“I feel terrible for the American people because it’s not the American people, and it’s not even elected officials, it’s one person,”
Americans elected Trump, and Americans are failing to do anything to reign Trump in.
These are the official policies for the COUNTRY! So unfortunately, this is not just one person, it is de facto USA as a whole.
If it was only Trump, it would just be Trump refusing to buy Canadian for himself. As it is, the whole apparatus is enforcing these decisions, and they impact all of USA.
The US electoral system is broken and has always been broken. Republicans have spent the past 2 decades gerrymandering and introducing as much legislation as possible to manipulate the outcome of elections in as many districts as possible. They’ve introduced legislation: to prevent people with debt from voting, to prevent people with criminal records from voting, to prevent people who cannot physically make it to polling stations from voting. The Republicans and the ruling class own all the largest media organizations in the United States, and they have weaponized social media and traditional media to indoctrinate and manipulate as many people as possible.
Trump won this election with fewer votes than he lost in 2020. He won mostly because Republicans and Democrats are material allies in neoliberal and imperialist endeavors. Democrats refused to campaign on progressive politics, instead choosing to run on a more conservative campaign than they ever have before.
The working class is not responsible for their own manipulation at the hands of the ruling class. It is not their fault that the system is broken. It is not the fault of American families who literally can not afford to resist, as without the income from their jobs, they will lose their homes and be unable to feed themselves and their children.
Capitalism is the problem. Conservatism, and by extension neoliberalism and fascism, is the problem. Donald Trump is an accelerationist fascist. He will not wait and seeks to plunge the nation headlong into fascism as soon as possible. But do not mistake that as being in opposition to the social and political system of America. Donald Trump is entirely a representative of the failure of American democracy, not a representative of the American people. He manipulated people into voting for him, as evidenced by widespread outrage at his actions even among those who ostensibly voted for him.
Which is why it’s considered a flawed democracy, which I stated.
Republicans have spent the past 2 decades gerrymandering
Except Trump actually won the popular vote this time. Making this argument void regarding the presidential election 2024.
Republicans and Democrats are material allies
That far I agree, they have arranged it so they share power, except this time, Republicans may choose not to share it anymore.
The working class is not responsible for their own manipulation at the hands of the ruling class. It is not their fault that the system is broken.
Isn’t it? Haven’t they mostly agreed on this arrangement because for decades many mostly whites benefited from it too?
Capitalism is the problem
I partially agree, but there is no real alternative to capitalism, and definitely not anything proven, the problem is not capitalism but how it is managed. In a social democracy it can work pretty well.
I’d say that what we see today is the logical conclusion of capitalism. In a way it’s a broken system, it just takes time to collapse. But growing wealth inequality and consolidation of power are inherent problems in capitalism, and we were always going to see times like this. I mean, for further example, look at climate change and how it’s damn near impossible to actually solve the problem
It’s more that there is little political will for an alternative system, but don’t get me wrong, if humanity wants to survive in the long run, there is no easy way out. I seriously do think that, either humanity makes a global economy that serves people, and not capital, or we will self-destruct due to systemic incentives of the profit incentive
I’d say that what we see today is the logical conclusion of capitalism
Capitalism is not a political system, what is happening now is what happens when governments fail to adhere to things that were figured out more than a hundred years ago, that Capitalism needs to be reigned in, exactly to avoid it from developing into monopolies and an oligarchy. USA has allowed that to happen, because of the (bitter) “sweet” profits, and with an already dysfunctional democracy, USA is very vulnerable to abuse of the power of extremely strong companies and even individuals now.
if humanity wants to survive in the long run, there is no easy way out.
I think there absolutely is, that is called social democracy, which has a pretty strong track record for protecting both citizens and the environment from powerful capitalists.
But it requires a well functioning democracy, and it probably can’t exist in a vacuum either. But in EU things have been trending in that direction, and EU is an excellent environment for it. USA however has a long way to go. The mentality simply isn’t there currently.
