Nope, turns out that the American Empire is being dismantled by something else entirely. A subset of the populace that feels jealous of those with more and scared of social change, reacting to try to hurt their fellow country men? A megalomaniac leader who is somehow completely controlled by Russia? It's hard to get the full picture.

The only segregation they appear to be against is the one that kept men out of women's sports (and any other women-only spaces).

Maybe on economic issues. On certain social issues it's definitely not "centrist" and arguably further left than other developed countries.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2025/02/28/wis...

[1] https://ground.news/newsletters/blindspot-report/Feb-25-2025 [2] https://ground.news/article/ec380800-9bf0-4cb4-a894-3fe0c001... [3] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/02/28/i...

Like sure some inclusive language is silly, but it’s a lot better than losing our national parks, destroying our social safety nets, celebrating cruelty to immigrants, and ripping the constitution to shreds in the process.

Doesn't stop populists from wipping up outrage.

Calm down with the rhetorical fallacies...

It’s pure theater designed to distract.

Instead of being curious why exactly some people are proposing something that challenges their worldview they instead immediately allow their fear to take over, and reject the change.

It's the same pattern that non-accepting parents of gay children tend to go through when their kid comes out of the closet; in that case a lot of them have a change of heart into acceptance because they love the person, over time they are able to overcome the fear and understand a new worldview.

Not so much for the masses with flames being fanned by politicians wanting to capitalise on that fear, they are kept in fear, they are told to reject any attempt to educate them, the messaging calls it "evil" or "not from God" or "only for betas", adapted to the audience's most chauvinistic identity (religion, machoism, etc.).

Since it's easy to manipulate those into hating whatever is the bad-word-du-jour then those same politicians can attach any policy with "combating bad-word-du-jour" and a lot of the believers won't question it much.

It's disheartening because even though I'm quite progressive and leftist (in the European sense), I still believe that conservatism is necessary to balance out the discussion, unfortunately it's also an ideology intrinsically bound to the fear of change, a feeling very easy to be co-opted by power-hungry people.

It's an ideology that rejects rationality and almost completely embraces emotion (fear), which is rather ironic since its most fervent followers want to believe they are the most reasonable and logical ones.

Life gets easier once one realizes that talking points like this are at best missing all important context, if not outright deceptive. Other examples would be the "They spent $X studying OUTRAGEOUS_THING"

Then they thank you for the information and go on to completely believe the next one with no pattern recognition whatsoever.

With regards from a hardcore european leftist

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=olivermuty

Left to me means workers movements, and there's very little of that in the US.

It's time to stop thinking in materialist terms when analyzing US politics, that has completely flown the coop. It's all culture war.

At no point was "liberal" mentioned in this comment chain prior to your comment.

>Left to me means workers movements, and there's very little of that in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics#Social_prog...

It's really only identity politics where the left is actually on the global left, and then it's far-left.

Those are arguably closer to "economic" than "social". Energy is plainly economic. Even healthcare and labor at the end of the day, boil down to dollars and cents (ie. how much people are paying for healthcare and how much they earn).

>speech

Having the strongest free speech protections in the world is "far right" now?

>religion

The Republicans might be "far right" on religion, but I don't see how the Democrats are. They can certainly be more secular (think the CCP), but at least they're not obviously religious. Compare this to the UK and Denmark which have state regions, and the christian democratic union in Germany.

>basic human rights

Clarify. "basic human rights" has been muddled by the left to include mean stuff like "healthcare", as well as the right to mean "right of babies not not get aborted" and "kids not being groomed".

That rings true, but how did the US get here? How did identity politics suddenly come to be the most important thing, bringing the world order to its knees?

Europe seems to be following America's lead (as we always do/did), but it hasn't reached the same extremes and probably won't, imho.

Maybe a year or two ago…the political landscape has shifted drastically in recent years and months.

California governor Gavin Newsom has a new podcast, and recently told Charlie Kirk (yes, he invited Kirk to pander to the young white male voters) something along the lines of “trans people shouldn’t play sports”.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-this-is-gavin-newsom-268...

Add “…with others” to the end of my statement.

Pedantry is what the oppressors want.

Also, do you not think American right wing media is not capable of whipping up panics? This feels like special pleading.

Americans should continue to conflate socially liberal and economically left-wing at their own peril.

Everyone claims they're the true voice of the 99%. Trump, despite being a billionaire, claims he's defending Americans workers by imposing tariffs and deporting undocumented immigrants. More broadly the right claims that they're fighting against the "elites" in the media/academia/corporations/"deep state".

Normie centrist views tend not to garner much attention either in traditional media or in online forums. Instead, we tend to focus much more on the issues that clearly and quickly establish our membership and bonafides in a particular group.

The same extreme-voices-get-heard feature gets recapitulated through our political system. Especially the rise of getting primaried from the left or right. Break ranks with your side? Get primaried. The result is that, to get heard over the fray, political candidates need to articulate more extreme views and stick to them.

Lots of words have been spilled about how various electoral reforms could get us out of this mess. For me, I believe ranked choice voting and open primaries represent an optimal trade-off between "legal, and plausibly implementable" and "yield biggest improvements to electoral system." A major complaint against ranked choice voting is that it tends to bias for more moderate centrists, which I think would be a not-bad problem to have.

The damage is already irreversible on any near to medium term timescale - how bad it gets on an absolute scale is the only thing left to speculate.

It will easily take a generation just for people to find solidarity and courage again.

Progress takes real sacrifice. People died fighting for basic dignity and rights. The anti-slavery movement in the US fought monied interests for centuries.

It took real sacrifice for the labour movement to gain rights such as voting, education, housing, health care in the face of deadly opposition from the rich and their legislative puppets.

It just takes a moment of complaceny on the part of progressive-minded people for the rich and their legislative puppets to undo the foundations of democracy.

The executive branch shouldn't have nearly as much authority as it does and anything we want to be difficult to be undone should be protected by law, with a legislative body needing something akin to a 2/3s vote to change it.

Instead we have a massive, powerful executive branch and legislators that can wield way too much power with a simple majority.

I actually wonder if the problem the USA has is that its system has no override function like the UK does under the Parliament Act 1918. I see a lot of frustration that Congress has been deadlocked for nearly 2 decades (mostly by Republicans) so it’s no surprise the average voter demands change and wants the executive branch to take all the power.

The large executive branch has been growing since steadily since FDR though, that isn't a recent reaction to gridlock. There's a good argument that gridlock is a feature of our system meant to slow it down intentionally. We're seeing now how jarring it can be to have the government completely change source every 4 years, gridlock and bureaucracy help smooth that out.

We could be making it worse by demanding gridlock be avoided through executive actions and similar.

Now they're talking about keeping the government running on auto-pilot budgets all the way to September. [1] Doesn't even help that it's Rep. Exec. branch, Rep. Senate, Rep. House, Rep. Supreme Court, and Rep. Governor majority. Still a stopgap CR land where nothing gets advanced.

[1] https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/03/07/congress/ho...

The budget is a weird topic when we consistently spend trillions in debt. I've found it hard for me to take budget debates too seriously when the idea of running such a deficit seems completely against any fundamental financial plan.

I'd care more about budget deadlines and temporary agreements if they were required to agree to a balanced budget.

Compare to the UK’s Parliament Act, which allows the Commons to override the Lords if it passes the same legislation in two sessions. It means that overriding isn’t free (it takes 1-2 years of focused effort) but critical legislation can’t be blocked. Combined with strict timetables that force rejection of legislation that isn’t passed in its allotted time, you bypass the pocket veto, too. Compromise is preferred but, if the upper house refuses to play ball, the threat of ramming it through anyway always exists to keep it in check.

What additional authority doss the US legislative branch need? They have pretty wide authority to create any laws that don't violate our constitutional rights, I don't know how we could really expand that further (but my view is definitely biased since I grew up here).

I think congress would be well within its rights to change their own rules to add time limits on legislation or required expiration on proposed bills, for example.

Some things do sit within Congress such as the Senate adopting the insane role allowing filibuster. However, this is also encouraged by the fact the Senate can kill legislation like this. Filibusters rarely happen in the UK Parliament because the majority party can force through legislation they feel is important enough.

You say that deadlock is built in as though this is desirable. However the public just became so frustrated by the system that they just elected a madman to smash it to pieces.

Encouraging compromise and working across the aisle is an excellent property in the US system. But that has broken down and I think part of the reason is there’s no mechanism to break the deadlock that can force parties back to the table.

The US political system is completely broken with regards to lobbying and campaign finance. All the money floating around makes it nearly impossible for representatives to work across the aisle, or to ignore the aisle and vote for what their own state wants regardless of party.

If there is ever a conflict between legislative and executive, then the legislative branch can remove the executive branch.

In other words: the president shouldn't be head of government (only head of state, sort of a figurehead).

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-r...

Latin America is all quite similar.

Mainland Europe is quite similar, bar the obvious exception.

But the Donald is doing everything he can to stop that.

Canada may as well be British, except Quebec who are somehow more french than the french themselves.

Also, it doesn’t help that Labour are shit at comms. They’re actually doing what they were elected to do but don’t want to tell the public about it, much like the Biden administration!

That seems like the kind of setup that works great until it goes very, very wrong.

It doesn't matter if rights are protected by law, if the executive branch has no intention to enforce that law.

Right now the executive branch is plainly violating laws established by Congress, and there is no one to stop them.

If any minority group has the power to overrule a majority vote, regardless of what the vote is for, then you don't really have a democracy.

Which is why under no circumstances you should ever elect anyone who will send yours in that direction. Canadians, take note, the CPC only detached its lips from Trump's backside because they needed to come up for air.

At minimum, don't elect people who staged failed coups. They and their supporters will not ever act like they are bound by law.

I would also note that while the current Trump administration has broken federal laws at an accelerated rate, the previous Biden administration did much the same thing on a smaller scale. People here on HN frequently make excuses for Biden's illegal student loan forgiveness program because they liked the results but if we want to preserve the rule of law then it needs to apply to every program. In the long run allowing unchecked growth of executive branch power and the administrative state will be bad for everyone.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...

In both cases the executive branch is overstepping legal bounds and attempting to take actions that it isn't legally authorized to do.

The why behind it matters most for how emotional of a response it will invoke, but maybe I'm preaching to the choir here.

Hope you don't mind me continuing to pull on this thread, I'm genuinely interested to better understand where you have drawn the line here.

Biden was circumventing established systems when he tried to cancel student debts. He even tried again when the first attempt was blocked. Our higher education system, legal framework around student debt, and the debt industry as a whole was very well established and legally defined.

What is so different with Trump's executive orders? I get that you disagree with them, I disagree with many of them too, but legally I just don't see much light between the two. They both abuse executive orders in an attempt to Dodge existing legislation on the books and make change that the office has no authority to make.

> dismantling the federal government, installing loyalists, betraying allies, allying with dictators, and promising lots of money to billionaires

while lying about everything.

Biden didn't do anything you suggest. You're consuming the propaganda. George Bush made it so that Federal workers with student loans could get them discharged at X years of service. X just happened to fall into Trump's first term.

Trump broke the promise made to people doing their civic duty, Biden repaired it.

Biden never took on more authority than what was established almost two decades ago.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/student-loan-forgiveness-applic...

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-506_nmip.pdf

How do you distinguish between propaganda and a lawyer arguing a political policy on behalf of the president of the united states, with the understanding that a lawyer should make the most compelling case they possibly can? Its political, its a one-sided view, its cherry picked, and its meant to persuade the target audience to believe a certain point - that sounds pretty propagandistic to me.

I was living out if the country st the time and didn't keep up, I could be mistaken there.

Democracy would have worked in that scenario, and society would just have bifurcated enough that the slight minority lost most power and very much disagrees with the direction.

Congress does have to act pike adults though and do their job of keeping the executive branch in check. If they don't the system is just fundamentally broken and the only reasonable choice is to throw it out and start fresh.

Fairness in the context of an election only means that it was done in accordance to the existing laws. Maybe equal access to voting needs to be on that list too, but I'd expect that to be covered by voting laws.

There have been many attempts to fix districting laws, but of course those changes have to be approved by representatives elected under the previous laws.

It has been difficult to challenge these in court because it’s hard to argue whether a districting is “fair”. There has been a little progress on challenging some districting based on a statistical argument that shows the one-party advantage resulting from the particular districting is extremely unlikely to be the result of chance.

That's not going to happen with the way tech/algos are exacerbating the divide.

We need to be proliferating alternative, humanistic, empathetic software in the world and putting it into people's hands. It's easier than ever for us to independently build a wealth of defensive infrastructure for the common people.

We have to use our intelligence and expertise to make applications which take care of users and their privacy, without them needing to suddenly become overnight computer experts. Most of the tooling I see today has (understandably) massive UX issues and is largely relegated to at least the mildly technical.

We need new and open Facebooks, TikToks, calendars, operating systems, etc. which protect and empower people but don't complicate their lives and stress them out, which leads to security and privacy fatigue. Even my current operating system, macOS, is so intensely user-hostile and obfuscated off the happy path, despite being heralded as a champion of human-oriented design.

We need a modern GNU-like organization but focused on building the social/web tooling that most people today are using.

Most people don't care enough to even ask the questions. Creating competing services were the value differentiation is privacy (likely at the trade off of cost or quality) is bound to fail for that same reason.

> Trying to make some end-run around market forces is futile

Market forces and the law are two different things, which one are you arguing?

