And the story continues. This means that no country will want to buy F16s. If you don't get support they are useless.
They are eroding really fast the US shine and trust in the world.
This is going to have a massive effect on the US economy, internal consumption will not save it. This is the end of an empire while its rich kings are golfing every weekend on the taxpayer dime using federal and local resources.
I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests (they have proven already that other's interests do not matter for them). This sounds like self-flagellation seen from the outside.
How can any reasonable national leader justify building their military on American systems anymore?
Especially now that the U.S. government is also talking about not living up to its NATO obligations.
This is not gonna hurt the rest of the world. Defense is where the U.S. exports a lot. So cutting back on U.S. weaponry will only help other nations.
The same is true of Tech. Currently the tech industry is global, but expect it to become increasingly national. Considering this is one of the biggest and fastest growing industries in the U.S. and one of its biggest exports, again, this is only gonna hurt thenUS economy.
And the US’s dominance in this space is so high the rest of the world will simply push for open source at no loss to their own economies, since it’s only the US’s profit making will be hurt.
risk of war going hot aside, the long term effect of this is fantastic for the rest of the world's industries
AWS, GCP and Azure looked unbeatable a month ago
but today, if you're a government official in the UK, Poland or Germany, would you be recommending AWS as your cloud provider?
absolutely not
they now have massive geopolitical risks associated with them due to being under the control of the increasingly unstable and authoritarian US regime that will sacrifice 80 years of foreign policy and soft power for a soundbite on fox news
> if you're a government official in the UK, Poland or Germany, would you be recommending AWS as your cloud provider?
They don't. Sovereign cloud in EU has been progressing for a few years now.
Such that some of your mentioned "unbeatable" hyperscalers have already been positioning (e.g. ceasable infrastructure), and some interesting new players on the block. As well as old benefiting from the related market positions: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/eu-sovereign-cloud/
The way they are doing it is entirely air gapped systems, run by totally independent companies (not subsidiaries, totally separate legal entities owned and run by other people) that are effectively licensing the software.
So the US legal system can say "give us this data" but they don't have access as they are on another company's servers in another company's data center operated by another company's staff.
> So the US legal system can say "give us this data" but they don't have access as they are on another company's servers in another company's data center operated by another company's staff.
US institutions don't hesitate to demand their companies to implement secret backdoors in their hardware or software, as evidenced by Snowden's leaks (for Cisco routers) and the Lavabit shutdown (mail company ordered to implement a tap on their clients' data).
Sure, you can have all you described, but how are updates vetted?
Yeah it is a risk, but so is it a risk for anything. Can you really trust the CPU, RAM, BIOS, USB-C cable etc on your desk? Maybe those have backdoors too?
But that is adversarial and is to be expected.
At least for these sort of cooperative partnerships that I am aware of in enterprise, there are typically provisions in contracts for code-access, verifiable builds, ability to reject updates and so on and so on. I don't know if these provisions exist in the sovereign cloud contracts that the cloud companies are building, but I would be really surprised if they went to all this trouble replicating Azure/GCP/etc in entirely air-gapped data centers with duplicated staff and hardware and all that, but don't bother to vet the code they get!
The US state just ask the UK GHCQ to get the data to them instead. That's what they already do for decades, and likewise the GHCQ gets the US data. Under the national security umbrella, so they'll deny any data exchanges. With Germany the figure is known to be 10%. With the UK the figure is 100%.
The EU should really fight these illegal circumventions
Disagree, location matters. It should be technically feasible to implement a code freeze (in software, or hardware) in a sovereign system when external partners’ motives become questionable. That being said in all likelihood that capability is cost prohibitive (speculation), but still co-location is a pre-requisite.
Cloud is going be far easier to transition for most companies compared to Office, Browsers, OS and Hardware. There are basically no non-american competitors, and so many companies deeply relying on the tech don't have the IT capacity to implement something OSS like Linux.
Yes, but if the government were to spend say 10% of their GPD on defense and infrastructure (Hi, German!), some of this spending might be in grants/tax breaks to help companies make this transition.
I think you underestimate what a capitalist system can accomplish, and how quickly.
"Sovereign cloud" is AWS/G-Cloud/Oracle/Azure, but promising to put your data in London if you're the British state, or Frankfurt if you're German and so on...
It's a cute little badge that does very very little to address the real concerns.
Even I, the founder of a small startup outside the US, caught myself considering things I never would have before.
Just last month, I had to change my dedicated server provider and was genuinely concerned about hosting my websites on US-based entities. Would Trump impose a tariff to antagonize my country and president? I don't have the resources to keep changing providers and migrating my services.
It isn't fantastic on net, although it could be a net benefit for those industries that compete directly with (former?) American strengths. The other industries will no longer benefit from the highly competitive offerings of US cloud providers, which are for now, better and cheaper than the alternatives.
AWS and Azure have regional data centers in each one of the countries. Data in EU stays in EU. The CAPEX risk is entirely borne by US companies while being operated by locals following local laws. These states can easily nationalize these data centers if, say, US does something really bad to them. So the geopolitical risk for using AWS or Azure seems low to me.
The idea that we (Canada, any EU country, etc) can "easily nationalize" data centers running on bespoke hardware that we do not have a supply chain for, bespoke software which we do not control or have the source to, running workloads for customers as dictated by business relationships with a (now hostile) foreign company, with the descriptions of those workloads almost certainly stored in said hostile foreign companies local (i.e. foreign to us) servers... is absurd.
It's even more absurd to suggest that this can be done in response to the US becoming more hostile than they are today. By the time they are more hostile, we're talking about open hostilities. It's only safe to assume that they will have exfiltrated all the data they are interested in, and then sabotaged or destroy as much of the hardware as possible (as can be done remotely), making the data center next to worthless. And prior to nationalization it was "their data-center", they were entirely within their "rights" to sabotage and destroy it.
The time to migrate away from data-centers to minimize geo political risk is now, not when the current data centers operators are actively trying to deal damage.
Similar to that jets effectively would be grounded the second that the US decides they would not be exportable to a former ally, my guess is that not many would, in this scenario, believe a former US owned AWS region in Europe to operate completely autonomously to the degree that it can be “easily” nationalized.
But long before that, I believe there will be other noticeable effects.
As someone working in a medium sized European company, with substantial investments across private infrastructures, AWS, GCP and some Azure, I can testify to that since last couple of weeks the Public Cloud Exit strategies around having services being prepared is a very hot topic. This concerns both existing services preparations as well as enforcing standards and configurations for new services.
'Data stays in EU' is not true: the US CLOUD act means that American law enforcement and intelligence agencies can and do access data stored in data centers operated by American companies, whether or not they are on American soil.
What does the hardware give you? These datacenters are dependent on US teams, US processes using US maintained software. It's just a bunch of fast deprecating assets, which would need a full reinstall by a team of an AWS-like entity built from ground up.
Like I said, go have a look at what happens when we lose reserve status and get back to me about how what you just said is in any way relevant. Parenthetically bullshit like this is why I invest in real estate.
See what happens to real estate when the boomers start dying.
The reserve status is overblown. The question is if not the USD what asset would reserves go into. Certainly not the yuan with china's currency controls.
Lol you want to know what happens to real estate when the boomers start keeling over en masse? Blackrock et al increase their rental portfolio, rent and land prices continue to rise. What, you think the largest hedge funds on the planet made a mistake when they started investing in residential real estate? Check your assumptions.
Nationalization of foreign assets occurs at an extreme level of hostility that stable European governments would have no chance of doing, unless it had been done first by the other side. It is the kind of thing that happened in Venezuela.
As a reference point, the US has not nationalized Russian or Chinese national's assets. Nationalization is much worse than poor diplomatic relations, on a scale of retaliation it is close to war.
This is an inherent property of closed source proprietary weapons. Which is why gun owners like stuff like the gen3 glock and ar-15 as everyone knows how to make the parts and the open source blueprints are put into manufacture by a gazillion companies to the point PSA shitwagon can compete with a Colt and interchange most the parts.
Maybe Europe should open source a fighter jet and let the world compete on how they'll manufacture it.
As an observation, when the US originally licensed out the AR-15 to other countries they often also had to license aluminum foundry tech at the same time. We take it for granted now because that tech is old.
The ability to scale advanced or exotic materials science at will was a cornerstone of why US weaponry is difficult to copy. People always underestimate this aspect but it is a major reason why manufacturing of state-of-the-art hardware is not fungible.
Europe's weaponry is already somewhat "open source". Many big things like aircraft and missile systems are designed and built with pan-European consortia. As a result, every country knows how to build these things.
Heck, even Italian Agusta sold some of their platforms to a NATO ally with build/iterate/export permissions...
Look up the F-35 sometime. For Germany's F-35 fleet, Rheinmetall was going to build the fuselages and do final assembly in Germany. Splitting up the work like this isn't unique to products from Panavia or similar EU-only consortia.
Same here, it's a massive risk to trust any important data or services to be handled by American companies now. Thankfully I was already fairly decoupled from US big tech, so the transition took just a couple of days.
Now there are new ideas getting pushed (through influencers like Musk): that Ukraine "should be sanctioned", that Ukraine "should give their minerals to the US", that Ukraine "should give up their lands", that Zelensky "should resign" and finally that "US should leave NATO".
It’s really bizarre that we are looking at a near future where our best ally is Russia and West Europe/Canada and everyone else who was our friend is now our enemy. You literally couldn’t write this up as fiction and be taken seriously a decade ago.
We have an authoritarian nation conducting a literal unprovoked invasion of a liberal democratic country, this entire thread is objecting to the United States STOPPING providing materiel to said country . . . and yet people still think defense contractors are the "bad guys."
It's morbidly fascinating, really. If there's anyone who could be accused of profiting from blood money in this instance, it's companies like Sukhoi and Kalashnikov Concern.
The US did not invade Korea. Post WWII, Korea was split into its northern and southern zones which ended up becoming North and South Korea (the intent had been to make it one independent Korea, but put the USSR and USA in a room together and there will be no agreement on how to do that). In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. The UN called for a military response, the US supplied most of that response. But the US did not invade Korea.
North Korea invaded South Korea, the US and others fought them back on behalf of, and with, South Korea . China and the USSR supported North Korea, which is ultimately why it ended in a stalemate.
Iraq invaded Kuwait, our “ally.” South Korea, a democracy, was invaded by North Korea, a Soviet proxy state. South Vietnam, a democracy, was invaded by north vietnam, a Soviet proxy state.
You can’t disentangle the two like that. If you posit that the first gulf war was justified, you’re 90% of the way to justifying the second. The intelligence was that Iraq was rearming. If your position is that the U.S. would’ve had to intervene in the event Iraq invaded a neighbor again, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to invade preemptively to avoid a potentially costlier conflict.
You’re the one who doesn’t know the history of mistaken american wars in the 20th century and I’m the one being disingenuous?
How do you distinguish Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War from Ukraine? And I suppose your only quibble about the Iraq War is that we should’ve waited until Saddam invaded another neighbor, like he did the first time?
The present administration isn't really planning to cut military spending, they just want to redirect it. $4B of military aid was recently approved for another country.
Here's the budgetary outlook: You'll notice that defense spending is projected to have a slight increase in real terms, or a slight (0.1%) decrease in terms of fraction of GDP.
Yep. DOD spending is likely to shift, but not be reduced. The major firms are probably going to see some contracts cut or tougher competition from the likes of Anduril in certain domains.
DOD spending in IT-related efforts may also shift, Palantir will be a major contender here.
And a bit further back, ask anyone who the Red Army helped liberate in WW2 what has happened later, and how long it took the Red Army to actually withdraw.
The Manchurian Candidate was along these lines, though it has an (early) happy ending, before the candidate becomes president, at least in the movie. I haven't read the book.
The game Tom Clancy's End War is basically about a quadripolar world (you play as Russia, USA or Europe), where Russia hacks the EU WMD network and uses it to attack an American space-based weapon, using that as a false flag operation to make America go to war with Europe. Russia "joins" USA in an alliance and attacks the EU from the east while the US attacks from the Netherlands and Denmark.
I think this is a popular but unrealistic take based on real observation.Real observations being. Increase friendliness towards Russia. Decrease friendliness towards Europe/canada. Don’t confuse inflection points with the actual position.
It was idiotically unbelievable fiction until literally the day before Trump took office, even with project 2025 readable on the internet.
In fact, we discussed how the whole idea of an USA ex-president calling up a personal militia, trying a coup that could reboot a civil war, giving up half way, and not ending up in jail or even politically castrated was garbage fiction until 5 jan 2021.
I lived through the 1980ies, and I still have trouble processing the idea that the anti-Soviet, rah-rah patriot types that loved movies like Red Dawn are now in bed with the Russians. It's just bizarre.
It is, but it also makes sense. The enemy wasn’t really Russia, it was communism and, more broadly, leftism.
Modern Russia resembles the USSR in some respects: oppressive government, not particularly wealthy, over-militarized. But it’s definitely not communist.
If freedom and democracy is your thing then that part doesn’t matter. But if your thing is anti-leftism, conservative morality, militarism, powerful rulers, and white people, modern Russia looks pretty good.
It used to be that fascists and communists were our most hated enemies. How the tables have turned!
EDIT: more seriously, though, throughout the 20th century America hewed much closer to fascism than communism. It's always been there, if not always out in the open.
They are more or less the same thing. Fascism in its original form (with that name) in Italy one century ago had an anti communism flavor because communists were its internal enemies to the road of power. Remove that and you are left with nationalism, control of society (what you can say in pubblic, how to behave) and control of economy even in something as thin as do as you please but do not challenge the big boss with the influence you gain with your money (see what happened in China a few years ago.)
Communism had an internationalist phase but that was over by the middle of the cold war. It started as an ideal, then become a way to rationalize the USSR's grip on the East, then it died out as countries started to realize they would be better off with the other bloc.
Edit: of course communism had more ideals than internationalism. For example it did not include the authoritarianism part. However they disappeared after it was implemented as a way to rule a country and were replaced by the means that allowed the ruling group to stay in power.
And that made sense, as there was a point in time that Russia did seem like it had a chance of becoming a normal democracy. At some point even the idea of the EU membership was floating around.
By the 2008 attack on Georgia it was clear that there is no democratisation of Russia, but some people didn't want to believe it for a long time, not even after 2014 attack on Ukraine.
EU membership was never feasible. Russia is too large population-wise, it would have threatened franco-german leadership of the EU. The EU, as it was back then was hanging in a delicate balance, where France and Germany usually had to agree on something to get things done, but other countries could form blocks of convenience to push their own demands through (eg. UK, Nordics and the Netherlands on fiscal discipline, or the Baltics, Visegrad and countries from the Balcans on immigration). France and Germany would not have wanted to lose that much influence, Poland would not have wanted to be between Russia and Germany again (politically speaking), and hatred of Russia runs rather deep in countries of its former empire.
The US has had normal relations with places as radical as Saudi Arabia for many decades. Ideological, political, and other differences do not preclude normal relations. There's really an absolutely phenomenal article on the deterioration of Russia-US relations here. [1] In general, the problem is that after the collapse of the USSR, the US was left as the defacto ruler of the world. And we wanted to cling onto that position permanently. Germany, for example, is a country that could be independently great but has made no efforts towards such and has largely been content to remain deferential to the US, so it retains extremely positive relations with the US, so far as such a relationship can be called positive.
But as Russia started to regain strength in the early 2000s, they specifically aimed for positive relations with the US, but also were not happy with a Germany style relationship and wanted to be treated as equals. This led to us doubling down on hostilities towards them. But this deterioration of relations inevitably led to where we are today, but fortunately not where we could have ended up - which is in the nuclear wasteland that was briefly called WW3.
This also ties right back in to Georgia. Back in 2008 at the Bucharest summit the US was openly encouraging and supportive of Georgia's efforts to join NATO. France and Germany were strongly opposed to such, arguing that such a move would needlessly provoke Russia, but we aimed to move ahead with it anyhow. The Georgia-Russia war would start a few months later.
It’s extremely relevant when you’re talking about why liberals would think we should be friendly to this country. I haven’t seen a lot of liberals in favor of being friendly to Saudi Arabia.
Well, there was a point when everybody, including European politicians, wanted to normalize relations with Russia. But the guy had a different view and chose to invade Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. At that point some people still chose to believe that he can be civilized. It backfired badly in 2022. So now Trump trying the same thing and pretending to be Putin's buddy and trying his best to make Ukraine miserable is just sad.
Russia didn't pivot its policy in 2008, it did so a decade earlier, when the second Yugoslavian war was carried out without buy-in from it (the first one was, to an extent, a joint NATO-Russian operation).
And then the coalition of the willing invaded Iraq[1], again, against Russia's protests, and by that point, that's like two countries attacked (one invaded and occupied) by NATO/most of its members, and you'd have to be an idiot to look at that and not notice that it shifted from a purely defensive alliance to an offensive one. [2]
Putin isn't an idiot, he looks at this and starts surrounding himself with buffer states, through both soft and hard power. Unfortunately, soft power isn't working out great in this, for various reasons.
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[1] It's weird how when you mention Iraq in isolation, people think it's indefensible, but when you mention it in the context of Russian anxieties, all of a sudden, we are all bending over backwards to explain how it was perfectly justified, and it wasn't unprovoked aggression against an uninvolved country.
[2] It's been 14 years since NATO attacked a country, though (Libya in 2011 - if you squint hard enough, Syria might not count), so I guess we could once again reframe it as a defensive alliance. [3]
[3] It the US continues on it's insane trajectory and withdraws, it will definitely become a defensive alliance, simply because it will lack the ability to project power.
“It's weird how when you mention Iraq in isolation, people think it's indefensible, but when you mention it in the context of Russian anxieties, all of a sudden, we are all bending over backwards to explain how it was perfectly justified, and it wasn't unprovoked aggression against an uninvolved country.”
Wat? I’ve never heard anything like that. I’ve heard people try to justify it on the basis of believing the WMD lie or removing Saddam from power, but Russia is never even mentioned in this context.
Obama’s dig at Romney was well after the invasion of Georgia. what Obama correctly understood is that Russia’s designs on Eastern Europe don’t actually matter to America.
Obama's 100% correct point was that Russia was incredibly weak economically. Obama never said we should disengage "with the rest of the world military." Bush, Clinton, W. Bush also tried to normalize with Russia. Everyone hoped Putin was sane. Obama strengthened our alliances. And he has been proven right. Ukraine has depleted Russias military stockpiles and their National Wealth Fund. Russia was weaker than people thought.
>Bush, Clinton, W. Bush also tried to normalize with Russia. Everyone hoped Putin was sane.
Bush Jr, who unilaterally withdrew from the START treaty in 2002[1], and pushed to establish ABM sites in eastern Europe in 2007? That's considered "normalizing"?[2][3] And Putin, who protested both of these actions as destabilizing, is somehow considered the not-sane one in this narrative?
>Ukraine has depleted Russias military stockpiles and their National Wealth Fund. Russia was weaker than people thought.
"Russia is never as strong as she appears....and Russia is never as weak as she appears." -- multiple attributions including Bismark and Churchill
Russia was supposed to run out of ballistic missiles...in summer 2022.[4] They've also likely taken more casualties than the entire active duty strength of the UK, French, and German land forces combined (73K + 118K + 63K ~= 250k) while still keeping a cohesive force capable of offensive combat operations in the field, which has GROWN since the war started to somewhere around 550-650K (up from ~200-350K in 2022).[5][6] Russia only appears weak by the standard established by the US 1990-2005....but the US is essentially a super-saiyan and functioned on a different plane of existence from every other military in the world.
The article in Telegraph is not about ballistic missiles, but about a very specific type of cruise missile, Kh-55, which is a nuclear capable missile.
There are other cruise missiles that Russia makes, and there is still production of ballistic, aero ballistic and hypersonic ones.
I am in no way defending their conduct but they did simply ask for a firm No NATO in Ukraine and they were rebuffed before he 2022 invasion and during initial post invasion negotiations.
They absolutely positively did not. They wanted to roll back of NATO membership as a start and were uninterested when Ukraine was trying to avert the possibility of a larger scale invasion (not to mention when Russia violated both Minsk treaties then pretended it didn't apply to them).
Russia knew that Ukraine had little chance of getting into NATO in early 2022 and wasn't even persuing it after the revolution of dignity before the 2014 invasion
> You must have been traveling in some neocon circles a decade ago. But normalizing relations with Russia and disengaging with the rest of the world military was the goal for us liberals back then
I don't know which is more wrong, the broad claim here or the claim that you are a liberal.
I mean, what you describe was generally the case...but between the fall of the USSR and the start of the new US-Russia Cold War around 1998-1999, with the belief that Russia was on a path that, while rocky, led to Western-friendly democracy with the right support.
From 1999-2014 (but generally declining through that period) engagement was viewed as useful, in part because Russia’s hostile turn was seen by some as curable with reassurance, but more because Russia was seen as a generally hostile generally but having useful alignments of interest in some parts of the world.
But by a decade ago, 2015? “Normalizing relations with Russia and disengaging with the rest of the world militarily” was certainly not a common, much less the dominant, American liberal position on foreign policy.
Leaving NATO is not a one way street. If the US leaves NATO, then the NATO countries can also stop supporting the US. How many components of US weapon systems are made in the EU?
The US cannot support it's military projection without allies. If every US base has to be ran as 'fortress USA' the budget will break. Even just losing a few strategically located bases will greatly increase the cost of power projection.
All Europe has to do is stop all local support for US bases and force all resupply to be done via the US military and the bases existing infra, not via ANY civilian infrastructure (no civilian airports, no civilian trucking, no civilian shipping). That's just one pain point in the USAs soft underbelly that we didn't have to worry about before because we had allies.
US power in Europe has been our intentional policy since the end of WW2. I can't do justice in educating you on the geopolitics of it all but there is a plethora of information out there for you. Not sure how an American can get to be an adult without understanding the background and reasoning.
We did this to the point of encouraging Germany to include limitations on their own power in their constitution (along with Japan). Anyways it's a long, thought out standing position of our country that has 70 years of thought put into it versus the recent 'but it's not fair to us' MAGA reaction based position.
Because the alternative to a US dominated world is a world dominated by someone else.
History has shown that lesson again and again and again. There is no “peaceful world without a hegemon” period of history. There is Pax Brittanica, Pax Romana and Pax Americana which is now coming to an end.
But your answer was handwaving. What’s the evidentiary basis for concluding that maintaining bases all over the world benefits americans? The British Empire was motivated by mercantilism: by requiring colonies to sell raw materials to Britain and buy finished goods from Britain, it ensured Britain remained highest on the supply chain, and redirected capital from the colonies to Britain.
