Second Trump Administration Thread

[creature386]

Since we had a very lively discussion about the recent US election in the "Index to AGW Denialist Claims" thread, I thought we might give it its own topic, as obviously, the implications will reach beyond merely global warming.

Plus, Project 2025* plans to censor social media content critical of the administration; a small forum like this is exactly the kind of low-traffic place that'll fall under the radar.

(*For those who don't know, Project 2025 is a conservative political initiative widely considered to be the inofficial manifesto for the next Presidential term. Trump repeatedly denies to have read it, the Heritage Foundation employs many people closely-aligned with him and its proposals overlap with many of the promises he made during his campaign.)

Use this thread to:

A) Post news articles related to the upcoming second Trump administration.

B) Share your predictions and opinions on what impact they'll make on both the nation and worldwide.

C) Vent about whatever you need to vent about that you wouldn't like to post in a place where the federal government might be watching

I'll start. The website futuretimeline.net, known for its somewhat sensationalist futurist predictions, wagers a detailed, yet pessimistic forecast (at least they're predicting economic hurdles to block the worst stuff):

2025-2028

The United States is becoming more authoritarian

On 6th November 2024, Donald Trump defeated the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the US presidential election. Trump became the first Republican nominee since 2004 to win the popular vote, and the first president to be elected to a non-consecutive second term in 132 years, when Grover Cleveland won the 1892 election.
Ezoic

Trump's campaign incited outrage with its barrage of false statements and divisive rhetoric – including claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, engaging in anti-immigrant fearmongering, and promoting conspiracy theories. Trump's embrace of far-right extremism, as well as increasingly violent, dehumanising, and authoritarian language against his political opponents, drove historians and scholars to describe his words as fascist, unlike anything a political candidate had ever said in modern U.S. history, and a continued breaking of political norms.

With control over both the executive branch and Congress, Trump's administration quickly set its sights on implementing Project 2025 – a sweeping blueprint for consolidating power within the federal government. Published by The Heritage Foundation, America's most influential conservative think tank, and co-authored by 140 former Trump staffers, Project 2025 outlines a bold vision to reshape the country's governance. The plan grants the president unprecedented control over federal agencies, reduces regulatory oversight, and strips protections across various sectors. Through this initiative, the executive branch seeks to dismantle the so-called "deep state" and replace thousands of career civil servants with loyalists, prioritising those aligned with Trump's ideological vision. Critics warn that these changes could weaken democratic institutions and erode checks and balances, letting the president operate with fewer constraints and less accountability.

One of the Trump administration's first major actions is a sweeping programme of mass deportations targeting undocumented immigrants. With promises to remove up to 10 million undocumented residents from the United States, the administration moves swiftly to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations, increase detention centre capacity, and deploy resources to accelerate deportation proceedings. The goal, officials claim, is to secure the nation's borders, reduce crime, and prioritise jobs for American citizens.

In addition to the mass deportations, Project 2025 includes proposals to denaturalise certain immigrants – a process that revokes the U.S. citizenship from naturalised immigrants deemed "problematic" or "disloyal" – thus rendering them deportable. Although historically a rare practice and highly controversial, denaturalisation enters mainstream policy discussions during this time, with potential targets including individuals from certain countries, those with specific political affiliations, or those found to be overly critical of the administration.







However, the scale of this deportation effort is hampered by formidable challenges, with projected costs running into the hundreds of billions, alongside a number of legal, logistical, and operational issues.* Industries such as agriculture, construction, and hospitality – which rely heavily on immigrant labour – face the potential for major workforce shortages and supply chain disruptions, triggering a backlash from business leaders. Legislative progress also stalls, as even some conservative lawmakers express concerns over the programme's economic and social implications. Civil rights organisations file a series of legal challenges, complicating and delaying the rollout, with courts ruling in some cases that specific aspects of the programme violate the constitution.

Despite these hurdles, Project 2025's centralised structure allows the administration to push forward elements of the initiative by bypassing certain safeguards and circumventing state-level protections. Together with ongoing issues over the Mexico border wall, started during Trump's first presidency, these deportations become highly contentious and polarising. Increasingly frequent reports emerge of human rights abuses, particularly at detention centres, such as overcrowding, poor sanitation, and lack of care.

In addition to immigration reform, Project 2025 includes a series of measures aimed at expanding federal surveillance and tightening control over civil liberties. Under the guise of "national security," Trump's administration proposes enhanced monitoring tools for tracking suspected threats – targeting political opponents, activists, and minority communities. The programme extends to online spaces, where authorities implement intensified monitoring of social media platforms, forums, and independent news websites to detect and flag "subversive" content. These expanded surveillance capabilities raise concerns about the potential targeting of individuals who openly criticise the administration or express dissenting views.

