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Comment by nothrowaways | Hacker News Reader

This seems more like a coup in developing countries as time goes by.

If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this. But it certainly looks like an authoritarian power transfer.

I am affected by this and I didn't vote for this. It's easy to say that "the American People" voted for this, but it's not correct to say that I am personally being affected by my bad choices.

I think the elections were "fair", for what its worth- I just don't agree that "fairness" makes me blame-worthy when I face the consequences of other folks actions.

I 100% agree with what you said, but no one looks back and remembers the people who voted against Hitler, or says 'there were some good people in Nazi Germany'.

What is possible though is a form of actual resistance. There is nothing forcing us to just share a union so to speak.

States rights has been too closely associated in the popular mind with slavery and racism (via arguments over what the civil war was really about). It'll be tough to disassociate those enough to make a persuasive argument for secession.

At the point you actually want a secession movement people aren't worried about the optics of it. It's not happening because the actual cost of secession, civil war and everything else is staggering. These are one way, permanent changes where a large number of the agitators will not live to see the better world.

It's compromise, carnage and collateral damage. Doing anything else is a better option 100% of the time.

Nobody's going to hear "we're seceding because we're sick of dying from lack of healthcare" and think "ooh, I wonder if it's secretly about slavery?"

No, but the folks talking about it will be given labels like 'racist'...and that makes it a lot harder for them to gain traction.

I agree with you completely, but this gets at a debate that's been going on since the ancient days about whether democracy is actually good or not. Whether a tyrant is elected by a fair majority or inherits the throne at best (or Divine Right of Kings, whatever) makes little difference IMHO.

That said, while I have criticisms for democracy and do enjoy pointing out it's imperfections when people talk about democracy as some self-evident ideal, I do think it's probably the best system of government in a sea of less than ideal choices.

I'd argue the problem lies less with democracy, more with the media. Democracy requires an informed populace. The success of populist politicians shows you don't have that

I'd the cause is advertising-based business model of the media industry, then.

Too few people pay for news these days. So the news aren't the product and we ended mis- and ill-informed.

If it worked it would work.

If having an informed populace is required for democracy to work then it doesn't work. Especially when you ask the question, "informed about what"?

I'm tired of hearing that people aren't informed.

They were informed. Trump told them that science is crap, that tariffs are good, that we should punish immigrants, that he would pardon the jan 6th people, etc.

This is what people voted for and what they wanted. Hate and retribution.

When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.

Sure, they heard from Trump that tariffs would fix inflation. But they still aren't informed because they didn't actually know what tariffs are [1].

> When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.

Really do not hate to point this out. Democrats are really responsible for a lot of this mess. Both Republics and Democrats really love to blame the other one but they're really just the Father and Mother and when the child is having problems, it's both of their faults.

Personally, I think it's gotten this way because of the whole first-past-the-post so if you have a belief like "far right" or "far left" then your best bet politically is to run underneath Republican or Democrat and push out the "moderates" in a primary as opposed to making a new political party that actually has your beliefs.

[1]: https://thenightly.com.au/politics/us-politics/what-is-a-tar...

I don't think it's just FPTP, given that other countries that have it are nowhere nearly as polarized.

I think it's actually the combination of FPTP and open (or at least broadly accessible) primaries. In Canada and UK, parties generally have much more control over their primaries, and party elites generally try to exercise that power to ensure that candidates don't upset the existing arrangements too much. Not even necessarily as a deliberate strategy, but when you have to work your way through the "smoke-filled rooms" as a candidate, that filters out the purists and favors those willing to compromise. US was also like that for a long time, and notably we didn't have this degree of polarization then.

But once primaries are wide open and the party no longer controls the candidates, it seems inevitable that more extreme candidates will win. They appeal to the more ideologically motivated voters who are generally more likely to show up and vote (especially so in the primaries), and so any candidate who wants to win there has to appeal to them first.

US had cycles of polarization from the earliest years. When in your model did parties lose control to more ideologically motivated voters?

Cycles, yes, but what we have right now is more of a spiral - there's clearly some kind pf a positive feedback loop in the system that consistently drags parties apart, and that wasn't there before.

I think it started somewhere during the Reagan admin, going very slowly but steadily at first, but the wider the gap between the parties is, the faster the process goes, so it became really visible somewhere around Obama. The relevant rule changes wrt primaries and conventions date back to early 70s, though.

