We don’t have another opposition group in politics who have any power or political capital at all, so we’re pressing on them to do their job for once. They are doing the right thing by holding out so the GOP doesn’t gut social services, I wish they could have held out stronger in many other standoffs. People like Schumer have let us down over and over by making concessions and ignoring what people want.
Do you know a single person that voted that way? Have you ever heard of a specific person who did?
You likely don’t live in a conservative or even liberal area. The demographics of the last election might also be throwing people, as a lot of people you wouldn’t expect had their hate and fear ramped up and didn’t pay much attention past “Trump is gonna hurt people you don’t like” so we had a lot of young people, people of color and even goddamn immigrants voting for Trump.
Have you not seen the vast neighborhoods of Trump yard signs and stickers? I know you and others want to believe that the election was handedly stolen but it was mostly just manipulated via social engineering on larger scales. Easier to do, and pans out in the exit polling and the large number of Americans who straight up say they didn’t really care who won and stuck to Trump because they saw Harris as more Biden.
The reality is at once more depressing and more disappointing, so I get why it’s easier to believe that nobody actually supports Trump. And honestly I don’t think people do, it’s just that the people who matter most in electoral politics stopped caring.
There should be no reason to worry that they know if anyone is organizing, because it should be a plan that requires only numbers and expects only political change.
Where we need leadership and planning however is in getting ahead of the sabotage and dissonance that will plague such operations with or without the enemy knowing about them, the provocateurs, the bad-faith actors, and of course the expected problems we always face on the left, which is a vastly splintered and wildly diverse mess of groups, each fiercely principled and educated and ready to stand their ground and argue and debate superficial or distracting issues until nobody wants anything to do with any of it anymore.
We need populism, we need liberals, we need actual political leaders involved from the ground up. This is why we need to start right now by building communities. Pushing each other to be more social, to get to know the politics of where you live, who is running for what, what their views are, who they actually represent. If we made a more unified effort across the whole country to start pushing pride in our communities and our representatives, we could take it all back in just a few cycles, it IS doable, it’s happened in the past, it can happen again but we have to do hard things. Harder than just showing up with protest signs, but that’s a good start.
I like to remind people that Mussolini was not captured by a band of plucky rebels who managed to push people out into the streets. Mussolini was deposed and arrested by his own government and the king, then he handed to the people to do as they wanted. Sometimes we need support in high places, and all this starts with picking wise leadership unless you want to do it yourself.
Unfortunately, we have an entire civilization with “screeching messages” in their ears right now, we have a population largely reactive and only thinking that they’re thinking, people are fed nonsense, a deluge of headlines that blur reality and fantasy. I have to explain to people working in my team in the morning huddles when they are chatting that no, we did not in fact discover Atlantis and a mermaid kingdom. No, there are no giant floating eyeballs in space. We did not discover a city on Mars, aliens have (as far as we know) NOT been in contact with anyone, much less politicians. When media and headlines on stories are designed to sensationalize, people stop paying attention and stop believing anything but what they want to hear, and you can change people’s ideas what they want to hear.
I’m quite sure efforts were made to swing the election manually, via voting machines and ballots, maybe those efforts made a difference, but a lot of people who have never been involved in the logistics of voting in a country this size have no concept of how hard it is to rig. Remember, this was part of the huge contention with Trump when he lost in 2020, he claimed fraud and because of those claims everyone got a better glimpse into how secure the US’s elections are. They are secure simply because the scale of the operation needed to change results is staggering.
I’m not saying you’re entirely wrong, but I think the election was stolen via more subtle and broad, sweeping methods, which is more efficient and less easy to track down individuals responsible - I am talking large-scale social engineering. It doesn’t take a lot and it doesn’t give back a lot, but it can be enough to turn a tide, it can be enough to shift perspectives just enough, it can be enough to capitalize on public mistrust and frustration and it can select for the people most vulnerable to specific, tailored messaging.
And this was before AI was what it is today, I expect the next elections are going to be even more baffling.
Exactly, churches are by and large pyramid schemes that don’t pay taxes.
They ain’t knocking on your door on a weekend afternoon because they actually care about your soul. They want to rise in ranks and get the next tier of benefits.
(Yes there are some good churches and actual spiritual leaders who care about community and charity out there but they are dwarfed by the commercial entities bedecked in crosses and bible merch.)
The military certainly has no desire to try to run a country this large and complicated, that only works out in smaller, less developed nations and even then they usually hand it over as fast as possible to a new government. I don’t see a populist uprising on either side of politics actually forming any kind of movement with power either, people are too comfortable and too checked-out from politics broadly. Sure, we see huge no-kings type protests, but these are more like weekend activities than real action, a demonstration, not a revolution.
People want narratives more than they want to actually set fire to buildings and break a system that has been keeping them comfortable. They want to participate in something that they think will make their lives immediately better if they’re going to expend this kind of energy and risk their entire life and job.
More realistically, we will see a gradual increase in redistricting fights until representation in congress and senate becomes just for show and ceremony, meaning that if every state can just make up the value of their electorate maps, there’s no point in having federal representation and some states will gradually start to renegotiate what they’re contributing in federal taxes.
(This will lead to election reform, but not in a good way.)
From there, you will see states that make more money like California and New York start forming their own partnerships with neighboring states and negotiating international trade without the US government. These alliances will go on to start forming new agreements and documents between each other, designating regions by setting their own tax and trade rules, and eventually these regions or alliances of states will basically draft their own constitutions as they start to build their own military forces for defense and political capital, likely using existing local bases and forces which will be slowly re-incorporated into the new government systems.
