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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

I have come to believe that many people's political attitudes can be boiled down to a single uniting element: an overwhelming fear that other people might do to them the kinds of things that they would absolutely do to other people if given half a chance.

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This line of thinking is increasing and dangerous (and no doubt intentional from at least some of the popular examples that come to mimd). It will make it that much harder for authentic candidates to talk about legitimate change and ideology.

When your platform is "free lunches for school children" no one has to worry about the devastating consequences of someone doing it to you.

Many of these people literally believe that "free lunches for school children" inevitably turns into "those socialists will force me to eat bugs in an Orwellian nightmare".

For them, Sweden and North Korea are on the same spectrum of communism and will end up the same.

Meanwhile they somehow don't see wealthy and powerful people using their political connections to enrich themselves by garnering favorable treatment from powerful government officials as an essential part of how things worked in the USSR.

The problem with the saying "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" is that a lot of people haven't forgotten history; they simply never learned it in the first place.

Whose platform is that, and only that? I've never seen a single political candidate where that was their sole position.

Either that or just getting pleasure from doing it and getting the opposite of pleasure when on the receiving end.

Is that like projection?

A very rational fear for anyone who has any knowledge of history. There aren't any good or bad guys in this fight.

The bad guys are the one in power right now trying to turn the US democracy into an autocracy, following the Project2025 playbook and what other autocrats have done like Putin. This isn't a normal administration.

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