143
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Look, at the root of this is that you're fundamentally dealing with authoritarians. You can define that in two different ways for this context and they're both correct.

  1. A belief that the state inflicting harm (physical, fiscal, mental, or otherwise) on a person or group of people as a means of accomplishing political goals is acceptable.

  2. A belief that it's preferable to collect political power into the hands of a 'chosen few', whose political will is absolute or nearly so.

This is part of why so many frustrated Bernie people jumped ship to Trump, imo. The real desire here is for a benevolent (to them) dictator who can assume full power, snap their fingers, "fix" everything without having to "deal with the bullshit", and then everything will be great. For me, a millennial who became politically aware shortly after 9/11, this is a tremendous tone shift. In the oughts, if you suggested that the US was flawed or needed work in any way, you'd immediately get brow beaten for being unpatriotic scum and fiercely corrected that "we are the best country on earth". Fast forward eight years and it's "make America great again", because in eight years we somehow lost all of our glory as the greatest country on earth. In reality, imo, the "greatest country on earth" schlock was half jingoism, half denialism, and almost all before the great recession kicked everyone's ass. That is, I don't think the people saying it really believed it as much as they were invoking it as a kind of talisman to protect their ego or idea of the US.

I think it's beyond denying anymore that the US has some big fucking problems, and that's partly why the denialism has gone away. Everyone wants to fix it; yes, even the MAGAs imagine a future America where everyone lives happy and healthy, even if their path for getting there is unhinged. I think a lot of MAGAs actually know that these problems aren't easy to fix, which is why they want a benevolent dictator to step over "all the bullshit", the problem is that they don't realize where the difficulty in solving these issues is coming from. They think that a lot of the "bullshit" is the government DMV-izing everything from medicine to education to the military, and making the implementation of solutions impossible, and to be fair, that's a non-zero factor. What I think they don't realize is that our government has been functionally captured or hobbled at nearly every turn by wealthy groups or individuals that aren't really representative of or interested in the general public welfare. They don't realize that we've built a new economy that's monetized problem management instead of problem solving. That's why if the government needs to install Raytheon brand cameras in everyone's toilet and subcontract to Amazon to monitor the feeds (lol, what deficit?), that bill gets passed in ten minutes flat, but anything that actually helps anybody seems to be dead on arrival.

They've lost faith in our republic, and rightly so; it's done precious little to inspire any in the 20 years I've been paying attention. So, they're ready to choose their benevolent dictator in everything but name to come and just fix everything. I think the thing that they really believe about Trump is that he can destroy the republic, because the republic is something that deserves to die (in their view). They're ready to give Christian Nationalism a chance, to see if the HOA of religiosity really can fix America (spoiler alert). Obviously, it won't, but by the point that reality dawns on MAGA, the fuckheads purposely trying to erode our democracy for their own personal gain will already be too deeply engrained in the system and in control of the reaper drones to do anything about it.

To be honest, it seems to me like this is a really strong signal for socialists and communists to try and start making some inroads. People are desperate for something different, and the only people that seem to have been successful at getting themselves out there are the fascists. No matter what, though, the fundamental truth here is that everybody knows that the US is in a bad fucking way and anyone claiming otherwise is probably lying and doing it for the wrong reasons. What we're seeing here is a deeply misguided attempt to reckon with that truth.

[-] HWK_290@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is well reasoned and thoughtful take. Thank you

this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
143 points (94.4% liked)

politics

19097 readers
1853 users here now

Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

Rules:

  1. Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.

Example:

  1. Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
  2. Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
  3. No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
  4. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
  5. No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

That's all the rules!

Civic Links

Register To Vote

Citizenship Resource Center

Congressional Awards Program

Federal Government Agencies

Library of Congress Legislative Resources

The White House

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Partnered Communities:

News

World News

Business News

Political Discussion

Ask Politics

Military News

Global Politics

Moderate Politics

Progressive Politics

UK Politics

Canadian Politics

Australian Politics

New Zealand Politics

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS