Seriously, what the f*** is keeping Donald Trump in this presidential race?
Kamala Harris running a damn near flawless campaign, with just a month 1/2 of campaigning. She’s been holding rallies nonstop with Tim Walz & not making her talking points about her race or gender like Hillary. She’s offering expanded healthcare, reinvestments back into public housing, wants to take on corporate greed, protect reproductive rights and chose a pro labor, pro education running mate.
Yet, she’s either barely leading or ties in most polls with a guy that:
Is a convicted felon.
Liable Sexual Predator.
Gets sentenced in November.
Has several more pending cases.
Increased Drone Strikes by 300%. (Joe Biden dosent use drones anymore).
Illegally killed an Iranian General unprovoked with a missle strike.
Increased tensions in Israel/Palestine with the Abraham Accords.
Wants war with Mexico (his words).
Tried to coup Venezuela.
Will bend the knee for Netanyahu’s potential war with Iran.
Lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% (lowest in history).
Obvious tax cuts for the rich.
Told people to drink bleach during the pandemic.
Is the main driving force for America’s current division.
Constantly attacks marginalized groups.
Tried to steal the 2020 election (Find Me 11,000 votes in GA).
Did Fake Elector Slates to pressure Mike Pence to not certify the 2020 election.
Caused a riot on the capitol that lead to his OWN supporters dying.
Just got washed by Harris in the last debate, was completely unprepared on anything but immigration (“I have concepts of a plan”).
And so much more. So seriously what is it? Is it just the attraction to bigotry/racism? Is it to end “wokeness”. Is it because Kamala is a woman of color? You can’t use the both sides argument like Hilary or Biden, Kamala is the obvious better choice. Could you imagine if Kamala had as much baggage as Trump? The media would lose their minds.
Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?
It's simple. Bigotry and greed. Trump plays to people's fears that "others" will soon have the same rights they do while also assuring his rich handlers that he will make them richer. He's convinced the poor to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Conservatism is a mental illness, it can't be defeated with logic and reasoning
YouTube channel Knowing Better made a video about the Seventh Day Adventist. Basically the same conclusion.
Found it! It's almost 3 hrs long, so you know what that means: a glass of wine, your favorite easy chair, and of course, this YouTube video streaming on your home system. So, go on, and indulge yourself. That's right, kick off your shoes, put your feet up, lean back and just enjoy the rational documentary. After all, knowledge soothes even the savage lemming.
Offspring?
Yeppers, peppers! 🫑
Have an updoot, Offspring-fan.
Have an updoot, recognizer of Offspring-fans.
FOX “News” has effectively divided, conditioned and massaged Republicans for decades to regurgitate the message disseminated by Rupert Murdoch through their favorite flavor talking heads (Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and more recently Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters).
They went from ‘Russia bad’ in the 1980’s to ‘Russia good’ and ‘America had it wrong’. The viewers lack critical thought under scrutiny and regurgitate the talking points of their favorite broadcasters.
Yep, I lay the majority of our political insanity on Fox's door. Look, we all know they're the GOP's propaganda arm, but how many of you have actually watched a good bit?
I was stuck with a week of it during the Snowden revelations. In the space of an entire week, I didn't hear a single word on what was worldwide news. Stunning, and I still can't explain it, but it happened. Point being, a lot of the lies are in what they don't say. Early afternoon of 01/06, not a blip on the website. (Which BTW, is far more sane than the TV version.) I checked the wayback machine and FOx reported nothing until hours after kick off. I presume they prayed it would blow over or at least die down. Imagine the spin control behind the scenes! Hell, even Tucker Carlson pleased with Trump to make a sane statement and cut it off.
After hearing "Obama" thousands of times, over and over and over, I was sick of him! The whole time my friend's step-mom was screaming at the screen, "The KKK ought to do their got damned JOB!" These people sat in their armchairs 24/7 (never saw them go to their bedroom), smoking weed and watching nothing but Fox. We tried to put on a movie or another show exactly twice and it promptly got switched back.
One time I was stuck with Fox at the doctor's office, some kind of round-table show going on. A metric showing black people doing better under the Obama administration came up, something about pay I think. One of the hosts slams his fist of the table and shouted, "Obama's a RACIST!" Constantly listen to crap like that and you are, eventually, getting brainwashed.
That's the irritating part for me. Every time I visit a certain segment of the family, it's as if I was stepping into 1984 with the big brother screens, except that they must be on all the time. I was forced into it during the missing MH370 news. They blatantly, incessantly push fear, and it hooks the idiots into believing if they aren't watching 24/7 that they're going to miss the apocalypse.
You made me remember! Yes, this was on a HUGE TV, probably 70", and that in a time when those were insanely expensive, had never seen one in a home. It was like the house walls in Fahrenheit 451.
"Come look! The White Clown is talking!"
An LSD party back in college taught me a thing I'll never forget. There were 3 TVs in the living room and my best friend and I were tripping balls. He pulls me over to where I can see all 3 screens.
He said, "Notice who the number of people watching is directly proportional to the size of the screen?"
Mind. Blown.
don't forget rush limbaugh
Yes thank you, and for some time Glenn Beck as well. Also a dishonorable mention to Jeanine Pirro.
This is the key point that a lot of people miss.
If you wholeheartedly, or at least performatively, believe that there is a "natural" hierarchy where some people are better than others, then what one might see as equality is seen as oppression by hardline conservatives.
This is why emotion is the key component of Trumpian messaging, regardless of veracity.
The key is to never play the game. Always proactivity act with questions, never "defend" and react with truth; they're not interested in the truth.
It's not conservativism, conservativism has been captured by think tanks funded by oil and banking billionaires. They're framed conservativism, gutted it, and replaced its insides with Libertarianism (and sometimes technocratic fascism), as that's what gives them the lowest taxes, the most corporate welfare, union busting capabilities, and defends their wealth accumulation most efficiently.
They're not good members of society, this is demonstrated in Trump's fascism (which is based on Roy Cohn's fascism). It seeks to destroy society, the nation, and government.
His debate performance was stunning because he spent 75% of his time talking about how we are being invaded by an enormous wave of criminals and insane asylum escapees who are violently claiming buildings and territory. I was like excuse me? Do I need to go check my yard for invaders? I didn’t realize we were being overrun. And yes I live in a state that borders Mexico.
If the race were between The Literal Devil (R) and Jesus Christ (D), the vote total would be 45%-55% just based on the letter they choose to run after their name.
Policy doesn't matter when people base their entire personality on their political party identification.
Jesus was a socialist Jew. We had one of those run for President, too, but couldn't make it past the Democratic primary.
But see how evil he looks...
/s
Wanting us to become fiscally responsible, like not get into new wars into we've paid off previous ones? i.e. pay less money to the rich via the Military Industrial complex?
Wanting to tax the wealthy?
Wanting to redistribute money to take care of the poor?
Yeah, obviously evil indeed 😂 (from the POV of "I got mine, now I'm pulling up the ladder🪜").
If you completely forget everything about Bernie; who he is, what he's done, how he speaks, everything; he does look like a CEO who would lay off half his staff for a discount on a sandwich. But thats more because he's an old white guy in a suit and they all look like that
He has joyful eyes
He got my first D primary vote... but NOT MY LAST.
needs more puppies and rainbows
Jesus is a Mexican name. Check mate.
Closer to 50/50 with the electoral college.
And it pisses me off that people will vote for the dipshit because he's an R, but i would vote for a half-dead horny toad on the other side.
Like the real Jesus would run as a Democrat. At least with the Devil you know where you stand! /s
Nothing I've read has ever explained Trump's appeal like this article.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
Nothing in there makes a cute soundbite. "They're racist!", is far easier than having to digest what the author lays down.
Seriously, read it. It's important.
It’s a good article. It explains rural America. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in Huntington Beach CA. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in suburban Inland SoCal. It doesn’t explain rich privileged shitheads like Musk and Thiel.
Exactly. I get the frustrations of the son and grandson of factory workers that finds it hard to imagine anything more than working at Walmart wanting to tear it all down. What I don't understand is my neighbor in Dana Point.
People like Musk are cynical, attention-seeking manipulators and narcissists. They aren't afraid that their way of life is being threatened, they're using the fears of others to further their own ends, and consider themselves above it all.
That article was the most cogent take I have seen on this subject. I have a similar cultural background (rednecks and urban, religious Polish-Americans), but see myself as a science-literate atheist. I have seen this first-hand, but wasn't able to articulate it as well.
It doesn’t explain them because that’s who the author assumes he’s speaking to.
Those guys just don’t want to see the US go the way of Europe where scorched-earth capitalism has been tamed and extreme wealth is taxed extremely. They are wealthy beyond avarice and STILL don’t feel they are free because they come up against regulations and institutions.
They capitalize on the rural Trumpism because it is the path most likely to lead to unchecked capitalism. Remember, the US isn’t like Europe - yet. And It will take a lot of work to get it there. All those rich guys need is a government that will do nothing. So not only is tax-cut Trump their friend objectively, he creates chaos. And chaos prevents action. Rancorous divisiveness means a logjammed national agenda. Which is all they want: no action. Look the other way while they rape the world.
Honestly, hadn't read this one and it's got some seriously solid points in it.
I remember reading this and thinking it had some points. Then I remembered that despite having some of the same issues, we have vastly different responses. When I’m lied to and beaten, I don’t look to the person that did it for help.
For instance, the church being the only social space. They could have a community center or a library. Sure funds are hard to come by but what kind of political party would even consider that? The answer is probably further left than democrats but fifty years of red scare won’t let anyone accept that.
The "writing them off" part comes from their willingness to not ostracize evil people when they get something they want. We can all be bullheaded or blinded by bias from time to time but accountability and decency shouldn’t be political.
