7 ms·

Because half of American voters want fascism.

by AtlasBarfed 1y ago

righthand 1y ago
Not even close to half.
- animitronix 1y ago
  Yeah well maybe the rest should get off their ass and vote then chief
  - wat10000 1y ago
    A third are for it. A third are against it. A third just don’t care.
  - righthand 1y ago
    Yes that’s a valid emotional criticism, I’m more worried about normalizing authoritarianism and fascism by saying “half support it”. We’re already sliding down because we’re lazy privileged Americans. IMO, stating that half agree signals an okayed complacency. There are emotions (half support) and then reality (less than 30% of Americans). The emotions got us into this mess about misdemeanors at the federal level. The authoritarians want you to say: “50% of people love this, give up already.” When the truth is that 28% of people voted for Trump in 2024. He has lost a percentage of that support through his actions since January. Don’t help them normalize this through emotion. Say it’s “half” is negotiating with fascists.
- whoooboyy 1y ago
  Note the parent said "voters" not people. Of the people who voted, yes, nearly half voted for this. You are correct it's a small minority of the populace, but not of voters.
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
Are there really that many unbelievably stupid people?
- spencerflem 1y ago
  Some of them are unbelievably cruel
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Probably the most horrible thing I heard this year: “I’m ready to watch people burn now.”
- animitronix 1y ago
  Yup!
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  This is what abolishing knowledge tests for voting caused. It was an unintended consequence of a necessary reform.
  - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
    As I recall, those knowledge tests were specifically designed to prevent black people voting. Unfortunately, the USA seems to be regressing to a system whereby only rich white men would be able to vote (and only if they're going to vote for the fascists).
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 Evidence suggests that about 30% of people will accept being worse off in order to inflict a greater loss on someone else. They form a plurality, with the other groups being win-win types (~20%), loss-averse pessimists (~20%), selfless volunteers (~15%), and inconsistent folks who may be confused (~15%). Now this is just empirical observation rather than proof, but it's a good quality observation, enough that it has heuristic value. If you admit the possibility that about 1/3 of people are mean, then an awful lot of ongoing political phenomena become much easier to understand.
mothballed 1y ago
Democrats threw the election by telling their primary voters party base to go fuck themselves and instead just jammed through an unpopular candidate (even in her home state) at the 11th hour.
- wat10000 1y ago
  I really enjoy the American political dynamic where Democrats are the only ones considered to have any agency. If Democrats do it, it’s Democrats’ fault. If Republicans do it, it’s Democrats’ fault for provoking them or not doing enough to stop them. Nothing is ever the responsibility of the people who cast their votes for Trump.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    The Democratic party selects the Democrat candidate in a two-party system. It can be argued as shared fault. By, without vote/primary, unilaterally selecting a candidate to go on the ballot an unelected bureaucracy jammed up the election. Unfortunately in USA, it doesn't work how you propose, whether you appear on ballot is only up to democratic choice if there are primaries, if not an unelected bureaucracy selects the people that actually go on the ballot and due to dynamics of our voting system virtually ensure those will be the options. In most states you basically have Democrat, Republican, maybe Libertarian party nominated candidate on the ballot and that is it. Writing in is throwing your vote. I would argue we probably could fix this with write-in only and some sort of ranked voting kind of system or similar, but as it stands a large part of the election process is vulnerable to anti-democratic processes and this played out in Trump's favor last election.
    - wat10000 1y ago
      This boils down to: Democrats didn’t provide a good enough alternative. Which I will completely accept as true. They didn’t. From here, there are two branching paths. Did the Democrats put up someone who was actually worse than Trump? As in, are we better off than if the November election had gone the other way? Or did the Democrats have a better candidate who just wasn’t better enough to win? (Fully understanding that this is a very subjective question.) It’s my firm opinion that it’s the second one. Harris would have been a better President. (So would Jeb! Bush, Mitt Romney, the festering corpse of Richard Nixon, or a frog snatched out of the Tidal Basin.) In which case, giving Democrats any blame for the outcome requires the people who voted for the actual winner to have no agency. They were presented with a choice and they selected the worse one. That’s entirely on them.
danaris 1y ago
This is unhelpfully reductive. First of all, it's misleading in its categorization: "half of people who voted in the last election" is not the same as "half of all eligible voters". Second of all, a lot of the people who voted for Trump do not meaningfully "want fascism". Some do—no question about that! And, unfortunately, some who didn't before have rationalized themselves into wanting it now in order to self-justify their decision to vote for him. But many of them are low-information voters who genuinely do not understand what is going on, and fall into one (or more) of a few categories: - People who have always voted Republican, because their parents always voted Republican, and that's just The Way Things Are. - People who have been brainwashed by constant propaganda from Fox News over the past 30 years telling them that Democrats are Evil. - People who have poor to no civics education, have seen their economic situation slide slowly downward over the last few decades (or fall off a cliff, eg in 2008), and have heard the various Republican candidates telling them, over and over, "Just vote for us! We will solve all your problems. You don't have to worry about how!" (or "...by punishing the evil Others who are the cause of every ill in this country", depending on how racist they're already primed to be) None of that requires "wanting fascism". And I can tell you, from personal experience, that there are still people out there—left, right, and center—who genuinely do not know what is going on. They don't watch the news. They just try to get by. They have no idea that ICE is abducting citizens off the streets, that Trump has shattered the executive branch institutions that actually run this country, or that the Supreme Court has said that Trump can do whatever the hell he likes. If you want to be able to fix a problem, you have to understand it in all its nuance, and just dismissing tens of millions of people as "eh, they all wanted fascism; guess there's no possible way to reach them, then" is the wrong problem definition.
- dfedbeef 1y ago
  Not to be an asshole, this will not get fixed. It doesn't matter how reductive people are, helpfully or otherwise. The fascist cat is out of the bag.
  - danaris 1y ago
    Oh, well, then I guess we should all just give up and deepthroat the boot, right? Don't be absurd. Fascism rose in Germany, and was defeated. Fascism rose in Spain, and Italy, and was defeated. We can defeat fascism too. We will defeat fascism too. It'll just be harder if more people think like you.

