No, the current system does not work for most of the people hence the "just nuke it" option sounds like a rational one.
Canadian elections show that people can change their mind overnight, but unfortunately some of the changes that happened in the US institutions and the global relations will take decades to reverse (if ever).
The Canadian elections are structurally different though. Not everybody changed their mind, the Conservatives won more seats than before. What happened was that Bloc Quebecois and NDP voters broke ranks to vote in a Liberal MP for their riding, to block what seemed like a surefire supermajority for the Conservatives. This is possible when you don't have a 2-party system with deeply calcified divisions.
> the current system does not work for most of the people
Bullshit. America is the richest country on earth. Your unemployment is remarkably low. Your disposable income is relatively high. And all the issues you complain about, like housing, are worse outside the US than in the US.
Moreover, a lot of the MAGA people are NOT working class struggling families. There are a lot of middle class middle aged low digit millionaires who are certainly not hurting for anything, but for some reason really love Trump.
It's not just simply economic. I'd say it's more like there are many groups of people who do not feel represented by their government. Some of these groups are quite opposed to each other. Add to that politics and media that have become intentionally divisive and you get a society where everybody is mad about or scared of something.
Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude. They've been conditioned to believe that geriatric white dudes are the only ones capable of holding the office. So, when compared with the younger black/indian woman, the natural choice was to select the old white (orange) guy.
Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude.
That’s not even true within my lifetime, let alone historically. People freaked the fuck out because Reagan was going to be all of 70 when he took office in 1982. That’s nothing compared to the fossils that they’re propping up in front of a microphone these days. 70 year olds in Congress these days are nicknamed “The Kid”.
> Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude.
That's only true for an incredibly expansive definition of geriatric: Teddy Roosevelt was 42, Kennedy 43, Obama and Grant 46, etc. By a commom conventional standard of "geriatric” in general use (65+), only Buchanan, Harrison, Reagan, Trump, and Biden qualify at the start of their first term, and only 16 total would at the end of their last term.
> So, when compared with the younger black/indian woman
Harris was closer to (but still older than) both the mean and median age at start of term for a President than Trump was (even if you compared her in 2024 to Trump when elected in 2016). Gender and age, sure, but the whole geriatric thing as a long-term bias evident across the whole list of Presidents is unjustified (there's probably a decent argument that the current electorate has a geriatric bias, but its not a long-term historical one.)
> There are a lot of middle class middle aged low digit millionaires who are certainly not hurting for anything, but for some reason really love Trump.
They love him because he's as degenerate as they are, and makes it cool to be white. Or so I'm told.
Not that I believe any of that, just going by what Trump supporters tell me.
You can’t see why average Americans would want a change from many of the Biden Administration’s policies? It has nothing to do with racism, xenophobia, or transphobia. A lot of the policies were just objectively bad for average everyday Americans.
Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided, and we wouldn’t have to hear stories about “we sent $X billions, but Zelenskyy says he received only $0.5X billions” which could have been spent here, not to mention millions of lives spared (the latter doesn’t affect ordinary Americans directly, but there you go).
Edit: it’s abundantly clear that Trump is also highly corrupt. A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption (not to mention the felt need to pick a side)
That's all well and good, but that money would never be spent here. That's not how our budget works. It's our defense budget, determined ahead of time, and America's defense budget is huge
The idea that Biden was taking food out of our mouths to send to Ukraine was pushed by the very people that approved that budget because it was easy to do. And Americans know this, they really do, they just forget it because they've had this narrative yelled at them so many times.
And even given that, we were very shrewd. We sent old weapons that were going to be decommissioned, so I would hardly say we sent a bunch of money to Ukraine. More like we goosed our weapon production.
It’s true that the large majority of aid came in the form of weapons that the military industrial complex wanted to replace anyway. However, there has still been many billions of “cash” sent, totaling over $40 billion. That’s nothing to sneeze at. For example, from two years ago:
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-us-aid-ukraine-money-e...
I think that's fair, Covid was completely insane. Personally the part of the US response I disliked the most was the closing of schools. Like, in Ireland the pubs were closed for basically 2 years, but we kept the schools open for most of it, which I think was the right call. Difficult situation though, and the vaccine mandates were crazy (particularly given how ineffective they were in preventing transmission).
> Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided,
I really don't see that. Like, Russia basically invaded as soon as (like that week) Nordstream 2 was finished (which unlike Nordstream 1 didn't pass through Ukraine). I think it's arguable that the US didn't need to be as involved (although if they hadn't been, then the EU-US break would have happened much, much sooner).
