what'd we bounce into? what did we bounce back from? what effects are you talking about specifically.
I work in aerospace and the sentiment was exactly opposite. People cheered both Trump elections and were dead terrified of a blue win ruining contracts and business.
I don't ask because I am overtly political, I ask because I think it's fascinating that both sides seem to think we're a stone's throw from the apocalypse.. which very much seems to be projected onto the voter base on purpose..
The effects of this insular isolationism can only be explained by simplicity that doesn't hold up in reality: things will be more prosperous for us if we keep what we have to ourselves. But in truth growth is growth. To build prosperity, we need more production, which means more people. Perhaps your share gets bigger, but the pot gets smaller.
You are thinking of a tide that lifts all boats.
The people supporting these policies don't want all boats to be lifted - they want prosperity for themselves and subjugation for anyone else.
The power imbalance is the point. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
> it's the fundamental idea that people coming here is bad
Too many people coming here that don't integrate and don't assimilate is bad. A nation cannot thrive with too many conflicting demographics. Multiculturalism working to the degree people want it to these days is a total fantasy. People coming here and extracting value from the economy to send home is also a problem.
> We can't even allow things from other countries to come here.
We don't want to be reliant on other nations. So we incentivize internal production, and disincentivize importing. You can argue that the way that the administration went about it was ineffective at accomplishing that, and that'd be another conversation.
> To build prosperity, we need more production, which means more people.
So incentivize the native population to have more kids. Incentivize technological innovation that doesn't require mass importation of foreigners.
Absolute howler.
It's a (pretty white supremacist-coded) fantasy to say that immigrants don't assimilate. They typically assimilate better than native-born citizens! Meanwhile the most economically dominant states are extremely ethnically diverse, and have been for the past century.
> People coming here and extracting value from the economy to send home is also a problem.
Another example of what would be a knee-slapper if it were a joke, but it is actually white supremacist dog whistle. Immigrants are an absolute boon. For example, per the Congressional Budget Office[1]:
> CBO estimates that the immigration surge will add $1.2 trillion in federal revenues over the 2024–2034 period.
This nativist dreck that has infected the country through algorithmic social media is going to wreck the future of the country, and the sad part is that the declining fortunes it causes will still be wrongfully blamed on immigrants.
Trump got a higher percentage of the Black vote than any Republican since Gerald Ford. He nearly won an outright majority of Latino voters. How did a white supremacist candidate manage to do that? False consciousness? Marc Maron: "Progressives have really got to figure out how to deal with this buzzkill problem. You do realize we annoyed the average American into fascism."
I...wasn't replying to you?
Anyway I wasn't trying to change anyone's mind. I'm just pointing out facts, not trying to make a conversion from what's obviously someone's religion.
Although I know that being politically correct is not in vogue at the moment, I do care and empathize, and try to be accommodating with my language.
What is the preferred way to refer to people who support the transition of the USA into a fascist christian ethnostate?
Our most prosperous times came in the wake of great immigration waves. I think the expectation is that "assimilation" is:
- a one-way street and - immediate
Neither is true, of course. German assimilation from the mid 19th century took several generations. Same with Italian assimilation in the late 19th/early 20th century.
What about the American rich extracting wealth overseas? Vacations, real estate, yachts constructed in foreign countries, investing in companies in other countries, etc.
I think you're asserting more money leaves the US economy because an average person comes to the US (legally or illegally) and sends a portion of their paycheck back home, but I'd bet American born citizens spend/send far more money out of the country...
> Too many people coming here that don't integrate and don't assimilate is bad.
But ... why? This is stated as a matter of fact without any real qualification. Why is different "bad." We have far too many examples in our very own country of different - sometimes dissonant - cultures in the same space and still enjoying success as a society and a nation.
> A nation cannot thrive with too many conflicting demographics.
Again ... why not? NYC is our prime example of this working and the city succeeding despite some very, very different cultures side-by-side. There are also monoculture countries that have fallen far behind us to use as counterexamples.
