That’s the most frustrating part. What America calls leftists is considered pretty centrist everywhere else. They’re so afraid of empathic policies it’s no wonder the country is falling apart.
The damage is already irreversible on any near to medium term timescale - how bad it gets on an absolute scale is the only thing left to speculate.
It will easily take a generation just for people to find solidarity and courage again.
Progress takes real sacrifice. People died fighting for basic dignity and rights. The anti-slavery movement in the US fought monied interests for centuries.
It took real sacrifice for the labour movement to gain rights such as voting, education, housing, health care in the face of deadly opposition from the rich and their legislative puppets.
It just takes a moment of complaceny on the part of progressive-minded people for the rich and their legislative puppets to undo the foundations of democracy.
The executive branch shouldn't have nearly as much authority as it does and anything we want to be difficult to be undone should be protected by law, with a legislative body needing something akin to a 2/3s vote to change it.
Instead we have a massive, powerful executive branch and legislators that can wield way too much power with a simple majority.
I was living out if the country st the time and didn't keep up, I could be mistaken there.
Democracy would have worked in that scenario, and society would just have bifurcated enough that the slight minority lost most power and very much disagrees with the direction.
Congress does have to act pike adults though and do their job of keeping the executive branch in check. If they don't the system is just fundamentally broken and the only reasonable choice is to throw it out and start fresh.
Fairness in the context of an election only means that it was done in accordance to the existing laws. Maybe equal access to voting needs to be on that list too, but I'd expect that to be covered by voting laws.
There have been many attempts to fix districting laws, but of course those changes have to be approved by representatives elected under the previous laws.
It has been difficult to challenge these in court because it’s hard to argue whether a districting is “fair”. There has been a little progress on challenging some districting based on a statistical argument that shows the one-party advantage resulting from the particular districting is extremely unlikely to be the result of chance.
I actually wonder if the problem the USA has is that its system has no override function like the UK does under the Parliament Act 1918. I see a lot of frustration that Congress has been deadlocked for nearly 2 decades (mostly by Republicans) so it’s no surprise the average voter demands change and wants the executive branch to take all the power.
The large executive branch has been growing since steadily since FDR though, that isn't a recent reaction to gridlock. There's a good argument that gridlock is a feature of our system meant to slow it down intentionally. We're seeing now how jarring it can be to have the government completely change source every 4 years, gridlock and bureaucracy help smooth that out.
We could be making it worse by demanding gridlock be avoided through executive actions and similar.
Compare to the UK’s Parliament Act, which allows the Commons to override the Lords if it passes the same legislation in two sessions. It means that overriding isn’t free (it takes 1-2 years of focused effort) but critical legislation can’t be blocked. Combined with strict timetables that force rejection of legislation that isn’t passed in its allotted time, you bypass the pocket veto, too. Compromise is preferred but, if the upper house refuses to play ball, the threat of ramming it through anyway always exists to keep it in check.
What additional authority doss the US legislative branch need? They have pretty wide authority to create any laws that don't violate our constitutional rights, I don't know how we could really expand that further (but my view is definitely biased since I grew up here).
I think congress would be well within its rights to change their own rules to add time limits on legislation or required expiration on proposed bills, for example.
Some things do sit within Congress such as the Senate adopting the insane role allowing filibuster. However, this is also encouraged by the fact the Senate can kill legislation like this. Filibusters rarely happen in the UK Parliament because the majority party can force through legislation they feel is important enough.
You say that deadlock is built in as though this is desirable. However the public just became so frustrated by the system that they just elected a madman to smash it to pieces.
Encouraging compromise and working across the aisle is an excellent property in the US system. But that has broken down and I think part of the reason is there’s no mechanism to break the deadlock that can force parties back to the table.
The US political system is completely broken with regards to lobbying and campaign finance. All the money floating around makes it nearly impossible for representatives to work across the aisle, or to ignore the aisle and vote for what their own state wants regardless of party.