Because half of American voters want fascism.

righthand 1y ago

Not even close to half.

animitronix 1y ago
Yeah well maybe the rest should get off their ass and vote then chief
- wat10000 1y ago
  A third are for it. A third are against it. A third just don’t care.
- righthand 1y ago
  Yes that’s a valid emotional criticism, I’m more worried about normalizing authoritarianism and fascism by saying “half support it”. We’re already sliding down because we’re lazy privileged Americans. IMO, stating that half agree signals an okayed complacency. There are emotions (half support) and then reality (less than 30% of Americans). The emotions got us into this mess about misdemeanors at the federal level. The authoritarians want you to say: “50% of people love this, give up already.” When the truth is that 28% of people voted for Trump in 2024. He has lost a percentage of that support through his actions since January. Don’t help them normalize this through emotion. Say it’s “half” is negotiating with fascists.
whoooboyy 1y ago
Note the parent said "voters" not people. Of the people who voted, yes, nearly half voted for this. You are correct it's a small minority of the populace, but not of voters.

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago

Are there really that many unbelievably stupid people?

spencerflem 1y ago
Some of them are unbelievably cruel
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Probably the most horrible thing I heard this year: “I’m ready to watch people burn now.”
animitronix 1y ago
Yup!
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
This is what abolishing knowledge tests for voting caused. It was an unintended consequence of a necessary reform.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  As I recall, those knowledge tests were specifically designed to prevent black people voting. Unfortunately, the USA seems to be regressing to a system whereby only rich white men would be able to vote (and only if they're going to vote for the fascists).
anigbrowl 1y ago
Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 Evidence suggests that about 30% of people will accept being worse off in order to inflict a greater loss on someone else. They form a plurality, with the other groups being win-win types (~20%), loss-averse pessimists (~20%), selfless volunteers (~15%), and inconsistent folks who may be confused (~15%). Now this is just empirical observation rather than proof, but it's a good quality observation, enough that it has heuristic value. If you admit the possibility that about 1/3 of people are mean, then an awful lot of ongoing political phenomena become much easier to understand.

