The atmosphere is so heated, and the statements are getting more and more extreme. Let’s just assume Harris wins the election. After a campaign like this, how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?
There hasn’t been any normal for 8 years plus now. Somewhere between 30 and 45% of the population are openly trying for fascism.
Realistically it’s only a matter of when unless we make some pretty damned sweeping changes which they are going to fight tooth and nail.
We need to unrig the judicial system. We need to unrig the voting system. We need to put guardrails up on media disinformation. And we need to start holding some of these fucking politicians accountable for openly lying in campaign. We need to roll back the dictator privileges they managed to shove in at the last moment for the president. We need to hold some of these oligarchs accountable for crimes.
They should lock Musk up for a month. Go ahead and have him shit himself that he’s not above the law.
I don’t know who the next Republican president will be. But you can bet money there’s going to be plenty of bloodshed once they decide to do whatever they want with complete and total immunity.
Way longer than 8 years. Depending on your perspective and level of privilege, it’s been decades, generations, or the entire history.
Things got bad after Obama got elected in 2008 and the racists lost their shit. But they were also bad after Bush started two wars, or when Bush got installed as preznit in the first place in 2000. Or when Gingrich went after Clinton’s penis in 1998. Or when Gingrich took over the Congress in 1994. Or when Clinton first got elected in 1992 and the racists and militias lost their shit and started bombing things. Or the year before that when the other Bush started a war. Or when Reagan broke multiple laws and got away with it, thanks to Ollie North. Or when Reagan got elected in the first place in 1980. Or when Nixon broke enough laws flagrantly enough to get impeached in 1974. Or when he bombed the shit out of SE Asia. Or when Johnson started a war in Vietnam. Or… I mean it just keeps going endlessly. But that’s just my lifetime. If you are Black or Native American the fuckery goes back as far as when white people first stepped foot here.
If you just tweak what you’re looking at a little bit you can easily move that statement back to all of recorded history.
I’m sure the sentence for everything Musk has done has to be far more than a month (the election stuff aside, he has some shady financial stuff surrounding the purchase of Twitter and probably Tesla stock, etc). They need to lock him up as long as they would lock up the rest of us if we did that.
how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?
…Why would I want to? Seriously, why would I want to have a relationship with people that have shown me that the things they value are antithetical to the things I value? I don’t give a fuck if people are nice to me; I want people to be kind across the board.
Our inability to compromise is deliberate.
We can’t organize if we can’t compromise.
We are supposed to hate our neighbors. That makes any kind of organizing impossible.
There are some things that you just can’t compromise on.
This is the new normal. It’s everyone angry all the time until something snaps or the culture changes. Personally I believe you have to wait until the older part of Gen X is dead before we get relief.
hope my older relatives fucking die or figure out it’s time to change. on a more serious note, protest and try to help build coalitions against this but idk it seems quite grim.
I’ve cut out all Trumpers after Jan 6 2021 basically except for maybe my wife’s parents. I’m afraid to ask them. All of us have a spoken agreement to not bring up politics because we all have to see each other and don’t want to fight. A major caveat to that is that we see them as little as we can though.
You don’t. Most of us have already either fully cut-off contact with Trump supporting family members or limit our interaction with them heavily. Our country is rotted to the core, and this election won’t be the end of it. Even if Harris wins, there will be contestion of the results. There may even be a successful coup by the Republican party. A civil war is not out of the question.
There is no normal. There won’t be ever again.
I think it’s fantastic because know it is very clear who I need to exclude from my life.
Honestly I’m as agoraphobic as they come so, since I hardly ever leave my residence, I find it quite easy to forget that it’s an election year, aside from many of the news outlets and media posts dictating it. My life outside of the internet has hardly any political interference.
Yes I still vote, but I keep my political beliefs to myself, but As Marcus Aurelius said, “You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control”
I take a lot of solace in that. I know certain things and have certain opinions but I am absolutely not a politician and it’s not something I’ll wreck my soul over. Life is short enough as it is.
You don’t. You accept the fact things are progressively getting worse and move on
You live through enough of these “Most Pivotal Elections” and the effect is muted.
I remember Bush winning in 2004 vividly, the soul-crushing realization that Americans were ready to continue the relentless slaughter of Arabs for another four years with a fuck-you kicker to anyone LGBT looking to come out of the shadows and get married. (Nevermind the shady vote counting in Ohio).
That was after the 2000 election was stolen in full view of the public by a nakedly corrupt court.
“How could so many people be so blaise about this shameless disregard for democracy, civil rights, and rule of law?”