New policies also seek to curtail press freedom with stricter regulations on media outlets deemed "unpatriotic" or "biased." As part of this effort, the Trump administration moves to defund public broadcasting entities like NPR and PBS. Journalists critical of the administration face heightened scrutiny, with some even threatened with legal action.

Meanwhile, Project 2025 empowers federal law enforcement with broader authority to suppress protests, even going as far as deploying the military to break up such gatherings. This marks a significant departure from American norms, which historically upheld free assembly and civil disobedience as protected rights, drawing comparisons to hardline regimes like China and Russia.

Adding to concerns over civil liberties, Project 2025 mandates that states provide abortion data, ending what had previously been a voluntary reporting system.* States must now report on the number of abortions performed, gestational age at the time of the procedure, reasons for each abortion, the pregnant person's state of residence, and method used. To enforce compliance, the administration threatens to halt federal funding for states that do not supply the required data. As surveillance of pregnancy outcomes intensifies, this data is weaponised against individuals in states hostile to abortion rights, criminalising those seeking or assisting with abortions. The prospect of a nationwide abortion ban moves closer to reality, with grave implications for women's health and well-being.

Project 2025 also envisions a rollback of protections for LGBT individuals, proposing measures that remove federal recognition of gender diversity and eliminate protections against discrimination in healthcare, housing, and employment. The plan aims to reinstate narrow definitions of gender and sex, erasing policies that provide access to gender-affirming healthcare and protect individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Critics argue that this marks a dangerous regression in civil rights, targeting people in ways that parallel the restrictive laws seen in authoritarian states that enforce social conformity. The impact of these policies threatens to marginalise LGBT individuals further, eroding gains made in recent decades and enforcing a rigid, state-sanctioned ideology around gender and sexuality.

Overall, the combination of intensified surveillance, restrictions on reproductive rights, rollback of LGBT protections, expanded police and military powers, and the deportation of political dissidents creates a troubling precedent for free speech, privacy, and civil liberties, marking a shift towards a more authoritarian state.

Project 2025 includes many other proposals – affecting education, employment, the environment, welfare programs, and much more* – signalling a decisive rightward turn in policymaking. As it begins to reshape American governance, concerns grow that the 2024 election may have been the last truly free and fair presidential contest in the United States. The consolidation of executive power lays a strong foundation to influence or restrict any future democratic processes. With echoes of tactics employed by autocratic leaders such as Vladimir Putin, observers warn that democratic safeguards Americans have long taken for granted may weaken further, creating a turbulent road to the 2028 election and beyond.

www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2025.htm#usa

(The other predictions you can read there are more optimistic, I swear.)

[theropod]

Nov 15, 2024 22:32:21 GMT 5 creature386 said:

I'm gonna be real, it's not even the fanatical MAGA Trumpists that I'm mad about. Yes, these guys are fascists and they know it, but what really gets my blood boiling are the swing voters and independents, the "normies", if you will, who overwhelmingly voted red.

Same. It makes you lose faith in humanity as a species.

Honestly, are they expecting me buy any of this crap? Are they expecting me to believe that voters who had to google what tariffs are after the election give a damn about economic policies?

When I first read about that, I had a major Deja Vu experience, specifically related to how the most googled terms in Britain right after the 2016 brexit referendum were "why should we leave the EU?" and "what is the EU?". Yeah, well. Not surprised that a majority fell for lies some idiot painted on a bus, and not surprised the majority has changed their mind now that they know what they got themselves into.

The same thing happened with Trump the first time around, let’s just hope that the second time people come to that realization there will still be free elections.

Clearly enough voters are totally at the whim of their emotions when voting, so much that they will let go of all rational thought or realism when voting. I’m not talking about hard-core trumpists, of which there are, of course, way too many as well,  but about the swing voters you are also referring to. They have a vaguely defined sense of anger at the incumbent, so they vote for any idiot in order to vote him out, no matter the consequences. "The economy" is just a term people hide behind, especially when they don’t even understand what it means. Rational people who have rational and legitimate grievances will not vote for someone who will make their situation worse just because they are angry at the guy currently running the show. People who are:

Angry about Biden not doing too much to stop Israeli war crimes
Angry about Biden not doing enough to make sure their wages increase.
Angry about Biden not doing enough to combat inflation.

Are not rational, and they are not talking about legitimate grievances, what they are talking about is just pretext for behaving like angry 3 year olds who cannot get everything they want whenever they want it. The only real difference is that most countries don’t let pouting 3 year olds vote.

Like, the thousands of media articles speculating about what Harris supposedly did wrong are obviously holding her to far higher standards than her rival.

Not so much higher standards, but simply standards. It seems that when it comes to Trump, there are none whatsoever. There is literally nothing left that guy could do that he hasn’t already done that he would be held accountable for either by his voters or legally. He’s already been found guilty of rape, after all, and more people turned out to vote him after this than ever before.