mothballed 1y ago

Democrats threw the election by telling their primary voters party base to go fuck themselves and instead just jammed through an unpopular candidate (even in her home state) at the 11th hour.

wat10000 1y ago
I really enjoy the American political dynamic where Democrats are the only ones considered to have any agency. If Democrats do it, it’s Democrats’ fault. If Republicans do it, it’s Democrats’ fault for provoking them or not doing enough to stop them. Nothing is ever the responsibility of the people who cast their votes for Trump.
- mothballed 1y ago
  The Democratic party selects the Democrat candidate in a two-party system. It can be argued as shared fault. By, without vote/primary, unilaterally selecting a candidate to go on the ballot an unelected bureaucracy jammed up the election. Unfortunately in USA, it doesn't work how you propose, whether you appear on ballot is only up to democratic choice if there are primaries, if not an unelected bureaucracy selects the people that actually go on the ballot and due to dynamics of our voting system virtually ensure those will be the options. In most states you basically have Democrat, Republican, maybe Libertarian party nominated candidate on the ballot and that is it. Writing in is throwing your vote. I would argue we probably could fix this with write-in only and some sort of ranked voting kind of system or similar, but as it stands a large part of the election process is vulnerable to anti-democratic processes and this played out in Trump's favor last election.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    This boils down to: Democrats didn’t provide a good enough alternative. Which I will completely accept as true. They didn’t. From here, there are two branching paths. Did the Democrats put up someone who was actually worse than Trump? As in, are we better off than if the November election had gone the other way? Or did the Democrats have a better candidate who just wasn’t better enough to win? (Fully understanding that this is a very subjective question.) It’s my firm opinion that it’s the second one. Harris would have been a better President. (So would Jeb! Bush, Mitt Romney, the festering corpse of Richard Nixon, or a frog snatched out of the Tidal Basin.) In which case, giving Democrats any blame for the outcome requires the people who voted for the actual winner to have no agency. They were presented with a choice and they selected the worse one. That’s entirely on them.

danaris 1y ago

This is unhelpfully reductive. First of all, it's misleading in its categorization: "half of people who voted in the last election" is not the same as "half of all eligible voters". Second of all, a lot of the people who voted for Trump do not meaningfully "want fascism". Some do—no question about that! And, unfortunately, some who didn't before have rationalized themselves into wanting it now in order to self-justify their decision to vote for him. But many of them are low-information voters who genuinely do not understand what is going on, and fall into one (or more) of a few categories: - People who have always voted Republican, because their parents always voted Republican, and that's just The Way Things Are. - People who have been brainwashed by constant propaganda from Fox News over the past 30 years telling them that Democrats are Evil. - People who have poor to no civics education, have seen their economic situation slide slowly downward over the last few decades (or fall off a cliff, eg in 2008), and have heard the various Republican candidates telling them, over and over, "Just vote for us! We will solve all your problems. You don't have to worry about how!" (or "...by punishing the evil Others who are the cause of every ill in this country", depending on how racist they're already primed to be) None of that requires "wanting fascism". And I can tell you, from personal experience, that there are still people out there—left, right, and center—who genuinely do not know what is going on. They don't watch the news. They just try to get by. They have no idea that ICE is abducting citizens off the streets, that Trump has shattered the executive branch institutions that actually run this country, or that the Supreme Court has said that Trump can do whatever the hell he likes. If you want to be able to fix a problem, you have to understand it in all its nuance, and just dismissing tens of millions of people as "eh, they all wanted fascism; guess there's no possible way to reach them, then" is the wrong problem definition.

dfedbeef 1y ago
Not to be an asshole, this will not get fixed. It doesn't matter how reductive people are, helpfully or otherwise. The fascist cat is out of the bag.
- danaris 1y ago
  Oh, well, then I guess we should all just give up and deepthroat the boot, right? Don't be absurd. Fascism rose in Germany, and was defeated. Fascism rose in Spain, and Italy, and was defeated. We can defeat fascism too. We will defeat fascism too. It'll just be harder if more people think like you.