The problem is the Democrats aren't far left, they aren't even really left. There is no viable political counterbalance to the right wing in US politics anymore, the so-called left is moving right, and the right is moving further right. Kamala Harris' whole campaign (such as it was) was an attempt to court "moderate" Republicans rather than the base who was never enamored with Biden to begin with.

I agree that first past the post is a problem and this election was more lost by the Democrats than won by the Republicans, but I think it's a myth that any of it has to do with the Democrats going "too far left." Call me when any Democratic Presidential candidate openly calls for dismantling American imperialism and scaling back the military, or criticizes capitalism and endorses nationalized healthcare, education and UBI, or doesn't kiss the ass of police or curry favor with Evangelical Christians, or has immigration policies that actually materially differ from those of Republicans.

To be fair, we almost had Bernie which supported all of those policies and positions (other than UBI if I remember right).

And what happened to him? The party purged him so fast there's nothing left of him but memes.

Earnestly: do you have a sense of when and where such an informed populace existed?

Is it the media or unfettered capitalism? Traditional media (newspapers, and local news) is dying slowly, they cannot successfully compete with centralized juggernauts with global footprints sucking up all the ad dollars. Was it Thiel who remarked that capitalism may not be compatible with democracy? One guess on which he'll choose to keep.

It was worse than you remembered. Thiel said freedom and democracy were not compatible.

This is why early democracies limited voters to a subset which was perceived as better informed or more responsible - rule of any person passing thresholds (like e.g. land ownership) that proved a minimum level of capacity.

It would be more accurate to say that it was intended to (and did) limit voting to a subset that was perceived as more loyal to the social order, such as property laws and other arrangements that define who's on top of the social pyramid.

Considering it was a similar subset which in the US was largely responsible for the US revolution, I can't say that interpretation is persuasive.

The US revolution did not upset the foundational structures such as property rights, though. People who owned the most in US before it were still, by and large, the top dogs after. If anything, they improved their position - where previously they had to share with the metropoly, now they were fully in charge.

I do think a big part of the problem is the two party system. It makes negative campaigning far to effective. That way you get pathological choices, like Biden vs Trump when you wouldnt entrust any of them with running a small business you own.

All eligible voters are collectively responsible for the outcome of the election. You can't be proud of democracy if you won't shoulder the blame when it renders poor outcomes.

There's a difference between shouldering the burden of the outcome and the outcome indicating that you made bad choices.

I didn’t say burden and choices, I said blame and responsibility.

Right… in response to someone talking about choices.

Elon Musk found that if you throw billions at getting our low propensity rural voters you can sway the election by enough percents.

That's true, but man am I mad at the Democrats for entirely abandoning that demo for decades before. It lead to this situation.

You’re over complicating things.

You are a willing participant in the political system. You agree to live by the results of the election, even if you don’t personally agree with them.

You’re not personally responsible for the results, but you are a willing participant in the system that caused them.

"Willing" in what sense? What's my realistic alternative? Lay it on me.

I didn't vote, for what it's worth. I don't think it's ethical to participate in that kind of thing.

The US is 2 crimes and a real estate scam in a trench coat. When I was younger, I indeed thought that maybe it had some legitimacy, but after having read quite a lot of the history of the millions that the government here has enslaved and murdered I no longer thing it's legitimate.

I understand that they have the guns and the power, but realistically I am not a willing participant in this system.

> "Willing" in what sense? What's my realistic alternative? Lay it on me.

Leave the country. I did it.

> I didn't vote, for what it's worth. I don't think it's ethical to participate in that kind of thing.

That's your choice.

You have plenty of options. Get involved politically. Organize. Fund raise.

Plenty of opportunity to affect the outcome. But you'd rather just complain about it online.

Yeah, "just colonize somewhere else" is pretty much the response that I expected.

I spent last night doing a shift till 4 in the morning at a warming center for folks who don't have houses, and I've spent the last several months working on taking an off grid chunk of property to a place where I can host full families of folks to "come and play music".

None of that makes the US government one bit more legitimate.

> Yeah, "just colonize somewhere else" is pretty much the response that I expected.

How is immigrating to a new country "colonizing"? Are you suggesting Mexicans (for example) who come to the US are "colonizing" it?

> None of that makes the US government one bit more legitimate.

Of course not, why would it?

Authoritarian power transfers usually involve (immediate) executions, or at least the imprisonment/exile of important people from the previous government/administration/regime, to stabilize the new regime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Political_Surviva...