Great read. There’s 70+ million people out there choosing to vote for Trump, why? Even if the answer is complicated you can’t dismiss them all outright.
I see a decent amount of comments painting all republics with one brush. I think it’s low effort and unproductive.
I feel like this is just gift wrapping being a dumb racist hick in prettier paper. They are scared of cities because their full of black people, gays, and Mexicans. They like assholes who show the same level of hate as they do - who will keep the black people, gays, and Mexicans away. And they like someone who justifies hiding behind religion so they can tell themselves that God made them this dumb and rascist. So they can delude themselves into thinking they are really the good guy.
The article describes how the rural population has been overlooked and abandoned in favor of the inner cities, leading to higher levels of racism.
“This is just dumb hicks mad at black people!”
Good job buddy
Good read thanks
Good read. Thanks!
Good. Read, Thanks!
I mean it's definitely an interesting read. I'm just not sure what to actually do with this information. The fundamental problem feels like a generally small bubble, and at times a specific disinterest in venturing outside of it. If anyone's whole worldview is shaped entirely by their tiny rural hometown, it's easy to understand why others with radically different backgrounds feel scary.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't feel like a good enough reason to drag the rest of the country through rigid christofacist moral dogmas and support the industries that prop up those small towns at the expense of the planet as a whole. But as long as those people aren't interested in venturing outside their communities and meeting other different people, im not sure how to convince them of this.
Maybe if the cost of living becomes too untenable in major cities and work from home continues in certain industries rural areas will see more growth and this will improve somewhat? Idk
That was an amazing read.
The problem with that argument is that 80% of people live in cities. There are not enough rural people for them to be a majority of the Republican party.
In america, land votes more than people. We have the electoral college, the senate, and gerrymandering. Rural areas by design have wildly outsized power. This was done intentionally to preserve slavery
The outsized effect of the EC and Gerrymandering have a very simple fix. I wonder why Democrats never talk about it?
Low density places are always going to kind of suck on a lot of metrics. You just don't have the people to support a lot of stuff. I'm sorry that small towns are dying but like there's not really a reason they'd thrive.
Cities have been important since like the dawn of history. At least farms grow food. Suburban sprawl is the worst.
Cost of living needs to go down and wages up, but no one should be vying for low density.
Jason Pargin is a goddamn hero.
I've read this article when it was posted before and my impression is it does EXACTLY the thing to non-rural voters as it warns the reader about doing to rural voters. I can quote the bits if you are going to force me to read it again, but I don't see how anyone can fail to see that.
It also doesn't change the fact that the party who might actually make their lives better is NOT the one they are voting for.
Also - racism (and bigotry generally)
That was from before we knew better. We've seen since then that it is indeed racism and hatred that powers the Republican base. That's why the GOP doesn't need to have any real policy laid out anymore. They just have to promise to hurt the "right" people this time around. Any sane Republicans that existed then are voting Democrat now.
Fun piece. I don’t know about best explanation ever.
It starts out talking about how movies idealize simple honest people from the heartlands (Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Braveheart) but then says:
So which is it? Does pop culture feed rural America’s sense that it is “Real America” or does it make them hillbillies?
As if explaining politics through TV and movies isn’t reductive enough, it can’t seem to keep its own story straight for ten paragraphs in row.
I remember the summer of 2016, when I was playing Pokemon Go in the parks and people I had never talked to and that lived nearby were playing it next to me. We were all celebrating when we caught a pokemon when we were after, and comparing which ones we'd caught with each other.
At the time I thought...who would buy Trump's conman routine? Who actually thinks that the country is in a terrible enough place that we need to elect this person who seems to actively hate the country and seemed to want to set the entire thing on fire?
I left my Californian home and went back to my original state to visit my family. We went to several different areas of the state in fall of 2016 because my wife was from a rural area and I originally grew up in a slightly more suburban area. I saw the signs in the yards, I saw the discontent, and I saw how people did not seem to be reacting the same way to his craziness. I saw how casually they would put on his rants in the background while talking about other issues. I saw how some of them were amused by his antics. It had been a couple of years since I had last been back and it once again struck me how much worse the area appeared to be from the last time I was there. I was in a rural area when the "Access Hollywood" tape dropped. People seemed to visibly shrink at even the mention of the news. I thought he was done for, and that this was a bridge too far for his supporters to cross. That people would vote third party, or not vote at all. I did not get the sense that my thoughts were shared by those around me.
When I came back to California, people were talking about the debates. It was sunny and nice out, and people would talk about the projects they had going on in their houses, or they'd talk about work related affairs. People were sometimes amused by Trump's antics, but everyone uniformly thought it was impossible for him to win the election. Having seen what I had seen in the weeks prior, I was no longer one of these people. "They'll never let him win", one of my co-workers said. I was stunned....who are "they"? Does the rest of the country actually believe this?
It turns out quite a few of them did. Many people thought there was just simply no way that Trump would win, because either the system was already rigged against him and would not allow him to win, or because the country was just not in dire enough straits to elect such a madman (as I once thought).
Hindsight is 20/20 but when I thought it was bizarre that he was even a viable candidate at one point in 2016, and I saw the decaying state where I grew up, I thought "if he wins the election, then we are in a much worse state as a country than I thought". And we undoubtedly are.
Of course he won, but the reason that I have this somewhat rambling response to this question is that the answer to "why is he still in the race?" ultimately comes down to the overall state of this country.
He is in this race because this is where we are as a country: barely able to imagine a possible future that is brighter than the present, because we are still caught up in degenerative non-sense that keeps us thinking that our broken down towns, and our poor social bonds are caused by some horde of "others" instead of their true causes: our ever-widening wealth inequality, our ever-decaying moral responsibilities to each other, and our national instinct to absolve ourselves of our responsibilities by claiming that not only is it correct to be forever self-serving, but that even the idea of altruism is a lie.
Wow. You're right. Helping others is as politicized as abortion. One of the tribes can't even fathom uplifting their neighbors because that could be equated to socialism and it would get them kicked out of their in-group.
That explains the "virtue signaling" accusations.
I rmember stephen colbert's face lol
You're in a media bubble. It feels like there's no way anyone could see it differently. The people who disagree with you are also in a media bubble and don't understand how you could believe what you do.
For everything you said they
Reality may have a leftist bias but most people don't live in reality. Most people live in a reality constructed by corporate media. Social media is largely derivative of it.
There's some truth to this, but if you take the effort to break out of your media bubble, to find original sources, to read documentary evidence, indictments, transcripts.
To go the other direction and track down evidence for Trump's accusations against others,
the guy comes off even worse.
Something a lot of people tend to forget is that reality doesn't have inherent biases. The facts are the facts, no matter how cartoonishly evil those facts might make one side look.
Presenting "both sides" as equally valid doesn't mean you're unbiased. It means you're giving the Nazis what they want.
Exactly. If anything, the anti-trump media "bubbles" are going easy on the guy.
That doesn't help you understand his supporters though. You have to wade in the shit they call news. You have to hear what they say to begin to understand them.
I hear what they say I still don't understand them.
I grew up in the south, I understand them perfectly.
Imagine growing up your whole life being told you need to be angry because you're the greatest but everybody else takes what you deserve from you.
It used to be that pesky northerners took away your slaves, but that evolved to taking away your rights to enforce your own laws (Jim crow), then your rights to be Christian the way you want (school prayer, abortion, insisting on a Christian country), then forcing you to tolerate gays who are abominations against God and nature, then letting foreigners come in and steal the one thing you have 9f value, your citizenship.
All while being rich coastal liberals who never did any real work because they set the rules of the game that your parents never understood, but education can't be that important, you're all the chosen of God and your pastor explained that there's no knowledge that you need outside of the truth of the Bible.
So you have a choice between a loud, uppity foreign woman telling you why you're not good enough in her fancy words, or somebody who talks sense and tells it like it is, and you know he's right because it's what you've always known in your heart.
They were raised on 3 things: college football, NASCAR and pro-wrestling, and they never got involved with politics till now, so they use pro-wrestling as their model, and he is clearly the face right now.
I can buy that. I live in the North West and this description doesn't fit MAGA here.
He's white, Christian, and male. That's a about where the similarity ends.
He's a professional making good money, drives a nice car has a nice family, never watched NASCAR or wrestling, doesn't care about sports, went to college, comes from a line of immigrants who "made it" in America by the sweat of their own brow which is a source of pride, without even a tangential connection to slavery, and weirdest, hated Trump. He thought Trump was disgusting in 2015. Now won't hear a bad word about him.
That’s a great analogy.
Elections in America are all about vibes. People who care about facts are nerds.
I'm actually curious.
Are there countries (ones that have a voting system) where it isn't all one big popularity contest?
In Norway it is common to find quizzes in newspaper websites that question you on different topics and score how well you align with the various parties. They're great at both introducing you to current political hot topics while also orienting you about the various parties that exist, of which there are far more that two that are viable to choose from.
Germany has one that they call a wahlomat.
I'd say here in Germany it is mostly a unpopularity contest.
I think there's a saying about this, "Elections are always lost, never won" or some such.
Parliamentary systems at least choose parties, not people. This means that the most popular party, not person, will have a greater share of power. It's harder, but not impossible (looking at you, Geert Wilders), to get a Trump.
Australia's electoral system is far from perfect, but it seems to be less focus on the prime minister then there is on the US president.
Of course the PM still needs to be popular and electable, and we're sliding to the right like most democracies, but I can't imagine we could have an election like the current US cycle where no one is really talking about policy.
Ireland uses a variant of ranked choice voting. In essence, voters get a list of candidates for their voting district, and rank as many of them as they want in order of preference. When votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated, and votes of those who ranked the candidate first are distributed to their second choice. Rinse and repeat until only as many candidates remain as there are open seats in the constituency.
