America Failed

[BiggDick]

So no serious answer?
Did you actually vote?
Just curious.

Yea.

I voted third party.

If you want I'll say who I voted for.

But if you want me to say who I voted for, then I'm gonna also ask you to go read their website.

[KUTradition]

obnoxious

[KUTradition]

speaking of low-information voters…

[pdub]

So no serious answer?
Did you actually vote?
Just curious.

Yea.

I voted third party.

If you want I'll say who I voted for.

But if you want me to say who I voted for, then I'm gonna also ask you to go read their website.

I would read their website ( regarding policy ) to prevent saying things about them that weren't true.

[KUTradition]

i’m not a huge fan of Kimmel, but this is spot-on

[KUTradition]

there are people in this country that went to the polls thinking Biden was still on the ticket

[jfish26]

I'm very closely aligned with this.

Last Time Was Lucky

https://defector.com/last-time-was-lucky

On the last day of vamping about opinions before the election became a fact, in a roundtable discussion among New York Times pundits, the respectable conservative David Brooks tried to turn to history to understand what might be coming. "Mostly I just worry about Trump's general incompetence," Brooks wrote. "We got lucky during his term, because there were no existential or complicated threats, until the pandemic."

Brooks wasn't trying to be a Trumper. He built his career on Ronald Reagan's promise that America would be a Shining City on a Hill, only now to witness a Republican campaign declaring that America was the "garbage can for the world." Still, despite what he took to be his best intentions, he was delivering the essence of the message that carried the MAGA movement to victory in 2024: There were no existential or complicated threats, until the pandemic.

The story wasn't true even on its own terms—the ice caps were melting in the years 2017 through 2019, strife and chaos radiated out of the White House daily, mass murder was rampant, American life expectancy was shortening—but also on the far side of that "until" were more than a million dead people, people dying on waiting-room floors, dead bodies stacked in freezer trucks and shoveled into mass graves. One amazing fact about the 2024 presidential campaign was that not even once, as the political media earnestly pressed Kamala Harris about whether she was sincere in supporting Pennsylvania's fracking industry, did anyone ask Donald Trump what he would do if, as president in 2025, he were to learn about an outbreak of some new and deadly disease.

But the Biden administration and the press long ago established a consensus that there is nothing more that can be done about COVID, and that somehow got projected backward to the beginning of 2020, so that the most lethal and catastrophic failure of the Trump administration was erased from the record. There was never anything that could have been done about COVID; the fact that the president did nothing when the virus arrived, then spent weeks denying and downplaying the severity of what was happening, became a matter of simple misfortune, ruining an otherwise successful presidency.

With that, three years of corrupt flailing and one year of bottomless horror were transmuted, in the opinion polling, into that ineffable lost era of American greatness that Trump had been promising to bring back all along. A majority of the voting public replaced their own memories of what life had been like four and five and six years ago with a retrospective fantasy of easy times under the confident, patriotic, deal-making president. Meanwhile every newscast—not just the partisan Fox and Sinclair empires, but straight-down-the-middle CNN and regular radio—filled living rooms and waiting rooms and Ubers with the endless refrain that regular Americans were being crucified by inflation under Joe Biden, that daily life was miserable and getting worse, that crime and migration were uncontrolled crises.

It was futile to say all of this was bullshit—the bounceback inflation went hand-in-hand with the strongest sustained employment in generations, crime was down, the border emergency was not an emergency—but it's vital to remember that it was, in fact, bullshit. For decades of American politics, the basic dynamic has been that Democrats manage the country and the economy well enough to make people feel fairly materially secure, which gives Republicans the opportunity to whip people up about emotional nonsense and cultural resentments, which wins Republicans power, which Republicans use to cut taxes and wreck the economy, which gets Democrats brought in again to clean up the mess. Only now, instead of just the economic growth chart and the federal budget deficit, people were rallying around reversing the recent upturn in the national life expectancy figures.