Presumably authoritarian regimes only execute/imprison/exile dissidents if they think it's necessary to eliminate opposition. An authoritarian regime which does not think there's much of a threat to opposition probably wouldn't bother.

There is a huge cost in executions. Especially in places where they have not been super common place and super public.

Serves to prove it's not an authoritarian regime? They know they won by not so much and are likely to lose next time, especially given Trump can't run anymore.

TBF, we're only on day 2. (I am 90% certain it won't come to that, but there's a 10% queasiness left that hasn't been ameliorated by the haphazard approach untethered from legality that we've seen so far)

"This guy is running around giving everyone pardons. The funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is he didn’t give himself a pardon. And if you look at it, it all had to do with him."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

I fully expect Trump to ruin Biden's final years with investigations and court cases. Maybe that's not out right execution, but Trump definitely wants revenge.

Sure. But that is, for better or worse, perfectly legal. (No, I'm not saying it's great, but I'm saying this is still within non-dictatorship realms)

Whereas executions have a small issue in that area.

I don't think even Trump wants to call in the constitutional landmark case of a president pardoning himself. That'd be true chaos.

>I fully expect Trump to ruin Biden's final years with investigations and court cases

I'm still 50/50 on if Trump makes it that far, physically. He's older than when Biden ran his administration and not exactly in the best health.

But I guess they did get Regean through his last years. Nothing's impossible.

> That'd be true chaos.

We've crossed the Rubicon.

I mean if Biden actually was making corrupt deals trading influence/access for money then he absolutely should be investigated and prosecuted for it. And there's already hard proof that Hunter was selling access to his father, and that the foreigners he was selling said access to believed he could actually provide it.

If we didn't have the DOJ and other institutions protecting Biden for the last several years it would be pretty easy to find out if he actually did sell influence (vs. Hunter deceiving the people he was making deals with) with just a couple of warrants and subpeonas.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/former-fbi-informa...

Which has nothing to do with the hard evidence on Hunter's laptop

He ran on “lock her up” in 2016 and never followed through.

I find it hilarious that everyone is scared of Trump when there was a concerted effort by the other side to use the justice system to stop him from ever running again.

Need I remind everyone of multi-year Russiagate investigation that was all made up? The misdemeanor charges that becomes felonies with massive fines? The media collusion to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story when the FBI knew at the time it was real?

It’s the pot calling the kettle black. It’s the thieves accusing everyone else of stealing.

All made up? You're thinking of the Benghazi hearings, which were admitted to be nothing but a smear campaign by the Republicans[0].

"Russiagate" meanwhile found plenty of stuff[1].

[0]https://www.vox.com/2015/9/30/9423339/kevin-mccarthy-benghaz...

[1]https://www.acslaw.org/projects/the-presidential-investigati...

Yes, the Steele Dossier which the entire Russiagate investigation was based on was fake and funded by Hillary Clinton.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-2022-midterm-elect...

Four years and immense government resources were wasted investigating the President calling him a "tool of the Russian government".

And the "plenty of stuff" found? "Undisclosed contacts" and "obstruction of the investigation".

What a massive flop.

> I find it hilarious that everyone is scared of Trump when there was a concerted effort by the other side to use the justice system to stop him from ever running again.

I honestly don't get what you mean by this. Lets say all your comments about Biden, the FBI, laptops and whatever else are 100% true. How does that change if I should be worried about stuff Trump might do? To use a totally extreme example, if John Wayne Gacy went around talking all the shit in the world about Jeffrey Dahmer, does that somehow make Dahmer not a serial killer?

> He ran on “lock her up” in 2016 and never followed through.

So that proves he lies and makes promises he can't/won't/doesn't keep? Is that a positive trait in a politician? How are we supposed to determine when he is 'just joshing, bro' and actually is being truthful? And yes, I know Biden and the dems also make promises they don't keep, but again that doesn't excuse Trump from doing the same.

I mean, it's pretty clear they want to sue Fauci and more. Attacking dedicated public servants working for the health of the country is going to have serious negative effects.

The Heritage Foundation (who is behind all this and has been at it since 1973), says that the transfer of power will be bloodless if we allow it to remain bloodless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/heritage-foun...

They've been telling us exactly what they're going to do ... and we just let it happen.

that's the beauty of it all outright murders usually create resistance

this way the opposition is cleansed in a mini genocide as well as algorithmically in a decentralized manner so resistance can't form

the fourth reich is here :)

An established bureaucracy used to "following orders" will just soldier on assuming the authoritarian comes in legally. The most well known example is Germany. The Führer came in elected, got voted to dictator after the Reichstagsbrand and then never left power - and barely anyone in the executive resisted.