There is still some inertia, especially in rural areas ("my dad always voted for this candidate, so I'll vote for his son"), but the system still lends itself to more informed voting. From what I've seen in other countries, on average Ireland does a better job at electing more reasonable candidates than the US or EU countries.
I live in Taiwan and met a guy yesterday who is moving to Taiwan because Austin is a "liberal hell hole".
When pressed on any issues about Trump, his answer was that Biden is worse than Trump. When I asked about Harris, he just mentioned she will just copy Biden.
The funny thing is that Taiwan is by far more liberal and more progressive than Austin Texas. He seemed to like the universal healthcare and the many social services. He didn't mind the high corporate taxes companies have to pay.
My assessment is that he is only basing his vote on vibes and feels alone. Judging from the conversation, he is more of a Bernie supporter.
I know they say don't judge a book by its cover but your friend sounds like he ate glue sticks in elementary.
This guy has a master in mechanical engineering and is self teaching himself Rust l. Dude isn't dumb. Just misguided and brainwashed.
True, I've met my fair share of smart people who end up falling off the deep end. I think it has something to do with generational trauma. Some people seem to have a much easier time recognizing the faults in how they were raised than others.
Have you considered that you actually found a tankie in the wild?
I'm going to give this guy the benefits of a doubt. He sounds more misguided and brainwashed wrapped into a heavy dose of tribalism.
I watched a bunch of YouTube videos of a psychiatrist talking about Trumpism and how to undue the brainwashing. I'm going to continue to hang out with him to see if I can wake him up.
i feel like a tankie would just refer to joe as genocide joe, but maybe i'm too internet pilled?
Tankies praise China and the Soviet. He's from Texas. I think he's just brainwashed.
Austin really does suck, he's bound to be a little fucked up.
Many Conservatives have been conditioned to stop looking for facts and believe what the TV tells them. Trump admitted as much during the debate. When challenged on the cat thing, he dismissed the reporter's research and said that he believes it because he saw it on TV. His voters will, too.
Roger Ailes was Nixon's media consultant during Watergate, and the lesson he learned was that if the media was on Nixon's side, he could have gotten away with it. Ailes went on to run Fox News. That is no accident.
It's honestly madness.
The former President, running a multi-million dollar campaign, with access to the best information in the world, has nothing to say but rambling "but the TV said, but the TV said!"
Just an absolute fool.
But he's always been like this. He had the world's largest intelligence apparatus at its service, but didn't believe what they said when it contradicted what his buddies Vlad and MBS told him.
Oh I agree, you just want to believe that even the world's stupidest person could eventually learn something. It's not like this is a case of him being deliberately obtuse, which we often see, he truly believes his own nonsense.
My mother in law who's a staunch Republican told my husband that she shouldn't have to learn anything new at her age. This is the type of people we're dealing with. They are willfully and spitefully ignorant.
My older neighbor is like that. He was pouting off some BS he heard on Fox News and I called him on it, that it was lies. When I asked him what he didn’t like about Harris he couldn’t give me an answer. He’s not even going outside his sphere to see if what Fox is saying isn’t true. It’s pathetic and shameful.
People eat that shit up because it's they same way they're fed all their propaganda too. They think Trump is just like them and not some NY socialite.
Conservatives who are capable of good quality research, and honest self-reflection barely exist because those two qualities often destroy their affiliations to modern conservativism as it stands today.
So some become neocon-neoliberal hybrids, others become economic Libertarians or Fascists in sheeps clothing, but most, are just as they seem - people who feel betrayed and shut out by the prevailing liberalisms of the day (often personified in the form of an ex-wife, ex-boss, or minority on the street), and it's something they don't want to investigate or research honestly.
In fact, most conservatives of this "follower" ilk, are deeply and psychologically invested in their sickness, in maintaining their "honest dogma" as it explains past traumas and the state of their lives in easy and convenient ways.
Get them together in groups and it becomes a self-reenforcing system. Self-propagating. It's a self-sustaining set of problems and problem mindsets.
Some for conspiracy theorists, gets to be a real problem when they get a platform too.
Did everyone just collectively agree to forget 2016? The polls were all favoring Clinton by a dramatic margin. CNN famously had a headline where they predicted Clinton had a 99% chance to win off of the polls.
And what ended up happening? 538 (before bought and neutered by ABC) gave the odds 65-35 or so, in Clinton's favor. Trump ended up winning that 35%. This year, according to polls, Trump's odds are better than in 2016. Kamala has the upper hand, but
A) lots of things can change suddenly before the election (like the Hilary emails thing)
B) polls are not the ultimate arbiter of who will win an election- actual real votes are
C) Trump more than likely has some "extracurricular plans" in store, much like Jan 6th, that has a chance of working.
Tldr: don't get drunk on positive news. Keep a level head and you'll see this election is still very close to a coin flip
Exactly, remind people to get out and vote
I firmly believe he's going to lose the popular vote, the electoral college, and yet still "win" by having the assholes that filled important election official positions refuse to certify the results and have the election kicked to Congress where the Republicans have a majority of states in their control and so one state one vote means Trump wins...
Every single mother fucker better riot like there's no tomorrow if they do this
This is what I'm afraid of too. And it's entirely within the realm of possibility, and likely too because he's seemingly incapable of accepting public loses. He's going to do something, anything in response.
I also believe that there are a significant number of Trump voters who have quieted down out of embarrassment (but will still vote for him)
I don't think people realize how close that means the race was. 50/50 is like a coin flip. 35% is like rolling a six-sided die and getting either a 1 or a 2. It's not the most likely outcome, but it's not a surprising result either.
This is just hilarious to even think that this affected the election outcome after reading about all of the horrific shit Trump has done and has promised to do.
The media is owned by rich old white men that would gladly accept fascism for lower taxes. It's that simple.
That sure is part of it but don't forget about voters. Even with all the gerrymandering and other sh*t, he does actually have a base of real supporters who can and do vote. Now the question is, how does he have supporters? I think the general answer is for decades if not generations, the Republicans have been systematically destroying public education, presumably because it's much easier to trick an ignorant electorate into voting against their own interests than it is to trick a well educated electorate. They have been preparing for this for a long time... To really protect our democracy, we must invest in our population - and specifically in education. We need smart, critical thinkers to take this country forward.
We need to invest in our citizens, cause suffering struggling people will pick any easy option to try and make themselves feel safe. Its not just education but work and healthcare and community and local events.
Its just that we have done everything to not bother spending money and steal back every tax dollar for the rich to hold onto.
It's seen as financially "smart" by all parties for decades now. We need to go back to trying to build society instead of deciding it's done and getting as much money back from it.
There's this bizarre assumption that debates shape public opinion rather than sharpen prior biases.
Liberals watched the debate and concluded Harris was normal and therefore won.
Conservatives watched and concluded only Trump is willing to speak The Truth to a hostile media and therefore won.
Undecideds don't like either one of them for a variety of reasons. But nothing these two said on Tuesday really turned heads. It was classic Trump and classic Kamala.
We have the baby boomers on the edge of dying. They are afraid of it, but there is nothing that can be done - so those fears shift to other things that "could" be dealt with.
-Immigrants destroying the culture they grew up in (that culture went away for other reasons),
-Gays and trans people being happy (The closeted Senator Graham saying there is no happiness in real life - why did gays of old have to suffer and hide if it was all for not?),
-The worst economy in the history of the US! (They are in their 80s, don't have a job, and running out of money, so it is bad for them)
-Small town on the edge of dying (because there is no jobs or amenities because they didn't want them in their town)
Trump speaks their insecurities and offers a path to fix things that no other politician dares to go down: "Burn the system to the grown and the people you hate will be hurt". Because modern Republicans care more about hurting the ones they hate than helping themselves, either because of self hate or a illusion that they won't get hurt in the process.
Not= naught
FYI
The whole “small town on the edge of dying” bit. Holy shit have I experienced that firsthand.
See, what happened with a lot of these towns is that their industry became a part of their pride and culture. Where I’m from it’s coal. Trucks everywhere have a decal of a coal miner with one of two phrases. “Coal keeps the lights on.” and “6 inches from hell.”
My grandfather was a coal miner, so was his father, and his father, on both sides of my family. My father realized that the industry was dying so he left (and left us here haha). My brother did it for awhile but left it behind because of the drug problems in the mines. There was a whole underground urine market that kept things moving.
Even the poor fools who never worked in the mines go on and on about coal like it’s some kind of idol.
I would imagine the same thing happens in other places. The people fear big changes until their fear backs them into irrelevance. I’m getting older, so I can relate to that, only I vote for my kids, not to make me feel less afraid. Whatever world they grow up in won’t be one that I’d be perfectly comfortable in. It has always been that way as far back as we have been recording history. No sense in fighting where the world is going just because I don’t understand it or relate to it.
Some very deep pockets.
People want to say it's just racism, but we have to stop ignoring how much of this is happening because of obscenely wealthy media moguls who don't give a damn about the future of the country and are only worried about ratings, and holy shit, Trump brings in ratings. The crazy fucks who vote for him are deeply influenced by this media, like Trump, they believe everything they see on TV.
-Leslie Moonves, CBS CEO in 2016, on Trump
I worked in local television news from 2000-2010ish. I watched it spin out of control during the Bush years. I remember the President of Dinsey-ABC (waaaaaaaay prior to Disney+) claiming she would nail a TV to her child's dorm room wall since her child had expressed she didn't need a TV because she had a laptop.
-Anne Sweeney, President of Disney-ABC in 2009
These fucking dinosaurs did fuck nothing for twenty fucking years while the internet ate their lunch. The only idea they ever had was doubling down on insane shit to grab views. They never once considered becoming a better source of news or providing any kind of real local value to communities.
