Every single bit of the right is projection. "The left hates America" = we (the right) will dismantle and destroy this 250 year experiment
But yes, projection. Like free speech, playing with World War III, etc.
My favorite example is probably getting my wife's uncle to agree that the proletariat has nothing to lose but it's chains mid-rant about how right-wing militia groups are the only folks in the country with a finger on the pulse and how they were absolutely going to overthrow the federal government with a selection of canned goods and small arms...
Is this really the case in 2025? There's been more than a few self-described leftists/liberals writing about attending Trump rallies over the years and this not being their experience. One example: https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2018/09/what-i-learned...
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.
That's not going to happen with the way tech/algos are exacerbating the divide.
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.
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).
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.
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
Maybe on economic issues. On certain social issues it's definitely not "centrist" and arguably further left than other developed countries.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the left was strong in the US there would have been a contest between Hillary Clinton and an actual left wing contender like Bernie Sanders. Even people like AOC would make a decent centrist candidate in Europe.
That’s the kind of persecution they are talking, and angry, about. If that incident had not happened, Trump may never have been elected.
How about you check out the rest of the western world, where each single democracy had their own pickings with communist tendecies. And most of them handled that in the common sense way of giving workers basic protections and ensuring their share of wealth so they don't feel the need to go to the communists.
Worked pretty well for most European countries.
Although, once communism was gone, the ideology of neolibral economic thinking took over and thus all benefits to workers were seen as unnecessary expenses. Leading to the current rise in nationalism and fascism nearly everywhere.
It is pretty simple: If you want all people to carry a system, all people need to feel like they profit from its existence. Once the mask slips and people realize they aren't profiting, they will be unwilling to hold up their side of the social contract. This is what is happening right now.
Yup, and the response to from the owner class is not to uphold the social contract, but to renegotiate it.
"the whole structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration." - Sam Altman
I mean I am actually impressed by the sizeable part of the population media moguls managed to convince into a cultish devotion to lie to themselves against their own naterial interests. This is bad everywhere, but the current US has a propaganda machine that is truly astonishing, in a scary way.
The problem with that is that authoritarians have no incentive to figure out the real roots of a problem. Like a doctor that always blames it on some devil, demon, or whatnot when you go to them an authoritarian will not solve the problem, because every (real) crisis is a chance to blame the (fictional) enemy.
Has it though? It appears most of Europe is by and large a failed state collapsing under such communist-adjacent policies plus unbounded immigration. I would not want to be Europe today, so yeah, to the extent McCarthyism has been a protection against that, kudos.
the saddest part about a comment you are commenting on is that their mind has been so polluted that they only see the world through the views of two arbitrary political parties (who shift their own views every couple of decades, hard rightist from few decades ago is basically same-ish person as far-leftist today). all empires fall and USA is slowly getting there (now going “little” faster) because of thinking like this in part.
