This is it. It's not uncommon to see people on this very forum defending many of his policies, so the hope that the population has simply been duped and everything will right itself in a few years is a hard one to hold. One begins to question so much of America and see how much we had actually been turning a blind eye to since the end of the war.
Yes, it has to get much much worse before it can get better. Another half-competent democratic presidency now would only result in an even worse republican one next.
So was Harris unintelligent, extreme or senile? Why can the Republicans run a candidate who is evidently dumb, extremist and senile all at the same time, but the Democratic alternative has to be perfect?
Harris to me seemed not very impressive to be president. Not dumb compared to the average person but not great for the top job. Also her voting record I think was the most far left in the senate.
It's a reasonable question. It seems like those who don't support Trump don't quite get yet that if they don't actually want him to be President, they have to show up to vote.
The turnout just didn't happen. Too many people are fine with it.
You're delusional if you think the reason Trump has support is somehow because of Biden.
He has support because he's a populist leader that's going to tell you the country is failing and we need to burn it all down and, of course, it's brown people's fault. And that type of populist messaging really resonates with stupid, poor white people. Which is a growing fraction of the US as people get poorer overall.
There's no "middle of the road" between neoliberals and outright fascists. The democrats need to shed their (literal) old skin and become a real left-wing party, with aggressive anti-corporate messaging.
That this gets downvoted shows that people have still not learned a single thing. You're spot on, it's tragic that so very few people understand this, based on how incredibly little I see it voiced online. In fact, you're the first I've seen voice it in ages.
E.g. if Harris (another, at best, incredibly mediocre candidate) would've won, the post-Harris Rep presidency would've been even worse than the current one. Until there's a competent non-Rep president, every single subsequent Rep government will be worse, until there will be no more fairish elections - and likely we're already there. Someone like AOC - not policywise, people don't vote on policy, it doesn't matter. Attitude-wise. It's abundantly clear the DNC hasn't learned (or more likely, doesn't want to learn), so the next president will be another Hillary/Biden/Harris candidate who will either lose or make the next Rep win even more decisive.
I think maybe it gets downvoted because it comes across as victim blaming and has echoes of abusive reasoning. The left must change what they want because otherwise the right will throw a hissy fit and start opening concentration camps?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. It could be helpful to point to actual policy failings of Harris rather than handwaving about mediocrity.
When Harris actually completed to be presidential candidate she came in fifth. She was on stage a couple of times saying 200 million Americans died of covid - you have to be fairly thick to not realize that isn't so - she'd misread 200,000. They had to keep her away from interviews to stop similar stupid leaking out.
I don't recall this ever happening and, if it did, it was not a big enough deal for anyone to care about it. Certainly not a single person I know who didn't vote for Harris said this was the reasoning.
The reality is she was much more intelligent, better spoken, and higher qualified than Trump. That's not the reason she lost, and anyone proclaiming otherwise is stupid. Yes, stupid.
The "word salads" were completely made up. It was always a hallucination.
The reasoning is that she's a black woman, so obviously she's stupid, and then we work backwards to word salad. That's how that happened.
In reality, she's very well spoken. 99.99% of all the stuff Kamala says is very easy to understand.
We can cherry-pick clips that represent 0.00001% of her speaking career all day. The fact is she's an educated woman who knows how to publicly speak, and she knows it well. Any other narrative is an alternative reality, sorry.
Yes? Consider the following, typical Trump speech:
> But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t—you know, there’s something … You have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.
As if Trump's word salads weren't 100 times worse?? I have no idea how someone can be this blind to the shit they say. Yes, Harris is better spoken than Trump, this is an absolute fact.
Misreading a number seems incredibly insignificant to the number of outright idiotic things Mr Trump says on a daily basis. Why the disparity in expectation/response?
The misread number was almost two thirds of the entire population. That's the sort of thing I'd expect someone to catch as they're saying it because of how absurd it is.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration claimed to have saved 258 American lives with their drug busts. In contrast to Harris, who I'm sure realised her mistake and would've corrected it if asked about it, the Trump admin actually believes their number and doubled down on it.
