Comment by Ancapistani | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ancapistani | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Ugh - OK, I'll wear my politics on my sleeve in this thread.

I'm not a member of either major party, or any of the minor ones for that matter. I describe myself as an anarchist but practically speaking I'm a pragmatist. I grew up in a red state, so my "red mask" is higher quality than my "blue mask", but objectively I share about the same amount with each of them.

From where I sit the only thing that has changed is that Trump's administration isn't keeping up appearances. They're doing openly what every other administration in my lifetime has done behind closed doors.

I'll break down the rest and respond piece by piece:

> Perhaps a vengeful delusional authoritarian

Agree. No notes.

> who previously tried to manipulate an election

I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.

> became president,

Yep. I've seen no compelling evidence of organized fraud in any of our recent elections that I've analyzed, either, so I assume he was rightfully elected.

> and his party, for whom he has something like a 90% approval rating from,

A couple of points here.

First, Trump has utterly destroyed the establishment GOP. That's why he has such a high approval rating within his party - the party itself has changed. That change was a direct result of the Obama and Biden presidencies; the consolidation of that support into a coherent party is a direct result of Trump's force of personality.

This isn't the first time this has happened; there are many parallels to Lincoln in Trump's rise. JFK was somewhat similar as well.

We won't know how Trump's second term will end up until we're through it. In retrospect, I was almost as rabidly "anti" during the Clinton and Obama years as I see many people here express about Trump. In hindsight, while I strongly dislike the man, I'd take Clinton over any options we've had since.

> bought a voting machine company.

Yep. I believe the real question should be: do we want to allow a single company or individual this level of influence over our electoral process?

> I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.

It was almost certainly Trump's intent to overturn the results of the 2020 election. I do not see why else he and his personal lawyers would go through such convoluted efforts to do all of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

Trying to intuit Trump's state of mind is always a funny game that is played when discussing whether or not he lost the 2020 election, but you often end up with two possibilities: 1. Trump is a sane person who is lying about the results of the 2020 election to rile up his base (very plausible) or 2. Trump is a delusional person who willfully ignored the advice of his Vice President and Attorney General (less plausible, but even more highly concerning given this person was voted into office twice).

> First, Trump has utterly destroyed the establishment GOP. That's why he has such a high approval rating within his party - the party itself has changed. That change was a direct result of the Obama and Biden presidencies; the consolidation of that support into a coherent party is a direct result of Trump's force of personality.

One note: I don't think this is right. Trump did very-swiftly take over the party, but not because of Obama and Biden. Republicans and Republican-friendly rich dudes and organizations deliberately built up a propaganda machine after Nixon, and that machine molded an electorate very far right with the aim of ensuring they'd always vote against Democrats—but to support a party that shared very little of their cultivated electorate's far-right aims.

I have also spent a lot of time in red areas and come from a mostly-red family, and typical Republican politicians from Reagan on traditionally have talked a pretty unconvincing game and really just run a pro-(big, monopolist)business/pro-rich party when in office. They could depend on their captive electorate because they'd convinced them the democrats wanted to give illegal immigrants jobs grabbing Republican voters' guns while funding their free abortions with taxpayer dollars and handing the US government over to the UN or something (this is, for readers not familiar with this crowd, a glib presentation but not really an exaggeration of the kind of thing these folks really do worry will happen when Democrats get in office, and probably the least-accurate part of that passage is that Republicans might think Democrats would give illegal immigrants jobs rather than just tons of free money to illegally-vote for Democrats or something like that—that this stuff hasn't happened when Democrats have gotten in office doesn't seem to register as meaningful to them, for some reason)

Trump started talking like a Republican voter, not a Republican politician. "Why don't they just build a wall?" "What does NATO do for us?" "Why don't we just ship illegals out wherever we find them, the constitution doesn't apply to them, probable cause doesn't apply, et c." (dip a toe in social media outside left-wing bubbles and you'll see a truly alarming amount of stuff like that latter sentiment) and disturbing support for military action in "lawless democrat cities", "democratic politicians are all constantly doing crimes up to and including secret murders, we should prosecute all of them"—this is shit their media has been telling them is true and good for decades, Trump's just the first option they've had who's crazy enough to act on any of it. You could hear it on AM radio in the '90s, you could overhear it in a rural diner in the '00s, no problem. This is who their voters are, and have been since before Obama, before Biden, and even before Trump.

