@SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net - just came back from touching grass and saw your comment asking me to comment, still catching up with the US election news and still processing.

(also I have no idea what’s going on with the mod situation or whatever that happened over the past week but I hope you stay and run the news mega because this is probably my only attachment to the site)

I will give my hot takes now for the sake of driving a discussion: Harris lost, the Democrats won, Trump a sacrificial lamb, third party movements annihilated, Biden will have the last laugh though he (or his demented mind) probably won’t live long enough to see it

First of all, the US electoral system is designed to PUNISH. What you’re seeing now is the (non-)voters getting disciplined. Trump didn’t exactly win, Harris lost because millions of voters did not turn up to vote for various reasons that we’re all too familiar with. If you refuse to vote for Harris, you DESERVE Trump. That’s what the libs are snickering about now. Arab voters chose to punish Harris for committing genocide in Gaza? Well, how about you getting punished by Trump who will hopefully deport all of you? The libs are going to be enjoying the schadenfreude of seeing minorities and immigrants getting punished under Trump and continue to scold those who refused to support them.

The Democrats will not change their way just because they lost the election. The system is working exactly as intended, and the new Trump administration is being used as a fascist terror regime to scare the (non-)voters back into the fold of the Democrats by 2026 mid-term elections. And because of this, the genocide against Palestinians will almost certainly be ramped up under Trump just to spite on the people who wanted to punish them for the genocide.

The main question is: will the American voters who have decided to sit out this election be scared enough by Trump into voting the Democrats again in 2026 and 2028? If so, then the system is simply correcting itself, and all the Democrats have to do is to be patient and wait 2 years.

To repeat: the US electoral system is designed to PUNISH. American Democracy^TM^ meant to rule by FEAR.

Meanwhile, the DNC will fundraise like no tomorrow until 2026. Wealthy liberal donors so appalled by Trump’s victory will be dishing out their live savings to protect “American democracy”. What’s unique this time is that the Democrats have also secured enough of the traditional Republican establishment donors who have splintered off Trump’s MAGA party that the DNC will now receive double income from both the Democratic liberal and the Republican establishment. Because of how Citizens United works, the DNC will go into the mid-term with very strong financial backing and will certainly have no trouble running their campaigns (reminder that Harris out-spent Trump 4:1 in this election - they have the money for sure).

As such, the Democrats will continue to rebrand itself as the new Republican Party over the next 4 years, achieving what they have already dreamed of for decades. This is a huge win for the Democrats even when they have lost the election.

Third, Biden has already set off a ticking time bomb when the Fed started to reduce interest rates back in September. There is no indication that anyone will stop the rate cut from now on, with Trump himself wanting to cut the rate even faster.

This is a deliberately timed policy such that when the interest income dried up, it will be at least 6-12 months (depending on the rate at which the deficits are drained) after the election. This means recession - and if you think the last two years of inflation was bad, what’s coming is going to be far worse. Many people will lose their jobs. I don’t know if it will be 2009 GFC level recession, but whoever is in the government over the next 2-4 years will be in hot water trying to resuscitate the economy.

Combined this with Elon Musk pledging to cut 2 trillion deficit, if they really went through with this, we’re going to be looking at an epic proportion of the US economy meltdown (which will also send shockwaves across the world so for those of you living in the Global South, don’t get too excited over this). I doubt the establishment will let it happen but Trump and Musk are both wildcards so anything goes.

Incidentally, the Wall Street will survive this round of onslaught no matter what, as China has already committed to a financial opening up and lifted all foreign investment restrictions for their manufacturing sector. China is definitely going after the foreign investment route, and I will not pretend that this isn’t a Biden foreign policy win for bullying the Chinese libs into agreeing to this bullshit. What is almost certainly going to happen is that the Wall Street will jump all in for the Chinese stock market and buy up Chinese assets while Trump struggle to re-industrialize the American manufacturing sector. Trump thinks he can take on Wall Street, but in the end China will once again save the American bourgeois class from their domestic “threat” (I don’t think Trump is an actual threat, but rather an aberration that needs to be corrected). The working class will suffer, they will blame Trump and the GOP by the next election, and the affluent libs will be as insufferable as you can imagine.

Again it must be repeated just how incredibly well timed the Fed rate cut in September was. I don’t know what the Biden administration was on but they have played their cards and adapted to a very dynamic geopolitical situation extremely well, that’s for sure. (I already wrote about how the Fed rate cut + a global recession will allow the US imperialists to take a big bite on the globe a while back, so I will just skip the entire essay here).

Fourth, this election also sealed the fate of third party electoralism. People would rather sit out than to vote for a third party. The bourgeois establishment has achieved their goals of preventing third party voting (not that it was ever an actual threat to begin with, now that we look back in hindsight) and the ratchet effect of Democratic-Republican bipartisan machine will continue to spin. I don’t think the third parties are ever coming back from this - Bernie Sanders had one good opportunity to run as a third party candidate when getting screwed by the DNC last time, but that opportunity to reshape the American political landscape is now forever lost. It’s either voting for the Democrats or face an ever vicious Republican party - those are the only choices left now. The only way out of this nightmare is a revolution.

Finally, we’ll talk about some wildcard scenarios. While I still think that Trump will follow the neocon strategy as before (or rather, unable to stop the wheels already in motion), the fact that you have Trump and Musk as two crazy people running the show warrants further speculations into the wildcard scenario that may arise. Most worrying is Trump wanting to appoint Musk as the DOGE minister to cut 2 trillion spending. This is going to be a huge drain on the US deficits that are important to flood the Global South and get them hooked on the dollar.

Not understanding how the US monetary imperialism works, they might just fuck this up and screw up the dollar liquidity essential to maintaining the US hegemony, while at the same time landing the US into a huge economic crisis that could be beyond what the establishment had envisioned. I have mentioned about Wall Street flooding the Chinese capital markets, but the US economy is so massive that an epic meltdown of the economy might end up inflicting such a huge blow on the Chinese export economy that even the Wall Street financiers get drowned there. This is obviously not something that the bourgeois establishment would like to see happen, and this could actually trigger WW3 if we are unfortunate enough to end up in this scenario.