The results of actually electing Trump are going to be fractally disastrous, making every detail of every aspect of living in the country worse. Every single piece of what's coming would be its own standalone atrocity: hundreds of new lunatic federal judges, RFK Jr. in charge of food and drugs, career-saving pardons for NYC mayor Eric Adams, whatever awaits Volodymyr Zelensky. Barring a late miracle in the House, a Trump Congress will join the Trump Supreme Court to obliterate whatever abortion-rights measures voters desperately passed in their own states. Millions of people, including legal residents and American citizens, are going to be hunted, seized, locked up, and deported.

But the Trump campaign won by casting aside material reality altogether. The confounding thing for anyone who would second-guess the Democratic effort is that even on the plane of seemingly essential election operations, Trump won with nothing. He was out-organized, outspent, and outhustled on the ground by the Harris campaign, by every known indicator of what's supposed to shift the balance in close elections. By the end Team Trump didn't even have the physical figure of a plausible president to put forward, just a mumbling, miserable-eyed husk wearing a safety vest in the name of a convoluted riff on an ethnic insult, bronzered up to look like Al Jolson.

Nevertheless, nearly every demographic group, nearly everywhere in the country, rode the gusts being pulled toward this vacuum. Even if they still voted for Harris, their margins moved in Trump's direction, drawn by the fake promise of rescue from their imaginary fears and grievances. The second thing I saw on my phone this morning, after the Washington Post headline about Trump's victory, was a quote from Bernie Moreno, who had just flipped an Ohio seat in the Senate from Democratic to Republican:

"We're tired of being treated like second-class citizens in our own country," Moreno told supporters in his victory speech. "We're tired of leaders that think we're garbage, and we're tired of being treated like garbage."

None of this referred to anything that exists. It was a discourse about discourse about discourse, a complaint mashed together out of references to other complaints. It was a winning message in a country where Elon Musk is suddenly the only media baron who matters, where Twitter is quite abruptly and actually operating as real life. America is a meme stock now. The only fundamental is that there are no fundamentals—until 330 million people discover, at high speed, where the true limits may be.

[BiggDick]

Nearly a month ago, Kamala Harris appeared on ABC's The View in what was expected to be a friendly interview aimed at pitching herself to Americans who wanted to know more about her.
But the sit-down was quickly overshadowed by her response to a question on what she would have done differently from incumbent president, Joe Biden: "Not a thing comes to mind."

I keep hearing the above stated over and over ad nauseam. That single moment was scooped up and run in for the score by the opposition. Despite her actual policy plans and Donald's hundreds of screw-ups

Hi Dr. P!

yea, that was a single moment soundbite that kinda blew up in an unsavory way.

count it as one of her screw-ups, I guess, or count it as conservative media going wild. I dunno if it makes a big difference either way, particularly at this point.

But, for the sake of illy otherwise trying to gaslight me about how the whole Kamala running on the status quo thing was actually just created in my head, I think it does work as evidence to the contrary.

But, regarding policies and screw-ups, I think there's something to distinguish between Pub voters and Dem voters.

Pubs can, and will, overlook damn near anything for the sake of their guy. Cue the Trump "shoot somebody in the middle of 5th avenue" soundbite here, among so many other examples.

Dems, however, actually expect a little more substance to their candidate, for better or worse...but, not even a majority of dems! Just a certain critical mass. Other than that - dems too can, and will, overlook damn near anything for the sake of their guy...or as the case is this election, their gal.

But - let's talk policies and screw-ups. I hope dems realize that, for the record, and among other issues, having their administration associated with GENOCIDE, and having their campaign associated so directly with NO WE WON'T STOP OUR GENOCIDE, is just not a good look. (or, if it IS a good look, it's only a good look among the very extreme far right worst voters in a society)

if that many dem voters really were able to overlook actual valid credible concerns of GENOCIDE and still cast a vote for Kamala anyway, then there's your basis for understanding how a republican voter is able to overlook Trump's bullshit and vote for him.

