I’m only 20 years old, I’ve never voted or even really bothered paying attention to any other election, and I dunno it kinda feels like I started on one that was really crazy? But I’m not sure maybe every election has been insane and I just didn’t know because I wasn’t paying attention.
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No, they’ve been getting progressively crazier since 2016.
2000 was fairly divisive, it went to the Supreme Court after all. But it wasn’t even a fraction this dramatic, people mostly shrugged and figured GWB would be like his father, which was unfortunate, but sane at any rate. Nobody was really predicting 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.
2004 was pretty dull. John Kerry challenged GWB but felt sort of like an empty suit.
2008 was nice, Obama was a strong and exciting candidate vs the very known quantity of McCain, who was a moderate repub known for bipartisanship. Sarah Palin provided for hours of entertaining impersonations by people like Tina Fey, but since she was the VP candidate nobody really cared.
2012 was dull. Romney was a strong candidate, another moderate repub. But Obama was fine, he hadn’t broken the country or anything. Brought us out of a recession, even if people were upset about bank bailouts and stuff. Lot of people got health insurance.
Then it starts getting spicy.
And it should be said - politics should not be spicy. It should be boring. Just like investing, if things are getting too exciting you are not investing in the future - you are gambling.
“Obama was fine” ???
Did you not see his tan suit? The humanity…
Yes, he took all our guns, too. Look, there’s none to be found anywhere.
I actually feel a lot like I did in 2004. I felt sure that Bush’s lousy wars would be his undoing. Then people signed up for more of him and I realized “Oh, he isn’t the problem. It’s the electorate.”
You can say with hindsight that we shouldn’t be surprised, blah blah, but the truth is that a couple of days ago, most of us were saying “there’s no way people would actually RE elect this criminal, crazed, orange clown!”
And here we are. He could take a bullet tomorrow and we’d still share a country with all these deplorable people. Hilary took shit for using that word but she’s a smart lady and didn’t stutter.
I kind of understand Bush vs Kerry. Bush had a vision. It was a crazy neocon vision, but it was a vision and he used it to communicate effectively enough that we still occasionally meme about bombing people into freedom.
Obama had a clear vision, and communicated it well. Hope, prosperity for the middle class, international leadership. Biden had a vision, a less divisive America where we came together and worked on overdue problems. Hilary didn’t really, nor did Kerry or Gore. They were more policy administrator types who focused on specific policies and administration, and the idea of incremental improvement just didn’t resonate with people.
Trump, for all his failings, does have a vision he is capable of communicating to the American people. Harris did too, better than Hilary anyway, but it didn’t really come online until fairly late into the campaign and stayed a little too nebulous. I do think she was hurt in this regard by getting such a short campaign with no real prep time, she was evolving in the right direction.
I think we need a Bernie or AOC, someone with a powerful vision and ability to clearly communicate it, to the point of literally cudgeling people over the head with it. And we need to vote them in during the primary, over any competent administrator types, despite the fact that we are fully aware of how effective and necessary those policy administrators can be. Our valuing of them is a place where we’re out of touch with the broader American electorate though.
edit: MLK Jr was good at this. He had a dream, and it was a simple one that any person could visualize in their head. It didn’t require any policy expertise to understand it. We need that.
Not even close. This was a turning point election.
This election determined that we will live with an ultra conservative Supreme Court for the rest of our lives. In just the last couple years that court has removed women’s federally protected right to bodily autonomy and determined that presidents are above the law and can’t be held accountable for anything they do while in office. Decisions like that will continue for the remainder of our lives and chip away at our nation as we once knew it.
Trump’s administration ran on making fundamental changes to our government, including deconstructing the department of education. He promised to make an anti-vaxxer the head of the department of health. Ukraine will cease to exist. Palestine will cease to exist. Russia will expand their borders and threaten Europe. America will lose allies. NATO will be weakened.
We made a criminal who failed his last term as president by every conceivable metric and illegally attempted to overturn an election the most powerful figure on the planet. He will fill all positions with unqualified toadies, just like he did last time when he had the highest White House turnover rate in US history.
What Americans just did was change the political order we will be living under for the foreseeable future. And no one will suffer more for that than your generation.
We categorically failed you and the decline we are about to experience could last a generation and the suffering is currently unquantifiable. The decision we just made will change the world we live in in a negative way we can’t fully fathom yet.
The remainder of your life just got a whole lot harder and I’m sorry. I did not vote for it to be this way.