Harris misspoke. Trump believes the majority of the American population would have died in 2025 had he not been in office.
So misreading it and not immediately catching it is the issue? It seems incredibly human. And you really feel this is worse than the dumb things Mr Trump is on record as saying?
> I think maybe it gets downvoted because it comes across as victim blaming and has echoes of abusive reasoning.
Ah yes, rather downvote because it smells of victim blaming than actually coming to terms with the reality which has played a huge role in a superpower to spiral into facism. Seriously? Now's not the time for that.
> The left must change what they want
>It could be helpful to point to actual policy failings of Harris
You still don't get it at all, I literally stated it verbatim. It's not about policies, it's about candidates, attitude, messaging, narrative.
> The left must change what they want because otherwise the right will throw a hissy fit and start opening concentration camps?
As explained, this is not the case, there isn't a need to change the "wants" - that's the least of the concerns. But let's disregard that and imagine a world where yes, that is the case. Are we going to say "nuh-uh, we rather have concentration camps than change what we want"? If that would be the reality (which it isn't) then that's how things are. Start facing the reality we live in.
I understand why one might take my comment that way, but I'm advocating for the exact opposite: democrats should start acting as a real left-wing party, with aggressive messaging on oligarchy, healtcare, the depravity of the right, you name it.
The democrats, as they exist now, are almost "controlled opposition". There's much to wager that if they succeeded Trump II, they wouldn't undo 10% of the damage he's done. I fully believe Harris could have done a correct job at maintaining the status quo, but that's not what the people want or need.
The democrats should stop showing weakness and trying to build bridges with fascists, and instead speak 24/7 about how vile and stupid this entire circus is. Then they should start advocating for big changes that will hype Americans: free healthcare, extra taxes on billionaires, etc.
Fully agree that they should get back to their roots and start being actually pro-working class on economical matter. Alas, the establishment is too afraid of alienating their wealthy donor class to appeal to the "poor". Maybe after a democratic tea party?
But I don't believe that they need to be "centrists" on identity. What even is centrism anymore? This country has shifted so far right recently. I think the issue is that their "rainbow capitalism social justice" sounds hollow (because it is) if they don't consider economical class as an important matter. Start there and you can keep fighting against -phobias and -isms, just don't make them the center-piece of your messaging.
Centrism on identity would be a more modern version of don't-ask-don't-tell. When Republicans try and nail Democrats into corners about LGBTQIA+ issues... respectfully refuse to engage:
'I think all Americans that pay their taxes and contribute to our country deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'
Focus on multiculturalism and personal automomy as a star-spangled, patriotic American characteristic.
GOP: 'So you want to give trans people healthcare?'
Democrats: 'We want to give Americans healthcare. Why do you want to take it away from any citizen?'
Start throwing more punches, instead of being surprised every goddamn time the other side does.
That seems like a much more reasonable position, thanks for taking the time to clarify. All I can say is what a unspeakably massive pity it is that there hasn't sooner been a reform to the electoral system that would have allowed for a less reactive governance.
Indeed. I don't know how much comfort it could bring you, but know that almost the totality of western democracies are slowly succumbing to right-wing populism, not just the US. While flawed, I believe the current electoral system is only a minor part of a much deeper issue, that being the prevalence of money in our democratic processes.
I kid you not but some of the Silicon Valley elites believe themselves to be philosopher kings and wish to lord over the rest of us in some bizarre techno-monarchy system.
Weren't they planning to make their own techno-monarchic sovereign state? I remember reading up about one venture that actually received funding from your usual VC suspects.
Even the folks in Wall Street weren't this dystopian, come on.
The people largely have been duped by populist messaging.
If you notice the people who defend Trump or his policies don't even really believe them. Half the time the defense is, "well he's not really going to do that" (Trump is a liar). Or, "that's not actually happening" (deporting citizens or permanent residents).