We don’t do anything like that. We don’t extract resources from Europe at below market value. We run a trade deficit, so free trade doesn’t even help us. So what’s the concrete explanation that isn’t just recycling liberal internationalist tropes?
I would like to see the trade deficit evening out, but even then, the deficit is ~0.6% of our GDP. Charitably, the intake of goods we do support keeps our internal economy extremely productive, so even at a deficit maybe it's worth it.
That said, it's not very difficult to fix the deficit if there were any will. And once fixed, the US would benefit from open maritime trade more than anyone else. Holding these bases helps us keep the world in order, and in the current order the US winds up on top. (Though the US does need to deal with China's incursions).
It's funny to see you use the word "evidentiary" when you do not apply any standard to your own comments. If you do reply, please try to back up your points, since I'd like to understand where you're coming from.
Why would we benefit from more trade when we don’t make anything?
I don’t have evidence that american empire is bad for the economy. But the cost of maintaining it are indisputably high and result in a lot of immortality. So I would like evidence that maintaining an empire actually results in benefits that offset the cost.
Economic theory certainly doesn’t predict that empires would make you richer than free markets. And if empire makes you richer, why is Europe so content to be under our yoke?
Well, the US has been the most prosperous country for a long time, so clearly something is working. Maybe the "empire" has nothing to do with it, sure, but I'd like to see you support your position instead of nitpicking other people's.
We make a lot of stuff. The manufacturing industry contributes >$2T to US GDP.
The US doesn't have an empire, but we do have a degree of worldwide hegemony. As a practical matter if the US turns isolationist then China will fill that gap. Will that make US citizens richer?
One nice thing about being a superpower is that we don't have to do anything. We can choose to be isolationist. That seems like a seductive option in the short term because it costs us nothing. But historically that approach hasn't worked out well for us in the past. Will the average US citizen be better off if China takes over as the primary global power?
And stop being disingenuous by labelling the current US-led global security system as an "empire". Words mean things and I'm sure you're smart enough to know what a real empire looks like, so I can't imagine what you think you're accomplishing by trying to frame the debate that way.
Why do you assume China will take over as a superpower? It’s certainly not the case historically that there’s a single global hegemon.
Also, I use “empire” because people are justifying our having military bases all over the world on that somehow benefitting america economically. I am not sure I understand why—forcing the world to use dollars as the reserve currency seems to be part of the theory. But if that’s the case then empire is an appropriate label.
So we can extract value value from having the biggest stick. Surely any competent businessman turned president couldn't fail to turn a profit when our military, and only our military, can secure the safe travel of goods anywhere in the world and overthrow any non-nuclear power who acts not in america's interest.
Establishing fascist military regimes all over the Americas, Europe and Asia might have been good for longterm peace and stability, and esp. US companies and global trade, but not so for the oppressed civilians and workers.
I’m not sure in what way do you think US “financed Hitler and Mussolini” (or whatever’s going on in your head for that matter..)
But it’s a weird thing to say when the USSR/Stalin literally bankrolled the Nazi invasions of Norway and France (whatever the financing they got from the US USSR contributed a few magnitudes more).
Germany had no oil after Poland and its not far fetched that France/Britain could have just waited it out had the Soviets not bailed them out.
I think that's kind of the point. The Trump admin takes a very isolationist view of things, so I don't think they even want all those international bases.
It's not the point for the MAGA types. They want the power AND deference of the good old days, not actual feeble pullback and irrelevance. They think Europe paying it's share means Europe will pay for OUR military presence. Add on their kids no longer having access to military jobs/path to education and those communities will start to freak out. Trump wants to project power in the middle east. That's current done out of European bases.
> Leaving NATO is not a one way street. If the US leaves NATO, then the NATO countries can also stop supporting the US. How many components of US weapon systems are made in the EU?
Imagine how many people are going to die from this. It's quite sickening to think about.
The president of peace who is not interested in war, but something much crueler, extortion and retribution which seems to be positioning the world for a real WW3. Not a Fox news theortical "Biden" inspired one.
I think the administration is gambling on being able to consolidate global power before anyone is going to have a chance to build anything. Europe is completely reliant on the US and US technology for defense right now, these systems took decades and trillions of dollars to build and refine, and an 800 billion EUR investment does not magically create a military industrial complex overnight. Decades ago in my early career I briefly worked on some logistics software for the Joint Strike Fighter project and had some contact with a couple of the army of contractors working on the project. The scale and complexity of this effort blows away anything else I've ever seen in my career, which includes a number of multi-billion dollar infrastructure and nuclear power projects.
Trump talks about invading Canada or Greenland and people act like it is a joke. I don't think it is.
The US is in a position to completely dictate to Europe what they will or won't do, using Russia as a proxy for now. We are 48 days in. A couple of weeks ago I replied to someone suggesting the US could provide weapons to Russia with disbelief. I no longer consider that an impossible scenario. Europe stops buying F35s? Trump tells Europe that if they don't buy them he's going to sell them to Russia. I mean that's a relatively tame response compared to the options on the table.
Right now the only chance for Europe is to stop this madness in the US. We have this "take it down" act, the executive order to produce a report advising whether or not to declare martial law, the January 6th pardon of the Proud Boys who are now effectively a paramilitary force of thousands waiting for Trump to deploy. These are all familiar elements in history and I think we are in for a bloody, bloody summer. I think we're going to see government forces opening fire on protesters, martial law declared, and the implementation of Chinese style suppression and crackdown on dissent online. Maybe attempts to strip US citizens of their citizenship and "deport" them for good measure, anything to try to sow fear into average people to not step out of line. If the administration is successful in quashing the opposition and getting everyone to go back to work, Europe could easily next on the chopping block. Remember all the things Bannon said about the EU during the first administration.
>Europe stops buying F35s? Trump tells Europe that if they don't buy them he's going to sell them to Russia.
Actually Europe would stop supplying components for the F-35's so the US would not be able to build any more or keep the ones they have working, let alone sell them to Russia. Russia would never buy them anyway, how could they trust that the next US president wouldn't pull the plug on spare parts? Would they trust that Trump is going to become dictator for life? (And what happens after he dies?) Russia has their own fighters that may not be quite as capable in some ways, but are good enough. Russia sells jet fighters themselves, they do not buy them.
>Europe is completely reliant on the US and US technology for defense right now, these systems took decades and trillions of dollars to build and refine, and an 800 billion EUR investment does not magically create a military industrial complex overnight.
Europe already has a large local military industrial complex. Half of what Ukraine has received has come from Europe. They would only have to expand what they have, not develop new technologies, except perhaps for a replacement for the Patriot missile system. They'd get a boost from converting their existing factories from building US weapons components to building EU weapons components as well.
I'm actually surprised that the US military industrial complex (MIC) is not screaming bloody murder about some of this. They stand to lose sales of replacement weapons for those sent to Ukraine, to lose support contracts for F-16's, and to lose a whole lot more if the US pulls out of NATO. Even if the US does not pull out of NATO, the NATO countries have already started investing in their own defense industries, which is going to severely cut into US MIC profits. They should be terrified.
The US has so many options to bully Europe. What about turning off cloud providers and other services like word, excel etc. Or restricting hardware like GPUs or other consumer stuff. There are a thousand options to bring europe to its knees. And there is nothing Europe could do.
ASML acquired Cymer in 2013 to accelerate the development of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) semiconductor lithography. Based in San Diego, California, Cymer was founded in 1986 by two college friends Robert Akins and Richard Sandstrom to develop laser and lithography light source technology for the semiconductor industry.
I can't imagine whatever Cymer is doing is completely hidden from the parent company and that it's non-replicatable anywhere else in the world?
Maybe there is some way the IP is blocked from ASML on national security grounds or something, I don't know, but what I do know, is their mutual destruction for the sake of some crusade against something ridiculous like "the woke mind virus" is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
There has been zero reason given for this attack on Europe.
>I can't imagine whatever Cymer is doing is completely hidden from the parent company and that it's non-replicatable anywhere else in the world?
I mean this is technology that is not in textbooks and is so specialized that China of all groups have yet to replicate it and have been trying like its life or death(because it is).
>Maybe there is some way the IP is blocked from ASML on national security grounds or something, I don't know, but what I do know, is their mutual destruction for the sake of some crusade against something ridiculous like "the woke mind virus" is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
The technology was originally developed by the US Research labs. The acquisition was only approved by the US government given certain stipulations: namely the US can tell the Dutch to do whatever they want when it comes to chip tech using their research. Thats why when the US phones up the Dutch to block sales to China, they dutifully complied. I would argue that it is pretty reasonable. The US put in the effort to develop these innovations, then gave up the freedom to commercialize it (to the complaints of some US politicians) because the Dutch had other necessary components ready to go.
It remains to be seen how the Dutch will now react given current realities but im sure there is a lot the US government can do to damage ASML if it came to that so surely that much be in the calculations.
SAMP/T exists and is allegedly better than Patriot.
I don't think there are any particular weapon types for which there is no qualified European alternative. Very many systems are however designed around some amount of American components. Even if there are locally produced, reasonably equivalent versions of those components, you can't just swap them out without major redesign work.
For example the license-manifactured jet engines used in the Saab 39 Gripen. If Trump/Musk pulls the plug on support for those, it will be an epic headache to rebuild around some other engine. Not quite designing a new plane from scratch, but very major rework.
> I don't think there are any particular weapon types for which there is no qualified European alternative.
Strategic bombers and fifth-generation multi-role aircraft are definitely missing. You could maybe convert A400Ms using a Rapid-Dragon style system into an adequate B-52/Tu-95/H-6N-like bomber, but it wouldn't be a modern penetration bomber like the B-1 and certainly not like the B-2 or B-21. The arguably best European fighter is the French 4.5+ gen Rafale. It's damn good but lacks the stealth of the F-22 and J-10, and the sensor fusion of the F-35.
Maybe also add heavy-lift helicopters, I don't think Europe produces anything in the class of the CH-53/CH-46 and definitely not the Mi-26, but a good-enough big heli is a much easier engineering problem compared to the other two aforementioned equipment categories.
Stealth is losing its effectiveness with new VHF targeting radars that can track stealth aircraft. Maybe EU sensor fusion algorithms are not as advanced as in the F-35? They certainly must have some kind of sensor fusion algorithms, if just to create coherent cockpit displays of what is going on in an airspace. Maybe they lack cooperative sensor fusion across multiple aircraft? Are bombers still effective any more? I know they are being used by Russia to launch stand-off weapons, but isn't a long range missile as good as or better than having a bomber? Maybe the modern way to think of a bomber is as a reusable missile first stage so the missiles can be smaller and cheaper. Actually flying bombers over cities/bases and dropping bombs no longer happens, does it? Stealth in a bomber buys you nothing if the bomber is directly above you because the cross section becomes enormous. Maybe precision glide-bombs are cheaper than surface to surface missiles. I think if an army had a choice they'd rather have many S-S missiles rather than many glide bombs and a few bombers. The missiles would be much more versatile, as long as they had enough of them.
I have yet to see a good analysis of the tradeoffs between big expensive weapons and many cheap drone weapons. It seems possible that very soon the big expensive weapons will be seen as too expensive and less capable. Ukraine is making millions of drones, maybe when the are making tens of millions they'll care less about conventional weapons. Seems like making lots of drones could help the EU scale up quickly without a lot of research and at lower cost.
Yes the US may have a second civil war coming. The good guys won the last one; they should win this one too, but it may take some time. In the end though they should go for a "reconciliation"; MAGA will show no mercy -- the good guys shouldn't either.
70% of the country is fat/obese. If its going to happen, it might end up looking comical: angry people of walmart riding around in their scooters then deciding to go back home: this civil war stuff is too much effort, whats on Netflix?
This might be the most delusional comment I’ve ever seen on HN. Crackdown on dissent online? That’s the explicit policy of our “democratic” European “allies” that the Vice President openly criticized in Munich. Opening fire on protestors? What protestors? And this talk of a thousands-strong Proud Boys “paramilitary” is paranoid nonsense.
There have been street protests here in Montana (red state) already (because he fired large numbers of national park and forest service employees and said any foreign students who made online comments supporting Palestinians should be deported).
Well I hope you are right. All of those things were already either done or tried by Trump during his last term. The trajectory is leading towards further escalation.
The protests will escalate in the summer, when the weather is warmer, more time has passed for awareness of what is happening to soak in, and students are on school break.
No one should have placed their trust in the U.S to begin with.
Let's not forget that American history is riddled with interventionist failures, from Afghanistan to Vietnam, and CIA-backed operations that destabilized the Middle East and Africa, leaving behind suffering and chaos.
Meanwhile, American corporations have shown blatant disregard for local laws, privacy, and security while exploiting loopholes to dodge taxes, further eroding global trust. Europe literally had to fine them millions, just to get them to start paying _minimum_ attention..
The recent instability in American and the division between its own citizens has exacerbated the issue and now with Trump, I believe it has reach new heights, even causing conflict with its (arguably) closest ally and loving neighbor: Canada.
As a Canadian, it saddens me to write this, because I have nothing but love for American people.
Totally agree that Trump is trading long-term dominance for short-term gains.
I think that in a few months, we will see the U.S. economy doing very well and somehow rebuilding its industrial base. In the long term, U.S. influence and wealth will make up a much smaller share of the world’s wealth than it does today.
I do think there will be a recession yes. But within 6 to 18 months, the recession could be over with and growth will come back as the US rebuilds some of its industrial base. US imports and exports will decrease over time.
Note: it is my prediction at 70% (e.g. I think there is 70% that it will happen).
It could be over, but it won't be over, because he can't be trusted, changes position on important issues every night, and this does not create environment welcoming to investors. Nobody sane will commit to longterm investment. No investment, no growth.
> US imports and exports will decrease over time.
So prices will rise and and government expenditures will fall. Where exactly will that growth come from?
I think companies who want to access the large U.S. internal market will have an incentive to have factories in the U.S. That will likely fuel growth. The growth will be coupled with less imports and exports given nationalism and tariffs.
And if it is what the Americans want why not. But as the U.S. take this new direction, let's make sure former allies are treated with respect and given proper notice of the changes so that they can adapt their economies and defense postures.
It usually takes five to ten years to move a factory from one country to another, and it costs an enormous amount of money that mostly will not drive new profit. Costs in the US will be higher also. There is more to consider in moving a factory to the US than market access.
Could work. Or they could just decide to invest elsewhere.
I guess if the economy is in a recession and people spending less it is not the best place to invest. Unless it is for cheap labor but then you'll have problems with export tariffs.
If they invest elsewhere, they will have limited access to the U.S. market—that is Trump’s policy it seems.
If the U.S. has one thing going for it, it’s the strength of its market, characterized by high consumer spending and strong potential for growth. Contrast this with the Japanese consumer market, for instance: in real terms, salaries have not increased over the past 10 years, and consumer spending is below what it was a decade ago. (Note: I love Japan, but this is the reality.) European market is between these extremes I believe. The U.S. market may be significantly more attractive to most companies.
If the high tarriff environment sticks around, including reciprocal tarriffs, the issue is either you produce in the US and have good access to the US and poor access everywhere else, or you produce outside the US and have poor access to the US, and good access to much of everywhere else (depending on things).
The US is a big and important market, and for some things, it would be better to forgo competitiveness in the rest of world market; but for others, rest of world adds up to be more important.
Same line of thinking was used during the Great Depression of 1929, protectionist measures only made everything worse, deepening and extending the recession.
There isnt the slack in the US labor force to rebuild the manufacturing base. Not without significant inflationary pressure. Especially with the hostility towards migaration.
Who will be building, and manning all that newly developed industrial base? You cannot create enough labour in 18 months, it's a very hard fact of reality.
Your labour market has been running at full employment for a while, 4-5% unemployment, there's no leftover hands to help with building up multiple industrial bases. Unless you want massive inflation when all these openings for the rebuilding of USA's industrial base, and need to pay a lot to absorb as much labour as possible to actually happen.
Not even considering in how much risk the investors of this new industrial base will be having to hedge against, who knows when Trump will increase tariffs on their inputs until everything rebuilds internally, financial hedging, oversupplying their warehouses to prepare for shocks, etc. are all quite expensive. Who will pay for it?
I keep expecting him to rally his support base and attempt to overturn the 22nd amendment. Short-term "winning" might be exactly what he needs to rally them.
Yeah, would have been really useful for the US to at least convince China's northern neighbor to constantly do mobilization exercises [1] on their shared border to keep the PLA off-balance and draw combat power away from important theaters. Instead, we've pissed away the Sino-Soviet Split and enabled Eurasia to operate with secure interior lines. This can be chalked up entirely to really arrogant and foolish neocon decision-making with regards to Russia 2003-2007.
Oh, the US are gonna help Taiwan? I would've thought you might think of it as unwinnable too.
Oh, that's why Trump is trying to speed up TSMC to build chips on US soil! Now everything makes sense! Surely, TSMC will just do it! And the Chinese will wait for the transition period to finish before they attack the island!
This is absolutely intended to be sarcastic and demonstrate the absurdity that someone who cuts ties with allies would ever do anything to help the next one. And if that next one is threatened with war, it would ever feel comfortable to effectively destroy their only bargaining chip for assured US military help afterwards.
Man, all I know is this year isn't going to end well. For anyone.
Long term the Taiwan situation absolutely is unwinnable, and their current government is completely dependent on the US when it comes to staying in power. There is a strong pro-unification party ready to take over the moment US support is put on hold. Wonder if we'll see this card played when negotiating with TSMC...
There’s close to zero chance the US would win a war with China in the event that it attacks Taiwan. Either china wins quickly, or it takes out all the assets which make it strategic in any case.
Why would the US or the west or China wants to start a war? Over what? They don't have any disputes about land or people. Just some irritations about whatever. But certainly not recipe for war. Even Taiwan is not a reason for the US to start a real war against China. Proxy war by supporting Taiwan sure. But thats it.
> Totally agree that Trump is trading long-term dominance for short-term gains.
I'd say the other way round - rebuilding everything that was outsourced will take a long time, so hard times are ahead. In the long term, I hope the USA will be less dependent on China.
But at the same time the way it was done completely destroyed the credibility of the USA as a reliable partner, both in trade as well as military relations. Countries will organize new treaties, and the USA will be a powerful player but with far less influence than before.
Anyone you buy equipment from can withdraw support. The US would only withdraw support if you turn against them, same as any other country selling such equipment.
How do they justify buying US war tech? By understanding what the US will do to their country if they don't buy it, and figuring out how to sugar coat this to their populace.
This simply isn't true. Various countries bought F-35 even after recognizing it's far more of a geopolitical PITA than Rafale or Gripen because F-35 is world-beating. It is that much better than the competition that putting up with various restrictions is almost always worth it.
Where the competition is less slanted, yes you see countries selecting Leopard for their MBT over Abrams (the US won't sell the advanced Abrams armor packages). But when it's F-35 vs. literally anything else, the competition is for second place. You only really choose something else when F-35 isn't an option at all. Threats aren't needed when you just have to do a fly-off.
But is that really how nations decide which plane to buy?
Sure, technical capabilities are crucial, but don't political and economic factors significantly influence the adoption of the F-35? Factors like strengthening alliances, diplomatic influence, cost sharing, job creation, and export strategies.
My point is: you don't just buy a plane. You buy into an ecosystem where supply chains, political partnership, trade deals and long-term support are just as important. Take away some of that, and I'm sure for a lot of buyers the Typhoon or Gripen suddenly start looking a lot more attractive.
The F35 is better, but they're not going to trust or give business to the US anymore. The Typhoon, Rafale and Grippen are good enough, so we'll see more purchases of those.
Countries do have choices and many did choose the us as security provider. Some thirld world countries recently switched away from russia and/or started to built versions of their own design of previously in license produced weaponry. Examplw: India
And Turkey buys from both. But India and Turkey have a degree of independence that small European nations do not have. The latter are entirely reliant on NATO for their security, and until recently this meant being friends with the USA.
I always thought that the American Empire would be dismantled when it elected a leftist steeped in anti-imperialist ideology who wanted to better the world.
Nope, turns out that the American Empire is being dismantled by something else entirely. A subset of the populace that feels jealous of those with more and scared of social change, reacting to try to hurt their fellow country men? A megalomaniac leader who is somehow completely controlled by Russia? It's hard to get the full picture.
The myth of how much harm "leftists" can do/are doing in the US is probably what got you all here. It's another McCarthyist boogeyman, and it's not even being sold well -- a lot of the marketing's just outright lies, and people are eating that up.
The funniest part is how MAGA are literally rabid against anyone left of Bret Baier while embracing the overtly obvious Russian propaganda to the point where you start feeling sorry for them when the outright repeat Russian talking points e.g. deep MAGA don’t care a single iota for about anything more than 20ft from the US shores (because America first!) and yet they will have the strongest and most deeply detailed opinions on Crimea lol
During Trump's first term in office I developed a hobby wherein I would get hardcore conservatives to unequivocally support various talking points from the Communist Manifesto, normally in response to them bitching about "leftists". This takes a lot less effort than you might think.
I mean it's not like I told them they were agreeing with communist propaganda at any point during the conversation so from everyone's perspective in the moment everything was going fine. The typical workflow was something along the lines of them bitching about liberals which is fine by me until they misapplied the term leftist or similar at which point I'd normally inject a non-sequitur about how bankers and execs are piling up cash with a forklift while the folks that actually work for a living can't hardly get by. This never gets any pushback and provides the perfect opening to quote your choice of communist propaganda, which also doesn't get any pushback as long as you aren't goofy enough to attribute your sources. ;)
My favorite example is probably getting my wife's uncle to agree that the proletariat has nothing to lose but it's chains mid-rant about how right-wing militia groups are the only folks in the country with a finger on the pulse and how they were absolutely going to overthrow the federal government with a selection of canned goods and small arms...
> The funniest part is how MAGA are literally rabid against anyone left of Bret Baier
Is this really the case in 2025? There's been more than a few self-described leftists/liberals writing about attending Trump rallies over the years and this not being their experience. One example: https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2018/09/what-i-learned...
That’s the most frustrating part. What America calls leftists is considered pretty centrist everywhere else. They’re so afraid of empathic policies it’s no wonder the country is falling apart.
> decades, possibly a generational timescale to repair.
It will easily take a generation just for people to find solidarity and courage again.
Progress takes real sacrifice. People died fighting for basic dignity and rights. The anti-slavery movement in the US fought monied interests for centuries.
It took real sacrifice for the labour movement to gain rights such as voting, education, housing, health care in the face of deadly opposition from the rich and their legislative puppets.
It just takes a moment of complaceny on the part of progressive-minded people for the rich and their legislative puppets to undo the foundations of democracy.
