I am probably part of the 0.001% of people who actually had interest in and read exit polling from 2024, because it contains data that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable, particularly on the left who have blamed repeated losses on voter turnout.

The problem is not turnout, the problem in American democracy is the subversion of the broadest swath of people, the tuned-out, overworked, misinformed liberal majority in America.

The last several federal elections have had the highest voter turnout in American history.

What they didn’t have though was people who had any involvement in the issues or understanding how the political system works, and apparently no attention spans at all. Many millions of the people who voted for Trump were people who voted for Obama or supported Bernie Sanders, and that should spark a massive conversation about leftist/democrat messaging, but is largely glossed over. And a massive swath of the voting was literally hinged on the price of eggs at the time, and the well-known effect of voters making their decisions based on current economics and the party currently in power.

A lot of this came from forces foreign and domestic doing everything they can to salt the discourse, poison all the wells and boost all the weirdest, worst nonsense on both sides so that average people who only get their news and information from two hours of facebook or twitter scrolling every week had no idea what was going on.

So yes, “just vote harder” didn’t and won’t work going forward. Our chance at turning this around though is that people right now are a LOT more unhappy with our politics than they were in 2024, everyone in 2024 were far more comfortable and didn’t actually believe the stories about Trump being a fascist dictator, and tuned out his previous administration because attention spans broadly are melted. Right now if elections were held, or canceled, Trump will get wiped out one way or another.

The GOP’s only hope of retaining power is literally a fascist takeover, they know it, they’re just too dumb broadly to pull it off so I have a good feeling midterms are going to be a violent spank in the ass, and Trump will likely not finish his term. This country has actually survived many similar periods. If enough people can get their brains disengaged from the slop then we have a chance.

it will give cover for gerrymandered red-states to reduce their efforts to make voting available and visible to their citizen.

I think you’re absolutely right, as it draws near we will get a steadily increasing narrative how elections are rigged, there’s massive corruption in voting systems (the paper is chinese!) and many other distracting nonsense claims.

But what they have overreached on over and over again is they are broadly very stupid people, and they can’t grasp the scale of this country and the people. I’m sure there will be election shenanigans but I doubt it will be enough to turn the tide. If they try to cancel any elections outright, while people are this tense and ready to riot, there will be widescale violence. Which the administration may want, but no town mayors or state governors want. The states still hold the cards here.

This is a group of people who are almost entirely led by, or are themselves, incels who grew up and got attention for screaming about how bad women are and how everyone needs to be an “alpha male” to succeed. They’re not healthy. They are fascists, and every fascist movement has been the product of sexual insecurity.

There’s a Ven Diagram out there of conservatives who are obsessed with if people are trans, and men who are afraid to touch their ass in the shower to clean because it’s “gay” and those circles almost line up perfectly.

My favorite stage of fascism is when there are grainy newspaper pictures of the dictator’s body being paraded for the citizens to witness.

Not sure if we’ll get that, but a man can dream.

Our problem here is one that has cropped up in history over and over, which is a huge, stable, liberal, comfortable population benefitting from their state’s imperialism become aware of a schism in their country’s direction, they see two sides:

One side is screaming that the country is collapsing, burning the country’s flag, lecturing about human rights.

The other side is declaring glory and success for the mighty Empire, worshipping the flag that keeps everyone safe and comfortable.

We can argue day and night about what events and specific things started the schism and how aware the population was about the atrocities, but at the end of the day, the majority of a comfortable population is always going to veer away from change and accountability, they will always lean towards the nationalists who basically say “You don’t need to feel bad or worry, our country is fine, we’re all gonna be okay, just go back to work, pay your taxes.”

This has happened over and over, and eventually always has the same end. I wish to fuck more of my countrymen would learn about history.

The fantasy that this is all entirely the fault of outside influence gives everyone a nice, comfortable “out” for not having to get involved or feel like they’re not doing enough.

They’re not doing enough.

This is fantastic, part of the reason the right has been so emboldened in being anti-society and anti-humanity for a while now is because they have a tight-knight community who take care of each other. This is what we need to do to cancel that effect out.

For every right-wing piece of shit who screams racist epitaths out their car window and gets fired for it and ends up making a half million dollars, we have to make sure we’re taking care of people who get fired for posting videos of ICE murdering innocent people or quoting Trump’s own words without editorial.