I think it's time to accept that the "average Joe" (you know, the kind of person who is neither chronically online, nor fanatically devoted to any political tribe) understands, on a gut level, that voting for a proto-fascist wannabe dictator with enough felony convictions is sorta bad, but that he is still the "lesser evil" compared to having a black woman as President.

Apparently so. And I’m starting to get really angry at all the people, even anti-trump voters, who look at Democrats and gripe that it’s all their fault. I obviously don’t have an issue with saying that the Democrats are far from perfect. But no, this is not simply their fault (not to mention how a whole bunch of people just suddenly seem to have realized how everything is wrong with them). We can accept that a party of candidate is not perfect, and is not the solution to every problem, and is not the answer to all hopes and prayers of the entire human species, without turning it into an excuse for voting in fascists.
And I think it’s important to recognize that it’s also dangerous to keep legitimizing people’s opinions in that way by making excuses ("oooh, but they just voted for Trump because they are so unhappy with their economic situation, it’s not their fault they voted in a fascist, it’s the incumbents’ fault for not improving their situation more!!!"). Sometimes public opinion, of course fueled (now more than ever) by manipulative populist rhetoric and media, simply takes a nosedive off a metaphorical cliff, and there’s simply nothing that can excuse that so many mature adults willingly give up their higher reasoning skills and/or integrity in favor of blind hatred. I get that it’s easier for something like this to happen against a backdrop of real crises, but that is only an explanation, not an excuse. And it doesn’t mean democrats or anyone else would be well-advised to play into those disgusting impulses that compelled people to vote for Trump (the way so many opportunistic "centrists" often do in parroting right wing talking points or willingly cooperating with far-right extremists).

At this point I think only directly and severely feeling the consequences of their own decisions can and will teach the people who voted in Trump a lesson. I’m just not sure if it will be of a more permanent nature than the last time, nor if it is perhaps too late for it to matter.

[creature386]

Nov 17, 2024 0:44:14 GMT 5 theropod said:

And I think it’s important to recognize that it’s also dangerous to keep legitimizing people’s opinions in that way by making excuses ("oooh, but they just voted for Trump because they are so unhappy with their economic situation, it’s not their fault they voted in a fascist, it’s the incumbents’ fault for not improving their situation more!!!"). Sometimes public opinion, of course fueled (now more than ever) by manipulative populist rhetoric and media, simply takes a nosedive off a metaphorical cliff, and there’s simply nothing that can excuse that so many mature adults willingly give up their higher reasoning skills and/or integrity in favor of blind hatred. I get that it’s easier for something like this to happen against a backdrop of real crises, but that is only an explanation, not an excuse.

100%. I think “protest vote doesn't justify authoritarian vote“ is something American voters ought to copy a 100 times on a chalkboard.

In some ways, it is a structural problem. If you only have two major political parties and only one of them is committed to maintaining democratic principles (the names should give away which one it is), you don’t have much of an option for a protest vote (though on the other hand, there were people besides Trump available for the Republican preliminaries, so there’s that).

In Germany, where the traffic light coalition has huge popularity problems, too, you at least have a large democratic party like the CDU in the opposition. Unfortunately, this didn’t prevent the AfD from making historic gains during the last state elections, nor did it prevent the rise of far right parties all across the board in this year’s EU elections.

So, clearly, there is a deeper problem here. In many ways, this isn’t just a failing among the voters, but also of the media. I get that most voters aren’t economists. I get that most voters don’t understand that the incumbent’s effect on the economy is often overstated and that the GDP depends on global cycles and predecessor policies while current policies often take years to show an effect.

I don’t get why the media refuses to explain any of this.

I mean, I can think of some reasons, like corporate interests or the increased violence against journalists putting them under pressure. But those reasons (while still present) are not as prevalent in Germany as in the US, even though the underlying problem still exists here.

Germany is in a recession right now and a lot is due to underlying structural problems of the German economy that have always been around, but Covid and the Ukraine war put them to the forefront. The aging population, the high dependence on Russian gas, the high dependence on energy-rich industries while having a very small tech sector; all of these problems have been present in the Merkel years and weren’t fixed despite having 16 years to do so.

While the traffic light coalition is by no means a competent government, a lot of the infighting has been caused by the FDP which (as shown by recent reveals about Lindner’s plans) has been acting maliciously. Yet, what did the media do? Blame the Greens, as they are always the scapegoat No. 1 of reactionary conspiracy theories and that sells well!

Now, obviously, I’m not American, so I can’t tell what the economy is like from firsthand. But part of why I bring up the German recession is because, frankly, inflation has become a global problem after supply chains broke down post-Covid. In fact, incumbents have been losing everywhere precisely because this is a global problem:

www.marketplace.org/2024/11/14/incumbents-are-losing-around-the-world-not-just-the-u-s/?utm_campaign=MPD_20241115&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sfmc_&utm_content=&utm_term=122460991

From what I can tell, America's post-recovery was among the best among G7 nations.

