Donald Trump supporters at the Missouri Republican Caucus on Saturday attacked fellow attendees who supported the former president's opponent, a prior member of the "grand old party" reported.Former Lincoln Project veterans affairs adviser Fred Wellman, an ex-Republican and current Democratic campai...
I mean, when the dictator is in-office that's not usually what they do after they line up the dissidents. Those folks should feel lucky they just got the preview.
It's not just moderate Dems, ANYONE that thinks not voting in protest (voting third party is slightly different but almost as bad in our current system) in the us general election is sending a message has a misunderstanding of the mechanisms of our elections especially those whose ideals are not mainstream. Participation is essential for a healthy democracy, and not participating is forfeiting one's ideals and influence. It should be obvious that political campaigns aren't likely to cater towards ideas that nobody visibly supports and risk alienating groups that reliably turn out to vote. None of this is any one person's fault, but leftist refusing to vote only serves to shift the representation that much further right each election and spite the effort of other voters on the left, especially so if those withholding votes didn't participate in primaries and vital local elections. It's also very important to realise that this is very slow and can take decades.
In essence, each election skipped, no matter how small, is like your friends getting pizza for the party, and when they ask what you want, you say something like "It doesn't matter to me, anything is fine." But then when those friends come back with a pizza you really don't like such as pineapple pizza, which most of the friend group asked for then it's hard to blame them. And it's certainly not helpful to get mad and announce that because you don't like it you aren't going to tell them what you want next time either. You will only ever get what you want by pure chance this way and it's very unlikely to happen if your favourite pizza happens to be anchovie or barbeque chicken.
The Americans that participated chose Biden and trump
And it turns out a lot of them want or are okay with fascism if they realise it or not, and have propelled trump.
Biden has to consider those reliable voters on the right that are alienated by this if he wants to be re-elected
Do the leftist come out to push back and fight against the influence of the right simply by voting? Or do they do nothing and let things get worse because the rest of the people that put the effort in and participated in democracy didn't choose what they wanted. I hope you can see that it really is the fellow progressives that this mindset hurts the most.
I mean, not really. They're at the 'lunatics running the asylum' stage. They underestimated how much they had radicalized their base and completely lost control of them in 2016. Now, that radicalized base is starting to be elected into office and the old guard are too afraid to try to take control of the party back.
Which is why there is zero point for Democrats to try to appeal to Trump voters. They are a lost cause, stuck in a cult. When they decide to get out of that cult, sure, we'll welcome them back into sanity.
She's probably shocked to her core that white Republicans had to suffer the consequences of cultivating MAGA extremist hatred. Violence is only supposed to happen to brown people and LGBTQ+.
Also what's with the girl next to her wearing an "Obama you're fired" shirt? Obama has been ineligible to run for president for a while now. I mean, so has Trump, but at least Obama isn't forcing a Supreme Court ruling about it.
This explains the phenomena better than anything I ever read. I'm not being funny, I really mean it. I've seen both sides, this rings true. Rings LOUD and true.
I've read that article. It does to city culture what it claims city culture does to rural culture, IMO. I had a slightly more nuanced objection the last time someone posted it, but I'm not going to take the time to read it again now. IIRC It's worth a read, but that man paints with as broad a brush as anyone he criticizes in that article, and folks should go in knowing that.
Edit -
By coincidence, here's an article about a book that takes an opposing view, and the current Lemmy discussion about it. As of this moment I've not yet read more than the first para of the article:
In the popular imagination of many Americans, particularly those on the left side of the political spectrum, the typical MAGA supporter is a rural resident who hates Black and Brown people, loathes liberals, loves gods and guns, believes in myriad conspiracy theories, has little faith in democracy, and is willing to use violence to achieve their goals, as thousands did on Jan. 6.
According to a new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.
The authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post, persuasively argue that most of the negative stereotypes liberals hold about rural Americans are actually true.
They do not mince words about what this means for the future of democracy in America. “Rural voters—especially the White rural voters on whom Donald Trump heaps praise and upon which he built his Make America Great Movement—pose a growing threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”
And Schaller and Waldman bring receipts.
In a book filled with reams of data to back up their arguments, Schaller and Waldman show that rural whites “are the demographic group least likely to accept notions of pluralism and inclusion” and are far less likely to believe that diversity makes America stronger.
I love this author. I hope people don’t write it off just because it’s on a comedy site - he’s very thoughtful. I read the monkey sphere a long time ago when cracked was popular and it really gave me a lot of perspective.
I didn’t realize David Wong was a pen name until your article. I recognized his style immediately.
There was a great article called The Sociology Of Brexit that discussed how Britain made the choice to leave the EU. The TLDR was that it was because for many years, despite some prosperity, there were large parts of the country, especially white, uneducated, working-class people that felt things weren't going well. A strong economy didn't translate to a better life for them, and all they saw was others in a totally different world prospering.
The reason I mention it is because it was written before Trump came to power, but it accurately predicted that Trump would beat Clinton. It said that there were similar groups in the US that felt the same, and that they are often a much larger demographic than you'd think. The main point of the article is that these people don't care if the radical in charge will fuck the economy, or do things "incorrectly", because those things are so detached from their life that it won't change anything. It's the political equivalent of giving yourself chemotherapy to get rid of a cold.
While many of these people are justifiably criticised for their extreme views and actions, they've been radicalised through inaction. If you ignore a problem like the racist assholes that moan about foreigners taking their jobs, in several years someone will combine those voices and have a platform to exploit.
Exploitation is the right word here, because what many conservatives are now finding is that the shift towards the right is often at odds with their parties core beliefs. In the UK, Boris Johnson gutted the party of anyone that disagreed with one of the core tenets of the party (unionism) to push Brexit along, and if that party loses the next election, they will arguably have no one left outside of right-wing nutjobs. The US will likely find the same, in that MAGA have replaced what their party stood for, with none of these leaders planning for the future. If you are a traditional conservative in the Republican party, you'll probably struggle for the next 5-10 years, and a presidential campaign is highly unlikely. If Trump loses to Biden, it might mean a generation of inaction and inability from the Republicans, in the same way that Conservatives around the world are being wiped out
I wish democrats would start kicking conservative and Israel supporting dems out of the party. It is NOT ok to support Israel regardless of your other positions.
Wow I'm not from the US but it really seems like either there are some agent provocateurs out there or you guys just want to dither like idiots while Trump fucks up your country even more
It's also not ok to splinter the coalition with purity tests. If someone is pro democracy, pro LGBTQ, pro women's rights, pro science, pro immigration, pro education, pro Ukraine, and pro Israel, I still want them in the fight.