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akira2501

> Biden was utterly incoherent at the debate.

Which was so totally unpredictable?

> and got the party behind her immediately

I remember this quite differently.

> and brought hope back to the Democrats.

I honestly doubt it was anything other than trepidation masquerading as hope. She was the worst performing Democrat in the last open primaries. This hope was not based on anything other than an exigent fear of Trump.

> she did far better than we could have reasonably expected.

The metric, as always, is votes / campaign spend. Are you sure you've evaluated this earnestly?

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> Are you sure you've evaluated this earnestly?

Not at all. Honestly I’m completely bewildered.

To me she obviously cleared the incredibly low bar required to be better than her opponent: a self-serving demagogue who literally tried a coup and has a long history of grift and worse.

I’ve got family who support him, and I’ve heard their F-you sentiments against a government and liberals looking down on them and telling them how to live (get vaccinated, wear a mask, don’t have guns, don’t eat meat, don’t drive a hummer, don’t say slurs, don’t bully, men are toxic, etc).

My assessment is the root is a desire to retain their status as “real Americans” who are socially on top. Religion, racism, nationalism, heteronormativity, patriarchy are all just useful tools for this. Policing is crucial, and don’t be too gentle.

I probably am blinded by this assessment and can’t see past it.

During Covid it was incredibly obvious how some people positively got off on bossing other people around. I was vaccinated and boosted, and I felt guilty for that when I saw signs saying people who aren't vaccinated and boosted have to eat outside. Even if they wear a mask. For a vaccination that didn't even impact transmission meaningfully.

It was hysteric circus, and it was cruel and gloating, too. I remember the graffitis saying "we'll vaccinate you all". Who does that? Who goes around at night and sprays that on walls and pavements? People who want to lord it over others is who.

> My assessment is the root is a desire to retain their status as “real Americans” who are socially on top.

Everybody should be socially "on top" in that there is no other human being, ever, who can tell me what to think, surely not by persecuting me with a manifesto they can't even coherently remember themselves, much less argue for in their own words. At that point the content doesn't even matter, even if someone tried to enforce world peace and equality that way.

From here in TX, from the other side, I also remember a hysteric circus, where at school board meetings, as I reeled from the loss of someone close to me and pleaded for any mitigations, defiant unmasked parents behaved aggressively, spouted nonsense about ivermectin and whatnot.

Anyway, they won. It’s over. Bygones.

I do very much agree with your ideal of nobody persecuting one another.

I don’t see how you square that ideal with, e.g., anti-abortion policies, mass deportations, support for brutal policing, anti-trans hysteria including CPS interventions, bringing bibles and chaplains into schools, and the like.

Maybe we’re all the same. I see vaccines and espousing tolerance and demanding respect for people’s preferred pronouns and such as justified for what I see as the social good. Perhaps you see strong borders and order and christian values as a similarly imperative for the social good. We both feel victimized and like the other is a massive hypocrite, because we just want different worlds?

And I'm not a Trump fan. I'm not even American, and I think he's a fascist. But he is exploiting a vacuum left by others, that's for sure.

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