But then 2008 rolls along and suddenly I’m surrounded by conservative revanchists who want to talk about secession, because a black guy just won the presidency. And it begins to occur to me… “Oh, I’m just living in a fascist country”.
Now, having familiarized myself with US history a bit more, another fascist winning in one more corrupted and propaganda soaked election cycle makes perfect sense.
Great point about the relentless slaughter of Arabs. So easily forgotten how many innocents America slaughtered during this time period. America is morally rotten to the core, high on its own supply of hatred and cruelty.
I don’t think Bush ever sunk to the depths of the Hitler-like rhetoric that Trump and his cronies have been using, however. Maybe the guardrails will hold if Trump wins again (or loses again) but this is not normal.
The Bush administration pioneered the theory of the unitary executive, which is the idea that the president can do anything because he is the president. They’re the ones who kicked over the guardrails, they just did it in the context of an endless war that they started. For more on this I recommend Sheldon Wolin’s work.
Not rhetoric, but deeds. I bet Bush killed far more people than Trump did, even including COVID mismanagement.
I wish you were wrong, but I know you’re not.
This has been the norm since 2016. Until the GOP unilaterally rejects Trumpism, this will be how it is every four years.
You sure there is a ‘every four years’ then?
You’re right, the other side of the coin that I forgot to mention is, “Trumpism wins and turns America into a fascist dictatorship”.
Only on day one he said
Ah, so we’re only going to be subject to the whims of a fascist dictator for the first 24 hours? What a relief! And it’s a good thing he’s got a track record for voluntarily and peacefully giving up power, or else I might suspect he wouldn’t think twice about holding on to that power until his dying breath. /s
Hmm due to text based communication, what I said was in no way meant to be pro trump, I wanted to clarify
Ah, your comment reads to me like you were emphasizing “only” day one, implying that he would relinquish that power the following day. Happy to hear you elaborate on what you meant.
Yeah, I see how it could have come across as making an excuse for him. Of course being a dictator for a day would be all he needs to make it eternal.
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That’s been a growing issue for the last 15 years. The answer is community groups but they haven’t been very successful.
this is normal. half the country is composed of backward degenerates.
24% is backwards degenerates. That’s the percentage of the population that voted for trump in 2020. No where near half, no matter how much they may claim to represent half.
Non-voters are complicit in what is happening. Maybe saying they are as bad is a stretch, but they clearly either don’t care or are ignorant about it.
Yeah. I was sloppy in my choice of words.
you don’t. you believe them when they tell you who they are and remove them from your life.
Or, do what a disturbing number of people have done and make them the centrepiece of your entire life.
Posters all over your house, stickers and flags all over your mobility scooter, hats, T-shirts, the lot.
One of our neighbors had a MAGA collar for their dog…THEIR DOG. Why do they need to drag their DOG into this? He was a good boy. (Was, because the dog passed away from cancer a year or two ago.)
Very easy to hate. But it’s part of the cycle.
It isn’t hate. It’s leaving the evil, cruel, and/or misinformed alone.
It’s not hate to cut horrible people out of your life. You get to pick who you let into your universe. Be picky.
Nah, I cut my parents out of my life entirely due to the racism they have allowed to grow and fester around them in the last few years. I’m completely done with it. Not giving them any reason to think it okay or forgivable.
my dad was spouting trump shit. I don’t know if he was legit or just trying to get a rise out of me, but fuck that. il told him “I don’t associate with trump supporters, so fix that or move on. you raised me better than that, stop drinking Kool aid.”
You don’t. It wasn’t really normal before 2016 and normal left the building since.
Since 2016, its been a constant onslaught of idiots that live on the internet creeping out into the real world with their bullshit and conspiracy theories and half of America taking them seriously
I blame McCain. When he chose Palin to be his running mate in 08, he gave voice to the crazies on the right wing. It wasn’t long after that that we saw the rise of the tea party, which led to maga.
I think it really started with the Clinton impeachment, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, then we had the stolen 2000 election, then 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “support our troops”, anti Muslim rhetoric, then the rise of social media. All coincides with the brainwashed kids/boomers who came out of the heritage foundation. Obviously, the racism and conservatism was always in the background. You could even trace it back further to Regan/Nixon/McCarthy. Also, desegregation.
You can trace it back as least as far as Barry Goldwater and the rise of right-wing “think-tanks” in the 1960s which came as a backlash to the civil rights movement and the perceived dominance of left-wing politics in government. Which led to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and the ongoing brainwashing of much of rural America in particular.
