I’m only 20 years old, I’ve never voted or even really bothered paying attention to any other election, and I dunno it kinda feels like I started on one that was really crazy? But I’m not sure maybe every election has been insane and I just didn’t know because I wasn’t paying attention.
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I’m nearly three times your age and so will likely have a very different perspective, but…
I remember watching the news (from Canada) when Reagan was first elected. it felt HORRIBLE, and turned out to be just that - Reagan, Thatcher, and their psychophant hanger-on Mulroney ushered in a new era of “get fucked by the rich, fuck the poor” also known as trickle-down economics.
And yet, there was always a sense of decorum among them. Even Harper and Bush jr. at least pretended to be civil in the world of politics, no matter how corrupt and evil they were.
Trump changed everything. He was loud, abrasive, offensive, and off the rails. And he won! Suddenly the doors were open. Here in Canada, O’Toole did outhouse attack ads against Trudeau. Jingoistic, vapid, fear-mongering populism took root throughout Europe. And it just kept getting worse.
Now this election in the US was unhinged beyond description. Trump said things and did things that should have gotten him locked up. Musk should be facing either life in jail or the electric chair for his interference. There are no limits in American elections anymore - I would genuinely say including shooting someone onstage.
Here in Canada, Poilievre has been carefully fanning the same embers - stoking fear, instilling rage, creating groups to hate; and at the same time, throwing out meaningless attacks on his opponents. Unlike when O’Toole awkwardly attempted it, it is working very effectively. Having an entire room or stadium chanting “AXE THE TAX” without even offering an alternative shows that he’s winning by being the same empty bully as Trump.
(And meanwhile, Harper is chortling quietly from behind the curtain as he pulls the puppet strings.)
So yeah, this is crazy - and it’s the new normal, until we start showing politicians that it doesn’t work, and can get them arrested.
Since all of these politicians are at the same time ensuring that they are above the law, I don’t think you can count on getting them arrested.
as a ~40 year old Canadian looking from the outside at the US election
this one was crazy for sure but the last couple have been kinda out there to say the least. before the internet we Canadians always knew when it coming, but it was never covered in a 24h news cycle like now. other than daily newspaper (that was a physical unit of paper that was like social media, where we could not really choose who to follow other than politically left or right and only updated every 24h) we’d get news at 6-7pm and 11pm. then the noon news showed up. while there have always been issues between right and left, there had never been violence on the scale we see now. like Reagan getting shot, happened just after i was born, so not like it was all sunshine and rainbows but nothing like the scale that’s seen now.
this could be from the mass news reporting and social media, or people have just gone off the rails. I’m guessing option 2.
2000 was bugfuck insane.
This election has the same dreadful feeling as 2000.
Nevermind the crazyness, it’s the certainty that something worldwide bad is going to happen due to the incompetence of the American government.
It’s easy to forget all the shit Ashcroft said he was going to do, like misinterpret existing laws to go after porn producers, harrass gay folks, all kinds of other Christofascist shit. Then 9/11 happened, and this is a pretty good summary of what happened:
he sought to sweep away any meaningful restrictions on his power and use the fact of September 11th to do so.
But this is an attorney general who treated dissent and criticism as if it was treason, who launched the largest campaign of ethnic profiling we’ve seen in this country since World War II, who sought… who treated judicial review and congressional oversight as inconvenient obstacles to getting the job done.
And I think ultimately he’ll be seen as a disaster, both from a civil liberties perspective and also from a national security perspective.
I’m thinking worldwide. George Bush paved the way for a lot of populistic right wing politicians in other countries, showing that reckless incompetence is fine as long as you put on a suit and pretend to know something about economy.
He then dragged the entire ensemble of headnodding clowns into a war in Iraq on a false premise. Yes, Saddam was an asshole and needed to go, but he did not have chemical weapons. The entire war was about taking full control of oil, that Bush’s croonies had planned long beforehand.
Then there was a little financial crisis called “the great recession” in 2007 and onwards, and of course history has a tendency to point backwards, but I think it’s fair to say that the complete lack of oversight of the financial institutions was the main cause. The cause of this crisis was G. Bush Junior and all the other conservative government leaders in suits claiming to be “fiscally responsible”. If only they had been “financially conservative” that would’ve better, but they didn’t even attempt. It was pretty much as irresponsible as it gets.