The challenge: not digging into these people’s past and history and finding “problematic” things that make other users hesitate before donating to pushing the needle back where it should be.

The algorithm may only feed us rage-bait and the worst news because it gets the most engagement, but it needs to be repeated that Trump’s efforts have been shot down or blocked over and over, almost every day, by judges and the existing institutions. He can abuse the powers he has, but he can’t bend the entire judicial system or he would stop burning through thousands of lawyers.

You can’t pardon impeachment proceedings, only federal crimes. Not sure if anything will come from impeachment, but we need to understand the system even a little.

You can’t pardon an impeachment, it’s not a criminal charge, it’s about misconduct that can lead to removal from office.

That said, I’m split if this will lead to anything. The administration is suffering massive public outcry and pushback, they need to hang someone. But they’re also prideful and dumb and might shoot themselves in the dick and let her stay in office.

Look at the source, MS.now? “Maddowblog”? this is liberal slop meant to make tuned out median Americans who oppose Trump say “Well, looks like it’s falling apart, I can just sit back and wait.”

It’s a tranquilizer. It’s meant to dull your mind and digest an atomized view of the world. I would challenge the average Lemmy browser who is about to say something positive here to go look at some conservative forums and subreddits, they are getting the exact opposite messaging.

Mainstream media is trying to divide us and feed us opposing narratives so we don’t unite and organize. Or at least so we don’t bother doing anything or getting involved in our politics.

I don’t have the crayons to explain how large-scale wars inevitably drag in every “side” country because every country is a resource and the key players are not going to just fucking ignore resources, please read some history.

As simply as I can state it without delving into geopolitics that I know I’m not qualified to claim authority on, if two world super-powers faced off in a full-scale war, not even nuclear, it wouldn’t be a quick spat, it wouldn’t be a couple wacky years as the rest of the world looks on, it will ravage everything, and everyone will get drawn in. Everyone.

But it’s worse than that, because it’s not even going to be a border-war, it’s going to be a strategic/ballistic war, that means bombings, and if you don’t think two powers at war with each other, bombing each other’s cities, aren’t going to eventually cow to public demand for nuclear retribution, maybe not in short term, but somewhere down the line as the original actors are long gone and new leaders have taken the reins, in a world far less stable and reasonable world, man do I have some Fermi-Paradox solutions to show you.

Why?

I don’t even know how to begin to explain this if you can’t already see how biblically devastating that would be for all human life across most of the world.

africa shit

There won’t be a rest of the world for Africa to work with, I cannot even fathom how someone can’t see how bad this would be, even if it never escalates to nuclear exchanges.

Republicans likely have funded putting him away and out of sight in some nice hotel while they figure out what to do about the situation.

They have no idea what to do about the situation. I just watched Kristi Noem basically set herself on fire on Jake Tapper. The emperor demanded she fall on her blade and she’s so weak and pathetic that she did it.

They aren’t nearly terrified enough. They shouldn’t be allowed to sleep, nor leave their car tires unattended, nor get delivery, nor trust what’s in their fast food orders.

I can only assume you have typical American hubris if you assume the US will be allowed to do whatever they want.

Are we really doing this shit? I’m not reading the rest and I’m blocking you, you know damn well I don’t represent my country’s politics, and you fucks out there need to do better than become like this rotten country and start doing the tribalism shit. I am giving political analysis and if it sparks you to want to hate someone for it, send that hate where it belongs, the people who are controlling the US and will soon control Canada and europe as well. And I don’t mean Trump.

Global instability from a Europe-North American war would likely cause a lot of conflicts around the world.

An actual Europe/US war would raze the world to cinders. This is why Greenland is going to get us shut out from trade and protection, not start a war. I can’t speak for this current administration of death-cultists, but the EU doesn’t want the world reduced to cinders. This is why the administration thinks they can get away with annexing it, and they may to some degree.

As a US citizen who will suffer under the embargo the rest of the world will set up around US trade, I will kind of miss things like toothpaste and medicine and food.

but shouldn’t

We’ve been saying this broadly for a few years. What should be is not happening broadly. This country is going down in flames.