In fact, our recession is so bad in part because, after the inflation reduction act, many of our industries moved to the US. It was the “Green Economic Miracle“ we were promised, but better. We couldn’t have anything like that because we have our debt brake and especially the FDP really insists on keeping it.

Now, granted, the US had many structural advantages from the start, like being a way more resource-rich country and thus not being bothered by Russia.

Even so, Biden had to clean-up the mess Trump left him with. You know, the guy who racked up the national debt (we’ll never know how much American tax money went into real-estate businesses) and had the most incompetent covid-management of any developed nation.

Unfortunately, Trump inherited a good economy from Obama (the GDP and job growth rates were about the same during his and during Obama’s terms), and anything other than “I was feeling better under Trump than under Biden“ apparently means not taking the American working class seriously.

Nov 17, 2024 0:44:14 GMT 5 theropod said:

At this point I think only directly and severely feeling the consequences of their own decisions can and will teach the people who voted in Trump a lesson. I’m just not sure if it will be of a more permanent nature than the last time, nor if it is perhaps too late for it to matter.

The best-case scenario is that, now he has more power and a cabinet full of corrupt sycophants, he messes up the economy the second he enters the White House and has it stay that way for most of his term so that everyone can see it. (He's apparently aware of the economic damage his mass deportations would cause - he wants to do it anyway.) Then, he crushes the GOP’s approval ratings worse than Herbert Hoover did and we get at least four terms of uninterrupted Democrat rule where they clean up the mess, reform the Supreme Court, undo the Project 2025 stuff, and get Republicans to behave themselves.

(His tarrifs are also going to wreck the German economy, but at least Friedrich Merz will be the one to carry the blame and he’ll be unlikely to get a second term.)

Unfortunately, the more likely scenario is that he’ll inherit Biden’s work and claim it as his own and that his mess only becomes apparent later so that the next Democratic candidate will be blamed for it, thus having the cycle repeat.

That’s not just how his first presidency went, that’s also how populism sustains itself 90% of the time.

Countries that have already been governed by populists have a higher probability of another coming to power. Argentina—home of the first modern populist leader, Hipólito Yrigoyen—has been governed by populists for almost 40 percent of its history since 1900. Italy has had populist leadership for 29 percent of that period. Slovakia has been governed by populists almost 60 percent of the time since winning independence in 1993.
Part of the reason for this persistence is that populists are political survivors. They rarely disappear quickly or on their own. Instead, they do everything they can to increase their chances of retaining power, be it through their core strategy of polarization and agitation or through more drastic methods such as new electoral laws, takeovers of the media, and intimidation of the judiciary and opposition.
As a result, populists are in power for an average of six years, compared with three years for non-populist rulers. They are much more likely to be re-elected, with a probability of 36 percent, compared with only 16 percent for non-populists, a gap explainable by their popularity as well as their adeptness at insulating themselves from the levers of democracy.

www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/kiel-focus/the-economic-consequences-of-populism/

In all fairness, the article points out that Trump didn’t quite cause the economic wreck populists are usually known for in his first term. Given his increased power, that might change. On the other hand, the next election is almost guaranteed to be less free than this one with more, as the article put it, “new electoral laws, takeovers of the media, and intimidation of the judiciary and opposition“, so it might cancel out.

(There’s also a third possibility where he doesn’t immediately wreck the economy, but where he repeals the Affordable Care Act and, after enough poor people die from preventable diseases, the American working class regrets not voting for universal healthcare. Unfortunately, Trump’s Covid disinformation mostly got his own voters killed and they still didn’t care, so I’m not sure that’ll change a thing.)

So, what’s going to happen next? Comparative internation studies, like the one by the IFW Kiel, are of limited usefulness. The United States have a much longer democratic tradition (for white people, at least) than countries like Turkey or Hungary, which supply the majority of data on populism. However, the Jim Crow era laws, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the McCarthy era all happened not too ago and they were perfectly within the bounds of America’s democratic institutions.

The other problem is that, while they’re obviously much more in harmony now than during his first term, I still don’t think Trump and his party share the same goals. The GOP is evil, but it’s a more lawful kind of evil. Project 2025 is their idea, not his.

The first question is, what does the post-2020 GOP want? To be clear, while I think the Republicans, as a whole, used to be a democratic party prior to 2020, they were already heading in this kind of direction before Trump. Their rightward shift began ever since Goldwater wanted votes from racist Southeners and the Project 2025 is just the culmination of decades worth of nationalism, white supremacy, Christian fundamentalism, libertarianism, and science denial.

