462
Trump least popular newly elected president since Second World War – except for himself
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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politics
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sorry if i seem one-sided its because of the genocide and the shitshow defacto appointment strategy from the dnc et al.. there is a reason the left infights more than the right- there's a logic to attempting to speak to the side that is ostensibly closer to your ideals. what has yelling at or about trump accomplished, btw?
Republicans are not better on the Israel-Gaza stance, so your support of Republicans must be for some of their other policies such as Racism, anti-choice, deregulations, lowering tax for the rich, etc.
critizing the democrats doesn't automatically equate to "support of republicans", you illustrate a big obstacle for reasonable discourse
It does in this country.
The USA is a first past the post two party system.
It literally does mean that. If you talk about all the bad things about the good option, people will pick the worst option. Centrism is empowering Fascism.
If you truly hate the reality of two bad choices, then you should vote Democrat so that they can pass Campaign Finance Reform and other progressive changes to elections to better represent what the people want.
it literally does not.
The question was never if Republicans were better, but if Democrats were good enough to override the Republican thumb on the scale.
If Democrats are better than Republicans, then they're the only option we currently have.
If there's only one option then the idea that we might have had a choice is merely a delusion.
Half of the one option passes completely different legislature than the other half, so maybe get your delusions checked.
Could you finish that thought? It sounds like you're admitting that the Democrats are too divided among themselves to effectively resist the Republicans and that would seem to confirm my argument that the voters is this country do not have the agency to justify blaming them for the outcome of the election.
Lmao you can't even follow the setup of your own centrist hypothetical?
What centrist hypothetical? My argument is non-hypothetical and based in a question of agency rather than political orientation.
Nope. The question was which of the two candidates, Democrat or Republucan, would be the best (or least bad, if you will) in each of the elections, from President down.
Because the Republican propaganda machine managed to convince enough people this was a referendum on the Democrats, the Republicans won at every level.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding how elections work in this country. You cannot hold a refferendum on anything when public opinion can be manipulated so easily and the results ignored when they contradict the desires of the billionaire class. Elections in America are a popularity contest designed to designed to diffuse responsibility for the operations of the state from the parties that are responsible to the electorate.
Blaming voters for their choices when neither party ran a primary is just a trick to get the people fighting among themselves instead of demanding better from their supposed representatives.
Consider the presidential election. A simple binary choice was presented to the electorate; the Democrat candidate versus the Republican candidate. There were no other possible results. It was extremely clear to anyone who wasn't already MAGA levels of devoted to the Republicans, that the Republican candidate would do far worse things than the Democrat candidate, thus there were functionally only two actions you could take: vote for the democrat candidate or vote against the democrat candidate. Abstaining, voting third party, or otherwise not voting democrat had exactly the same result as directly voting for the republican candidate, namely increasing their odds of winning.
Neither candidate should have been standing, both parties should have had free, fair and open primaries, and the whole situation stank, but that was the situation when the polls opened, and voters needed to act accordingly. As I said, the republican propaganda team was in overdrive and successfully fooled a large enough portion of the electorate into thinking of the election as a referendum on the democrats, rather than a choice between democrat and republican, and got them to think along the lines you've outlined above. That was enough to shift the election in favour of the republicans, and leave us in the situation we're in now.
The same dynamic played out all the way down the ticket, giving what is likely to be a catastrophic result for a vast number of people. The argument that it's not the voters' fault is disingenuous; no-one was holding gun to their heads when they voted. Yes, the amount of disinformation and propaganda they experienced was extreme, but that does not absolve anyone of their personal responsibility. The fact that neither party treated the electorate with any respect, likewise, does not absolve anyone of their responsibility, nor did it change the nature of the election. The trick was played on voters by the republicans, getting them to think, and say, that the democrats weren't good enough without considering what the alternative was.
As you say, they want people fighting amongst themselves, and it would certainly be best to acknowledge that the election has passed, and the situation is as it stands. The republicans have a clean sweep of every branch of federal government and many state ones too, and are wasting no time in implementing their worst and more damaging policies as quickly and ruthlessly as they can. Now we have to work out how to protect the vulnerable, slow the oncoming tide of fascism and find a way to start bringing people back together again. The next major round of elections should be in two years, and present an opportunity to turn, or at least, slow the tide that threatens to wash away the USA. Between now and then a lot has to change, but it's doable, even if the parties themselves do not, but it will take people looking past the obvious tricks and understanding that they usually, unfortunately, only have two options in an election, and now-a-days one is much, much worse than the other.
The fact that you're getting downvotes for this gives me little hope for the future of our country.
Balkanization is too good for the US.
Of course they're getting downvotes, Republicans are worse for all of the policy stances they talked about, but they're shitting on Democrats.
As they should, because they (and the rest of the liberals) relied on a capitalist political party to save them.
The USA has 2 options. They picked the worst option because of people like you and them shitting on the better option.
Voting is the process by which governments legitimize their right to rule, and the USA has not had a legitimate government in my lifetime. If there were options then we'd never have been forced into a "choice" of bad or worse in the first place.
If the voted government was not legitimate than voting is not a process that legitimizes the rule then is it?
Voting is just one tool of many to try to improve life for as many people as possible.
Whether it is actually legitimate or not is immaterial. The point is that people voted instead of rioting in the streets. If people aren't objecting then the government is free to act.
Voting is a tool to keep you complacent by redirecting your ire from the politicians responsible and onto your fellow voters.
The people who aren't voting are even more complacent, prove me wrong.
You're not listening.
Whether or not one is complacent is entirely irrelevant when one has no agency.
Voting is a fig leaf that covers up how un-democratic our country is. It exists to keep you from taking matters into your own hands.
You're not listening: the people who aren't voting are still not taking matters into their own hands either.
How would you know?
Can you personally confirm that ~90 million people aren't doing anything?
The UK sends £185m in military technology, £136m for aircrafts, helicopters and drones, and £30m in grenades, bombs and missiles.
Germany has also authorized over $100 million in military exports to Israel in 2024.
The US is not the only country providing shit to Israel. Stop pretending it is.
So your argument is that because other countries are supporting Israel's genocide that it's OK for the US to support it as well? Even if the US was only contributing 1% of the weapons and funding it still wouldn't be acceptable.
To be clear, Palestine wasn't a valid reason not to vote for Harris, for as shit a candidate as she was (although marginally better than Biden) she was still significantly better than Trump. But Palestine absolutely was a valid reason to criticize Harris. Backing Israel on this one was one of the dumbest moves the Democrats made in the last election because it would have cost them literally nothing to withdraw funding or even making future support conditional on Israel stopping attacks on civilians (and not engaging in ethnic cleansing which was where this was all obviously heading as we're now seeing).
Absolutely not. But according to everyone here the US is the only one backing them. Yes the US is the largest backer, I know that too. Call all the spades a spade though, not just one.
I agree with your entire second paragraph.
but did you watch the big lebowski yet?
You have a very bad sense for the time and place to say things.