It's the money, especially the money in traditional radio and television media, that is propping him up. He's truly the last gasp of a dying generation, desperate to keep control over people who are way more informed than ever before and the only tool they have in their toolchest to fight that is misinformation and disinformation.
The same deep pockets that were able to kick Joe Biden off the ticket. They didn't give a fuck when people like you and I said Biden was too old, but once the folks with the money started talking about it being an issue, Biden got curbed.
Unlike Biden, conservatives are in a cult and losing Trump would lose their voters. They're attached at the hip and they can't dump him in the same way without essentially just admitting they will lose hard this year.
This is the right answer. Money. There's plenty of the rest of the stuff mentioned, but cults of any sort are useful tools for the powerful. And actually, it's not even money, it's POWER.
It's about power and pursuit of power, yes. That's why there's so much racism and xenophobia, because those who desire power need people to lord their power over, or they don't feel powerful.
The money is just a path to that power.
There's a reason plenty of them are legitimate rapists, because rape is also about power. Power is literally the only thing that means anything to them. That's why you get freaks like Weinstein who can't even use their fucking dick raping people. Because at the end of the day it all boils down to these freaks getting off on using power over others.
It's also why they lean so hard on misogyny, racism, anti-lgbtq and general xenophobia, because all of them are rooted in having power over other groups.
My take:
Americans are either republican or democrat.
If you're a republican then you're going to vote for your guy. They see everything he does as just bullshit and bluster. "He says things to rile up the lefties but that's just his brand." They see the legal issues as politically motivated, or "maybe he's a bit dirty, but all politicians are".
I think it really is that simple. The vast majority of the population is not making a decision of whom to vote for based on their research regarding each party's policies. They will just always vote the way they've always voted.
Democrats are a varied group. If Republicans weren't so bat shit crazy, it would be nearly impossible to get all the Democrats to support the same person or set of policy preferences.
I think built into the question is - how can there still be so many Republicans? The 30% - 40% of voters who support him know what he's about. That's a fuck ton of spiteful adults in America. Seems like Canada, UK, and others in Europe aren't so different either. Fuck.
I'm one of the most spiteful and petty people I know and even I think trump is a total piece of shit that I would never vote for. I dont like either party but holy shit is there a clear choice here when i realistically only have two options. The people who look at Trump and think he's good have to be truly deranged or broken on a fundamental level.
Who knew the world was so full of terrible people?
I'm a socialist and I'll vote D for as long as the GOP is the other option.
It's 100% this. Politics is treated like a sport in the USA; the only thing that matters is your side winning, and which side you root for is largely dictated by location and family history. This is encouraged by the private news media, who intentionally report on election campaigns in this manner in order to increase ratings and ad revenue. Social media only made it worse because it made a lot of abstract identity dimensions, such as political affiliation, feel stronger to people than their everyday lives.
I'd say most Americans aren't Republicans/Democrats, just like most Americans aren't Christians.
Registering as an independent is a stupid idea in most states, it just means you get less say in the government that rules you. So many people register just because they would rather have the ability to say, "nah not that person" in the primaries.
As for the religion part, if Americans got taxed annually like they do in other countries and had to pay the church out of their incomes or check a box that says they aren't religious, the number of religious people listed would drop by a fuck ton. Not a single person I know would pay 4% or something to their church, many would lie and say they do, but they would take the money every time. Especially when they realized everyone else was doing it, so poof they no longer would feel bad about doing it.
I would bet we would drop to 25% after 2 years, 10% after 5, and 3% after 10, which is where it would stay. Especially if donations to church's didn't grant tax deductions, which they shouldnt be.
How did I get here? Oh, Fuck the party system.
Many good points on here. I'd also suggest watching "Get Me Roger Stone". In it, Stone basically details his secrets to getting the 'silent majority' to pay attention. He says that fear is a bigger motivator than love. He says that the uneducated can't tell the difference between entertainment and politics. There's so many lines in that documentary that will make your ears perk up and be like, damnt, this was exactly how they did it.
He's correct in a sense you may not notice.
Those voters fear Harris and what she represents, and love some idea of what GOP could in theory represent.
So the fact that Trump is shit means less for them as it's on the side they love, while Harris being stronger makes them even more afraid.
That is, the best strategy for Dems to insure victory would be to successfully present Trump as having a potential to win to his own voters. Then they would care about him being a felon and such.
if you are rich and souless
if you are a moron. I am tired of people saying trumptards are "misguided" or some bullshit like that. If you voted for him in 2016, sure, you could have been misled. But after his trainwreck of a presidential run, if you vote for him, you are just stupid. Straight up a dumbfuck.
Society has to acknowledge that half of its members are of below average intelligence. And we need a way to handle the lowest tenth, since they are a danger to themselves and others.
Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how 'nice' they may seem.
I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of...I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.
And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening's entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.
That's the people we're dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.
I've watched my in-laws change since they first voted red in 2016. Their reasoning at the time was that Obama didn't reach across the isle enough so they voted trump. The other option was Hillary Clinton, and Trump said some weirdly populist stuff that made him further left than her on some matters, so can ya really blame them?
But since then their critical thinking skills have declined so much, their comfort with risk has increased significantly, and their ability to empathize has dropped like lead. They've also shown their true colors in having zero willingness to make even the smallest changes to plans to account for severe allergies or their special needs grandkids (and refuse to see the obvious mental illness and distress in some of their family too)
Quite frankly, Trump's base is a cult of personality. These poor souls need to be deprogrammed and taught once again how to think critically, and probably temporarily disconnected from social media and cable news
I know how democrat reeducation camps are a conspiracy theory of the right, but for these people it actually needs to exist. They will not become normal again without them
Republicans have been taught to ignore reality and give in to their hatred.
Despair is also a key party platform. The more hopeless someone is, the more likely they are to invite catastrophic change like Trump promises.
I would say that all Americans were. Republicans/conservatives overachieved however.
I think you're correct. We were taught about manifest destiny but not the genocide of Native Americans, and that's just one instance of the institutionalized racism we were taught was good. SO MANY PEOPLE never grew out of that or tried to be better.
Well we were taught about the trail of tears as a thing that happened a long time ago. But it's all good now. But my family having strong tribal connections. Tribal leader on my father's side a couple of generations back. We're all on the official tribal rolls. And I was old enough to have gotten the reparations doled out in the 1980s for what happened to my great great great ancestors. A whole $10,000. Which is better than a kick in the teeth. But definitely not any sort of compensation for what was stolen.
So I knew about the Indian schools and some of the other heinous shit that Canada and the United States had pulled unlike so many others. But even I was surprised to learn that they were still current and operating well within my lifetime. People treated as if it's a long ago solved problem. There are people still alive and well today that have families destroyed or lost family because of it. And there's plenty of other shenanigans. Probably the most depressing part is that United States and Canada weren't all that alone. Heck China is more or less doing it today. To cultural groups whose identity differs from the Vanguard parties chosen monoculture.
People really underestimate how violently angry "liberals" can be, too.
Just the other day in my city I had some violently unhinged liberals comparing a drug addict who tried to run from cops, failed, and killed someone in the process to mass shooters. Right, because someone with serious mental health and addiction issues who wasn't trying to kill anyone but rather escape the cops is totally the same as a mass shooter. They were all but calling for her death and doing the good old FOX News of digging up her entire criminal history to show how terrible she is and how much she deserves death.
I'm in an extremely "progressive" city deep in the Northwest.
The US is absolutely filled to the brim with unhinged violent freaks.
We are told to be angry, and that spills out in every possible way.
The same thing that is powering most other political figures, all of which can be termed "Populists"
People are angry about a number of things. The wealth gap is very large, they are constantly told that the reason they aren't doing well in life is because of their own failings, whilst they watch elites with political access get away with things they can only dream of. They're being told immigrants and/or AI's are coming for their jobs. They're being told they can't have what their parents or the wealthy had because Climate Change, or because inflation.
This generates a great deal of friction, which in turn pushes people to radicalize their beliefs. You can't continue to sell a liberal, centrist viewpoint of the world when it simply isn't working for them. They might cotton on to "dumb" ideas, but this does not mean that they are stupid. It means that they are angry. This is is demonstrative of a deeper problem that is being very deliberately ignored or papered over, because those in power have a vested interest in keeping the gravy train running for as long as possible. The sheer scale of the problems we now have to deal with are exceeding the kinds of moves and actions most Western politicians have learned over the years, so we aren't getting appropriate results out of our political apparatus.
In times such as these, many people will look to the past for ideas on how to deal with their current situation. They sometimes come back with bad ones, sometimes they come back with good ones, and the pre-existing power structure will do everything it can to resist both of them, because to change is tantamount to completely losing grip on power for many of the people invested in the way things are. They cannot adapt, and once gone they will never get it back.
So we have a kind of a worst-case situation with a maladaptive leadership, extreme public resentment and actual natural/physical catastrophes forming a kind of crucible that this civilization needs to endure.
The trumps/erdogans/farages/orbans/lukashenkos/putins/meleis of this world are symptoms of these issues.
Trump was elected in 2016 because he got on twitter and was a birther dickhead.
Democrats ran Hillary and that was just a bridge too far for some Americans.
Democrats ran an old white man in 2020 and won.
2024 Democrats are running a black woman. Is that a bridge too far for Middle Amerikkka?
Running Hillary over Bernie was the dumbest thing ever in politics, she was never going to beat Trump. Bernie would have easily won and was/is still more popular
alsmot like its all smoke and mirrors and they didn't actually care who won, at the time. Now I think they get it but they did drop the ball, almost did this time trying to push biden.
Obama won before and he was part black. Why would that be a problem now?