No, I live in the EU, the same capitalistic problems exist here, they’re just slowed down a bit due to social democracy. But don’t get me wrong, the fundamental issues are here just as much as anywhere else on the globe
Capitalism is not directly an ideology by itself, no, but it is a massive fundamental part of a given ideology. There’s a reason most ideologies revolve around the economic system, because it’s so pervasive in everything we do. From the things we do every day, to the way we interact with others, to the way we get access to resources and services we need and want, to where we live, to how we think
What you need to keep in mind, is that under capitalism there will always be a profit incentive to undermine the system for even further profit. This is what collapses civilizations, this is what makes society fall apart in the long run
Making a capitalistic economy work for the benefit of everyone, for the people, is like trying to swim upstream all the time, forever. It would be much much more internally consistent to just have a river you swim downstream with. In other words, an economy based on cooperation, not competition. A civilization based on competition is almost an oxymoron, civilization itself is fundamentally a cooperative environment. Why do we tack competition on top of that?
If you had read the rest of my first line, the American electoral system has always been broken. This isn’t a new state of affairs. The working class of America has been in a perpetual state of manipulation into further and further right-wing politics since at least the presidency of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
He won this election with fewer votes than he lost in 2020. Ultimately, the popular vote is largely irrelevant as the number of votes overall is not what determines who won the election. He won in 2016 without the popular vote. Voter manipulation and strategic disenfranchisment won them that election and this one.
Correct, so the American public had a choice between conservatism and fascism. A state of affairs that outraged many people. The democrats and the Republicans share an interest in their corporate benefactors. They will unite to seek better outcomes for the ruling class at the expense of the working class. The democrats will and have consistently refused to adopt popular politics like those of Bernie Sanders and AOC. Those politics are in contrast to the desires of their benefactors.
The working class has been manipulated through a union of the education system and mass media to indoctrinate them into fascism and further anti worker politics. Even in traditionally democratic held states, there is a persistent refusal to educate children on anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics. There is a refusal to educate children on the failures of American democracy and an insistence on nationalist indoctrination. In red states, this is even worse. These problems have existed since at least the presidency of Richard Nixon and to differing extents even before then. American fascism is the system. It didn’t start yesterday, and has been manipulating the American working class for a very long time.
Even more than that the entirety of the media and education systems unite to indoctrinate the working class into anti working class politics. It indoctrinates the people into believing civil unrest is wrong, that protest and demonstration is wrong, that all political violence is wrong. This is deliberate. It is a deliberate effort to protect the interests of the ruling capitalist class.
Socialism is an alternative to capitalism. You have been indoctrinated by the capitalist ruling class into believing that socialism has never functioned. It has and continues to do so today. Socialism and authoritarianism are not equivalent concepts. The failure of authoritarian socialist states were failures of authoritarianism, not of Socialism. Capitalists have taken advantage of those failures to manipulate billions of people, like yourself, into seeing Socialism as the problem. It isn’t. Capitalism is and has been a global failure. A system that serves the self interests of billionaires is a failure. A system where workers do not own the fruits of their own labor is a failure. A system that tolerates landlords and private corporations is a failure.
f you had read the rest of my first line, the American electoral system has always been broken.
How does anything I write indicate otherwise? It’s not Trump that broke democracy (yet), he is merely exploiting the fact that it’s broken.
so the American public had a choice between conservatism and fascism.
Conservatism that at least makes room for social democrats like Bernie AOC and Ilhan Omar, and over that they chose fascism.
I don’t think there’s much point in arguing further, seems to me you are making a lot of false equivalences, and I have no patience for arguing against that.
And it’s not like the tariffs were a bait and switch. Trump literally had them in his platform.
In fact, all the crap he’s been pulling was in his platform. He’s doing exactly what he promised he would do, and half the country was like, “Maybe this isn’t a good idea” and the other half enthusiastically voted him and then are shocked he’s doing exactly what he said he would do.
This is like the time the UK voted for Brexit and then became shocked when Brexit happened.
In fact, all the crap he’s been pulling was in his platform.
Yes, and he was making similar attempts about everything he is doing now already in his first term. So these policies aren’t new, and Americans voted for it.
This is like the time the UK voted for Brexit and then became shocked when Brexit happened.