These things happen painfully slow, or blessedly slow depending on how fast you want to see the states crumble.
Also, even if you’re not counting the large swath of the population who are chronically attention-span handicapped, the average middle-class American family has to work 6 - 7 days a week to support the increasing costs of raising families and having homes.
Most of these people don’t watch the news, they barely have time to watch a disney movie with their kids Sunday night before browsing social media for 30 minutes and going to bed to start the week all over. People are incredibly overworked and distracted. Politics doesn’t seem to touch you in this kind of life because the US protects the middle-class to some degree, as long as you’re putting in your 80 - 100 hours of work each week between yourself and your partner, you will just barely make the bills and expenses, you will have just enough for expenses and never enough to stop or take a break.
These families are good people, they just don’t have a margin in their life to care about politics. This is the system that’s been engineered to keep people from mobilizing and working together.
Almost everything has become media entertainment, media is about capturing attention-spans because attention is monetized via commercials and clicks on affiliates and the like. This has led to an arms-race in grabbing attention faster and faster, so now the general population, and I mean MOST people, pay less attention to anything that requires patience or does not provide immediate dopamine hits.
This is just the state we’re in, it’s widespread and it’s a massive problem and AI is making it even worse every day.
The average grade-school teacher reports they have to design curriculums around 3 - 7 minutes maximum attention-spans, that anything more than a few minutes at a time and kids will start fidgeting, looking around and acting disinterested, nor can teachers even give kids homework anymore because they use ChatGTP to finish it most of the time. Adults aren’t in much better shape. About a full quarter of America’s adult population are functionally illiterate, meaning while they can usually work out words and text messages via context, they can’t read an article or a book, they can’t assemble paragraphs to form narration in their minds.
This is why we’re in this mess right now, because many people are exploiting this trend and only a handful of people are raising awareness about it and trying to get us broadly to put the electronic devices down. Which nobody wants to do, nor can we all do because of the need to use smartphones and computers in our daily lives.
While being manipulated is not your fault as a member of the public, it is certainly the public’s fault for not being informed or taking the time to learn about and understand politics and allowing the kind of “why you gotta make everything political” anti-engagement sentiment to influence you.
Somewhere along the way we started allowing someone’s poor understanding of how the world works and how the country operates to be a respectable and protected identity, rather than a sign of massive failure from top to bottom of the system.
Which is why I wrote this:
Depending on where you are and what your situation is.
I really feel like our movement has a chance at success if we collect enough power-ups and body armor upgrades.
Much like how they dumbed-down the original story for The Matrix, they decided that a romance with Death wouldn’t sell as many action figures, lego sets and app games I suppose. Gotta keep dem stories 2-dimensional.
You are describing the overwhelming majority of American voters.
Is that a real possibility?
No, there are far, far too many people who are not just ready and willing to seize on any power vacuum, no matter how small, but are actively trying to create those opportunities.
There is nobody in charge above a nation. There is nobody going to come turn out the lights and clean the place up if we can’t manage this. The will of the people has eroded, and unless we all get VERY organized, and I don’t mean protests with funny signs, we’re stuck with this.
Possibly to the point where the pot boils over and the government gets thrown away because it was closed for so long.
Lovely notion, but realistically… who is going to do the “throwing away?” There’s no system above our government. We don’t have a deal with Britain that they’ll come back if we can’t manage our country. There’s no real such thing as law above a nation.
Instead we have thousands of aspiring political leaders on both sides who will see ANY vacancy of power as an opportunity. They’re jockeying right now like Mad Max behind the scenes, but instead of tricked out cars with spikes, it’s committees, delegations and policy wonkery to get prepared for the midterms which are still a year away.
I am only saying all this because you and your friend’s sentiment is common and needs to be adjusted… Nobody is coming.
Sadly, most Americans have very short attention spans and will soon forget what the shutdown was about and will be more concerned with a short term crisis than long term health care worries. My worry is the Republicans know this, after all they manufactured this nation’s eroded attention span and used it to gain power already.
I wonder how successful an app to coordinate raids on Walmarts and amazon shipping centers would do.
As someone with experience in this, churches often will ask you to become a member of their congregation before they assist. Depending on where you are and what your situation is. Food banks are amazing but rarely have nearly enough resources to help even their normal visitors every week.
There are simply nowhere near enough resources to help every family who relies on SNAP benefits.
Everyone should try, you should flood city emergency lines when you run out of food and can’t get help. But the fact is, people WILL starve next month. This is what people voted for.
That’s probably accurate but not unusual, it still had some of the highest turnout in history and the data backs this up, we didn’t have as much of turnout problem as an attention span and informed voter problem.
The problem was more revealed in exit polling determining that people largely didn’t see a difference between candidates, saw no difference between Harris and Biden (kinda true) but saw Trump as a “lets see how he does” option because he wasn’t in charge when egg prices went up.
Studies have shown the Trump beat out Dems in all categories and it has a lot to do with people largely losing interest in politics and just marginally paying attention to social media propaganda, which skews heavily right. Financial uncertainty often pushes populations towards conservatism and authoritarian leaders, and Dems are very, very bad at this kind of populism.
The divide between cultures and populations becomes highly apparent on sites like this, which attract a very select group.