But he's not a woman.
Because it nurtured the racism in a LOT of people bringing it out in the open...which led to the rise often hat orange turd in the first place, who went from a reality tv star that nobody gave half a fuck about to spewing anti-Obama shit left and right solely based on race and because he got his fee-fees hurt at a WH correspondents dinner. Large parts of the repub base are still reeling in from "black president" 16 years ago that they can't fathom "black woman president". Sadly there are a lot of em, and they vote
He's still in it for the fascist coup.
This is a serious answer so it's gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.
There's a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Above all else, these communities don't really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.
To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.
Ironically I think a lot of Trump's worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.
An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community's wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that's literally what happened just a few years prior.
The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment's bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.
Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment's outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word "sky fairy" on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.
Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.
A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don't conform like shit. I'm pretty sure I'm voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It's completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you'll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.
There's a difference in attitude when they keep doubling down and proving their critics right. That's how misbehaved children act. Except when you're not a child but full grown adults who refuse to budge like when mommy used try to give you that cough syrup you don't want it so you twist and turn your head with your mouth sealed up tight. Yeah of course people are going to laugh at you. People laughing at you on social media is no excuse. What the hell even is this logic. This is not much more than a thinly veiled reddit tier pseudo-intellectual reply. Complete with the "ill be downvoted but", "btw I'm actually voting liberal", and the pièce de résistance using Black people as a rhetorical cudgel.
Btw I'll get downvoted for this reply but whatever.
Look man I don't know how old you are, but this type of comment is what I'd expect a teenager to write. it's not just that you're acting like a massive asshole; You're using insults and arguments that I'd expect a teenager to come up with. It's the sort of argument that only works if the vast majority of people in the audience are already both deeply in your corner and also immature. Otherwise you'd just come off looking like a massive jackass.
Do you have any experience talking to people outside of an echo chamber? How does that go for you?
And there you go from the moral/intellectual high ground, mocking them as toddlers and saying it's right and normal to laugh and make fun of them.
I can't stand vaccine hesitancy and anti-science bullshit. I've had to deal with this becoming a Fox News thing in my own family, and lost too many people from alternative "Eastern" medicine over "Western" medical science. But the mockery and ridicule only feeds into the Christian persecution complex most of that rural white population already embraces, and causes the wagons to circle.
I feel like a common trend is that if people generally showed more compassion for others, quite a bit would much better already. I mean for instance with vaccines, , not immediately vilifying people for not wanting the bacon, but trying to understand why. Also on the other side, antivaxxers trying to not just get pissed but trying to understand the other side. Not sure if I'm now thinking "understanding" or "compassion", but i guess the later would be a first step to not just giving up on people, instead of getting pissed or writing them off like stupid.
But lol not gonna lie that's hard.
The culture war has been going on for a lot longer than a decade, it's just only in the last decade or so that it's been amped up to 11 in terms of how aggressive it's being fought. Conservatives are almost always on the losing side of social issues that require a culture shift. Women's suffrage, civil rights, seatbelt laws, anti-smoking laws, gay rights... the list goes on, and the fight is never quite done for some, but they always lose in the end.
The very fact that conservatives are very pro for things like coal mining that liberals are trying to legislate away create strong reasons for some people to hold their noses and vote Republican regardless of how noxious the candidate is. When their livelihoods are literally at stake and the liberal response is "Well you should have gone to college to learn a new skill or trade" it makes sense that they are corralled right into the arms of conservatives. Economic drivers are the most powerful force behind the conservative movement right now, not culture bullshit that deep down they don't really care about. It doesn't help that very few people understand the relationship between "the economy" as outlined by experts and "the economy" as experienced when paying for groceries or filling up their car at the pump. It doesn't matter that conservatives almost never deliver on their promises to fix the economy and often end up sending the nation into a recession, if bad decisions on a national scale lead to temporary relief on a local scale for some, that's what they will remember when voting next time.
Liberals need to be doing more to bring disenfranchised voters into the fold. Educating them without being condescending or dismissive would be an excellent start. Turning down the temperature in politics is not possible without also lowering the stakes, backing off of hardline positions in the short term might be the most effective way of undermining support for terrible conservative candidates.
I think this is accurate. But I'd like to restate it.
The Left (as the apparent big tent party full of literal minorities) has been learning to deal with disenfranchisement and the feeling "that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked" for its entire existence. Because of a huge variety of factors, the Right is losing some of its influence. They are not handling this well. The Left (being well acquainted with feeling unheard) should have been able to help the Right through this transition. Due to deep seated insecurities on both sides, we are no longer able to help one another as a people. Buckle up.
This is actually a very good and nuanced reply.
We're going through similar problems in Britain. There are a lot of people from deprived communities that suffered during the seventies (Winter of Discontent, high inflation), had their manufacturing/mining jobs and access to social housing dismantled under Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, were ignored by successive leaders (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), then suffered through austerity at the hands of David Cameron.
Meanwhile, the media had been pushing tonnes of hatred towards immigrants and to nobody's surprise, hate crimes against Muslims and Eastern Europeans have skyrocketed. Things are so bad that we voted to leave the European Union in 2016, voted in a corrupt Tory government that pulled us out of the bloc in 2020, and given the trend of our most recent election, it's becoming increasingly likely that we are going to vote in a far-right government by 2029 or earlier.
What's keeping him in the race is the delusional nature of his supporters. Think about all those points you wrote about what a horrible person he is. How many other candidates could survive even one of those controversies? He lives in an imaginary world of his own creation where whatever he says he believes to be true, and his cult like followers are so brainwashed that their perfectly smooth grey matter just soaks it up like a sponge. There's precious little he could do or say at this point that would have his base leave him.
Rhetoric about scapegoats that distract people from the real causes of their issues, a cult of personality, and lots of money. Additionally, a lot of his voters thought he started to expose the truth behind how things actually run in the government instead of seeing how he is playing them for fools just as much (or more than) other politicians. Mostly though, it's the money.
A cult of fanatics who worship him due to his ability to let them display their complete lack of empathy as well as their extremely racist and misogynistic views.
What keeps him in the race? The lack of alternatives. No Republican candidate but Trump has even a chance to win. The GOP has no viable political program that could create a victory, all they have are the blind and dumb masses of Trump followers.
It's propaganda.
Everything you listed is a "Democrat lie" if you were to ask a Magoo. Fox news, Newsmax, and the like spend an enormous amount of effort in creating a reality where Republicans are always the victim, and they point to the population to say "you're next!"
Anything they can't say is specifically a lie, they'll say "well you did it too so it's not bad." Anything else just isn't a concern to them since people like Hannity tell them what to think.
It's propaganda. But, it's not just propaganda, it's effective propaganda.
The fact that it's so effective is somewhat new and very concerning. We have to understand why it's effective if there's any hope of eventually stopping it. And, it's effective not just because the propaganda is well crafted, it's effective because there's a whole system that immerses the audience in it and never lets them see an alternative point of view.
In North Korea the only information you get is information specifically selected by the state. The US free market and first amendment was supposed to be a shield against that sort of propaganda. Unfortunately, while people have the right to find other forms of media, a lot of people want the comfort of living inside their own media bubble. Then the propaganda channel tells them that every other source of media is full of lies, and controlled by the jews, and who knows what else, and those people get even more locked in to their propaganda source. Then they're told that scientists are getting rich (ha!) by selling out, so you can't trust scientific papers. So, you can't trust the government, the media, scientists, doctors, schools... you can only trust them.
Then they're told that if they ever do try to do their own research, they're not going to get results because of censorship. Some censorship exists. Sometimes it's formal, sometimes it's informal, like YouTube taking down videos that hurt their bottom line, or cause them headaches. But, the convenient thing about claiming that information is being censored is that it's unprovable or "unfalsifiable". You can't prove that something that doesn't exist was censored because you can't prove it ever existed in the first place. And, of course, when an idiot is told that information on "turbo cancer" is being censored, they search for it and get no results, that just reinforces their belief that the news is being censored.
Add to that that the same group that wants to lock people into a pipeline of disinformation also wants to defund schools and universities. You can't hope that someone can learn the truth from a teacher or a professor if the school no longer exists. You can't hope that the next generation learns critical thinking in high school if the high school is defunded and shut down.
Big tech companies making their platforms extremely engaging is yet another element in this shitty soup. Most of these companies actually employ mostly liberal people, and the culture is at least somewhat left of center. But, they get their money by keeping people engaged, which means feeding them things that are shocking, angering, etc. That keeps people in their bubbles, and keeps them from engaging their critical thinking abilities.
The end result is you get people living in bubbles, listening to, watching and reading news that makes them feel good because it reinforces their existing biases. They cut off people in their lives who have dissenting views because either they're angry about that person's views, or it's just too much of a headache to constantly fight with them. Social media keeps them in a bubble that keeps them engaged, and keeps them seeing the same point of view over and over. And so-on.
Because the whole situation is so complicated, it's not going to be easy to reverse. It's not just a matter of shutting down Fox News, or Newsmax or MSNBC or any other propaganda fountain. It's also going to have to involve breaking up tech monopolies, or at least removing their Section 230 protection for their editorial decisions. It's also going to require major educational system reforms, ensuring that all kids go to schools that teach critical thinking skills, and because this is the US that will involve major fights over property taxes and religious freedom. I honestly don't know if it's going to be possible.
Very very well put!
I think if you made a word bubble of all the comments I've made the largest bubble by far would be "I fucking hate propagandists!!"
Yep. My parents are in their own echo chamber of Fox news and other 80-year-old racist fucks, and anything you try to say bounces off them with the basic formula you outlined. Actual external logic doesn't matter. The wild thing is how big that echo chamber has gotten.