Yes, but this is actually worse. Although Brexit cannot be reversed, and Trump’s first term was somewhat reversed. The way USA is acting now, threatening every ally they have, very seriously undermining NATO, Europe, democracy and Ukraine, threatening to destroy economies of Canada and Mexico. This can never be forgotten. USA is not even considered an ally anymore in most places that used to be the strongest allies of USA.
Yup. Whoever is next, and hopefully that will be in January 2029 if not earlier, is not going to have anything like the same influence that previous presidents have had. They will be able to deescalate short-term issues and generally provide a lull in the storm, but Trump has exposed the fragility of US power, and his base proves that America is an unreliable partner, so getting anything significant done that might cross administrations is going to be so much harder. Even if the next president is not insane and is without any above-average level of evil (neither is guaranteed), then that only helps temporarily. Hell, even if there’s some sea change in the electorate that makes democratic allies more optimistic, recovering from Trump 2 is going to mean the US looks inward for a time and there will be, if not a power vacuum, a serious low-pressure system that draws in disturbances.
Now, I’m not sad about the decline of American hegemony per se, but this is very much a “not like this” moment, and a slower unwinding would be better for stability. Our best case scenario here is that our allies understand the conflict inherent in the American ethos and work with us where practicable but also pursue the “strategic independence” we’ve been hearing about. I hope it’s Europe that steps up and reasserts itself, because barring a very unlikely leveling of the international order, your other options are China bulldozing the world for the financial benefit of the party, or Putin throwing bodies (both at enemies and out of windows), cutting off fossil fuels, and threatening nuclear war every time he doesn’t get his way.
This. I can’t stand how they blame the system for a choice they chose to make, be it voting for the orange turd, or sitting it out to protest a war halfway across the world, knowing fully well that he’d use that complacency ro return to office. Now the rest of us are dragged into the muck.
Absolutely, Trump was elected in a democratic election.
USA is a (flawed) democracy supposedly with checks and balances.
It’s not like some military general overthrew the democracy out of nowhere.
Obviously there are good Americans that oppose this, and tried to prevent it, but they are unfortunately a minority, and as a whole USA as a country is doing this, and letting it happen.
IDK isn’t it? Good information is available, and they choose to ignore it. I know victims of scams can be so entangled with it, that they can’t see it, even when the police arrest the scammers, and show them the evidence they were being scammed.
But at that point, isn’t that too their own fault that they choose to believe the scammer over police and evidence?
I don’t think we shall give a pass based on “stupidity”, staying stupid is generally their own choice.
Americans elected Trump, and Americans are failing to do anything to reign Trump in.
These are the official policies for the COUNTRY! So unfortunately, this is not just one person, it is de facto USA as a whole.
If it was only Trump, it would just be Trump refusing to buy Canadian for himself. As it is, the whole apparatus is enforcing these decisions, and they impact all of USA.
The US electoral system is broken and has always been broken. Republicans have spent the past 2 decades gerrymandering and introducing as much legislation as possible to manipulate the outcome of elections in as many districts as possible. They’ve introduced legislation: to prevent people with debt from voting, to prevent people with criminal records from voting, to prevent people who cannot physically make it to polling stations from voting. The Republicans and the ruling class own all the largest media organizations in the United States, and they have weaponized social media and traditional media to indoctrinate and manipulate as many people as possible.
Trump won this election with fewer votes than he lost in 2020. He won mostly because Republicans and Democrats are material allies in neoliberal and imperialist endeavors. Democrats refused to campaign on progressive politics, instead choosing to run on a more conservative campaign than they ever have before.
The working class is not responsible for their own manipulation at the hands of the ruling class. It is not their fault that the system is broken. It is not the fault of American families who literally can not afford to resist, as without the income from their jobs, they will lose their homes and be unable to feed themselves and their children.
Capitalism is the problem. Conservatism, and by extension neoliberalism and fascism, is the problem. Donald Trump is an accelerationist fascist. He will not wait and seeks to plunge the nation headlong into fascism as soon as possible. But do not mistake that as being in opposition to the social and political system of America. Donald Trump is entirely a representative of the failure of American democracy, not a representative of the American people. He manipulated people into voting for him, as evidenced by widespread outrage at his actions even among those who ostensibly voted for him.
Which is why it’s considered a flawed democracy, which I stated.