> which could have been spent here,
Like, for the avoidance of doubt, sending old weapons to Ukraine doesn't actually cost the US as much as they claimed. Ye'd have had to decommission them anyway. (This is a surprisingly large pattern in US aid to other countries).
> A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption
> the vaccine mandates were crazy (particularly given how ineffective they were in preventing transmission)
The data are known to show that the primary effect was in reducing the risk of hospitalization, severe disease, and mortality. Why, then should the lack of effect on transmission be the end-point that determines the appropriateness of mass immunization?
Because ordering people to take medical treatment is a big deal. If it reduces the hospitalisation rate then it's rational to take for oneself, but requiring it for a bunch of things was overkill.
And I say this as someone who thinks Biden was a pretty good President.
The closest I've seen to a convincing explanation of this came from a recent Some More News episode. The host argued that, while Democrats at the Federal level have pretty fucking clearly been far better for normal Americans this century (and longer, but let's consider the last 25ish years) with things like the CFPB and ACA and bringing down fentanyl overdose death rates (to say nothing of economic performance under Democrats versus Republicans, going back quite a bit farther than this century), they have simply not done enough, and the perception is still, by death through a thousand cuts, that things are getting worse.
Long hold times and phone-tree mazes for help with the dozen bills that showed up due to one night in the hospital (despite insurance and all that!), housing costs shooting up year over year, inflation (people genuinely don't understand that "inflation is down" doesn't mean "prices dropped", which, after the giant covid price spike, is what they actually wanted to happen). More visible homelessness. Scam call attempts 2-3 times a day, and your Grandma and thousands of other grandmas and grandpas and fathers and mothers lost a ton of money to them, and nobody in power seems to give half a fuck. The neoliberal trade changes in the '90s were supposed to come with mountains of support to the demographics likely to be harmed by them, and that never meaningfully materialized, and people remember that and families still feel the pain from it. It may seem silly, but: tip prompts for take-out. It's some bigger things, and a whole lot of little things like that.
Add the cultivated, perceived, not-backed-by-data problems Republicans propagandize, to those very real ones above. Sky-high and worsening crime, "invasions" at the border bringing in fentanyl and such (it's mostly Americans doing it, in fact, for the obvious reason that they have a much easier time crossing the border Mex-to-US while carrying drugs when the crossing itself isn't illegal, so it's far less risky) and trans athletes, all that junk.
This left a good chunk of the electorate eager for someone promising to upend the system, when the two options presented to-date had been "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll get worse)" and "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll still get worse—just more-slowly)".
Fertile ground for a fascist conman.
There are other aspects to it, of course. Conspiratorial thinking (QAnon and friends) twisted, as it usually is when it hits politics, into "these openly-grifting elites are on my side and will stop the secretly-grifting elites I've been assured are the problem!" is a pretty big one, thanks to the feed-algo right-wing-radicalization pipeline giving that nonsense a ton of oxygen. A non-trivial set of folks really are just racist as hell. But the above is the most-plausible explanation I've seen for the "things are bad and getting worse" voters.
Honestly, no. Biden was a really terrible president by any metric except for "isTrump? yes/no". To be fair though, he excelled on that one pretty consistently throughout his term
> Biden was a really terrible president by any metric except for "isTrump? yes/no"
It’s not solely Trump’s identity that makes that distinction; it’s the haphazard, uninformed, and ruinous adventures in poor decision-making in economics and otherwise that characterize the difference. Biden was ineffective and a poor choice, but utterly benign in comparison to his mendacious, unskilled successor.
Biden’s record is public and the number of bipartisan bills passed under his admin is extraordinary in this day and age. No serious ranking of presidents puts Biden low at all.
> This is all because they don’t like immigration?
You could spend an entire college semester discussing how and why.
Immigration is the current scapegoat for the effects of a hollowed out middle class, though.
It's not new and it's far more broad than that. The staggering government corruption and incompetence has been ignored for decades. You can't just pretend that this is suddenly new and one sided if you want to solve the problem.
This just isn’t true, it is easy to find blatant corruption tied to politicians at all levels from both parties. Look at California, New York, Chicago, and Baltimore, look at the Biden family, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Letitia James, the Democrats are just as corrupt, the mainstream media just reports on it less.
rattling off a bunch of people who haven't been criminally charged in response to a party whose leader quite literally HAS been charged with fraud is the point.
how many indictments were passed down during the Obama admin vs Trump admin vs Bush admin and so on. Republican admins are notorious for being criminals.