The risk of undoing progress so quickly is only possible after nearly a century spent centralizing the very authority that makes a quick undo possible.
The executive branch shouldn't have nearly as much authority as it does and anything we want to be difficult to be undone should be protected by law, with a legislative body needing something akin to a 2/3s vote to change it.
Instead we have a massive, powerful executive branch and legislators that can wield way too much power with a simple majority.
Under the constitution, the US federal government has far less power than, say the UK government does in comparison. Yet, if the other branches of government show no interest in constraining it, then it’ll expand rapidly.
I actually wonder if the problem the USA has is that its system has no override function like the UK does under the Parliament Act 1918. I see a lot of frustration that Congress has been deadlocked for nearly 2 decades (mostly by Republicans) so it’s no surprise the average voter demands change and wants the executive branch to take all the power.
A weaker federal government was always our design though. Really until the last century, our federal government was extremely weak and limited in authority. It wasn't until around FDR that we started seeing a shift if power to the federal government, often specifically to the executive branch.
The large executive branch has been growing since steadily since FDR though, that isn't a recent reaction to gridlock. There's a good argument that gridlock is a feature of our system meant to slow it down intentionally. We're seeing now how jarring it can be to have the government completely change source every 4 years, gridlock and bureaucracy help smooth that out.
We could be making it worse by demanding gridlock be avoided through executive actions and similar.
Sure, the system was designed to have gridlock, yet they're supposed to at least be able to operate the government. Currently, like pretty much every year lately, we're heading into March, And We Still Don't Have A Budget.
Now they're talking about keeping the government running on auto-pilot budgets all the way to September. [1] Doesn't even help that it's Rep. Exec. branch, Rep. Senate, Rep. House, Rep. Supreme Court, and Rep. Governor majority. Still a stopgap CR land where nothing gets advanced.
Agreed the budget should be a non-starter. Meaning, they shouldn't be allowed to punt on agreeing to a budget deadline.
The budget is a weird topic when we consistently spend trillions in debt. I've found it hard for me to take budget debates too seriously when the idea of running such a deficit seems completely against any fundamental financial plan.
I'd care more about budget deadlines and temporary agreements if they were required to agree to a balanced budget.
Compared to historic USA, perhaps, but compared to OTHER COUNTRIES, the US system has insane gridlock and, right now, a very unhappy public. What I’m pointing to is not that more power should shift to the executive but that it should be given to the legislature, and could happen in a way that reduces this gridlock.
Compare to the UK’s Parliament Act, which allows the Commons to override the Lords if it passes the same legislation in two sessions. It means that overriding isn’t free (it takes 1-2 years of focused effort) but critical legislation can’t be blocked. Combined with strict timetables that force rejection of legislation that isn’t passed in its allotted time, you bypass the pocket veto, too. Compromise is preferred but, if the upper house refuses to play ball, the threat of ramming it through anyway always exists to keep it in check.
Honest question (including that since its sometimes hard to tell when written) -
What additional authority doss the US legislative branch need? They have pretty wide authority to create any laws that don't violate our constitutional rights, I don't know how we could really expand that further (but my view is definitely biased since I grew up here).
I think congress would be well within its rights to change their own rules to add time limits on legislation or required expiration on proposed bills, for example.
You’re thinking too high level and not looking at the mechanics. Congress has no power to, say, give the House of Representatives override the Senate and President. In the UK, this is not only possible but happened in 1918. The USA would require a constitutional amendment which falls into the same deadlock problem.
Some things do sit within Congress such as the Senate adopting the insane role allowing filibuster. However, this is also encouraged by the fact the Senate can kill legislation like this. Filibusters rarely happen in the UK Parliament because the majority party can force through legislation they feel is important enough.
You say that deadlock is built in as though this is desirable. However the public just became so frustrated by the system that they just elected a madman to smash it to pieces.
Encouraging compromise and working across the aisle is an excellent property in the US system. But that has broken down and I think part of the reason is there’s no mechanism to break the deadlock that can force parties back to the table.
We definitely agree on needing to better encourage compromise and collaboration. I'd much prefer that to be done by changing incentives rather than expanding powers though.
The US political system is completely broken with regards to lobbying and campaign finance. All the money floating around makes it nearly impossible for representatives to work across the aisle, or to ignore the aisle and vote for what their own state wants regardless of party.
I’m not talking about “expanding” power, merely proposing that the USA learn from other systems that have deadlock breaking systems, with limitations to mitigate abuse. I’m not sure taking money out the system will have the same effect, as we’ve seen Republicans gain a lot of political capital by just being obstructive since 2008.
Here is a example of an alternative system, that I would prefer: the legislative branch is the one that people vote for, (with proportional representation), and the legislative branch then elects the executive branch.
If there is ever a conflict between legislative and executive, then the legislative branch can remove the executive branch.
In other words: the president shouldn't be head of government (only head of state, sort of a figurehead).
Which other major countries have happier publics? The UK public seems at least as unhappy as the USA. UK citizens certainly aren't happy with low economic growth (everywhere outside London), high immigration, tiny houses, and decaying healthcare. Similar issues in Germany, etc.
I would argue that the much higher incidence rate of suicide and mass murder in the US compared to the UK or Germany suggests otherwise. Citizens in other developed countries seem much less prone to irrational, life changing outbreaks, that to me seems consistent with the idea that there is a deep current of unhappiness running through the American population that is causing people to “break”
Suicide rates are more a cultural artifact than a sign of national happiness level. The rates in an number of Arab countries are particularly low, even though people there seem to be deeply unhappy to the extent of trying to escape to Europe.
There is a compelling argument that the US is culturally much more like a highly developed version of a Latin American country than a European country. Over time I find myself coming around to this idea.
To the extent it's similar to any other culture I agree, the closest feels like brazil (to me) - but it's also very distinct, it's very much it's own thing in a way that few other cultures are (I would probably count the UK as one of those few by the way).
Latin America is all quite similar.
Mainland Europe is quite similar, bar the obvious exception.
I’d argue a lot of the unhappiness in the UK is a consequence of 5 years of a Tory government choosing not to govern. The public still have a hard time believing this fact because it sounds too insane to be true, no matter how much evidence we have for it!
Also, it doesn’t help that Labour are shit at comms. They’re actually doing what they were elected to do but don’t want to tell the public about it, much like the Biden administration!
But in the UK this effectively gives power to the executive. Our exec are drawn from the legislature, and most ruling party MPs will
Have a government position - especially if the majority is slight.
It’s not a minority of Parliament though. It requires a majority vote, in two separate sessions, to be forced through (in essence, it takes up to 2 years). It’s not an easy system to abuse at all.
The UK's Constitution is the result of a literal war between the legislative and executive branches. The legislative branch won, and cut the King's head off.
The legislative and judicial branches are both expected to hold the executive accountable if it breaks the law. If that doesn't happen our system is fundamentally broken, we might as well throw it out and start over.
Is there any democratic system that is safe from democratically voting to dissolve the democracy and replace it with whatever autocracy/kakistocracy/oligarchy we've got now?
No, every country is one election away from this shit-show.
Which is why under no circumstances you should ever elect anyone who will send yours in that direction. Canadians, take note, the CPC only detached its lips from Trump's backside because they needed to come up for air.
At minimum, don't elect people who staged failed coups. They and their supporters will not ever act like they are bound by law.
The executive branch has blatantly violated numerous laws but so far they have still obeyed court orders which explicitly required them to follow those laws. The real Constitutional crisis will come if they decide to openly defy a federal court order.
I would also note that while the current Trump administration has broken federal laws at an accelerated rate, the previous Biden administration did much the same thing on a smaller scale. People here on HN frequently make excuses for Biden's illegal student loan forgiveness program because they liked the results but if we want to preserve the rule of law then it needs to apply to every program. In the long run allowing unchecked growth of executive branch power and the administrative state will be bad for everyone.
Right, continuing a tradition of executive overreach to help indebted students get the dick out of their ass is the exact same thing as dismantling the federal government, installing loyalists, betraying allies, allying with dictators, and promising lots of money to billionaires. I intend for it to be telling that I don't see them as the same. We don't even live on the same fucking planet.
I expect "illegal" action in the sense that it will sometimes turn out the executive doesn't have the authority to do it when tested by courts. I expect that to happen when the executive tries to push its agenda past an obstructionist Congress (for better or worse). It's not something I would consider "illegal" in the sense you could go to jail for doing it. But the reasons for acting a certain way absolutely matter here as they always do, and I am much more concerned about sanewashing with both-sideisms. Not just the reasons, but the extent to which he is willing to circumvent established systems of how basically everything works is much more concerning than attempting to pass EOs that are eventually struck down in the courts.
> Not just the reasons, but the extent to which he is willing to circumvent established systems of how basically everything works is much more concerning than attempting to pass EOs that are eventually struck down in the courts.
Hope you don't mind me continuing to pull on this thread, I'm genuinely interested to better understand where you have drawn the line here.
Biden was circumventing established systems when he tried to cancel student debts. He even tried again when the first attempt was blocked. Our higher education system, legal framework around student debt, and the debt industry as a whole was very well established and legally defined.
What is so different with Trump's executive orders? I get that you disagree with them, I disagree with many of them too, but legally I just don't see much light between the two. They both abuse executive orders in an attempt to Dodge existing legislation on the books and make change that the office has no authority to make.
One intended to help relieve people's debts and the other attempts to dismantle the government and remove those who oppose him. I don't understand how you don't understand how they are categorically different actions, even if both are illegal. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. To reiterate
> dismantling the federal government, installing loyalists, betraying allies, allying with dictators, and promising lots of money to billionaires
>People here on HN frequently make excuses for Biden's illegal student loan forgiveness program because
Biden didn't do anything you suggest. You're consuming the propaganda. George Bush made it so that Federal workers with student loans could get them discharged at X years of service. X just happened to fall into Trump's first term.
Trump broke the promise made to people doing their civic duty, Biden repaired it.
Biden never took on more authority than what was established almost two decades ago.
Biden was absolutely trying to cancel, or partially pay for, any federally backed loans and pell grants [1]. It wasn't limited only to federal employees with student debt.
Lawyers are paid very well to present the best case possible for their client, you can't honestly believe that every detail of the events are going to be submitted as evidence, right?
How do you distinguish between propaganda and a lawyer arguing a political policy on behalf of the president of the united states, with the understanding that a lawyer should make the most compelling case they possibly can? Its political, its a one-sided view, its cherry picked, and its meant to persuade the target audience to believe a certain point - that sounds pretty propagandistic to me.
That's a total non sequitur. Did you even read it? I linked to the final Supreme Court opinion, not the arguments made by lawyers on opposing sides or exhibits entered into evidence by the trial court.
Its not a non sequitur. The court can only rule based on what was admitted into the record, and that's controlled by the lawyers who as I said earlier are there to make the best case for their client, not the most complete and accurate case.
Again a total non sequitur. Both sides had ample opportunity to present evidence and make their arguments. If you think something was missed or wrongly decided then be specific and provide citations.
In theory, that isn't too far from the system we have. The President was never meant to have so much authority, and Congress already requires a 2/3 majority in order to make certain kinds of decisions, including overruling a presidential veto.
There was some debate whether or not to remove the rule requiring a 60% vote to end filibusters in the Senate. Because this rule still stands, most laws cannot pass without 60 Senators' votes. Budget reconciliation bills, however, can be advanced with only a simple majority of the Senate. Though this is not a recent rules change, much recent legislation has gone through the reconciliation process to avoid the supermajority requirement.
That's fair, Lincoln did kick it off. I've always considered it more that Lincoln crested the precedent that was only really used layer by FDR, but maybe that's ignoring nuance of how powers were expanded between the two.
Before Lincoln states had much more power. Both Lincoln and Wilson curtailed civil liberties. Wilson created the income tax which gave the president a large source of income. FDR created the bureaucracy that spends the income tax money.
If the voting public of a democracy fairly elected so many people to office like that, I don't really know what we can complain about.
Democracy would have worked in that scenario, and society would just have bifurcated enough that the slight minority lost most power and very much disagrees with the direction.
Congress does have to act pike adults though and do their job of keeping the executive branch in check. If they don't the system is just fundamentally broken and the only reasonable choice is to throw it out and start fresh.
The word “fairly” is doing a lot of work there. There has been a lot of success on one side to tilt things with redistricting and voter suppression since the 80s.
Redistricting and voter suppression are definitely a problem. If they were both done in a way that was technically legal though, we can't be too angry about it before we change the laws that allowed it in the first place.
Fairness in the context of an election only means that it was done in accordance to the existing laws. Maybe equal access to voting needs to be on that list too, but I'd expect that to be covered by voting laws.
The purpose of the laws should be to ensure fairness. Fairness is not defined by the law. Unless you consider it was fair for women not to be able to vote, when that was the law.
There have been many attempts to fix districting laws, but of course those changes have to be approved by representatives elected under the previous laws.
It has been difficult to challenge these in court because it’s hard to argue whether a districting is “fair”. There has been a little progress on challenging some districting based on a statistical argument that shows the one-party advantage resulting from the particular districting is extremely unlikely to be the result of chance.
Nah, it's a by-product of giving people what they want to make money. This sort of issue has been building for a long time. It's based on abundance of resources and availability of choices. As we have more time and money to spend on things, we can make more independent choices and take positions on issues that we didnt even think about before. Essentially, the semi-homogeneous population slowly fragments into smaller and smaller factions that are not geographically constrained (thanks to tech).
If you have engineering or product skills, now is the time to take a hard look in the mirror, inventory your interests and concerns, and figure out how to fight fire with fire.
We need to be proliferating alternative, humanistic, empathetic software in the world and putting it into people's hands. It's easier than ever for us to independently build a wealth of defensive infrastructure for the common people.
We already have the tools. The problem is marketing, FOMO, etc. We can use stuff like Cloudflare restrictive DNS, a Pihole with additonal lists (like social media), a VPN, screen time or app usage timers, etc. Will and self-control are what's lacking.
The problem isn't marketing or FOMO. The problem is the average person barely understands what you just said, and we can't expect them all to become domain experts, especially when many people lack the fundamental research skills and experience needed to intuitively grok these technologies.
We have to use our intelligence and expertise to make applications which take care of users and their privacy, without them needing to suddenly become overnight computer experts. Most of the tooling I see today has (understandably) massive UX issues and is largely relegated to at least the mildly technical.
We need new and open Facebooks, TikToks, calendars, operating systems, etc. which protect and empower people but don't complicate their lives and stress them out, which leads to security and privacy fatigue. Even my current operating system, macOS, is so intensely user-hostile and obfuscated off the happy path, despite being heralded as a champion of human-oriented design.
We need a modern GNU-like organization but focused on building the social/web tooling that most people today are using.
Almost anyone who cares about their privacy should be able to Google how to improve it, find an article about VPNs, and sign up for Nord VPN (pretty user friendly and commercials everywhere). Dive just slightly deeper and you can find information on DNS and set the VPN to use the DNS you were recommended.
Most people don't care enough to even ask the questions. Creating competing services were the value differentiation is privacy (likely at the trade off of cost or quality) is bound to fail for that same reason.
You're proving my point, that users have to be protected by software engineers in the same way that pedestrians know nothing of civil engineering but trust that bridges are safe to walk on, and aren't to blame when they fail. It's not a marketing or FOMO issue, it's a matter of culture within our profession and way of life as engineers.
No, that would be a matter of law. Bridges aren't safe because some group of engineers wants safe bridges. They have to meet safety standards set by the government, the engineers need license issued by the government, etc. If you want privacy, you need to change the law to grant it. Trying to make some end-run around market forces is futile. People en masse aren't going to pay for a service with privacy when they can get a free version that does the same stuff but blasts them with ad trackers.
Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up. I don't know about you, but in my current country I have absolutely zero representation with the current oligarchy.
> Trying to make some end-run around market forces is futile
Market forces and the law are two different things, which one are you arguing?
> People en masse aren't going to pay for a service with privacy when they can get a free version that does the same stuff but blasts them with ad trackers
I never suggested anyone pay for anything, this is a straw man argument.
I don't understand your aggressive stance against engineers building better, open alternatives to current offerings. The market is getting hungrier for it, and if a product is genuinely better, "market forces" will do their thing, no run-around needed.
The workflow goes like this -> R&D -> rl testing -> if broken with deaths -> law to prevent it from happening again
But.. it's a chicken-egg problem. Has there been a law for prevention before an incident happened or is the law formulated after something happens?
.. it's naive to think and say
> Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up.
If it were like this, then no house would be destroyed by earth quake like in Turkey somewhen 2-3 years ago - and Turkey did pass a law some 10 years ago to prevent cheap buildings in earth quake areas.
No bridge would've collapse in Germany - the laws in Germany are one of the toughest making construction very expensive.
And there are much more examples in real world that opposes your "Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up."
The problem is no one wants to pay much money for the better quality, if a little less in quality will do similar job. Compare housing and housw building costs in US and western Europe/Germany.
So, your engineers can do the best things and the market decides. .. yes, ma‘am!
All of those examples are irrelevant because we are talking about software, which is much, much different than your physical examples. Get back to me when we can have open source, community-maintained roads and bridges which can be copied, forked and modified to suit anyone's needs.
The problem right now isn’t the rich. The problem is that half of the electorate is on board with this stuff. You can’t rally the people against this when half the population is in favor of it.
I’m sure there’s a good argument that wealthy people and a broadening wealth divide are responsible for this, but it’s too late to attack that now. We need a huge shift in public sentiment if this is going to change now.
Even if the outcome had been different in November. We’d still be in deep trouble. A lot less, but still a lot. The fundamental problem we have right now isn’t that Trump is President, it’s that about 50% of those who bother to vote think he’s worthy of it.
I think you need the populace on your side first, though. Otherwise how can you change anything if you have neither government nor a majority?
Unfortunately, I don’t see any way to change the minds of the American populace. They’ll have to learn the hard lesson of where this stuff goes. The problem is that we all have to learn that lesson alongside them whether we need it or not.
It doesn't help that the tech sector is falling in line. Spearheaded by Musk who is still glorified my many in the industry, other tech giants are following suit. Meta, Google, Amazon, nobody dares challenging the new US order and is playing along. This is really where the HN crowd should realize how much they are involved in this. Tech was one of the bullwarks against right wing fascist takeover. Not anymore, they are playing along. It's going to be dark.
I never thought that. They have always just played along with society. When LGBT rights were fashionable, they were more than happy to jump on that bandwagon and rainbow wash everything for money. Which, is great, don’t get me wrong, but I never thought for one second it was because the leadership truly thought that was important deep down in their hearts (Tim Cook perhaps excepted, but even then not fully, as he still cares about business more than principals, though he has more to lose personally.)
Excellent point. Why would a move a certain crowd likes be out of principle and when the tide turned and a move in the opposite direction happens suddenly be just opportunism? The more realistic/neutral interpretation is that it's all just opportunism in either direction.
Most authors that look at the subject have usually proposed 3+ groups post-balkanization. Tends to depend on whether it's simply an "After America" balkanization or a complete apocalypse scenario. Table top roleplaying games are full of speculative fiction on those kinds of concepts. Nukes, or zombies, and sometimes black swan "magic" tend to be rather popular.
After America would be like the Fall of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Chinese Jin (romance of the three kingdoms) and Tang (five dynasties, ten kingdoms) eras, usually because of human bickering over power and control. Occasionally, systems like Shadowrun have a "mild" apocalypse that mostly serves as a catalyst for balkanization. Whatever vestiges of a state remained fall apart under the stress.
Complete apocalypse tends to be something like large scale devastation from a known threat that final gets used (nuclear, biological, dangerous machine sentience) and everybody's too busy dealing with their own issues to care about larger ideas like a continental federal state of "America."
Either way, tends to result in 3+ most of the time. From looking at the Roman Empire and the multiple collapses of China though, it really does not take anything especially dramatic to result in pretty severe balkanization. Often its the old "Blue and the Grey" divide and then most of the West just does their own thing. Occasionally it's more like East Coast, Heartland, and often the West still is not really included.
The result for the West has actually been one of the weirder parts of reading a lot of those settings. Often this undercurrent that the West has never really been a part of "America." The heavily populated East is still mostly fighting over the same issues with each other, the lightly populated West is just some far away land they occasionally pay attention to (mostly California and Texas).
For this to happen, the US population is probably too old on average, and too overweight.
Civil wars and the like are usually based on youth bulges, as they need a lot of breathing bodies to fight it out. Preferrably slightly hungry bodies, as hungry people are easier to provoke into fighting.
What is more likely is that significant portions of rural America break off and the part that's left doesn't feel it's worth it to take it back by force.
A lot of rural area across the country have movements to break states into pieces, or join other states. I don’t think most are very serious but at least two of them are serious enough.
One, there are a few counties on Oregon that want to redraw the boundary so that they become part of Idaho. This, I think, is only mildly serious.
The second is the border of Indiana and Illinois, which is serious enough that the Indiana state legislature has voted to create a commission to work on it. It was a bipartisan vote, too. Because there are a number of rural counties in Illinois that would like to join Indiana, and two urban counties in Indiana that say if the option is on the table they’d rather be part of Illinois. Such a thing would need both states to agree and then send it on to Congress, but ultimately I don’t think anything will come of it.
When you look at state funding, these urban counties are sending more tax dollars to their respective state capitols than the states are spending in their counties. In the case of these rural Illinois counties, the state is spending between $5 and $6 per tax dollar collected. Does Indiana really want to take on such welfare queens? And give up some of their few donor counties in exchange? It seems hardly likely!
That’s the rub all across the US. The urbanized areas are subsidizing the rural areas. Are the rural areas prepared to do without such subsidies? They can say “the cities can’t live without the food we grow”, but the entirety of human history shows that the cities always come out ahead in these transactions.
The Jefferson area of CA seems about as serious as Oregon.
With out current structure of governments, as we get around/over 80% urbanization, the rural areas will just get steamrolled and want to break away due to a lack of agency. If you study people in the "western Idaho" area and on the Oregon coast, it would be easy to see that they are two different nations.
Also,do you have e a source for the 5x tax collected number? The 5x seems really high. I couldn't find one for Indiana, but Illinois shows it's <2x.
Right. So anyway, if various states (or the whole country) breaks apart based on urban/rural divides, the urban areas have very little incentive to try to reunite. It’s a losing proposition for the rural areas.
My personal opinion is that our state and nation legislatures have way too few members given our current populations. For example, the US House should have some sort of dynamic membership count: the smallest odd number such that when you run the apportionment algorithm the smallest state has 3 members. That’s probably somewhere around 1100 members (just spitballing).
