But Obama was fine, he hadn’t broken the country or anything. Brought us out of a recession, even if people were upset about bank bailouts and stuff. Lot of people got health insurance.
Then it starts getting spicy.
And it should be said - politics should not be spicy. It should be boring. Just like investing, if things are getting too exciting you are not investing in the future - you are gambling.
Unfortunately it’s the exciting politics that gets all the attention. Democrats likely lost because they’re just too boring.
I actually feel a lot like I did in 2004. I felt sure that Bush’s lousy wars would be his undoing. Then people signed up for more of him and I realized “Oh, he isn’t the problem. It’s the electorate.”
You can say with hindsight that we shouldn’t be surprised, blah blah, but the truth is that a couple of days ago, most of us were saying “there’s no way people would actually RE elect this criminal, crazed, orange clown!”
And here we are. He could take a bullet tomorrow and we’d still share a country with all these deplorable people. Hilary took shit for using that word but she’s a smart lady and didn’t stutter.
I kind of understand Bush vs Kerry. Bush had a vision. It was a crazy neocon vision, but it was a vision and he used it to communicate effectively enough that we still occasionally meme about bombing people into freedom.
Obama had a clear vision, and communicated it well. Hope, prosperity for the middle class, international leadership. Biden had a vision, a less divisive America where we came together and worked on overdue problems. Hilary didn’t really, nor did Kerry or Gore. They were more policy administrator types who focused on specific policies and administration, and the idea of incremental improvement just didn’t resonate with people.
Trump, for all his failings, does have a vision he is capable of communicating to the American people. Harris did too, better than Hilary anyway, but it didn’t really come online until fairly late into the campaign and stayed a little too nebulous. I do think she was hurt in this regard by getting such a short campaign with no real prep time, she was evolving in the right direction.
I think we need a Bernie or AOC, someone with a powerful vision and ability to clearly communicate it, to the point of literally cudgeling people over the head with it. And we need to vote them in during the primary, over any competent administrator types, despite the fact that we are fully aware of how effective and necessary those policy administrators can be. Our valuing of them is a place where we’re out of touch with the broader American electorate though.
edit: MLK Jr was good at this. He had a dream, and it was a simple one that any person could visualize in their head. It didn’t require any policy expertise to understand it. We need that.
“Obama was fine” ???
Did you not see his tan suit? The humanity…
Yes, he took all our guns, too. Look, there’s none to be found anywhere.
Are people forgetting his Dijon Mustard scandal? Unforgivable.
Dijon? Sounds like socialism to me!
Don’t forget his terrorist fist jab.
I think most elections would have been as if a Kamala Harris ran against another Kamala Harris. In other words, two normal politicians so that the result wasn’t perceived as much of a difference who one. Also, in the past if a politician said things like, “you won’t have to vote again” or called the opponent names, he would have been shredded in the media and probably lost the election due to scandal. I mean a felon has never run for president before. Trump just somehow has different rules.
“Somehow” ie. billionaires support his insanity.
Billionaires lost their fear of publicly supporting fascism.
Nah don’t worry this was your first and last election anyway
It didn’t used to be, but I’m guessing this is how it’ll be from now on. It used to be a pretty mundane activity, and people could even agree to disagree. When I was your age I remember asking friends who they voted for, and those conversations would go something like this
Friend 1: Who did you vote for?
Friend 2: So-and-so
Friend 3: haha, that guy is an idiot! You’re so stupid
Friend 2: lol, yeah maybe
Friend 1: whatever, let’s go find a party
And it wouldn’t really change much. Now everything after friend 2 would be full of hatred, people disowning each other, and outright vitriol. If we can’t even talk to our friends about this stuff, how the hell are we going to talk to people who we completely disagree with that we don’t know? Of course it’s been engineered to be like this now. This isn’t people changing of their own accord. This is intentionally manufactured division and strife to keep people fighting amongst each other while the billionaires pick everyone’s pockets, and the fascists consolidate power. It’s not going to go back to the way it was without significant activism and hardship.
