Comment by hnarn
7 days ago
I'm European. While it's pretty childish to paint the US and the EU as two human being with a "relationship" it's of course pretty jarring to see a country that has for my entire life been the undisputed cultural hegemony simply check out of the world stage and suddenly treat everyone on "their" side (culturally, politically and economically) like an enemy, or at the very least an abuser.
I'm not an economist, but I don't think you have to be one to realize that kicking the entire global economy right between the legs will lead to a recession -- just look at the supply chain issues that echoed for years after Covid, and the massive "quantitative easing" that had to be done to avoid a recession.
The abandonment of trade partnerships I could live with, I'll make it through a recession and every country is free to elect their own politicians and make their own fiscal policies, dumb as they may be; I don't get my "feelings hurt" by Americans wanting to bring back manufacturing jobs -- although I have issues understanding the reasoning.
What worries, and actually saddens me, is the complete doing away with of values, that I do think have existed in the past. The US has never been a beacon of exemplary behavior, and I understand that "nations have no friends, only interests" -- one needs to look no further than the US treatment of the Kurds for an example of this -- but it's unbelievable to me how so many Americans can not see the American self-interest in making Russia pay for what they've done in Ukraine.
Russia has been the main antagonist of the US for the entire post-ww2 era. It's a totalitarian state and an obvious enemy to the US. Invading Ukraine was a massive mistake, and all the richest country in the world had to do to basically risk-free damage their biggest antagonist, was to keep pressing a dollar-button together with the EU. No boots on the ground, no Iraq- or Afghanistan scale disaster, just military and economic support for a country that could end up being an extremely close ally. There is literally zero chance Russia could win a war of attrition with this dynamic. Instead, it's like the Soviet union in the 70s would have given away Cuba for free and instead threatened to invade North Korea.
In the end, I think what makes me uncomfortable is that I truly do not understand what it is that the average American (or voter) wants, because the actions of the US on the international stage makes no sense to me, yet so many Americans seem to cheer it on.
I was told the average voter wanted cheaper goods (especially eggs). One candidate lied and said you'd get that day 1 (like someone running for class president who promises free ice cream at recess every day), the other was realistic and used coherent words to describe their policy.
Our loss.
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Most Americans just don’t care that much about international affairs.
Quality of life has been going down for most Americans over the past few decades. It's harder to buy a house, raise a family, etc. on a modest income. Increasing cost of goods has outpaced wage increases but there are probably other factors at play too.
Americans lived in a world where all you needed was a decent job and you could have a good life - defined by what I said above. That's not the case anymore and they're upset about it - they're looking for someone or something to blame.
The republican party chose to blame immigrants and the democrats chose to blame lack of DEI. This fractured the citizens into two camps who can seemingly find no middle ground anymore.
Meanwhile, the wealth gap continues to increase and the middle class is shrinking. But neither political party can run on a platform of reducing spending AND higher taxes on wealth. They'd lose their funding sources - so they're stuck with immigrants and DEI.
Meanwhile, Trump sees an opportunity to extract wealth from the working class by reducing government spending and diverting those savings to corporations and the wealthy. Moderate Americans feel a bit powerless given how quickly our long standing legal and government structures seem to be deteriorating.
> I truly do not understand what it is that the average American (or voter) wants,
there's no such thing as an average American voter
#1 Per our Constitution, USA has minoritarian rule baked in.
There's many anti-democratic choke points: Electoral College for POTUS, Supreme Court, US Senate, gerrymandering effect on US House, long history of systemic disenfranchisement, etc. aka Vetocracy per Francis Fukuyama.
#2 ~6m Biden voters stayed home in 2024.
There's a sizeable cohort of infrequent voters and a huge cohort of non-voters who self disenfranchise. Due to nihilism (voting doesn't matter), both parties are the same, low motivation, whatever.
#3 Like most everywhere else, our information ecology is broken, fragmented.
The audience for "traditional" media's news is tiny, compared to social media. The Dems focus on "traditional" whereas GOP have successfully embraced "social". So for all the billions spent every presidential election (political advertising), most voters don't ever hear from Democrats.
Therefore, US voters are mostly unable to correlate policy positions with politic parties. So mass politics really comes down to marketing and vibes.
#4 Addressing these "legitamacy" issues (government by consent of the governed) is wicked hard when one of our two political parties has been utterly opposed to democracy and effective governance for decades.
My take on this is the right wing media re-defined the word “woke” to create an enemy, and take the propaganda to full blast to convince the average idiot that “woke” is the ultimate threat to society, and nothing else matters. Add to that the vicious religious practices and the false prophets who financially benefits from the brainwashed, to make it harder to question the new paradigm. That’s what the average american/voter was told to “want”: destroying woke by all means. What “woke” actually means, and the fact the definition is so vague (meaningless?) is the true weapon.