> People coming here and extracting value from the economy to send home is also a problem.
This is my biggest issue. If you work here, you're producing something for this country. What you do with your money is frankly, your business. In either event, you're also spending money on housing, food, etc. You're both producing in this country and contributing to our economy. If you want to send the rest back to Mexico, why is that my business? Why does that hurt me?
The ability to reject someone before they come in, or force them to go away, is usually never an option you have control over - except for immigration policy in a democratic republic. If we weaken the ability to enforce immigration laws, then we're losing one of the strongest tools for maintaining a cohesive community.
If allowing diversity in your community is so great, then why is the blue city Austin, Texas seeing a simultaneous rise in homelessness and drop in property prices?
If allowing immigrants in without any control is so great, then why would rich metropolises like New York and Chicago react so badly to the busses of immigrants sent to them from Texas during the Biden regime?
If your political party refuses to acknowledge that there are immigrants who believe their first loyalty is Sharia Law, the Chinese Communist Party, or whatever else, then why would law-abiding U.S. citizens take your position seriously?
If your vision of the future presents a better world for non-citizens vs. the citizens who have a right to be here, then why would you expect fascism to loose the next election?
Additionally...
If lecturing the largest bloc of US citizens about why they're inherently privileged and guilty is so great, then why did the political party pushing this loose the presidency in 2016 and 2020?
What are the conflicting demographics ?
US is so big and diverse from its founding - it seems to have worked out pretty well
That is an idea. Although we murdered 9/10 of them and relegated the rest to stinking refugee camps (oh, sorry, "reservations") for eight or nine generations. And even today we have a huge problem with murder/kidnapping/disappearance of young women of those groups, which we're apparently unwilling to address.
Any other bright ideas?
"People coming here" is not inherently good or bad. Some people would be good for the country, and some people would be bad. I'm speaking of individuals here, not groups. The issue is that the electorate at large feels like it has been given a choice between two extremes: "Effectively allow ANYONE to come here and stay as long as they want" and "Don't let ANYONE come here". If you give a people a choice of two extremes, don't be surprised if they choose the extremism you don't like.
Reconceptualize MAGA as voting AGAINST what the Democrats are offering, instead of FOR what Trump is offering, and it might make more sense.
The issue is trust. Why should voters trust that Kamala Harris will implement immigration policies they want? Why should they expect her not to yield to the most extreme elements in her party, which believe that borders are a fiction and should not exist? Look at Barack Obama's "evolution" on gay marriage over the course of his political career. Now take an issue that is far more important than gay marriage - how is she going to stop unlimited unskilled immigration? How is she going to stop fraudulent claims of refugee status? How is the whole immigration problem itself going to be solved, if you posit that every one of the 10 million "unauthorized immigrants", and every one of the refugee claimants, needs multiple appearances in court to resolve their situation?
It seems to me that many US people want their cake and also eat it. Cheap workers are good, but also illegal immigration is bad. You kinda need to pick one.
Every job (as an employee) I've ever had has required me to submit IRS form W-9[0] on my first day of employment (or before). It's a standard part of the on-boarding process. To clarify, the W-9 form is to provide your "Taxpayer Identification number" (TIN) to those who will be handling payroll/tax withholding (that is, your employer).
If you cannot provide a TIN, you are not allowed to begin working. If you don't have a TIN, presumably you don't have the right to work. Or is there something about the UK's processes I'm missing?
People apparently feel that the Dems are pro 'letting everyone in' -- an understanding created not just by what the Dems say and do on the topic (and others) but what their opponents say too.
If they don't want people to think they aren't pro-immigration then the Dems have dropped the ball on their messaging and actions.
For a similar and reasonably concrete example, the 'Harris is for they/them' ads and their impact is a worthy case study.
This is expected behavior, but not to be taken seriously as a moral argument. Preserving liberty and rule of law vs preserving money, so hard to choose...
It’s a little more complicated than what you wrote, but basically: yes.