Economics aren't the only factor, so the rural areas may not care so long as they are free. That also assumes the rural areas keep the same service levels and regulations. It's possible they could create conditions to lure some industries to them. They would also have to raise food prices to deal without subsidies. It's likely many services would see reductions, such as road maintenance, anything heavily relying on grants, and possibly schools. Certainly the colleges in the article would be closed.
Decreasing the ratio of constituents to representatives won't really work. It may work at the margins, but you will still have the mismatch in proportions between urban/rural.
California has multiple times brought up splitting out into multiple states, its made it as a prop a few times too. I think most people want it to happen, its just tough to figure out what the best split would be
Despite all the 2nd Amendement talk, it mainly comes down to the military.
The military have the tanks, the air support, the logistics, the surveilence net, the miscelaneous support equipment, and all the training to use everything.
A split within the military, that gets real ugly real fast.
I think any civil war would have a split within the military, because in your premise that they're using tanks and aircraft, some people are not going to want to bomb the place where their mother or child lives, not to mention the supply chain of all that fancy stuff relies on a somewhat functioning domestic society to make and deliver much of the underlying goodies and support.
Yes, almost certainly. But I meant more of a split between those on opposing sides; not between those who refuse to fight at all because they had just been asked to fight the very people they signed up to defend, vs. those who will follow any order.
And then, because there were demonstrably some absolute sadists demonstrably present in the armed forces during my lifetime (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hooded_Man), perhaps the conscientious objectors will be convinced to fight anyway, to stop the sadists.
It also matters what such a civil war be about — Is it between those who would seize power and those who would prevent it? Is it the same borders as the old Civil War? Is it city-vs-rural?
If there is one (still an if), and if it is Trump vs. the constitution… it's still not impossible for such a conflict to be without a single shot fired. Conversely, if it's between two groups of cities neither of which will consent to the other's choices for president, it could have every major city in the US reduced to radioactive debris.
The youth are also of poor quality these days. It was one thing in 1860 when a given 18 year old was built like an ox from hauling bales of hay or whatever else. Today most 18 year olds are sedentary. We don’t even do the mile run in gym class anymore.
Well, looking into really old draft records, you will find a lot of disqualified recruits with bad health - tuberculosis, parasites, or general bodily problems caused by malnutrition.
But yeah, there also was a lot of physically strong young people to choose from.
Yes, exactly. Some of the federal farm subsidy and low-income nutrition programs we have today came out of findings in WWII that many potential recruits who had grown up during the Great Depression were literally malnourished: too weak and underweight to be combat effective. While the new HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is kind of wacky and has terrible policies in many areas, he at least recognizes the serious state of youth obesity and poor nutrition.
Has there been a single HHS secretary that did not acknowledge the youth obesity problem?
Our expectations are so low that we ignore the real things that qualified people have done, to pretend that an anti-science wacko has some semblance of sanity.
Don't forget school lunch programs were pushed by the military in the 1946 National School Lunch Act (America's Great Age to MAGA) to improve the fitness of potential recruits. Programs the Republicans now attack as 'woke' nonsense.
Gen Z are a lot fitter and drink and smoke less than my Gen x peers afaict. What’s more, the 90th centile Gen zer is a -lot- fitter. Not everyone needs to join up…
>What America calls leftists is considered pretty centrist everywhere else. They’re so afraid of empathic policies it’s no wonder the country is falling apart.
Maybe on economic issues. On certain social issues it's definitely not "centrist" and arguably further left than other developed countries.
I agree, but would add that many issues (left and right) here are more extreme. I think two things are a self-reinforcing cycle driving both ends of the political spectrum to extremes. First, hyper-partisanship has emerged where it was formerly held in check by social norms within our political institutions. Second, US politics has become a national pastime, replacing sports and other things in our attention. Everyone is able to be part of the commentator class by virtue of social media (I cite this thread, including my comment, as an example of this).
Normie centrist views tend not to garner much attention either in traditional media or in online forums. Instead, we tend to focus much more on the issues that clearly and quickly establish our membership and bonafides in a particular group.
The same extreme-voices-get-heard feature gets recapitulated through our political system. Especially the rise of getting primaried from the left or right. Break ranks with your side? Get primaried. The result is that, to get heard over the fray, political candidates need to articulate more extreme views and stick to them.
Lots of words have been spilled about how various electoral reforms could get us out of this mess. For me, I believe ranked choice voting and open primaries represent an optimal trade-off between "legal, and plausibly implementable" and "yield biggest improvements to electoral system." A major complaint against ranked choice voting is that it tends to bias for more moderate centrists, which I think would be a not-bad problem to have.
For economics (both sides) healthcare, labour, "defense", energy, firearms, speech, religion and basic human rights, both main parties in the US are far right by Western standards (and true outliers for most).
It's really only identity politics where the left is actually on the global left, and then it's far-left.
>For economics (both sides) healthcare, labour, "defense", energy
Those are arguably closer to "economic" than "social". Energy is plainly economic. Even healthcare and labor at the end of the day, boil down to dollars and cents (ie. how much people are paying for healthcare and how much they earn).
>speech
Having the strongest free speech protections in the world is "far right" now?
>religion
The Republicans might be "far right" on religion, but I don't see how the Democrats are. They can certainly be more secular (think the CCP), but at least they're not obviously religious. Compare this to the UK and Denmark which have state regions, and the christian democratic union in Germany.
>basic human rights
Clarify. "basic human rights" has been muddled by the left to include mean stuff like "healthcare", as well as the right to mean "right of babies not not get aborted" and "kids not being groomed".
If you think the UK state religion is in any way relevant to this then you are sorely mistaken. The Church of England has little to no influence on daily politics and is a historical oddity. All political parties, left and right, are essentially secular. Religious politicians basically have to keep their faith quiet while gaining and maintaining office. Blair is a good example of this.
> It's really only identity politics where the left is actually on the global left, and then it's far-left.
That rings true, but how did the US get here? How did identity politics suddenly come to be the most important thing, bringing the world order to its knees?
I don’t actually think it’s far left though. And they are certainly much less effective than other socially liberal parties in Europe.
In the UK it was our right wing party that legalised gay marriage, for example.
Europe is a lot more woke than the US (and a good thing too)
The American left seems to be very focused on making sure nobody will ever need to feel even the slightest bit offended or pressured. Best intentions, I'm sure, but I don't think that's an achievable or even a desirable goal. A healthy society requires a certain amount of peaceful friction.
Europe seems to be following America's lead (as we always do/did), but it hasn't reached the same extremes and probably won't, imho.
US is still pretty far-right on social policy by the standards of most of Europe. This is an average, there’s lot of outliers such as even the proper left in France being weird about Muslim dress.
Identity politics is on the right in Israel. In a general sense I think it might not belong on the same spectrum as redistributive policies or militarism.
That's true to an extent, but President Biden also maintained a de facto open borders policy which undercut wages and drove up housing prices for US union members. This was deeply unpopular with the union members that I know. I'm not trying to start a debate on the merits of various immigration policy options, just pointing out that union members perceived this as a lack of support.
The biggest win the Republicans and billionaire class ever had was convincing the American public that left == liberal. It's not. Blue hair, trans flag, black lives matter, pro-palestine, etcetera; these are socially liberal stances. "Left" doesn't mean any of these things for the rest of the world in a conventional sense. Left means unions, workers rights, socialism or sydicalism; generally, power to the workers/99%/people rather than the capatilists/monarchists/regime.
Americans should continue to conflate socially liberal and economically left-wing at their own peril.
It's worth noting that labor unions have mobilized all over the globe in solidarity with Palestine. Given that the main bone of contention in this country is continued material and financial support to a military campaign it feels odd to lump in with "social liberalism".
>Left means unions, workers rights, socialism or sydicalism; generally, power to the workers/99%/people rather than the capatilists/monarchists/regime.
Everyone claims they're the true voice of the 99%. Trump, despite being a billionaire, claims he's defending Americans workers by imposing tariffs and deporting undocumented immigrants. More broadly the right claims that they're fighting against the "elites" in the media/academia/corporations/"deep state".
It was surreal watching Trump, the man who has made his very name into a corporate product, campaign against Hillary Clinton with claims that she's too influenced by corporations. And, somehow, our politics managed to get even stupider since then.
Well yeah, plenty of developed countries are xenophobic and bigoted in terms of same sex marriage still. I’m curious what “social issue” you are imagining that is represented by the american left but not the european left otherwise.
The US left wing is far more supportive of trans rights, particularly youth gender affirming care, than its counterparts in Europe. For example, I do not think you'd see a Democrat outside of a swing district publicly say, "It's very important that we protect female-only spaces," as Keir Starmer has. Also, while on the campaign trail he said he wouldn't scrap the proposed ban on teaching young people in England about transgender identity in school, saying, "I'm not in favour of ideology being taught in our schools on gender," language not too dissimilar from the Trump administration's.
> For example, I do not think you'd see a Democrat outside of a swing district publicly say, "It's very important that we protect female-only spaces," as Keir Starmer has.
Maybe a year or two ago…the political landscape has shifted drastically in recent years and months.
California governor Gavin Newsom has a new podcast, and recently told Charlie Kirk (yes, he invited Kirk to pander to the young white male voters) something along the lines of “trans people shouldn’t play sports”.
That's not what Gavin Newsom said. What he actually told Charlie Kirk is that it isn't fair for women to have to compete against biological males. You can disagree with him but don't misrepresent his position.
Yes, that's my point. And there are many Labor MPs that are to the right of Starmer on this issue. The party that's closest to the Democrats (and arguably slightly more left on the issue though not by much) are the Lib Dems, and they got, what, 12% of the vote?
Also, do you not think American right wing media is not capable of whipping up panics? This feels like special pleading.
Outside of trans rights though, it’s hard to see what issues the us left is to the left of Europe on.
What’s more, we actually have left wing parties in power and using govt machinery to advance what would now be called ‘woke’ in the us.
Which? Be clear, because the only ones I hear you dogwhistling here are Trans folks rights or Black folks rights if you are vaguely referencing "social issues" and generally America's historical context there is Pretty Dang Bad.
There is nothing dogwhistleable here, US leftist race policy is a huge outlier in the Western world and I would hesitate to call it "liberal". Once someone groups people into racial groups and treats them like interchangeable Lego bricks by color, they have left any pretense of liberalism, which by necessity considers an individual to be the smallest and most vulnerable minority of them all.
That’s been shared a lot on social media but those posts tend to leave out the context that this was only in technical language around IVF, not a broad change, and that it was intended to resolve confusion around what “mother” means in the context of what goes on a birth certificate in the case where a same-sex couple means the child has two mothers.
Thanks for clearing that up, it really changes the story for me. This actually came up as only 4% reported by the left in Ground News' weekly Blindspot Report [1][2]. It only lists one left-leaning source, also from USA Today [3], but not the one you linked, one critical of the measure. I guess Ground News really didn't help here in guarding against bias. That's pretty disappointing.
I get being against this sort of thing, but it’s wild to me how people are SO against something so inconsequential (official language on government forms or whatever) that they’re willing to instead support a party that’s actively pushing us into authoritarianism.
Like sure some inclusive language is silly, but it’s a lot better than losing our national parks, destroying our social safety nets, celebrating cruelty to immigrants, and ripping the constitution to shreds in the process.
My feeling is that people aren't much against something inconsequential per se, instead they are against something that's out of their status quo and that question some underlying values they haven't ever questioned themselves (for example: genders).
Instead of being curious why exactly some people are proposing something that challenges their worldview they instead immediately allow their fear to take over, and reject the change.
It's the same pattern that non-accepting parents of gay children tend to go through when their kid comes out of the closet; in that case a lot of them have a change of heart into acceptance because they love the person, over time they are able to overcome the fear and understand a new worldview.
Not so much for the masses with flames being fanned by politicians wanting to capitalise on that fear, they are kept in fear, they are told to reject any attempt to educate them, the messaging calls it "evil" or "not from God" or "only for betas", adapted to the audience's most chauvinistic identity (religion, machoism, etc.).
Since it's easy to manipulate those into hating whatever is the bad-word-du-jour then those same politicians can attach any policy with "combating bad-word-du-jour" and a lot of the believers won't question it much.
It's disheartening because even though I'm quite progressive and leftist (in the European sense), I still believe that conservatism is necessary to balance out the discussion, unfortunately it's also an ideology intrinsically bound to the fear of change, a feeling very easy to be co-opted by power-hungry people.
It's an ideology that rejects rationality and almost completely embraces emotion (fear), which is rather ironic since its most fervent followers want to believe they are the most reasonable and logical ones.
Whether a birth certificate for a same-sex couple in the IVF case mentions "mother" or the less ambiguous "inseminated person" is indeed fully inconsequential for the vast majority of the American public.
Changes in official government paperwork to be more inclusive are very much not "control of language and attempts to assert control over its use and definitions".
I mean, you could describe the Trump administration's executive order requiring government agencies to stop using Gulf of Mexico and instead use Gulf of America as simply "changes in government paperwork." But I think it's obviously also an attempt to change the language.
I wouldn't classify it as "changes in government paperwork" since the EO defined the official name for a geographical feature, very different from some law changing the usage of a term in a government's form. Quite a different level and degree, if that's out of consideration everything can be reduced to some more general form to be played as equivalent.
I also DGAF about the renaming of the gulf of mexico relative to essentially any of the other, much more consequential actions the administration is taking.
> the recent proposal to change the word "mother" to "inseminated person" in Wisconsin state law
Life gets easier once one realizes that talking points like this are at best missing all important context, if not outright deceptive. Other examples would be the "They spent $X studying OUTRAGEOUS_THING"
The exhausting thing is doing to required research to point out to people that the outrage pornography sound bite they're screaming about is, of course, completely fake and designed to enrage them.
Then they thank you for the information and go on to completely believe the next one with no pattern recognition whatsoever.
Indeed. Social democracy is a requisite for stability. It’s surprising it lasted this long. I guess the New Deal might have been instrumental in postponing collapse.
People forget, how oligarchies are actually not desirable for the oligarchs. Because there is no law and no stability. The zhar/king has a bad day and the whole crowd around you shifts in some economic landslide. Oligarchs in Russia came and went, and they took their money to europe/swiss/uk/us - because you can not thrust a oligarchy, when you are today in favor of the golden god king.
Such moves towards such systems, are usually desperate jumps of those whose empires are under threat of being broken up anyway.
The countries that have had the most successful but empathetic policies have reversed course on the key issue of immigration: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/magazine/denmark-immigrat.... MAGA would be thrilled to achieve the reversal of immigration that's happening in Denmark, for example.
Immigrants to the US are mostly from the Americas, so Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, etc. The US also has people fleeing war, such as Ukrainians.
The main difference is that they are easier to integrate. For instance, immigrants from the Americas speak a romance language, and if they speak Spanish, that's like a second language for the US. Most are also Christians, and yes, it matters because they don't uphold Sharia over local laws. Yes, the US is also getting drug dealers and such, but I bet that a vast majority are there to work and pay their taxes.
Europe has the problem that it took in many people from Africa and Asia, that are harder to integrate, and with many of them fleeing war. And the difficulty here is that people fleeing war have no intention to integrate or even to work for a living if they can get away with subsidies, many intending to return home as soon as possible. Europe also has the issue that it has never been a melting pot, smaller countries in Europe don't have a tradition of cultural diversity, they are unprepared to integrate that many people over a short period of time.
There was also a story recently about Russia apparently fuelling immigration from war zones into Europe, to destabilize the EU and its governments. They also funded “green” NGOs and politicians who succeeded in shutting down shale gas extraction and nuclear power plants, increasing the energy dependence on Russia. I'm guessing their hybrid war is a wild success.
Not to be misunderstood here, I am pro immigration. For example, Germany has been a powerhouse of Europe due in no small part to their generous immigration policies. The population is growing old, and we need people to support society. The “low skilled” classification is a canard. Countries require “low skilled” work as well, and note that unemployment is at an all-time low, US and EU included.
I'll also note that the UK ran xenophobic ads ranting against Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians, as a justification for Brexit. After Brexit, they wanted them back, especially during the pandemic, since “low skilled” Eastern Europeans started going to Germany and other EU countries instead. And immigration actually got worse for them after Brexit, which was ironic, but not unpredictable.
Trump is the result of anti-system vote by people who were ignored for decades by both parties.
Trump obviously won't solve their problems. Inequality won't decrease. Healthcare won't become more accessible. Workers' rights won't be fixed. Homes won't get more affordable. Inflation won't drop.
So - even when Trump disgraces himself completely - these disappointed voters will just vote for another anti-system con-man.
Trump's core voters desperately need Sanders to win. But they will vote Trumps and get fucked over time and time again.
This is how democracy dies. People distrusting the system so hard they destroy it.
> This is how democracy dies. People distrusting the system so hard they destroy it.
Funny. Reminds me of the last time I visited Brazil. In the last day I heard someone justifying voting for Bolsonaro by saying "things are so bad that I just want someone who will destroy everything".
It's weird, they think things can't get any worse. In my country, union got us 7% raise in 3 years, thats 4% if you discount union membership cost and people talk about leaving union "because it's not worth it".
Without union we get nothing and people before us had to fight to get us these rights and now some people want to throw it away because they didn't get big enough raise.
Bolsonaro is a symptom of the same disease as Trump. At least he's ineligible until 2030. Who would have thought that Brazil would have stronger democratic institutions?
That really caught me by surprise. On the other hand, this is mostly to the credit of their Supreme Court, and one can argue it's one judge doing the most work... so it's all probably quite fragile :/
There are safety features built-in in more recent democracies. USA is just a very early implementation and hasn't been keeping up with the patches.
2-party system is bad. Regional representation instead of population representation is bad. Allowing gerrymandering is bad. Letting companies/oligarchs to contribute to election campaigns is VERY bad.
All of this ends with a system that cannot reform itself. It's a common failure mode in early democracies. There are known workarounds.
First-past-the-post voting systems are extra dangerous. I.e. where all the votes of a district go to the winner of the district.
If instead all votes go proportionally according to what people voted, you get less extreme policies and encourage parties to build coalitions. Nobody is happy, but fewer people are extremely unhappy.
I realize this is just my own idea, but I think the Constitution forbids gerrymandering, by demanding a "republican form of government" in the states. The question is how this opinion would stand up to being tested by the current Supreme Court.
You can find plenty of "workarounds" in any Wal-Mart or pawn shop in the US. You can even buy a "workaround" from someone directly and avoid a background check.
Bernie Sanders would not fix the American Problem, because he too would be unable to do anything. It's a mistake to think that there was one recent event decided on the margins that somehow led to collapse.
The American Problem is not one of systems or policies. The American Problem is about people, what they do to each other, and that you allow that to happen. The constitutional arguments they have are Red Herrings. What matters is what people do, and what they want to be allowed to do by their arguments.
It's not like in authoritarian countries where their votes just go down to trash. It's not like they cannot voice their opinion or organize demonstrations. I agree there is a sentiment of "I'm ignored", but at any point in time it's up to them to not being ignored in democratic society.
This is just a baffling attitude. Sanders is the only name that regularly gets respect from every corner of the political spectrum. His most vociferous critics by a long shot are centrist democratic loyalists.
Sanders means well in the things he does, but he's unfortunately very very .. how do I put this, stupid in his ideas.
Even his own party never votes for his stuff because his ideas are always terrible. They are always emotional, but he never thinks them through. I don't think he's able to think them through.
I'll give you an example from a different person: There's someone on Twitter who wants a 0.1% tax on stock transactions, and then he calculates that this little change will fund everything we could possibly want. He utterly ignores that if you put this tax people will change their behavior! There will be fewer transactions, and this tax will fund nothing at all.
Sanders is the same way: He makes an idea, and completely ignores how people will respond to it.
This is a misrepresentation of the position. It’s possible that to sell a policy like a transaction tax you might overstate the potential revenue. But nobody serious actually thinks you could simply multiply the tax rate by transactions to predict revenue.
But that doesn’t matter. The revenue would be non zero. And there are plenty of other reasons to tax transactions anyway (stability, realign market and societal priorities)
I can't find his original post on X (although that's probably for the better because his feed is filled antisemitic garbage, and he's pretty clearly at utter idiot).
But yes, some people really do think that way: They never think about the results of their proposals, and getting back to the topic at hand Bernie is the same way (although unlike that other guy Bernie really does seem to care about people), but he never thinks about the effects of his proposals, how people would react and change behavior.
This would make him a terrible President.
And I would remind you that despite being in congress for 34 years Bernie has never manged to get even a single idea of his passed.
Bernie’s Sanders is very easy to attack because of how fast he folded to the DNC in the past decade.
Even for the Trump "bull in the china shop" voter, Sanders has become less relevant in 2020 and 2024 because he offers so little and for someone so called principled, he doesn’t hold the same ideas on immigration that he has before.
Look, all I have is polling data from multiple national presidential elections to back me up.
I know many Trump supporters but not a single one of them respects or like Sanders, and all the polling data I can find points out that this is the general trend.
Any Sanders path to victory involved massive amounts of youth turnout that would have otherwise stayed home, and there's basically zero Republican leaning voters that would switch to Bernie. And the swing vote swings massively to Trump when Sanders goes against Trump.
I wonder what those swing votes would be today, now that people start to realize how quickly and efficiently the USA is being destroyed from the inside, right now.
Could you please implement Sander's socialist paradise in Vermont first? I'd really like to see how it works out before you try and subject the rest of us to your ideas. thanks!
If there was some way to isolate VT from the rest of the country then there are many strategies to make it work. This is a major cause of the homeless problem in CA> Progressive policies designated for the citizens of CA get abused by all the red states dumping the results of their bad policies into California (by way of one way bus tickets). The same would happen to VT. Its much easier to just look at the EU and see the positive results.
The idea that anyone can know without a doubt what someone else needs is part of the problem.
People need to be treated as adults before they can be expected to act like adults. There's always the risk that goes wrong, it has in the past, but we're doomed if we believe the only way forward is a small group of elites forcing change on us because they "know best".
Political science has decades of research that consistently shows that it’s entirely correct to think that most voters have no clue about anything, including what would be best for them.
Reasoned, informed votes aren’t a major factor in elections.
[edit] see if your library has a copy of Democracy for Realists and also dig into older major works they cite, if you’re interested in more on this. For a quick gut-check, look up the proportion of US voters that understand how marginal income tax rates work, then reflect on the fact that this is something very simple that directly affects them in ways they must confront at least once per year, and despair at how bad similar measures must look for practically everything else and that if they don’t understand the basics of how things work, they can’t even begin to figure out “what’s best” for them or for anyone else.
I will see if I can find that book, thanks for the recommendation.
I'm not sure how we could untangle the issue of today's uneducated populace with our education system itself. If people don't understand marginal tac rates, for example, and most people go to public school because the government makes it pretty difficult to choose anything else, is it not the fault of public education for either not teaching it or teaching it poorly?
