You mean I just imagined all those years post 2016 of democrats asserting “Russians stole the election” while wearing “not my president” tshirts? It seems like both parties are just as bad on that front.

At this point I view anybody who enthusiastically supports either of the parties as either naive or malicious.

Yeah, partisan politics are everything that is wrong with our country. It's just a big race to the bottom. "How dare you suggest my party needs to improve instead of fixating solely on The Other Party which is at least 1% worse than us (if you squint)". Too many people putting their party over their country; too much hatred between compatriots.

And then theres this faux-centrist meta hatred of strong opinions, and a general malaise of false equivalence. The Democrats and the Republicans are not the same.

There is demonstrably one party that pushes a heavily moderate corporatist populist agenda and one party that pushes radical christian nationalist policies which a majority of the population is not in favor of, from a heavily gerrymandered and structurally unfair (the Dakotas have the same number of Senators as NY and CA, f.x.) political position carefully engineered since the advent of the Southern Strategy.

Now, im not making a statement of 'correctness' vis a vis one side or the other, but if youre a woman or a person of color or queer in this country, The GOP policy platform is inherently hostile to your continued free existence.

The hatred is flowing mostly from the right, and being enacted into law.

Yes, we have a conservative party and a criminal party. We don't have a true progressive party. We are in the period of the cycle where political parties shift. As the Democratic-Republican party, Federalist party, Whig, Copperheads, Bull Moose, Know-Nothing, and others all got relegated to the dust bin of history, it is time for the political grounds to shift again.

> And then theres this faux-centrist meta hatred of strong opinions

I suspect you're conflating "hatred of strong opinions" with "hatred of people who prioritize their own radical ideology over the good of their country". I don't think many people hate strong opinions.

> and a general malaise of false equivalence. The Democrats and the Republicans are not the same.

No, but partisans are the same in that they both are willing to sacrifice the good of the country to see the other side lose on some token issue or another (pronouns, trans bathroom policies, etc).

> pushes radical christian nationalist policies which a majority of the population

No parties are pushing "Christian nationalist" policies. Whatever your position on abortion, banning it isn't "Christian nationalism". It's not an unreasonable position that human life (and thus human rights) begins before birth. There are some more extreme positions that are unpopular and hard to defend which the right pushes for (prohibiting abortions even when pregnancies are unviable or threaten the life of the mother) but there are also positions that are unpopular and hard to defend that the left pushes for (elective late term abortions).

> from a heavily gerrymandered and structurally unfair (the Dakotas have the same number of Senators as NY and CA, f.x.)

I think this is eminently fair, and without this the Dakotas would be steamrolled by the likes of NY and CA. Policies that make sense in NYC (restrictions on single family housing, car transportation, gun ownership, etc) would be forced on the rural states because they would be too irrelevant to worry about (why take the time to make sure policies work for the Dakotas when they are politically irrelevant?).

> Now, im not making a statement of 'correctness' vis a vis one side or the other, but if youre a woman or a person of color or queer in this country, The GOP policy platform is inherently hostile to your continued free existence.

I think this is patently absurd--I'm not a Republican nor have I ever voted for a Republican. However, it's not "hostile to people of color" for the GOP to stand with 80% of black Americans in opposition to de-policing policies which have driven the last decade's violent crime surge (which has disproportionately impacted black communities). Similarly, it's not "hostile to queer people" to pass a law which prohibits teaching sexuality ideology (whether left-wing gender ideology or "christian nationalist" ideology).

This is precisely the problem with partisan politics--any attempt to improve the country that falls outside of your narrow ideology is defined in the worst terms ("if you don't support police abolition you're a genocidal white supremacist!", "if you support enforcing immigration policies, you're literally Hitler!", "if you think late term abortions should be illegal, you're a 'Christian nationalist' that hates women"). This is precisely the kind of extremist hatred that is swelling the ranks of the right.

> No parties are pushing "Christian nationalist" policies.

One extreme, but popular, politician says otherwise: https://boingboing.net/2022/07/25/marjorie-taylor-greene-pus...

Oh, right, I forgot about that. Fair point, although I don't actually think "Christian nationalism" means anything when MTG or her opponents use it.

That's a ridiculous re-writing of history. Russia has documented interference in the election [1]. Also, most Democrats protesting not my president and stolen elections do so because Trump was elected while losing the popular vote. Republicans just made up lies and then tried a coup on democracy, that was just barely prevented by republicans with a backbone. It's crazy how close we came to dictatorship, helped enormously by people like you love to be contrarian and say "both sides"

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber/russian-interference-in-201...

> The "not my president" stuff is pretty cringey and I didn't see it much even living in a major city.

For better or worse, it was all over Chicago (and Twitter) circa 2016-2017.

weird, didn't see it much around NYC.

There was at least one "Not My President's Day" rally in NYC (10k-13k people in attendance), but I definitely don't know what the tone was or whether the slogan was common beyond that event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_My_Presidents_Day#New_York

Oh, yeah. I guess just don't really notice people wearing this stuff. Maybe a Bernie shirt here and there. I don't go to most rallies or protests. Most of us understood that Trump was indeed the president.

Both the 2016 and 2020 elections were widely disputed by Democrats and Republicans respectively. Recall that the Democrats broadly alleged that the 2016 election was a Russian conspiracy, and "not my president" was a Democratic slogan that endured throughout Trump's presidency.

