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If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this. But it certainly looks like an
by andrewstuart2 2y ago
If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this. But it certainly looks like an authoritarian power transfer.
- scarecrowbob 2y agoI am affected by this and I didn't vote for this. It's easy to say that "the American People" voted for this, but it's not correct to say that I am personally being affected by my bad choices. I think the elections were "fair", for what its worth- I just don't agree that "fairness" makes me blame-worthy when I face the consequences of other folks actions.
- sour-taste 2y agoI 100% agree with what you said, but no one looks back and remembers the people who voted against Hitler, or says 'there were some good people in Nazi Germany'.
- aaomidi 2y agoWhat is possible though is a form of actual resistance. There is nothing forcing us to just share a union so to speak.
- generalizations 2y agoStates rights has been too closely associated in the popular mind with slavery and racism (via arguments over what the civil war was really about). It'll be tough to disassociate those enough to make a persuasive argument for secession.
- XorNot 2y agoAt the point you actually want a secession movement people aren't worried about the optics of it. It's not happening because the actual cost of secession, civil war and everything else is staggering. These are one way, permanent changes where a large number of the agitators will not live to see the better world. It's compromise, carnage and collateral damage. Doing anything else is a better option 100% of the time. Nobody's going to hear "we're seceding because we're sick of dying from lack of healthcare" and think "ooh, I wonder if it's secretly about slavery?"
- generalizations 2y agoNo, but the folks talking about it will be given labels like 'racist'...and that makes it a lot harder for them to gain traction.
- freedomben 2y agoI agree with you completely, but this gets at a debate that's been going on since the ancient days about whether democracy is actually good or not. Whether a tyrant is elected by a fair majority or inherits the throne at best (or Divine Right of Kings, whatever) makes little difference IMHO. That said, while I have criticisms for democracy and do enjoy pointing out it's imperfections when people talk about democracy as some self-evident ideal, I do think it's probably the best system of government in a sea of less than ideal choices.
- peterashford 2y agoI'd argue the problem lies less with democracy, more with the media. Democracy requires an informed populace. The success of populist politicians shows you don't have that
- rcMgD2BwE72F 2y agoI'd the cause is advertising-based business model of the media industry, then. Too few people pay for news these days. So the news aren't the product and we ended mis- and ill-informed.
- from-nibly 2y agoIf it worked it would work. If having an informed populace is required for democracy to work then it doesn't work. Especially when you ask the question, "informed about what"?
- light_hue_1 2y agoI'm tired of hearing that people aren't informed. They were informed. Trump told them that science is crap, that tariffs are good, that we should punish immigrants, that he would pardon the jan 6th people, etc. This is what people voted for and what they wanted. Hate and retribution. When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.
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- grahamj 2y agoAll eligible voters are collectively responsible for the outcome of the election. You can't be proud of democracy if you won't shoulder the blame when it renders poor outcomes.
- llamaimperative 2y agoThere's a difference between shouldering the burden of the outcome and the outcome indicating that you made bad choices.
- grahamj 2y agoI didn’t say burden and choices, I said blame and responsibility.
- llamaimperative 2y agoRight… in response to someone talking about choices.
- klipt 2y agoElon Musk found that if you throw billions at getting our low propensity rural voters you can sway the election by enough percents.
- Tostino 2y agoThat's true, but man am I mad at the Democrats for entirely abandoning that demo for decades before. It lead to this situation.
- refurb 2y agoYou’re over complicating things. You are a willing participant in the political system. You agree to live by the results of the election, even if you don’t personally agree with them. You’re not personally responsible for the results, but you are a willing participant in the system that caused them.
- scarecrowbob 2y ago"Willing" in what sense? What's my realistic alternative? Lay it on me. I didn't vote, for what it's worth. I don't think it's ethical to participate in that kind of thing. The US is 2 crimes and a real estate scam in a trench coat. When I was younger, I indeed thought that maybe it had some legitimacy, but after having read quite a lot of the history of the millions that the government here has enslaved and murdered I no longer thing it's legitimate. I understand that they have the guns and the power, but realistically I am not a willing participant in this system.
- refurb 2y ago> "Willing" in what sense? What's my realistic alternative? Lay it on me. Leave the country. I did it. > I didn't vote, for what it's worth. I don't think it's ethical to participate in that kind of thing. That's your choice. You have plenty of options. Get involved politically. Organize. Fund raise. Plenty of opportunity to affect the outcome. But you'd rather just complain about it online.
- scarecrowbob 2y agoYeah, "just colonize somewhere else" is pretty much the response that I expected. I spent last night doing a shift till 4 in the morning at a warming center for folks who don't have houses, and I've spent the last several months working on taking an off grid chunk of property to a place where I can host full families of folks to "come and play music". None of that makes the US government one bit more legitimate.