And this is likely also where the US are heading. The putsch will not be loud and with a bang like Syria, it will be slow as molasses but about as difficult to impossible to stop like a broken dam worth of water moving downstream.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of people who voted for him really didn't pay much attention beyond him promising to lower prices. But this is the electorate we have - a lot of them just can't be bothered with much detail as attention spans are short these days.

No they listened about TikTok

for 13 hours? I suppose we never specificied how long it had to be banned for.

I listened to and watched a lot of interviews with people who voted for Trump. They just said he didn’t mean it whenever they were confronted with quotes from Trump that obviously disagreed with their views as evidenced by earlier questions in the interviews. Or take the many Muslims in Dearborn who still claim Trump is better than Harris would be on Israel/Palestine - they refuse to believe the evidence despite action days in,(or from trumps last term) it’s not possible to argue rationally with these people. Not only are they barely paying attention, they only see and hear what they want to.

If someone clicks on "click here to update your password" in a phishing email, are they choosing what actually happens, or what they thought would happen? Even if they should have known, and could have known, I think it's objectively true that they didn't.

it depends on the advancement of society to be honest. I wouldn't blame someone getting scammed in 2000 over a "Hot sexy singles in your area, click now!". I would 100% blame them in 2020+.

I don't know how far we've come in regards to email phishing to make a call on that.

The claim I'm contradicting is that they knew full well, not that they should have known.

*23% of American people voted for this.

I'd put that number closer to 67%: adding in the 90M eligible voters who, you know, didn't.

How many of those 90M were in one of the few states where your vote matters?

I dunno, probably similar to how many of the 75M that did vote.

I'll still stand by the point though: 23% is an unreasonable number to throw out.

Every 4 years, American voters get to choose between garbage and trash.

This constant false equivalence between parties is part of the reason we got here.

The Democrats are terrible but somehow I doubt Kamala Harris would be doing this much damage two days in. I don't think people would be wondering whether Tim Walz actually did a Nazi salute at the inauguration. It can be the case that both parties are evil, and they are, but that America still chose the greater evil.

So many false equivalences and assumptions in these few sentences alone lol. Why don't we wait at least a few months before deciding if their actions are evil or not.

Why are we suddenly pretending that Trump is an unknown quantity? We know what he's about, and we know what his agenda is. It was literally published to the public with bullet points and everything.

Trump spent a huge amount of his time during the election disavowing Project 2025. Did people vote for a change in government? Yes, but they didn’t vote for this this theocratic authoritarian bullshit.

You are telling me Trump lied? Shocked...

You'd think he'd do that? Go on the ~~internet~~ podium and tell lies?

nevermind he never had a plan for any of the issues people voted for him on. A still vague plan on fixing inflation (spoilers: he cannot do as much to fix inflation as many think), still rough numbers on what these tarriffs are supposed to do. What else did conservatives think he was going to do... -----

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg5jdgzy1o

‘You want to come to America? Earn it, like I did’

well he is indeed hastening the deportation... nevermind conservatives with undocumented workers only lose from this and don't want to pay americans minimum wage. Well done.

'He invokes fear in the rest of the world’

Yeah, I guess pissing off all our friends and getting cozy with China/Russia will invoke fear.

Hey, Maybe Trump is more honest than I thought. Of course, when it comes to making lives worse for the world.

If you believed his disavowl, I've got a bridge... fuck it. Just give me your bank account number and I promise there will be $47 million in it tomorrow morning.

Trump has been pushing theocratic authoritarian bullshit for nearly a decade. It's what Trumpism is known for. It's what his supporters are known to support. We're not doing this historical revisionism now. This is exactly what people voted for.

This is the informed voter thing, right? We know Trump is a liar, and beyond that perhaps the most documented liar in human history, and we also can plainly see who is involved in the campaign, his cabinet, his inner circle and easily cross reference them to the people whose names are directly on Project 2025. That is to say: to anyone paying even the minimum amount of attention, it was obvious that there is a 100% negative correlation between Trump disavowing Project 2025 and the expectation that he would lean in hard to it.

> If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this.

No, if you trust the election results, it's a legitimate election by defined process and there are no grounds to contest it.

But "The American people voted for this" is a distinct, strong, affirmative statement that doesn't hold.