If there is ever a conflict between legislative and executive, then the legislative branch can remove the executive branch.
In other words: the president shouldn't be head of government (only head of state, sort of a figurehead).
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-r...
Latin America is all quite similar.
Mainland Europe is quite similar, bar the obvious exception.
But the Donald is doing everything he can to stop that.
Canada may as well be British, except Quebec who are somehow more french than the french themselves.
Also, it doesn’t help that Labour are shit at comms. They’re actually doing what they were elected to do but don’t want to tell the public about it, much like the Biden administration!
That seems like the kind of setup that works great until it goes very, very wrong.
Now they're talking about keeping the government running on auto-pilot budgets all the way to September. [1] Doesn't even help that it's Rep. Exec. branch, Rep. Senate, Rep. House, Rep. Supreme Court, and Rep. Governor majority. Still a stopgap CR land where nothing gets advanced.
[1] https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/03/07/congress/ho...
The budget is a weird topic when we consistently spend trillions in debt. I've found it hard for me to take budget debates too seriously when the idea of running such a deficit seems completely against any fundamental financial plan.
I'd care more about budget deadlines and temporary agreements if they were required to agree to a balanced budget.
It doesn't matter if rights are protected by law, if the executive branch has no intention to enforce that law.
Right now the executive branch is plainly violating laws established by Congress, and there is no one to stop them.
If any minority group has the power to overrule a majority vote, regardless of what the vote is for, then you don't really have a democracy.
Which is why under no circumstances you should ever elect anyone who will send yours in that direction. Canadians, take note, the CPC only detached its lips from Trump's backside because they needed to come up for air.
At minimum, don't elect people who staged failed coups. They and their supporters will not ever act like they are bound by law.
I would also note that while the current Trump administration has broken federal laws at an accelerated rate, the previous Biden administration did much the same thing on a smaller scale. People here on HN frequently make excuses for Biden's illegal student loan forgiveness program because they liked the results but if we want to preserve the rule of law then it needs to apply to every program. In the long run allowing unchecked growth of executive branch power and the administrative state will be bad for everyone.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...
In both cases the executive branch is overstepping legal bounds and attempting to take actions that it isn't legally authorized to do.
The why behind it matters most for how emotional of a response it will invoke, but maybe I'm preaching to the choir here.
Hope you don't mind me continuing to pull on this thread, I'm genuinely interested to better understand where you have drawn the line here.
Biden was circumventing established systems when he tried to cancel student debts. He even tried again when the first attempt was blocked. Our higher education system, legal framework around student debt, and the debt industry as a whole was very well established and legally defined.
What is so different with Trump's executive orders? I get that you disagree with them, I disagree with many of them too, but legally I just don't see much light between the two. They both abuse executive orders in an attempt to Dodge existing legislation on the books and make change that the office has no authority to make.
> dismantling the federal government, installing loyalists, betraying allies, allying with dictators, and promising lots of money to billionaires
while lying about everything.
Biden didn't do anything you suggest. You're consuming the propaganda. George Bush made it so that Federal workers with student loans could get them discharged at X years of service. X just happened to fall into Trump's first term.
Trump broke the promise made to people doing their civic duty, Biden repaired it.
Biden never took on more authority than what was established almost two decades ago.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/student-loan-forgiveness-applic...
How do you distinguish between propaganda and a lawyer arguing a political policy on behalf of the president of the united states, with the understanding that a lawyer should make the most compelling case they possibly can? Its political, its a one-sided view, its cherry picked, and its meant to persuade the target audience to believe a certain point - that sounds pretty propagandistic to me.
That's not going to happen with the way tech/algos are exacerbating the divide.
We need to be proliferating alternative, humanistic, empathetic software in the world and putting it into people's hands. It's easier than ever for us to independently build a wealth of defensive infrastructure for the common people.
We have to use our intelligence and expertise to make applications which take care of users and their privacy, without them needing to suddenly become overnight computer experts. Most of the tooling I see today has (understandably) massive UX issues and is largely relegated to at least the mildly technical.