I legitimately think their endgame is a new Jim Crow era. The Jim Crow laws basically happened because a bunch of Southeners wanted slavery back under a new name and I think the post-Goldwater shift of Abraham Lincoln’s party to the right is because some Southerners wanted race segregation back under a new name. Admittedly, it’s mostly immigrants rather than blacks now, they successfully copied that bit from the European far right, and the new lynch culture is currently mudering more queer (especially trans) folks than ethnic minorities, but that’s close enough. Project 2025 might just be a new dark era in American history and, much like slavery or racial segregation, it might end once a new civil rights movement forms.

However, there is a big variable without precedent in American history and that variable is Donald J. Trump himself. He is a way more chaotic and unpredictable evil than his party.

Now, there have been populist politicians in American history, but they were not “populist“ with a capital P like Trump. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan have used the same anti-intellectual, polarizing, and anti-establishment rhetoric Trump would later copy, with the difference being that they were democratic politicians who neither denied elections nor stage coups.

However, their rhetoric helped turn Republicans into what they are now. The Nixon’s Watergate is probably a huge reason why Americans distrust their government so much more than Europeans do. Reagan, however, managed to turn this into an asset by turning the government into an ultimate scapegoat. It’s how Republicans consistently got the working class to vote against their own interests by selling tax cuts for the rich, cutting medicare, and cutting social security systems as a “small government“ (while corporate welfare and high military spending somehow don’t fall under “big government“). It also desentized their voterbase to scandals. (“Look, all politicians are corrupt and greedy, I’m just honest about it!“)

Trump basically copied their model, just completely unfiltered and without any kind of shame.

Now, there is a lot of discussion about whether or not Trump is a fascist. Personally, I think he is only a fascist with a lower f much like how I consider Reagan and Nixon to be populists with a lower p.

He’s saying fascist things and he’s riding on a wave of fascist sympathy to get elected, but he doesn’t have a manifesto with capital F Fascist goals like Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

However, even if he doesn’t have fascist goals, the fact that he’s normalizing fascist rhetoric is disturbing and a break of democratic norms unlike anything in Democratic history. There has been fascism before in American history (hello, Ku-Klux-Klan!), but not on the scale seen today.

Of course, even now, American democracy is much, much more stable than the Weimar Republic or pre-Putin Russia, but assuming this changes in the next coming decades, I don’t think an unironic American Hitler (or Putin) is impossible.

(In fact, Weimar fell largely because of a constant stream of crises that the government couldn’t solve, no matter who was in power, making people lose faith in democracy. With climate change getting worse, this is a disturbingly plausible fate for Western democracies.)

Granted, we’re discussing the long-term future now. I don’t think a fascist America is realistic in the short to mid-term future. An illiberal democracy, where only rich white men have real democratic rights, is neither unfeasible nor without historic American precedent, however.

Whether this happens or not, of course, also depends on if the Democrats can still stop them. The Democrats had a similalry crushing defeat in 2004, yet they managed to recover from this during the 2006 midterms and during the 2008 presidential elections.

Republicans aren’t going to have Trump anymore during either of these elections (they don’t have a 2/3 majority in the Congress, so it’s not like they can change the constitution to give him a third term or wahtever). While he’s an unpredictable idiot, his personality cult draws in voters and he’s difficult to replace. A lot of Republican policies are very unpopular among the general public which is why they hide behind the Supreme Court.

However, the Democrats have plenty of problems of their own. For one, they keep losing the working class and now also various minority groups to the Republicans. For another, they constantly get obstructed by Republicans any time they try to get something done which is where the “Democrats would be center-right in Europe“ or “both parties are the same“ memes come from among non-voters and third-party voters.

I’m not sure what they could do to rehabilitate themselves among these two groups. For the first problem, there’s always the suggestion that they should just abandon the culture war issues and focus purely on FDR-stlye economic leftism, but they need to do this believably and this where we get into the second problem.

Even if the Dems somehow get a landslide victory in 2028, they’re still going to be left with a Supreme Court that is strongly against them. It’s not an insurmountable problem, FDR got his New Deal passed despite a Supreme Court that was even more Republican than the current one, but it’s going to be a lot of work, as the SCOTUS was a huge reason Biden didn’t get more done on cancelling student’s debt or protecting the environment. Maybe it’d be a start to stop any pretense of bipartisanship or trying to appeal to “moderate Republicans“ (which don’t exist).

That’s, of course, assuming Trump doesn’t make good on his promises. He threatened to imprison Kamala Harris and a ton of other high-ranking Democrat politicians should he win. To be fair, he threatened the same on Hillary and it was just a bluff, but as always, he’s unpredictable. AFAIK, he tried to deny disaster reliefs for states that voted blue during his first presidency and was only held back by his staff. This time, he might actually make good on his promises of bringing the military into blue states and declare a “day of violence“.

Of course, if he starts a civil war, that’s (hopefully) going to destroy the GOP’s approval ratings even longer than a wrecked economy. We already had the George Floyd protests during his first presidency, the biggest wave of protests since the Civil Right’s movement. That could theoretically happen again. Now, Project 2025 does include proposals to allow the President to employ the military against protests, but that’s why Americans have their Second Amendment.