I think it's naive not to see the "both sides" card get pulled anytime there is a criticism of the right. All the "centrists" come out to hold water for conservatives when their policies are clearly and specifically failing.
A elite that fights social welfare as socialism, while at the same time removing the middle class and handing the lower classes infinite competition. Nobody cares about who the elite pretends to care for, nobody cares about corruption, they want to see that house burn down, like theirs was torched. The sounds of humanism the enemy makes, are irrelevant, as the sound of compassion made while doing nothing.
How did you feel about the Biden family’s blatant corruption? Do you really think that Hunter Biden was an amazing artist and brilliant corporate energy sector lawyer that is just falling on hard times now like the rest of us? It’s a weird coincidence that he can’t sell his paintings anymore now that his Dad isn’t politically relevant anymore.
Joe’s brother has also made a lot of money off of questionable government contracts.
This is important, and most partisans will get caught up in a discussion about whose corruption was worse. The bigger issue in my mind is that no one wants to police their own side, which leads to absurd flip-flopping hypocrisy every time the other party gains power. "Less bad" corruption is still a very bad thing, whoever you believe to be the more corrupt. But our current political system doesn't seem to have a way to wrestle with this.
IDK, I think actual democratic voters tend to be far more on the "hammer the button even more enthusiastically" side of the "ah, but if you press that button, the Bidens will also be investigated!" meme-cartoon.
Like, yes, please, investigate all of them.
Republicans sort-of tried with Hunter, but kept balking at public hearings because they knew a bunch of the stuff they were claiming when they went on Fox was made-up, so it better served their propaganda purposes to avoid pursuing it. If there was actually anything to it, I hope and assume they would have gone ahead.
Which brings up the credibility problem with these claims from Republicans: "There's fraud in government! We found tons of it!" cool, that's a crime, where are the indictments? Oh, there aren't any, because you're full of shit. "Massive election fraud!" cool, that's a serious crime, you're in power now, a bunch of your AGs launched high-profile investigations, where are the indictments? You snagged a half-dozen cases, all mundane shit like someone with two houses voting in both states in two different elections because they forgot about it or didn't realize it was illegal? Where is the massive, organized fraud? Oh, you were just lying. Again. (They've been fucking that particular chicken for nearly two damn decades and somehow still have nothing to show for it, the democracy-undermining pricks). Months and months and all those hours of interviews for the Benghazi "investigations", and what? Nothing again. It's tedious. Shit or get off the pot, go after crime but stop lying about it.
To compare Hunter Biden, a private citizen, making a few paintings, to the actual president of the country grifting with crypto to the tune of billions, is rather something. Especially after watching the 2 billion dollar bailout that Jared Kushner got from the Saudis during the first term.
Jared Kushner is just as much a “private citizen” as Hunter Biden is.
Hunter Biden blatantly and corruptly sold his father’s influence. There’s even evidence that Joe got his “10% for the big guy” on these dealings. It’s a massive disgusting scandal.
For the record I can’t stand when either side pulls this crap. The whole narrative that my side’s politicians are less corrupt than yours needs to end. They’re dividing us into tribes and playing us for fools while the political class robs us blind.
Hunter Biden, as far as I know, didn't hold an official title within his father's administration. Jared Kushner, on the other hand, did hold an official title within Donald Trump's first administration.
Hunter Biden, as far as the country has been made aware, never requested an TS-SCI clearance, as Jared Kushner did. Jared Kushner was given one via overrule from the 45th administration when the FBI and CIA said there's no way in hell he should be given access to any state secrets due to his background.
For the record, fuck Hunter Biden for anything he might have done. But don't equate selling access to demanding the highest levels of access to our nation's most closely held secrets.
Why can’t we just agree that both are really, really bad? The amount of mental gymnastics that each side does to justify such blatant corruption is astounding.
All corruption and law breaking should be investigated and prosecuted as appropriate. I don’t care what side they are on. Our entire political class is full of corruption. For the record I’m also not a fan of the Trump meme coins, Jared Kushner’s actions, or various Republican politicians at all levels that are blatantly corrupt.
So if Don Junior starts selling finger paintings to Russian oligarchs and Saudi royals you’d be okay with it since he’s not officially part of the administration?