The people that voted for this are the people that voted for it, and even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.

If this isn't what they were voting for, what did they think they were voting for? Did none of them believe that he would actually do the crazy shit he said he would? Did none of them pay attention to the insanity of his first term?

I have a simpler explanation: they all know what they were voting for, and none of them give a shit. It's the same as the mob cheering and applauding the sieg heil on Monday. They know it's deplorable and unamerican and they don't care. Because the only thing that matters is that their boy will stick it to the enemy.

Given the binary choice, much if the American people simply didn't vote. You can't present a false dichitomoty, and then act as if any downstream choice is full approval.

They always had the choice of not voting.

The people who voted for this actively engaged and endorsed it. It strains credulity for them to claim ignorance.

Plenty of Americans chose not to vote, many others did mainly out of massive social pressure.

Not voting is a choice. It's a choice for "I don't care how this train moves, I'm moving with it". So yes, those non-voters tacitly approved of the idea of Trump being elected. They didn't hate it enough to get to the polls.

Those who thought "nothing would change no matter what"... well nothing has changed I guess. I suppose Harris would have done mass deportation raids and cutting funding from science and healthcare at all, right?

I lived in New York during the election, nothing would have changed regardless of who I voted for, because New York went to Harris anyway. So in my case, “nothing would change no matter what” was objectively true.

Do you really believe that the majority of Americans — or even the majority of Trump voters — are applauding the use of Nazi symbols? That is completely divorced from reality. The only people openly supporting Nazism are the extreme fringe right which is fortunately still nowhere near the majority in the real world.

[flagged]

How does that contradict what I wrote?

Social media and HN included is a magnet for people with extreme political views to voice them (presumably because it’s the only audience they have).

Trump won with an overwhelming mandate. He is popular with a majority of the country.

The fact that nobody on HN seems to support Trump should tell you about who is on HN.

I think you are wrong about the overwhelming mandate unless you are solely using the electoral college total as the yardstick. The popular vote is much closer.

You need to look at things in totality.

- won the popular vote by over 2M votes

- won by electoral college by 84 votes

That alone would be “a solid showing”.

But he also:

- carried the Republicans to maintain a majority in the House

- helped increased the margin of seats in the Senate to a majority

Many members of the Republican party had been against Trump. This election, most were pro-Trump. His popularity helped pull both houses.

And did this after the opposition tried every tactics possible to ruin him - a fake Russian dossier that was peddled unquestioningly by the media, a misdemeanor crime gets prosecuted as a felony in the hopes to bankrupt or disqualify him from running again.

Against those odds? That showing is remarkable. Oh and he was almost assassinated, twice.

Then add on top he increased Republican share in solid Blue states like NY and CA by double digits. He increased Republican votes with black and hispanic voters.

He basically increased every single voting group across the board.

In light of the challenges, the outcome is a clear showing that a significant percentage of the US voters support him and the people in his party that are aligned to him.

I'm not sure what else you'd need to show a clear mandate.

I never saw anything but a favorable GOP outcome in the Senate in 2024 predictions and no one thought that was possible except the Democrats running in red states sending out fundraising emails, I never saw any analysis saying the 2024 Senate election was favorable to the Democrats in the run up to 2024. Show me anything that was printed prior to the election in 2024 that is not from one of the 2024 Democratic campaigns. That just one of your points where you state that as a clear mandate.

The assassination stuff is just not germane to a discussion about mandate nor your purported fake Russian dossier.

This came out shortly after the election about the House and Senate and Presidential election, the USA is just very divided, almost evenly. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/2024-election-5-take...

Trump won with 49% of the popular vote vs Harris' 48%, with one of the smallest margins of victory ever - just 0.15% of eligible voters. He won just a handful more electoral votes than Biden in 2020, and far fewer than Obama or Reagan.

That is not an overwhelming mandate, nor does it represent a majority of the country.

But then Trumpists never let the truth get in the way of their own mythmaking. They said they had an overwhelming mandate and the support of most Americans even in 2016 when literally millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton. Hell, they didn't even think they actually lost in 2020. I'm surprised they can square the cognitive dissonance of Trump being elected to a third term.

> Trump won with 49% of the popular vote vs Harris' 48%, with one of the smallest margins of victory ever

Irrelevant, we don't elect presidents by popular vote.

> That is not an overwhelming mandate, nor does it represent a majority of the country.

He won the Senate as well. Increased the majority in the House. Increased his votes in NY, CA. And among blacks and hispanic voters.