(Yes, I get that guns won’t work against military helicopters, but the point is that I think Americans will recognize a tyrannical government once it shows its face.)

Yes, I get it, that’s a long essay for saying “We don’t know what will happen“, but it’s fun to speculate.

[creature386]

BTW, since this thread is about the administration, it might be appropriate to show the faces:

[Infinity Blade]

You know, I think it's funny.

A couple YouTubers I'm subbed to (RationalityRules and Adam Conover) have both pointed out that the straight and simple reason the Democrats lost is because people are concerned about the economy. The Democrats just didn't really explain how they would make the economy any better and didn't point out what the real problem was, lest they piss off their rich donor base.

I don't blame them. Hell, my rent is slightly up from what it was when I moved in almost a year ago. But then you have a surge of people looking up what tariffs are right after the election, realizing that this (plus the mass deportations) are going to make the economy even worse, and then going "oh crap".

This morning I learned that a bird species I had never even heard of, the slender-billed curlew, is now declared extinct. Probably left the world close to or very soon after 1995. To this day we're declaring species extinct due to our own hubris and short-sighted degradation of the planet. How many more are going to join this curlew thanks to however poorly Trump is going to handle environmental issues? He's certainly going to cut back our already insufficient efforts to minimize the damages caused by climate change.

More than likely, entire lineages of life are going to be lost forever (never mind all the horrific blows to women, people of color, LGBT people, immigrants, and yes, even straight white men who are going to see the cost of everything rise up and the economy worsen thanks to the tariffs and mass deportation of immigrants)...because a lot of people wanted some cheaper gas. Because they didn't know what f*cking tariffs are...

Ain't that funny!?!? (this is the part where I'd schizophrenically laugh if I were actually insane)

[theropod]

Nov 19, 2024 8:11:01 GMT 5 Infinity Blade said:

You know, I think it's funny.

A couple YouTubers I'm subbed to (RationalityRules and Adam Conover) have both pointed out that the straight and simple reason the Democrats lost is because people are concerned about the economy. The Democrats just didn't really explain how they would make the economy any better and didn't point out what the real problem was, lest they piss off their rich donor base.

I’ve seen the same videos I think. On the one hand I guess they have a point, on the other hand I do think that some of how RationalityRules put his argument sounded a lot like he was putting all responsibility squarely on the Democrats, which I think is unfair.
Obviously I am not in the US (and tbh I am pretty glad I am not), but I do think I have a fairly decent grasp of US politics for an outsides. What I do see is that certainly Democrats have not managed to make the sweeping changes that would have been required to truly address the structural inequality of their country and give working-class people the impression that politics was concerned with them. But who is to blame for that? In a democracy, even an imperfect one, in the end of the day politicians can only do what voters give them the power to do. Even if the "democratic establishment" had been hell-bent on making sweeping changes, they could not have done that without a lot more people voting for them, because even a simple majority in both chambers of congress (which most of the time voters didn’t even give them) isn’t enough to get meaningful legislation passed.

So if working-class or middle-class voters are so disillusioned with their personal economic situation and the Democrats’ inability to improve it, why the heck are they voting for someone who is clearly going to make it worse, by driving prices up with tariffs, by abolishing the affordable care act, by opposing unions and workers’ protections? And why are they blaming "the democratic establishment", and not themselves for refusing to elect candidates who would support the kinds of policy reforms that would really benefit them?

This isn’t limited to the US either, it’s a common theme: Voters first refusing to vote for candidates that have agendas perceived as too "radical" as long as they are on the left of the political spectrum, or refusing to give left-wing candidates, parties or coalitions the kinds of majorities they would need to address structural problems. And then complaining when those parties do not manage to improve their lifes meaningfully.

I mean sure, the Democratic party and its members (though that, in the US at least, means a huge share of the electorate, so part of that responsibility pretty much reverts back to ordinary voters) did make some serious mistakes, not least among them their stubborn refusal to nominate Bernie Sanders (twice!) and their late change of candidate which prevented open primaries in 2024. But in the end of the day, voters would have been the ones with the power to effect change in the party. That there would have been a far better chance at actually seeing their interests represented by supporting progressive, democratic candidates than by supporting a fascist should have been beyond obvious to any rational minded person. There are a multitude of ways of making their anger heard that don’t involve just making it worse for everyone who isn’t a billionaire.

So without having to take away all blame from the Democratic party (which is certainly far from perfect), I am a bit critical of what felt to me like attempts by certain youtubers to shift blame away from voters. In the end of the day, voters should face up to their responsibility, and no amount of disillusionment can justify voting for a fascist. Perhaps I merely misread the video’s tone a bit though.

I don't blame them. Hell, my rent is slightly up from what it was when I moved in almost a year ago. But then you have a surge of people looking up what tariffs are right after the election, realizing that this (plus the mass deportations) are going to make the economy even worse, and then going "oh crap".

