> Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?

No, it couldn't. Trump tells them to vote a certain way, they do it. Look at Massie's primary as an example.

Go on thinking that, but it really won't help the Democrats win if they persist in this attitude. Voters are just looking at what's on offer from both parties, and one party's platform has been judged to be both hostile to their interests and also actively scorns them as people. The other is mostly hostile to their interests and is super corrupt, but it cuts taxes[1] and doesn't belittle them.

The Democrats squeaked out one miraculous win buoyed by the incompetence of Trump's band of corrupt idiots in the early COVID days. But now merely pointing out how incompetent and corrupt Trump is stopped working, as we saw in 2024. Do Democrats have anything left in the playbook besides derision and scorn toward those outside their tent? We will soon see, I guess.

[1] I know the talking points say that the tax cuts "only benefit the rich" but I'm far from a 1%er and can tell you that I'm paying way more taxes in a blue state than I would be in a red state, and also the OBBB improved things for me. Voters in those blue states can see their tax bills and the one thing Democrats can't say is that they don't put a huge tax burden on those who work.

You're just arguing that pandering and short-term-ism works. I won't hold my breath for a Republican caucus that's actually fiscally responsible.

I'm not a Democrat.

I can only speak to 1 scenario but state tax was higher in CA than in TX, but property tax was higher in TX. TX had wild utility bills (top minds in CA are working on this though).

Unless your people walked across the Bering Strait during the last ice age you're an immigrant.

Which ones?

Certainly if 8,000[1] years ago a tribe walked across and settled, and then 7,000 years ago another group walked across and set up camp next to the descendants of that first tribe who had been there a thousand years, the second group were actually immigrants, right?

And how do we sort it out now, millennia after those various groups arrived, after all that DNA has been mixed together?

My point is just that it's silly to label any race or group "immigrant" or "native" based on what movements we guess from their skin color that their ancestors may have made millennia or centuries ago, or even what their parents did. Yes, I'm very in favor of birthright citizenship, even if people have "anchor babies" in bad faith the baby didn't have any say in it. And no one else of any color had any say in being born in America either.

[1] please substitute correct numbers -- they don't matter

I think it's pretty clear these are shorthand terms for the issues with systemic bias in our modern society.

Pre-colonial North America was certainly not some idyllic pacifist utopia as people like to fetishize. However, any previous ethno-political disputes between those nations is irrelevant compared to the very recent history of the last 200 years.

The genocide of Native Americans in the 19th century happened under the unbroken chain of authority of our current government.

And under treaty with those so victimized. Which is continually forgotten in these sorts of conversations.

I don't know. I do know that, as far as America is concerned, "native" doesn't include the colonizers who showed up 200 years ago when the land was already settled.

Land can only be nonviolently settled exactly once. The arrangement of who had what land 400 years ago when many European-Americans' ancestors started to arrive was merely the then-current state shaped by centuries of violent bloodshed (or "colonization") between one Native tribe and another Native tribe.

I'm saying that pre-colonial-age America was not a place where each tribe came in, found their own piece of virgin land, and lived in peace and harmony. They were not any different than the homo sapiens on other continents, which is to say, smart, determined, and willing to kill outsiders to improve their own tribe's chances of survival.

The only reason of course that they are viewed so sympathetically today is the tragedy of their near-complete destruction, which can be explained very thoroughly by their incredibly bad luck of having almost no domesticable native animals, and their not having gotten Iron Age technology. But in the end their destruction was mostly due to disease, traceable to early Spanish contact, which had absolutely decimated North American societies before almost any human Europeans had set foot on the mainland.[1] Europeans indeed did lots of bad things to those peoples, but I argue this is less proof that "Europeans are uniquely mean" and more proof that humans are brutal when they come into conflict over scarce resources and will press whatever advantages they have, whether it's large numbers of braves with obsidian arrowheads or muskets.

A good read for some perspective on what we can piece together about what pre-colonial America was like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization

> "According to Keeley, among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, only 13% did not engage in wars with their neighbors at least once per year. The natives' pre-Columbian ancient practice of using human scalps as trophies is well documented. Iroquois routinely slowly tortured to death captured enemy warriors (see Captives in American Indian Wars for details)."

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11831114/

You can excuse or justify the genocide of native people by European colonizers any way you want, although it baffles me why so many people want to. But it doesn't matter, they still don't get to call themselves native.

What if they took the bus across?

By “American People” you mean native Americans?

Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant. Or are you referring to the Spanish that settled the west? The French in the far south? The Italians and Jews that populated New York? The British and Africans?

