Comment by palmotea
10 hours ago
> How the US president became president is still the question that baffles me the most.
> Twice. You did it twice.
If you want the answer, look at the Democrats. That's why he got elected twice: they were that bad at politics.
No. It is fault of conservatives, republicans and their supporters. Primary and absolitely. And same everywhere. AfD rise is on the AfD and those voters. The person doing the bad things is the culpable one.
Blaming everyone except those who worked hard to achieve this is absurd.
Always someone else's fault.
The people most responsible for getting their candidate elected is the campaign team. If the plan is just for your opponents to do a bad job, you don't deserve to win.
If half the voting population elects a vicious moron completely unsuitable for power, that's not the fault of the opposition. *They actively chose to vote for the fascist.*
Party of personal responsibility and all that.
There have been people that claimed they would have voted for the worst rulers registered in history before the dems; and at the same time John Bolton recurretly used the phrase "a cardboard cutout would be better than".
The question on whether they perceived (actually, whether they can perceive) what others like e.g. Bolton see is valid - nonetheless, you have to face that they explicitly, vocally refused to vote for the dems, "whatever it takes".
And the system in the USA is very broken - among the issues, there are only two options in the choice, with all the paradoxes it brings.
> If half the voting population elects a vicious moron completely unsuitable for power, that's not the fault of the opposition.
Don't let the opposition off the hook: as you said they lost to "a vicious moron completely unsuitable for power." How does someone fuck up an election like that so badly? It should have been a slam dunk.
It's the fault of the opposition for not doing a better job (at all manner of political competencies). One thing I've noticed over the last ten or so years, is that Democrats/Liberals/Progressives are very averse to admitting to and learning from their own mistakes. They'd much rather focus on blaming someone else for their own incompetence.
This is still unbelievable to me, up to this day. If the opposition choses to run for office with a moron, couldn't you at least find a candidate that is not demented.. You can't make this up..
You sure are letting the U.S. voter off the hook here…
3 replies →
You're kinda correct but making the mistake that the democratic party is a uni-party and not a vibrant political group made up of hundreds of different vying interests.
There is only one group to blame and it's the same group that has controlled the party since the 90s: neoliberals. Neoliberals do not have a vision of the future worth fighting for, more corporate control, so it's not hard to see when other opposing forces can simply offer something different.
It's the same problem we saw in the 1920s that lead to growing fascism: pushing for austerity, more corporate control over society, and deregulation are all things that help fascists and authoritarians thrive.
1 reply →
Factually, Harris as a candidate was orders of magnitude better than Trump: a boring, competent, left-leaning centrist. In a functioning society, a reactionary revolutionary like Trump -- complete with Project 2025 manifesto -- should have scraped off maybe 5-to-10% of the vote, almost regardless of his competition.
The problem wasn't really Harris, who got very close to half the vote. The problem is that half the voting population does not think that electing a fascist demagogue is that big of a deal, or compares favorably to electing a boring centrist. This suggests that our civic culture is fundamentally broken at the moment. You can't run a society like this!
5 replies →
[flagged]
"…a woman who spent over a year committing genocide"
Wild, if true.
That's like blaming a rape victim for being bad at fighting off her rapist.
If you want the answer, look at Republicans. They nominated him twice, and the second time around the Republican base ignored all of the moral issues they knew about and voted for him anyway because they wanted the chaos and anger.
Look at the polling right now: even after Trump's policies have destroyed millions of Republican lives, those voters are still convinced that Trump has their best interests at heart and its really those dastardly Democrats' fault somehow even though the GOP controls all 3 branches of government.
> That's like blaming a rape victim for being bad at fighting off her rapist.
WTF? The Democrats lost some important elections to a fool, that's nothing like getting raped.
> If you want the answer, look at Republicans. They nominated him twice, and the second time around the Republican base ignored all of the moral issues they knew about and voted for him anyway because they wanted the chaos and anger.
I'm not saying there are no problems with Republicans, but that the bigger, more important, and more tractable issue is that the Democrats could lose to someone like that, twice.
Complain about how bad Trump is all you want, but if you lose to him, it's pretty clear you are in some important sense worse than him. Focus on fixing that, because bitching about the other side is going to do no good.
There you go again trying to shift the blame from Republicans to Democrats.
Trump won with 49.8% of the vote, which is the lowest % since Bush in 2000. Democrats voted against him. Independents voted against him. But MAGA voters loved his race-baiting and voted for him in overwhelming numbers, and even anti-Trump Republican voters decided that they could live with the racism and corruption and destruction of civil liberties if they could end abortion at the federal level and make all dozen trans athletes in the country disappear.
The problem is, and always was, the Republican voters. Blame them.
1 reply →