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- nickff 2y agoAuthoritarian power transfers usually involve (immediate) executions, or at least the imprisonment/exile of important people from the previous government/administration/regime, to stabilize the new regime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Political_Survival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Political_Surviva...
- tshaddox 2y agoPresumably authoritarian regimes only execute/imprison/exile dissidents if they think it's necessary to eliminate opposition. An authoritarian regime which does not think there's much of a threat to opposition probably wouldn't bother.
- aaomidi 2y agoThere is a huge cost in executions. Especially in places where they have not been super common place and super public.
- jojobas 2y agoServes to prove it's not an authoritarian regime? They know they won by not so much and are likely to lose next time, especially given Trump can't run anymore.
- groby_b 2y agoTBF, we're only on day 2. (I am 90% certain it won't come to that, but there's a 10% queasiness left that hasn't been ameliorated by the haphazard approach untethered from legality that we've seen so far)
- jayknight 2y ago"This guy is running around giving everyone pardons. The funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is he didn’t give himself a pardon. And if you look at it, it all had to do with him." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-hannity-interview-biden-pardons-b2684659.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic... I fully expect Trump to ruin Biden's final years with investigations and court cases. Maybe that's not out right execution, but Trump definitely wants revenge.
- UncleOxidant 2y agoUnfortunately, a good chunk of people who voted for him really didn't pay much attention beyond him promising to lower prices. But this is the electorate we have - a lot of them just can't be bothered with much detail as attention spans are short these days.
- travisporter 2y agoNo they listened about TikTok
- johnnyanmac 2y agofor 13 hours? I suppose we never specificied how long it had to be banned for.
- stevenwoo 2y agoI listened to and watched a lot of interviews with people who voted for Trump. They just said he didn’t mean it whenever they were confronted with quotes from Trump that obviously disagreed with their views as evidenced by earlier questions in the interviews. Or take the many Muslims in Dearborn who still claim Trump is better than Harris would be on Israel/Palestine - they refuse to believe the evidence despite action days in,(or from trumps last term) it’s not possible to argue rationally with these people. Not only are they barely paying attention, they only see and hear what they want to.
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- computerthings 2y agoIf someone clicks on "click here to update your password" in a phishing email, are they choosing what actually happens, or what they thought would happen? Even if they should have known, and could have known, I think it's objectively true that they didn't.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoit depends on the advancement of society to be honest. I wouldn't blame someone getting scammed in 2000 over a "Hot sexy singles in your area, click now!". I would 100% blame them in 2020+. I don't know how far we've come in regards to email phishing to make a call on that.
- computerthings 2y agoThe claim I'm contradicting is that they knew full well, not that they should have known.
- School-Cotton 2y ago*23% of American people voted for this.
- linsomniac 2y agoI'd put that number closer to 67%: adding in the 90M eligible voters who, you know, didn't.
- School-Cotton 2y agoHow many of those 90M were in one of the few states where your vote matters?
- linsomniac 2y agoI dunno, probably similar to how many of the 75M that did vote. I'll still stand by the point though: 23% is an unreasonable number to throw out.
- vcryan 2y agoEvery 4 years, American voters get to choose between garbage and trash.
- krapp 2y agoThis constant false equivalence between parties is part of the reason we got here. The Democrats are terrible but somehow I doubt Kamala Harris would be doing this much damage two days in. I don't think people would be wondering whether Tim Walz actually did a Nazi salute at the inauguration. It can be the case that both parties are evil, and they are, but that America still chose the greater evil.
- leesec 2y agoSo many false equivalences and assumptions in these few sentences alone lol. Why don't we wait at least a few months before deciding if their actions are evil or not.
- krapp 2y agoWhy are we suddenly pretending that Trump is an unknown quantity? We know what he's about, and we know what his agenda is. It was literally published to the public with bullet points and everything.
- sundaeofshock 2y agoTrump spent a huge amount of his time during the election disavowing Project 2025. Did people vote for a change in government? Yes, but they didn’t vote for this this theocratic authoritarian bullshit.
- wstrange 2y agoYou are telling me Trump lied? Shocked...
- johnnyanmac 2y agoYou'd think he'd do that? Go on the ~~internet~~ podium and tell lies? nevermind he never had a plan for any of the issues people voted for him on. A still vague plan on fixing inflation (spoilers: he cannot do as much to fix inflation as many think), still rough numbers on what these tarriffs are supposed to do. What else did conservatives think he was going to do... ----- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg5jdgzy1o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg5jdgzy1o ‘You want to come to America? Earn it, like I did’ well he is indeed hastening the deportation... nevermind conservatives with undocumented workers only lose from this and don't want to pay americans minimum wage. Well done. 'He invokes fear in the rest of the world’ Yeah, I guess pissing off all our friends and getting cozy with China/Russia will invoke fear. Hey, Maybe Trump is more honest than I thought. Of course, when it comes to making lives worse for the world.
