I do. I think all the Trump people put in the work and showed up. The people who didn’t bother to show probably would have leaned toward making their own lives better instead of other people’s lives worse.

well, keep in mind, it doesn’t even have to be legitimate.

It can be extremely illegitimate >_>

in fact, I am kind of expecting it to be an illegitimate, manufactured, sensationalized false flag spectacle that exists solely to provide them with an excuse to accelerate.

unless those are the factors that define a “legitimate reichstag” x_x;

Yeah, I get it. It’s just that it’s sad.

Oh, that’s not all they’ll do. There will also be some strongly worded letters.

What do you want the Democrats to do?

Stage a coup of their own?

The Republicans won democratically and they’re doing what they said they would and the American population gave Trump his first popular vote win because of it.

I mean, you can understand why black people have and have had historically a very unique position in this country as a kind of uniquely ostracized population, right? That’s not a 1 to 1 comparison we’d make in like, any other circumstance, I dunno why we’d start now. Effectively, what I’m saying is something that goes back quite a ways, you could come up with a lot of historical examples of this, it’s not new. Italian immigrants after ww2, eastern european immigrants, irish immigrants, even jewish immigrants to a certain extent, they were all able to be subsumed by the larger umbrella of whiteness precisely as they voted in accordance with more conservative interests which explicitly do not like them. The same thing that would have happened in this election with latinos, except we’ve run up on the rails of that process because things are materially different. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t really make sense to get mad at that voterbase for voting in that particular way.

The broader point I’m making is that there’s a difference between thinking about these things critically, and getting mad at the wind, and I see a lot of people getting mad at the wind. Except, unlike getting mad at the wind, their anger is actually harmful, actually creates a constant feedback loop in how it’s directed. Some people get mad at a dog for biting them. Certainly, it makes sense to get mad in general, since you’ve been bit, that’s painful, and the dog is the most directly at fault object for that. Some people get mad at the owner, since they can’t control their dog, you know, maybe that’s a step removed, maybe that’s even actually effective at preventing future bites, I dunno. Some people just start to move towards the medicine cabinet as soon as possible, so they can clean their bite. I would rather be the third person, in that example.

i think the criticism isn’t over people like us who oppose this shit. the criticism is the people who picked the “wrong team” so to speak. areas of the country that would never vote democrat no matter what. people that allowed this shit to happen because they couldnt see past “the team” at these fucking oligarchs tearing apart our country.

honestly if trump ran as a democrat he would have fucking lost in 2020 and 2024. he never would have made it past primary in 2016. that’s the “team based” mentality at work.

For fucking real. Are these pleas for nuance ever aimed at the people voting for real actual neo-Nazis, instead of the people the neo-Nazis are going after?

Empathy and nuance aren’t something that you do because you’re guaranteed to get something in return from the other person as a kind of, reciprocal action. They’re tools that you use to analyze your opposition, understand them better, and plan accordingly. They’re internally rewarding methods, rather than being something you just do to get a reward.

I think we’ve all understood it to be the case for quite a while now that plenty of conservatives, being relatively uninformed blank slate or single issue voters, will actually agree with communism, as long as you don’t use the word communism. Liberals, even, will not commonly do this, because they usually have much more pre-established and calcified opinions about the reasons why the world is the way that it is that go beyond just the surface level. That could even be considered a symptom of their higher education. We’ve understood that to be the case for like the last 20 years.

Why, then, is there still such a significant commitment towards mocking your rural conservative idiot voter, in the rhetoric of the left? I think there’s a lot of people who still hold onto some semblance of liberalism in their culture, their rhetoric, their attitudes, even after they become a part of the left. I think there’s probably also a significant proportion of actual liberals which, being controlled opposition, seeks exclusively to widen that divide and sort of, function as the pepsi to the coke, even as that strategy actively drives us towards more and more extremism and destroys the country. In any case, beyond the extremely cynical corporate institutional wing that actively desires for the country to be more right wing in service, at least theoretically, of tax breaks and a lack of regulations, or maybe more coherently, in service of short term gains, the regular individual should understand that this rhetoric, this strategy, it isn’t really getting them anywhere. It’s actively harmful. I think at some point with the individual participation in this behavior, people start to build up their own complexes around it, eerily similar to the complexes that conservatives begin to take, as I’ve described previously. A belief in a total and logic-defying free will, an innate moral character, meritocracy.

They fall for true liberalism. It shouldn’t be any mystery why I might not like that ideology, I should think. Not in my leftists, not in my liberals. We should understand that’s failed.

Social media really accelerated that particular kind of violent, hedonistic stupidity, I think. Explicitly monetized it, explicitly selects for it, even on platforms which would otherwise appear to be algorithmically agnostic in their format. I’m not sure how to solve that, or if it’s even solvable, in the current system in which the internet exists. I think I still need to watch that one zizek video where he talks about how the function of ideology is to kill hope, and I maybe kind of agree with that statement at face value even if he’s probably going to end up saying something much more complicated and nuanced in the actual video.

