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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

In my travels to Europe post-2001 it became pretty clear to me that the citizens there could separate the American citizen from the American government.

They knew, as they did before 9/11, that the American people were generally peaceful and generous, which was in direct contradiction to the actions of the US Government.

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And yet, look what kind of candidate is still in the race to become president. The American government is voted into office. At least parts of the American people are also partially responsible. I am not saying, they could have known entirely, but the US is involved in the Middle East making it worse and worse since the early nineties, well before 9/11.

Edit: Actually since after WW2, but the Iraq wars started in the nineties.

Candidates are selected in primaries which represent only a tiny bit of total american voters. So thats it.

Properly done opinion polls represent the American voters, for example this one [0] which states that 41% of American voters think that it would be a good idea to elect Trump. That is more than a tiny minority.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-holds-lead-o...

It's hard to base anything off opinion polls like that. They don't ask "Who, at of all eligible men and women in the US, should be elected?" They ask, "Who, of these <small set> candidates do you support?" Someone can support Trump if only because they don't support Hillary (fuck, the reverse is probably half her vote).

In every representative democracy you elect the lesser evil. That is part of the point of democracy, you compromise with everybody else. In my opinion "not bombing people", "not building a wall around the country" and similar stuff should be pretty high on everybody's wishlist for a new president. Apparently in America 41% of the voting population has a very different wishlist and/or is ignorant to or does not know the things candidates actually say.

I get that Americas election system is broken and I also get that "not Clinton" or for some people "not a woman" is on their wishlist. It just puzzles me that America, the country of "the [letter]-word", does not have a blacklist of phrases a candidate simply cannot say engrained deep enough into society.

This has nothing to do with democracy. This is what you get when you have a majority based voting system with centralized power structure. Democracy in its origin was about the separation of powers and the involvment of citizens in governance.

I intentionally said representative democracy. I personally think it is a good model. Council and referendum based democracies have been tried, I think as the main model, they do not work. And even with them, compromising is the point of the Western democracy, its definition almost always includes human rights and protection of minorities.

Trump is a vote for American white nationalism, not the kind of overseas aggressiveness that normally angers other nations about US foreign policy.

Nationalism is a foreign policy. Bombing and wall building definitely are, too.

Huh, what??

Have you listened to Trump? He has stated, in as many words, that we should go into Iraq and "take the oil". He's advocated our involvement in other issues. He's repeatedly suggested the use of nuclear weapons to deal with current conflicts.

How is this not a textbook example of "overseas aggressiveness that ... angers other nations"?

It's a bit incomplete to act incredulous about the existence of one specific candidate while ignoring how terrible the other mainstream option is as well.

While each of us will have our personal alarms set off harder for one or the other, please work to avoid transmuting this arbitrary difference into actual support for either of the bags of shit.

When you only have two options thats what you get. Such polls are meaningless.

Primaries get about 50% turnout per party. And "we don't care to use our power to decide who are leaders are" isn't much of a moral defense against what those leaders do.

>> but the US is involved in the Middle East making it worse and worse since the early nineties, well before 9/11.

I think we've found out people want freedom in the Middle East, they just don't want to have to fight to keep it anymore. We gave Iraq freedom and look what happened. We toppled several dictators in the Middle East and what happened? It created a power vacuum and ISIS stepped into the fold and look what they're doing. The pseudo democratic governments we set up were rotten to the core. How soon we forgot that here religion and family ties means nothing to the people voting. There, your family and religious views dictate everything you do - it turned into a huge dumpster fire because of our nativity in thinking all we have to do is give you this incredibly powerful thing (freedom) and you'll be fine keeping and protecting it.

Even in this country we had a fairly long revolution and a very nasty civil war in order to get where we are today - something these countries are now having to go through and endure the pain and misery of doing so. I won't touch on how having several global super powers running proxy wars between these countries involved in civil war isn't help them figure it out at all either.

I think the problem is not what America and the West has done here, but that it will not stop repeating the same mistake over and over.

People in the West are not rational either, they vote based on enemy stereotypes, too. Socialism, islam, China, immigrants are some of them, "socialism" probably being the most abstract and religion-like one.

Giving Iraq 'freedom' after decimating its infrastructure and institutions in a war based on lies by rich white men is not the gift you think it is.

It's a comdemnation if anything.

Unsure which candidate you're talking about (both?)? They're both equally awful in different ways.

The U.S. Government is crazy generous. As a European I live in zero fear of being invaded by any other country. We receive huge military subsidies in the form of NATO protections.

Would you say that someone living in, say, Argentina, or Mongolia, also lives in zero fear of being invaded by any other country?

Generous implies the US is benign in maintaining military forces in countries all over the world. It's not.

They knew, as they did before 9/11, that the American people were generally peaceful and generous

The American people strike me as incredibly schizophrenic overall because half seem to be, as you say, generally peaceful and generous, whereas as the other half seem dangerously self-serving and gung-ho aggressive in their views of the rest of the world, the poor, women, foreigners, science etc.

It's this half that tends to support the US governments destructive foreign policies.

Alas, people are responsible for their governments. You can't have all the rights of citizenships without any of the responsibility. I would say (having lived in both regions) that 'most people in Europe' wish that Americans would take a lot more responsibility for the crimes of their state than they currently do ..

Quite a lot of this goodwill went away after GWB was re-elected. We all thought you made a childish mistake at first (do the downvoters of this comment even remember that campaign? perhaps they were in kindergarten), but the second time.. that was what burned bridges.

There were many people who voted for Bush II the first time, believing his marketing of no "nation building" etc, and were then completely appalled at what he proceeded to do. Unfortunately, the number of blind war-cheerleaders was far greater - tell people they're under attack, and they fall into line. Furthermore, it's not as if with the other party now in power, USG has actually stopped attacking other countries.

I think another thing other nationalities (especially Europeans) need [0] to understand is that USians view the necessity of government differently. I believe you see the Democrats as being the reasonable bunch because their rhetoric is more compatible with what you generally expect from politicians. Whereas the Republicans' rhetoric is mainly opposed to the Democrats' version of "progress" rather than proposals of their own top-down solution. So you end up seeing it as progress vs anti-progress, while domestically we do not implicitly assume government structure is even needed.

(This is certainly not an endorsement of either party's actual actions after they take office, but only analysis of how their marketing is perceived)

[0] if you want to analyze US politics, that is.

Actually, many non-US countries had extremely high approval of GWB. http://www.pewglobal.org/2008/12/18/global-public-opinion-in...

Bush was very generous with food aid to Africa, for example, which won him a lot of support there.

Bush did more for Africa than any other world leader in history. There isn't a close second to that. The aid went far beyond just food as well:

"When the Bush administration inaugurated the program [PEPFAR] in 2003, fewer than 50,000 HIV-infected people on the African continent were receiving the antiretroviral drugs that keep the virus in check and halt the progression toward full-blown AIDS. By the time Bush left office, the number had increased to nearly 2 million. Today, the United States is directly supporting antiretroviral treatment for more than 4 million men, women and children worldwide, primarily in Africa."

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/04/george-w-bushs-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-geor...

It's almost sad to think how history will peg GWB as the best US President in the first quarter of the 21st century.

I doubt the overarching narrative for this period in this country's history will be in terms of positive qualities such as "best".

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