- frob 2y agoIf you believed his disavowl, I've got a bridge... fuck it. Just give me your bank account number and I promise there will be $47 million in it tomorrow morning.
- krapp 2y agoTrump has been pushing theocratic authoritarian bullshit for nearly a decade. It's what Trumpism is known for. It's what his supporters are known to support. We're not doing this historical revisionism now. This is exactly what people voted for.
- a12k 2y ago
- swatcoder 2y ago> If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this. No, if you trust the election results, it's a legitimate election by defined process and there are no grounds to contest it. But "The American people voted for this" is a distinct, strong, affirmative statement that doesn't hold. The people that voted for this are the people that voted for it, and even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.
- vkou 2y agoIf this isn't what they were voting for, what did they think they were voting for? Did none of them believe that he would actually do the crazy shit he said he would? Did none of them pay attention to the insanity of his first term? I have a simpler explanation: they all know what they were voting for, and none of them give a shit. It's the same as the mob cheering and applauding the sieg heil on Monday. They know it's deplorable and unamerican and they don't care. Because the only thing that matters is that their boy will stick it to the enemy.
- sudosysgen 2y agoGiven the binary choice, much if the American people simply didn't vote. You can't present a false dichitomoty, and then act as if any downstream choice is full approval.
- vkou 2y agoThey always had the choice of not voting. The people who voted for this actively engaged and endorsed it. It strains credulity for them to claim ignorance.
- sudosysgen 2y agoPlenty of Americans chose not to vote, many others did mainly out of massive social pressure.
- paxys 2y agoLooking at history authoritarian power transfers usually start with a vote, or at least wide spread public support.
- fpgaminer 2y agoIt doesn't look like, it is. e.g. violent coup and Nazi salutes during inauguration. Are people expecting the rise of authoritarianism to look different or something? This is the exact same fascist playbook that's been run every time. I really thought WW2 would have taught humanity as a whole the lesson but apparently not.
- theGnuMe 2y agoI think we as a society forget once the previous generation is gone.
- derbOac 2y agoAmericans also voted for their US Senators and Representatives. It's funny how these discussions forget about that, which is part of the problem. It's also worth remembering how the Trump campaign consistently denied Project 2025, and ridiculed those who suggested it was their agenda. Maybe it won't go there but so far it seems to be headed in that direction, and if so actively lying about your agenda raises questions about exactly what the American electorate was voting for.
- NelsonMinar 2y agoIt's a stretch to say the American people voted for gutting our health research capabilities.
- krapp 2y agoI take it you haven't encountered the contempt that Trump supporters have for "mainstream science," particularly anything to do with biomedicine? Not even remotely a stretch. Ever since COVID they view those "health research capabilities" in the same way everyone else views the experimentation of Joseph Goebbels and Unit 731. Most of them still think Biden and Fauci cooked it up in a lab.
- pstuart 2y agoI'm not so sure about them. https://old.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/ https://old.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/
- tzs 2y agoTrump got 49.8% of the vote. 50.2% went to other candidates (48.32% Harris, 0.56% Stein, 0.49% Kennedy, 0.42% Chase, 0.42% others). If anyone is curious, here are the Presidents since the 19th century who got at least 50% of the vote: Biden Obama (both terms) Second Bush (second term) First Bush Reagan (both terms) Carter Nixon (second term) Johnson Eisenhower (both terms) Second Roosevelt (all four terms) Hoover Coolidge Harding Taft First Roosevelt McKinley The lowest since 1900 is Wilson's first term at 41.8%, followed by Clinton's first term at 43%, Nixon's first term at 43.4%, and Trump's first term at 46%. You might think that Wilson at 41.8% must have lost the popular vote but actually he beat the person with the second highest popular vote total by over 14%. That was back when the US had more than two viable parties. The vote went 41.84% to Wilson (Democrat), 27.4% to Teddy Roosevelt (Progressive), 23.17% to the incumbent Taft (Republican), 5.99% to Debs (Socialist), and the rest to a few others. Similar with Clinton's 43%. That was about 5% more than second place. That year Ross Perot running as an independent got 18.91%. Same with Nixon. His 43.42% was the biggest slice of the popular vote, followed by Humphrey at 42.72%. George Wallace running for the American Independent party got 13.53%.
- UltraSane 2y agoThe media has been sane washing Trump for the last 9 years. If Trump had been treated like the joke he has always been he wouldn't have been elected.