Except Trump actually won the popular vote this time. Making this argument void regarding the presidential election 2024.
That far I agree, they have arranged it so they share power, except this time, Republicans may choose not to share it anymore.
Isn’t it? Haven’t they mostly agreed on this arrangement because for decades many mostly whites benefited from it too?
I partially agree, but there is no real alternative to capitalism, and definitely not anything proven, the problem is not capitalism but how it is managed. In a social democracy it can work pretty well.
Regarding the capitalism part
I’d say that what we see today is the logical conclusion of capitalism. In a way it’s a broken system, it just takes time to collapse. But growing wealth inequality and consolidation of power are inherent problems in capitalism, and we were always going to see times like this. I mean, for further example, look at climate change and how it’s damn near impossible to actually solve the problem
It’s more that there is little political will for an alternative system, but don’t get me wrong, if humanity wants to survive in the long run, there is no easy way out. I seriously do think that, either humanity makes a global economy that serves people, and not capital, or we will self-destruct due to systemic incentives of the profit incentive
Capitalism is not a political system, what is happening now is what happens when governments fail to adhere to things that were figured out more than a hundred years ago, that Capitalism needs to be reigned in, exactly to avoid it from developing into monopolies and an oligarchy. USA has allowed that to happen, because of the (bitter) “sweet” profits, and with an already dysfunctional democracy, USA is very vulnerable to abuse of the power of extremely strong companies and even individuals now.
I think there absolutely is, that is called social democracy, which has a pretty strong track record for protecting both citizens and the environment from powerful capitalists.
But it requires a well functioning democracy, and it probably can’t exist in a vacuum either. But in EU things have been trending in that direction, and EU is an excellent environment for it. USA however has a long way to go. The mentality simply isn’t there currently.
No, I live in the EU, the same capitalistic problems exist here, they’re just slowed down a bit due to social democracy. But don’t get me wrong, the fundamental issues are here just as much as anywhere else on the globe
Capitalism is not directly an ideology by itself, no, but it is a massive fundamental part of a given ideology. There’s a reason most ideologies revolve around the economic system, because it’s so pervasive in everything we do. From the things we do every day, to the way we interact with others, to the way we get access to resources and services we need and want, to where we live, to how we think
What you need to keep in mind, is that under capitalism there will always be a profit incentive to undermine the system for even further profit. This is what collapses civilizations, this is what makes society fall apart in the long run
Making a capitalistic economy work for the benefit of everyone, for the people, is like trying to swim upstream all the time, forever. It would be much much more internally consistent to just have a river you swim downstream with. In other words, an economy based on cooperation, not competition. A civilization based on competition is almost an oxymoron, civilization itself is fundamentally a cooperative environment. Why do we tack competition on top of that?
If you had read the rest of my first line, the American electoral system has always been broken. This isn’t a new state of affairs. The working class of America has been in a perpetual state of manipulation into further and further right-wing politics since at least the presidency of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
He won this election with fewer votes than he lost in 2020. Ultimately, the popular vote is largely irrelevant as the number of votes overall is not what determines who won the election. He won in 2016 without the popular vote. Voter manipulation and strategic disenfranchisment won them that election and this one.
Correct, so the American public had a choice between conservatism and fascism. A state of affairs that outraged many people. The democrats and the Republicans share an interest in their corporate benefactors. They will unite to seek better outcomes for the ruling class at the expense of the working class. The democrats will and have consistently refused to adopt popular politics like those of Bernie Sanders and AOC. Those politics are in contrast to the desires of their benefactors.
The working class has been manipulated through a union of the education system and mass media to indoctrinate them into fascism and further anti worker politics. Even in traditionally democratic held states, there is a persistent refusal to educate children on anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics. There is a refusal to educate children on the failures of American democracy and an insistence on nationalist indoctrination. In red states, this is even worse. These problems have existed since at least the presidency of Richard Nixon and to differing extents even before then. American fascism is the system. It didn’t start yesterday, and has been manipulating the American working class for a very long time.
Even more than that the entirety of the media and education systems unite to indoctrinate the working class into anti working class politics. It indoctrinates the people into believing civil unrest is wrong, that protest and demonstration is wrong, that all political violence is wrong. This is deliberate. It is a deliberate effort to protect the interests of the ruling capitalist class.