More importantly in my opinion, if people don't care to understand it that's fine - they can make that choice. If the system still works and no one complains, great. If it becomes a problem we can either better educate people on how it works or move to a more simply form of taxation that is easier for people to understand.
I’m not sure how much understanding the issues is a factor in democracy functioning well. I think it has more to do with widespread belief in democratic and rule-of-law identity, such that voters will reliably punish those who violate those tenets, and structures set up to resist the kind of rot that targets inherent weaknesses in democracy, especially to prevent capture of media and lobbying by rich minority interests. These reduce the effects of directed exploitation of voter ignorance, and block democratic attacks on democracy itself.
Both of those factors are, to use the scientific term, completely fucked in the US, which is why we’re where we are now. We’re not here because people think that we spend 20% of our budget on foreign aid, but rather, people think that because of concentration and capture of media ownership, and intense lobbying. The ignorance would be there either way, but the direction and form of it is carefully cultivated, and allowing that cultivation is the problem.
The generation of hard data demonstrating that voters (more or less) don’t know jack-shit about anything goes back to IIRC the 1950s, and the best answer Poli Sci has for why this results in a functioning system at all is that voter behavior is fairly erratic (much of it amounts to “do I perceive that things are bad, even that have nothing to do with the government or with me? Then throw the bums out!”) and (this was once accepted but is now controversial) that voter ignorance kinda balances out by virtue of being chaotic. If that ignorance becomes directed, however, both of these things are weaponizable or breakable.
Many of the founders of the US wrote about the importance of an educated populace and feared that an uneducated voting public would ruin the system.
What you describe are both results of an uneducated voting public in my opinion. At least as I see it, those are two important effects with the root cause being a lack of education and critical thinking.
If people were better educated on how our systems work and issues that impact them directly, and willing to think critically and listen to, or engage in, reasoned debates we wouldn't have to worry about what shit they may hear or see in the media, or from politicians, lobbyists, etc.
The solution at the time largely involved not letting groups unlikely to be educated… vote at all.
I’d definitely be interested in evidence that there are democracies with voters who are significantly better at understanding the function of their government, the breakdown of the budget, how basic functions of it work, et c, than in the US before, say, 1975.
I'm not totally sure whether you meant the 1975 point as a comparison of democracies today versus 1975 US, or democracies from 1975 compared to the US.
This is anecdotal since I don't have evidence handy, but I've been impressed with Swiss voters that I've met and they have all spoken highly of both their Democratic model and their voters. I don't know all the intricacies of it, but my understanding is that their system pushes any meaningful change to a vote. Its slower and requires more voter engagement, but at least from my experience that has succeeded in building a better informed public.
We should never expect people treated as children to act as anything more.
Acting like an adult requires practice and learning lessons when you mess up. Treating those you may disagree with, or don't trust, as children is a self fulfilling prophecy and strips them of the dignity of having the chance to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences.
Is there much overlap in Trump and Sanders policy views?
I wouldn't expect voters for either candidate to agree with much from the other candidate, but maybe I don't know their platforms well enough to see the similarities.
People are definitely voting for policies. There was a study that found trump spent a higher percent of time talking about policies than Hillary. The PBS documentary on 2016 had an anecdote than in 2016 the trump rally crowd would chant things that became trump policies.
Trump surely has policy views. Maybe they aren't consistent, and he often speaks contradictory to whatever his views are, but you're underestimating him if you believe his has no views. If you consider him a threat, underestimating him sounds dangerous
> Trump _is_ the policy and the view.
That may be true for voters, I know quite a few Trump voters that only care to vote for him and couldn't explain any coherent policy reason for preferring him. That has no bearing on Trump's own policies or views though.
I assume you mean they're racist. Yes I do know one openly racist person who happened to vite for Trump. I don't think he voted for Trump for that reason though, he's just been a republican voter for decades if I'm not mistaken.
No, I mean they'd rather not verbalize why they want Trump in office. Like one of his voters mentioned during his first term when she felt he wasn't "hurting who he's supposed to". A surprising number of Trump voters see him as a tool for retribution against various groups the voters' feel animosity towards. Saying this outright is probably something most are not comfortable to say to you, so they stay vague and non-specific.
I would assume the same goes for some Democratic voters as well. There's a lot of hate thrown across the aisle in both directions these days. Maybe it comes more frequently from Trump's supporters, I don't know, but I've been surprised by how much blatant disregard, disrespect, and animosity I've heard from those on the left. The idea of voting for Trump was so foreign to many in the Biden/Harris bubble that anyone willing to vote for Trump must have been crazy or less than.
I didn't vote for Trump (or Harris), but working in the tech industry and mostly around people who would consider themselves progressive or liberal has been pretty eye opening the last few elections. Everyone wants to be inclusive unless its political and they strongly disagree with the other side.
I distinctly remember the lead up to the 2016 election. I remember having one conversation with a friend who is relatively affluent. Not independently wealthy but a top 1% earner. I had been watching Bernie gain steam and I brought this up in the context of how unhappy with the status quo people seemed to be.
This immediately got dismissed. "Everything is fine". It is a mistake to paint all Trump voters as just being proto-fascists (which the majority are). Many ended up there because they desperately wanted change and establishment candidates were just offering more of the same. Hilary absolutely was a "more of the same" candidate. And the entire GOP primary field (21 at one point) were "more of the same". That's why Trump won the primary. That, combined with Hilary's massive negatives and her generally being a terrible candidate, were why Trump won in the first place.
2020 was an anomaly in many ways. We had Covid lockdowns and were coming off 4 years of Trump chaos. Because of the lockdown, voting was made substantially easier with early voting and mail-in ballots. The more people vote, the more Democrats win. It's why voter suppression is a key part of the Republican platform (make no mistake, "voter ID" is simply voter suppression). Were it not for the pandemic, I very much suspect Trump would've won re-election. Biden was a terrible candidate and never should've been the nominee. Clyburn basically handed him the nomination (in South Carolina) and Warren stayed in long enough to split Bernie's vote, the second time the DNC had actively sabotaged Bernie's campaign.
Remember in 2020, Bernie had Joe Rogan's endorsement.
The Democrats are really just Republican Lite now. Kamala's immigration plan was Trump's 2020 immigration plan. Kamala abandoned opposition to the death penalty from the party platform and called for the most "lethal" military. She courted never Trumpers like Liz Cheney. Like seriously, who was that for? She refused to separate herself from Biden on any issue despite his historic unpopularity. And of course, she refused to deviate from the deeply unpopular position on Israel-Gaza. In short, she offered the voters absolutely nothing.
In this election, progressive voter initiatives outperformed the Democratic party by a massive margin. For example, minimum wage increases passed in Missouri, a state Trump won by 22. Trump won Florida by 14 yet recreational cannabis and abortion protection got 55-59% of the vote (unfortunately, you need 60% to pass in Florida).
The Democratic Party exists to actively sabotage any progressive momentum. We didn't get a convention primary after Biden withdrew because the DNC was scared a progressive candidate would win. They stuck us with Kamala to avoid that.
My point here is that Trump doesn't have and has never had a majority. He only won each time because there was effectively zero opposition. A chunk of Trump's base are simply people desperate for change. At least Trump lied to them and gave them something to vote for. Democrats wouldn't even lie to them and tell them they were going to fix housing and egg prices and give them healthcare.
This is an excellent summary. The core problem that has led us to this point. I wish there was an easier way to explain the entire context to my European and Non-American friends but I try my best.
I have often felt that the only way to break this cycle is to get more non-voters to join the fray. There are enough people totally checked out but get a bunch of them and you can make up for the centrist dems. Its gotta be a celebrity that has any chance of ramming through the Democratic primary just like Trump did. AOC isn't going to cut it. If we make it to 2028, We need a superstar.
This is the real bisector. If one party gets to use magic and capture the stupid vote, what's the other party supposed to do? Lie more? Lie less? As long as magic appeals to stupid people, we're screwed.
The real underlying problem is the collapse of the consensus of the elites, projected through corporate media. Murdoch saw a financial opportunity to break from this model, and social media companies followed with this as their only business model. Murdoch and Zuckerberg make money spreading magic which appeals to stupid people who vote in deranged morons. There is no effective feedback mechanism because not enough voters have the mental skills to evaluate the consequences of their actions. Or perhaps they just like seeing chaos and destruction. Rinse repeat.
Thats more than enough of a margin for a definite loss. Image if Trump lost in 2016. His supporters and the whole world wide right wing ecosphere would never had gotten emboldened.\
The article doesn't touch upon it but there was a contagion of two time Obama voters that voted Trump. This group was touched upon in Michael Moores documentary Farenheit 11/9. People like those in Flint, MI who felt abandoned by Obama switched their allegiance to Trump.
> That’s the most frustrating part. What America calls leftists is considered pretty centrist everywhere else.
The most frustrating part is that Trump is sabotaging the US by enacting the pseudo-anti war policies that the republican party has been vilifying for decades.
It was literally in an official gov directive this week, to remove any requirements from government contractors that they not be segregated. so now a government contractors can be segregated if they desire.
This is such a wild con, especially looking at the whole thing from Europe. The Us has no significant political left, how on earth are they "behind everything" if they can't even manifest some influence within the Democratic party?
If the left was strong in the US there would have been a contest between Hillary Clinton and an actual left wing contender like Bernie Sanders. Even people like AOC would make a decent centrist candidate in Europe.
It’s just a boogeyman so we can swing this country into full blown fascism. Hitler did the same crap. It’s always somebody else’s fault, usually your friends and neighbors.
Nonsense, you have no idea how many conservatives are still mad the “leftists” forced the baker to make a custom cake endorsing gay marriage against his beliefs. (Not sell an off the shelf one, he was okay with that, a customized cake.)
That’s the kind of persecution they are talking, and angry, about. If that incident had not happened, Trump may never have been elected.
Left/right is not nearly as useful a lens here as is authoritarian/democratic.
The real key to avoiding mass starvations is giving people economic freedom to grow their own food or at a minimum trade for it, as well as democratic means to remove rulers that will starve mass numbers of people.
> Eh, the right still has a lot of work to do if they want to catch up with the economic damage (and the sheer body count) perpetrated by leftists over the last century.
I'm curious to see this quantified. Mao was certainly terrible, but so was Hitler of course and so were the various famines imposed by British rule.
It's well-accepted that Stalin's various purges and famines killed several times more civilians than Hitler managed to, for instance.
Here in the US, I'm personally more concerned about a replay of Pol Pot's regime. He took Hitler's warped notions of anti-intellectualism ("Jewish physics") to a whole new level ("Kill anybody wearing glasses.")
The fact that he did so under the standard of leftism doesn't really seem that meaningful or relevant, because if/when it happens here, it will evidently be perpetrated by the extreme right. A pox on both their houses.
Regardless of how McCarthyism is antagonized under post Cold War era, it is not at all clear to me that such crackdowns wouldn't have been essential in ensuring the culture war is not lost to the Soviet Union.
How about you check out the rest of the western world, where each single democracy had their own pickings with communist tendecies. And most of them handled that in the common sense way of giving workers basic protections and ensuring their share of wealth so they don't feel the need to go to the communists.
Worked pretty well for most European countries.
Although, once communism was gone, the ideology of neolibral economic thinking took over and thus all benefits to workers were seen as unnecessary expenses. Leading to the current rise in nationalism and fascism nearly everywhere.
It is pretty simple: If you want all people to carry a system, all people need to feel like they profit from its existence. Once the mask slips and people realize they aren't profiting, they will be unwilling to hold up their side of the social contract. This is what is happening right now.
I agree with Sam Altman that the whole structure of society will be up for debate. But he probably assumes that in the new structure he is going to be on top.
I mean I am actually impressed by the sizeable part of the population media moguls managed to convince into a cultish devotion to lie to themselves against their own naterial interests. This is bad everywhere, but the current US has a propaganda machine that is truly astonishing, in a scary way.
The problem with that is that authoritarians have no incentive to figure out the real roots of a problem. Like a doctor that always blames it on some devil, demon, or whatnot when you go to them an authoritarian will not solve the problem, because every (real) crisis is a chance to blame the (fictional) enemy.
Has it though? It appears most of Europe is by and large a failed state collapsing under such communist-adjacent policies plus unbounded immigration. I would not want to be Europe today, so yeah, to the extent McCarthyism has been a protection against that, kudos.
Yes, two of my siblings are European citizens. It's staggering how much richer US feels. Many Europeans are fed daily propaganda and thus are in denial/ideological hatred. I implore Europeans especially the ones in technology to skip over anti-capitalist and anti-American propaganda widespread in Europe (e.g. you'll hear shootings every day; you'll be BK and die on the street if you get cancer) and seriously explore opportunities in the US. They can be multiple times wealthier, not just some measly percentages.
This is the classic american take, look at how much more money you could have.
To most europeans there are more important things than money, especially those working in tech who likely earn enough to have a great quality of life. Also lots of them have been to the US and made their own minds up.
Yes most of the population does not enjoy that benefit. I understand you only care for yourself, so yes please enjoy the current system that benefits you. Maybe we can a country just for you and send you there.
I completely distrust and generally regard leftists with contempt due to my personal interactions with them alone. I regard them as societal cancer and would prefer any other group to be in charge over them. No McCarthyist propaganda needed. I'll take a fascist's boot on my neck any day over a lefty who pretends to do it for my own good.
Strong words here friend. Just curious, have you ever had a boot on your neck? What does leftist mean to you? And reading your comment back slowly do you still agree?
the saddest part about a comment you are commenting on is that their mind has been so polluted that they only see the world through the views of two arbitrary political parties (who shift their own views every couple of decades, hard rightist from few decades ago is basically same-ish person as far-leftist today). all empires fall and USA is slowly getting there (now going “little” faster) because of thinking like this in part.
I think the meta is studying history, and wondering if any slide toward facism has ever been successfully stopped in its tracks without being beaten down in wars.
The two sort-of examples in Western history I can think of are Spain after Franco, and the UK in the 1930s. In Spain a monarch's left-shift was perhaps the deciding and surprising variable, and in the UK it was a powerful civil rights movement.
The US has neither, so I don't know what to expect. The two-party system also makes it very hard to bootstrap meaningful change, since both parties tend to try and chase the Overton window, but only one is really pushing to move it right now.
In Spain one of the deciding factors was the prime canditate for succeeding Franco as a dictator being blown up by Basque terrorists. Also, you should consider the Carnation Revolution in Portugal as another example.
The regime collapsed when the Portuguese colonial war in Africa consumed up to 40 percent of the national budget, and a new generation of university-educated military officials began spreading through the armed forces.
Portugal endured a dictatorial regime for almost 42 years, one of the longest in modern Europe, which was tolerated by NATO due to its anti-communist stance. [1],[2]
Interestingly enough, Russia is currently spending more than 40% of its budget on the war. [3]
A far more effective strategy to force them out of Ukraine, would be genuine economic starvation. Instead, the West tolerated hundreds of businesses continuing to operate in Russia.[4]
The most likely explanation for agent Krasnov’s, (currently occupying the White House), sense of urgency to halt the war in Ukraine, and use it as a pretext to restart economic ties with Russia is the impending collapse of the Russian economy.[5]
If the USA were to leverage its real and soft power by issuing executive orders that refuse to allow any company to do business with Russia. And by threatening sanctions on India and China for enabling the Russian economy, it would force India and China to choose between access to the US market and economic prosperity, or support for Putin. The war would cease, employing the same tactics Reagan used to bankrupt the Soviet Union.
Instead, the US administration chose to betray the entire West, by yielding to Russian demands.
Re: economic sanctions against Russia. In 2019 Russia main exports went to EU and China and Belarus, while main import a were from US EU and China [0]. It will be crucial for EU to keep their sanctions or maybe even tighten them. Even if US stops their sanctions Russia will mostly buy technology from the US (for drilling). This will not solve Russia’s problem re:lower revenues.
I am very curious if EU is smart enough to keep and even tighten their sanctions. After all is European security that is threatened by Russia.
>A far more effective strategy to force them out of Ukraine, would be genuine economic starvation.
It doesn't seems like that. The West was pretty intolerant to business connections with Russia, and if instead of 80% cut there was 100% cut - it doesn't change the overall picture very much.
>by threatening sanctions on India and China
If We look at the trade balance of Western countries and China - the West isn't close to the position to do that.
>use it as a pretext to restart economic ties with Russia is the impending collapse of the Russian economy
>yielding to Russian demands.
That's a blatant conspiracy theory. It seems like the main obstacle in the Trump's "peace deal" is that Putin is thinking that he is winning this war and that the Russian economy has way more time than the Ukrainian army will be able to conscript new soldiers.
>employing the same tactics Reagan used to bankrupt the Soviet Union
Soviet Union collapsed because of it's own complete left economy, because oil prices were several times lower than now (even adjusted for inflation) and because Gorbachev thought that it is better for him to advertise pizza, then to be the Supreme Ruler of those piece of sh.t of a country.
But here is the problem...The West is still sending, and this incredible
after 3 years of the Ukraine war, more than 200 to 300 billion a year to Russia!
The Russia military budget is 100 Billion! Their GDP is smaller than Italy.
There is no political will. Sadly, and on this Trump is correct,
the pathetic EU sent as much money to Ukraine as the amount of money
they sent to Russia in oil purchases:
Yes. A colonial war in three countries simultaneously, 2,000 miles from the nation.
Yet it still took 13 years, combined with the regime’s economic collapse and a shift in the educational background of the Armed Forces hierarchy to spark the revolution.
The US most likely will be in a civil war in eight to six months.... A cut in social security benefits will do it...
Not at all, the reason the current administration is acting so cruelly is to bring people to despair. And desperate people do desperate things. A violent action will be used as excuse to deploy US armed forces against US citizens.
Poland is still in the midst of a constitutional crisis caused by the Law and Justice party's attempts to subvert the country's constitutional court. It's only with the formation of Donald Tusk's government in 2023 that Poland has come back from the brink.
>I always thought that the American Empire would be dismantled when it elected a leftist steeped in anti-imperialist ideology who wanted to better the world.
Most leftist political parties in Scandinavia and the Baltics manages to be be both pro-Palestine, pro-NATO, and pro-Ukraine. They don't seen any contradiction because there aren't any.
Why do some American leftists follow this 3rd worldist neo-Maoist thinking that Western civilization needs to burn down before you can get free healthcare and free college?
Probably because 2/3 of the population can't be reached. They either want to do whatever they can to be anti-left, even if it hurts themselves, or they don't care at all. So voting harder isn't going to work. All while education is being gutted. I honestly don't know what other options are left. Maybe turning states into their own countries and let them raw dog the world without any help from the federal govt. Idk, it's bleak.
> Why do some American leftists follow this 3rd worldist neo-Maoist thinking that Western civilization needs to burn down before you can get free healthcare and free college?
Let's be fair, you said "some". We also have some of those in Europe.
But to answer, with a guess: perhaps the difference is that in European countries there are way more political parties. But I'm not an expert on American politics so feel free to say this is BS.
3rd wolrdism also exists in Europe. I'm pretty sure it's far more popular.
The reason why they feel overrepresented in the US is simply because a real, progressive leftist political project is essentially impossible, so the most extreme of the extremes are proportional more audible.
It's quite frustrating, but it's clear propaganda spread. There's a complete vacuum of media for leftists in the US, and a tiny amount of money goes a long ways to cementing desired propaganda. Seeing the entire left in the US turn on Ukraine calling them Nazis, when in fact they were occupied by Nazis, with all the terrors that entails, and were planned to have half their population killed and the other half enslaved to Nazis, well, it's red pilling. The left in the US is so weak and leaderless that it is easily co-opted to any sort of end.
DSA, Jacobin, Democracy Now, etc. etc. etc. have all been incredibly anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian invasion. This is in contrast to the left in much of the rest of the world, though not all places (e.g. the German left is filled with Vatniks, as is the UK, and nearly every communist party the world over).
Electing Trump has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. It's about being mouthpieces for Russian propaganda.
Why focus on fringe groups with very little following and no political power and completely ignore the party and president that is actually invoking the policy at hand? Which one is on the nightly news saying Ukraine started the war?
I'm a resident of a leftist enclave in the US, and that's what "the left" refers to, unless you have a better definition? I'm not sure what your complaint was, I've been very specific about the groups I'm talking about, but I still have not idea what you consider "the left" to be. If there isn't a distinction between liberal and "the leftl in your view then we have been talking past each other. Liberals haven't turned away from Ukraine, they have supported Ukraine, there's a clear distinction. But the left in the US is aligned with Trump on this matter, and there's also a lot of crossover from the left to Trump in the form of Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr, who both get a lot of yard signs in my town from houses that were "leftist" a mere year ago.
I think the issue is you're using terms like "the left" and "a lot" but you're talking about a very niche, fringe set of the population as if it represented any significant proportion. I would not say that the non-conservative kook vote is synonymous with "the left" but at least I can understand your point a bit better.
Was gonna say, they're so pro-Russian invasion, they "condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and demand immediate diplomacy and de-escalation to resolve this crisis"
> We recognize that the expansion of NATO and the aggressive approach of Western nations have helped cause the crisis and we demand an end to NATO expansion. We also oppose US and NATO military interventionism and the tens of billions in military aid and weapons shipments which only further exacerbates the war and undermine a negotiated settlement, as well as sanctions that will harm ordinary Russians.
In the very first paragraph, filled with Russian propaganda and ahistorical takes easily disproven by Putin's own words and exegesis in Russian.
Accepting the genocidaire's justifications uncritically, in addition to the IC's many other genocidal language about "denazification," is absolutely appalling. As they say, if you wonder what you would have been doing when the Nazis weee invading the world, look at what you are doing now.
so a hypothetical ("NATO expansion kinda not cool!") vs. reality (Russia invading a sovereign nation, causing an untold number of civilian and military deaths).
> leftist steeped in anti-imperialist ideology who wanted to better the world.
This is precisely how half of the US media characterized Barack Obama, who pioneered an even more impersonal style of American imperialism with drone warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Syria.
Obama is responsible for advancing the power of the presidency pushing further the limits with executive orders to make law. When met with the uselessness and obstructionism of Congress, both parties elected officials choose authoritarianism. When faced with disagreement, both party's voters advocate for authoritarianism. If the opposition doesn't agree, we'll use the government to force them.
That's what the "would be" indicates directly in front of the part you quoted. And in reference to your comment below, I am definitely not referencing Obama, that doesn't even make sense because he did not dismantle American Empire in his two terms, in addition to not really being a leftist at all.
English is ambiguous. Your statement can be interpreted as "I thought the guy we elected (a specific individual to whom I refer coyly, not by name) would destroy everything" or "I thought it would take electing a certain type of person to destroy everything".