We need new and open Facebooks, TikToks, calendars, operating systems, etc. which protect and empower people but don't complicate their lives and stress them out, which leads to security and privacy fatigue. Even my current operating system, macOS, is so intensely user-hostile and obfuscated off the happy path, despite being heralded as a champion of human-oriented design.
We need a modern GNU-like organization but focused on building the social/web tooling that most people today are using.
Most people don't care enough to even ask the questions. Creating competing services were the value differentiation is privacy (likely at the trade off of cost or quality) is bound to fail for that same reason.
> Trying to make some end-run around market forces is futile
Market forces and the law are two different things, which one are you arguing?
> People en masse aren't going to pay for a service with privacy when they can get a free version that does the same stuff but blasts them with ad trackers
I never suggested anyone pay for anything, this is a straw man argument.
I don't understand your aggressive stance against engineers building better, open alternatives to current offerings. The market is getting hungrier for it, and if a product is genuinely better, "market forces" will do their thing, no run-around needed.
But.. it's a chicken-egg problem. Has there been a law for prevention before an incident happened or is the law formulated after something happens?
.. it's naive to think and say
> Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up.
If it were like this, then no house would be destroyed by earth quake like in Turkey somewhen 2-3 years ago - and Turkey did pass a law some 10 years ago to prevent cheap buildings in earth quake areas.
No bridge would've collapse in Germany - the laws in Germany are one of the toughest making construction very expensive.
And there are much more examples in real world that opposes your "Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up."
The problem is no one wants to pay much money for the better quality, if a little less in quality will do similar job. Compare housing and housw building costs in US and western Europe/Germany.
So, your engineers can do the best things and the market decides. .. yes, ma‘am!
I’m sure there’s a good argument that wealthy people and a broadening wealth divide are responsible for this, but it’s too late to attack that now. We need a huge shift in public sentiment if this is going to change now.
Even if the outcome had been different in November. We’d still be in deep trouble. A lot less, but still a lot. The fundamental problem we have right now isn’t that Trump is President, it’s that about 50% of those who bother to vote think he’s worthy of it.
Unfortunately, I don’t see any way to change the minds of the American populace. They’ll have to learn the hard lesson of where this stuff goes. The problem is that we all have to learn that lesson alongside them whether we need it or not.
Civil wars and the like are usually based on youth bulges, as they need a lot of breathing bodies to fight it out. Preferrably slightly hungry bodies, as hungry people are easier to provoke into fighting.
The military have the tanks, the air support, the logistics, the surveilence net, the miscelaneous support equipment, and all the training to use everything.
A split within the military, that gets real ugly real fast.
And then, because there were demonstrably some absolute sadists demonstrably present in the armed forces during my lifetime (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hooded_Man), perhaps the conscientious objectors will be convinced to fight anyway, to stop the sadists.
It also matters what such a civil war be about — Is it between those who would seize power and those who would prevent it? Is it the same borders as the old Civil War? Is it city-vs-rural?
If there is one (still an if), and if it is Trump vs. the constitution… it's still not impossible for such a conflict to be without a single shot fired. Conversely, if it's between two groups of cities neither of which will consent to the other's choices for president, it could have every major city in the US reduced to radioactive debris.
But yeah, there also was a lot of physically strong young people to choose from.
Our expectations are so low that we ignore the real things that qualified people have done, to pretend that an anti-science wacko has some semblance of sanity.
strong bodies are lackin' wisdom.
Or:
Who do not smoke, not drink, has never lived.
One, there are a few counties on Oregon that want to redraw the boundary so that they become part of Idaho. This, I think, is only mildly serious.
The second is the border of Indiana and Illinois, which is serious enough that the Indiana state legislature has voted to create a commission to work on it. It was a bipartisan vote, too. Because there are a number of rural counties in Illinois that would like to join Indiana, and two urban counties in Indiana that say if the option is on the table they’d rather be part of Illinois. Such a thing would need both states to agree and then send it on to Congress, but ultimately I don’t think anything will come of it.