[BiggDick]

So no serious answer?
Did you actually vote?
Just curious.

Yea.

I voted third party.

If you want I'll say who I voted for.

But if you want me to say who I voted for, then I'm gonna also ask you to go read their website.

I would read their website ( regarding policy ) to prevent saying things about them that weren't true.

https://www.cornelwest2024.com/platform

it was a close one between him and De La Cruz.

And I don't agree with every single detail about every single issue, but I thought it was important, particaurly in this election, to show support for a third-party option...you know, for the sake of democracy.

(you wouldn't believe how many people this season tried for a "BUT YER WASTING YER VOTE," as if "democracy" is supposed to be about something BUT voting for the candidate whose platform you feel most aligns with your values.

[pdub]

I don't have an issue with you voting for a 3rd party.

[BiggDick]

whoa.

thanks bro!

You'd be surprised how many dems do.

In fact, I'd say dems/liberals tend to have had more issue with it than righties.

[KUTradition]

so sad, if true

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/arizona-vot ... rogan/amp/

[twocoach]

I don't know why anyone engages him anymore. I am done responding to that whole group of ding dongs.

[BiggDick]

As for democratic primaries, well...

I think 2016 and 2020 are very much evidence that left-leaning voters really are thirsty for an actual progressive candidate.



https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... ising.html

[BiggDick]

and just imagine if there was an actual progressive candidate who wasn't even old and kooky like Bernie, but instead progressive but also younger and more charismatic!

It'd be a landslide victory for Dems.

And yet...

[Sparko]

Harris was really a republican like the 1970s. They are completely cult members now. And a third party vote was wasted. You got one chance to stave off concentration camps and virtue signalled.

[jfish26]

As for democratic primaries, well...

I think 2016 and 2020 are very much evidence that left-leaning voters really are thirsty for an actual progressive candidate.



https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... ising.html

Land doesn't vote.

I don't think there is a serious argument to be made that a more progressive candidate would have changed anything.

The present direction of my thinking is that no particular policy item would have changed anything. The present direction of my thinking is that (1) the result here is consistent with results for incumbent parties globally in 2023-24 - the incumbent party simply is being blamed, everywhere, for post-Covid inflation, and (2) the result here is attributable more to R/right-wing exploitation of our information ecosystem than to anything politically substantive.

Yes, a part of this is an Elon-Vlad point. And that part is whiny and finger-pointy.

But another part is that the Dems probably need to learn that, right or wrong, fair or unfair, the Rs won by reaching and converting low-information voters. Voters who had no basis for even learning that post-Covid inflation was less-bad here than elsewhere, and largely Trump's fault besides.

And it is important that the Dems LEARN from this, as opposed to trying to fight the tide on it.

[KUTradition]

sorry, but i’m sick of the Dem-blaming

there is a massive part of this country that has continued to support trump for the last decade

the narrative “why the dems lost” is wrong, imo…it should instead be “why trump won”

(Fish’s post touches on this, though i think at least some of the issues are more deep-seeded)

[jfish26]

sorry, but i’m sick of the Dem-blaming

there is a massive part of this country that has continued to support trump for the last decade

the narrative “why the dems lost” is wrong, imo…it should instead be “why trump won”

(Fish’s post touches on this, though i think at least some of the issues are more deep-seeded)

Right - there's another angle here, which is that it took Trumpism resulting in hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, and massive (if targeted) economic pain, for Trump to fail at the ballot box. And narrowly (per our rules), at that.

The longer view of history will show a through line connecting 1980s talk radio to the Brooks Brothers riot to Obama's election to Citizens United/Buckley/Shelby County to (and through) Trump.

We are dealing with a profound reaction to white men losing (and going to dark lengths to maintain and regain) power.

[DeletedUser]

So no serious answer?
Did you actually vote?
Just curious.

As an adult, I'd never admit if I didn't.

Doubt he's any different.