I assume he was trying to allude to Obama, which at least in the recent decades came the closest to that in terms of media image, but the claim that there has been an anti-imperialist president of the US (on any relevant timescale) doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.
It’s being dismantled by an immigrant from South Africa with a dude who’s grandparents immigrated about 100 years ago from Germany who has an immigrant wife.
If the current situation continues to unfold logically, it is inevitable that we may witness the secession of several states within our lifetime, to form a Federation of States. Hopefully California + Oregon + Washington State can secede and form the Western Federated States of America (WFSA).
The combined nominal GDP of California, Oregon, and Washington is approximately $4.1 trillion. If these three states were considered a single entity, their combined GDP would rank as the world’s fifth-largest economy.
It is, in my own opinion, a common fallacy to attribute the outcome as a direct consequence of the associated ideology, when more often than not the ideology is at best a post-hoc rationalization. Material decisions and their natural consequences are far more consistently impactful than any abstract justification for them.
The system is eroded by the people who were brought into the position of being capable to destroy the system: by the system!. In so far: "The purpose of a system is what it does" (Stafford Beer). This should motivate us to ask what properties of the system lead to this and how we might change it.
To me it seems to be a bit like what the Böckenförde-Diktum points to, which is: "The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself."
Basically the modern capitalist secularized society is so void of deep human values and only emphasizing legality and profitability that it brings out a certain kind of elite. An elite which is decoupled from all real human connection and value leading to a thinking like this: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-...
Well and now we have to cope with this. But until we understand that these elites are no accident but logical results of the system we foster, nothing will really change. Or better: until we accept that the reductionist approach to human society and value that this system is based on is flawed and act accordingly everything we do is basically just flex-taping it and waiting for the next escalation.
Calling Republicans jealous and afraid is a good way to make yourself feel better but very much misses the character of what's happening. The "I'm a superior son of a bitch" attitude of leftists is gross. Saying "they're just jealous" is something you tell children.
What you're saying here is "we're better than everyone else and everyone else disagrees with my positions because they envy how awesome we are".
Can you please explain the character of what's happening in a way that isn't demeaning to anyone? It's hard for me to view these events while inside without assigning blame.
Race and class friction and conflict in America is getting more complex than black and white, and many people are still stuck thinking of it that old way. A whole lot of people a stuck in rather well insulated ideology bubbles and there's not much self-doubt going on.
It's really quite difficult to not be demeaning because the core of the problem is bigotry across the political spectrum, making significant unequal decisions about individuals based on shallow characteristics (appearance, ethnicity, gender expression). And you can't really have a discussion about it because nobody will accept that making decisions based on a person's race/gender/... is discrimination regardless of which group gets the positive benefit. And you can't really have a discussion about it because "yeah but what the other guys did or are still doing is way worse".
Bottom line: to succeed in the 21st century you have to weigh pros and cons and live in the grey area. This is an optimization problem not a battle between good and evil. Viewing the world exclusively through the "good vs evil" lens is going to lead to a civilization threatening war.
Oh please. Between "libtards" and "snowflakes" and general condescension and insults comming from the the right for years and years, it is getting really tiring when the same people suddenly become thin skinned.
For years we have been listening "fuck your feelings" coming from the right.
"Fuck Your Feelings" was strongly and rapidly adopted as a slogan by Trump campaigners in 2019. Prior to that it wasn't strongly used in a political context, instead used nonpartisanly as disparagement of ones opinions in general. It didn't come "from the left".
Democrats have a real problem with saying true but demeaning things that you have to discuss when coming up with strategy, out loud in public.
Hillary’s “deplorables” thing was maybe the most prominent example. Her point was that democrats who think that all republicans are committed to evil positions we can’t compromise with or entertain isn’t correct! Only about a third of them are, according to the data. The rest could maybe be reached or worked-with!
This is true shit you say in blunt terms in a strategy meeting or nerdy discussion groups, not in public, because poli sci is just full of demeaning stuff about voters, because they are stupid and often evil and if you study democracy soberly that’s what you’ll find, and you have to grapple with it to act effectively, but you don’t say it in public because most voters also don’t know that stuff because they’re not poli sci nerds. She, and/or her speech writers, had been around strategists and wonks too much.
[edit] on the other hand, one wonders how much this really matters when Trump wins while saying worse things about all kinds of folks. The way the media approach and characterize and amplify (or don’t) the messages may matter more than what’s actually said.
I find complaining about basked of deplorables coming from the conservative side to be the height of hypocrisy. The same people compete with each other who will be more insulting.
They voted for Trump, twice. They love it when politicians are insulting.
Trumpers are utterly immune to declarations of hypocrisy, as people who refuse to engage in good faith often are. There's basically no point in calling it out.
I'm the most cynical person I know, and somehow I spent 38 years thinking the US would always be on top, and despite the smaller scale invasions and the odd assassination, would maintain world peace and fund prosperity for all in terms of fundamental research.
I knew that democracy was fragile and that losing it could happen to all of us - except the US. somehow I believed their separation of powers would always work, that the pretence of freedoms would always be in the interest of Western oligarchs.
it does occur to me that maybe they think robot soldiers will soon be able to keep them safe from the revolution, but honestly, they're probably just greedy and reckless.
The idea that the empire has a burden to civilize the world is a common theme in empires throughout history.
It's part honest desire to do something good with the position history has afforded the empire, and part self-serving rationalization, depending on who is doing the talking.
I need to give a name to my theory which posits that horseshoe theory is a bullshit right-wing talking point, no different from the classic villain trope "We are not so different, you and I", where one side admits to being awful but uses false analogies to try and paint the other with the same brush, and the other rejects both the comparison and the conclusion.
The underlying goal of horseshoe theory is not to create a meaningful comparison between two positions, but an underhanded attempt to demoralise those on the left, and to swing undecided centrists by convincing them that the left isn't really offering the progress that it claims. I think it's also used as a shield by people who are right-leaning but don't want to admit it out loud.
...unless you can find a single good example of a notable left-wing proponent suggesting that horseshoe theory is valid, actually.
This and 1000 times this. It is so absurd: of course it seems ad hoc plausible to treat roughly similar things as if they were the same. However: never do this in this forum, since this is a community is looking a lot into all kinds details, so you will get called out.
But somehow – SOMEHOW – the same people that ask for nuance in everything act as if it would be even remotely plausible that the two most polar opposites of political theory would be basically the same for all important intents and purposes if thought to an end.
It is simply mind-blowing. People looking at something, seeing it is complex, stopping their thinking and just somehow feeling their way to the most empty assessment ever: "probably the same consequencesif you think it to the end". Without even having begun to think their way through it!
But I get it: thinking is nice as long as it is a purely intellectual endeavor but not if any personal moral responsibility is concerned. You might be morally obligated to draw consequences in your behavior – Heaven Forbid!
Trump's actions towards the EU has resulted in a massive increase in military spending by those nations. This is exactly what Trump has demanded of them. This is consequential to Russia and in no way good for them. To think Trump is "controlled by Russia" is such a tired, worn out farce.
The only path to believing this is to accept Trump communications exclusively.
The entire Trump ecosystem is now prohibited from saying that Russia invaded Ukraine. Reality plays no role in any of these narratives.
Trump may or may not be a literal Russian agent. But his actions are indistinguishable from one. I'm sorry you're tired of hearing it, I'm equally tired of seeing it.
I'm not sure if you saw my parent comment which circumstantially refutes your assertion that Trump's actions are indistinguishable from that of a Russian agent. I don't think someone courting the Russian interest would encourage the armorment of it's neighboring continent.
> Trump's actions towards the EU has resulted in a massive increase in military spending by those nations. This is exactly what Trump has demanded of them. This is consequential to Russia and in no way good for them. To think Trump is "controlled by Russia" is such a tired, worn out farce.
I cannot find an objective lens that enable one to view the current administration's policy changes as beneficial to the US and it's interests. This forces ones to explore why US leadership would aggressively espouse policy changes that are almost universally assessed to be damaging to us and our interests.
Is Europe finally stumping up and spending more defence? Yes. But they are also much less likely to buy US made systems in the future, and they will ask for more in exchange for intelligence sharing, or maintaining US military infrastructure domestically. The risk of nuclear proliferation is higher than it would have been without the shift.
Trump even refused to call Russia a dictatorship, not that that is material to policy decisions, but it provides fodder to those who are skeptical of Trump's policy goals and objectives.
Is it possible that he was smart enough to agree with Putin but that neither was smart enough to expect the unintended consequences? It is trivially easy to see things as "obvious" in hindsight, which were not actually, prior.
Did you read the evidence Grok gave, at least? Lots of citations in there.
Trumpian foreign policy isn't new. It's an "America First" ideology that goes back to Andrew Jackson. Arguably it goes back to George Washington, and his famous resignation speech.
Playing nice with foreign empires, economic protectionism, domestic military action, an "all or nothing" attitude towards foreign wars, taking chunks of our neighbors back yards, etc.
This isn't new at all. It's exactly what FDR had to overcome to build the American Empire.
It always ends up happening how you least expect it, though maybe that expectation is evidence that it was bound to happen via a different road anyway.
At the end of the day, the problem isn't really Trump. The American Empire isn't going to end because its only exporting $300B of military might to the world instead of $600B, when no one else on the planet is scratching $50B (I made these numbers up as an illustration).
It might end because it seems like the media landscape has entirely striated the US population into two groups: One group who genuinely and deeply believes that these actions are necessary for the continuity of the US way of life, and another group who genuinely and deeply believes that these actions will destroy the US way of life. No one makes any good faith effort to understand the other side; even my suggestion that this division is the real threat will get downvoted by HackerNews' overwhelmingly leftist bubble. American political discourse is now dominated by people who cannot allow even a single imperfection in their coat of armor, Trump cannot possibly be wrong about anything, his supporters cannot admit they might not have known the implications of what they voted for, the left cannot possibly be wrong about any of their criticism of him, we're screaming past each other.
Interrogate your inner thought process right now; were you thinking "What side is this person on?"
Its so difficult to get the full picture of understanding of the other side. Trump is rich, egotistical, and doesn't listen to the counsel of others; but Russia is controlling him? Trump wants to reduce the federal debt levels of the United States; but is hellbent on spending anything to deport economically productive illegal immigrants? Trump is silencing the media and kicking them out of the white house; while streaming more than Pokimane, direct from the Oval Office, just rambling for hours a day? Trump supporters were hoodwinked and lied to; yet more than any President america has had for decades, Trump is doing exactly, to the letter, what he said he'd do on the campaign trail; its just that the left didn't believe him back then, because we're so used to Presidents that do nothing. America's children have the worst test scores in the G20, and cost the most to educate; we should continue what we're currently doing? America's healthcare outcomes are among the worst in the G20, and most expensive; we should continue the path we're currently walking?
We're in a crisis of understanding right now. We need more moderates. We need people who understand both sides of the coin, and can have a reasonable conversation about why the past 20 years hasn't worked for most Americans, and also why Trump's policies also won't fix things. My fear, however, is that we won't get that in 2028; instead we're just going to move into our camps further, with a leftist version of Trump v JD Vance, and we'll dig further down the hole of two sides that need each other to solve the problems we face, but refuse to work with one-another.
> No one makes any good faith effort to understand the other side
I do and have.
Too many of their issues are simply made-up for me to get much traction, though. You see one outrageous thing after another and go “omg if that’s true it does seem pretty bad!” and then it’s almost always not true when you look into it. You can do this all day long with Fox News, let alone even nuttier sources.
The latest one for me was a discussion about the Olympic boxer from Algeria. Apparently it was proven through leaked medical records that she does, in fact, have XY chromosomes.
I did some digging. 99.999% of the articles covering this are just circular references to each other celebrating their moral victory. Finally I found the original source which was an online-only French newspaper that as best I could tell publishes like three articles a year from random guest contributors.
Reading the “leaked report”, the only evidence are screenshots of photocopies of… what literally just seems to be a textbook explaining the supposed condition she has. Not regarding her specifically. Literally just a textbook description of the condition.
There are no confirming documents. Nothing with her name on it. Nothing with an actual lab result. Nothing but a random Internet personality pseudonymously claiming that they somehow, out of all the other possible news outlets on earth, received leaked copies of her medical report. And zero receipts.
Every. Single. Time. that I dive into actual claims from the conservative outrage machine, there is nothing there. This specific topic has the right running victory laps, reposting one another as their primary sources. Nobody has bothered to look if it was actually based on anything real.
For sure. The 2024 Republican party is one built on Vibes; if you double-click on any of the specific issues, ask five questions about them, it turns out that really, that issue probably isn't all that material to Americans' lives, or isn't even real.
Example 1: We sent hundreds of billions to Ukraine, while North Carolina and Florida flooded and people lost their homes. This is a direct talking point Trump has used; maybe we should have spent that money on the homefront. Well: We spent billions on disaster relief for these affected areas, there were reports from Governors that they were getting everything they could meaningfully deploy, and moreover it doesn't seem likely to me that the money we spent on Ukraine came from some funding source that incurred that direct trade-off. The DoD isn't getting a budget increase equal to the amount spent. It was money already allocated.
Example 2: Illegal immigration is raising the crime rate. Well, its not an incorrect statement; Trump has literally deployed this "technically correct" argument that every illegal immigrant is committing a crime by entering the country illegally, and thus it raises the crime rate. Then, they talk more about the homicides and "eating the cats and dogs", and it should be obvious to anyone that: Everyone commits crime. Illegals are no different. Are they committing crime at a rate higher than citizens? I doubt it. Sure, slowing down the rate its happening has reasonably-majority agreement among Americans; but removing those already here instead of finding a path to getting them work authorization benefits no-one.
But remember: Republicans are a Vibes party, and there is something real to the Vibes they run on. These vibes should, in my view, be a mostly-bipartisan issue. Heck, its things I've seen leftists rightly complain about many times: American education sucks, American healthcare sucks, American health sucks, no one can afford a home, unemployment is growing, tons of jobs are getting shipped overseas, or supplanted by AI, what is going on?
The way I've seen it: The Republicans are a party that are quick to admit that there is a problem, but they have all the wrong solutions to it. The Democrats, on the other hand, won't admit there's a problem beyond abstract generalities in a campaign speech, and don't offer any solutions anyway.
I wonder if part of the problem is that we abdicated our information intake to online sources, which for whatever reasons end up driving the divisions (engagement optimization, ads, money interests, etc.).
Where information input before the Internet might have been: 20% newspapers, 50% face-to-face (at the bar, church, work), 10% radio, 20% TV, now it's more like 80% Internet, 10% TV, 10% face-to-face. And it seems to make it a lot easier to grow hateful without the human element.
That’s fine if Trump wants to spend less or even withdraw from NATO.
Doing it like it just did with basically no notice is a stabbing in the back to former allies of the US. And Republicans are also not saying much.
That behavior should and very likely will not be forgotten by Europe.
The next phase that makes sense is an iron curtain between 4 blocks (US, Europe, Russia, China). Like during the Cold War, it is the approach that will minimize the risk of war.
Trump does not want to reduce US debt level- Trump wants a tax cut. If government spending decreases as a result of DOGE that will not result in lower debt- it will result in a bigger tax cut.
The savings from DOGE ( if there will be any) will pass on to rich people, not to the average American voter.
No one on the left is surprised by what Trump is doing. The people who are surprised are his voters.
"I thought he was going to hurt those other people, not me."
Well. About that.
The problem isn't even left vs right. It's a media system that has parted company with reality and deliberately promoted lies and rage bait for clicks and distraction.
It's a huge machine. It's not just Fox, it's the entire network of neoliberal, now neofascist media outlets - from think tanks and "serious journalists", to bot farms and weaponised social media that promotes selected views and deboosts others, to podcasts, influencers, megachurches, mainstream econ schools, MBAs, startups... all promoting the same dysfunctional reality-denying neoliberal supremacist views under various guises.
As someone who doesn't go to church or watch fox perhaps I've missed it, but all I've seen are refutations of this, for instance highly upvoted posts saying "x days of not regretting my vote" as of a few days ago.
Id be curious to see the data if there are any articles or polls that show a large amount of Trump voters regretting their pick. Thanks.
> will get downvoted by HackerNews' overwhelmingly leftist bubble
I think your over all point is healthy but you really need to reexamine this assumption. Take a look at /active and see how often topics critical of Trump, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin, etc. flagged.
Comparing 90s Russia to 2025 Russia is naive at best. Not even Clinton at his Bill-Clintonest would think of normalizing with Putin's Russia in 2025 had his presidency time-travelled to today.
This is before we look at the cost of "normalizing" relations with Russia, if we assume that's what Trump is doing. Turning back to allies, ripping up treaties and trade deals, threatening annexation, knee-capping your own Military-industrial complex, the list goes on. That's nothing like liberals in the 90s.
Yes, I’m referring specifically to the anti-imperialist angle.
There were lots of factions within the anti-imperialist left, but fundamentally there was a distrust of “foreign-policy experts.” And while Trump isn’t a pacifist (and I’m far from one) that’s the part that he really gets.
The anti-imperialist angle is the same as pro-Ukraine, and opposing Russian imperialism.
It's easy to confuse anti-imperialism with pacifism, but you have to remember the anti-imperialist supported anti-colonial warfare even back in the 80s and 90s. Supporting a war to resist imperialism is completely congruent with anti-imperialism, and explains support for Ukraine.
I know you (rayiner) know how colonialism works, and you know the belligerents in Korea and Vietnam and which side of the imperialism coin they fall.
I do not believe equating Vietnam with Ukraine is something you can do in good faith.
Edit: America has remained an empire through a willingness to meddle far from home unde the banner of "protecting American interests". Watching a so-called conservative president dismantle the American empire is startling, seeing the rank-and-file fall in line with narry a dissention is almost unnerving. Anti-imperialist Americans must be having mixed and conflicting feelings right now.
Just to clarify again (saw this in another comment), the belligerents in the Korean War were the North Koreans when they attacked South Korea. This is what led to the US and others joining.
That's an oversimplification of an already complex history of Korea[1], which is why I said equating Vietnam to Ukraine is a disservice, which offers a clearer contrast.
1. The whole Korean peninsula was a colony of Japan, and was divided between the US and Russia after WWII. Both sets of governments claimed to be the the legitimate authority over the entire region. It ended up being a proxy war - so not comparable to Ukraine for a different reason, unless one thinks the war in Ukraine is a proxy war - which completely takes away the agency and sovereignty of the people of Ukraine, and will be provable via a natural experiment over the next days as the US has stopped its involvement, the the war is continuing.
It's not being dismantled at all. It's engaged in a sudden retrenchment which has been brought on by years of slow decline.
They even say this - Rubio said that we do not live in a unipolar world any more - a comment which attracted weirdly little notice.
Biden's approach assumed a unipolar world which did not exist. That's why the Ukraine war, from the American imperialist perspective, backfired.
The achilles heel of the American empire was, ironically, always profit and greed. If there is one thing that could be used to persuade America to let its industry rot it is profit and its industrial malaise is largely responsible for the ever-more-obvious decline in hard military power.
USAID and NED propaganda and agitation are nowhere near as effective as they used to be and they have a stronger tendency to piss off foreign leaders and push them into the arms of rival powers. The golden days of the color revolution are over.
The failure in Georgia to push back on the "pro Russian law" (a law similar to one the US has which required all foreign propaganda to be clearly labeled) was probably seen as a watershed moment that it was about time to hit the reset button on that stuff. That one didnt just fail it backfired.
No US military bases have been closed though, have they?
Because they went in to protect their own interests in the world after the world war 2. They dropped 2 nukes on Japan, remained in the country, and now they want money. Crazy people.
Incorrect. He tried to box in China and contain it as a solely regional power by building military bases along the first island chain and flipping countries into the US sphere of influence.
If China started doing something similar in North America the US would probably invade that country almost instantly (e.g. like it almost did to Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis).
Probably not - the Cuban missile crisis was about nuclear missiles and nothing else.
Cuba remained an ally of the USSR after the missile crisis and continued to host Soviet conventional forces, including fighter jets permanently stationed just 10 minutes from Miami, and regular temporary rotations of nuclear bombers like the Tu-95: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/guest-bloggers/tupolev-tu-9...
I assume they meant that the Biden administration's approach backfired because instead of isolating Russia on the world stage it strengthened its ties with other countries and China in particular.
Few wars have exactly one cause, but to deny that NATO expansion was the main cause of this one is to be a western equivalent of an unequivocal and passionate Putin apologist.
Even Donald Trump now admits that stalling NATO expansion and not treating Russian security concerns with utter contempt could have prevented this.
Im not sure it's a distinction worth drawing. Other kinds of gang also expand by luring in fresh meat who join voluntarily in a fractious security environment.
It's very vulnerable position being a prospective member of a gang. The fact that you try to join one for protection doesnt mean you wont end up being sacrificed when the gang leaders demand you "prove yourself" first.
NATO has participated in 4 wars in the last 20 years, 4 of which were offensive. Unfortunately underlining the word defense doesnt magically make it less of an offensive alliance.
The horseshoe theory applies here. Putin's supporters take equally orwellian positions to this.
In the past 20 years, I see 2 that could be qualified as offensive, at most.
NATO's command in 2003 in Afghanistan came following an unanimous UN Security Council resolution; Russia even provided support. But yeah, let's count 1 here, given the disaster of the whole thing.
Involvement during the Libya campaign in 2011? under a UN mandate again; Russia didn't veto, abstained, and afterwise criticised how it's been interpreted on the ground. Let's count 1.
That makes 2.
NATO did not join the USA in Iraq.
Kosovo Force is a peacekeeping mission.
Ocean Shield was an anti-piracy mission.
Baltic Air Policing, following the Baltic states joining NATO in 2004, is practically a shared border patrol across these states.
Enhanced Forward Presence, since 2016 is a deterrence in response to Russia actions in 2014 in Crimea.
Lying to the security council about the intention to overthrow the government in Libya was probably the main action that changed Russia's view of NATO from "a risk" to "overtly hostile threat". Quite rightly.
It puzzles me why some people (you, but you're not the only one) think that gaining the UN mandate to conduct a humanitarian mission under false pretensions and THEN saying "we came. we saw. he died" exculpates NATO. It makes it so much fucking worse.
The orwellian/Putinesque thinking is evident here also. If you can excuse this you can excuse the invasion of Ukraine just as easily.
The problem is proving it was a lie and not a change of circumstances/opportunities during the operation (which doesn't make it right either, but at least dismisses the disingenuous intent).
So your attribution to my thinking is pretty unwelcome. I don't think it was ok, I don't think either it makes Putin's perspective more reasonable or acceptable.