[edit] Example study construction: pick some issue where there’s been a heavy propaganda push against it from one party, but a law they opposed passed anyway. Ideally, something like a tax increase, that can directly affect voters in a way they might reasonably be expected to understand and know about. Observe that the (say) tax hike affects not more than 2% of the population you’re studying. Survey. Observe that 35% or 40% of people say the new tax law increased their taxes, and very nearly all of them favor the party that opposed the hike and was claiming or implying it would affect more people than it did.
Repeat similar studies over a period of decades, always with familiar outcomes. Draw conclusions.
Separately, you can probe basic understanding of how our government & various policies or laws work. You’ll find half of everyone not knowing how marginal income tax rates work, that almost all the people who think our foreign aid spending is way too high believe it’s 10x, 20x, 30x higher than it actually is, et c. Generally speaking, voters hardly know how anything works, so of course they buy lies about it. That’s not me being shitty, it’s what the evidence overwhelmingly says is true. And this is far from an exhaustive treatment of alarming traits & behaviors of the electorate.
All most all the replies to your comment have nothing to do with the substance of what you said. The reality is that the us system is predominantly run by bureaucrats which make sweeping changes hard. This is a feature of the system.
This means that whatever party is in charge will have a harder time enacting the crazy.
I never understood the “my side”/“us vs them” from people. There is only one side and we are all on it.
Projected by whom, by what means, and to what end?
Consider that both sides may have legitimate reasons to be concerned with this term that didn't apply to Trump's first term, and that what you see isn't simply some form of mass-manipulation or "projection onto the voter base."
The 2nd term is making fundamental changes to our economy that carry a promise of bearing fruit. Not only are those promises generally contested by economic experts, the short-term results have been unsurprisingly poor.
1. If a democrat is elected, they will take all their guns (their campaign rhetoric keeps saying this will happen, but it continues being no part of democratic presidential campaign messaging, and hasn’t happened the times they warned it definitely would—this one’s fake)
2. Election security. But republicans keep getting into positions to investigate this and either not doing it (because they know it’s BS) or doing it and finding only a handful of mostly-accidental cases that don’t favor either party. Also fake.
3. Leftward shift around acceptance of non-standard sexual and social norms. This one’s real. Whether it’s a problem or just… fine and not worth worrying about? That’s another matter.
4. A bunch of totally wacky shit like litter boxes in classrooms. Fake.
5. Healthcare prices. Real! Democrats also worry about this.
6. Socialism. LOL we’re not remotely near it, very nearly nobody elected in the Democratic Party is left of center-right in most of the rest of our peer states, on economic issues and social safety nets and such. Fake issue.
7. Illegal immigrants increasing the crime rate (fake) and taking our jobs or driving down wages (true, with an asterisk that the effects are complicated, but sure, true) and bringing in drugs (you want citizen drug mules, they cross the border easier, or to just use shipping containers or cargo trucks entering the ordinary way with some greased palms as you can do crazy volume that way, this is fake)
8. Crime being out of control. Broadly, fake. (“But police stats could be…” yeah we have victimization surveys too, people study this and already thought of your objection. Again, fake)
9. Colleges being too liberal. Look at all that “fake” stuff above. Yeah gee I wonder why, dude. Real, but wholly self-inflicted.
10. Rampant fraud in social programs, by the people receiving the aid. This is extremely well-studied. Fake.
11. The budget deficit. Except Republicans are even worse for the budget than democrats, over the last 40 years. By, like, quite a bit. Mostly because they think tax cuts magically pay for themselves, plus Bush’s wars. They mocked the shit out of Gore for talking sense on this topic, and elected cut-taxes-and-spend Dubya. So. Real issue but they are extremely confused about who to vote for to improve it.
There are more but you get the idea. Yes, Fox News and Mark Levin and all them have convinced republicans the world is going to end if democrats win elections. But it’s largely based on completely made-up shit.
Left as an exercise for the reader to make a list for Democrats’ side. Nb how much of its worry about Republicans causing harm by trying to address the fake issues above. Probably most of it. And that’s a real thing that happens, to be worried about.