He took the party over by exploiting a weakness the party itself had spent enormous resources and decades developing in cynically seeking a powerful tool against the Democrats. Their plan worked really well, but left them vulnerable to the first person positioned to credibly claim to want to do all the stuff Republican voters have been told they should want, but denied by their Republican politicians (because a whole bunch of the ideas are wasteful, insane, totally pointless, or extremely dangerous to democracy or the rule of law, so, to economic stability)

For people who have lived decades in red America before Trump, when he started talking, I think a lot of us saw he was dangerous pretty fast. Not because he was saying crazy shit we'd never heard before, but because he was saying crazy shit we'd heard all the time.

I agree with pretty much all of this, and suspect I’m a bit closer to the right in a couple of those areas :)

I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right. Trump and his admin are emboldened, and what little resistance there was to domestic actions just… dissolved.

Hell, some of the stuff Republican voters are worried about that Republican politicians have been ignoring them on (while their media promote it, in some cases) is really popular on the left, too—and also ignored there, as Democrats adopted a bunch of Republican (the politicians, not the voters) positions after Reagan’s landslide win.

There’s some version of Trump out there in the possibility space who took a more-measured (but still with more give-a-damn than traditional Republicans have exhibited) approach on immigration, wasn’t fixated on anti-LGBT stuff, went more-credibly forward with cautiously pulling back from the “world police” role for the US, wasn’t quite as into cheesy comic book villain levels of corruption and civil rights violations (this really fucks up his appeal as an “anti-swamp” candidate), approached free-trade skepticism with a less confused and more effective and targeted strategy, followed through on his kinda-“socialist” messaging on healthcare in the first race (a lot of—though not all—republicans would absolutely support stuff like this as long as a democrat wasn’t behind it), didn’t do off-the-charts wacky stuff with NOAA and Dept. of Health et c., pursued actual deficit reduction efforts (you can’t keep cutting taxes if you actually care about this…), and enjoys like a 70% approval rating. He could probably even get away with illegally killing some Venezuelans if he really wanted to, and hardly hurt that approval rating, with the rest of that stuff going on.

> I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right.

I might be missing something, but from what I saw, almost every major politician on the left condemned the Kirk killing, including major progressives like AOC.

I think there was more interest in crafting a narrative around that, than engaging with reality. The (at least partially successful) attempt at shifting sentiment didn’t have statements from major democratic figures that were useful, so ignored those and focused on randos posting Kirk quotes of the shrek-some-of-you-may-die.jpg variety regarding school shootings juxtaposed with news of his dying in a school shooting along with sensible-chuckle.gif as the most horrible things ever, and tantamount to endorsing political violence. A bunch of other things didn’t really fit the narrative of calls for political violence and the commission thereof being especially left-wing coded over recent decades, so were also ignored.

It would have been convenient to the effort if left wing leaders had endorsed the murder, or if the language and acts of political violence over recent decades had tended to come from the left, but the lack of those supports didn’t keep them from trying.

Reality and truth-seeking aren’t that important to the outcome of affecting perception, is the thing. That was accomplished, regardless of any “but wait a minute, this doesn’t seem quite right” we can spot. You can watch Fox News and do that all day long with all kinds of things they cover, but it’s simply not important that a lot of their “angles” are really weak—they’d surely prefer they were strong, but it’s also not necessary. In fact a hallmark of the modern version of the thing they engage in is that it doesn’t avoid weaknesses and focus on strengths, but continues unperturbed and with all the trappings of confidence and strength even when all it has at the moment are weak notions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com