Putin's track record is way worse than that: multiple military or mercenary invasions, journalists, activists and politicians murders, multiple meddling with foreign elections.
This does not diminish the defence fundamentals of NATO. Putin's strategy only reinforced NATO making sense for its own members and for candidates. He could have acted differently, and favour democratic changes rather than making himself a defence to autocratic regimes, both at home and abroad.
The NATO Expansion line has been disproven to death.
Putin sees the fall of the USSR as a historical wrong that must be righted. He uses NATO Expansion as an easy excuse to sell to the rubes, but it's just that, an excuse.
He was going to go after Ukraine and Georgia NATO or not.
It hasnt been disproven even once. The usual attempts to do so deny geopolitical realities (e.g. assuming the Finland-Russia border is as vulnerable as the Ukraine border).
Georgia was, obviously, left alone after it dropped its NATO ambitions, disproving the rather quaint theory that Putin is intent on reforming the USSR.
And what Kalingrad is to Poland, and what Transnistria is to Moldova, and what Abkhazia and South Ossetia are to Georgia, and what Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea are to Ukraine.
If you wish to understand this issue, you must condemn the russian invasions and annexations in Poland, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, and many others.
> Even Donald Trump now admits that stalling NATO expansion and not treating Russian security concerns with utter contempt could have prevented this.
Even person who panders to Putin repeat bullshit Russian propaganda? How surprising. The NATO expansion excuse is just ignorant talking point. Russian imperialism is the very reason why every neighbour of Russia (apart from the ones that are it's puppet states) want to be in NATO, not the other way around.
According to the Kremlin, this means Russia dictating security policy to a population double its own. You may choose to believe that you can count on one hand the number of countries in the world with genuine sovereignty, but I assure you the citizens of the other countries will beg to differ.
Also it's not clear what "Even Donald Trump now admits..."is intended to mean here. Donald Trump has always repeated Kremlin talking points so I'm not sure why anyone would think of this as novel.
>Also it's not clear what "Even Donald Trump now admits
Obviously American left coast DNC die hards and neoliberals hate him with a passion that beggars belief but he's basically still a different face of American imperialism repesenting similar goals with a changed strategy. Patching things up with Russia is part of that.
The conspiracy theory that he's a Russian plant is amusing, but a delusion to which even the most die hard Putin supporter cannot reach. I guess it's easier to admit than the idea that America lost.
>Even Donald Trump now admits that stalling NATO expansion and not treating Russian security concerns with utter contempt could have prevented this.
I'm confused why you would phrase it as "even Donald Trump", as if we should somehow expect Trump to not buy in to Putin's propaganda line? The fact that Trump "admits" that he agrees with Putin should not give any weight to what Putin claims.
"Even" Donald Trump? The man who many accuse of being a Russian asset and having more sympathy for Putin than for decade-long allies? That Donald Trump?
> Even Donald Trump now admits that stalling NATO expansion and not treating Russian security concerns with utter contempt could have prevented this.
EVEN Donald Trump? As if minihands is the staunchest critic of Russia? I mean, c’mon. Pretty much _only_ Donald Trump claims this outside the context of actual Russian propaganda.
It’s a terribly flimsy argument. Like, no-one has ever, as far as I know, said that Poland should invade Belarus because it joined the CSTO, say. Because that would be obviously ridiculous; actually joining, never mind wanting to join, a defensive treaty organisation is no sort of excuse for invasion. None of this makes any sense unless you accept to start with that Russia has some sort of rights over Ukraine, and no-one really buys that except for Russia.
There's some truth to this, but the bigger issue is that we've been paying A LOT in taxes for A LONG time and because larger and larger portions of that are going to pensions, people are starting to second guess every expense.
The good news - form my perspective - is that the GROWTH in the percentage of the workforce living off pensions is slowing dramatically and is now under REAL growth, which means working folks might feel like life is getting better again.
The reason people have complained that life hasn't gotten better for workers over the last 20 years is because nearly all growth has gone to more people being retired and the 0.1%.
If you keep the same growth, but the number of people retiring slows, there's a little more wiggle room with the pie.
I moved from Australia to the USA (be careful who you swipe on dating apps) and went from paying 50% tax to 15% tax for basically the same job with basically the same quality of life. Tax in America is outrageously low which is no doubt why it cant balance its budget (though I approve of cutting government spending aswell).
What is your bill when an ambulance brings you in? When you have a legal problem at your workplace? What will be your pension? How is the mass transit system? What do you pay for child care, how is your school, how safe is your neighborhood, how do the number of murders in your area compare?
Counterpoint: I’m in the US and my effective income tax rate is in the mid-40s, with my marginal rate over 50%. And I’m not in one of the few states with the highest state income taxes.
The highest federal bracket is 37%, the highest state bracket in the US is California at 13.3%, Medicare at 2.9% if you're self employed, NIIT caps out at 3.8% - so even earning well into seven plus figures, with punitive NIIT, only puts you at a max of 47% marginal. Social security taxes stop long before the brackets kick in.
NYC has combined local and state top marginal rates of 14.776%, to go up to 48.476%.
I call BS on marginal rates exceeding 50%
Edit: even the new 2024 California payroll tax cap lift and mental health tax on seven figure incomes put it at 49.1%. Marginal rates that high don't exist in the US. Even then that requires paying payroll taxes and NIIT on the same income, which I'm pretty sure is impossible.
Thanks for the correction- I did some math and my marginal rate is something like 46%, which, while it’s indeed not over 50%, still is pretty discouraging when weighing whether it’s worth putting in enough effort to get another raise.
A single W-2 earner making $1 million has a 33.49% effective federal tax rate (OASDI, Medicare, Income) taking only the standard deductible and doing nothing else to lower their taxable income (no tax advantaged accounts, not spending enough in categories that allow itemization, etc.). A single non-W-2 earner (has to pay the employer part of payroll taxes) has an effective rate of 34.84%.
If they're married the rates are 29.62% (W-2) and 30.97% (non-W-2), under the same assumption that they do not do anything to qualify for either reduced taxable income or any kind of rebate or credit.
Most people don't make $1 million, and those that do have ways to reduce their tax burden quite a bit without much trouble.
EDIT: Small modifications to the numbers above, they were off by about 0.4% to 0.5%.
Social security is 6.2% and is capped (you only pay social security taxes on a max income of $168,600). So if your income is 168,600 you pay $10,453 in social security taxes.
And if your income is $1,000,000 you still only pay $10,453 in social security tax.
$176,100 this year, and you should also include Medicare which is 1.45% and has the same cap. That does mean a base 7.65% federal tax rate for most W-2 earners. But when you work out the math on the effective tax rates for income tax (not payroll) it takes a lot to hit 25% as your effective federal income tax rate.
Around $350,000 gets you to a 24.8% effective federal income tax rate if you're single and only take the standard deductible, $700k if married. That puts you in the top 3% and 1%, respectively, of incomes in the US these days.
But that gets reduced when you include things like tax advantaged retirement accounts, various tax credits, dependents, paying for health insurance, possibly being able to itemize (more likely at those incomes than the US median income). So really you have to be making something like $400k-500 as a single person to hit 25%, and $800k+ for a married person.
In US, employer pays their share of social security + medicare taxes, which is about 7.6%. If you are self-employed, you need to pay both the employee and the employer side (about 15.2% taxes, mandatory).
When we briefly had a balanced budget (kinda, if you squint just the right way) we had 1990s tax levels and a major economic boom.
We’ve since had two major rounds of tax cuts by republicans, so a balanced budget isn’t feasible even in booms and when we’re not deficit spending on two stupid wars. And now we’ve got all the interest on the debt from those tax cuts and wars to worry about.
If only anyone could have predicted this. Oh wait, everyone who knew anything about taxation policy did.
How do I know? Because my parents earning ~1000 USD per month each living in Poland have higher standard of living than most Americans. Despite paying ~30% taxes.
You have to add up what the taxes pay for in the calculation. Free healthcare, free university education, good public transport, low inequality (= low crime). All of that adds up to higher standard of living achievable with pretty shitty earnings.
Oh and before you blame it on military spending - we spend higher% of GDP on military than USA. Russia is a shitty neighbor, we have to.
American problems are exactly the opposite of what Americans think they are. You are in dire need of some social democracy.
Lack of civic pride and a lack of belief in even the possibility of effective government means that the US -- and many countries like it have a) ineffective civil service and b) ineffective government.
> Free healthcare, free university education, good public transport, low inequality
And I think these are all difficult things to do well and make money, as in doing a good job in healthcare, education, etc. is not really profitable. So, they are areas for government involvement.
That's an interesting perspective, that could be used as an argument by both camps. You say more social democracy, someone else might say, more social cohesion due to shared cultural background and low immigration.
Social democracy is orthogonal to immigration policy.
You can have welfare state with close or open borders and anything in between, and you can have libertarian state with close or open borders.
For the last few years most EU countries have been going towards pretty strict immigration policy but not towards libertarianism.
Also Poland is not a good example (it's been accepting A LOT of immigration since ~2014 - more than average in EU). But that argument gets pretty detailed very quickly so unless you want to go into it - I'll leave that alone).
Comparing a mostly homogenous 312km^2 country to an extremely diverse 9 million km^2 USA doesn't seem like a strong point to me. Regarding healthcare though, I would love to see it subsidized for the working person who neither qualifies for Medicaid or their employer's health insurance.
Is Canada or Sweden a better comparison then? Poland was just the easiest example for me (cause I live here). It's not unique nor the best at these things.
The idea that USA's got it right when most of the world does it differently (and with better results adjusting for cost/effect) always amazes me.
The best explanation I've heard is that this (almost) half of the US population doesn't care if it hurts a bit, as long as it hurts the other half of the US population more.
Take a step back and consider how hardened the divide is between “the two sides”. It should have never come that far, how are you gonna keep national unity in a situation like that!? Are there other first world countries that are that divided?
The US voting system is probably fairly unhelpful, here. Most democratic countries have _multiple_ sides, and need to form coalitions; compromise is, of necessity, more of a thing. For instance, the next government in Germany will likely be a centre-right/centre-left coalition.
It's the root of the problem imo. However, with the majority of the population on a middle school reading comprehension level, it's impossible to explain.
To add: Beyond the need for compromise, a multi-party democracy also provides a safety valve; if a fringe element of a major party grows _too_ fringe, it will often just break off (in the last 20 years Ireland has had _two_ new minor parties emerge from an anti-abortion/anti-LGBT fringe breaking with a major party, say). In two party systems, you instead tend to get ‘big tent’ parties, with the fringe elements on the inside, and sometimes one of the fringe element takes over. For instance, see the US Republicans with Trumpism, the UK Conservatives with Brexiteers (and later an attempted, though largely failed, takeover by Truss’s lot, and, er, whatever the hell they’re doing now, who even knows anymore), and arguably UK Labour with Corbyn’s faction (again, this didn’t really last).
(The UK’s a bit of an oddity here in that it’s _kind_ of a multiparty state for historical reasons, but doesn’t really have the right type of electoral system to support a multiparty system.)
Disenfranchised, easily manipulated voters that want to tear down the system on one side, and people whose convictions are still somewhat based in reality on the other.
That would not be a split in halves, by any means, though. East Germany accounts for about 15% of the population, last I looked. Also, the far-right AfD got about 20% of the votes in the recent election. That is also not a split in halves.
Why squabble at semantics here fixating on exactly half? 1/5th of modern Germany voting for the modern incarnation of the nazi party is a disgrace and speaks to the propaganda situation their population faces.
You can see for yourself: https://bundeswahlleiterin.de/bundestagswahlen/2025/ergebnis...
This shows the winners of the "second vote."
Dark blue = CSU (conservative party), its outlines are identical to Bavaria because this party only runs there and, this time around, won 100% of the second votes.
Cyan = AfD, far right-wing party. Its outlines are nearly identical to the borders of the former GDR.
Gray = CDU, CSU's sister party, making up for most of the remainder.
Increasingly so most western countries are getting fractures by the Russian and Chinese propaganda apparatus. Ask any rural/working class western european these days and whatever rhetoric they are primed to regurgitate to you is not dissimilar to what you’d get from a similar american: people who aren’t white are destroying the country they claim, they claim they should be more insular and less tied to the global stage, and they are trusting charlatans who speak to these bigoted positions without ever actually reading their policy positions that solely benefit the oligarch class in that country.
You mean (almost) a quarter of the population--only 47% of Republicans actually support funding Ukraine less [1]. There are plenty on both sides that disapprove of the foreign policy decisions of the current administration.
I've seen these "people in party x categorically do y" comments a whole lot more recently, and it really feels like a net negative to political discourse. Based on the source I pointed to earlier, there seems to be a plurality of support for at least continuing aid to Ukraine, with only 30% believing we're sending too much. Us vs them mentality won't help people recognize and voice disapproval of decisions within their own party that they don't agree with; we need to concede that people may vote a candidate for a narrow set of reasons (thanks to the two-party system) and have political discourse that encourages disagreeing with certain of your own party's views.
That data is outdated. That support has eroded since then, and will continue to erode now that Trump has stopped equivocating (lying) about his position on Ukraine.
Hate to break it to you, but people in the GOP will support anything Trump tells them to. The right wing political ecosystem is a closed system and it’s driven from the top down, and they’ll believe anything they’re told, so long as the entire ecosystem is reinforcing it. They spent 60 years building this system; it works really well now. And it’s the reason the country is now being dismantled, and the reason there’s nothing anyone can do about it. This system was the cracks in the foundation and Trump was the nitroglycerin.
There is nothing like this on the Democratic side of the fence. There’s no centralization of opinion, and there’s no media ecosystem whatsoever. The so-called “mainstream media” is now all owned by right-wing or at best center-right billionaires, so Democrats can’t actually push a message even if they could get it together, because they don’t have any microphones.
There were attempts at a Democratic media ecosystem, all of them sabotaged by centrists who didn’t want progressives to gain power. Because “better things aren’t possible” wasn’t a winning message and people on both sides of the political fence generally prefer progressive policies (until you associated them with the Democrats, then GOP support plunges.) But it would threaten people like Nancy Pelosi whose power and personal fortune derive from doing massive favors for defense contractors.
There is a huge centralization of opinion among democrats. They all made tiktoks last week reading from the same exact script. If anything they would hugely benefit from a diversity of opinion.
Most of politic seems to be about negotiating to keep a third of the population away from power. Because once they get in power they will trash almost anything in their path
No, that's not it. I'm writing this from rural America in deep Trump territory, and people here are already struggling and have been for years. From their perspective they've been left out of the benefits of the global economy—the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans.
They're almost certainly wrong about the medicine, but their diagnosis isn't far off: globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns.
Edit: Downvoting people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time. You won't win elections by fighting a straw man invented by your echo chamber.
Saw an interesting article on zero-sum thinking as contingent on the idea that the pie stays fixed, thus ruling out the possibility of "lose a little now, but the pie grows overall so your share grows more to compensate" (the basis for friendly trade relations, basically).
What I realized was that, for people who've been "left out of the benefits of the global economy", that picture makes total sense--the pie didn't grow, and in fact probably shrank for them. Thus, zero-sum thinking makes perfect rational sense. It's an accurate worldview, and anyone trumpeting "the pie will grow, you just need to give up a little more (in increased taxes or jobs shipped elsewhere)" in spite of the evidence that IT HASN'T, must be either a fool or outright lying to them.
Anyways, for the first time I felt myself understanding a little bit how these voters may feel.
It's actually a bit worse than that, from their perspective. What if they see it as someone telling them "sure, the pie will shrink for you, but for me and mine it will grow and I'll get a bigger share of it and you should take one for the team so I can prosper"...
Who would go for that? If it were merely about the pie shrinking, maybe that's just inevitable, and reasonable people would have to concede that it must shrink. They feel as if there is an element of fraud in the proposals that are made. Rather than miscalculation, rather than misfortune.
Their pie shrunk, because they have nothing of value to offer. And instead of buckling down and figuring out how to provide value and making things better for themselves, they have decided to ruin everything for everyone (themselves included!) Coal mining is dying, and it isn’t coming back, not because of some liberal agenda, but because renewable energy is a better business model. Car manufacturing has been automated and/or shipped overseas, because no one wants pay a premium for a shitty car, just because it was made by Americans.
But, instead of focusing on spinning up solar panel production factories or cutting edge automation in automobile manufacturing or funding world class universities to reskill people in things the modern world needs, they’d rather double down on their protectionist agenda while blaming the liberals, despite it being 100% their own fault. Fucking over the liberals might make them feel smug, but the conservative position is worse, because now there isn’t the remote possibility that they can get government funding for all these “socialist agenda items”, never mind that it would actually help them.
I’m not saying you’re defending their position, but I am saying that they need to get over themselves, because that’s the only way things get better for them. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying things don’t suck for them. I’m sorry for them that life is hard, and things change. It would certainly be nice if we could just do the things we’re used to and like forever without needing to adapt. But shit changes, and being mean to trans people or whatever just isn’t going to make their lives better, it’s only going to make every one else’s worse too. We rely on each other. We have no choice not to. So instead of being antisocial, they need to grow up and join the rest of us in the society we’re trying to have.
>Their pie shrunk, because they have nothing of value to offer.
They were a member of a club, and that club was rich and they deserved to enjoy the results of that. But then other people tricked them into letting a bunch of other people in the club, and selling off the club's assets at the same time, until their share was diluted to nothing. Then the same people who pulled this trick come to them and say "you have nothing of value, you deserve to starve". And some of those people pretend to be the other side "just implement marxism, so you can have your fair share of nearly nothing".
>or funding world class universities to reskill people in things the modern world needs,
Those universities have nothing to do with that. Go talk to those people, they don't want to "become vocational schools". Not when there's so much grift money to be made bringing in foreigners on student visas.
>but I am saying that they need to get over themselves, because that’s the only way things get better for them.
Nothing gets better from here on out. This is terminal decline, and the two (or more factions) who are at war here couldn't even stop it if they cooperated for some reason.
>I’m sorry for them that life is hard,
Not really. But even if you could shed a genuine tear for them, I think it's going to be short-lived when you discover that you're in much the same boat as they.
>and join the rest of us in the society we’re trying to have.
The society you're trying to have is dying. The first rule of societies is that they absolutely must make more generations of people who will then (and soon) become that society. The society you're trying to have thought you could all upload your brains into robot bodies or something and forgot that. And now it's dying, and nothing can save it. These people aren't trying to "be mean to trans people", they were hoping the kindergarten teacher wouldn't groom them into becoming infertile. They were hoping for grandchildren, against all odds.
Though it's (a) smaller share of GDP compared to the 'good old days' of the 1950-60s, and (b) does not need as many workers because of automation. This is true in a lot of industries: various seaports have never imported/exports more goods, but have fewer dockworkers than decades ago because of containerization and giant cranes.
Though one problem is of 'concentrated loss': if a town/area was dependent on one factory (or industry), then it could be especially heavily hit because of that single point of failure.
And so… they vote for the cheaper goods and killing their towns more?
> the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time.
The Democratic platform has been around providing succour and training to rural areas for several election cycles, Clinton’s campaign included 30 billions in infrastructure, training, and redevelopment, as well as healthcare and pension safeguard for coal counties.
And how has that been working out for those communities? Democrats have been in office for 5 of the last 9 administrations. Wealth inequality is as high as ever during that time period. Whether it’s because their platform isn’t actually meant to benefit them, or because of incompetence by the party in implementing it, Democrats haven’t proven to be any better to them than Republicans.
How is it benefited these communities? They can get health insurance now, and Biden kicked off a manufacturing boom (as long as DOGE doesn't kill it). Sure, that's not enough to immediately fix everything, but it's steps in the right direction.
The Democratic platform has been particularly tone deaf and ineffective for rural areas dependent on resource extraction industries. Federal grants won't fix the fundamental economic problems. When Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden told unemployed coal miners to learn how to code that didn't go over very well.
> Federal grants won't fix the fundamental economic problems.
The economic problems are that once a location reliant on extractive industries gets too expensive (and / or gets automated leading to orders of magnitude cuts to the necessary workforce) it's not coming back, the companies either fold or leave. Europe has coal countries which folded a century ago. Once your coal is too far to be cheaply extractible, even if new tech made extracting it viable once again it almost certainly would not need anywhere near the same level of crewing. And reactivating an old mine is probably not worth the cost over upgrading mines which are still active.
So your only "fixes" are to flee the area or move to a new industry. And to do the latter, you need a way to kickstart the change. That's the goal of federal grants.
The recovery of extractive areas is difficult, and may not even be possible if too dependent. And it certainly does not happen by clinging to the extractive industry which left you behind.
Don't you see how that platform is more patronizing than "I'll bring the jobs back home"? It's far more appealing to hear that your jobs were taken by cheap Chinese labor than to hear that your skills are out of date and you need training.
It doesn't actually matter in this case who is right—as I said, they're wrong about the medicine—what matters is who understands the human beings who vote better. And Trump understood these people better than any member of the establishment in either party, which is why he was able to hijack one and defeat the other.
Inventing stories about how half the country just wants the other half to hurt won't help win the midterms and the next presidency. We have to get past that and actually look at what Trump voters truly believe, then speak to them as real people, not strawmen.
I may be old fashioned, but it actually does matter who is right. Because reality is a thing.
Being a leader means understanding the reality of a situation, developing a strategy, and understanding where people are so you can get them on board and all work together to improve things.
It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.
It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.
It does mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power to do whatever you wanted to do. Their prejudices are the real part of reality.
This is such an important point, and why I believe the Dems constantly "get owned".
Frankly, everyone has prejudices, some stronger than others, but the Dems made it part of their ethos that if you even acknowledge having some of these prejudices that you're a bigot. But their fatal flaw is the Dems convinced themselves that very few people harbor these beliefs.
Very real strategic case in point: I think it sucks that this is our current reality, but the American populace at large has now shown multiple times that they are not willing to elect a woman from the managerial class as President. It's not just Dems (e.g. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris) but Republican women have also been rejected multiple times (e.g. Nikki Haley, Carly Fiorina). I am not in any way saying being female is the only reason these candidates were rejected (indeed, I think one flaw on the Democratic side is that they pushed this "they just hate women" narrative too strongly), but in a ~50/50 electorate, a few percentage points makes all the difference.
So the problem for the Dems is they want to appeal to this "higher nature", but, again, as much as I may personally not like to believe this, I strongly think that if they put forth another woman at the top of the ticket in the near future that they will lose, again.
Before you can be a leader people have to follow you, and in democracies people have to vote for you. And the unfortunate reality is that reality doesn't matter for elections, only the perception of reality matters.
So if you want to be a leader, you have to start by understanding people and, yes, pandering to them. There's a reason why too many of our powerful politicians have been essentially indistinguishable from sociopaths.