In former times if one candidate had promised to overthrow the entire system and abolish elections and democracy, then nobody would have voted for that clown.
It just goes to show how little faith people have in the system. They’d rather destroy it all just to see if something better comes out. Morons don’t recognize that the game is rigged. Unless nuclear war breaks out, it will just keep getting worse.
I started paying attention in 2000, even though I didn’t really understand it and couldn’t vote, however my first voting election was 2004 and I remember being disappointed when John Kerry lost to Bush, who had already gotten us involved in two wars that would cost trillions of dollars.
My experience has been that Republican administrations tend to be rife with corruption, cut taxes for rich people and run up the deficit.
Eventually, people get sick of the moral decay and tanking economic prospects and put a democrat back in, who tries to undo all the damage, but is blocked most of the time by Republicans in Congress acting in bad faith.
Then, the right wing media environment drums up a load of fear about immigrants and actual lies about the economy to get everyone voting for a Republican again.
That’s the cycle, except the Republican media ecosystem gets more extreme over time, and so do the candidates.
It didn’t used to be, but I’m guessing this is how it’ll be from now on. It used to be a pretty mundane activity, and people could even agree to disagree. When I was your age I remember asking friends who they voted for, and those conversations would go something like this
Friend 1: Who did you vote for?
Friend 2: So-and-so
Friend 3: haha, that guy is an idiot! You’re so stupid
Friend 2: lol, yeah maybe
Friend 1: whatever, let’s go find a party
And it wouldn’t really change much. Now everything after friend 2 would be full of hatred, people disowning each other, and outright vitriol. If we can’t even talk to our friends about this stuff, how the hell are we going to talk to people who we completely disagree with that we don’t know? Of course it’s been engineered to be like this now. This isn’t people changing of their own accord. This is intentionally manufactured division and strife to keep people fighting amongst each other while the billionaires pick everyone’s pockets, and the fascists consolidate power. It’s not going to go back to the way it was without significant activism and hardship.
No. This is extremely abnormal. I grew up in the 80s and elections were boring. Something happened in 2000, where Al Gore should have won but Bush was favored in court. That was the start of a sense of wrongness with our political system, that has manifested into what we have today.
Not even a little bit.
And you’re probably not gonna get a point of comparison, because it’s looking likely to be one party rule by the absolute shittiest american embarrassments forever at this point. At least until America does some stupid shit globally and gets themselves invaded by a united band of good guys down the road.
Would take China and/or India in that case. Europe and Canada don’t have the population, Mexico probably doesn’t the will.
Mexico probably doesn’t the will.
Yup, we do not. We have enough problems at home created or perpetuated by Americans like gun violence, organized crime and now gentrification on top of everything else. Good luck.
Well I doubt the orange cares about deporting people to the correct country so you might get more problems…sorry.
China definitely aren’t the good guys.
There are no good guys. That said no I don’t want to be under the Chinese surveillance state especially as a non-chinese. India also not great at the moment though. Those are just the two main countries with the population and domestic production capacity to potentially go toe to toe with the American military, probably still need some help from Europe…our military is so damn bloated.
2012 was what felt like a more normal election where the candidates respected each other and it played out a lot more typically. (Same for 2008). Trump changed that up and it’ll possibly stay that way going forward.
Certainly, at the presidential level, however I recall Congress having a bunch of “tea party” nut jobs elected that shut down the government over the passage of Obamacare.
I think most elections would have been as if a Kamala Harris ran against another Kamala Harris. In other words, two normal politicians so that the result wasn’t perceived as much of a difference who one. Also, in the past if a politician said things like, “you won’t have to vote again” or called the opponent names, he would have been shredded in the media and probably lost the election due to scandal. I mean a felon has never run for president before. Trump just somehow has different rules.
No, they have been getting extra crazy lately.
It’s usually between someone you kinda don’t like and someone you kinda like, so the stakes are lower. This year we had to choose between The Antichrist and Some Boring Lady, but this country hates women 🤷♂️
No
In my experience mostly yeah. Except my first one, 2012 was a glorious election
2000 was bugfuck insane.
If blue still has any branch of government then this might have been a nothing burger. Yeah, we’d be set back 10 years but nothing unfixable.
Trump has absolutely no checks on his whims. Even the supreme Court is in lockstep. He could make it illegal to not be orange on day one and actually enforce it. Not everywhere equally, since blue states still exist. But we’ll see if trump doesn’t use military force on them.
A whole lot of “not state rights” are coming