> People en masse aren't going to pay for a service with privacy when they can get a free version that does the same stuff but blasts them with ad trackers

I never suggested anyone pay for anything, this is a straw man argument.

I don't understand your aggressive stance against engineers building better, open alternatives to current offerings. The market is getting hungrier for it, and if a product is genuinely better, "market forces" will do their thing, no run-around needed.

But.. it's a chicken-egg problem. Has there been a law for prevention before an incident happened or is the law formulated after something happens?

.. it's naive to think and say

> Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up.

If it were like this, then no house would be destroyed by earth quake like in Turkey somewhen 2-3 years ago - and Turkey did pass a law some 10 years ago to prevent cheap buildings in earth quake areas.

No bridge would've collapse in Germany - the laws in Germany are one of the toughest making construction very expensive.

And there are much more examples in real world that opposes your "Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up."

The problem is no one wants to pay much money for the better quality, if a little less in quality will do similar job. Compare housing and housw building costs in US and western Europe/Germany.

So, your engineers can do the best things and the market decides. .. yes, ma‘am!

I’m sure there’s a good argument that wealthy people and a broadening wealth divide are responsible for this, but it’s too late to attack that now. We need a huge shift in public sentiment if this is going to change now.

Even if the outcome had been different in November. We’d still be in deep trouble. A lot less, but still a lot. The fundamental problem we have right now isn’t that Trump is President, it’s that about 50% of those who bother to vote think he’s worthy of it.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any way to change the minds of the American populace. They’ll have to learn the hard lesson of where this stuff goes. The problem is that we all have to learn that lesson alongside them whether we need it or not.

Civil wars and the like are usually based on youth bulges, as they need a lot of breathing bodies to fight it out. Preferrably slightly hungry bodies, as hungry people are easier to provoke into fighting.

One, there are a few counties on Oregon that want to redraw the boundary so that they become part of Idaho. This, I think, is only mildly serious.

The second is the border of Indiana and Illinois, which is serious enough that the Indiana state legislature has voted to create a commission to work on it. It was a bipartisan vote, too. Because there are a number of rural counties in Illinois that would like to join Indiana, and two urban counties in Indiana that say if the option is on the table they’d rather be part of Illinois. Such a thing would need both states to agree and then send it on to Congress, but ultimately I don’t think anything will come of it.

When you look at state funding, these urban counties are sending more tax dollars to their respective state capitols than the states are spending in their counties. In the case of these rural Illinois counties, the state is spending between $5 and $6 per tax dollar collected. Does Indiana really want to take on such welfare queens? And give up some of their few donor counties in exchange? It seems hardly likely!

That’s the rub all across the US. The urbanized areas are subsidizing the rural areas. Are the rural areas prepared to do without such subsidies? They can say “the cities can’t live without the food we grow”, but the entirety of human history shows that the cities always come out ahead in these transactions.

With out current structure of governments, as we get around/over 80% urbanization, the rural areas will just get steamrolled and want to break away due to a lack of agency. If you study people in the "western Idaho" area and on the Oregon coast, it would be easy to see that they are two different nations.

Also,do you have e a source for the 5x tax collected number? The 5x seems really high. I couldn't find one for Indiana, but Illinois shows it's <2x.

https://news.siu.edu/2018/08/081018-research-shows-state-fun...

Shows that on average it is about 3x. There are more detailed per-county numbers available in the actual study.

The real losers are the suburban counties surrounding Chicago. Cook County is only slightly shafted.

https://www.farmweeknow.com/policy/state/state-tax-dollars-b...

My personal opinion is that our state and nation legislatures have way too few members given our current populations. For example, the US House should have some sort of dynamic membership count: the smallest odd number such that when you run the apportionment algorithm the smallest state has 3 members. That’s probably somewhere around 1100 members (just spitballing).

Decreasing the ratio of constituents to representatives won't really work. It may work at the margins, but you will still have the mismatch in proportions between urban/rural.

I don't believe that at all.

But yeah, there also was a lot of physically strong young people to choose from.

Our expectations are so low that we ignore the real things that qualified people have done, to pretend that an anti-science wacko has some semblance of sanity.

strong bodies are lackin' wisdom.

Or:

Who do not smoke, not drink, has never lived.

The military have the tanks, the air support, the logistics, the surveilence net, the miscelaneous support equipment, and all the training to use everything.

A split within the military, that gets real ugly real fast.

And then, because there were demonstrably some absolute sadists demonstrably present in the armed forces during my lifetime (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hooded_Man), perhaps the conscientious objectors will be convinced to fight anyway, to stop the sadists.

It also matters what such a civil war be about — Is it between those who would seize power and those who would prevent it? Is it the same borders as the old Civil War? Is it city-vs-rural?

If there is one (still an if), and if it is Trump vs. the constitution… it's still not impossible for such a conflict to be without a single shot fired. Conversely, if it's between two groups of cities neither of which will consent to the other's choices for president, it could have every major city in the US reduced to radioactive debris.

After America would be like the Fall of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Chinese Jin (romance of the three kingdoms) and Tang (five dynasties, ten kingdoms) eras, usually because of human bickering over power and control. Occasionally, systems like Shadowrun have a "mild" apocalypse that mostly serves as a catalyst for balkanization. Whatever vestiges of a state remained fall apart under the stress.

Complete apocalypse tends to be something like large scale devastation from a known threat that final gets used (nuclear, biological, dangerous machine sentience) and everybody's too busy dealing with their own issues to care about larger ideas like a continental federal state of "America."

Either way, tends to result in 3+ most of the time. From looking at the Roman Empire and the multiple collapses of China though, it really does not take anything especially dramatic to result in pretty severe balkanization. Often its the old "Blue and the Grey" divide and then most of the West just does their own thing. Occasionally it's more like East Coast, Heartland, and often the West still is not really included.

The result for the West has actually been one of the weirder parts of reading a lot of those settings. Often this undercurrent that the West has never really been a part of "America." The heavily populated East is still mostly fighting over the same issues with each other, the lightly populated West is just some far away land they occasionally pay attention to (mostly California and Texas).

Zuck is probably the best example.

Such moves towards such systems, are usually desperate jumps of those whose empires are under threat of being broken up anyway.

Trump is the result of anti-system vote by people who were ignored for decades by both parties.

Trump obviously won't solve their problems. Inequality won't decrease. Healthcare won't become more accessible. Workers' rights won't be fixed. Homes won't get more affordable. Inflation won't drop.

So - even when Trump disgraces himself completely - these disappointed voters will just vote for another anti-system con-man.

Trump's core voters desperately need Sanders to win. But they will vote Trumps and get fucked over time and time again.

This is how democracy dies. People distrusting the system so hard they destroy it.

2-party system is bad. Regional representation instead of population representation is bad. Allowing gerrymandering is bad. Letting companies/oligarchs to contribute to election campaigns is VERY bad.

All of this ends with a system that cannot reform itself. It's a common failure mode in early democracies. There are known workarounds.

E.g. Republican Schwarzenegger has been advocating against gerrymandering for a long time.

Force all states to cast election votes to be proportional to citizens' votes (some states do but others do not).

If instead all votes go proportionally according to what people voted, you get less extreme policies and encourage parties to build coalitions. Nobody is happy, but fewer people are extremely unhappy.

People need to be treated as adults before they can be expected to act like adults. There's always the risk that goes wrong, it has in the past, but we're doomed if we believe the only way forward is a small group of elites forcing change on us because they "know best".

Reasoned, informed votes aren’t a major factor in elections.

[edit] see if your library has a copy of Democracy for Realists and also dig into older major works they cite, if you’re interested in more on this. For a quick gut-check, look up the proportion of US voters that understand how marginal income tax rates work, then reflect on the fact that this is something very simple that directly affects them in ways they must confront at least once per year, and despair at how bad similar measures must look for practically everything else and that if they don’t understand the basics of how things work, they can’t even begin to figure out “what’s best” for them or for anyone else.

I'm not sure how we could untangle the issue of today's uneducated populace with our education system itself. If people don't understand marginal tac rates, for example, and most people go to public school because the government makes it pretty difficult to choose anything else, is it not the fault of public education for either not teaching it or teaching it poorly?

More importantly in my opinion, if people don't care to understand it that's fine - they can make that choice. If the system still works and no one complains, great. If it becomes a problem we can either better educate people on how it works or move to a more simply form of taxation that is easier for people to understand.

Both of those factors are, to use the scientific term, completely fucked in the US, which is why we’re where we are now. We’re not here because people think that we spend 20% of our budget on foreign aid, but rather, people think that because of concentration and capture of media ownership, and intense lobbying. The ignorance would be there either way, but the direction and form of it is carefully cultivated, and allowing that cultivation is the problem.

The generation of hard data demonstrating that voters (more or less) don’t know jack-shit about anything goes back to IIRC the 1950s, and the best answer Poli Sci has for why this results in a functioning system at all is that voter behavior is fairly erratic (much of it amounts to “do I perceive that things are bad, even that have nothing to do with the government or with me? Then throw the bums out!”) and (this was once accepted but is now controversial) that voter ignorance kinda balances out by virtue of being chaotic. If that ignorance becomes directed, however, both of these things are weaponizable or breakable.

What you describe are both results of an uneducated voting public in my opinion. At least as I see it, those are two important effects with the root cause being a lack of education and critical thinking.

If people were better educated on how our systems work and issues that impact them directly, and willing to think critically and listen to, or engage in, reasoned debates we wouldn't have to worry about what shit they may hear or see in the media, or from politicians, lobbyists, etc.

I’d definitely be interested in evidence that there are democracies with voters who are significantly better at understanding the function of their government, the breakdown of the budget, how basic functions of it work, et c, than in the US before, say, 1975.

This is anecdotal since I don't have evidence handy, but I've been impressed with Swiss voters that I've met and they have all spoken highly of both their Democratic model and their voters. I don't know all the intricacies of it, but my understanding is that their system pushes any meaningful change to a vote. Its slower and requires more voter engagement, but at least from my experience that has succeeded in building a better informed public.

Acting like an adult requires practice and learning lessons when you mess up. Treating those you may disagree with, or don't trust, as children is a self fulfilling prophecy and strips them of the dignity of having the chance to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences.

I wouldn't expect voters for either candidate to agree with much from the other candidate, but maybe I don't know their platforms well enough to see the similarities.

Given the GP comment I assumed we weren't talking about that scenario where people are only a candidate or party voter.

> Trump _is_ the policy and the view.

That may be true for voters, I know quite a few Trump voters that only care to vote for him and couldn't explain any coherent policy reason for preferring him. That has no bearing on Trump's own policies or views though.

Perhaps the reasons can't be mentioned in polite company.

I would assume the same goes for some Democratic voters as well. There's a lot of hate thrown across the aisle in both directions these days. Maybe it comes more frequently from Trump's supporters, I don't know, but I've been surprised by how much blatant disregard, disrespect, and animosity I've heard from those on the left. The idea of voting for Trump was so foreign to many in the Biden/Harris bubble that anyone willing to vote for Trump must have been crazy or less than.

I didn't vote for Trump (or Harris), but working in the tech industry and mostly around people who would consider themselves progressive or liberal has been pretty eye opening the last few elections. Everyone wants to be inclusive unless its political and they strongly disagree with the other side.

That's an interesting idea. Care to expound on who some Democratic voters were eager for Kamala to "hurt"?

I know many Trump supporters but not a single one of them respects or like Sanders, and all the polling data I can find points out that this is the general trend.

Any Sanders path to victory involved massive amounts of youth turnout that would have otherwise stayed home, and there's basically zero Republican leaning voters that would switch to Bernie. And the swing vote swings massively to Trump when Sanders goes against Trump.

Even his own party never votes for his stuff because his ideas are always terrible. They are always emotional, but he never thinks them through. I don't think he's able to think them through.

I'll give you an example from a different person: There's someone on Twitter who wants a 0.1% tax on stock transactions, and then he calculates that this little change will fund everything we could possibly want. He utterly ignores that if you put this tax people will change their behavior! There will be fewer transactions, and this tax will fund nothing at all.

Sanders is the same way: He makes an idea, and completely ignores how people will respond to it.

Sanders has a 0% chance of winning.

This guy does:

https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/114/099/2...

I can't find his original post on X (although that's probably for the better because his feed is filled antisemitic garbage, and he's pretty clearly at utter idiot).

But yes, some people really do think that way: They never think about the results of their proposals, and getting back to the topic at hand Bernie is the same way (although unlike that other guy Bernie really does seem to care about people), but he never thinks about the effects of his proposals, how people would react and change behavior.

This would make him a terrible President.

And I would remind you that despite being in congress for 34 years Bernie has never manged to get even a single idea of his passed.

Even for the Trump "bull in the china shop" voter, Sanders has become less relevant in 2020 and 2024 because he offers so little and for someone so called principled, he doesn’t hold the same ideas on immigration that he has before.

This immediately got dismissed. "Everything is fine". It is a mistake to paint all Trump voters as just being proto-fascists (which the majority are). Many ended up there because they desperately wanted change and establishment candidates were just offering more of the same. Hilary absolutely was a "more of the same" candidate. And the entire GOP primary field (21 at one point) were "more of the same". That's why Trump won the primary. That, combined with Hilary's massive negatives and her generally being a terrible candidate, were why Trump won in the first place.

