politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
He's a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that's the crux of it.
Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to "small government" and "traditional values") lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Well, Trump was the first one who didn't talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn't a politician, and that's a great thing because (as they'd all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, "hey, he's lying to you!" The voters' response was, "yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!"
He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he's exactly like them but he doesn't give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It's the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that'll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don't care about the democratic institutions he's destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.
Note: I don't personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it's a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I'm just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he's so weirdly transcendent to them. He's a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.
Except he didn't fight for them and he lied constantly about fighting for them with no results.
And dementedly burning down everything one sees and grabbing pussies doesn't make one "a fighter" - just a narcissistic asshole criminal.
Hooray what a hero.
Even if I grant all the arguments are true for the sake of discussion, the fact that they've seen how incompetent and ridiculously stupid he is for FOUR YEARS not to mention he tried to destroy their fucking government and they're all "yay we upset city people" Okay Granpa Jones but that makes you objectively a complete fucking asshole moron and your continued support of this rapist fraud criminal is not helping you in any way at any level. Try again. Got someone smart? Articulate? Anyone? We're open - any age, any gender, any race - anyone? No? This guy huh. He's your guy is he. Yeah.
That's what we thought.
But they didn't see who he was. Their news media fed them a different story about liberals getting in his way and the immigrants making things worse and the government not letting him fix things. It's all the "lazy" city people voting for big government handouts that's making the world worse.
Anything he''s accused of is just liberal politics and a hoax.
Yeah it does.
Like, by definition. He fights.
It's not about facts though. They didn't logically choose to support him based on facts, figures, and results. It's all feelings.
Perception is reality
It's a good explanation. And it confirms the core nihilism motivating these voters. "Burn it all down" is an abdication of responsibility and self-infantilizing by forcing that responsibility on everyone else.
Their frustration and motivation, while I can understand it, is an insult to those of us continuing to keep it together as they make everything worse.
Left wing doomers and "revolutionaries": sweats profusely
Wasn't the first, Ross Perot had a huge following here in rural Utah for that very reason.
Well said.
If only there was a group of people who told us neoliberalism and NAFTA would be disastrous!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests
https://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/testimonies/comesatime.htm
Interesting reflection in today's world where we keep getting told that the current administration has done great for the economy, and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.
There's an also an interesting linguistic difference that is very noticeable between this movement and today's repercussions of the inaction that followed. While in English we often speak of "anti-globalization" in French they say "alter-mondialisation". A different globalization instead of against globalization. The French term much better described the left wing movement of the time, while the media only spoke of anti-globalization which now became a calling cry of the right.
Fun fact, a Twitter was originally conceptualized as a result of the 1999 protests^1 due to the difficulties and successes people on the streets had with coordinating via SMS (which at the time was rather new and novel).
Anyhow, I guess we should all vote for the neoliberal again, surely that will fix it!
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3485447.3512282
I mean, you're not wrong. I think Trump's ascendancy represents the collapse of the neoliberal consensus of the late 20th century. Where we go from here is anyone's guess, but the fact that both the left and right are screaming about the evils of neoliberalism means that there's now a bipartisan coalition willing to dismantle the institutions that arose out of that consensus. It's a loose coalition, to be sure, and each wing is arguing for fundamentally different futures, but they're still targeting the same players, and new economic models are now en vogue and within the realm of possibility. Just sucks that one of them is outright fascism.
The two also have been fundamental in establishing those policies.
Reganomics/Thatcherism is just as much to blame.
I'm actually go with "you are wrong". Under Biden, the wealth gap has grown in absolute dollars, but only because the wealthy had so much more to start with. Lower income families saw much higher percentage growth in wealth and income. Mathematically, it will take a long time for lower income families to catch up, but this is a good trend.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2024/feb/us-wealth-inequality-widespread-gains-gaps-remain