Comment by radiofreeeuropa
20 hours ago
My "holy shit, we're in for... interesting times, and like, soon" moment was when Trump suggested his supporters might shoot Hillary if she won ("If she wins, I can't do anything about it. But the 'Second Amendment people'...."), and didn't see a huge hit to his popularity, and supporters in his own camp distancing themselves, immediately.
Norms are dead, you can just suggest assassination of your opponent and still win a Presidential election now, the batshit crazy stuff's not just for races in rural Montana or whatever. Like, IDK how this reads to younger folks, but I assure them that things are now happening practically daily that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago, let alone farther back. Things got visibly weirder fast.
I'm in my mid 30s and have definitely noticed a gap in perception between people in their early 20s who haven't experienced much of pre-2016 politics and the older folks. The younger folks are much less alarmed because they weren't familiar with the "normal political discourse" that occurred when they were children.
It makes it hard to be optimistic that there is any plausible roadmap back to some form of normalcy in the medium term.
What you want to look at is how countries navigate back to normalcy after coups or assassinations. It's not usually a smooth process, you have to do amnesties or hash out disagreements somehow...
That's what worries me. young kids today have no idea how fucked up things are right now because this is all they've ever known.
Just this week Trump posted on his social media that Obama should be indicted for treason, aka, executed and not a blip from the supposed left-wing media