Socialism is an alternative to capitalism. You have been indoctrinated by the capitalist ruling class into believing that socialism has never functioned. It has and continues to do so today. Socialism and authoritarianism are not equivalent concepts. The failure of authoritarian socialist states were failures of authoritarianism, not of Socialism. Capitalists have taken advantage of those failures to manipulate billions of people, like yourself, into seeing Socialism as the problem. It isn’t. Capitalism is and has been a global failure. A system that serves the self interests of billionaires is a failure. A system where workers do not own the fruits of their own labor is a failure. A system that tolerates landlords and private corporations is a failure.
How does anything I write indicate otherwise? It’s not Trump that broke democracy (yet), he is merely exploiting the fact that it’s broken.
Conservatism that at least makes room for social democrats like Bernie AOC and Ilhan Omar, and over that they chose fascism.
I don’t think there’s much point in arguing further, seems to me you are making a lot of false equivalences, and I have no patience for arguing against that.
And it’s not like the tariffs were a bait and switch. Trump literally had them in his platform.
In fact, all the crap he’s been pulling was in his platform. He’s doing exactly what he promised he would do, and half the country was like, “Maybe this isn’t a good idea” and the other half enthusiastically voted him and then are shocked he’s doing exactly what he said he would do.
This is like the time the UK voted for Brexit and then became shocked when Brexit happened.
Yes, and he was making similar attempts about everything he is doing now already in his first term. So these policies aren’t new, and Americans voted for it.
Yes, but this is actually worse. Although Brexit cannot be reversed, and Trump’s first term was somewhat reversed. The way USA is acting now, threatening every ally they have, very seriously undermining NATO, Europe, democracy and Ukraine, threatening to destroy economies of Canada and Mexico. This can never be forgotten. USA is not even considered an ally anymore in most places that used to be the strongest allies of USA.
Yup. Whoever is next, and hopefully that will be in January 2029 if not earlier, is not going to have anything like the same influence that previous presidents have had. They will be able to deescalate short-term issues and generally provide a lull in the storm, but Trump has exposed the fragility of US power, and his base proves that America is an unreliable partner, so getting anything significant done that might cross administrations is going to be so much harder. Even if the next president is not insane and is without any above-average level of evil (neither is guaranteed), then that only helps temporarily. Hell, even if there’s some sea change in the electorate that makes democratic allies more optimistic, recovering from Trump 2 is going to mean the US looks inward for a time and there will be, if not a power vacuum, a serious low-pressure system that draws in disturbances.
Now, I’m not sad about the decline of American hegemony per se, but this is very much a “not like this” moment, and a slower unwinding would be better for stability. Our best case scenario here is that our allies understand the conflict inherent in the American ethos and work with us where practicable but also pursue the “strategic independence” we’ve been hearing about. I hope it’s Europe that steps up and reasserts itself, because barring a very unlikely leveling of the international order, your other options are China bulldozing the world for the financial benefit of the party, or Putin throwing bodies (both at enemies and out of windows), cutting off fossil fuels, and threatening nuclear war every time he doesn’t get his way.
This. I can’t stand how they blame the system for a choice they chose to make, be it voting for the orange turd, or sitting it out to protest a war halfway across the world, knowing fully well that he’d use that complacency ro return to office. Now the rest of us are dragged into the muck.
Absolutely, Trump was elected in a democratic election.
USA is a (flawed) democracy supposedly with checks and balances.
It’s not like some military general overthrew the democracy out of nowhere.
Obviously there are good Americans that oppose this, and tried to prevent it, but they are unfortunately a minority, and as a whole USA as a country is doing this, and letting it happen.
The people who voted for him got scammed. They’re stupid, but it’s not their fault either. They are spiritually invested in a scam.
IDK isn’t it? Good information is available, and they choose to ignore it. I know victims of scams can be so entangled with it, that they can’t see it, even when the police arrest the scammers, and show them the evidence they were being scammed.
But at that point, isn’t that too their own fault that they choose to believe the scammer over police and evidence?
I don’t think we shall give a pass based on “stupidity”, staying stupid is generally their own choice.