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Comment by ryoshu | Hacker News Reader

~30% of voting age Americans voted for the current president. ~29% voted for the other option.

Thats not an insignificant number. This election had the second highest turn out in recorded history(2020 was slightly higher)

https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_...

This is normal turn out.

Anyway voting is not about recording a talley for every 18+ year old human with a pulse. It’s citizens selecting a leader and policy from their community. Getting your people out to vote is part of the event.

When people choose not to have their vote represented, for whatever reason, when the outcome was so clear in advance, then there is practically, legally, morally and philosophically no distinction between not voting and voting for Trump.

We (Americans) can’t be relied on. Yeah most Americans are still supportive of Europe but our political system produces whipsaw foreign policy. The end result of all this is America is weakened on the global stage as our allies lose faith in us and start working around us. Why should Europeans boycott China, sanction Iran, support Israel, isolate Cuba, intervene in another Iraq? These are American priorities, not European ones.

The US has successfully created a system that integrates the US economy with Europe, limiting Europe's choices and greatly enriching the US for decades... and then last week JD Vance in Munich yelled at everyone and claimed the EU was somehow stealing money from the US.

A++ gaslighting, great job.

The really funny thing is: Vance is ~right that the Europeans "steal money" from the US. What I do not get is why that is a bad thing. A "trade" nowadays basically always involves one side getting something tangible that they want, be that goods or services or commodities. And the other side getting something intangible claims or money.

If I can get something inherently valuable for essentially nothing but an empty promise? That's an extremely comfortable position to be in..

Because they are a part of NATO and have basically zero military to speak of on their own. There's a reason all of their proposed plans to support Ukraine include an American backstop: because they can't stand on their own and have relied on US military spending for decades to prop themselves up.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO and has no significant mutual defense treaty with America. We intervened nonetheless, to protect Europe. I think we should continue intervening, but I also think it's ludicrous for the EU to threaten to not support America, when they've allowed their military infrastructure to rot away at our expense.

Why do you think the US is going to remain in NATO for the next 4 years? Trump loves to say the quiet part out loud and he’s been repeatedly threatening to pull out.

If the US pulls out of NATO, then it's true that Europe has very little reason to support American interests (unless America "pulls out" of NATO by renegotiating a new mutual defense pact, in which case the countries in that treaty obviously will have plenty of reason to support America — similar to how Trump replaced NAFTA with the USMCA in his first term; which is also what Trump has said he wants to do with NATO).

However, that is an "if" statement that has not come to pass.

Well, threatening to seize an ally's territory kind of put the ally bit in question doesn't it? For all intents and purposes NATO ended existing with Trumps speculation to use military force to seize Greenland. After that statement nobody can consider the US a reliable ally anymore. So.. the US may not have pulled out of NATO^ but there is absolutely no reason to believe in any kind of support being available from the US either.

^which by-the-by is difficult to achieve on a practical level. Notifications of withdrawal have to be handed in to the US government

If you were correct, then European countries wouldn't keep asking that the US sign an agreement to backstop a Ukraine deal — after all, regardless of the paper, the US wouldn't be trusted to do it.

But they are asking for that; I think you should consider why.

Look we're all grateful for the Americans that do care about The Alliance but we've seen the political trends in America and it looks bad. You can't elect Trump twice and say it doesn't represent America. Trump's politics isn't going away. The Democrats allowed 'radical' social change to dictate the party platform and didn't implement enough reforms to please the average citizen. Until they do or Trump makes massive blunders we don't have a hope that the old America is coming back.

It’s a grave mistake to assume that some “old” America is ever coming back.

Everything you're saying about the international trust American voters have betrayed and thrown away is pretty reasonable. But this:

> The Democrats allowed 'radical' social change to dictate the party platform and didn't implement enough reforms to please the average citizen.

is false.

Democratic policy has done plenty to benefit average citizens, in a long tradition (at one point bipartisan) going back to WW2.

And it's never been centered around any idea more "radical" than taking seriously the words of the declaration of independence about equality, inalienable rights, and life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, even for people who are doing something others think is weird.

It's even pretty clear that Democratic policies have strong electoral popularity:

https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50802-harris-vs-t...

https://www.dataforprogress.org/insights/2024/8/22/harris-ca...

But "swing" voters (assuming they really exist in any form as popularly understood) among others are often not really clear on who supports the policies they prefer. My suspicion is that this comes from Democratic underinvestment and poor investments in media and culture while their opposition has been doing this aggressively, which allows others to define them as radical.

And how many were too apathetic to even bother voting?

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