I think the phrase is, "It's the economy, stupid."
The economy had been trending upwards under Obama, and it peaked under Trump. If you're a Keynesian, you might gripe that Trump increased spending when the economy was doing well rather then saving for a rainy day. Then, the rainiest of all rainy days hit with the pandemic, which shot spending through the roof. That caused rapid inflation that became most noticeable after Biden came in. Most Americans either don't pay enough attention or attribute cause and effect to more or less random factors, so the experience is, Trump economy good, Biden economy bad.
Second, skepticism of the government is a facet of American culture, fed into from the national mythos regarding the Revolutionary War, by anticommunist propaganda about how the government doing stuff makes things worse, and also from experience with getting disillusioned from politicians not delivering on promises and the government generally not acting in people's best interests. Kamala comes across more as representing the political establishment, and her messaging doesn't tap into that dissatisfaction or contrarian nature.
Third, people feel like they're getting fucked, and Trump offers a clear, simple narrative of who is fucking them. And the narrative scapegoats people at the bottom of the social structure, who are least able to push back against said narratives, and who already have negative stereotypes about them. If you're not going to do that, then you either have to tell people they're not getting fucked, or you have to blame the people who are actually doing the fucking, who are at the top of the social structure, who are most able to push back against your narrative. Imo, in order to employ the latter strategy most successfully, you need a sense of solidarity, a sense that everyone is included in your movement and you won't allow anyone to be scapegoated or sacrifice anyone for your own advancement -and it's kind of hard to do that with the whole genocide thing going on.
All of this possible because half of Americans are functional illiterates barely able to follow the plot of a Tom and Jerry cartoon
Very Well said! u brilliantly explained whats going on. i had a blast reading it.
Brainwashing most simply.
Edit: I found the image that I was thinking of when I posted this...
Your mistake is to consider an election is a rational competition. It's not. Not anymore, because medias make it impossible to know the truth. So it is more like a football match. People have the team they support, and for most nothing will change their mind because there's too much propaganda. When almost everything is propaganda, you get to choose the reality you "prefer".
So the point of the campaign is more about convincing people to vote in order to defeat the opposing team. Or to persuade the other team to concede.
It's interesting to think how this would be if the only info we got about him was in daily newspapers and 6 o'clock news, instead of 24/7.
I agree that the 24-hour news cycle is pretty horrendous and leads to a lot of unneeded political badness. At the same time, going back to the old style of political news is also a mistake. Hell, it let Nixon get reelected.
Rather than either of those options, it's important for people to realize that they are actively consuming the news, and one way to protect themselves from being manipulated is to consume the news in different ways and from different sources. It's surprisingly easy to do that these days, if you have a couple of different social media accounts or use an RSS reader, for example. Of course there are many other ways. It is our own personal responsibility to be active and aware enough to avoid getting manipulated in predictable ways.
Conservatism is a social cancer that primarily affects unintellectual people and sociopaths.
This cancer metastasizes as fascism. Social progress is sometimes an effective treatment, but a permanent cure is long overdue.
Money
The american people do not own the elections like people think. It is big bucks to run an election and very very few politicians are supported financially by the people. Trump grifts sure but he's paid by people because he'll get the most votes, they think.
Also, he blatantly corrupt. If you pay him enough money, you can be sure that he will rubberstamp anything you want. He's probably even relatively cheap if you stroke his ego enough.
Trump's ego and desire for self preservation (throwing a sitting president in prison never happened) is unmatched in US politics. And don't forget, there is still a lot of new gerrymandering shit that is going on that will still swing in his favor no matter how demented he gets.
Trump could be rolled out drooling and leaking brain fluid from his ears and 40% of voters will fully go behind him cause he's a republican. And the "undecided" voters will somehow see it as a strength. By the way, anyone still claiming to be undecided on Donald Trump in 2024 is full of shit
If he doesn't win he goes to prison, possibly for the rest of his life.
He'll never see the inside of a cell
I didn't know if you meant it that way, but my sleepy brain read it like a threat
America will never put an ex-president in jail.
or a rich white dude unless he steals from other richer white dudes
If not he will spend the rest of his life in court trying to avoid prison.
Know how yous get upset when people say "Americans are stupid"
Literally a third of you have demonstrated that you'd eat gravel if someone said it'd cure immigrants
A third. So lets just say only half of the other two thirds are stupid
That's quite a few. Almost a quarter pounder
Do you mean a Royale with Cheese?
I think they mean that 2/3 is close to but still not quite as big as 1/4 since 4 is bigger than 2 or 3.
Is there any possible way you'd ever vote Republican? If not, remember that there are people like that on the opposite side. You're always going to have single issue voters. A huge example is anti abortion advocates voting Republican. If someone genuinely believes abortion is murdering a baby they aren't going to care how good a candidate looks in a debate.
If you can believe it, Trump supporters will accept the Ohio immigrant pet eating story as true.
Somehow media is pitching the "moderate position" as halfway between anywhere within the normal range of political positions and the crazy positions.
Why is he still in the race or why are his supporters?
For him I think it's obvious. Narcissism and the fact that he has a lot of federal crimes in the courts that he can stop when he is elected.
His supporters are more complicated. He pretty decently still owns the GOP so even if they are getting cold feet, they don't seem to have a plan to overthrow him. I feel like they are planning on just stonewalling for 4 more years and then try to win the next one and cut the checks to the billionaires then.
I got nothing on his base though. I haven't understood them for 10 years now. Not sure I ever will.
Part of the checks cut get reinvested in the propaganda that gets more checks cut. It's a whole corrupt system, as attested to by this list of think tanks backing someone like a Jordan Peterson:
https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/yl29i2/jordan_peterson_and_the_think_tanks/
...you can research most rightwing media and personalities and make lists and connections (some if Trump's for instance run through Roy Cohn, the original red scare and the mafia for instance).
It's likely the same for some leftwing individuals to. It's the reproduction of this culture, and the economic loops that perpetuate the toxicities of the current systems.
...and it will keep going long after Trump is gone.
Judging by some of my distant acquaintances it’s something along the lines of HURR DURR GASOLINE WAS CHEAPER 8 YEARS AGO. They focus on a global commodity of all things.
Seriously, the only stuff I’ve seen from them that even approaches a policy comparison rather than “lol black lady is a ho” caliber stuff revolves around money. And some of that might actually be a valid discussion if it were correct and if it weren’t for the absurd amount of other issues.
It’s just a low-information team sport, regardless of how insane reality is.
But that doesn't keep him in the race, there are moron candidates with moron voters in other countries but they generally drop out pretty quickly. What keeps Trump in the race is mostly the electoral college but also the first past the post voting. Trump wouldn't have a shot at winning if the electoral college didn't skew the value of individual votes and first past the post effectively limits the amount of candidates you can have.
That’s true, but I would amend it to say that the EC and our stupid FPTP system, plus the bias of the senate, are what’s keeping the entire Republican Party relevant.
The rabid and mean stupidity is what is keeping Donald Trump in particular in the race. The establishment might actually like to get rid of him and get back to “money good, human well being bad” like God intended, but they could not get away with it yet.
"Donald Trump makes me, a white christian, feel like I'm important."
Whole two party system, we vs them sport mentality has fucked their brains up.
There's this quote from Chomsky about how spectator sports plays into propaganda because it trains people to think in terms of aligning themselves with a group of people that they they don't know or have any meaningful connections to, while vilifying the other groups and their supporters who are just like they are. When the team that they are only connected to in their minds win, they win. This is the mindset that gets working class people to obey the orders of plutocrats to go kill working class people just themselves.
I would look into the “polls” and how realistic they actually are and who has paid for them.
Also don’t forget that the media has great interest in trump since he creates so much news with his bullshit. Newspapers don’t sell with headlines like “politician does something normal and expected”.
Fuck the mainstream media, they will love a trump administration and its utter depravity.
Best thing I’ve heard all week is Swift siding with Harris. If the young actually vote, whatever this form of the Republican Party is will be dead.
The GOP's desperation for relevancy in a world where literally every problem can be blamed on Republicans
That's all his financiers hear.
That's all his voters hear.
Everything else goes in one ear and out the other, muddied up with enough "whataboutism" and "both sides" rhetoric from the financiers to keep the voters from actually considering alternative options.
the only reasonable answer, is literally fascism and a deluded right wing in america.
See my previous comment on another thread for additional context if you please.
Welcome to the post truth era. Nothing matters except the way it makes you feel. Ignorance is strength and rage is fuel. If it feels good it's true, if it challenges your paradigm, it's fake news. This phenom is not exclusive to Republicans but they sure do excel at it.
Amerikkkans.
At one time it would have sounded like a conspiracy theory, but you don't get here without a massive disinformation campaign.
Trump's supporters have been so programmed to accept everything he says at face value or, in some cases, just to ignore what he actually said in favor of the party's updated spin. In all cases, they believe it is impossible that he could do any wrong, so any semblance of incongruity or poor leadership or any negative aspect of Trump at all must be due to lies of his opponents -- even if that means the entire system would have to be rigged against him to an extremely unlikely degree.
The last time the world saw these tactics used to such an extreme extent and with such success required a widespread campaign of so-called "denazification" after a very prolonged war.
The left have been asleep at the wheel since 2014 (this is the smaller of the two problems), and centrist neoliberals will not wake up because they're inculcated into the systems that keep them asleep at the wheel (this is the larger of the two problems, and likely includes establishment leftists like Kamala).
It's the problems of "the one dimensional man" where we can't even think outside of the systems we know to be the problem... and most people don't even make any serious efforts to try to.
We Taught This Chimpanzee to Understand the American Political System and He Hanged Himself
It's easy. They don't believe Harris will do any of the things she has said, and they don't believe trump has done any of the things you've said. Additionally, some of them don't like the things Harris is saying she'll do, even though they're positive things to you.