I’m painting in broad strokes, but to say “the American People” as if it’s somehow distinct from immigrants is just ladder pulling.

You don't know the meaning of the word you're using.

Immigrant (noun) A person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.

> Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant

I'm not American, but this conversation happens a lot in Canada where I'm from too

I was born in Canada, in a Canadian hospital. I've never had any other home than this country.

I'm descended from immigrants, but I am not an immigrant. I'm not considered indigenous either, that's a whole other type of person.

What a strange thing, to be from a place but have many people say "it's not your place, it's stolen" as if I had a say in that. If I went anywhere else, I would be an immigrant there.

Very odd.

The point is your parents, or their parents, were immigrants. But those very same people we are now trying to restrict from coming here.

Meaning, if we time travel and apply these restrictions, you yourself would have never been a citizen. In fact, you probably wouldn't even exist. Do you see the problem?

That, my friend, is ladder pulling. When you destroy the very conditions that allow you to thrive.

The entire world has been settled and resettled. You can't let past conquests stop you from having a country, laws and borders or all countrys would be illegitimate.

>The point is your parents, or their parents, were immigrants.

Or my parents, parents, parents, parents, parents, parents were... And if they came here for a better life, obviously there was some mind virus that was going on in their home country that forced them to leave in search of a better life. Don't try and bring that mind virus here if you had to immigrate here to escape it.

The US in particular has always been made up of immigrants. I don't know how it works for canada. But for the US, that's always been the case. We're a country by immigrants, for immigrants. An American identity is not one of skin color or race. To suggest otherwise is not just a ahistorical, it's anti-American.

There is no mind virus. People which to rewrite history to fuel their own delusions. They don't require enforcement around immigration, they require medication and perhaps a history lesson or two.

Measured as a percentage of population, we have more immigration now than we did in the 1890's peak. Given our drastically larger population, this is a problem.

Suicidal empathy mixed with this 'idea that america is illegitimate' cause we are a 'nation of immigrants', and we 'took land from the natives' is quite frankly retarded. And i can use the word retarded because i mean it in the literal since, "a verb meaning to slow down, delay, or impede a process."

Measured as a percentage of population, this graph:

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...

shows the USofA having much the same level of immigration as it had from 1860 through until 1920.

Holy shit, we've gone form 4.5% of the pop and 10M to 14.5% to 50M?(!)in 40 years since 1970? Isn't that alarming? we are at the same level of immigration as the potato famine?

Also, check the definition of that chart... We have far more "illegal immigration" today than we did back in 1890. So.... egg zack ly. Don't you think that's a big problem considering our current size? I'm all for 'some' immigration, but the level we are at today is totally unsustainable when we have an absolute homeless epidemic in all of our cities?

  Holy shit, we've gone form 4.5% of the pop and 10M to 14.5% to 50M?(!)in 40 years since 1970? 

You (the UsofA) have returned to 1860-1920 levels, yes.

  Isn't that alarming? 

No.

  We have far more "illegal immigration" today than we did back in 1890. 

But the same level of immigration ... the problem lies with classification and stalled paperwork pipelines.

  Don't you think that's a big problem considering our current size?

The US has increased in size with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959, but still appears to have room for people.

   I'm all for 'some' immigration, but the level we are at today is totally unsustainable when we have an absolute homeless epidemic in all of our cities?

Is that a statement of fact, an opinion, or a question?

Are you certain that all US cities have "an absolute homeless epidemic"?

I guess its was inevitable that Suicidal Empathy guys would break containment and make Hacker News accounts.

Au contraire, the actual suicide is blowing up our economy just to stick it to some brown people. Make no mistake, dumping tens of billions of dollars into ICE and supporting a man with the fiscal responsibility of a rock will not help the American economy.

It is truly astounding to me what lengths Republicans will go to to "win". Well, you've won. When are things going to get better? I'm waiting.

The point is that people who immigrate to USA and Canada will have descendants who will be just like you. Only difference will be their skin color (maybe).

Is Kash Patel any different from Americans who have lived here for generations? Is Rishi Sunak any different from the people who lived in Britain from generations?

It sure is odd! This is something that the educated descendants of colonizers just have to grapple with. I imagine it's still less difficult than being born as someone lacking the systemic privileges.

'America' is named after Amerigo Vespucci. America is a European nation.

A distinct people? That's a myth. Every American is an immigrant, or descended from an immigrant.

The word loses all meaning then, because so were the ancestors of the indigenous people who crossed the Bearing Strait.