Yeah the tea party started around 2009, so that tracks. However, I’d say we had this current undercurrent of fascism since Reagan. I don’t know if it was a little more chill in the few decades before him but we did also have FDR and internment camps, the Amerocan nazi parties live the German American Bund and others.
It’s something that american society can’t seem to shake nor doesn’t want to
This attitude is part of why we have this problem today. These people didn’t come from nowhere. They weren’t just creeps on the internet. The percentage of the population that desires a trump presidency is far too significant. Half the country has been quietly wishing for a christo-fascist oligarchy since 2001. They’ve put in a lot of time and effort to make their dream come true. It’s a shame nobody was really watching (even though the FBI has reports going back years about the infiltration of white supremacy groups into law enforcement), at least not close enough to make a difference in its growth.
The unfortunate truth is that this was allowed to happen. We dismissed their beliefs as crazy rantings instead of real threats to be addressed. If people more readily acknowledged the beliefs held by trumpets as real (a real threat) instead of internet insanity, we wouldn’t be here. Instead, we shoved them away, crying wacko. Now the propaganda runs so deep in most, there is literally no turning them back. The rise of fascism in this country hasn’t been taken seriously enough. And I don’t think it ever will be, until it’s far too late.
We dismissed
No, the Democratic Party and enlightened centrists dismissed the threat. There were people like me rallying against this bullshit since George W Bush stole the 2000 election. Some of us were able to hear these crazies clearly and realized what they wanted. We were told to shut up and stop overreacting.
Being able to say “I told you so” isn’t much of a salve when you’re starting down the barrel of a totalitarian regime, but don’t paint us all as rubes. People were sounding the alarm, they were ignored.
You are correct. I wish I had more to say than that. I wish I was cogniscient of these issues back then.
Whole i agree with most of your comment, I’m not really reading any solutions. I’d my attitude is the problem, what’s the proper attitude to have to deal with these imbeciles?
The proper attitude is to treat their beliefs as real (to them) and not just conspiracy or insanity. To look at them as your brother or sister and ask yourself “how did they get this way?” and not just hand-wave away their beliefs as insanity. The proper attitude is to truly engage with those who aren’t just acting in bad faith. How to differentiate that aspect, though, is getting harder to the point of impossibility. I fear we may have reached a tipping point where it becomes impossible to discern bad faith from deep propaganda brainwashing. I’m not sure if there is still a path forward in genuine conversation and understanding, which is the only route to breed empathy, something these people both lack within themselves and are deprived of from outside. I don’t see it as their fault. I see it as a failing of the community at large, one that is more ready to shun the individual, because that’s way easier than actually trying to genuinely engage them and help them grow as a person.
I believe the way out of fascism truly is love and compassion. My fear is that it’s a cycle; the perceived distance of fascism makes our society more susceptible to being taken over by it, leading to a fascist society benefiting the few, leading to the grassroots recognition that we are one people and one humanity, leading to an uprooting of fascism and rise of empathy.
Sorry if this was a bit hard to follow, I haven’t been sleeping well and I’m awake far too early.
Yeah the differentiation is the trick.
How does one engage sometime who thinks that Harris is literally the antichrist?
I don’t know and it distresses me, hence my fear of being past the turning point. Sometimes you can’t even begin to engage without getting outright hostility in return, such as with your example.
After a campaign like this, how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?
You’re assuming those relationships survived the 2020 election. For many, myself included, they didn’t.
I was willing to overlook 2016, but after 4 years of horror culminating in a (failed) coup, and those people still supporting him, I just cut them out of my life.
Supporting Trump is no different than supporting Hitler. I find it very easy to cut nazis out of my life.
One side wants me dead, there are no worthy discussions to be had.
That’s understandable. It’s also, in microcosm, the reason your country is so divided. If you want to continue living in a democracy, you’re all going to have to talk - and listen - to each other.
I don’t disagree at all. However, that is a whole lot easier said than done when one side is so far gone in an alternate reality of lies and hate.
We’re going to need a mass cult de-programming or something. I just don’t know how we come back from where we are.
The usual way to fix these things is civil war. Don’t worry, you won’t have to start it, the racists and fascists will do it for you. And then they’ll get annihilated, like always.
This is because they may be loud, aggressive, greedy, hateful and boastful which all help them start and ramp up wars. But they are also stupid, cowardly, irrational, week minded and a minority, which make them loose these wars.
What you think about them, they think about you. They’re not evil, they’re not idiots. If they lived nextdoor you would probably find each other very pleasant.