2020 was an anomaly in many ways. We had Covid lockdowns and were coming off 4 years of Trump chaos. Because of the lockdown, voting was made substantially easier with early voting and mail-in ballots. The more people vote, the more Democrats win. It's why voter suppression is a key part of the Republican platform (make no mistake, "voter ID" is simply voter suppression). Were it not for the pandemic, I very much suspect Trump would've won re-election. Biden was a terrible candidate and never should've been the nominee. Clyburn basically handed him the nomination (in South Carolina) and Warren stayed in long enough to split Bernie's vote, the second time the DNC had actively sabotaged Bernie's campaign.

Remember in 2020, Bernie had Joe Rogan's endorsement.

The Democrats are really just Republican Lite now. Kamala's immigration plan was Trump's 2020 immigration plan. Kamala abandoned opposition to the death penalty from the party platform and called for the most "lethal" military. She courted never Trumpers like Liz Cheney. Like seriously, who was that for? She refused to separate herself from Biden on any issue despite his historic unpopularity. And of course, she refused to deviate from the deeply unpopular position on Israel-Gaza. In short, she offered the voters absolutely nothing.

In this election, progressive voter initiatives outperformed the Democratic party by a massive margin. For example, minimum wage increases passed in Missouri, a state Trump won by 22. Trump won Florida by 14 yet recreational cannabis and abortion protection got 55-59% of the vote (unfortunately, you need 60% to pass in Florida).

The Democratic Party exists to actively sabotage any progressive momentum. We didn't get a convention primary after Biden withdrew because the DNC was scared a progressive candidate would win. They stuck us with Kamala to avoid that.

My point here is that Trump doesn't have and has never had a majority. He only won each time because there was effectively zero opposition. A chunk of Trump's base are simply people desperate for change. At least Trump lied to them and gave them something to vote for. Democrats wouldn't even lie to them and tell them they were going to fix housing and egg prices and give them healthcare.

This is a solid summary of what happened during the political shifting of the last (almost) ten years.

Unfortunate that this comment is so deep in the thread here.

This is the real bisector. If one party gets to use magic and capture the stupid vote, what's the other party supposed to do? Lie more? Lie less? As long as magic appeals to stupid people, we're screwed.

The real underlying problem is the collapse of the consensus of the elites, projected through corporate media. Murdoch saw a financial opportunity to break from this model, and social media companies followed with this as their only business model. Murdoch and Zuckerberg make money spreading magic which appeals to stupid people who vote in deranged morons. There is no effective feedback mechanism because not enough voters have the mental skills to evaluate the consequences of their actions. Or perhaps they just like seeing chaos and destruction. Rinse repeat.

I have often felt that the only way to break this cycle is to get more non-voters to join the fray. There are enough people totally checked out but get a bunch of them and you can make up for the centrist dems. Its gotta be a celebrity that has any chance of ramming through the Democratic primary just like Trump did. AOC isn't going to cut it. If we make it to 2028, We need a superstar.

1: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-pri...

Thats more than enough of a margin for a definite loss. Image if Trump lost in 2016. His supporters and the whole world wide right wing ecosphere would never had gotten emboldened.\

The article doesn't touch upon it but there was a contagion of two time Obama voters that voted Trump. This group was touched upon in Michael Moores documentary Farenheit 11/9. People like those in Flint, MI who felt abandoned by Obama switched their allegiance to Trump.

The American Problem is not one of systems or policies. The American Problem is about people, what they do to each other, and that you allow that to happen. The constitutional arguments they have are Red Herrings. What matters is what people do, and what they want to be allowed to do by their arguments.

Funny. Reminds me of the last time I visited Brazil. In the last day I heard someone justifying voting for Bolsonaro by saying "things are so bad that I just want someone who will destroy everything".

Without union we get nothing and people before us had to fight to get us these rights and now some people want to throw it away because they didn't get big enough raise.

Nah, they were not ignored by both parties. It is votes by people who were listened to by the republican party again and again and again.

It's not like in authoritarian countries where their votes just go down to trash. It's not like they cannot voice their opinion or organize demonstrations. I agree there is a sentiment of "I'm ignored", but at any point in time it's up to them to not being ignored in democratic society.

The most frustrating part is that Trump is sabotaging the US by enacting the pseudo-anti war policies that the republican party has been vilifying for decades.

Leftist now refers to that. The leftist of like over a decade ago. That leftist is now more centrist.

If you want to copy Denmark, I'm guessing you also want their universal healthcare.

The main difference is that they are easier to integrate. For instance, immigrants from the Americas speak a romance language, and if they speak Spanish, that's like a second language for the US. Most are also Christians, and yes, it matters because they don't uphold Sharia over local laws. Yes, the US is also getting drug dealers and such, but I bet that a vast majority are there to work and pay their taxes.

Europe has the problem that it took in many people from Africa and Asia, that are harder to integrate, and with many of them fleeing war. And the difficulty here is that people fleeing war have no intention to integrate or even to work for a living if they can get away with subsidies, many intending to return home as soon as possible. Europe also has the issue that it has never been a melting pot, smaller countries in Europe don't have a tradition of cultural diversity, they are unprepared to integrate that many people over a short period of time.

There was also a story recently about Russia apparently fuelling immigration from war zones into Europe, to destabilize the EU and its governments. They also funded “green” NGOs and politicians who succeeded in shutting down shale gas extraction and nuclear power plants, increasing the energy dependence on Russia. I'm guessing their hybrid war is a wild success.

Not to be misunderstood here, I am pro immigration. For example, Germany has been a powerhouse of Europe due in no small part to their generous immigration policies. The population is growing old, and we need people to support society. The “low skilled” classification is a canard. Countries require “low skilled” work as well, and note that unemployment is at an all-time low, US and EU included.

I'll also note that the UK ran xenophobic ads ranting against Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians, as a justification for Brexit. After Brexit, they wanted them back, especially during the pandemic, since “low skilled” Eastern Europeans started going to Germany and other EU countries instead. And immigration actually got worse for them after Brexit, which was ironic, but not unpredictable.

That’s the kind of persecution they are talking, and angry, about. If that incident had not happened, Trump may never have been elected.

How about you check out the rest of the western world, where each single democracy had their own pickings with communist tendecies. And most of them handled that in the common sense way of giving workers basic protections and ensuring their share of wealth so they don't feel the need to go to the communists.

Worked pretty well for most European countries.

Although, once communism was gone, the ideology of neolibral economic thinking took over and thus all benefits to workers were seen as unnecessary expenses. Leading to the current rise in nationalism and fascism nearly everywhere.

It is pretty simple: If you want all people to carry a system, all people need to feel like they profit from its existence. Once the mask slips and people realize they aren't profiting, they will be unwilling to hold up their side of the social contract. This is what is happening right now.

Yup, and the response to from the owner class is not to uphold the social contract, but to renegotiate it.

"the whole structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration." - Sam Altman

I mean I am actually impressed by the sizeable part of the population media moguls managed to convince into a cultish devotion to lie to themselves against their own naterial interests. This is bad everywhere, but the current US has a propaganda machine that is truly astonishing, in a scary way.

The problem with that is that authoritarians have no incentive to figure out the real roots of a problem. Like a doctor that always blames it on some devil, demon, or whatnot when you go to them an authoritarian will not solve the problem, because every (real) crisis is a chance to blame the (fictional) enemy.

Has it though? It appears most of Europe is by and large a failed state collapsing under such communist-adjacent policies plus unbounded immigration. I would not want to be Europe today, so yeah, to the extent McCarthyism has been a protection against that, kudos.

To most europeans there are more important things than money, especially those working in tech who likely earn enough to have a great quality of life. Also lots of them have been to the US and made their own minds up.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

Ignore the US; keep believing that Sweden is happier than Spain :)

They should really call it something like "World ESG Index."

If the left was strong in the US there would have been a contest between Hillary Clinton and an actual left wing contender like Bernie Sanders. Even people like AOC would make a decent centrist candidate in Europe.

It's almost as if they both suck. Horseshoe theory is a very real thing, like it or not. From the victim's point of view, what's the difference between a Hitler and a Stalin?

The real key to avoiding mass starvations is giving people economic freedom to grow their own food or at a minimum trade for it, as well as democratic means to remove rulers that will starve mass numbers of people.

I'm curious to see this quantified. Mao was certainly terrible, but so was Hitler of course and so were the various famines imposed by British rule.

Here in the US, I'm personally more concerned about a replay of Pol Pot's regime. He took Hitler's warped notions of anti-intellectualism ("Jewish physics") to a whole new level ("Kill anybody wearing glasses.")

The fact that he did so under the standard of leftism doesn't really seem that meaningful or relevant, because if/when it happens here, it will evidently be perpetrated by the extreme right. A pox on both their houses.

Oh look one of you. Hitler didn't get the chance to execute Generalplan Ost.

My favorite example is probably getting my wife's uncle to agree that the proletariat has nothing to lose but it's chains mid-rant about how right-wing militia groups are the only folks in the country with a finger on the pulse and how they were absolutely going to overthrow the federal government with a selection of canned goods and small arms...

Is this really the case in 2025? There's been more than a few self-described leftists/liberals writing about attending Trump rallies over the years and this not being their experience. One example: https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2018/09/what-i-learned...

Every single bit of the right is projection. "The left hates America" = we (the right) will dismantle and destroy this 250 year experiment

But yes, projection. Like free speech, playing with World War III, etc.

the saddest part about a comment you are commenting on is that their mind has been so polluted that they only see the world through the views of two arbitrary political parties (who shift their own views every couple of decades, hard rightist from few decades ago is basically same-ish person as far-leftist today). all empires fall and USA is slowly getting there (now going “little” faster) because of thinking like this in part.

The two sort-of examples in Western history I can think of are Spain after Franco, and the UK in the 1930s. In Spain a monarch's left-shift was perhaps the deciding and surprising variable, and in the UK it was a powerful civil rights movement.

The US has neither, so I don't know what to expect. The two-party system also makes it very hard to bootstrap meaningful change, since both parties tend to try and chase the Overton window, but only one is really pushing to move it right now.

Portugal endured a dictatorial regime for almost 42 years, one of the longest in modern Europe, which was tolerated by NATO due to its anti-communist stance. [1],[2]

Interestingly enough, Russia is currently spending more than 40% of its budget on the war. [3]

A far more effective strategy to force them out of Ukraine, would be genuine economic starvation. Instead, the West tolerated hundreds of businesses continuing to operate in Russia.[4]

The most likely explanation for agent Krasnov’s, (currently occupying the White House), sense of urgency to halt the war in Ukraine, and use it as a pretext to restart economic ties with Russia is the impending collapse of the Russian economy.[5]

If the USA were to leverage its real and soft power by issuing executive orders that refuse to allow any company to do business with Russia. And by threatening sanctions on India and China for enabling the Russian economy, it would force India and China to choose between access to the US market and economic prosperity, or support for Putin. The war would cease, employing the same tactics Reagan used to bankrupt the Soviet Union.

Instead, the US administration chose to betray the entire West, by yielding to Russian demands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_de_Oliveira_Salaz...

[3] https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/1...

[4] https://leave-russia.org/

[5] https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/01/russias-economic-dilemm...

I am very curious if EU is smart enough to keep and even tighten their sanctions. After all is European security that is threatened by Russia.

[0]

[https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/RUS/Yea...

It doesn't seems like that. The West was pretty intolerant to business connections with Russia, and if instead of 80% cut there was 100% cut - it doesn't change the overall picture very much.

>by threatening sanctions on India and China

If We look at the trade balance of Western countries and China - the West isn't close to the position to do that.

>use it as a pretext to restart economic ties with Russia is the impending collapse of the Russian economy >yielding to Russian demands.

That's a blatant conspiracy theory. It seems like the main obstacle in the Trump's "peace deal" is that Putin is thinking that he is winning this war and that the Russian economy has way more time than the Ukrainian army will be able to conscript new soldiers.

>employing the same tactics Reagan used to bankrupt the Soviet Union

Soviet Union collapsed because of it's own complete left economy, because oil prices were several times lower than now (even adjusted for inflation) and because Gorbachev thought that it is better for him to advertise pizza, then to be the Supreme Ruler of those piece of sh.t of a country.

There is no political will. Sadly, and on this Trump is correct, the pathetic EU sent as much money to Ukraine as the amount of money they sent to Russia in oil purchases:

https://www.euronews.com/video/2025/03/05/has-europe-spent-m...

Three years of war and no real strategy of economic starvation of Russia....

Yet it still took 13 years, combined with the regime’s economic collapse and a shift in the educational background of the Armed Forces hierarchy to spark the revolution.

The US most likely will be in a civil war in eight to six months.... A cut in social security benefits will do it...

"Trump suggests he’ll use the military on ‘the enemy from within’ the U.S. if he’s reelected" - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-suggests-hell-us...

Democrats will dress in pink...

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/20/1246134779/the-reality-behind...

"In the near future, the U.S. president has given himself a third term. He's disbanded the FBI."

"Trump Muses About a Third Term, Over and Over Again" - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/trump-third-t...

The underlying goal of horseshoe theory is not to create a meaningful comparison between two positions, but an underhanded attempt to demoralise those on the left, and to swing undecided centrists by convincing them that the left isn't really offering the progress that it claims. I think it's also used as a shield by people who are right-leaning but don't want to admit it out loud.

...unless you can find a single good example of a notable left-wing proponent suggesting that horseshoe theory is valid, actually.

But somehow – SOMEHOW – the same people that ask for nuance in everything act as if it would be even remotely plausible that the two most polar opposites of political theory would be basically the same for all important intents and purposes if thought to an end.

It is simply mind-blowing. People looking at something, seeing it is complex, stopping their thinking and just somehow feeling their way to the most empty assessment ever: "probably the same consequencesif you think it to the end". Without even having begun to think their way through it!