When you look at state funding, these urban counties are sending more tax dollars to their respective state capitols than the states are spending in their counties. In the case of these rural Illinois counties, the state is spending between $5 and $6 per tax dollar collected. Does Indiana really want to take on such welfare queens? And give up some of their few donor counties in exchange? It seems hardly likely!
That’s the rub all across the US. The urbanized areas are subsidizing the rural areas. Are the rural areas prepared to do without such subsidies? They can say “the cities can’t live without the food we grow”, but the entirety of human history shows that the cities always come out ahead in these transactions.
With out current structure of governments, as we get around/over 80% urbanization, the rural areas will just get steamrolled and want to break away due to a lack of agency. If you study people in the "western Idaho" area and on the Oregon coast, it would be easy to see that they are two different nations.
Also,do you have e a source for the 5x tax collected number? The 5x seems really high. I couldn't find one for Indiana, but Illinois shows it's <2x.
https://news.siu.edu/2018/08/081018-research-shows-state-fun...
Shows that on average it is about 3x. There are more detailed per-county numbers available in the actual study.
The real losers are the suburban counties surrounding Chicago. Cook County is only slightly shafted.
https://www.farmweeknow.com/policy/state/state-tax-dollars-b...
My personal opinion is that our state and nation legislatures have way too few members given our current populations. For example, the US House should have some sort of dynamic membership count: the smallest odd number such that when you run the apportionment algorithm the smallest state has 3 members. That’s probably somewhere around 1100 members (just spitballing).
Decreasing the ratio of constituents to representatives won't really work. It may work at the margins, but you will still have the mismatch in proportions between urban/rural.
I don't believe that at all.
After America would be like the Fall of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Chinese Jin (romance of the three kingdoms) and Tang (five dynasties, ten kingdoms) eras, usually because of human bickering over power and control. Occasionally, systems like Shadowrun have a "mild" apocalypse that mostly serves as a catalyst for balkanization. Whatever vestiges of a state remained fall apart under the stress.
Complete apocalypse tends to be something like large scale devastation from a known threat that final gets used (nuclear, biological, dangerous machine sentience) and everybody's too busy dealing with their own issues to care about larger ideas like a continental federal state of "America."
Either way, tends to result in 3+ most of the time. From looking at the Roman Empire and the multiple collapses of China though, it really does not take anything especially dramatic to result in pretty severe balkanization. Often its the old "Blue and the Grey" divide and then most of the West just does their own thing. Occasionally it's more like East Coast, Heartland, and often the West still is not really included.
The result for the West has actually been one of the weirder parts of reading a lot of those settings. Often this undercurrent that the West has never really been a part of "America." The heavily populated East is still mostly fighting over the same issues with each other, the lightly populated West is just some far away land they occasionally pay attention to (mostly California and Texas).
1. Europe propped up Russia despite Obama and Trump’s warnings before the war
2. Europe still buys more from Russia than they give Ukraine in financial aid
3. Europe is more friendly towards America’s rival China
4. Europe expects US to spend more protecting Europe than Europe
Zuck is probably the best example.
Maybe on economic issues. On certain social issues it's definitely not "centrist" and arguably further left than other developed countries.
Left to me means workers movements, and there's very little of that in the US.
At no point was "liberal" mentioned in this comment chain prior to your comment.
>Left to me means workers movements, and there's very little of that in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics#Social_prog...
It's time to stop thinking in materialist terms when analyzing US politics, that has completely flown the coop. It's all culture war.
It's really only identity politics where the left is actually on the global left, and then it's far-left.
Those are arguably closer to "economic" than "social". Energy is plainly economic. Even healthcare and labor at the end of the day, boil down to dollars and cents (ie. how much people are paying for healthcare and how much they earn).
>speech
Having the strongest free speech protections in the world is "far right" now?