I just don’t know how we come back from where we are.
It looks pretty simple from where I’m standing. You talk to them. You listen to them. You find things you agree on, beginning with the smaller things. They’re not automatons, they’re people.
Update. This avalanche of supposedly tolerant progressives who are openly against the idea of talking to their fellow citizens proves to me that America deserves everything it gets. Good luck.
Naw, maybe you’re not queer and not being called a pedo, or followed or having your job threatened by a former president. It’s not my job to raise an adult right and free of hate, I have one child. I don’t need to burn myself out giving Republicans 3rd and 4th chances to be decent people.
“What you think about them, they think about you”
No, this is precisely the issue. Any leftist worth their salt can’t fucking stand conservatives and YET we will still protect their basic human rights and accept them into a collective society.
Conservatives on the other hand are perpetrating violence every single day against leftists and minorities they LOUDLY do not accept into a collective society. They deny abortions for women who are on the verge of death, they advocate for draconian health care policy that massively raises the suicide rates of trans kids because they hate trans kids and they believe deep down in their racism with an unshakable fervor that makes their meager spiritual practice of christianity look sad and pathetic in comparison.
It is far past the point of having a debate with rightwing conservatives, what is left is to intimidate them into shutting up, drowning out their voices and laughing at their tiny hateful visions of the universe.
The social fabric of the US is being ripped apart by conservative white men because they can’t handle how scary using pronouns is and frankly the solution is to activate everybody else, not humor these people yet again with another discussion they are going to approach in a fundamentally disengenous way.
They’re not evil, they’re not idiots.
Hard disagree.
Your first sentence, yes I agree. The next two, not so much. In my town in 2020 we had groups of these chuds roaming around downtown, armed, hunting for “antifa,” meaning anyone wearing black or looking slightly punk. Some of them really do want to shoot us with impunity.
But yeah, it’s also my parents, who probably wouldn’t turn me into the gestapo, but the cognitive dissonance where they simultaneously believe I’m their family but I’m also “the enemy within” doesn’t seem sustainable. At some point, it’s got to be one or the other. Getting them to agree on small things hasn’t changed their overall loyalty to the party, their disdain for Dems, or our relationship.
What you think about them, they think about you.
True, but irrelevant.
They’re not evil, they’re not idiots.
Hard disagree - they have to be at least one of those things to be MAGA, usually both.
If they lived nextdoor you would probably find each other very pleasant.
Hah! They DO live next door and I most certainly don’t find them pleasant.
You are dead wrong. I was raised in a deeply conservative lifestyle with conservative friends, family, and neighbors. I retired from a career steeped in conservatives, working shoulder to shoulder with them daily. The vast majority of the people I’ve known through the years have been conservative. I’ve been talking and listening this whole fucking time, trying to move them toward reason, naively thinking they would someday grow emotionally, become empathetic or introspective. A conservative is simply not able to experience these things. Empathy and introspection are not conservative traits.
Conservatives will not budge an inch. The more one attempts to reason with them, the more angry they become. If you aren’t careful, you will end up on their enemies list just for being a suspected non-conservative.
I appreciate your friendly approach, as it seems to come from a place of kindness and empathy, but that capacity for empathy does not exist in a conservative.
Never in history has fascism been cured by just talking and listening. Historically, the cure for fascism is only delivered by force.
They’re not evil, they’re not idiots.
No, they’re both. They know they’re spreading hate, and they find it funny.
Let’s assume that they are not bad people. In order to bring them to sanity, it would take an ungodly amount of pressure, and they would have to have no connections back to the cult. If there is even a single connection all the effort would be for naught.
They are not where they are, due to logic or empathy, so you can’t use logic or empathy to argue them out of it. I lost my entire extended family over this.
I know what you mean, when I put to nazis and bigots, through various civil discourses, the most agreeable and cordial justifications for their systematic capture and extermination or deportation, to my great surprise, they never acquiesce to any form of intellectual exchange, regarding the legitimate concerns I raise.
Its the most bizzare thing because, just previously, they’d been more than happy to declare thus and so the most polite and reasonable argumentations supporting the very same thing for other people. More so, they many were lamenting how unfair it was for them to be denied the opportunity to pontificate on such matters, just a short time previously.
I’m sure you can only imagine my surprise when they did this, after their claims of wanting nothing more than “civil discourse.”
Yankee here, and fully agree with what you said. Unfortunately, empathy seems to be an increasingly lost art in this country and it only seems to get worse as each side continues to dehumanized the other.
