It’s not like any candidate was actually good but they did pick the worst one.
It's funny, they say fascism happens in slow motion and no one expects it to actually happen until it's to late.
I really feel like we're watching it happen in America.
Everyone's laughing at Trump's stupidity while the systems to stop fascism are slowly destroyed behind the scenes.
Feels like he's just a distraction from what's actually happening.
No one's laughing at trump's shit anymore. Anyone with at least a lukewarm iq and even a cursory knowledge of history can see his fascism. It's just the system is rigged to give regressive areas more voting power
You don't even need any of that, he explicitly told everyone that he's gonna be a dictator
I keep saying it, but no one wants to join my radical and poorly regulated militia so this will be everyone else's fault.
my radical and poorly regulated militia
Talk about fighting fire with fire!
It does happen in slow motion, and every single time, some people see it happening. They march and wave their arms shouting FASCISM! whilst their neighbours call them hyperbolic.
If you read contemporaneous accounts, you can feel the frustration.
Or… I thought I could feel the frustration, until recently (eta: if you haven’t read They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, please do as soon as possible). Now it’s doubly frustrating. I keep wracking my brain, wondering what I can do that they didn’t. I can’t stop this, so I keep saying ‘if you were a German in the 1930s, knowing what you know now, what would you do?’
I don’t know the answer to that. I know many Germans saw it coming and couldn’t stop it.
What the fuck can we do? Because it is absolutely coming.
e: oh, and worse, trump isn’t actually the problem. He’ll likely lose, then everyone will high five that we’ve defeated The Problem, but Trump is just their carnival barker. He could die tomorrow and the threat wouldn’t change. There’s a solid fascist movement in the US and elsewhere that will not stop with trump’s defeat. There are thousands of them in high levels of the US government , and they’ll barely miss a beat without trump. He barely matters, and I’m afraid when he loses, the fascist movement behind this will find a wide opening.
I keep wracking my brain, wondering what I can do that they didn’t
These internal questions are what led to me finally realizing how powerless I really am. I can't even convince my close personal friends to re-evaluate the batshit crazy things they learn online, let alone change the trajectory of a nation.
Yup, not to say that my country is doing much better or anything, but looking over at the USA it's almost comical how extremely clear their decline into fascism and decay is. It'd almost be funny if it weren't so serious.
Unfortunately it's not hard to see a future where the rest of the world have to fight a war against some future form of christiofascist white supremacist USA.
Not next year or the year after of course, but within my lifetime for sure. People forget how quickly some nations go from progressive and democratic to straight up Third Reich.
It takes a shockingly short amount of time once the slow burn has laid the ground work over the initial decades. The slow burn we're watching now.
Yeah but this slow burn is already like ten years old. The fascists demand retribution for us daring to elect Obama. As soon as they saw the light at the end of that tunnel, they said never again.
If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy. (David Frum)
It's too late.
Fascism isn't something on the horizon. Look at what is happening in Idaho. Within a year or two half of the US states will have criminalized abortion, and all you hear from federal legislators is how important it is that we shovel more money we don't have into other countries' wars.
It's over.
The only power you or I have left is in our immediate local communities, where you can still accomplish the general good.
I got banned from a web forum in 2015 for calling Trump a fascist. This shit should not have been any sort of surprise to anybody paying attention.
They're not even bothering with destroying things behind the scenes. They're doing it right out in the open, because nobody has the teeth and cajones to stop them.
Lol pick a candidate that is likely going to be in prison come election time! Geniuses!
Most of the people I know who plan to vote for him think of that as a good thing. It's the whole "drain the swamp" thing that he's been rallying people behind for years; they think bad actors in the government are trying to hold Trump down, and him being in jail is just another attempt to do that - from their perspective, electing him even while he's imprisoned would be a big "fuck you" to those bad actors.
It's sad that they can't see that Trump himself is the bad actor, but to most of them, Trump is their last hope to hold on to their beloved world of racism and misogyny, free of any "woke bullshit." They'll overlook anything he says or does at this point, since they don't see any other way forward than through Trump.
Yeah right. If he wins, he's free. Shame on the justice department for not completing a single trial in FOUR FUCKING YEARS. Have they even started any of them? No way any of them are wrapped up before the election. The wheels of justice turn slowly. Yeah, yadda yadda yadda. They're barely turning at all against this fat fucking loser.
His lawyers have run out pretty much every option to delay trials, although several judges have seemed pretty damn complicit as well. I get wanting to make sure the case is as airtight as possible, but...the people they're worried about pissing off with a case that isn't entirely formed, were just going to be pissed off anyway.
There is almost no chance they are gonna lock him up. He could openly murder someone with his own hands, on stage, and he would still be able to run in the elections.
Haven’t you heard? He’s the second coming of Christ and his cross is the US legal system.
e: link
Isn't the point of "conservatives" to tear everything down? Because then they just elected the right man for that.
That's an accelerationist or a nihilist. If the status quo is pro-immigration and pro-LGBT rights, wanting to keep this status quo will make you a "conservative" because you want to conserve the status quo.
People love to harp about the good ole days
They're reactionaries.
"Conservatives" haven't wanted to conserve anything in a very long time. They want to prop up the rich with government subsidies, hurt the poor, control the women, and hopefully kill some sick people along the way. That's a damned far sight from conserving traditional American values.
The thing they want to conserve is a hierarchical society defined by wealth and privilege
The problem is I actually see Trump winning by breaking every system in the process and the ramifications will be, well, bad
Massive Coronary 2024.
The only sane choice.
Someone strapping on a suicide vest would be a more appropriate image.
Yeah, it's not just his supporters who will get hurt if he gets power again
If the media didn’t want him to win, they shouldn’t have called the race before even 10% of the state got a chance to vote. There’s going to be hundreds, possibly thousands of people who left caucuses early when they heard the race was called. The media is not only complicit in his win there, they have also exposed themselves to retaliation from campaigns and voters alike.
History. Since 1972, the Iowa caucuses have had a 55% success rate at predicting which Democrat, and a 43% success rate at predicting which Republican, will go on to win the nomination of their political party for president at that party's national convention. Source: Wiki
DeSantis is a much worse choice than trump. I would take trump over him any day of the week.
Desantis has the veneer of sanity, and actually has a clue regarding how to make things worse. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Trump just flails about and expects underlings to figure it out.
My only hope is that people as morally insane as Trump are rare, and there may be a correlation between his sociopathic traits, and how seemingly incompetent he is.
What this hopefully means in practice is that even though this time around he will surround himself with yes-men over which he will have more control, few of them will be precisely like Trump and so not immune to actual concern for the future, and to Trump's surprise will not all follow his insane ideas without question, as Trump clearly wants everyone to do. He can't rule on his own. He does need some people, and people needing people requires at least a semblance of regard for others.
In this same way, even his stacked Supreme Court I think will still be likely to put America itself ahead of Trump and a victory that would make a mockery of their own institution, the constitution, and just general common sense.
It's only a shred of hope, but one which might enable civil society to survive another Trump presidency, and if we're really lucky, avoid it.