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Crazy how effective at making everything worse this admin has been.
by mrbombastic 7mo ago
Crazy how effective at making everything worse this admin has been.
- arvid-lind 7mo agoThat's the strategy of Project 2025, make all the nice things we have much worse and broken so there's no choice but to scrap and start over. While they're in charge, of course.
- MengerSponge 7mo agoShowing that government doesn't work by making sure government doesn't work.
- fundad 7mo agoProject 2025 and the Trump administration is the most success ant-growth movements have ever had.
- xnx 7mo agoHorseshoe theory
- stackghost 7mo agoTrump is but a symptom of an underlying sickness. Things won't magically go back to normal after he dies.
- malfist 7mo agoDid someone say they would?
- greenavocado 7mo agoMost people think Trump is the lynchpin, when in fact, its his masters that decide what happens next.
- stuaxo 7mo agoIt would delay things, he has a "charisma" that his followers look like. But it's true he is a symptom.
- greenavocado 7mo agoHe is not a symptom he is an actor that is playing a part in a script. He is manipulated, bullied, and blackmailed into submission.
- andrewflnr 7mo agoEven if he was, a lot of things have been destroyed that will take a lot longer to rebuild. Notably, trust.
- lyu07282 7mo agoMany liberal people think he is an abberation, they would gladly return back to "normal". The point is, he is a symptom of a larger unaddressed sickness, there is no return to business as usual, it will only return far worse. To prompt with something more specific: there is a possibility of a Gavin Newsom vs. Tucker Carlson in 2028, it's crucial to understand why Tucker might win and why he would be ten times worse than Trump.
- michaelhoney 7mo agoIt will be a lot harder to convince voters when he's gone... if the US still has elections
- nozzlegear 7mo agoWhy wouldn't it?
- CamperBob2 7mo agoTrump has assured us there will be no need for them. I believe him. He lies a lot, but not about his own ambitions.
- majormajor 7mo agoVery few other people have Trump's ability to channel frustration in a nonspecific-but-charismatic way that connects the various extreme factions of the American right. None of those factions will be gone, but their battles will weaken their cause more than they have since 2016. Some of this can be seen by how even his own popularity falls any time he actually has power, since there are no effective ideas there, only misplaced blame, and that doesn't sustain support for four years. Without him there at all in an out-of-power period, the "blame the Jews"/"blame the brown people"/"blame the women"/"blame the baby-killers"/"blame the anti-Semites"/"blame the sexual deviants" factions will likely fail to find another person they all rally around.
- goosejuice 7mo agoThe extreme factions of the right are a very small portion of the electorate. They generally don't decide elections beyond the primaries and generally turn out in favor of the right regardless. Dems lean more on moderates/independents. Trump won because he persuaded that group, particularly the young men. https://www.thirdway.org/memo/why-republicans-can-win-with-their-base-but-democrats-cant https://www.thirdway.org/memo/why-republicans-can-win-with-t...
- fakedang 7mo ago25-33% of the electorate is no small fraction. There's a group of people who have been consistently supportive of this government's policies since 2016. Take any policy survey, and the fraction that supports the right-wing side of action always amounts to a consistent 25-33% of the votes.
- goosejuice 7mo agoYou're going to have to define extreme right with those percentages. You think 25-33% of the electorate is extreme right?
- fakedang 7mo ago
- jb827 7mo agoAmerica has neglected working class people for decades. The economy has shifted from supporting earning income to make a decent living, to protecting assets (bail outs etc.) Trump tapped into this and tricked these people into electing him, bringing along right wing or whatever they are.. and they got hold of power. Don't think numbers are there for this culture war crowd to stay in power unless they hitch a ride with someone. (edited: typo)
- JeremyNT 7mo agoHaving somebody less incompetent, senile, and corrupt at the helm may not make things "magically go back to normal," but it's a step in the right direction. Necessary but not sufficient. Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
- stackghost 7mo ago>Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive? It's that a significant number of Americans are mean, selfish, racist, arrogant, and delight in the victimization of those they perceive as belonging to an outgroup. 2/3 of your electorate either voted for him (meaning they liked what they saw) or were sufficiently unbothered by him to not vote (meaning they were more or less okay with Trump). These crocodile tears about how "we were bamboozled" are just that. It was plainly obvious to the rest of us looking in from outside, even before his first term but certainly after, that he was exactly the person he is now, and fully two thirds of American voters accepted this.
- LeChuck 7mo agoHas been the case for decades: http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/ http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/ >The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.” >But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.
- morkalork 7mo agoToday is MAGA, yesterday it was the "Tea Party" faction, before that it was something else, and tomorrow there will be another. Every time there's a cycle of fringe-right blowing up in popularity, pushing an agenda and flaming out, it's still the same people they're appealing to who are voting for them.
- nozzlegear 7mo agoCould you enlighten the class as to what you believe the underlying sickness is?
- elromulous 7mo agoAgreed. But also why are you speaking like Yoda?
- encrypted_bird 7mo agoThey're not; they're speaking colloquially: this is the word "It's" omitted from the beginning. --- *EDIT*: Corrected word. Lol.
- daemonologist 7mo ago"It's," perhaps?
- encrypted_bird 7mo agoYeah, nope, you're right. Not sure why my brain thought "The". Haha. I blame on the roughlu 2½ hours of sleep I got last night. Yay insomnia!
- rdiddly 7mo agoThat's not what made it sound like Yoda. It was sticking "has been" at the end, and I agree there was a better choice stylistically: "Crazy how effective this admin has been at making everything worse."
- mrbombastic 7mo agoDidn’t even strike me as weird phrasing. Or rather: strike me as weird phrasing it did not.
- JPKab 7mo ago[flagged]
- mrbombastic 7mo agoYou certainly built a large strawman out of one sentence.
- jghn 7mo agoI honestly thought you were talking about the US in your first paragraph.
- JPKab 7mo ago[flagged]
- awnird 7mo agoIsrael has killed more civilians than Russia and Iran combined. I don’t think your concern for civilian casualties is genuine.
- jghn 7mo agoI did assume you were being hyperbolic when writing it, but yes. I would think that anyone looking at the state of the US right now may see "A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes" as referring to it. Totalitarian: hyperbolic, but the state of the executive branch over the last couple of decades is moving things in that direction. And clearly one could say this to make a point. Theocratic: A slight stretch, but mostly yes. Long range ballistic missiles: check Nukes: check
- keybored 7mo agoThe kind of whacky religiousness that you find in the US matters because of foreign policy, among other things. (There are also domestic things like right to abortion.) The US ambassador to Israel is a Zionist that talks about the Bible with Tucker Carlson as if should have any policy weight, because he believes so. There are other (Republican) politicians that say something like the US having a Biblical responsibility to support Israel. > The narcissism of small differences on full display here. And what is your pose, here? The selfishness of implicitly dismissing the foreign policy implications of American religious n*jobs because you don’t live in the affected countries?