Not my president did not mean he was falsely elected, it was that they found him repulsive.

Kind of hard to believe when the same people are muttering about Russian collusion. Same deal when Republicans were saying "not my president" in 2020 while also muttering about election fraud.

It's actually very easy to believe. Because you can talk to people and have them explain their views.

Right, and many of them (on both sides) argue that they believe the election was illegitimate. This isn't complicated. :)

False equivalence

Nope

Hillary literally conceded the day after the election.

Has Trump ever admitted that he lost?

>Hillary literally conceded the day after the election.

Clinton withdrew her acceptance of the 2016 election results <https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi...>.

For context, when Clinton said this in 2020 it was known that:

- The FBI was investigating Trump at the same time they were investigating Clinton, but kept silent about it while making her investigation widely known. Trump later committed criminal obstruction of justice into that investigation and was let off the hook due to his immunity as President.

- Trump's campaign manager was handing internal campaign data to Russian operatives, the very same ones who hacked her campaign, and lied about it.

- Trump committed criminal campaign finance violations in the run up to the 2016 election for which his attorney was convicted and sentenced to 3 years in prison, but for which Trump himself wasn't due to his immunity as President.

So yeah, maybe she has a right to say "There was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level".

Sorta by accident:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJvQHVlkpPI

About 11 or 12 seconds in.

The original claim was that only one party has issues accepting election results, thus arguing about Hillary versus Trump's individual behavior is moving the goalposts. Moreover, while Hillary conceded the election officially, she still occasionally claims the election "was stolen from her". "But Hillary's election denial is better than Trump's!" <- I quite agree, but the original claim was that one party accepts election results and the other doesn't which is clearly not true.

I don't think it's moving the goalposts to look at the direct leadership of the political parties and their actions. Hillary and Trump aren't just random individuals.

> But Hillary's election denial is better than Trump's!

But Hillary isn't engaging in election denial, or really any denial. It's a verified fact that Russia leaked hacked material in order to hurt Hillary's campaign and portions of the Trump campaign colluded with that Russian effort.

You can call it bad behavior to bring up old complaints (due to effects on partisanship, etc), but Hillary isn't engaging in any denial.

IMHO the real people who are in denial about 2016 are the ones who still don't think Russia worked to sink Hillary with hacked material even after the criminal convictions and bipartisan Senate report.

> I don't think it's moving the goalposts to look at the direct leadership of the political parties and their actions. Hillary and Trump aren't just random individuals.

They aren't random individuals, but just because Hillary conceded the election on one occasion doesn't refute the many documented instances in which she and others in her party (at all levels of leadership) alleged or heavily implied the election was stolen.

> But Hillary isn't engaging in election denial, or really any denial. It's a verified fact that Russia leaked hacked material in order to hurt Hillary's campaign and portions of the Trump campaign colluded with that Russian effort.

It absolutely is election denial to allege or imply that the election was stolen, as Hillary has done many times over the intervening years, even if you believe there is good reason to deny the election results. Specifically, the original claim was that one party accepts election results and the other party does not--if you agree that some significant number of Democrats believed in Russian collusion even if there was collusion and that some significant number of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen even if it was stolen then you necessarily agree that the original claim (that one party accepts election results and the other does not) is false. You perhaps agree that the Democrats' election denial is better than the Republicans', but there is no room for disagreement that neither party accepts election results.

I think there's a big difference between grumbling about the results of an election being unfair due to your opponent engaging with a foreign government that hacked your campaign, and unprecedented moves from the FBI days before the election; and working earnestly to actually overturn the results of an election by knowingly lying about the existence of fraud, using multiple levers of government including DOJ and state legislatures to advance that lie, and to top it all off directing an armed mob to literally violently assault a joint session of Congress. If you call both of these things "election denial" that's the false equivalence others were referencing elsewhere in the conversation.

They are both election denial, and it’s not a false equivalence because recognizing that both are under the rubric of “election denial” doesn’t imply an equivalence.

When you compare two things that are significantly different in scale and scope without recognizing or addressing those important differences, yet proceed to call them the same without any qualification regardless, that’s exactly a false equivalence.

Let me be clear about what the difference is: the way that Democrats and Clinton behaved in 2016 was legal and constitutionally within their rights. The way Republicans and Trump behaved in 2020 was not only illegal, it was seditious bordering on treasonous. Putting those two reactions into the same bucket in any capacity is an act of historical whitewashing and indeed, false equivalence.

I wasn’t the one who made the original comparison bruv, and I have only been explicit about saying I thought Trump’s behavior was worse. I very clearly made no equivalences whatsoever.

> there is no room for disagreement that neither party accepts election results.

Seems to me like you’re very clearly making an equivalence right there.

One party responded within the bounds of the law and exercised their rights, whereas the other broke the law and tried to overthrow democracy, yet you equate these two responses as “not accepting results”. This is very clearly a false equivalence. If these two responses are equivalent in your mind under the umbrella of election denial, it would seem to mean that no American has ever accepted an election, because one side is always sore about the outcome. You’ve effectively rendered the term election denial meaningless (which is the reason false equivalence is a logical fallacy), so what exactly is your point then?

and the election of 2002