No. It’s called the Paradox of Tolerance. “Discussing” rationally with the intolerant only serves to justify their position in their own eyes and thereby embolden them.
In other words, putting up with them simply gives them more ink
Turning the other cheek only works if the person doing the slapping has a sense of shame. Trump and his ilk have long since proven they have none.
I don’t remember who said it first, but I’ve linked it before: there’s no paradox if tolerance is a social contact rather than an ethic. If someone breaks the terms of the contact, then the other party is not bound by it any more.
Yeah. Although what if half of the country is intolerant? What then? Divide the country into two?
Then you remove the nazis from your country by any means necessary. I’m sick of people talking about tolerance in the face of genocidal bigotry.
Calm your pits Beka.
Nobody should be advocating for a Final Solution.
People were this divided over FDR. My next door neighbor only ever referred to FDR as that “gimpy legged sonofabitch”. This was in the 1970’s.
If the good guys win the election, we can start to heal this if we choose to. But only if we take the complaints of everyone seriously. Ignoring the needs and political power of white men is what got us into this cluster.
If the bad guys win, start looking for allies.
What complaint am I supposed to be taking seriously exactly?
The one where trans people are invading women’s spaces to rape them?
The one where immigrants are all violent criminals who eat dogs?
Or maybe the one where women are getting abortions instead of using birth control and should not be allowed to make decisions about their own bodies?
I am a white man. I don’t care about the complaints of white men that boil down to “I’ve been on top for so long that any attempt at equity feels like a threat to that position”.
If Trump said:
Then you remove the nazis from your country by any means necessary
We would know what he meant. You are saying the same genocidal thing.
Most of them are hurting in one way or another. This particular round it’s mostly the financial, mental and emotional aftershocks of the pandemic amplified by greedy people coming up with new and inventive ways to take money from the poor and give it to the rich.
But you need to first hear and understand their pain to have any hope of getting through to them.
They’ve been told over and over through misinformation that immigrants, people with disabilities, loose/secular/independent women, people of different religious beliefs, skin colour, whatever else are the reason for their suffering, and that they should be afraid of them. That initial pain is channeled from fear to anger to hate to dehumanization to… “final solutions”.
They want Trump in because they’ve been convinced that he’s powerful and “Trump will fix it.” ‘It’ being whatever the pain is.
The reality is of course a much different story of basically just greedy people distracting them while they steal their lunch money, and narcissists that will do anything to gain ever more power.
But if you want to unprogram someone from that you need to hear their pain. What was that thing that was used by the greedy and narcissistic to channel into hate.
It’s mostly hurt/hurting people who are voting for Trump. To turn them around you need to hear their pain.
I’m not sure it’s half, maybe half of the voting population but that’s usually only around 40-60% of the total population.
If you want democracy to survive you should be intolerant of intolerance.
you’re all going to have to talk - and listen - to each other
We do not tolerate intolerance.
In all seriousness, how does one listen to and communicate with people who have slid so far down a misinformation hole to a place where science is fake, every expert who disagrees is part of a global conspiracy, and the only people they listen to literally can’t stop lying?>
I still talk to and value my mother, and believe she is a good person, but she’s fallen prey to insidious propaganda and believes that Trump is just a flawed tool for God and the Republican platform is the only way to save the world from the forces of evil.
As an aside, my favorite conspiracy theory was how all the governments of the world were collaborating on the COVID lockdowns so they could control the people and take power. The governments capable of national lockdowns could take power. 🤦🏼♂️
I’m not listening to Nazis so fuck off.
I get where you’re coming from. Unfortunately, it’s not really that simple. Sometimes a relationship is so toxic that there’s no way to restore the basic trust that’s needed in order to function as a unit. This is no different. Pre-Trump, we might have been able to talk and salvage things; at this point, they’re just as broken as a relationship full of cheating and domestic abuse. My fear is that the only way forward is breakup (ie civil war) or some other equally deep trauma.
I don’t need to talk to those who are openly racist. I’m not talking about some political double speak. I have trump voters in my community that openly use racist slurs in their discussion of immigrants, and minorities in town.
You are the company you keep, and those folks aren’t part of my life. Trump was just the vector to illuminate their position that was previously kept in hushed tones behind doors.
Yes, it’s our fault that fear-addicted racists have refused to listen to reason for decades and particularly during the last eight years when an obviously unfit clown was committing scandal after scandal. We should be inviting cultists who refuse to listen to us back into our lives and calmly discuss why it is good for the country to be a Christofascist dictatorship.
It’s hard to listen to the illiterate.