But I get it: thinking is nice as long as it is a purely intellectual endeavor but not if any personal moral responsibility is concerned. You might be morally obligated to draw consequences in your behavior – Heaven Forbid!

You are saying this as a hypothetical that never happened, right?

I assume he was trying to allude to Obama, which at least in the recent decades came the closest to that in terms of media image, but the claim that there has been an anti-imperialist president of the US (on any relevant timescale) doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrimonialism

They even say this - Rubio said that we do not live in a unipolar world any more - a comment which attracted weirdly little notice.

Biden's approach assumed a unipolar world which did not exist. That's why the Ukraine war, from the American imperialist perspective, backfired.

The achilles heel of the American empire was, ironically, always profit and greed. If there is one thing that could be used to persuade America to let its industry rot it is profit and its industrial malaise is largely responsible for the ever-more-obvious decline in hard military power.

Sounds like a destruction. The administration is abandoning both the US soft power and its abilities to project through allied countries.

The failure in Georgia to push back on the "pro Russian law" (a law similar to one the US has which required all foreign propaganda to be clearly labeled) was probably seen as a watershed moment that it was about time to hit the reset button on that stuff. That one didnt just fail it backfired.

No US military bases have been closed though, have they?

They still have the jdf but we kinda forced this position, it's a bit of a baffling question.

What is expected is to react to the latest headlines, accept them as truth and fight an approved R vs D battle.

Even Donald Trump now admits that stalling NATO expansion and not treating Russian security concerns with utter contempt could have prevented this.

It's very vulnerable position being a prospective member of a gang. The fact that you try to join one for protection doesnt mean you wont end up being sacrificed when the gang leaders demand you "prove yourself" first.

Those are democratic, sovereign countries, in an international order governed by law. Joining voluntarily a _defense_ alliance.

And one bully country that keeps on bullying, and pretends to be the victim of everyone, and unlawfully attacks a neighbouring country.

Despite its own twisted narrative, if someone took the wrong decision, that's Russia.

The horseshoe theory applies here. Putin's supporters take equally orwellian positions to this.

NATO's command in 2003 in Afghanistan came following an unanimous UN Security Council resolution; Russia even provided support. But yeah, let's count 1 here, given the disaster of the whole thing.

Involvement during the Libya campaign in 2011? under a UN mandate again; Russia didn't veto, abstained, and afterwise criticised how it's been interpreted on the ground. Let's count 1.

That makes 2.

NATO did not join the USA in Iraq.

Kosovo Force is a peacekeeping mission.

Ocean Shield was an anti-piracy mission.

Baltic Air Policing, following the Baltic states joining NATO in 2004, is practically a shared border patrol across these states.

Enhanced Forward Presence, since 2016 is a deterrence in response to Russia actions in 2014 in Crimea.

It puzzles me why some people (you, but you're not the only one) think that gaining the UN mandate to conduct a humanitarian mission under false pretensions and THEN saying "we came. we saw. he died" exculpates NATO. It makes it so much fucking worse.

The orwellian/Putinesque thinking is evident here also. If you can excuse this you can excuse the invasion of Ukraine just as easily.

The problem is proving it was a lie and not a change of circumstances/opportunities during the operation (which doesn't make it right either, but at least dismisses the disingenuous intent).

So your attribution to my thinking is pretty unwelcome. I don't think it was ok, I don't think either it makes Putin's perspective more reasonable or acceptable.

Putin's track record is way worse than that: multiple military or mercenary invasions, journalists, activists and politicians murders, multiple meddling with foreign elections.

This does not diminish the defence fundamentals of NATO. Putin's strategy only reinforced NATO making sense for its own members and for candidates. He could have acted differently, and favour democratic changes rather than making himself a defence to autocratic regimes, both at home and abroad.

Even person who panders to Putin repeat bullshit Russian propaganda? How surprising. The NATO expansion excuse is just ignorant talking point. Russian imperialism is the very reason why every neighbour of Russia (apart from the ones that are it's puppet states) want to be in NATO, not the other way around.

Putin sees the fall of the USSR as a historical wrong that must be righted. He uses NATO Expansion as an easy excuse to sell to the rubes, but it's just that, an excuse.

He was going to go after Ukraine and Georgia NATO or not.

Georgia was, obviously, left alone after it dropped its NATO ambitions, disproving the rather quaint theory that Putin is intent on reforming the USSR.

Serbia did not get Kosovo back did it?

If you wish to grandstand on this issue you must condemn the war against Serbia also.

If you wish to understand this issue, you must condemn the russian invasions and annexations in Poland, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, and many others.

Also it's not clear what "Even Donald Trump now admits..."is intended to mean here. Donald Trump has always repeated Kremlin talking points so I'm not sure why anyone would think of this as novel.

Obviously American left coast DNC die hards and neoliberals hate him with a passion that beggars belief but he's basically still a different face of American imperialism repesenting similar goals with a changed strategy. Patching things up with Russia is part of that.

The conspiracy theory that he's a Russian plant is amusing, but a delusion to which even the most die hard Putin supporter cannot reach. I guess it's easier to admit than the idea that America lost.

EVEN Donald Trump? As if minihands is the staunchest critic of Russia? I mean, c’mon. Pretty much _only_ Donald Trump claims this outside the context of actual Russian propaganda.

It’s a terribly flimsy argument. Like, no-one has ever, as far as I know, said that Poland should invade Belarus because it joined the CSTO, say. Because that would be obviously ridiculous; actually joining, never mind wanting to join, a defensive treaty organisation is no sort of excuse for invasion. None of this makes any sense unless you accept to start with that Russia has some sort of rights over Ukraine, and no-one really buys that except for Russia.

Allying with other countries is not illegal, therefore it cannot be a cause of a war.

russia invading a sovereign country is illegal, therefore it was the cause of the war.

I'm confused why you would phrase it as "even Donald Trump", as if we should somehow expect Trump to not buy in to Putin's propaganda line? The fact that Trump "admits" that he agrees with Putin should not give any weight to what Putin claims.

Incorrect, Biden treated China as a rival power and pursued an industrial policy based on this view.

If China started doing something similar in North America the US would probably invade that country almost instantly (e.g. like it almost did to Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis).

Cuba remained an ally of the USSR after the missile crisis and continued to host Soviet conventional forces, including fighter jets permanently stationed just 10 minutes from Miami, with regular visits from Tu-95 nuclear bombers: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/guest-bloggers/tupolev-tu-9...

The good news - form my perspective - is that the GROWTH in the percentage of the workforce living off pensions is slowing dramatically and is now under REAL growth, which means working folks might feel like life is getting better again.

The reason people have complained that life hasn't gotten better for workers over the last 20 years is because nearly all growth has gone to more people being retired and the 0.1%.

If you keep the same growth, but the number of people retiring slows, there's a little more wiggle room with the pie.

God forbid you live in NYC and it can gonna to 42%

If they're married the rates are 29.62% (W-2) and 30.97% (non-W-2), under the same assumption that they do not do anything to qualify for either reduced taxable income or any kind of rebate or credit.

Most people don't make $1 million, and those that do have ways to reduce their tax burden quite a bit without much trouble.

EDIT: Small modifications to the numbers above, they were off by about 0.4% to 0.5%.

And if your income is $1,000,000 you still only pay $10,453 in social security tax.

Around $350,000 gets you to a 24.8% effective federal income tax rate if you're single and only take the standard deductible, $700k if married. That puts you in the top 3% and 1%, respectively, of incomes in the US these days.

But that gets reduced when you include things like tax advantaged retirement accounts, various tax credits, dependents, paying for health insurance, possibly being able to itemize (more likely at those incomes than the US median income). So really you have to be making something like $400k-500 as a single person to hit 25%, and $800k+ for a married person.

NYC has combined local and state top marginal rates of 14.776%, to go up to 48.476%.

I call BS on marginal rates exceeding 50%

Edit: even the new 2024 California payroll tax cap lift and mental health tax on seven figure incomes put it at 49.1%. Marginal rates that high don't exist in the US. Even then that requires paying payroll taxes and NIIT on the same income, which I'm pretty sure is impossible.

AGI: $1000k Federal Income Tax: $322k California State Income Tax: $102k FICA Taxes: $32k Total tax: $456k

Compared to say Germany, where for the same income you would be paying over 50% in taxes. So I think you're doing very well.

Neither can France, which redistributes over 50 per cent of its GDP.

The hunger for public monies will eventually outrun any feasible taxation system.

We’ve since had two major rounds of tax cuts by republicans, so a balanced budget isn’t feasible even in booms and when we’re not deficit spending on two stupid wars. And now we’ve got all the interest on the debt from those tax cuts and wars to worry about.

If only anyone could have predicted this. Oh wait, everyone who knew anything about taxation policy did.

What is your bill when an ambulance brings you in? When you have a legal problem at your workplace? What will be your pension? How is the mass transit system? What do you pay for child care, how is your school, how safe is your neighborhood, how do the number of murders in your area compare?

How do I know? Because my parents earning ~1000 USD per month each living in Poland have higher standard of living than most Americans. Despite paying ~30% taxes.

You have to add up what the taxes pay for in the calculation. Free healthcare, free university education, good public transport, low inequality (= low crime). All of that adds up to higher standard of living achievable with pretty shitty earnings.

Oh and before you blame it on military spending - we spend higher% of GDP on military than USA. Russia is a shitty neighbor, we have to.

American problems are exactly the opposite of what Americans think they are. You are in dire need of some social democracy.

Going at it with a chainsaw isn't going to help.

And I think these are all difficult things to do well and make money, as in doing a good job in healthcare, education, etc. is not really profitable. So, they are areas for government involvement.

You can have welfare state with close or open borders and anything in between, and you can have libertarian state with close or open borders.

For the last few years most EU countries have been going towards pretty strict immigration policy but not towards libertarianism.

Also Poland is not a good example (it's been accepting A LOT of immigration since ~2014 - more than average in EU). But that argument gets pretty detailed very quickly so unless you want to go into it - I'll leave that alone).

The idea that USA's got it right when most of the world does it differently (and with better results adjusting for cost/effect) always amazes me.

I knew that democracy was fragile and that losing it could happen to all of us - except the US. somehow I believed their separation of powers would always work, that the pretence of freedoms would always be in the interest of Western oligarchs.

it's been a tough 6 weeks for me.

The difference now is that the plutocrats are high on their own supply.

There used to be an understanding that if they didn't give something back they'd end up hanging from a lamp post.

Now they've decided the little people and their silly little planet are disposable, and AI, magic robots, and a cult of narcissism will replace them.

Absolutely lunacy, with consequences as expected.

Yeah, about that... Analysis by Grok says "75-85% likelihood Trump is a Putin-compromised asset"

https://x.com/i/grok/share/WQepvCpIJl2EJ0F7tHNbLAhm6

Can you imagine if this were true?

The entire Trump ecosystem is now prohibited from saying that Russia invaded Ukraine. Reality plays no role in any of these narratives.

Trump may or may not be a literal Russian agent. But his actions are indistinguishable from one. I'm sorry you're tired of hearing it, I'm equally tired of seeing it.

> Trump's actions towards the EU has resulted in a massive increase in military spending by those nations. This is exactly what Trump has demanded of them. This is consequential to Russia and in no way good for them. To think Trump is "controlled by Russia" is such a tired, worn out farce.

Did you read the evidence Grok gave, at least? Lots of citations in there.

In the short term, Russia benefits.

I cannot find an objective lens that enable one to view the current administration's policy changes as beneficial to the US and it's interests. This forces ones to explore why US leadership would aggressively espouse policy changes that are almost universally assessed to be damaging to us and our interests.

Is Europe finally stumping up and spending more defence? Yes. But they are also much less likely to buy US made systems in the future, and they will ask for more in exchange for intelligence sharing, or maintaining US military infrastructure domestically. The risk of nuclear proliferation is higher than it would have been without the shift.

Trump even refused to call Russia a dictatorship, not that that is material to policy decisions, but it provides fodder to those who are skeptical of Trump's policy goals and objectives.

It's part honest desire to do something good with the position history has afforded the empire, and part self-serving rationalization, depending on who is doing the talking.

To me it seems to be a bit like what the Böckenförde-Diktum points to, which is: "The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself."

Basically the modern capitalist secularized society is so void of deep human values and only emphasizing legality and profitability that it brings out a certain kind of elite. An elite which is decoupled from all real human connection and value leading to a thinking like this: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-...

Well and now we have to cope with this. But until we understand that these elites are no accident but logical results of the system we foster, nothing will really change. Or better: until we accept that the reductionist approach to human society and value that this system is based on is flawed and act accordingly everything we do is basically just flex-taping it and waiting for the next escalation.

This is precisely how half of the US media characterized Barack Obama, who pioneered an even more impersonal style of American imperialism with drone warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Syria.

What you're saying here is "we're better than everyone else and everyone else disagrees with my positions because they envy how awesome we are".

It's really quite difficult to not be demeaning because the core of the problem is bigotry across the political spectrum, making significant unequal decisions about individuals based on shallow characteristics (appearance, ethnicity, gender expression). And you can't really have a discussion about it because nobody will accept that making decisions based on a person's race/gender/... is discrimination regardless of which group gets the positive benefit. And you can't really have a discussion about it because "yeah but what the other guys did or are still doing is way worse".

Bottom line: to succeed in the 21st century you have to weigh pros and cons and live in the grey area. This is an optimization problem not a battle between good and evil. Viewing the world exclusively through the "good vs evil" lens is going to lead to a civilization threatening war.