While these defenses are completely delusional, it at least highlights that most Trump supporters consider him untrustworthy. They support Trump because they're living in an alternate reality where everything is great and nothing bad has happened yet. Everything is always just around the corner, but they kick the can down the road in their head.
> It's not uncommon to see people on this very forum defending many of his policies
From what I've seen on the wider internet, the support for Trump is mostly a personality cult. The policies are getting support because they are his policies. They are on the Good Side, and the woke leftists are on the Bad Side. If Trump changes his views, most of his voter base will change with him.
The big question is: what's going to happen when Trump isn't in power anymore? Will he be able to motivate his voter base into a JD Vance presidency? Don Jr.? He's not getting any younger either - what if he dies?
With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.
> From what I've seen on the wider internet, the support for Trump is mostly a personality cult.
I agree with you but the point I'm trying to get across is that a disturbing amount of seemingly right minded people actually support him now on a policy level. Maybe they always did and feel comfortable to say it out loud now? I don't know.
But the deportations, skipping due process, defunding science, excluding foreign students, dismantling aid programs, cutting ties with Europe and Canada, stripping trans people of their rights, pulling support from Ukraine, not following the Paris Climate Accords, etc. etc. It's all stuff I've seen people here genuinely argue for.
> Maybe they always did and feel comfortable to say it out loud now? I don't know.
They always supported it. Lee Atwater put it best:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N***, N***, N***.” By 1968 you can’t say “N***”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N***, N***.”
Atwater was a political consultant for the Republicans, he was an adviser to Reagan and H. W. Bush, and chairman of the RNC. Not some nobody with an opinion that doesn't reflect core conservative strategy. He laid it out for us right there. They pushed the racism down and then they abstracted it to make it more palatable to people. But racism was still always the animus. It was his "Southern Strategy" which courted disaffected Southern whites which formed the basis of the modern Republican party. One of the reasons that today's Republicans claiming the mantle of Lincoln is so absurd.
That was how conservatives thought until about 2008. Then all of a sudden someone (Obama) came along that really opened the flood gates when it came to big conservative racist feelings. You'd still have groups like the Tea Party who would frame their views as fiscal, but then someone else (Trump) started saying the quiet part out loud, when he ran with the whole "birther" movement, an explicitly and overtly racist idea.
This set up a real ideological battle in 2015-2016. You had the neocons represented in Jeb Bush, who were happy to keep the quiet part quiet. But the foil was Trump, who came down his golden escalator shouting the quiet part: "Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers and we need to build a wall to keep them out". That message resonated deeply with Republican voters. Jeb, Rubio, and Cruz ultimately lost in 2016 because they weren't willing to say the quiet part, and after Obama, Republicans really wanted to hear it.
Since then, it's been a constant drum beat of conservatives attempting to undo all of the social progress of the last 50 years.
Now, this is not to say that everyone who supports Trump does so for the quiet part. But, MAGA is an explicit quiet part movement, so for those who don't, you have to figure out your exit ramp. The 2021 insurrection was a good and obvious one, but if you're right minded and still on board today, you better figure out your exit soon, because whatever fiscal policy you think you're voting for, you're not going to get it; this road leads to apartheid, genocide, and no where good.
Never underestimate the ferocity with which a cornered and dying animal fights.
The demographic writing is on the wall for the GOP, and they know it. Basically everything they do, from gerrymandering to trying to dictate who is and is not an American citizen, should be read in that light.
It is not just that. He works on support of the whole ecosystem - from heritage foundation through tech leaders to fox news. The ecosystem will keep existing and will find a new preacher. The same people who use their talking points now will keep voting for the same set of policies. Just about only exception are tariffs in their current implementation - those are genuinely the Trump thing. But everything else is Trump executing long known conservative goals that are accepted by conservative voters.
> With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.
Trump represents traditional conservatives. With exception of tariffs, he is doing exactly what they wanted for years. Likewise, republican moderates never disagreed or opposed Trump policies, they just wanted someone more presentable for it.