>religion
The Republicans might be "far right" on religion, but I don't see how the Democrats are. They can certainly be more secular (think the CCP), but at least they're not obviously religious. Compare this to the UK and Denmark which have state regions, and the christian democratic union in Germany.
>basic human rights
Clarify. "basic human rights" has been muddled by the left to include mean stuff like "healthcare", as well as the right to mean "right of babies not not get aborted" and "kids not being groomed".
That rings true, but how did the US get here? How did identity politics suddenly come to be the most important thing, bringing the world order to its knees?
Europe seems to be following America's lead (as we always do/did), but it hasn't reached the same extremes and probably won't, imho.
Also, do you not think American right wing media is not capable of whipping up panics? This feels like special pleading.
Maybe a year or two ago…the political landscape has shifted drastically in recent years and months.
California governor Gavin Newsom has a new podcast, and recently told Charlie Kirk (yes, he invited Kirk to pander to the young white male voters) something along the lines of “trans people shouldn’t play sports”.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-this-is-gavin-newsom-268...
Add “…with others” to the end of my statement.
Pedantry is what the oppressors want.
Americans should continue to conflate socially liberal and economically left-wing at their own peril.
Everyone claims they're the true voice of the 99%. Trump, despite being a billionaire, claims he's defending Americans workers by imposing tariffs and deporting undocumented immigrants. More broadly the right claims that they're fighting against the "elites" in the media/academia/corporations/"deep state".
Normie centrist views tend not to garner much attention either in traditional media or in online forums. Instead, we tend to focus much more on the issues that clearly and quickly establish our membership and bonafides in a particular group.
The same extreme-voices-get-heard feature gets recapitulated through our political system. Especially the rise of getting primaried from the left or right. Break ranks with your side? Get primaried. The result is that, to get heard over the fray, political candidates need to articulate more extreme views and stick to them.
Lots of words have been spilled about how various electoral reforms could get us out of this mess. For me, I believe ranked choice voting and open primaries represent an optimal trade-off between "legal, and plausibly implementable" and "yield biggest improvements to electoral system." A major complaint against ranked choice voting is that it tends to bias for more moderate centrists, which I think would be a not-bad problem to have.
Such moves towards such systems, are usually desperate jumps of those whose empires are under threat of being broken up anyway.
If you want to copy Denmark, I'm guessing you also want their universal healthcare.
The main difference is that they are easier to integrate. For instance, immigrants from the Americas speak a romance language, and if they speak Spanish, that's like a second language for the US. Most are also Christians, and yes, it matters because they don't uphold Sharia over local laws. Yes, the US is also getting drug dealers and such, but I bet that a vast majority are there to work and pay their taxes.
Europe has the problem that it took in many people from Africa and Asia, that are harder to integrate, and with many of them fleeing war. And the difficulty here is that people fleeing war have no intention to integrate or even to work for a living if they can get away with subsidies, many intending to return home as soon as possible. Europe also has the issue that it has never been a melting pot, smaller countries in Europe don't have a tradition of cultural diversity, they are unprepared to integrate that many people over a short period of time.
There was also a story recently about Russia apparently fuelling immigration from war zones into Europe, to destabilize the EU and its governments. They also funded “green” NGOs and politicians who succeeded in shutting down shale gas extraction and nuclear power plants, increasing the energy dependence on Russia. I'm guessing their hybrid war is a wild success.
Not to be misunderstood here, I am pro immigration. For example, Germany has been a powerhouse of Europe due in no small part to their generous immigration policies. The population is growing old, and we need people to support society. The “low skilled” classification is a canard. Countries require “low skilled” work as well, and note that unemployment is at an all-time low, US and EU included.
I'll also note that the UK ran xenophobic ads ranting against Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians, as a justification for Brexit. After Brexit, they wanted them back, especially during the pandemic, since “low skilled” Eastern Europeans started going to Germany and other EU countries instead. And immigration actually got worse for them after Brexit, which was ironic, but not unpredictable.