Hillary’s “deplorables” thing was maybe the most prominent example. Her point was that democrats who think that all republicans are committed to evil positions we can’t compromise with or entertain isn’t correct! Only about a third of them are, according to the data. The rest could maybe be reached or worked-with!

This is true shit you say in blunt terms in a strategy meeting or nerdy discussion groups, not in public, because poli sci is just full of demeaning stuff about voters, because they are stupid and often evil and if you study democracy soberly that’s what you’ll find, and you have to grapple with it to act effectively, but you don’t say it in public because most voters also don’t know that stuff because they’re not poli sci nerds. She, and/or her speech writers, had been around strategists and wonks too much.

[edit] on the other hand, one wonders how much this really matters when Trump wins while saying worse things about all kinds of folks. The way the media approach and characterize and amplify (or don’t) the messages may matter more than what’s actually said.

They voted for Trump, twice. They love it when politicians are insulting.

Now what American would ever think that?...

For years we have been listening "fuck your feelings" coming from the right.

The only reference I can find before Trump is the lil Wayne song that came out in 2014:

https://genius.com/Lil-wayne-fuck-yo-feelings-lyrics

Before that nothing:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=F...

The internet is filled with pictures of Trump supporters wearing flags that say "Fuck your feelings" though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owning_the_libs

So I'm wondering what evidence you've come across that this phrase came from the left.

At the end of the day, the problem isn't really Trump. The American Empire isn't going to end because its only exporting $300B of military might to the world instead of $600B, when no one else on the planet is scratching $50B (I made these numbers up as an illustration).

It might end because it seems like the media landscape has entirely striated the US population into two groups: One group who genuinely and deeply believes that these actions are necessary for the continuity of the US way of life, and another group who genuinely and deeply believes that these actions will destroy the US way of life. No one makes any good faith effort to understand the other side; even my suggestion that this division is the real threat will get downvoted by HackerNews' overwhelmingly leftist bubble. American political discourse is now dominated by people who cannot allow even a single imperfection in their coat of armor, Trump cannot possibly be wrong about anything, his supporters cannot admit they might not have known the implications of what they voted for, the left cannot possibly be wrong about any of their criticism of him, we're screaming past each other.

Interrogate your inner thought process right now; were you thinking "What side is this person on?"

Its so difficult to get the full picture of understanding of the other side. Trump is rich, egotistical, and doesn't listen to the counsel of others; but Russia is controlling him? Trump wants to reduce the federal debt levels of the United States; but is hellbent on spending anything to deport economically productive illegal immigrants? Trump is silencing the media and kicking them out of the white house; while streaming more than Pokimane, direct from the Oval Office, just rambling for hours a day? Trump supporters were hoodwinked and lied to; yet more than any President america has had for decades, Trump is doing exactly, to the letter, what he said he'd do on the campaign trail; its just that the left didn't believe him back then, because we're so used to Presidents that do nothing. America's children have the worst test scores in the G20, and cost the most to educate; we should continue what we're currently doing? America's healthcare outcomes are among the worst in the G20, and most expensive; we should continue the path we're currently walking?

We're in a crisis of understanding right now. We need more moderates. We need people who understand both sides of the coin, and can have a reasonable conversation about why the past 20 years hasn't worked for most Americans, and also why Trump's policies also won't fix things. My fear, however, is that we won't get that in 2028; instead we're just going to move into our camps further, with a leftist version of Trump v JD Vance, and we'll dig further down the hole of two sides that need each other to solve the problems we face, but refuse to work with one-another.

I do and have.

Too many of their issues are simply made-up for me to get much traction, though. You see one outrageous thing after another and go “omg if that’s true it does seem pretty bad!” and then it’s almost always not true when you look into it. You can do this all day long with Fox News, let alone even nuttier sources.

The latest one for me was a discussion about the Olympic boxer from Algeria. Apparently it was proven through leaked medical records that she does, in fact, have XY chromosomes.

I did some digging. 99.999% of the articles covering this are just circular references to each other celebrating their moral victory. Finally I found the original source which was an online-only French newspaper that as best I could tell publishes like three articles a year from random guest contributors.

Reading the “leaked report”, the only evidence are screenshots of photocopies of… what literally just seems to be a textbook explaining the supposed condition she has. Not regarding her specifically. Literally just a textbook description of the condition.

There are no confirming documents. Nothing with her name on it. Nothing with an actual lab result. Nothing but a random Internet personality pseudonymously claiming that they somehow, out of all the other possible news outlets on earth, received leaked copies of her medical report. And zero receipts.

By all means, read for yourself and determine if this is a credible source: https://lecorrespondant.net/imane-khelif-ni-ovaires-ni-uteru...

Every. Single. Time. that I dive into actual claims from the conservative outrage machine, there is nothing there. This specific topic has the right running victory laps, reposting one another as their primary sources. Nobody has bothered to look if it was actually based on anything real.

How can it be a photocopy of a textbook if it mentions the boxer by name?

Translated into English, the second screenshot includes the phrase: "This is the case of Imane who fully identifies as a woman."

It continues with: "On the therapeutic level, surgical correction and hormonal therapy will be indicated for her as well as sustained psychological support because a very significant neuropsychiatric impact has been observed in her. The patient will be followed regularly in consultation."

This screenshot also notes a "functional enzyme deficiency" which is consistent with this quote from the first screenshot: "The paraclinical biological, radiological and genetic exploration shows that there is a congenital genetic deficiency in 5-alpha reductase type 2, an anomaly of sexual development which leads to a defect in the metabolism of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone."

This is a developmental condition that only affects male sexual development.

Aside from this, there is other evidence for Khelif being male.

Firstly, karotype testing from two independent labs, both of which revealed XY chromosomes. This was reported by sports journalist Alan Abrahamson, who has viewed the lab reports and covering letter that was received by the IOC from the IBA. He quotes from them in this article: https://www.3wiresports.com/articles/2024/8/5/fa9lt6ypbwx5su...

Secondly, Georges Cazorla, who was part of Khelif's training team, revealed in an interview with French magazine Le Point that Khelif has a problem with both chromosomes and hormones, and has been under medication to bring testosterone levels into the female range. This matches up with the medical report quoted above. Interview is here: https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/2024-olympics-imane-khelif-was-...

There are other unusual aspects of this case as well, which are inconsistent with a female athlete being wrongly accused of being male. One is that Khelif chose to abandon a case at the Court of Arbitration for Sport after being deemed ineligible to compete in women's boxing events hosted by the IBA. If Khelif was actually female, this would be an easy win. But perhaps more likely, the decision was made to drop the case because rulings are made public, and this would reveal that Khelif is male. (Which is how we know that Caster Semenya, another male athlete who competed in the female category, has a specific disorder of sex development that only affects males - in fact, the same condition as quoted in the leaked medical report of Khelif.)

Another is that Rafael Lozano, the head of the Spanish national team, recounted that when the Algerians visited to train, Khelif ended up being matched with a male boxer to spar, due to upper body strength and punching power being too much to handle for the female boxers. This is highly unusual and again is not consistent with the claim that Khelif is female.

When you look at all the evidence in aggregate, it becomes very clear that Khelif is male.

Example 1: We sent hundreds of billions to Ukraine, while North Carolina and Florida flooded and people lost their homes. This is a direct talking point Trump has used; maybe we should have spent that money on the homefront. Well: We spent billions on disaster relief for these affected areas, there were reports from Governors that they were getting everything they could meaningfully deploy, and moreover it doesn't seem likely to me that the money we spent on Ukraine came from some funding source that incurred that direct trade-off. The DoD isn't getting a budget increase equal to the amount spent. It was money already allocated.

Example 2: Illegal immigration is raising the crime rate. Well, its not an incorrect statement; Trump has literally deployed this "technically correct" argument that every illegal immigrant is committing a crime by entering the country illegally, and thus it raises the crime rate. Then, they talk more about the homicides and "eating the cats and dogs", and it should be obvious to anyone that: Everyone commits crime. Illegals are no different. Are they committing crime at a rate higher than citizens? I doubt it. Sure, slowing down the rate its happening has reasonably-majority agreement among Americans; but removing those already here instead of finding a path to getting them work authorization benefits no-one.

But remember: Republicans are a Vibes party, and there is something real to the Vibes they run on. These vibes should, in my view, be a mostly-bipartisan issue. Heck, its things I've seen leftists rightly complain about many times: American education sucks, American healthcare sucks, American health sucks, no one can afford a home, unemployment is growing, tons of jobs are getting shipped overseas, or supplanted by AI, what is going on?

The way I've seen it: The Republicans are a party that are quick to admit that there is a problem, but they have all the wrong solutions to it. The Democrats, on the other hand, won't admit there's a problem beyond abstract generalities in a campaign speech, and don't offer any solutions anyway.

Doing it like it just did with basically no notice is a stabbing in the back to former allies of the US. And Republicans are also not saying much.

That behavior should and very likely will not be forgotten by Europe.

The next phase that makes sense is an iron curtain between 4 blocks (US, Europe, Russia, China). Like during the Cold War, it is the approach that will minimize the risk of war.

Where information input before the Internet might have been: 20% newspapers, 50% face-to-face (at the bar, church, work), 10% radio, 20% TV, now it's more like 80% Internet, 10% TV, 10% face-to-face. And it seems to make it a lot easier to grow hateful without the human element.

The savings from DOGE ( if there will be any) will pass on to rich people, not to the average American voter.

"I thought he was going to hurt those other people, not me."

Well. About that.

The problem isn't even left vs right. It's a media system that has parted company with reality and deliberately promoted lies and rage bait for clicks and distraction.

It's a huge machine. It's not just Fox, it's the entire network of neoliberal, now neofascist media outlets - from think tanks and "serious journalists", to bot farms and weaponised social media that promotes selected views and deboosts others, to podcasts, influencers, megachurches, mainstream econ schools, MBAs, startups... all promoting the same dysfunctional reality-denying neoliberal supremacist views under various guises.

Id be curious to see the data if there are any articles or polls that show a large amount of Trump voters regretting their pick. Thanks.

I think your over all point is healthy but you really need to reexamine this assumption. Take a look at /active and see how often topics critical of Trump, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin, etc. flagged.

Most leftist political parties in Scandinavia and the Baltics manages to be be both pro-Palestine, pro-NATO, and pro-Ukraine. They don't seen any contradiction because there aren't any.

Why do some American leftists follow this 3rd worldist neo-Maoist thinking that Western civilization needs to burn down before you can get free healthcare and free college?

The reason why they feel overrepresented in the US is simply because a real, progressive leftist political project is essentially impossible, so the most extreme of the extremes are proportional more audible.

Let's be fair, you said "some". We also have some of those in Europe.

But to answer, with a guess: perhaps the difference is that in European countries there are way more political parties. But I'm not an expert on American politics so feel free to say this is BS.

Electing Trump has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. It's about being mouthpieces for Russian propaganda.

wait, what?

https://international.dsausa.org/ukraine/

In the very first paragraph, filled with Russian propaganda and ahistorical takes easily disproven by Putin's own words and exegesis in Russian.

Accepting the genocidaire's justifications uncritically, in addition to the IC's many other genocidal language about "denazification," is absolutely appalling. As they say, if you wonder what you would have been doing when the Nazis weee invading the world, look at what you are doing now.

These two things are similar!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43311416

"normalizing relations with Russia and disengaging with the rest of the world military was the goal for us liberals back then"

... and not some expansive idea that Trump is just like 90s Democrats.

This is before we look at the cost of "normalizing" relations with Russia, if we assume that's what Trump is doing. Turning back to allies, ripping up treaties and trade deals, threatening annexation, knee-capping your own Military-industrial complex, the list goes on. That's nothing like liberals in the 90s.

You might wish to reply to that specific comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43311416

There were lots of factions within the anti-imperialist left, but fundamentally there was a distrust of “foreign-policy experts.” And while Trump isn’t a pacifist (and I’m far from one) that’s the part that he really gets.

It's easy to confuse anti-imperialism with pacifism, but you have to remember the anti-imperialist supported anti-colonial warfare even back in the 80s and 90s. Supporting a war to resist imperialism is completely congruent with anti-imperialism, and explains support for Ukraine.

And your same logic would have gotten the US involved in the korean and vietnam wars as well. How do you distinguish those?

I do not believe equating Vietnam with Ukraine is something you can do in good faith.

Edit: America has remained an empire through a willingness to meddle far from home unde the banner of "protecting American interests". Watching a so-called conservative president dismantle the American empire is startling, seeing the rank-and-file fall in line with narry a dissention is almost unnerving. Anti-imperialist Americans must be having mixed and conflicting feelings right now.

1. The whole Korean peninsula was a colony of Japan, and was divided between the US and Russia after WWII. Both sets of governments claimed to be the the legitimate authority over the entire region. It ended up being a proxy war - so not comparable to Ukraine for a different reason, unless one thinks the war in Ukraine is a proxy war - which completely takes away the agency and sovereignty of the people of Ukraine, and will be provable via a natural experiment over the next days as the US has stopped its involvement, the the war is continuing.

The combined nominal GDP of California, Oregon, and Washington is approximately $4.1 trillion. If these three states were considered a single entity, their combined GDP would rank as the world’s fifth-largest economy.

Playing nice with foreign empires, economic protectionism, domestic military action, an "all or nothing" attitude towards foreign wars, taking chunks of our neighbors back yards, etc.

This isn't new at all. It's exactly what FDR had to overcome to build the American Empire.