I don’t think Trump or the USA as a whole can litteraly destroy the environment, because they’re not that many, 300k people of 8 billion worldwide, and I also don’t think Trump will initiate any wars directly, but they’ll do nothing to stop the existing wars, and we will see a worldwide financial crisis as soon as the next budget doesn’t get approved or earlier.
Liberals screaming that the world is falling apart when they lose? Yeah
If blue still has any branch of government then this might have been a nothing burger. Yeah, we’d be set back 10 years but nothing unfixable.
Trump has absolutely no checks on his whims. Even the supreme Court is in lockstep. He could make it illegal to not be orange on day one and actually enforce it. Not everywhere equally, since blue states still exist. But we’ll see if trump doesn’t use military force on them.
A whole lot of “not state rights” are coming
Not even close. This was a turning point election.
This election determined that we will live with an ultra conservative Supreme Court for the rest of our lives. In just the last couple years that court has removed women’s federally protected right to bodily autonomy and determined that presidents are above the law and can’t be held accountable for anything they do while in office. Decisions like that will continue for the remainder of our lives and chip away at our nation as we once knew it.
Trump’s administration ran on making fundamental changes to our government, including deconstructing the department of education. He promised to make an anti-vaxxer the head of the department of health. Ukraine will cease to exist. Palestine will cease to exist. Russia will expand their borders and threaten Europe. America will lose allies. NATO will be weakened.
We made a criminal who failed his last term as president by every conceivable metric and illegally attempted to overturn an election the most powerful figure on the planet. He will fill all positions with unqualified toadies, just like he did last time when he had the highest White House turnover rate in US history.
What Americans just did was change the political order we will be living under for the foreseeable future. And no one will suffer more for that than your generation.
We categorically failed you and the decline we are about to experience could last a generation and the suffering is currently unquantifiable. The decision we just made will change the world we live in in a negative way we can’t fully fathom yet.
The remainder of your life just got a whole lot harder and I’m sorry. I did not vote for it to be this way.
You’re an optimist. This decline is gonna be way more than a generation.
Elections have strong outcomes, strong repercussions and sometimes strong benefits. Right now, this past election will have sharp and strong repercussions. Your vote is indirectly saying that you’re OKAY with whatever party you chose, to do with as they wish. And what they do with whatever they wish, will affect millions, including you.
So right now, everyone who didn’t vote for the Orange Fascist, are having solid reasons to be worried. They expect a lot of things to be ripped away or outright dismantled, setting the course to potentially have irreversible damages. All because of the collective voter’s choices that wanted the opposing party in.
In an election, I would much people vote to have a voice than abstain and not vote, expecting outcomes to magically work. However, there is a personal responsibility to be had when it comes to voting. That is, whatever comes your way in how people react when they find out who you voted for.
I always seem to lose friends every election, long tenure or short tenure, because of my choices that complicate theirs. It’s unfortunately a thing that’s going to happen. And it may happen to you.
By the way, I’ve failed to mention that it is important to vote, based on what you feel is valuable for the party to focus on. If they ever.
Not even a little bit.
And you’re probably not gonna get a point of comparison, because it’s looking likely to be one party rule by the absolute shittiest american embarrassments forever at this point. At least until America does some stupid shit globally and gets themselves invaded by a united band of good guys down the road.
Would take China and/or India in that case. Europe and Canada don’t have the population, Mexico probably doesn’t the will.
Mexico probably doesn’t the will.
Yup, we do not. We have enough problems at home created or perpetuated by Americans like gun violence, organized crime and now gentrification on top of everything else. Good luck.
Well I doubt the orange cares about deporting people to the correct country so you might get more problems…sorry.
China definitely aren’t the good guys.
There are no good guys. That said no I don’t want to be under the Chinese surveillance state especially as a non-chinese. India also not great at the moment though. Those are just the two main countries with the population and domestic production capacity to potentially go toe to toe with the American military, probably still need some help from Europe…our military is so damn bloated.