You don’t have to read all this if you don’t want to, but it feels as though many things which are otherwise politically agnostic, ideologically agnostic, are kind of, thrust into the political realm with great violence, mostly as a kind of hedonistic rhetorical game rather than through a legitimate desire to improve things. In order to score political points. Things like public transportation, something which is otherwise politically neutral, actually not that related, fundamentally, to any ideology inherently, get politicized, and then they’re guaranteed to die in that throes of that. The rights of transgender people is maybe another such example. These are things which, regardless of your ideological or political predisposition, are totally fine to have, right. Public transportation, or, maybe put more literally, regardless of public-private structure, trains, buses, trams, subways, even bikes and pedestrian-friendly development, is just explicitly more efficient than the car centric, overly privatized shit we currently have. That’s true in both a privatized context and in a public context, and you could have an orientation towards either method of development regardless of your politics. The elites, presumably, want a better standard of living, not even just long term, but on the scale of, say, the next five or ten years, right, and mass transit projects can achieve that goal, even for them, by virtue of letting them save on the costs spent on their peasantry, their underclass, and increases the level by which private roadways, a private transportation, can be used easily by them. Transgender rights are the same way, decreasing trans healthcare provides a maybe minor, yet still existent, cost, it imposes a cost on society. You hear this explicitly called out whenever some chud talks about the suicide rate. Ideally, you would want to avoid suicide! You would want that healthcare, you should want to prevent that, in an ideologically neutral context, because it’s strictly inefficient!

I think, then, maybe the great achievement of the social media superweapon in a post-nuclear, cold war context, is to manipulate these aesthetic ideological dispositions, disconnected from reality, to recreate the appearance of politics without any of the content. I think maybe cynically that it’s just a grand kind of illusion used by three letter security agencies and private capital interests to explicitly manipulate the population, not into necessarily being concerned with actual material reality, but into being lost in this kind of hedonistic game world. I dunno. I think even beyond that we’re kind of, as we’re seeing now, we’re now all explicitly lost in that illusion, the illusion that was created by the internet, or, maybe, the illusion that created the internet. Even at the highest levels of government, this is the case. There’s no concern with any basis in reality, anymore. So under the guise of that, right, I think maybe we’re cooked, is I guess what I mean. Nobody’s steering the ship, anymore, even.

I live in the Midwest and I have not met a Republican that wasn’t a moron.

Sure there obviously are Republicans that aren’t morons. But they still voted with the MAGAts.

Republicans = moron or bigot

Either way you shouldn’t trust them.

Literally the outcome of this election was guaranteed back in August. The second the Harris/Walz started polling at 50/50 was when a contested election became the best possible outcome, and a contested election was always going to be awarded to Trump through the captured Supreme Court.

I get that libs are disappointed that the country just gave him the keys without a fight, but Trump was prepared for that fight. It’s why they kept shouting that our election was a sham and already decided; they knew they would steal the election if necessary. Dems were never going to do anything to stop it, same as they did nothing for Gore vs Bush.

Their loss wasn’t nearly so catastrophic as to make it clear they’re in the minority. The issue with democratic legitimacy is that it’s mostly about impression of consensus rather than pure numbers because humans suck at processing numbers. Sure, neither government might have the actual endorsement of the constituency, but it doesn’t matter if the voting portion of it is split closely enough that it seems like they do.

If, say, the Reps hat lost 30:70, they possibly wouldn’t have been quite so bold, and on the other hand, the Dem leadership might have felt more confident in opposing them. Moreover, reducing Rep significance to a footnote could create space for progressive movements to be more than a spoiler, which could give them more weight in the internal party politics.

Note, however, the abundance of “could” and “possibly” and “might”. The difficulty with counter-factuals is that you can’t really compare them to facts. It’s just as possible that nothing would have been different at all. Much of predicting politics and public opinion is guesswork based on incomplete information, and putting it to a representative test would probably be impossible and possibly dangerous.

As it stands, you’re unfortunately right.

You’re right.

Why slow down the coup when you can just give up and let them announce a concentration camp for undesirable immigrants without any pushback?

It’s very funny to see people claiming to be anarchists ranting about “convicted felons” and “enemy governments”.

Oh, the extreme submissiveness of those who chose to blame for an electoral loss the millions who did not vote for the Leaders who refused to move an inch towards the interests of those voters rather than blaming the handful of Leaders for not moving an inch towards the interests of millions of otherwise natural voters (in fact, they even moved away).

It takes quite a “the boss is always right” butt-kissing boot-liking mindset to blame millions for not following an asshole rather than blaming “the boss” for being an asshole.

One of the most eye-openning discoveries here on Lemmy during this whole Electoral Process in the US is just how many of the “centrists” in America have interiorized a quite extreme level of unchallenging subservience to those they believe are their leaders.

But you haven’t thought of how clean their hands are.

“Didn’t offer them a pony” doesn’t equate to “stop funding a genocide in Israel”. This level of callousness is exactly why people stayed home

Which is funny because Jackson would have beat Trump to death with his bare hands.

Ok so I actually knew all of those aside from the water thing. For a second I thought he’d done something even more outrageous.

Well, the week has just begun anyway.

No, I think everyone commenting is a liberal.