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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

There's no such thing as zeitgeist. It's a fairy tale. And you're reading too much into election victories, which are almost always by very narrow margins. For example, the vote totals of Trump and Harris were separated by only 1.5%.

I'm not sure what you thought you were seeing 20 years ago. In 2004, George W. Bush was reelected on a very nationalistic campaign, and the US had literally invaded two sovereign countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, during his first term.

What happened to the rule of law and accountability? Do you remember the "War on Terror"? Do you remember the Iran-Contra scandal? Do you remember the Pentagon Papers? Perhaps you ought to lean into history.

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> Do you remember the Iran-Contra scandal?

I know of the scandal. I don't think it compares to the pardon of 1500+ people - that feels unprecedented. Or maybe it isn't. That's what I'm trying to understand.

George W Bush was flawed and caused a lot of damage, but he publicly supported Muslims and wouldn't say a fraction of the puerile statements (that are more often than not just rants) coming from the current POTUS. Maybe that demand for decency and decorum from the highest office of the land never existed (I think it did .. until 2016). These are the shifts I am trying to understand.

> I know of the scandal. I don't think it compares to the pardon of 1500+ people - that feels unprecedented. Or maybe it isn't. That's what I'm trying to understand.

Iran-Contra was so much worse. The Reagan administration directly ignored a law passed by Congress. And at the end of his term, George H. W. Bush issued pardons to multiple officials implicated in Iran-Contra. This was a cover-up, because Bush was knee-deep in it himself.

> George W Bush was flawed and caused a lot of damage

Understatement of the year. There's more blood on his hands than almost anyone in the world. Where's the "decency" in that?

You raise fair points but I think the guardrails of US democracy are coming off in a way we haven't seen before (such as how Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment but the SCOTUS ruled that the President is mostly sort of a king as long as it is an official act).

The US has never been a democracy. Did you notice that the person with fewer votes won in 2000 and 2016? It's a plutocracy, designed as such by the so-called founding fathers, wealthy men who were explicitly skeptical of democracy and of course denied the vote—and much else—to women and black men. The electoral college, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the veto, the weak federal government granting much power to the individual states, the difficulty of amending the Constitution, were all intended to curb democracy.

I'm not saying that the founders wanted someone specifically like Trump, though of course they did envision wealthy men in positions of power. But those today who clutch their pearls over "democracy" and "norms" are actually, perhaps ironically, yearning for a stable plutocracy. Many cry over January 6 2021, but I wonder why we didn't have a new American revolution on December 12 2000, for example. The answer could be that Al Gore had more loyalty to plutocracy than to democracy, and was rewarded with great wealth after leaving office, like Clinton and Obama too.

It is reasonable that things got bad on Dec 12 2000, but I contend that things have gotten worse (at least from a liberal PoV). I don't know understand the goal of projecting it as always being bad. I think that hides nuances or details that matter.

> It is reasonable that things got bad on Dec 12 2000, but I contend that things have gotten worse (at least from a liberal PoV).

What could be worse "from a liberal PoV" than the Supreme Court, on a 5-4 party-line vote, stopping the recount in Florida and thus giving the 2000 election to Bush, who then went on to become President for 8 years?

Even Hillary Clinton doesn't dispute that that she lost the electoral college in 2016, democratically, according to your definition. She conceded on election night.

January 6 was ugly, but Trump still left office at the end of his term.

> I don't know understand the goal of projecting it as always being bad. I think that hides nuances or details that matter.

The goal is to break you out of a dogmatic slumber, in which you seem to think that everything was basically ok until Trump came along. It wasn't.

The United States is a constitutional republic and that's a good thing.

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