795
I was gonna title this "And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice" and then write "Stuck inside of America with the fascism blues again" here, but I'm not sure if that comes off like gloating and that's honestly the last thing I want to do this morning.
I'm not sure what your problem is. Is nobody allowed to point out the failures in the Democrat campaign?
No post mortem. Blind support for neoliberalism is the only way.
"Now's not the time"
"Nobody could have predicted this"
etc...
As one of the dozens of people who are not American, I was chatting to my cousin the other day, and he said that after seeing the amount of dead kids that have come out of Gaza this year, and taking a mental health week off work due to the anxiety of watching the world not give a shit, he hopes Trump gets elected and America collapses into civil war... That Americans suffer for what their government has done, and is doing. He's not a bad guy. Bad guys don't have breakdowns from watching foreign children murdered.
I can't logically support his view, but I completely emotionally understand it. He knew Trump would be objectively worse for humanity, but is a fascist genocide that kills 2 million people better than a fascist genocide that kills 5 million people? At that point you're really just splitting hairs between failed states, and systems that deserve to be burned to the ground. After enough chances, opportunities, and desensitisation, you want the schadenfreude of watching the American electorate who voted for Trump shooting themselves in the face, destroying their livelihoods and lineage, along with all of their false patriotism and exceptionalism. I still suspect the conserva-russian PsyOps to be the main source of Trumps win, but I wouldn't be surprised if Israel's genocide is the straw that broke the Dems back.
With sympathy, panicked thoughts about what to do next, and quite a bit of horror? Absolutely.
With a casual blaming attitude, waiting for someone else to make it better? Sure, they're allowed to, just like I'm allowed to tell them to go fuck themselves.
Panic doesn't help anything. Neither does horror. We survived one Trump presidency, we'll survive this one, despite it being monumentally worse.
Do what you can to help those you can around you. Work in and grow the support structures in your local community, family, and social circles.
Panic leads to stupid, rash, not well thought out decisions. It should be avoided as much as possible while you take a long, honest, realistic look at the situation and evaluate what is and isn't in your power to effect.
You're right that passive defeatism isn't helpful, but you don't have to go straight to the other extreme of emotional turmoil.
Maybe you'll survive, bunch of people will survive, but not a lot of the minorities the Republicans currently have in their crosshairs. Maybe you'll find all the skeletons in the camps after however many years or decades it will take to defeat fascism.
We had four years under Biden to find the skeletons from Trump's last presidency. Please point me to them, as obviously I've missed something huge like roving squads of minority slayers or something.
It's going to fucking suck. Yes, people will die as a result of horrible policies and the general sociopolitical climate, but people claiming that minorities are literally going to be hunted en mass are out of their gourd.
Too many armed civilians spread through all the population demographics for that to work to the level a lot of people are screaming about.
I have to be honest, I am panicking a little bit.
Nothing will change instantly, or everywhere all at once, but it could get very bad, and not even a long time from now.
I don't have any great insight to offer, but - yeah, me too
They could, or they might not. The biggest thing is that we already have been through 4 years of Trump. We have some idea of what that will look like, we aren't going in completely blind.
As far as this "being the last election", there's too many safeguards in our governmental system and too many armed people (in both the civilian and military population) with deep vested interests to ensure real elections still happen for that to change.
There's a hell of a lot of posturing and hot air going on and that has gone on from Trumps camp that has absolutely no true way to get force behind it.
Things will be bad, but panicking will just make it thay much harder to distinguish true threats and problems from what isn't.
Think of it like this: Your car is stalled on a train track, and there's a train coming a few minutes away. There's also someone with a gun in your backseat about to shoot you. The train makes more noise, but the more immediate threat is the guy with the gun. Being more calm helps to discern those sorts of distinctions, and that the best solution would be to run from your car rather than try to pump the gas.
For every could, might, and may there's a didn't, might not, etc. You could start pissing blood tomorrow, but I assume you're in good health that you probably won't. But you still technically could.
The news media across the board is optimizing for ad views to support their existence with money. Keeping people stressed out increases viewership, so it's in their best interests to put everything through a funhouse mirror and rely on technicalities and speculation to stoke emotional response. There's been studies done and books published on this.
Bad times are not end times.
I'm not so sure considering there's a good argument to be made that this wasn't a "real" election, given all the voter suppressing bullshit that happened. I think we need to ask ourselves what a "real" election is and how we will know if we lose them, because I don't think even our good elected officials are going to tell us about it (because they think, arguably correctly, that living under a stable autocracy is better than the chaos that could happen when a mass of people reject the legitimacy of the government).
This is true and cannot be said enough. The world doesn't end, it moves on to the next struggle, and there is always a way to make it better. It might be very small, but there is always something to do. Like, yesterday I ended up up hanging out with some very sad old ladies who volunteered for my local League of Women Voters chapter and got them to laugh a couple of times at how ridiculously bad at bridge I am, and that was the little bit of good I could do yesterday. It wasn't much, but it was something.
What should my attitude be after decades of saying "triangulation doesn't work, going to the right to chase 'moderate republicans' just depresses turnout." and watching the dems do this over and over and over while getting accused of being a secret republican because I point this out?
You know what else doesn’t work?
Not voting and letting Trump get elected.
That shit’s going to do more damage to the left than a million Hillary Clintons depressing the turnout.
(I have more I could say on it, especially pertaining to the difference between accurately describing sins of the Democrats which are depressing turnout versus making up imaginary sins of the Democrats which people will then believe which will depress turnout, but I’m not planning on a long exchange so I’ll leave it there.)