The key missing piece here is the guns will be taken from law abiding citizens while criminals will be undeterred. Add to this a concern over team blue's rhetoric about replacing police with social workers and mental health advocates.
It was a part of a few Democrat presidential campaigns, like Beto O'Rourke.
> 2. Election security. But republicans keep getting into positions to investigate this and either not doing it (because they know it’s BS) or doing it and finding only a handful of mostly-accidental cases that don’t favor either party. Also fake.
Due to a consent decree from the 80s, Republicans weren't allowed to do anything in this area until a judge finally refused to renew it in the late 2010s.
Similarly, Germany was the de facto enemy of the Ally aligned world in the 40s and only a few short decades later best friends with most.
You can identify countless similar atrocities in US history after which relations stabilized within a few years.
Most in life are short term oriented and it's rare that these things produce lasting effects on perception.
Does anyone care or even remotely think about what Bush did as president 20 years ago? Some politically oriented and historically minded folks yes, 99% no.
They really have to be long lasting and persistent transgressions to produce generational distrust e.g. Japan invading China/Korea many times over the last few hundred years.
However the new gen seems far less concerned about this too.
Given Trump's larger than life character/ego/presence, it's more likely that anything he does will be attributed to him instead of the country as a whole. Which makes his actions perhaps even less impactful than a more neutral presenting president doing the same.
I don't think that's a great example. A few years after the bombs, Douglas MacArthur was ruling Japan. They didn't have much of a choice. Japan was occupied for almost 7 years, had their constitution rewritten to make them essentially reliant on the US for security.
It's undeniable that by and large Japanese sentiment towards the US bounced back quickly, despite a traumatic and expansive war
Western and Japanese companies alike started moving production outside Japan once wages started eating into profit margins. Today, underemployment is common in Japan and the low birth rate is one of several symptoms of the economic stagnation that began in the early '90s. Populist governments won't be far behind.
My understanding is that generally they expected a MUCH more severe set of penalties and occupation after losing - especially given the unconditional surrender, and instead got a stable and functional provisional government for the next 7 years.
---
Basically - Japanese sentiment is not a parallel to this. That time:
1. Japan started hostilities with a surprise attack
2. Lost, complete with unconditional surrender
3. Was then occupied by a government that was more stable, left much of the existing civilian infrastructure in place, and forgave many key figures (not the least of which was the emperor)
4. Then that government helped them roll out "new deal" style social reforms.
That is absolutely, utterly at odds with the current situation. There - the Allied powers were relatively graceful, culturally aware, and interested in a stable, functional government.
Here - We're insulting our friends, from a position where there's no moral high ground to stand on. Personally, I don't think they'll forget so quickly, and I think things will get much worse if the US continues down this path.
Can we rebuild those relationships? Sure, seems likely on a long enough timespan, but it takes a hell of a lot more effort to get it back than it does to throw away.
Then Trump decided his shitty Nobel Prize mattered more and threw 20 years of hard work in the dump.
The consensus in India is that America is perfidious. You claim that countries have goldfish memories, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Indo-American relations. It was immensely hard to build this relationship and easy to burn it.
But who knows? Maybe you have an insight into how Indian people think.
If they don't they are idiots. To name a few things: 9/11, the foreign policy disaster and money pit of the Iraq War/GWOT, the easily-avoidable GFC.
Those were both significant events in their own right and fundamental causes of the Trump presidencies.
...and then there's a regime change like "your capital city and every industrial center is firebombed to oblivion, kindergarteners are begging on streets, soldiers are coming back from POW camps to find their home burnt to ground and their whole family dead, and the occupying forces are executing high ranking officers of the previous regime for war crimes, just to drive the point home that their ideology will never be tolerated ever again."
If the numbers swing 5%, the US may suddenly have a radical change in foreign policy and governorship.
Seen as recently as the 2024 election.
Regardless, I'm discussing the opinion of the populace, not the political leadership.