Trump is the result of anti-system vote by people who were ignored for decades by both parties.
Trump obviously won't solve their problems. Inequality won't decrease. Healthcare won't become more accessible. Workers' rights won't be fixed. Homes won't get more affordable. Inflation won't drop.
So - even when Trump disgraces himself completely - these disappointed voters will just vote for another anti-system con-man.
Trump's core voters desperately need Sanders to win. But they will vote Trumps and get fucked over time and time again.
This is how democracy dies. People distrusting the system so hard they destroy it.
2-party system is bad. Regional representation instead of population representation is bad. Allowing gerrymandering is bad. Letting companies/oligarchs to contribute to election campaigns is VERY bad.
All of this ends with a system that cannot reform itself. It's a common failure mode in early democracies. There are known workarounds.
If instead all votes go proportionally according to what people voted, you get less extreme policies and encourage parties to build coalitions. Nobody is happy, but fewer people are extremely unhappy.
E.g. Republican Schwarzenegger has been advocating against gerrymandering for a long time.
Force all states to cast election votes to be proportional to citizens' votes (some states do but others do not).
People need to be treated as adults before they can be expected to act like adults. There's always the risk that goes wrong, it has in the past, but we're doomed if we believe the only way forward is a small group of elites forcing change on us because they "know best".
Reasoned, informed votes aren’t a major factor in elections.
[edit] see if your library has a copy of Democracy for Realists and also dig into older major works they cite, if you’re interested in more on this. For a quick gut-check, look up the proportion of US voters that understand how marginal income tax rates work, then reflect on the fact that this is something very simple that directly affects them in ways they must confront at least once per year, and despair at how bad similar measures must look for practically everything else and that if they don’t understand the basics of how things work, they can’t even begin to figure out “what’s best” for them or for anyone else.
I'm not sure how we could untangle the issue of today's uneducated populace with our education system itself. If people don't understand marginal tac rates, for example, and most people go to public school because the government makes it pretty difficult to choose anything else, is it not the fault of public education for either not teaching it or teaching it poorly?
More importantly in my opinion, if people don't care to understand it that's fine - they can make that choice. If the system still works and no one complains, great. If it becomes a problem we can either better educate people on how it works or move to a more simply form of taxation that is easier for people to understand.
Both of those factors are, to use the scientific term, completely fucked in the US, which is why we’re where we are now. We’re not here because people think that we spend 20% of our budget on foreign aid, but rather, people think that because of concentration and capture of media ownership, and intense lobbying. The ignorance would be there either way, but the direction and form of it is carefully cultivated, and allowing that cultivation is the problem.
The generation of hard data demonstrating that voters (more or less) don’t know jack-shit about anything goes back to IIRC the 1950s, and the best answer Poli Sci has for why this results in a functioning system at all is that voter behavior is fairly erratic (much of it amounts to “do I perceive that things are bad, even that have nothing to do with the government or with me? Then throw the bums out!”) and (this was once accepted but is now controversial) that voter ignorance kinda balances out by virtue of being chaotic. If that ignorance becomes directed, however, both of these things are weaponizable or breakable.
What you describe are both results of an uneducated voting public in my opinion. At least as I see it, those are two important effects with the root cause being a lack of education and critical thinking.
If people were better educated on how our systems work and issues that impact them directly, and willing to think critically and listen to, or engage in, reasoned debates we wouldn't have to worry about what shit they may hear or see in the media, or from politicians, lobbyists, etc.
I’d definitely be interested in evidence that there are democracies with voters who are significantly better at understanding the function of their government, the breakdown of the budget, how basic functions of it work, et c, than in the US before, say, 1975.
This is anecdotal since I don't have evidence handy, but I've been impressed with Swiss voters that I've met and they have all spoken highly of both their Democratic model and their voters. I don't know all the intricacies of it, but my understanding is that their system pushes any meaningful change to a vote. Its slower and requires more voter engagement, but at least from my experience that has succeeded in building a better informed public.