And this is really the point – it’s really a somewhat lazy argument to argue for how badly the Democrats have ignored the needs of working people, or how they have failed so utterly to appeal to them, but at the same time not fault voters for not even bothering to look up the most elementary of facts before choosing to protest vote against their own interests. We can talk about a partial responsibility of the democratic party, but the primary responsibility rests with voters who voted for Trump or didn’t go to vote at all.

This is always a politically less convenient stance, because generally telling one’s prospective voters that they are stupid a**holes is not a good political strategy, and acknowledging that the result of the election depends on things one cannot control (namely the stupidity of millions of people) is depressing. But we need to acknowledge that a large number of people are simply going to vote the way they vote because they are lazy, stupid, short-sighted, egoistic, and/or just want to see the world burn, and that even if Harris had led the most brilliant campaign of all time they might still not have voted for her because she simply isn’t Trump.

One thing I’ve noticed is how (I think it was also in those videos) "populist" seems to be used with less of a negative connotation in the US than it is in Europe. I’m not saying this is fundamentally incorrect, something isn’t automatically wrong just because it uses populist rhetorical style. But I think when characterizing someone as a populist, we need to differentiate between someone who is simply saying true things in a populist style, and someone who is spreading lies and disinformation the way we usually think of when we hear "populism" here in Europe (thinking back to Boris Johnson’s misleading bus claims). That people in the electorate genuinely seem to have lost the ability to do so is very relevant and concerning. They don’t care that almost everything Trump says is demonstrably false, because they have basically lost a sense of "reality-permanence", for lack of a better term. On the other hand, I frequently see Bernie Sanders described as "populist", and as potentially appealing to the same people who have swung elections towards Trump. That in the minds of a substantial number of people, these two extremely different people can somehow be viewed as equivalent just seems crazy to me. People really seem to care more for style and anti-establishment rhetoric than about anything a candidate actually says, and when they do the latter, apparently lies and hate are no longer considered a negative in any way.

More than likely, entire lineages of life are going to be lost forever (never mind all the horrific blows to women, people of color, LGBT people, immigrants, and yes, even straight white men who are going to see the cost of everything rise up and the economy worsen thanks to the tariffs and mass deportation of immigrants)...because a lot of people wanted some cheaper gas. Because they didn't know what f*cking tariffs are...

I couldn’t agree more.

[Supercommunist]

It would be one thing if Trump were a super competent evil overlord.

But he's not even that. He thinks a human's energy is finite and will run out like a battery if you exercise.

I don't know how anyone was duped into thinking a dumb rapist is going to look out for their economic interests.

[creature386]

Nov 19, 2024 8:11:01 GMT 5 Infinity Blade said:

You know, I think it's funny.

A couple YouTubers I'm subbed to (RationalityRules and Adam Conover) have both pointed out that the straight and simple reason the Democrats lost is because people are concerned about the economy. The Democrats just didn't really explain how they would make the economy any better and didn't point out what the real problem was, lest they piss off their rich donor base.

I now watched those videos and I have mixed thoughts.

As far as I know, Harris did promise to ban price gouging as part of her campaign. I'm not sure if this plan would work, I'm not sure what the advantages would be over the current system (IIRC, there are already laws in the US against price gouging, but only at the state level), I'm not sure if it's gonna fix some other inflation issues, like the post-Covid supply chain breakdown, and I know that the details on her plane are vague. However, "I'm gonna fight inflation with a law against high prices" sounds exactly like the kind of economic popoulism that the Sanders fraction is missing from the democrats. Maybe the communication was the issue, but what would have been the right the communication?

Harris mentioned "I grew up in a working class family" so often that it became a meme. The whole reason she nominated Tim Walz as her running mate was because of his humble biography and his simple language.

It wasn't enough. People did't want nice sounding policies (why didn't she implement them earlier?) or people who are supposedly "like them" (they don't buy it). They just want one thing: Scapegoats.

Let's be real: When times are bad, people want to feel angry. And when they want to be angry, they want to be angry at somebody. The Chinese, the immigrants, the current government. People are way more psychologically occupied with possible threats/losses than with possible gains (i.e. good policies).

It's aslo difficult to scapegoat when you're an incumbent which, I think, is the reason why incumbents across the entire world have been losing elections this year.

Maybe this year was just a fluke, but I doubt it. The current inflation crisis is the second global economic crisis we're having in the 21st century (the 2007 crash is still fresh in my memory) and we're not even a quarter through yet. With the decline of traditional media and the rise of online ecosystems of dubious factuality, I doubt facts are going to play a role in politics again any time soon either.

Rationality Rules does have a point that the Democrats are going to need their own online ecosystems quick, but he, unforunately, also has a point that finding donors will be difficult.