All while almost being assassinated (twice!) and having the mass media peddling lies against him for the last 8 years (Russiagate!). He wasn't like Obama who had the media backing him.

It absolutely is a mandate. It's a clear mandate because his Party has both houses and the Presidency!

> Irrelevant, we don't elect presidents by popular vote.

How the details of the election process actually works is tangential to what kind of mandate they have.

If some bizarre election mechanism that a country followed meant that a party getting 1 vote more than the opposition gave it 100% of the power, that's how elections in that country would work, but that doesn't mean the winners would have a strong mandate from the electorate as a whole.

In Nazi Germany, Hitler made the argument that, well, since 33% of the voters (17% of the population) voted for him, far ahead of the runner-up (who only got 20% of the vote), and his party made up the majority of the ruling coalition (196 out of 267 out of a total 620 seats), he should have all the power.

The system certainly gave him power for all those reasons, but it's farcical to say that 17% of the population voting for him was an 'overwhelming' mandate for Germany to embark on their insane politics, and it's also farcical to say that +1% of the vote is a clear mandate. It's a mandate, but a slim one.

The system was also designed with a lot of checks and balances and social norms in places, but as it turns out, if you collude with what were supposed to be adversaries and break all the soft (and hard) rules, you can get a dramatically radical agenda implemented, disproportionate in its scale to the popular support you enjoy.

> Do you really believe that the majority of Americans — or even the majority of Trump voters — are applauding the use of Nazi symbols?

Did you not see the entire inauguration applaud and cheer him? Do you think they won't be heiling right back at him on the next rally?

The ones that wouldn't are bending themselves into pretzels to explain how it's just a weird autistic handwave.

Do you think people who were at the inauguration are representative of Americans as a whole?

Ask some trump voters about what they think of it, and you'll get your answer. I have, and I don't like the answers. They are too busy on cloud nine, cheering how their king is back and is signing hundreds of executive orders and getting rid of the deep state.

They simply don't care about the details. And the ones that do think it's hilarious that he's owning the libs.

More eligible voters didn't vote for any candidate then for Trump or Harris.

Trump won a slim majority of the people who did choose to vote, but it's hardly an endorsement by a majority of Americans, much less the American people as a whole.

Choosing not to vote is a vote for the status quo. That still is a choice.

There are BS loopholes we need to correct, but people who can't do the bare basics to reserve a morning to fill out a ballot fundamentally have themselves to blame.

Nonsense. If you live in one of the ~40 states where the outcome is a foregone conclusion, who you vote for makes no more difference than it does in Russia. It’s reasonable to protest by refusing to participate in that unfair system, and doing so doesn’t mean you support one candidate or the other.

36% of eligible voters - 90 million people - likely had a similar attitude. The margin of victory was 2.3m votes. What's that phrase? Something about how no single raindrop thinking they're responsible for the flood.

Raindrops in New York, California and Mississippi are indeed not responsible for floods in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

43% of eligible voters in Mississippi didn't vote. 42% in NY and 38% in CA. That's a significant amount of people who could have swung the election either way despite them being "safe" states. Any state can be in play if turnout ever increased significantly. And even if your state voted your way federally, did every local/state race go to what would've been your preferred candidate? I doubt it.

while it's true that there's quite a few non-votes that far outweight the margin of victory, they're all spread out and not in states that held marginal votes. It may actually indeed be the case that their turnout would not affect the results.

However, turnout don't only affect the results, but future results.

Politicians look at votes to determine their future trajectory - those who don't turn out won't be seen at all, and would be treated as if they don't exist. After all, why hadn't the native indians got the vote until legislated, and why slaves too, until some compromise was reached?

So voting, regardless of your effect on outcome, is important. I only wish the vote was easier, as some people need to take time off work to vote, or have to trek far, or make arrangements which would be inconvenient. For example, making postal voting easier to get is a good starting point.

> this isn't what many of them were voting for.

So, Trump loses popularity over his original administration over lies and underdelivered promises, "we" vote him out. Then 4 years later we vote him back in?

At what point do we come and accept responsibility for falling for lies? And yes, there are in fact some people that voted against their best intertests because they fell into partisan politics; they still got their results, they just didn't read the fine print of the Devil's contract.

Fool me once… fool me twice.

> ... even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.

Yes it is. I understand the argument that this type of outcome wasn't their motivation for the ballot they cast. But it's also an entirely predictable outcome of their vote, which to me means this is exactly what they were voting in favor of happening.