Yeah, now it’s entirely reasonable to drop a human being from your friend pool for the rest of your life because of which person they voted for.
If I find out somebody has voted for Trump they are now persona non grata to me.
And before you say I shouldn’t let politics rule my friendships, my dad is dead because of how Trump bungled the covid pandemic response, so any person who has voted for that person has said that my dad dying is less important to them than that guy being given the highest office in the land.
I cannot think of a graver insult, and it is one that cannot be apologized for short of bringing my father back to life.
So if you voted for Trump, fuck you.
I’ve also cut people out of my life because of it. It says more than I care to type right now about a person if they’re voting for trump. Even discounting any possible statements it makes about their personal values, it tells me they don’t live intentionally, don’t think about their actions, don’t read, and don’t think critically. If they do those things, then it tells me a lot about where their other values lie. I’m too far along in my own personal journey to allocate time in my life for people like that.
This is true (edit: for fairly recent history; going back more we have women’s suffrage times and the civil war times), but I also don’t know that it’s great. When we see people having their rights denied or, worse, taken away, standing complicity by or with the people working to deny or strip those rights does not work for me. I have cut people out of my life and am even low-contact with some of my family because they want to hurt people I love and that’s not OK with me.
Annoying isn’t it.
Elections have strong outcomes, strong repercussions and sometimes strong benefits. Right now, this past election will have sharp and strong repercussions. Your vote is indirectly saying that you’re OKAY with whatever party you chose, to do with as they wish. And what they do with whatever they wish, will affect millions, including you.
So right now, everyone who didn’t vote for the Orange Fascist, are having solid reasons to be worried. They expect a lot of things to be ripped away or outright dismantled, setting the course to potentially have irreversible damages. All because of the collective voter’s choices that wanted the opposing party in.
In an election, I would much people vote to have a voice than abstain and not vote, expecting outcomes to magically work. However, there is a personal responsibility to be had when it comes to voting. That is, whatever comes your way in how people react when they find out who you voted for.
I always seem to lose friends every election, long tenure or short tenure, because of my choices that complicate theirs. It’s unfortunately a thing that’s going to happen. And it may happen to you.
By the way, I’ve failed to mention that it is important to vote, based on what you feel is valuable for the party to focus on. If they ever.
Yes, read history or take a serious gov class.
This was almost a 1:1 repeat of 2016 and yet lemmy is still getting spammed with denialism posts with hundreds of upvotes.
Trump is representative of the systemic issues America has left unresolved, not a cause, and the writing has been on the wall for decades; so much so that people think old media (ex: simpsons) was very cunningly predicting the future when in reality it was parodying the same issues at the time.
The one key difference has been the rather recent introduction of the internet. You can often find both much more reliable and higher quality information in less than a minute that what you could get from something like 10 newspapers combined 30 years ago. Especially for the younger generation, not everyone is falling for the same stupid tricks anymore.
Great example is Washington Post. People think it dropped in quality after it was bought by Bezos, but ask any international academic and they’ll probably tell you WaPo was always hot trash.
All this stuff you see being “worse” has been predicted for years on end, so while you can technically say it is “new”, it’s nothing unexpected. Even the next level filthy mouth ramblings of Trump are just something the previous guy did off camera (cough bush).
Trump is representative of the systemic issues America has left unresolved
Him and literally every other politician, so thanks for defining politics for us. The problem is that enough people think he’s the right solution. Oh boy are they wrong.
Liberals screaming that the world is falling apart when they lose? Yeah
Politics under Clinton seem civil now
Not every, but a lot of them yes.
It’s part of a trend of a significant portion of the electorate feeling ignored. It’s a trend that’s happening in large parts of the West, we’re seeing it in Europe too in places like France and Germany.
Now you can argue about whether these people have a genuine grievance or not. But if we don’t try and address the underlying causes of these people abandoning moderate parties, we’re going to see more and more extreme candidates and parties being successful. And I don’t think that’s something any of us want.