It didn’t used to be, but I’m guessing this is how it’ll be from now on. It used to be a pretty mundane activity, and people could even agree to disagree. When I was your age I remember asking friends who they voted for, and those conversations would go something like this
Friend 1: Who did you vote for?
Friend 2: So-and-so
Friend 3: haha, that guy is an idiot! You’re so stupid
Friend 2: lol, yeah maybe
Friend 1: whatever, let’s go find a party
And it wouldn’t really change much. Now everything after friend 2 would be full of hatred, people disowning each other, and outright vitriol. If we can’t even talk to our friends about this stuff, how the hell are we going to talk to people who we completely disagree with that we don’t know? Of course it’s been engineered to be like this now. This isn’t people changing of their own accord. This is intentionally manufactured division and strife to keep people fighting amongst each other while the billionaires pick everyone’s pockets, and the fascists consolidate power. It’s not going to go back to the way it was without significant activism and hardship.
Yeah, now it’s entirely reasonable to drop a human being from your friend pool for the rest of your life because of which person they voted for.
If I find out somebody has voted for Trump they are now persona non grata to me.
And before you say I shouldn’t let politics rule my friendships, my dad is dead because of how Trump bungled the covid pandemic response, so any person who has voted for that person has said that my dad dying is less important to them than that guy being given the highest office in the land.
I cannot think of a graver insult, and it is one that cannot be apologized for short of bringing my father back to life.
So if you voted for Trump, fuck you.
I’ve also cut people out of my life because of it. It says more than I care to type right now about a person if they’re voting for trump. Even discounting any possible statements it makes about their personal values, it tells me they don’t live intentionally, don’t think about their actions, don’t read, and don’t think critically. If they do those things, then it tells me a lot about where their other values lie. I’m too far along in my own personal journey to allocate time in my life for people like that.
This is true (edit: for fairly recent history; going back more we have women’s suffrage times and the civil war times), but I also don’t know that it’s great. When we see people having their rights denied or, worse, taken away, standing complicity by or with the people working to deny or strip those rights does not work for me. I have cut people out of my life and am even low-contact with some of my family because they want to hurt people I love and that’s not OK with me.
It’s part of a trend of a significant portion of the electorate feeling ignored. It’s a trend that’s happening in large parts of the West, we’re seeing it in Europe too in places like France and Germany.
Now you can argue about whether these people have a genuine grievance or not. But if we don’t try and address the underlying causes of these people abandoning moderate parties, we’re going to see more and more extreme candidates and parties being successful. And I don’t think that’s something any of us want.
Not every, but a lot of them yes.
Going forward? Maybe and I fear likely. Im over 50. voting for a republican when I was young was not completely crazy. Especially moderate ones in a liberal areas. Believe it or not there used to be institutional biases. Like senators were sorta snooty about the senate to the level they would be with a senator of the opposing party over a house rep from their own party. And party members in congress would be adversarial to their own parties president. A lot of this was a stay in your lane kind of thing. Like woa mr pres thats a congress thing and woa mr rep thats a senate thing. Also legitimately conern for the good of the country over party. If you have the patients read this wikipedia on ross perot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot# you can see he is a conservative rich bastard but then click on the presidential campaign. Higher taxes, investing in education, direct democracy. Granted he was third party stuff but it was a coming out of the conservative side. Back then drug, prostitution, and other victimless crimes legalization was a major part of the libertarian party. Over time the conservative side got worse and worse and voting for them became more and more unacceptable and also made voting third party a dangerous proposition. I was never really for the conservative party but I miss the days when they could be a legitimate option and individuals in the party could be decent.
This election was special, cause the candidate who got the most votes actually won.
To me, what’s different is that the modern republican party seems to think that I’m an enemy of the people. Bush was awful but I never felt like he personally wanted to harm me just for existing. I knew Bush would send emergency aid to a democratic Voting area, no question. The “enemy” was abroad. Now it’s within.
As a nonwhite person who vaguely looks mediteranian, growing up during Bush’s presidency I 100% felt like the enemy. The amount of racism and threats I had just for not being white enough is pretty wild. To be fair it had nothing to do with my vote, but just passing my perspective along.
Well luckily for you, it will never matter ever again.