I think one of the biggest issues with democracy in the US and probably democratic countries in general is infantilizing voters into being able to take credit for their intent rather than judging them based on the totality of the outcome of their choices. If you buy an Italian sports car because it's cool and your spouse is mad because it's also unreliable and can't fit your childrens' car seats, it's generally not considered a wise defense to say you only picked it based on the 0-60 time so it's not your fault it was less great by other metrics. Democracy would be a lot better off if we thought about voting the same way.

> Democracy would be a lot better off if we thought about voting the same way.

civic duty should be emphasized in school more. It's not a 10 second exercise every 4 years. It's something to be vigilant about indefinitely, and forever. Any change to laws, or any votes, require scrutiny, rational thought on the choices, and personal maximization.

Unfortunately, people are too lazy, or too dumb, to do this, and choose to listen to someone else's recommendation on votes.

So democracy represents somewhat of an averaged choice of the population. As the population becomes dumber due to lack of good education or cadence, their choices become increasingly worse.

Authoritarian regimes don't have this problem. The average person in one don't get to make many, if any, choices. The elites make them all - and if the elites are more altruistic, the country generally do better than average.

Everyone's to blame - those who voted for this idiot and everyone else for not doing enough to stop it.

voter turnout was slightly low, but well within ballpark of every other Us election.

If this is your position, you must conclude no American election is a strong signal of anything.

Furthermore, this is just bad stats. We received a massive sample of the population, that sample is not without bias, but at least is geographically distributed. Do you think if had a 100% sampling rate the result would be dramatically different?

I suspect that missing portion is going bias towards low information population and immigrants who have no interest in US election. Democracy is not about finding every adult with a pulse. You must build a coalition of citizens with a vested interest in their community to get on your program, and take physical action to indicate that support you.

Looking at history authoritarian power transfers usually start with a vote, or at least wide spread public support.

It doesn't look like, it is. e.g. violent coup and Nazi salutes during inauguration. Are people expecting the rise of authoritarianism to look different or something? This is the exact same fascist playbook that's been run every time. I really thought WW2 would have taught humanity as a whole the lesson but apparently not.

I think we as a society forget once the previous generation is gone.

Americans also voted for their US Senators and Representatives.

It's funny how these discussions forget about that, which is part of the problem.

It's also worth remembering how the Trump campaign consistently denied Project 2025, and ridiculed those who suggested it was their agenda. Maybe it won't go there but so far it seems to be headed in that direction, and if so actively lying about your agenda raises questions about exactly what the American electorate was voting for.

It's a stretch to say the American people voted for gutting our health research capabilities.

I take it you haven't encountered the contempt that Trump supporters have for "mainstream science," particularly anything to do with biomedicine? Not even remotely a stretch. Ever since COVID they view those "health research capabilities" in the same way everyone else views the experimentation of Joseph Goebbels and Unit 731. Most of them still think Biden and Fauci cooked it up in a lab.

I'm not so sure about them.

https://old.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/

Trump got 49.8% of the vote. 50.2% went to other candidates (48.32% Harris, 0.56% Stein, 0.49% Kennedy, 0.42% Chase, 0.42% others).

If anyone is curious, here are the Presidents since the 19th century who got at least 50% of the vote:

  Biden
  Obama (both terms)
  Second Bush (second term)
  First Bush
  Reagan (both terms)
  Carter
  Nixon (second term)
  Johnson
  Eisenhower (both terms)
  Second Roosevelt (all four terms)
  Hoover
  Coolidge
  Harding
  Taft
  First Roosevelt
  McKinley

The lowest since 1900 is Wilson's first term at 41.8%, followed by Clinton's first term at 43%, Nixon's first term at 43.4%, and Trump's first term at 46%.

You might think that Wilson at 41.8% must have lost the popular vote but actually he beat the person with the second highest popular vote total by over 14%. That was back when the US had more than two viable parties. The vote went 41.84% to Wilson (Democrat), 27.4% to Teddy Roosevelt (Progressive), 23.17% to the incumbent Taft (Republican), 5.99% to Debs (Socialist), and the rest to a few others.

Similar with Clinton's 43%. That was about 5% more than second place. That year Ross Perot running as an independent got 18.91%.

Same with Nixon. His 43.42% was the biggest slice of the popular vote, followed by Humphrey at 42.72%. George Wallace running for the American Independent party got 13.53%.