Honestly, this is one of the most depresssing points for me. With the huge amount of influence money has on US campaings, I am not sure if it is even possible for any meaningful political movement to tackle the wealth inequality problems at a systemic level.

Now, there has been a leftward-shift among the Democrats  after Sanders' strong performance in the 2016 and 2020 primaries. Biden's administrations has been called the most pro-labor presidency since FDR - in no small part because Sanders had a huge influence on it (I'm not sure why Biden didn't make him his Labor Secretary, but I guess keeping him in the Senate was more imortant). However, this shift has yet to materialize itself in working class gains.

(Of course, the cyncic's answer to "Why did Democrats lose the working class?" might be that people with college degrees are more likely to know what a tariff is.)

I guess it's his rhetoric that's missing. He knows how to talk to guys like Joe Rogan whose podcast is still Neuland to most of the Democratic establishment, even though he has a far bigger audience than pretty much all traditional media channels.

(This is, by the way, also why Trump and Sanders have this weird fanbase overlap theropod mentioned. Their policies might be as far apart as it gets, but both know how to talk to Joe Rogan and the rest of the New Media ecosystems while their respective party establishments don't. In fact, of all the things Harris did wrong during her campaign, her refusal to let herself be interviewed by Rogan might have been among her bigger mistakes.)

But, like you said, it's still sad we're going to lose so much for such a stupid reason.

Nov 19, 2024 21:00:06 GMT 5 Supercommunist said:

It would be one thing if Trump were a super competent evil overlord.

But he's not even that. He thinks a human's energy is finite and will run out like a battery if you exercise.

I don't know how anyone was duped into thinking a dumb rapist is going to look out for their economic interests.

Trump's incomptence is one of the few things that's giving me hope. While he certainly isn't a genius, he isn't stupid either or else he wouldn't have gotten as far as he did. During his first Presidency, he got away with enough atrocities that were just terrible enough to trigger the libs without being terrible enough to irrepairably stain his reputation. The only reason he wasn't reelected in 2020 was due to factors largely out of his control (yes, his handling of covid was an atrocity, but the fact that the pandemic happened at all was simply a case of bad luck for him).

This is why I'm not sure how much of the truly crazy stuff (like the tariffs or the mass deportations) he's actually going to do and how much will be only done symbolically. On the other hand, there is a good chance that his circus cabinet (putting Tulsi Gabbard in charge of national intelligence is having the lunatic run the asylum, same with putting RFK in charge of health) the near-guaranteed infighting is not going to bode well for him. Maybe we just have to see.

The other question is how much of the MAGA movement will remain once his personality cult is gone and if the other Trumpists, like J.D. Vance or Ron DeSantis, are going able to sustain it. Because while Trump might be a narcissistic clown eithout any real plans, these guys have plans and, unfortunately, they are a lot more strategic and restrained than him.

[creature386]

Oh, yeah, about Trump's clown cabinet, have I mentioned that a quack is going to be in charge of Medicare and Medicaid?

Trump picks Dr. Oz to run Medicare and Medicaid, wrestling mogul Linda McMahon for Education

www.oregonlive.com/nation/2024/11/trump-picks-dr-oz-to-run-medicare-and-medicaid-wrestling-mogul-linda-mcmahon-for-education.html

Everything you need to know about this guy in a single paragraph:

TV personality Oprah Winfrey helped launch Oz into fandom and fortune. After years of appearing on her show as a health expert, Oz landed a talk show of his own that aired for 13 seasons. Oz has been accused of hawking dubious medical treatments and products on his defunct TV show. And during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he pressured government officials to make hydroxychloroquine widely available, despite unresolved questions about its safety and effectiveness.

Say what you want about Trump's circus, at least his clowns are somewhat funny. I hope he puts a flat Earther in charge of NASA or something.

[Infinity Blade]

I just want to be clear by saying that I am NOT saying voters are not responsible for the outcome of the election. I mean, obviously they are, there would be no president elected if we didn't vote. What I (and I think the people I mentioned) were trying to do is explain why people voted the way they did, and I'm definitely not happy that they did (otherwise I wouldn't have vented about it here).

[creature386]

Sure, sorry for the dogpiling, my post was more focused on the videos than on your post. I do think the videos had many valid points, BTW, particularly what Rationality Rules said on the importance of online ecosystems and New Media.

@thread
The circus reports its first layoff:

Matt Gaetz withdraws from consideration for top law enforcement job

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general of the United States, former Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, withdrew himself from consideration Thursday. As VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson reports, Gaetz was facing a tough confirmation process due to various criminal allegations.

www.voanews.com/a/matt-gaetz-withdraws-from-consideration-for-top-law-enforcement-job/7872620.html

I'm not sure what to make of this. Either the infighting has already started and the GOP isn't as Trumpist as I thought (Gaetz is basically one more guy hired for loyalty over qualifications) or Congress is hoping to replace him with somebody more competent and discrete.