Half of the population benefits from the status quo while the other suffers. It is hard to tell whose fault it is, if this question even matters.

(The UK’s a bit of an oddity here in that it’s _kind_ of a multiparty state for historical reasons, but doesn’t really have the right type of electoral system to support a multiparty system.)

They're almost certainly wrong about the medicine, but their diagnosis isn't far off: globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns.

Edit: Downvoting people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time. You won't win elections by fighting a straw man invented by your echo chamber.

And so… they vote for the cheaper goods and killing their towns more?

> the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time.

The Democratic platform has been around providing succour and training to rural areas for several election cycles, Clinton’s campaign included 30 billions in infrastructure, training, and redevelopment, as well as healthcare and pension safeguard for coal counties.

It doesn't actually matter in this case who is right—as I said, they're wrong about the medicine—what matters is who understands the human beings who vote better. And Trump understood these people better than any member of the establishment in either party, which is why he was able to hijack one and defeat the other.

Inventing stories about how half the country just wants the other half to hurt won't help win the midterms and the next presidency. We have to get past that and actually look at what Trump voters truly believe, then speak to them as real people, not strawmen.

Sure, I'd rather just be given a million dollars and a unicorn as well.

> Inventing stories about how half the country just wants the other half to hurt

"He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting" is a literal quote from trump's first term.

> We have to get past that and actually look at what Trump voters truly believe, then speak to them as real people, not strawmen.

I guess you're right, as you say it's necessary to get past the idea that they're sapient beings.

> It doesn't actually matter in this case who is right

because the only thing that's important is whose claim is attractive to the population being pandered to, and that

> I'll bring the jobs back home

is amazing despite being completely nonsensical.

And the're probably right, mind. A lot of the responses seem to agree, just couching it in nicer terms (if barely). I guess putting it in plain terms is not acceptable. As is usually the case.

They don't want to be appealed to, nor do they intend to compromise. They want to tear down everything I value, burn it to the ground, piss on the ashes and put me up against the wall. I know this because they've told me precisely that, and have been telling me that for nearly a decade. They've been very vocal and clear about what they want, and it isn't to be understood, or to meet anyone halfway.

I'm tired of being told that I need to capitulate and surrender and understand why I deserve the bullet. Fuck that, and fuck them.

Trumpism Delenda Est.

The economic woes come first, and it's still not too late for a left-leaning populist to take charge of the Democrats and give the people what they need while protecting minorities and LGBT folks. The only way we get to the social justice disaster that people are predicting is if we all collectively throw up our hands and write off 50% of the voters as a lost cause.

And somehow, when left and democrats are doing something bad, left and democrats are to be blamed. And when conservatives or right do something bad ... left and democrats are to be blamed.

> The economic woes come first

No they do not. Trump does not make economy better, you know it, they know it, I know it. It is not about removing fraud or corruption, Trump is fraudster and they know it, you know it and Trump himself knows it.

It was a stream of lies and hate that won and people voted for. It has nothing to do with economic policies that could help these people or not. Pretending to yourself that some rational policy can counteract it is how you loose.

E.g., the party who actually succeeded in doing something about health insurance just lost to the party who did everything in their power to stop it, and who immediately decided to decimate Medicaid when they took over. So you can give the people what they need and still get punished for it.

Not one of them could name a single policy position Kamala Harris or Joe Biden had. Part of the reason for that is the dismal and pathetic ability of the Democrats to actually sell themselves, because they assumed just not being Trump would be enough. It should have been, but it wasn't, because Americans are the worst. But the other part is that Trumpists wouldn't have listened, nor would they have cared, regardless of what was offered. They were never going to listen to a "left-leaning populist." These people thought Hillary Clinton was a baby-eating Marxist. They set up a gallows on the Capitol. They saw the price of eggs was too high and the videogames were too woke and decided they wanted to watch the world burn. That's it.

I want social justice. I want UBI. I want socialized healthcare and education. I want a liberal, secular, social democratic society with robust labor laws, a boring and stable government, and a strong social safety net. I want to spend more of my tax dollars on infrastructure and fewer on murdering brown people for God and the almighty petrodollar. I want feminism and black liberation and gay and trans rights. I want land back. I want fully automated luxury space communism. I want science and scholarship. And a lot more Americans align with my views than the popular narrative would have you believe. We even won the popular vote in 2016, not that it matters. All of these things would help Trumpists more than Trump's own policies. Not that it matters. Hillary Clinton said a mean thing about them one time and the screaming in their head has never stopped. She was absolutely correct, though, and the right could have taken the chance to clean their own house instead of trauma-bonding with the worst elements in their ranks. Not that it matters.

But I can't have that. Obviously not from the Republicans, but neither from the Democrats. I can have whatever Snow Crash Handmaid's Tale cyberpunk dystopian nightmare the orange gibbon and his ketamine-tweaking puppetmaster cook up, and 20 years from now I guess can just die in a ditch of hunger and dysentery because JimmyDingleberry or whomever in Musk's cult of groyper fuckbois deleted Social Security and because vaccines were declared fake and gay in the Soyjak purge of 2030.

These are not rational people, and this is not a rational government. I'm not going to give them the dignity of pretending otherwise.

Being a leader means understanding the reality of a situation, developing a strategy, and understanding where people are so you can get them on board and all work together to improve things.

It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.

It does mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power to do whatever you wanted to do. Their prejudices are the real part of reality.

Politicians who forget this fact get owned.

Frankly, everyone has prejudices, some stronger than others, but the Dems made it part of their ethos that if you even acknowledge having some of these prejudices that you're a bigot. But their fatal flaw is the Dems convinced themselves that very few people harbor these beliefs.

Very real strategic case in point: I think it sucks that this is our current reality, but the American populace at large has now shown multiple times that they are not willing to elect a woman from the managerial class as President. It's not just Dems (e.g. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris) but Republican women have also been rejected multiple times (e.g. Nikki Haley, Carly Fiorina). I am not in any way saying being female is the only reason these candidates were rejected (indeed, I think one flaw on the Democratic side is that they pushed this "they just hate women" narrative too strongly), but in a ~50/50 electorate, a few percentage points makes all the difference.

So the problem for the Dems is they want to appeal to this "higher nature", but, again, as much as I may personally not like to believe this, I strongly think that if they put forth another woman at the top of the ticket in the near future that they will lose, again.

So if you want to be a leader, you have to start by understanding people and, yes, pandering to them. There's a reason why too many of our powerful politicians have been essentially indistinguishable from sociopaths.

In any case, this time around the likelihood is Trump will be long dead (of natural causes, I mean) before the impact of this election is realized. The change happening right now is generational in scale. The voters’ children will be reading this chapter in their history book and asking what on earth they were thinking.

Is that a position you hold consistently? Is there anything you believe that you wouldn’t be swayed on when presented evidence to the contrary of your belief?

I ask, because there is an awful lot of mainstream Republican and (here’s the controversial bit) Democrat thought that simply has no basis in reality.

Its usage often indicates the user gets their "news" from very particular sources.

The tough nut to crack is that it is impossible to talk with red tribe voters about any of this! You can sit there and listen, of course. But as soon as you say anything that still addresses their frustration and pain, but yet diverges from their overly-simplistic party chorus, you're now part of the "other" that is eagerly responsible for their problems and will just be reflexively argued with.

And the situation has gotten so bad that lighter touch individual-freedom-respecting solutions (that they could possibly agree with in theory) aren't likely to even work now. For example twenty years ago, stopping the profligate government spending and handouts to banks could have stopped rural economies from continuing to get hollowed out. Allowing deflation in consumer goods would have allowed main street to experience some of the gains from offshoring. Re-setting the definition of full time employment to 40 hours per household per week would have slowed down the financial grindstone.

Instead these days we're basically down to direct government stimulus to create new jobs - directly at odds with the medicine they think they need. Or even worse, completely uninspiring answers like UBI.

Training for what? What if our population of working age people is far larger than our economy's ability to absorb whatever sort of service worker you imagine they should be training to become? Given a fixed total population, there's only room for x masseuses or y graphic artists. If we have n unemployed people needing training, and that number is higher than x and y combined (for any sort of x and y), telling them to retrain doesn't solve their problem. Some are going to lose out. The truth of the matter is that by offshoring manufacturing, we created an economy where there is a surplus of ultimately unemployable people.

A message of training isn't just bullshit, it's transparent bullshit. Most people have an intuition that this is the case, after all. As for midterms, both the Republican and Democratic parties have a different strategy. They will simply import voters who will vote for them. H1Bs for the GOP, and the remainder of the naturalization pipeline for the Ds. It's slow, but they're willing to put in the longterm effort.

The Musk supporters feel that universal automation is coming fast and I bet the Chinese being as industrious as they are will seize upon that to make up for their demographic issues. They are already he world leaders at renewables and nuclear and regardless, their ability to ramp up carbon based fuel sources is second to none.

Meanwhile the US appears to have an okay demographic pyramid(especially compared to their peers) but birth rates are declining and all the ingredients to increasing birthrate are not in the upswing (good incomes, cheap real estate, stable governance). Now you are killing off the US's golden goose (immigration) it seems like you are repeating the mistakes of China.

Hillary famously said "those jobs aren't coming back". I do not know if she was incorrect in that, but I suspect she might have been right. I don't see a viable path to that happening, and I've yet to hear anyone else describe such.

So, how is inflation and egg price doing now when bad democrats lost?

Democrats have had 4 presidents in office in the last 10 administrations (11 if you count the current one), accounting for 24 of the past 56 years.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/joe-biden-tells-coal-miners-15210...

(I am not claiming that their opponents have any better solutions.)

The economic problems are that once a location reliant on extractive industries gets too expensive (and / or gets automated leading to orders of magnitude cuts to the necessary workforce) it's not coming back, the companies either fold or leave. Europe has coal countries which folded a century ago. Once your coal is too far to be cheaply extractible, even if new tech made extracting it viable once again it almost certainly would not need anywhere near the same level of crewing. And reactivating an old mine is probably not worth the cost over upgrading mines which are still active.

So your only "fixes" are to flee the area or move to a new industry. And to do the latter, you need a way to kickstart the change. That's the goal of federal grants.

The recovery of extractive areas is difficult, and may not even be possible if too dependent. And it certainly does not happen by clinging to the extractive industry which left you behind.

What I realized was that, for people who've been "left out of the benefits of the global economy", that picture makes total sense--the pie didn't grow, and in fact probably shrank for them. Thus, zero-sum thinking makes perfect rational sense. It's an accurate worldview, and anyone trumpeting "the pie will grow, you just need to give up a little more (in increased taxes or jobs shipped elsewhere)" in spite of the evidence that IT HASN'T, must be either a fool or outright lying to them.

Anyways, for the first time I felt myself understanding a little bit how these voters may feel.

Who would go for that? If it were merely about the pie shrinking, maybe that's just inevitable, and reasonable people would have to concede that it must shrink. They feel as if there is an element of fraud in the proposals that are made. Rather than miscalculation, rather than misfortune.

But, instead of focusing on spinning up solar panel production factories or cutting edge automation in automobile manufacturing or funding world class universities to reskill people in things the modern world needs, they’d rather double down on their protectionist agenda while blaming the liberals, despite it being 100% their own fault. Fucking over the liberals might make them feel smug, but the conservative position is worse, because now there isn’t the remote possibility that they can get government funding for all these “socialist agenda items”, never mind that it would actually help them.

I’m not saying you’re defending their position, but I am saying that they need to get over themselves, because that’s the only way things get better for them. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying things don’t suck for them. I’m sorry for them that life is hard, and things change. It would certainly be nice if we could just do the things we’re used to and like forever without needing to adapt. But shit changes, and being mean to trans people or whatever just isn’t going to make their lives better, it’s only going to make every one else’s worse too. We rely on each other. We have no choice not to. So instead of being antisocial, they need to grow up and join the rest of us in the society we’re trying to have.

They were a member of a club, and that club was rich and they deserved to enjoy the results of that. But then other people tricked them into letting a bunch of other people in the club, and selling off the club's assets at the same time, until their share was diluted to nothing. Then the same people who pulled this trick come to them and say "you have nothing of value, you deserve to starve". And some of those people pretend to be the other side "just implement marxism, so you can have your fair share of nearly nothing".

>or funding world class universities to reskill people in things the modern world needs,

Those universities have nothing to do with that. Go talk to those people, they don't want to "become vocational schools". Not when there's so much grift money to be made bringing in foreigners on student visas.

>but I am saying that they need to get over themselves, because that’s the only way things get better for them.

Nothing gets better from here on out. This is terminal decline, and the two (or more factions) who are at war here couldn't even stop it if they cooperated for some reason.

>I’m sorry for them that life is hard,

Not really. But even if you could shed a genuine tear for them, I think it's going to be short-lived when you discover that you're in much the same boat as they.

>and join the rest of us in the society we’re trying to have.

The society you're trying to have is dying. The first rule of societies is that they absolutely must make more generations of people who will then (and soon) become that society. The society you're trying to have thought you could all upload your brains into robot bodies or something and forgot that. And now it's dying, and nothing can save it. These people aren't trying to "be mean to trans people", they were hoping the kindergarten teacher wouldn't groom them into becoming infertile. They were hoping for grandchildren, against all odds.

But they haven't, they're just completely uninformed about what they're getting. If you think ANY of the rural farming communities could continue to exist without significant federal subsidies, you're crazy.

Ask a farmer whether globalization has helped him or not the next time China retaliates to a tarriff by refusing to import any US soybeans and you'll quickly discover that it has absolutely helped them.