You can't endear a country's people to you by installing a puppet government
Others trying to be him have not been able to replicate his success electorally. Lowest common denominator celebrity is key to his success.
Theres a good case to be made that he's an aberration and there won't be another demagogue after him to so effectively capture his audience and survive the corruption and incompetence that follows.
He has potential heirs that are smarter and more disciplined than him, but ironically that path doesn't lead you to a life of pop culture/paparazzi/TV celebrity.
Thats not to say we don't deserve to have lost significant trust and respect. But if you take the long view, it's not an extrapolation of this.
Neither is encouraging for the future.
And they weren't playing for the popular vote.
i think the reason there is no pushback is that things are happening too fast at an unprecedented scale that we can't even envision the consequences, let alone predict them. we are completely unprepared for this and by the time we can figure out how to deal with it, or even stop it, it will be to late.
it is also possible that many believe that this will stop by itself with the next president, and so there is no point in trying to stop things now. in a way i actually agree with that. walking in unity but realizing your error and changing course is a better choice than risking a civil war.
civil war sounds alarmist, and maybe it is, but i fear that without consensus on what is the right course of action, worse without consensus that the current trajectory is bad, i don't see any other outcome. before anything can be done, a consensus on what that should be is simply necessary. and unfortunately, it should be obvious that there is no such consensus now. if there were, we wouldn't even have this controversy.
An incident like the Gracchi brothers' populist power grab, which led to the first significant outbreak of political violence in Rome in centuries, was not immediately transformative but it did sow the seeds of conflict.
I personally think Trump, and especially Jan 6th, is the Gracchi brothers moment of the USA.
All of the powerful psycopaths have seen what one aspiring dictator can get away with. Trump will keep pushing over norms and other pillars of society and the next one will be starting much further along.
On the other side every democracy looses a bit focus over time and laws to keep government clean get softened, IMHO.
But let’s say the next election happens and the opposition will be voted in (if not, god knows where this ends) , then there will be a government with a state apparatus in tatas. They have the burden but also the opportunity to rethink how things are supposed to work and can make changes that most previous governments did not even thought possible.
Maybe, I don’t know. But maybe this slightly painful time is part of a renewal process that in the end will be helpful. And Trump of all people makes it involuntary possible.
the current events provide a wakeup call that has the potential to galvanize change. as i said, what we need is a consensus. hopefully the next government will realize that too, and work towards that. otherwise it is up to us individuals to work on that too.
The main response was a series of milquetoast foot-dragging prosecutions that accomplished little more than ralling the Republicans around him and giving him even more media attention.
Prevent people voting ?
ensuring the executive can't silence the other two powers and put a violent personal army on the streets of the USA. duh.
It is as resilient as the people (in power?) want it to be:
> To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
* James Madison, Papers 11:163, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-11-02-010...
I, the GP, am Canadian, so have my own system to worry about.[0]
But if you're going to talk about the pros and cons of a country's system, it is useful to a certain extent to look at what the architects were thinking. And in this particular case they did have some insight into the weaknesses of what they thought up.
Another that I heard in a recent podcast[1] was the fact that the existence / creation of political parties was not put in anywhere in the US system (even though they had existed in the UK already), and so you can get into tribalism/clans, which we are now seeing the effects of.
[0] https://sutherlandhousebooks.com/product/the-crisis-of-canad...
Many other latecomer nations didn't enjoy that kind of success - in fact many of them started with their first few presidents being brutal dictators, so they're under no illusion that their own "founding fathers" were infallible angels.
The US is not the first modern democracy; it's just the best at self-aggrandisement.
I think the main 'innovation' was the splitting up of the Crown / Executive.
One failing was not taking political parties into account. It's not like they were unknown at the time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party#18th_century
The political theories/philosophies developed by the founding fathers remain foundational for reasons.
lol, implying you'll find that on HN
The Founders based the Constitution on 2000 years of known human history (and psychology), including the fall of the Roman republic and, then, empire.
Those "old ideas" have worked very well for 250 years. You do better in your country. Show us!