Acting like an adult requires practice and learning lessons when you mess up. Treating those you may disagree with, or don't trust, as children is a self fulfilling prophecy and strips them of the dignity of having the chance to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences.
I wouldn't expect voters for either candidate to agree with much from the other candidate, but maybe I don't know their platforms well enough to see the similarities.
> Trump _is_ the policy and the view.
That may be true for voters, I know quite a few Trump voters that only care to vote for him and couldn't explain any coherent policy reason for preferring him. That has no bearing on Trump's own policies or views though.
Perhaps the reasons can't be mentioned in polite company.
I would assume the same goes for some Democratic voters as well. There's a lot of hate thrown across the aisle in both directions these days. Maybe it comes more frequently from Trump's supporters, I don't know, but I've been surprised by how much blatant disregard, disrespect, and animosity I've heard from those on the left. The idea of voting for Trump was so foreign to many in the Biden/Harris bubble that anyone willing to vote for Trump must have been crazy or less than.
I didn't vote for Trump (or Harris), but working in the tech industry and mostly around people who would consider themselves progressive or liberal has been pretty eye opening the last few elections. Everyone wants to be inclusive unless its political and they strongly disagree with the other side.
That's an interesting idea. Care to expound on who some Democratic voters were eager for Kamala to "hurt"?
Given the GP comment I assumed we weren't talking about that scenario where people are only a candidate or party voter.
Even his own party never votes for his stuff because his ideas are always terrible. They are always emotional, but he never thinks them through. I don't think he's able to think them through.
I'll give you an example from a different person: There's someone on Twitter who wants a 0.1% tax on stock transactions, and then he calculates that this little change will fund everything we could possibly want. He utterly ignores that if you put this tax people will change their behavior! There will be fewer transactions, and this tax will fund nothing at all.
Sanders is the same way: He makes an idea, and completely ignores how people will respond to it.
Sanders has a 0% chance of winning.
This guy does:
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/114/099/2...
I can't find his original post on X (although that's probably for the better because his feed is filled antisemitic garbage, and he's pretty clearly at utter idiot).
But yes, some people really do think that way: They never think about the results of their proposals, and getting back to the topic at hand Bernie is the same way (although unlike that other guy Bernie really does seem to care about people), but he never thinks about the effects of his proposals, how people would react and change behavior.
This would make him a terrible President.
And I would remind you that despite being in congress for 34 years Bernie has never manged to get even a single idea of his passed.
Even for the Trump "bull in the china shop" voter, Sanders has become less relevant in 2020 and 2024 because he offers so little and for someone so called principled, he doesn’t hold the same ideas on immigration that he has before.
I know many Trump supporters but not a single one of them respects or like Sanders, and all the polling data I can find points out that this is the general trend.
Any Sanders path to victory involved massive amounts of youth turnout that would have otherwise stayed home, and there's basically zero Republican leaning voters that would switch to Bernie. And the swing vote swings massively to Trump when Sanders goes against Trump.
This immediately got dismissed. "Everything is fine". It is a mistake to paint all Trump voters as just being proto-fascists (which the majority are). Many ended up there because they desperately wanted change and establishment candidates were just offering more of the same. Hilary absolutely was a "more of the same" candidate. And the entire GOP primary field (21 at one point) were "more of the same". That's why Trump won the primary. That, combined with Hilary's massive negatives and her generally being a terrible candidate, were why Trump won in the first place.
2020 was an anomaly in many ways. We had Covid lockdowns and were coming off 4 years of Trump chaos. Because of the lockdown, voting was made substantially easier with early voting and mail-in ballots. The more people vote, the more Democrats win. It's why voter suppression is a key part of the Republican platform (make no mistake, "voter ID" is simply voter suppression). Were it not for the pandemic, I very much suspect Trump would've won re-election. Biden was a terrible candidate and never should've been the nominee. Clyburn basically handed him the nomination (in South Carolina) and Warren stayed in long enough to split Bernie's vote, the second time the DNC had actively sabotaged Bernie's campaign.