Globalization is less the cause of their issue, it's deregulation. Consolidation of manufacturing has killed plants in those small towns. Consolidation of groceries[1] has made it impossible for small-town grocery stores to survive on their own. Both can be traced back to Reaganomics.

Are the Democrats at fault for not attempting to reverse any of that? Absolutely, but the answer isn't: we need someone who wants even more consolidation and to kill all international relations.

[1]https://ilsr.org/articles/policy-shift-local-grocery/

The liberal elites are paying for their inability to keep the societal compact somewhat alive. If too many people don't have jobs and can't find a dentist, they will start a "voter disobedience".

Of course the second order effects will be huge, but it is, in a sense, necessary development. A democratic country has to be able to keep a majority of its people reasonably satisfied and well-off.

FYI I don't believe in "THE REASON" or "THE CAUSE" and I am wary of people who reduce complex issues such as voting patterns to one single root cause, but to deny that economic hardship is a significant factor in anti-system vote seems to be wishful thinking to me.

Show me a relatively rich neighbourhood or voting district (say, over 130 per cent of average national GDP) with above average anti-system vote share, anywhere in Europe. I don't think you will find it. People who have a lot to lose don't rock the boat.

They want the 70s-80s economy back, but they don't want to support unions.

They think they deserve to receive government benefits. But others are moochers, and they don't deserve it.

They think Trump is deporting criminal / drug cartel illegal immigrants.

My state is red (State houses & governor have been conservatives for the last 30 years). Yet they blame all the issues on democrates. When my state signed the carry law, they thought Biden was the one who signed the law.

If you are in the deep trump territory, listen to conservative/religious radio stations. You will know how much hate they are spreading against liberal, trans, gays, and immigrants.

You have to distinguish between the rhetoric being spread to hijack the economic woes and the actual root of the problem. All that stuff is designed to give people an outlet for their very real economic frustrations. It's not deep seated (yet), it's a tool to exploit them. The only reason why it's working is because these people have been ignored for too long by the establishment in both parties, and it's not too late to respond and adapt.

Also your economic story doesn't hold water. The Biden administration successfully placed tons of factories all over the country with tax incentives for clean energy, but those factories could never trumpet what they were doing because hate for Democrats and for Biden and for clean energy is stronger than any desire for jobs. Similarly the destruction of the CHIPS act and its unpopularity in rural areas also shows that the economic opportunity aspect is just an excuse for the cultural hate that has been worked up.

The best way to understand a Trump supporter that I have come to is a person that hates Democrats more than anything, and will do anything possible to bully them, including the economic destruction of the country. I have a lot of family like this, and for years I thought they were just joking or exaggerating about their hate, but the past year has shown me that they were earnest. It's not the 1990s anymore, this is a visceral culture war above all else.

For no reason. Trans people aren't doing anything but trying to live their lives but the concept of being trans disrupts their view of the world. People fear what they don't understand and because they don't understand the real reasons for their struggles, everything they don't understand can be conflated by a confident liar saying they are related.

Possibly the most succinct summary has been sitting in pop culture for a quarter century but how it could apply to real life never clicked with most people: "Fear is the path to the dark side"

Nothing has changed here. It's doesn't matter what they've claimed they're doing, there are still no jobs here and working class Americans feel abandoned.

The vast majority of Trump voters around here voted for him because of the economy. The trans stuff was seen as evidence that the Democrats were so wrapped up in first world problems held by a tiny minority that they didn't even notice that the majority of the country was actively struggling to make ends meet. It's not about the trans people, it's about the narrative that Trump shaped about how that related to these people's economic lives.

People don't realize the economy isn't just a switch with good and bad

I'll probably give it a rest here for a few more weeks.

Even though you are the only person on HN who understands the working American, you deserve a rest.

But, sure, how about Barack Obama? https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fact-sheet-creatin... The one who created the hated Obamacare, but they rebelled when their R representatives threatened to cancel the ACA.

No, they're the byproduct of a failed educational system and culture of unearned entitlement. They expect others to save them from drug addiction while doing every possible to prevent help. And they only have this power because of the Senate represents land instead of people.

I actually saw a couple people saying that they've received a check from Trump during Covid, and mentioned that as a clear reason to vote for him. I thought it sounded dumb when I saw that he insisted on having his name on the stimulus checks, but apparently it worked. I also saw some people, southern women and big city black men, saying that they definitely didn't want a female president. That was probably part of why Hillary lost, and making the same play this time wasn't very wise from the democrats, although I would probably blame Biden for not dropping out earlier and leaving them very little choice.

All of this is made much worse by social media too, which fans the flames hotter than it ever could have been before.

But I got my face punched multiple times for not preforming masculinity in a way that they found acceptable or for standing up for someone smaller and weaker.

There isn’t a “progress” switch to turn on. The current state of the Rust Belt isn’t because they are full of knuckle dragging idiots inferior to the coasts. It’s because they were dealt the economic equivalent of a traumatic brain injury, and have spent decades trying to recover. Meanwhile, the areas of the country that inflicted this injury on them are now trying to convince everyone that it was their own fault.

I’m as disgusted by Trump as anyone, and would never vote for him. But I am from the Rust Belt and absolutely sympathize with the anger that would make someone want to burn the system down.

Living in Trump country doesn’t give you any extra credibility. I also live in “Trump Country” and say that the real reason is because they’re all goofs that fell into a personality cult due to the decline of US education and this country’s obsession with celebrity. Who is correct?

Save the downvote victim complex for Reddit.

You state "the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans. ...globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns."

I 100% agree with that. But I think that many folks are so enthralled with Trump because he was the first politician to really acknowledge this simmering rage, give it legitimacy, and say that it's all those woke, city-dwelling liberals fault. The GP comment says "The best explanation I've heard is that this (almost) half of the US population doesn't care if it hurts a bit, as long as it hurts the other half of the US population more", but that fits perfectly in with your explanation as well. A lot of Trump supporters are pissed as hell about the hollowing out of their communities, and they're looking to bring retribution for those they blame for their downfall (or the ones Trump has convinced them are responsible for their downfall). Heck, Trump even said it loudly and proudly, "I am your retribution."

I understand your perspective, but I don't think that explains most of Trump's actions. The (very valid!) critique of globalist profiteering you shared has been boiled down into something beyond economics and into tribalism.

I blame decades of right-wing media dominance on cable TV and rural radio.

America decided in the 1970s to liquidate its interior and its manufacturing base to make Wall Street rich from the labor arbitrage trade, and did so with the full throated support of both parties.

I live in the outer suburbs of a middle American city. The idea that all Trump supporters are cult members is vastly overblown. There is some of that, but much of his support is exasperation. Rural and working class Americans have nothing to lose and nowhere to go but down. The choice is to vote for Trump or keep watching everyone commit suicide with fentanyl. They know Trump might be full of shit or might not have any real solutions, but they also know Democrats and mainstream Republicans will continue to sell them out.

It's also important to understand that for the most part working class and small town Americans don't want welfare, which is the only thing the Democratic Party (possibly, maybe) offers them. They want jobs. They want to feel useful, to do useful things. Unless you are disabled, accepting welfare is disgraceful. I remember my mom (a lifelong Democrat BTW who hates Trump) feeling humiliated to use food stamps for a brief period when I was a kid. "These are for people who really need them. I don't need them." She worked as hard as she could to get off them. Americans want to do things.

MAGA is as much anti-traditional-Republican as it is anti-Democrat. In fact I know a few Trump voters whose hatred for the likes of Bush II and the Cheneys is greater than for Democrats. It's a third political party that has taken over the corpse of the Republican party that Bush II destroyed.

I didn't vote for Trump because I don't think he actually cares either, and I loathe the man in general. I also have two daughters, and his MAGA movement is full of people who cheer for pro-rape influencers like Andrew Tate or want to LARP the Handmaid's Tale. I can't vote for a movement that is openly allied with such people. Their performative scapegoating of LGBTQ people is gross too, and then there's the crazy autocrat ideologies lurking at the margins. Even if MAGA has some policy points I agree with, the movement is just too intellectually batty and personally disgusting to support.

I see nobody on the US political stage that I actually like. I voted for Harris as a "holding pattern" vote in the hope that something better will appear in the future. It's better to stay with the bad option than to go for obviously worse options. If you look around the world "just shaking things up" with nothing better waiting in the wings usually results in a bad outcome. Successful major political shifts or revolutions require a superior alternative with better ideas.

They had a different reaction to price increases under Biden because those were not resulting from pro-American-worker trade policies, or at least were not perceived as such. In reality Biden was doing some things to try to repatriate manufacturing, but these policies were badly communicated if they were telegraphed at all, and they were not enough.

Constantly assuming these people are all just stupid isn't winning back any votes. To be fair: Republicans and MAGA spend a lot of time attacking straw man Democrats and liberals too.

BTW -- I see what they're thinking, but I suspect a lot of repatriated manufacturing will be so heavily automated it will not result in the mass employment gains they're hoping for.

The basic template here is that the people (populism) become so discontented that they see no salvation in any of the existing elites or political movements, so they essentially appoint a dictator or an oligarchy to sweep it all aside in favor of <insert magical thing that will fix all their problems>. The level of naked authoritarianism and brutality varies between these movements -- some are more gloves-on and some more gloves-off -- but they all have an ultimately authoritarian character. The whole thing nearly always backfires into some form of "meet the new boss, worse than the old boss."

Which is it? I mean, I know it's "nothing left to lose" but how can "nowhere to go but down" fit in to that?

Except, that's the exact same outcome you get even if you vote for Trump, unless there's something I'm not seeing?

I think you are correct.

Trump promised change and had "concepts of a plan".

Democrats promised more of the same, and then realized that that was unpopular and then threw together a plan that they said would work.

The reality now is that Trump's promised change may or may not help those voters economically, but the accompanying geopolitical disruptions may be worse.

The way I look at Trump/MAGA is they took over an ineffective, sclerotic Republican party that spent 40 years talking about “family values” while selling off the productive base of the country to globalization and letting rural America rot. The tea-party movement of the late aughts was their last chance to avoid being decapitated. They failed. The Republican party has been hollowed out and is simply not the same entity it was 10 years ago. It has been taken over by a very angry insurgent force.

As I see, the Democrat Party is where the Republicans were in 08/09. They have, perhaps, a few more years of whatever it is they are doing before they similarly get taken over.

Best case scenario: we end up with a new political party (or two) that represent the more sane interests of the old guard and of the population as a whole. Worst case scenario: we end up with two absolutely insane zombie versions of our two legacy political parties fighting for control of the nation.

At least we don’t have more guns than people and a bunch of nukes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The reason I ask is that here in Romania the issue is completly fabircated by the social media and amplified by the algorithm. What I mean there was not a single law pro LGBTQ passed in Romania, the educational system is not teaching children about LGBTQ, there are no changes in schools or other places to unixes bathrooms, no forced or assisted transitioning programs.

It is just media with conspiracies like the COVID vaccines makes you gay, 5G makes you gay, Bruxelles wants to make your children gay, Soros wants to make the children gay. There are also staged video with transexuals making a circus and shared on TikTok. So now we have a lot of idiots that actually thinks that we need to surrender to Putin so he can kill the traitors and the gays.

As I mentioned in another thread, the Republicans switched from "the immigrants are stealing your jobs" to "the immigrants are stealing your cats."

Here are CNN's exit polls: https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-result...

The largest split in any income group is 52-46, nearly even. The largest split by gender is only 55-43.

By contrast, Blacks are 13-86. White Protestants are 72-26. White Jews are 20-79. White nones are 28-71.

With what their opponents had? They didn't even need one.

Manufacturing output in the US is at an all-time high:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

Though it's (a) smaller share of GDP compared to the 'good old days' of the 1950-60s, and (b) does not need as many workers because of automation. This is true in a lot of industries: various seaports have never imported/exports more goods, but have fewer dockworkers than decades ago because of containerization and giant cranes.

Though one problem is of 'concentrated loss': if a town/area was dependent on one factory (or industry), then it could be especially heavily hit because of that single point of failure.

It doesn't matter that Republicans are slightly more to blame then Democrats in the thinning out of rural places - the folks who live there, IMO, see both parties as the same thing.

They remember how their towns were when they were young, they had a bustling locally owned and operated main street full of commercial activity, they also often had a factory, or mill which provided good jobs too.

Some of the parallel commenters here only think rural = farming, and thats not true. If you look at the Carolinas for example, there were textile and lumber mills - farming there is still more or less as healthy as its every been - but all of those other sources of employment which brought money in from outside of the community are gone.

This story repeats itself in a bunch of places, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, and across the greater west too.

This rot started well before Reagan though - it's something I've called "the 1971 problem". If you go on a road trip across rural America, you'll rarely see a locally funded building (aka, not a chain store), built after 1971-3 - with the notable exception to this being places with a military base, college, or some other government facility - and I think the causes are multiple here, post vietnam drawdown of forces, détente, the 1973 oil crisis, stagflation, the Nixon shock, then later the so-called peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war.

Globalization thru the 80's-90's just made all of these issues worse, and hollowed out manufacturing too - now all of this this effected cities too, to some extent, but as you mention, cities got benefits of globalization - more information economy jobs, greater wealth flowing in from the financialization of everything, which while didnt replace the jobs lost in manufacturing, did replace the wealth generated by it. (there are even more things I've not really touched on - like the steady decrease in local ownership of businesses, and the corresponding civic rot that kicks in when this happens)

There is another issue I also want to touch on here - "jobs for regular people" - for a significant portion of the population, the best job they can hope for is a decent factory job, a job in the trades - or more likely today, a not so great service job. One of the reasons I want to onshore manufacturing is that we need those higher quality jobs to ensure the benefits of our economy are shared more broadly.