Because his voters don't believe any of the points you make about him. Trump is able to dismiss any criticism of him as "fake news." You can make any legitimate point about him and they will never believe it.
The guy is a convicted felon, and I've seen a shockingly high number of people wearing t-shirts outright acknowledging that fact.
For the upper tier of the socioeconomic scale, they only care about money and power which we had shifted in that direction. For the lower half, he continues to convince them all their problems are because of minorities, immigrants, women, poor, or any other marginalized group
In other words … follow the money.
probably the same drive that will make him a candidate in the 2028 election. 😁🙂
(this posted 06:01 UTC (2:01 AM EDT), 13 September 2024)
lol
It's as if this nation has deep internal divisions following a badly wrapped up civil war that have metastasized into irreconcilable worldviews.
Half of America wants a fascist state, unfortunately.
only about a third that want one but another third would rather argue with you about whether it is or isn't actually fascism.
It's a race between junk food vs. an actual meal. Junk food is easy and self indulgent, real food requires time and effort. It doesn't matter that junk food is a terrible value and lacks any nutrition. The Trump people choose junk, conservatives choose Trump people because the Trump people are mathematically mandatory to maintain their caste.
It's actually hilarious that you choose this comparison because I am always seeing disgustingly obese conservatives making fun of other people for being fat, but then clutching their pearls when anyone calls them fat.
"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled"
After someone has been convinced of something, it's very hard to convince them that they were wrong because now their ego is on the line. And the longer amount of time they've believed what Trump says then the harder it will be to convince them that he's a lying con man, because they'd have to admit to themselves and their community that they were massively conned. And they would to some degree have to even question whether their entire worldview is wrong.
Questioning your own ideas and trying to determine if you've been wrong about something takes a lot of openness maturity and emotional intelligence, which are things conservatives statistically are not good at
Spite is a powerful motivator. Both for Trump himself, and also for his supporters.
I dunno man. I got nothing. I don't understand it either.
There are a lot of racist and/or psychotically greedy people in the US.
Like, A LOT a lot.
There's a lot of reasons people have already mentioned, but I'll add this.
Your applying logic and reasoning to people who are illogical and unreasonable...
This video explains it all in 19 words. Democracy relies on intelligent, informed choice. Republican voters typically lack one or both.
The 19 words: "...because democracy basically meaningless..." (pause) "Government by the people, of the people, for the people... but the people are [fools]."
I'm inserting "fools" cuz I don't wanna use outdated insults.
...all that and you don't even mention that he's been an open russian asset for eight years?..
...the blunt truth is that he's in too deep, as are most of the remaining republican party, and the only way to keep their heads at this point is to double-down on seizing the apparatus of state to dismiss their criminal culpability...
Lead. Like the metal
Hatred for anything not Republican by MAGA and their brainwashed followers. That's what's keeping Donald T. still in the race.
Either lack of critical thinking or driven by greed.
You get the top to vote for you by ensuring they keep and/or increase their riches. That’s done by immediate things like tax cuts, or other long term strategies like cutting environmental protections and reducing the role of gov’t, allowing businesses to rape the planet and abuse their workforce as hard as possible to increase profits.
As for the rest of his supporters, the “MAGA” crowd, they’re kept in line by keeping them stupid, allowing you to more easily feed them propaganda and influence their emotions to fit your needs. Religion teaches them to be subservient from an early age and take a back seat to a higher power, whether that be god or the charismatic talking head at the alter or on tv, all the while leeching as much money from them as possible without leaving them totally destitute. This helps explain why conservatives/religious turds continue to attack early education (less chance of them learning to think critically and question things), school lunch programs (hinder brain development), libraries (access to other ideas/beliefs), sex education and abortions (keeping those accidental pregnancies from being stopped, thereby ensuring the already uneducated and poor families continue to have kids they cannot support financially and give a good education to). It’s all very sinister when you look at the whole picture. It’s why I detest religion, not so much the concept and practicing of religion, but how evil men have turned it into a weapon, and exploiting the very people they pretend to care about. A lot of the evil they push is all done under the guise of religious beliefs/freedoms.
We should all be glad he is still in the race. If he moves over, the republicans will certainly have a better chance to win, and I don't like their agenda at all. But fear of retaliation is what is keeping the republicans in line IMO.
I'm not actually sure I agree. Trump has so much support right now because he has formed a cult of personality. If Trump goes the GOP goes. Trump dominated every primary, no one else stood a chance, which means there isn't another GOP memeber that the cult would move to so easily. Trump has a "strength" in being an "outsider" to his base, anyone else who was in the primaries would just be another "elitist" politician to the magas.
Unfortunately our politics have gotten so fucked by a disgusting form of propaganda that disregards the typical "immoral" stances (racism, sexism, etc) that I actually believe the only people that could continue to keep the GOP going are the absolutely disgusting people like MTG and Bobert... The loudmouth assholes with no regard or respect for anyone but their "tribe."
I agree in principle, but I feel like I should point out that mindset is very similar to what we all thought back in 2016, and he ended up 'winning' because we underestimated his chances. Unfortunately, we'll just have to let hindsight be the judge
Hes a dancing monkey that brings in tons of ratings, viewership, and revenue.
So media has a vested financial interest in giving him tons of coverage, especially soft coverage, to get eyes on products. Its also why they have a vested interest in his winning, and are doing everything they can (including a mass hysterical hallucination that Biden was somehow old and incompetent due to having jet lag after a whirlwind 3 day international political trip) to ensure trump remains favorable in the eyes of people who wouldnt vote for him if they got the 100% unfiltered coverage about him.
Thats the biggest issue.
There are other issues, of course, helping this along (and benefiting from the above mentioned media bias) are things like the fact that he is a foreign puppet being manipulated by Putin mostly, and by others less so. Which is why they, especially russia, has invested so much money into the NRA, Republican Packs, and most recently, internet jackwads that balding beanie wearing fuckstick and his ilk. To have a chorus of mouth pieces pushing false news and pro-russian narratives, to undermine our democracy and reduce to outright eliminate our presence on the global stage as a bulwark against countries like Russia.
You also have petty powermongers at home that are sounding his call for dictatorial power so they can get their own petty feifdoms.
And the billionaire conservatives who want the world to be a festering cesspit of poverty so they can sleep on their mountains of gold.. and are using the media they control to further their goals, by lifting trump up and knocking everyone else down.
and finally, you have the lowest strata, his voters, Most of which vote for him because they want their women to be property, and their non-white neighbors to be property too. and they don't care how deep into hell everything goes as long as they can be racist twats who don't have to self censor and are free of repercussions for their twattery.
Theres more minutae to it, and several other layers and strata, but this is kinda the general broad strokes.
It's all that side has. Who else would run in his place? Nobody comes close to that sort of name recognition. The Republicans are betting on a culture war to win and who wages that war more than trump?
The left didn't invade rightwing spaces, the spaces that have been propagandized to since 2014, and present credible arguments against the propaganda on a consistent basis.
So what you have is a decades backlog of brainwashed people Russia and others were paying to spread propaganda to.
It's not that complicated, and it will continue - even after Trump is gone. Koch, Musk, Thiel, Dan and Ferris Wilks, Zuckerberg, American billionaires are in this too, paying nominally conservative people to believe Libertarianism, tax evasion and defunding the nation in the name of "owning the crazy libs" is patriotism.
It's nuts. America is under constant attack, and don't expect the Establishment Liberal majority to fight back outside of election season.
That's a feature, not a bug
Cultists and the GOP that feels beholden to those cultists lest they get primaried
In 2010 a group of unelected theocrats decided that billionaires can put however much money they want into propaganda. That's on top of the most widely watched media in the nation already being a billionaire's propaganda.
They have used this power to terrify their voting base into action. Their voting base are fear-addicted racists who willingly allowed themselves to be brainwashed.
Yep. There were literal meetings on Capitol Hill between Republicans and billionaires planning to buy the failing newspapers for more propaganda reach. I was invited and my then-boss attended.
racism. any other questions?
The republican branch of the GRU?
What's keeping Trump in the race is the fact that most Americans are working 2-3 jobs to main a basic standard of living and have to actually look at their grocery, utility, and medical bills.
Crazy doesn't seem so crazy when the other candidate promised to make your life better and failed.
I have to do the same thing but my natural response isn't to attack others based on physical traits or religious beliefs. My natural response is to figure out who's hoarding the most resources and convince them it's in their best interest to share lest others take a more violent approach at a more desperate time.
5% pleasure
50% pain
100% his reason is so we remember his name (🤮)
Fascism.
People have been lied to for decades and we all know it's going to get worse in the future. The democrats are neoliberals who will continue to exploit people. The news media and social media are all owned by oligarchs. Wealth inequality is getting worse. Climate change won't be solved and will make all things worse. Why should people vote for the status quo? Work hard, get fucked? No solidarity, no rational action, no plan. And nuclear war when?
Fascism and nationalism is not just something to break this but also has the better story. Something the stupid masses can believe in again. Trump is telling them everything they want to hear.
While there may be "No stupid questions", there are many, many "Stupid answers".
Today I heard the argument that if Trump wins, it will cause massive profits on the bitcoin market. So all the shady bitcoin bros are backing him.
It's no small shock that... checks notes... the adherents of a "monetary system" that is clearly being used for criminal activities such as money laundering are on board with a criminal running the country. They just want the regulations to go so they can take the money and run.
Disclaimer: I personally use bitcoin to donate to my favorite piracy sites. I have zero interest in bitcoin as an investment, because I'm not a fool.
It's his next chance of avoiding prison. Also pride.
Two party system, some would vote for party x no matter what.