The media has been sane washing Trump for the last 9 years. If Trump had been treated like the joke he has always been he wouldn't have been elected.

I keep on thinking maybe it's time to move somewhere else. I'm a first generation American, so I'd just be doing what my parents did before me. The problem is, I have no idea what country I would move to.

Hang in there, this is a long overdue correction. It's gonna over correct a bit, but then things should be better than before. The rhetoric of Trump being a dictator is way overblown. If this didn't happen we'd be heading toward bankruptcy around the time your kids grow up.

right. because he did so much to reduce the deficit last time.

yup, loves nothing more than to reduce the deficit /s

people are tragically funny these days I swear

Because covid? Congress wanted to pass a covid relief bill sending $700B to corporations. Trump said to get the money to the people so they increased it to do so. Biden happily kept the budget way overblown even though covid was essentially over. Neither party has addressed the budget in decades. One wants to spend more and the other wants to cut taxes. Neither fixes anything.

so.. how does this make things better long term if you just said neither side fixes anything?

So decreasing the increase of the problem is considered progress? No.

The deficit was increasing from 2017, long before covid.

No, not because covid. Obama's second term decreased the amount of deficit added each year. Since then (excluding drop after 2020/2021) the amount has trended upward every year.

I guess you could say less deficit was added during Trump's first term (excluding covid), than in Obama or Biden's first terms. Not sure that tells us anything useful though.

There hasn't been an actual deficit decrease since 2001 though.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

Considering the Republicans are the ones that weaponized debt in the 1980s with their policy to 'starve the beast' I don't see how Republicans are going to fix it. Unless you mean 'fix it' by shutting down those part of the government that they targeted in the 1980s?

How did the deficit trend 2017-2019?

And 2020-2024? That extra trillion was supposed to be a one time covid measure, not the new pork.

Ah yes the deficit which Republicans are famous for increasing will be fixed by... Trump? Ok.

https://miro.medium.com/v2/format:webp/0*-1b-D-2GuuH2_h_w

yes, he's just reassuring that we go bankrupt and have no kids by throwing half a trillion into AI. You complain about giving a trillion partially to people, and Trump is throwing all that, day one, into the richest corporations.

May as well speed to the inevitably cyberpunk future. Shame I'm not getting that cool cyborg arm.

If I understood correctly, that was private funding, and he was just taking credit for a business/private investment deal?

If you prefer the policies of the Democratic Party and have no special attachment here, then Canada or any European country is probably a level up for you.

Except Pierre Poilievre is likely to become Prime Minister of Canada and is explicitly taking cues from Trump, so it's unlikely to be much different a few years from now.

Britain is great, you don't have to deal with another language and it's affordable.

Uhh the only thing positive is the UK citizens finally saw through the conservative bullshit.. this is only because they were ahead of the USA in implementing disastrous policies which played out and showed that they had no clothes.

If the republicans are smart they won’t impose austerity but it won’t matter as whatever they do will have unintended consequences they can’t predict and it will likely tank them in the midterms and in 4 years.

But right now they are targeting the intellectual elite that actually run things/society. All because they can’t handle the truth.

Tech thinks they will be spared by focusing on their magic counting machines. Trump AI will fix everything.

England has the same weak implementation of democracy with the same flaws. You'll want to move a country that indirectly chooses the government and president.

I think most of the rest of the world is facing the same issues, just a few years behind the USA.

Except where the culture is completely different, e.g. East Asia. But they have different problems.

Australia is definitely facing the same problems and the same emerging far-right populist anti-immigration narrative as a result. Though to be fair, Australia has always had a pretty strong authoritarian populist far-right anti-immigration thing going on.

The one that has totally surprised me is Germany. Seeing them go down that same road again is genuinely shocking.

Ireland.

New Zealand is not the richest first world country, but when this global shitshow escalates into a major international war it'll probably be one of the safer places around.

Remember what happened to Trump after his first term. He's extremely invested in making sure that he won't be raided/arrested/etc again at the end of this term.

The power structures that tried that the first time won't be here in 4 years...his personal freedom depends on it.

If he is still around. He is older than when Biden started at his term.

Except it's not a coup and it's not a developing country but ok.

Drink some water.

It is most assuredly a coup. It just took a few years rather than a few days.

It's not developing anymore, that's for sure. Now it's devolving.

"just business as usual". i guess after you work hard to normalize these interventions on the thrid world, it becomes second nature here too.

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