I'm a proponent of tariffs as a way to solve this - not what Trump is doing which are penalty tariffs - but what I've called cost adjustment tariffs - tariffs that adjust the price of imported manufactured goods to the same level as if they were made here, where you price in labor differences overall regulatory burden, environmental and climate rules, and other factors - on a fundamental level, I feel it is immoral to export all the externalities from manufacturing to another country (pollution being the primary one I'm thinking of).

While tariffs, even at some low level may result in slower GDP growth. People cannot eat or pay their rent with GDP - a more ideal answer (one I support) is UBI, but UBI doesn't appear to politically possible - and there is also value in being able to do work where you can see the fruits of your labor (both in the physical good you've made - and the pay check you get at the end of the week), for good or for bad, it gives you self worth and a feeling of purpose too.

So I get why rural voters vote for Trump, and its because my side has failed to understand the economic pain that anyplace that isn't a tier 1/2/3 city has experienced over the last 50 years - and what their needs are for the future. In the end, I think Trump will fail them, and probably make everything else worse - but he's the horse that the American people who could be bothered to show up to vote picked (I'll note much to my consternation, that 3m less people voted in 2024 vs 2020).

Yes, and they're very aware that Trump is not a Republican in the traditional sense. It doesn't matter to them which banner he hijacked, they know he's different.

Some are just blind partisans, otherwise those places wouldn't have been voting for team red for the last 35 years or so.

There is also the paradox of the low information voter too, which seemed to have broken for Trump 2:1 - that does concern me some.

Trump also has a huge benefit with low information voters, he spews noise all the time which the news media covers with baited breath.

I call it the "Trump says alot of things" problem - it allowed people to paint whatever they wanted him to be onto him by essentially cherry picking the various things he's said to make up their own collage view of whatever they wanted him to be.

I wonder how much of that is due to the media and the polls claiming that Kamala had this in the bag? The same way that they claimed Hillary had it in the bag? This would cause people to stay home no?

Also there have been reports of accelerated efforts to disenfranchise voters by challenging their registration and not telling them until election day when they go to vote. A combination of these two things could have swung the election.

But they never ever deliver any real solution. Never. What trump solved in first term? No wall, he was joke of the world for that. No middle east peace - fuck, he made the invasion to Israel by giving Jerusalem official israeli status. Palestinians lost all hope at that point (I know its way more complex than that, I know, but this was the trigger point to go full mental like a cornered animal). Afghanistan withdrawal? Thats his contracts with taliban which made US look so weak they were shooting ducks as you guys and rest of west literally ran away for your life.

To make any successful long term massive changes, you need a steady leadership. trump is the opposite due to his mental & childhood issues, heck he is the epitome of instability. And so he drags whole world into same instability, changing global markets from bullish to bearish within a week, losing literally all friends and allies, globally. No, puttin' ain't your friend and never will be, he is a murderous sociopathic p.o.s. till his last breath.

If simpler folks refuse to see all this and much more and connect those few dots, your idea of babysitting them and hald-holding in ever changing environment is laughable. Even in Europe you guys consider semi-communist we don't do that, we can't do that, its idiotic. This problem is not unique to US in any way and solution ain't what he wants to do. But its so nice to hear all that crap, "I will fix your woes", "the others are to blame for all your issues" and so on. Full on emotions, 0 rationality. Folks, even societies work like that, but get ready China will overtake you sooner than you would like.

I kept thinking he is just a russian agent brainwashed in 80s during his visit to moscow (maybe deep hypnosis or something else), but it seems more and more he is doing massive favors to China actually, since russia is already insignificant globally. I don't mean some pesky tariffs, I mean whole world will realign around China, and he is giving it all to them for free. Bravo.

* Abolish democracy (only works preemptively, abolishing democracy while they're in charge would obviously not work).

* Wait for them to die and hope they don't teach what they know to a successor.

* Learn from them and speak to some fraction of their core even more persuasively than they do.

You don't defeat a populist by simple virtue of being right.

We’ve been falling over ourselves trying to understand these poor misunderstood Trump voters for nearly 10 years now. We’ve all heard these rationalizations many times before.

There are committed bigots in the Republican voter base. They’re suburban and rural-rich.

The rural poor Republican voters largely are, at least hypothetically (if you can get through their media bubbles) reachable by the right economic message. They’re not in it for the racism or what have you. That’s the suburban republicans.

This was beautifully expressed in the West Virginia teachers strike a few years back: https://youtu.be/JEjU-X57Wrc?t=4313

I can't ever understand why they have so much hate and bile in them? I'm guessing its just fear of losing what they do have? I don't really know.

When people do build factories, which they still do, they build them in or around the cities, not in the country, despite having to pay more for land, labor, and regulatory compliance. If they do locate in the country, they choose a town that has a university and a hospital.

The closest is his anti immigrant rhetoric but my guess is that this will largely hurt farmers (although maybe they know better than I do).

How is any of this helping fly over country?

How is your mental model literally backwards from reality?

Not sure about musk's wealth but TSLA is down by >30% in the last 3 months.

Say we put a tariff on socks. And Hanes opens a sock factory in the US. Is a few hundred sock jobs going to help the millions who aren’t making socks? Does working in the sock factory pay enough to buy computers and cars and other higher margin goods?

Generally speaking, for broad tariffs, the answer is “No”.

All more expensive than importing but supports local economies. Again, I'm not an economist, and tariffs are not a panacea, but they are also not useless.

There’s a place for tariffs. Protecting against countries that undercut us by skirting international labor or environmental laws is a decent example. Protecting a specific, narrow industry that has national defense implications could be another.

But against Canada and Mexico? GTFO. That’s nonsense that’s going to hurt the average consumer.

That much is clear.

This can kind of be the case with narrow, directed tariffs (protectionism of a vulnerable uncompetitive industry, for instance see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax), or in a developing country that has mostly primary industry (that is extractive industry, mining and that sort of thing). In a developed country, it’s a lot more complicated; a lot of that manufacturing probably depends on imported materials or parts (so tariffs hurt it from that direction) and a lot of the market is probably export (which tariffs also hit, for tariffs more or less inevitably lead to retaliatory tariffs).

And where you have heavy protectionism, the _consumer_ tends to suffer, as the protected industries have little incentive to make their products good or cheap. See British Leyland; for quite a while the British government attempted to keep it alive by heavily restricting the import of actually good cars. Spoiler: it did not work.

Might not turn out to be as self-sacrificing as I thought.

Briefly, the parts of the map that voted for Trump are largely known as flyover country. To oversimplify things, the people in this area have been neglected and talked down to by some portion of the political apparatus as far back as they can remember.

In some cases, the vote for Trump wasn't meant to be anything more than punitive. To get a rise out of the politically aligned groups that can afford to fly over and - literally - look down on.

Part of the reason many people consider those areas “flyovers” is that minorities, women, gays, nerds, really lots of people, can expect to get treated very badly in those areas.

Now, maybe there’s an obligation to turn the other cheek, reach out, and try to educate people in flyovers. But it is far too reductive to act like the blame points one way here and it’s just snobby elites who have abandoned these populations.

Look at Minneapolis, and Minnesota in general. Wealthy, hugely diverse, amazingly Red rural areas and unbelievably Blue urban areas. It's a lot like California, honestly.

It's not all roses and butterflies but a blanket statement like "women/gays/nerds/minorities get treated very badly" in these areas is laughable and very "online"/detached from reality.

Very snobby elitist take tbh.

I've seen these "people in party x categorically do y" comments a whole lot more recently, and it really feels like a net negative to political discourse. Based on the source I pointed to earlier, there seems to be a plurality of support for at least continuing aid to Ukraine, with only 30% believing we're sending too much. Us vs them mentality won't help people recognize and voice disapproval of decisions within their own party that they don't agree with; we need to concede that people may vote a candidate for a narrow set of reasons (thanks to the two-party system) and have political discourse that encourages disagreeing with certain of your own party's views.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/14/americans...

Hate to break it to you, but people in the GOP will support anything Trump tells them to. The right wing political ecosystem is a closed system and it’s driven from the top down, and they’ll believe anything they’re told, so long as the entire ecosystem is reinforcing it. They spent 60 years building this system; it works really well now. And it’s the reason the country is now being dismantled, and the reason there’s nothing anyone can do about it. This system was the cracks in the foundation and Trump was the nitroglycerin.

There is nothing like this on the Democratic side of the fence. There’s no centralization of opinion, and there’s no media ecosystem whatsoever. The so-called “mainstream media” is now all owned by right-wing or at best center-right billionaires, so Democrats can’t actually push a message even if they could get it together, because they don’t have any microphones.

There were attempts at a Democratic media ecosystem, all of them sabotaged by centrists who didn’t want progressives to gain power. Because “better things aren’t possible” wasn’t a winning message and people on both sides of the political fence generally prefer progressive policies (until you associated them with the Democrats, then GOP support plunges.) But it would threaten people like Nancy Pelosi whose power and personal fortune derive from doing massive favors for defense contractors.

if it was only half of the US population they want to hurt, it's also the rest of world, even the environment.

Most people everywhere generally believe what their social reference group tells them to believe. Human nature, I guess.

Best example of that is to take a look at HN in 2022 when Musk announced the Twitter takeover. A good half of the comments were quoting Voltaire and Snowden and applauding Musk for 'protecting free speech'. The other half saw it for what it was. When Musk stories come up now, there is no one still pushing the free speech angle.

Sounds like another reality distortion field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

Is this really the case or only a long term problem? The F-35 is a totally different story.

Pulling the cord with such little respect will not be forgotten. The USD will be lucky to still be the reserve currency in 5-10 years time. The rest of the world is likely to sanction the US at this rate. It is violating all of its agreements in bad faith.

if the US regime carries on at the rate it has over the last month I expect it will be gone considerably faster than this

Supplementing it may be faster (eg. adding Euro and/or Yuan) than outright replacing it, but it’s not my area of expertise. The timeframe was based on some light research.

the backing of which could be switched very quickly indeed

At this very moment, Apple and Google have to ability to disable communications for billions of people. They can make computers and phones totally unusable, beyond specific services.

EU was trying to legislate around this risk by forcing companies to bring data on EU soil and open their platform to alternative providers. They always tried to be gentle with it as companies will claim that they are taken advantage of but as the things unfold at this pace I'm pretty sure that it EU and probably the rest of the world will be very heavy handed the moment there's an instance of US president or US tech oligarch decides to shut down group of people from their devices to teach them a lesson or to compel them into something like they did with military systems in Ukraine. I was afraid for years that people will be insulated into groups and the global community will be destroyed and now I feel like its happening.

The way almost all societies have allowed themselves to be completely dependent on a few providers is mind-boggling.

Someone else 10,000 miles away has the kill switch for your phone, your credit card, your brokerage account, your TV, likely your HVAC if you're into home automation, maybe your car.

Even though later he claimed that he did not mean that, I guess more people will start thinking about these things.

There's a lot of bloviating from the chattering class about cozying up to Russia, but I've yet to hear a cogent alternative. And no, I don't think "endlessly funding Ukraine to a forever stalemate" qualifies.

Still waiting on the alternative plan.

Given Putin's stated wishes, this will only stop if Russia is unable to make such moves (for whatever reason) or states at risk of invasion are defended such that it's strategically stupid for Russia to even try.

You want the war to end so that Poland, Japan, Taiwan and Australia no longer trust that the US will help them and develop their own nuclear weapons!

Taiwan makes some of the most complex devices humans have ever constructed! They can figure out the almost 100 year old technology to make a gun bomb nuke.

And you, too, have failed to present one. Is funding a never-ending stalemate indefinitely the only option?

Fantastic.

Their economy is a joke. Putin can't exit because everything will collapse slightly faster than it's already collapsing.

They can't even protect their own territory in Kursk. It's not going to be a forever war.

Russia's misinformation bots are the most effective part of their military.

Having said that, Europe needs to step up because the US has lost it's damn mind.

I've literally never thought that the US wouldn't help us before Trump came to shit on everything.

Now I imagine we'd have to buy Trump off with "raw earth" or something in exchange for not being abandoned to China, and our head of state would quite possibly be berated publicly for wanting some kind of security guarantee for his people's future.

It's sad, I still feel like the US and UK people are closest to our values, but Trump only works for himself and his billionaire crony parasites.

He will end up with the loyalty he has earned.

Everyone around Trump hates him, and the US is heading in the same direction.

and while we're here, since the US is ostensibly going isolationist, maybe they should stop telling the Ukrainians they need to submit to subjugation.

Ukraine has an amazing job, but they wouldn't have been able to do even that without convincing others that it was in their best interest to fund the war. That's been clear from the beginning.

For Ukraine to continue existing, the russians have to be driven out. Otherwise the genocide will continue. The genocide caused by russians, caused by russians invading Ukraine, caused by russians stealing Ukraine's children.

In america's right wing trump followers, there is utter, sociopathic, monstrous indifference to Ukraine's suffering.

So I'll ask you, personally: If the neighbouring state or country decided to invade and take over an area of your state, and you were told "you've been resisting too long, give in already and give up your fight", would you lay down and welcome the invaders you've been fighting? If you knew that the invaders were stealing children, and murdering whole towns?