Winning, or perhaps losing, is existential to Donald Trump. If he loses, he will most certainly have to face down his legal issues.
Everybody will answer "greed, racism, idiocy, and bigotry" or some such rubbish, because morally and overall psychologically, that's the most comfortable answer.
The real thing is somewhat complex, and most people won't buy it.
Of course, part of it is those things, but there's way more going on here, some of it is cultural dynamics, some of it conscious intent. Those specifics are the symptoms, not the disease (though they may be diseases in their own rite).
structural weaknesses in the US government, which was barely meant to handle the complexity millions of people, much less tens or hundreds of millions of people. I.e., bandwidth issues. As more people push their views and goals into the system, all of that needs to get governed or implemented somehow. But there is no cohesive operating principle that guides US (and even other western) culture. There is no razor - not even material necessity (staying in-budget, or managing debt effectively) is accepted. There is no means to trim implementation that all parties will be happy with, so things don't get trimmed. They get crammed in, the laws (in the sense of legal structure, not crime) are consequentially self-conflicting, improbable, or impossible to fulfill. This leads to an intrinsically unstable environment, ripe for (and rife with, by all parties) abuse. What you are seeing is, in part, the breakdown of the rule of law. This breakdown can be allayed, to some degree, with authoritarian means, but that only goes so far, even if that authority has a willingness and capability to work with the people as a whole - which none of the active authorities do, anyways, except maybe Bernie, and he's been written off by the authorities because he can't work with them well, and they also have valid concerns that must be addressed. But, in any case, whether centralized or not, this breakdown is to be expected, because the rule of law, unless supplemented with common principle, becomes.. well.. legalistic, and rife with abuse.
governance that doesn't match underlying principles: we have no conscious least common denominator. People often point to distinct nations and say things like "see? they are doing X right!", but that nation has a cohesive culture, and isn't dealing with anywhere near the level of cultural complexity that any melting-pot nations are dealing with. What is enforceable must be agreed upon by common culture - or you must sacrifice the reality (though not necessarily the pretense) of diversity, and enforce your way. But that has obvious flaws. Instead, it is better, in my opinion, to enforce sovereignty, which is intrinsically what all the different cultures want, anyways, except that they also want to take control of everyone - which they don't get to do in a system with sovereignty as a basis, except by people ascribing to that culture. What you are seeing, is in part, a breakdown of unity due to a lack of agreement about what can be universally enforced. I.e., the system implemented does not address underlying cultural commonalities.
the need to incorporate raw power and personal responsibility into the governing body. Bending the rules, breaking the rules with impunity, changing the rules, explicit and implicit coercion are all possible, and as such, the existing system or ruling party must be able to address these things, and incorporate them where needed, for the larger good of upholding the spirit of the law. This relates to the breakdown of the rule of law, but is more primal: you know raw power must be met with raw power. That power can be of a different form, but it must be effective.
unconscious cognition of complex truths: or, in some senses, the "vote of no confidence". People understand, or are at least impacted, by the above issues. They have instinctive reactions against external control, and for good reason, as individual sovereignty is the source of a solid collective. But in any case, many people are aware there is a problem, don't see a solution, and are see no option but to let things burn. This may not even be a conscious choice, but simply an overall feeling - and thus, more powerful and deeply-rooted.
genuine mockery and rejection of opposing views. Nobody gets each other, unconsciously, and everyone else treats others outside their worldview like shit, and pretends that doesn't matter. A lot of the left separated from the "Christian" right due to this - only to turn around and do the same thing to the center and right, feeling just as justified in doing so. But it creates real alienation and aggravates the already deep wounds and rifts that exist. One's personal actions, thoughts, and feelings may not seem to matter, but they resound loudly in the whole - and making personal change does, too. For those who are genuinely growing and facing their hearts and minds - my respect.
All of these contribute to Trump's rising and staying power. Of course, he's just riding a wave of unconscious thought, and if it weren't him, it'd be someone else. But people like to fixate on a face.
The actual thing we're trying to do (integrate diversity into a cohesive whole) requires genuine acceptance and support of differing world views (including non-scientific or non-Christian ones - why do I have to say this?). That means that your group, your ideology, must make room for the people who are "wrong", and wish to live their lives wrongly in abhorrent wrongness - though they never gain the right to enforce participation in their culture, above and beyond what is a natural requisite by birth, upbringing, or other dependency.
That is, each person and organization has a sovereign right to rule their own life and the lives of their dependents as they see fit, but does not have the right to force others to use their system, nor to prevent others from abandoning their system and starting their own or joining another. This integrates the very opposite of federation (well, not in the Lemmy sense, which is actually confederation, but that's a no-no-word because some people thought that confederation did give them the right to force others through slavery - but it doesn't).
But Sovereignty Culture isn't simply confederacy, like Lemmy is, but it heads towards the same things. That which can be federal is only that which we fundamentally agree on. The federal must not be used as a means of furthering ideologies, but as a means of resolving disputes between differing ideologies. It can have as much power as the people grant it, and no more - else it loses the people. By making sovereignty a keystone of culture and governance, we intrinsically grant and naturally enforce rights of others, but without placing a burden on others (except the burden of self governance, which you already have, and can't avoid).
Rich donors who don’t want EU like welfare states in the U.S.
Because people like my idiot brother think “he trounced that ho in the debate.”
Ego + Narcissism.
Very stupid Americans, mostly.
The repuglicans that need to keep him out front so they can shovel their shit out of sight
I think a lot of Americans like to feel special/different/superior and Trump helps feed that addiction
Ridiculously enough, it's still a neck & neck race and Trump still very much has a good chance of winning. And he really has no incentive to drop out, he absolutely needs to get back into power in order to quash all these lawsuits against him, because at the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters to him. Biden had the humility to drop out for the good of both the Democratic party and for the Country, Trump has no humility whatsoever and doesn't care if he tanks the Republican party or plunges the Country into some sort of Civil War 2.0 (not likely, but it's a possibility), none of that is a priority to him.
This is kind of similar to the Roman Republic in some ways. Holding on to power made some Roman officials immune to being summoned to court while they were in office, and our own Supreme Court has almost brought that practice back (give them a few more years for the rest). So the incentive for shitty office holders is to just keep holding on to office so that none of their illegal shit they do comes back to haunt them. That November sentencing will mean nothing to him if he becomes President again.
Money and bigotry
It's depressing as hell that this is where we are.
I'm not from the US and so it's officially not my business. But from what I've seen around the webs is that he has gathered a loyal following all around the US. Seems he has enough loyals on his side to stay in the race. But I don't know a lot about the political system in the US. Excuse me if I'm wrong here.
He is a cult leader. More than a decade in the making. Hes the leader of a cult
ignorance-based fear.
lot of that in a geographically isolated country with poor education.
Racism and cult mentality.
There's a few major flaws:
Trying to out-flank republicans on the right with immigration and crime; instead of counter-messaging that republican claims of migrant crime are false and migrants commit less crime than average, and crime as a whole is declining, her campaign promotes how tough she is on crime. This is essentially campaigning for the republicans. The people who are terrified of immigrants and criminals are voting republican.
Trying to out-flank republicans on the right in foreign policy. Harris can promise rivers of Muslim, North Korean, and Russian blood, and the people who want that will still vote republican. Talking about how lethal the US military will be and how hostile the US will be to other countries decreases turnout. War is not popular. Trump's campaign is already hitting Harris on supporting the genocide in Palestine.
Huh. Wonder what that US reaper drone was doing over Yemen.
Some voters arestill "undecided" because "both sides are the same" (aka they don't know how to tell fact from fiction)
A technical reason is because he has been a president before
You have to remember that the voters are human beings, complete with areas of ignorance, prejudices, and logical fallibility. Trump certainly is aware of that and exploits it to the maximum extent.
He has an army of cultists who are leaving in an entirely different reality to the rest of us.
Hatred of brown people and Adderall
Inertia?
So this is a community for venting and asking rhetorical questions now?
The difference between someone who lived the struggle and someone who was just trying to represent it.
Why did the cubs have such a hardcore fanbase despite their legendary drought? A lot of people root for their team, not vote for their best interests.
If you really want to know why Trump is still competitive, listen to Anthony Scaramucci, a.k.a. The Mooch. He worked for Trump for a couple of weeks before being fired by him. The Mooch is a long-time conservative investor-type who knows Trump well and can't stand him, so he has been helping the Democrats. Thr Mooch really understands Trump and his followers. I'm pretty sure he helped with Harris's debate prep, especially helping her understand how to get under Trump's skin.
He hosts a great podcast along with Katty Kay called The Rest Is Politics US (as opposed to the parent program The Rest Is Politics UK). https://tripus.supportingcast.fm
In particular, check out the last two post-debate episodes:
#27 Trump vs. Harris: What You Didn't See
#28 Why Kamala Harris Still Has a Problem
The fear of dying in prison. After being publicly humiliated. Again.
Greed and jail is keeping him in the race. Followed by narcissism and the drive for power. (The last 2 are a requirements for a politician of any stripe).
I believe the answer is "A lot of Americans".
Many other comments here have a share in the reasons, but a huge reason is he’s looking at more state and federal charges, and more lawsuits (which haven’t going well for him).
He NEEDS to run and WIN so he can make all these cases go away for good.
Ego. Trump's narcissistic, authoritarian personality won't allow him to retreat or surrender in what he sees as a popularity contest.
Billionaires and their desire to have real wage slavery (even more so than now) and to not have to pay taxes.
Especially, and this is important, every SINGLE media company owner.
He is their golden goose for content and their dream of an oligarchic future
how else could the Democrats win?
every election they pander more to the right and if someone does not run that is worse what would they have to campaign on?
progressive politics?