Remember in 2020, Bernie had Joe Rogan's endorsement.
The Democrats are really just Republican Lite now. Kamala's immigration plan was Trump's 2020 immigration plan. Kamala abandoned opposition to the death penalty from the party platform and called for the most "lethal" military. She courted never Trumpers like Liz Cheney. Like seriously, who was that for? She refused to separate herself from Biden on any issue despite his historic unpopularity. And of course, she refused to deviate from the deeply unpopular position on Israel-Gaza. In short, she offered the voters absolutely nothing.
In this election, progressive voter initiatives outperformed the Democratic party by a massive margin. For example, minimum wage increases passed in Missouri, a state Trump won by 22. Trump won Florida by 14 yet recreational cannabis and abortion protection got 55-59% of the vote (unfortunately, you need 60% to pass in Florida).
The Democratic Party exists to actively sabotage any progressive momentum. We didn't get a convention primary after Biden withdrew because the DNC was scared a progressive candidate would win. They stuck us with Kamala to avoid that.
My point here is that Trump doesn't have and has never had a majority. He only won each time because there was effectively zero opposition. A chunk of Trump's base are simply people desperate for change. At least Trump lied to them and gave them something to vote for. Democrats wouldn't even lie to them and tell them they were going to fix housing and egg prices and give them healthcare.
This is a solid summary of what happened during the political shifting of the last (almost) ten years.
Unfortunate that this comment is so deep in the thread here.
This is the real bisector. If one party gets to use magic and capture the stupid vote, what's the other party supposed to do? Lie more? Lie less? As long as magic appeals to stupid people, we're screwed.
The real underlying problem is the collapse of the consensus of the elites, projected through corporate media. Murdoch saw a financial opportunity to break from this model, and social media companies followed with this as their only business model. Murdoch and Zuckerberg make money spreading magic which appeals to stupid people who vote in deranged morons. There is no effective feedback mechanism because not enough voters have the mental skills to evaluate the consequences of their actions. Or perhaps they just like seeing chaos and destruction. Rinse repeat.
I have often felt that the only way to break this cycle is to get more non-voters to join the fray. There are enough people totally checked out but get a bunch of them and you can make up for the centrist dems. Its gotta be a celebrity that has any chance of ramming through the Democratic primary just like Trump did. AOC isn't going to cut it. If we make it to 2028, We need a superstar.
1: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-pri...
Thats more than enough of a margin for a definite loss. Image if Trump lost in 2016. His supporters and the whole world wide right wing ecosphere would never had gotten emboldened.\
The article doesn't touch upon it but there was a contagion of two time Obama voters that voted Trump. This group was touched upon in Michael Moores documentary Farenheit 11/9. People like those in Flint, MI who felt abandoned by Obama switched their allegiance to Trump.
The American Problem is not one of systems or policies. The American Problem is about people, what they do to each other, and that you allow that to happen. The constitutional arguments they have are Red Herrings. What matters is what people do, and what they want to be allowed to do by their arguments.
Funny. Reminds me of the last time I visited Brazil. In the last day I heard someone justifying voting for Bolsonaro by saying "things are so bad that I just want someone who will destroy everything".
Without union we get nothing and people before us had to fight to get us these rights and now some people want to throw it away because they didn't get big enough raise.
Nah, they were not ignored by both parties. It is votes by people who were listened to by the republican party again and again and again.
It's not like in authoritarian countries where their votes just go down to trash. It's not like they cannot voice their opinion or organize demonstrations. I agree there is a sentiment of "I'm ignored", but at any point in time it's up to them to not being ignored in democratic society.
The most frustrating part is that Trump is sabotaging the US by enacting the pseudo-anti war policies that the republican party has been vilifying for decades.
Leftist now refers to that. The leftist of like over a decade ago. That leftist is now more centrist.