Yes, the question is what end are they devoting their sociopathic skills toward? And isn’t it the most “patronizing” thing of all to believe that people are too stupid to see that when they vote?
So far Trump 2.0 has done exactly what he promised he would, and his supporters are quite happy. If his actions don't lead to the outcomes he promised that may change, as long as someone else who understands the needs can offer an alternative.
I think we did that experiment in November, and it doesn’t support your assertion that people suddenly turn into rational performance evaluators after the election (or in this case an entire first term).
In any case, this time around the likelihood is Trump will be long dead (of natural causes, I mean) before the impact of this election is realized. The change happening right now is generational in scale. The voters’ children will be reading this chapter in their history book and asking what on earth they were thinking.
> I may be old fashioned, but it actually does matter who is right. Because reality is a thing.
Is that a position you hold consistently? Is there anything you believe that you wouldn’t be swayed on when presented evidence to the contrary of your belief?
I ask, because there is an awful lot of mainstream Republican and (here’s the controversial bit) Democrat thought that simply has no basis in reality.
All humans do that. The question is, do you want elect someone who seems to be better at perceiving reality according to evidence than yourself, or worse?
Well, then you have to fall back on whether one of them is at least better at it than the other, and it’s hard to believe that would be a difficult decision at the moment.
Unless the election already has an obvious winner so your vote doesn’t matter, that’s just silly. Write an editorial if you’re unhappy with the choice, but don’t throw away your vote and just roll the dice as if you’re indifferent to the two alternatives. (And if you really were indifferent to the alternatives this time around, I don’t know what to say.)
I’ve been typing these comments on my phone. But, in any case, I don’t parse “democrat” as an epithet. You are looking for things to be offended about.
"I'll bring the jobs back home" seems vastly more patronizing to me. That's just telling people they're stuck with their lot and shouldn't try to improve their situation because daddy GOP will take care of them.
The reality is most people are stuck with their lot, and that’s the point. These people understand the reality a lot better than the people making promises of retraining.
>It's far more appealing to hear that your jobs were taken by cheap Chinese labor than to hear that your skills are out of date and you need training.
Training for what? What if our population of working age people is far larger than our economy's ability to absorb whatever sort of service worker you imagine they should be training to become? Given a fixed total population, there's only room for x masseuses or y graphic artists. If we have n unemployed people needing training, and that number is higher than x and y combined (for any sort of x and y), telling them to retrain doesn't solve their problem. Some are going to lose out. The truth of the matter is that by offshoring manufacturing, we created an economy where there is a surplus of ultimately unemployable people.
A message of training isn't just bullshit, it's transparent bullshit. Most people have an intuition that this is the case, after all. As for midterms, both the Republican and Democratic parties have a different strategy. They will simply import voters who will vote for them. H1Bs for the GOP, and the remainder of the naturalization pipeline for the Ds. It's slow, but they're willing to put in the longterm effort.
Training for construction and manufacturing jobs. A lot of HN users don't seem to realize this but the USA is re-industrializing at an accelerating rate as the globalized system breaks down. The electric grid is growing fast due to higher demand including generation, transmission, and storage. The chemicals and plastics industries are booming due to cheap natural gas from fracking. Ocean shipping routes are getting slower, more hazardous, and more expensive. China's labor cost advantage is eroding due to demographic collapse and horrendous central planning policies (the USA has its own challenges in those areas but overall we're in better shape).
Yes I too have read the Peter Zeihan worldview but let me present the alternative worldview just to provide another viewpoint: The Chinese are amazingly industrious and won't take this challenge lying down.
The Musk supporters feel that universal automation is coming fast and I bet the Chinese being as industrious as they are will seize upon that to make up for their demographic issues. They are already he world leaders at renewables and nuclear and regardless, their ability to ramp up carbon based fuel sources is second to none.
Meanwhile the US appears to have an okay demographic pyramid(especially compared to their peers) but birth rates are declining and all the ingredients to increasing birthrate are not in the upswing (good incomes, cheap real estate, stable governance). Now you are killing off the US's golden goose (immigration) it seems like you are repeating the mistakes of China.
>Training for construction and manufacturing jobs.
Hillary famously said "those jobs aren't coming back". I do not know if she was incorrect in that, but I suspect she might have been right. I don't see a viable path to that happening, and I've yet to hear anyone else describe such.
Again, it doesn't really matter if you like them or think they're mature in their attitudes and approach, they've now proven that you can't win elections without them. Figure out how to appeal to them or watch us descend into decades of Trumpism.
... but appealing to them would mean descending into decades of Trumpism, because that's what they want.
They don't want to be appealed to, nor do they intend to compromise. They want to tear down everything I value, burn it to the ground, piss on the ashes and put me up against the wall. I know this because they've told me precisely that, and have been telling me that for nearly a decade. They've been very vocal and clear about what they want, and it isn't to be understood, or to meet anyone halfway.
I'm tired of being told that I need to capitulate and surrender and understand why I deserve the bullet. Fuck that, and fuck them.
See, this is exactly why I felt the need to speak up. Trumpism isn't what they want, it's just the closest thing to what they want that's been offered. And if you let Trump be the only person who speaks to them for the next 10 years, you might actually find they they begin to believe that it is in fact the real thing.
The economic woes come first, and it's still not too late for a left-leaning populist to take charge of the Democrats and give the people what they need while protecting minorities and LGBT folks. The only way we get to the social justice disaster that people are predicting is if we all collectively throw up our hands and write off 50% of the voters as a lost cause.
The trouble with this argument is that if what they want is to keep the coal mines running, no one can give them that. If it’s a disqualifying event to tell them that fact and offer to help, then it seems like we’re on a dead-end road. The election goes to the people who lie about it to gain power and still do nothing about it, or make it worse.
E.g., the party who actually succeeded in doing something about health insurance just lost to the party who did everything in their power to stop it, and who immediately decided to decimate Medicaid when they took over. So you can give the people what they need and still get punished for it.
We've been hearing what they are asking for and what they are saying. The push back that Romney and McCain got from their own voters because they wouldn't attack Obama as a foreign Muslim. What will it take for people to believe that people who state "He's not hurting the people he's supposed to be hurting" actually want to hurt people. We don't want the same things with different paths to get there. We have fundamentally different values.
I like how Trump is not what they want only when there is a need to deflect the blame. But when someone needs to deflect blame from Trump, then he is doing exactly what his voters want.
And somehow, when left and democrats are doing something bad, left and democrats are to be blamed. And when conservatives or right do something bad ... left and democrats are to be blamed.
> The economic woes come first
No they do not. Trump does not make economy better, you know it, they know it, I know it. It is not about removing fraud or corruption, Trump is fraudster and they know it, you know it and Trump himself knows it.
It was a stream of lies and hate that won and people voted for. It has nothing to do with economic policies that could help these people or not. Pretending to yourself that some rational policy can counteract it is how you loose.
Trumpism is what they wanted. It's what they voted for. They made it their identity, religion and basis for their worldview.
Not one of them could name a single policy position Kamala Harris or Joe Biden had. Part of the reason for that is the dismal and pathetic ability of the Democrats to actually sell themselves, because they assumed just not being Trump would be enough. It should have been, but it wasn't, because Americans are the worst. But the other part is that Trumpists wouldn't have listened, nor would they have cared, regardless of what was offered. They were never going to listen to a "left-leaning populist." These people thought Hillary Clinton was a baby-eating Marxist. They set up a gallows on the Capitol. They saw the price of eggs was too high and the videogames were too woke and decided they wanted to watch the world burn. That's it.
I want social justice. I want UBI. I want socialized healthcare and education. I want a liberal, secular, social democratic society with robust labor laws, a boring and stable government, and a strong social safety net. I want to spend more of my tax dollars on infrastructure and fewer on murdering brown people for God and the almighty petrodollar. I want feminism and black liberation and gay and trans rights. I want land back. I want fully automated luxury space communism. I want science and scholarship. And a lot more Americans align with my views than the popular narrative would have you believe. We even won the popular vote in 2016, not that it matters. All of these things would help Trumpists more than Trump's own policies. Not that it matters. Hillary Clinton said a mean thing about them one time and the screaming in their head has never stopped. She was absolutely correct, though, and the right could have taken the chance to clean their own house instead of trauma-bonding with the worst elements in their ranks. Not that it matters.
But I can't have that. Obviously not from the Republicans, but neither from the Democrats. I can have whatever Snow Crash Handmaid's Tale cyberpunk dystopian nightmare the orange gibbon and his ketamine-tweaking puppetmaster cook up, and 20 years from now I guess can just die in a ditch of hunger and dysentery because JimmyDingleberry or whomever in Musk's cult of groyper fuckbois deleted Social Security and because vaccines were declared fake and gay in the Soyjak purge of 2030.
These are not rational people, and this is not a rational government. I'm not going to give them the dignity of pretending otherwise.
What you say meshes with my understanding. The crux is how do we even pull up from this? It has essentially been the Republican playbook for the past few decades - the politicians enact backdoored policies that make things even worse, while personally looting and maintaining support with identity politics. Trump's main differences are the lack of usual political decorum, the level to which he's doing it, and how much his actions are openly benefiting foreign powers.
The tough nut to crack is that it is impossible to talk with red tribe voters about any of this! You can sit there and listen, of course. But as soon as you say anything that still addresses their frustration and pain, but yet diverges from their overly-simplistic party chorus, you're now part of the "other" that is eagerly responsible for their problems and will just be reflexively argued with.
And the situation has gotten so bad that lighter touch individual-freedom-respecting solutions (that they could possibly agree with in theory) aren't likely to even work now. For example twenty years ago, stopping the profligate government spending and handouts to banks could have stopped rural economies from continuing to get hollowed out. Allowing deflation in consumer goods would have allowed main street to experience some of the gains from offshoring. Re-setting the definition of full time employment to 40 hours per household per week would have slowed down the financial grindstone.
Instead these days we're basically down to direct government stimulus to create new jobs - directly at odds with the medicine they think they need. Or even worse, completely uninspiring answers like UBI.
What's QED exactly? The comment I'm replying to is saying that
> It doesn't actually matter in this case who is right
because the only thing that's important is whose claim is attractive to the population being pandered to, and that
> I'll bring the jobs back home
is amazing despite being completely nonsensical.
And the're probably right, mind. A lot of the responses seem to agree, just couching it in nicer terms (if barely). I guess putting it in plain terms is not acceptable. As is usually the case.
I know I responded to you once already, but the other thing I wonder is if globalization is really the issue here. There's also an inherent productivity gap between densely and sparsely populated areas. Had industrial jobs not moved to China, they would have moved to the cities.
When people do build factories, which they still do, they build them in or around the cities, not in the country, despite having to pay more for land, labor, and regulatory compliance. If they do locate in the country, they choose a town that has a university and a hospital.
That's not really as true any more. The plastics and chemicals industry is growing rapidly in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and those factories tend to be sited based on easy access to natural gas supplies rather than proximity to cities.
There are committed bigots in the Republican voter base. They’re suburban and rural-rich.
The rural poor Republican voters largely are, at least hypothetically (if you can get through their media bubbles) reachable by the right economic message. They’re not in it for the racism or what have you. That’s the suburban republicans.
Oh you hit the nail on the head! I know these people! I live in their town! A lot of MAGA is not poor, they are actually upper middle class(If I recall correctly one of the Jan 6 people even arrived to do her revolt using a private jet? I might be misremembering that)
I can't ever understand why they have so much hate and bile in them? I'm guessing its just fear of losing what they do have? I don't really know.
Redneck has labor roots, people like Michael Moore explain this in his documentary Fahrenheit 11/9. People have forgotten this history. The term "redneck" has multiple origins, but one significant historical source comes from coal miners in West Virginia during the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. Union coal miners wore red bandanas around their necks as a symbol of solidarity and collective action during their struggle against mine owners who exploited their labor. This protest, known as the Battle of Blair Mountain, was one of the largest labor uprisings in U.S. history, and the red bandanas they wore earned them the nickname "rednecks."
This is happening in other countries as well. It is often the internal periphery (former GDR, rural France etc., poorer parts of the EU) that votes for anti-system parties out of bitterness.
The liberal elites are paying for their inability to keep the societal compact somewhat alive. If too many people don't have jobs and can't find a dentist, they will start a "voter disobedience".
Of course the second order effects will be huge, but it is, in a sense, necessary development. A democratic country has to be able to keep a majority of its people reasonably satisfied and well-off.
This seems to me more like simplistic attempt to quickly find the reason.
In my poorer corner of Europe we vote for these "anti-system" parties for more than decade. One could argue that they actually are the system. And somehow when in the US every other time "anti-system" sentiment gains the rule (often without popular majority) people see it as deep trend while when other side wins then no-one is saying that "people like globalists". Because I think that it is not really the cause in both cases.
I think it was already 20 years ago when a French sociologist whose name I have forgotten showed that the share of vote for the Front National clearly correlated with various negative economic variables, including "distance from the closest still functional railway station".
FYI I don't believe in "THE REASON" or "THE CAUSE" and I am wary of people who reduce complex issues such as voting patterns to one single root cause, but to deny that economic hardship is a significant factor in anti-system vote seems to be wishful thinking to me.
Show me a relatively rich neighbourhood or voting district (say, over 130 per cent of average national GDP) with above average anti-system vote share, anywhere in Europe. I don't think you will find it. People who have a lot to lose don't rock the boat.
That's a very very partial picture of it. There's a lot of hate about social change, people are terrified of trans people and that has been effectively turned into a culture war issue.
Also your economic story doesn't hold water. The Biden administration successfully placed tons of factories all over the country with tax incentives for clean energy, but those factories could never trumpet what they were doing because hate for Democrats and for Biden and for clean energy is stronger than any desire for jobs. Similarly the destruction of the CHIPS act and its unpopularity in rural areas also shows that the economic opportunity aspect is just an excuse for the cultural hate that has been worked up.
The best way to understand a Trump supporter that I have come to is a person that hates Democrats more than anything, and will do anything possible to bully them, including the economic destruction of the country. I have a lot of family like this, and for years I thought they were just joking or exaggerating about their hate, but the past year has shown me that they were earnest. It's not the 1990s anymore, this is a visceral culture war above all else.
For no reason. Trans people aren't doing anything but trying to live their lives but the concept of being trans disrupts their view of the world. People fear what they don't understand and because they don't understand the real reasons for their struggles, everything they don't understand can be conflated by a confident liar saying they are related.
Possibly the most succinct summary has been sitting in pop culture for a quarter century but how it could apply to real life never clicked with most people: "Fear is the path to the dark side"
> The Biden administration successfully placed tons of factories all over the country with tax incentives for clean energy, but those factories could never trumpet what they were doing because hate for Democrats and for Biden and for clean energy is stronger than any desire for jobs
Nothing has changed here. It's doesn't matter what they've claimed they're doing, there are still no jobs here and working class Americans feel abandoned.
The vast majority of Trump voters around here voted for him because of the economy. The trans stuff was seen as evidence that the Democrats were so wrapped up in first world problems held by a tiny minority that they didn't even notice that the majority of the country was actively struggling to make ends meet. It's not about the trans people, it's about the narrative that Trump shaped about how that related to these people's economic lives.
IMO - the trans stuff feels like a moral panic, like on the same level as the Satanic Panic of the 80's - or the violence in video games panic, or any number of other things - I'm just waiting for the storm to blow over.
All of this is made much worse by social media too, which fans the flames hotter than it ever could have been before.
I'm not American, but the issue I saw time and time again from Americans getting interviewed by various news organizations was inflation, specifically food prices. So many people said that food was cheaper when Trump was president, so they want him and his food prices back. This is of course totally disregarding that the rest of the world also had massive inflation, and most of it comes from increased oil prices because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and governments printing money to use for Covid stimulus. The tariffs probably didn't help either, but I don't know how many of those Biden kept so I don't know if any side can be blamed there. I doubt all these new tariffs will help though.
I actually saw a couple people saying that they've received a check from Trump during Covid, and mentioned that as a clear reason to vote for him. I thought it sounded dumb when I saw that he insisted on having his name on the stimulus checks, but apparently it worked. I also saw some people, southern women and big city black men, saying that they definitely didn't want a female president. That was probably part of why Hillary lost, and making the same play this time wasn't very wise from the democrats, although I would probably blame Biden for not dropping out earlier and leaving them very little choice.
Maybe its more relative prices have gone up. Europeans were already used to paying more so paying even more is part of the norm. However things have been really cheap in the US for a long time. Taking the inflation as a whole(ie. not just looking at egg prices) this is likely the beginning of a long term permanent inflation that is coming due to things like China possibly aging out of manufacturing and the replacements being more expensive. People think they can turn back the clock so they try. Eventually they will be forced to get used to the new reality.
In the last 30 years, which other nominee for president by one of the two parties that matter has made addressing the struggles of working class America the center of their platform?
No, they're the byproduct of a failed educational system and culture of unearned entitlement. They expect others to save them from drug addiction while doing every possible to prevent help. And they only have this power because of the Senate represents land instead of people.
I applaud you for trying, but HN doesn't want reason or understanding w.r.t trump or his voters. Way easier to label everyone/everything as fascist nazis and stick your head in the sand.
Thanks. I know. I'm here every few weeks with a fresh attempt. It went over better before the inauguration, but now that Trump is actually implementing the policies that he campaigned on it's a bit harder for people to stomach the idea that his voters are anything other than orcs.
I'll probably give it a rest here for a few more weeks.
Nah, there are plenty of us here, we've just mostly gone underground in the face of the mindless hate and anger that's been dominant the last month or two. Echo chambers are self-reinforcing that way.
>No, that's not it. I'm writing this from rural America in deep Trump territory, and people here are already struggling and have been for years. From their perspective they've been left out of the benefits of the global economy—the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans.
But they haven't, they're just completely uninformed about what they're getting. If you think ANY of the rural farming communities could continue to exist without significant federal subsidies, you're crazy.
Ask a farmer whether globalization has helped him or not the next time China retaliates to a tarriff by refusing to import any US soybeans and you'll quickly discover that it has absolutely helped them.
Globalization is less the cause of their issue, it's deregulation. Consolidation of manufacturing has killed plants in those small towns. Consolidation of groceries[1] has made it impossible for small-town grocery stores to survive on their own. Both can be traced back to Reaganomics.
Are the Democrats at fault for not attempting to reverse any of that? Absolutely, but the answer isn't: we need someone who wants even more consolidation and to kill all international relations.
Grew up in the midwest and still have a lot of ties there. You left out the absolutely gargantuan amount of right wing crazy propaganda that has all of them hating democrats and "The Left" and "socialists" to death. The most religious literally believe the Democrats are evil and want to destroy America. They've been harping on that for 40 years.
There are always some fraction of nutjobs in any coalition, but in my part of the Midwest that is a tiny fraction of the voters. Most are just tired of change and tired of feeling left behind. To the extent that they're riled up by that rhetoric it's because it gives them a place to put their economic frustrations.
In my experience, the average Trump voter is far more accepting than the average leftist, who will refuse to even engage with you if you think differently than they do.
This has not been my experience growing up in a rural America. Sure leftists might try to cancel you online.
But I got my face punched multiple times for not preforming masculinity in a way that they found acceptable or for standing up for someone smaller and weaker.
How big a role did race and religion play? I'm genuinely curious because the mainstream media won't talk about it, perhaps out of a sense of political correctness. But it seems odd that they're framing the election as a referendum on economics, when the Trump campaign didn't even float a coherent economic agenda.
As I mentioned in another thread, the Republicans switched from "the immigrants are stealing your jobs" to "the immigrants are stealing your cats."
It played a role in giving people an outlet to attach their anger to, the same as it did in 1930s Germany. But the economics came first and are still dominant in the majority of Trump voters I speak with. The vocal minority pushing the racism and anti-LGBT stuff are not representative.
It's like you and I are reading from the same book! - If I just go off what I see online, most of the loudest anti-trans voices, and most of the racists, I'm more or less convinced have never met or gotten to know any trans people or any black people. It's a certain amount of willful ignorance on their part.
I don't think it's plausible, on the face of it, that the party would risk transparently directing the full force of its campaign message to an insignificant fringe. Maybe they know the composition of their voting base better than we, who are inclined to only see the best in people, do.
All my employees are Trump supporters and Trump got 75% of the vote in my county.
They want the 70s-80s economy back, but they don't want to support unions.
They think they deserve to receive government benefits. But others are moochers, and they don't deserve it.
They think Trump is deporting criminal / drug cartel illegal immigrants.
My state is red (State houses & governor have been conservatives for the last 30 years). Yet they blame all the issues on democrates. When my state signed the carry law, they thought Biden was the one who signed the law.
If you are in the deep trump territory, listen to conservative/religious radio stations. You will know how much hate they are spreading against liberal, trans, gays, and immigrants.
> If you are in the deep trump territory, listen to conservative/religious radio stations. You will know how much hate they are spreading against liberal, trans, gays, and immigrants.
You have to distinguish between the rhetoric being spread to hijack the economic woes and the actual root of the problem. All that stuff is designed to give people an outlet for their very real economic frustrations. It's not deep seated (yet), it's a tool to exploit them. The only reason why it's working is because these people have been ignored for too long by the establishment in both parties, and it's not too late to respond and adapt.
But what is Trump saying/doing that's addressing their concerns? Cutting taxes for the rich? Tariffs? Renaming the Gulf of Mexico? Killing trans/gay rights?
The closest is his anti immigrant rhetoric but my guess is that this will largely hurt farmers (although maybe they know better than I do).
> Downvoting people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time. You won't win elections by fighting a straw man invented by your echo chamber.
Living in Trump country doesn’t give you any extra credibility. I also live in “Trump Country” and say that the real reason is because they’re all goofs that fell into a personality cult due to the decline of US education and this country’s obsession with celebrity. Who is correct?
> people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices
We’ve been falling over ourselves trying to understand these poor misunderstood Trump voters for nearly 10 years now. We’ve all heard these rationalizations many times before.
That's what populists do, everywhere including Europe - they take real issue and low-income & low-education folks (usually big overlap), tell then how they were wronged, play on their emotions, dumb down things to us-vs-them yada yada.
But they never ever deliver any real solution. Never. What trump solved in first term? No wall, he was joke of the world for that. No middle east peace - fuck, he made the invasion to Israel by giving Jerusalem official israeli status. Palestinians lost all hope at that point (I know its way more complex than that, I know, but this was the trigger point to go full mental like a cornered animal). Afghanistan withdrawal? Thats his contracts with taliban which made US look so weak they were shooting ducks as you guys and rest of west literally ran away for your life.
To make any successful long term massive changes, you need a steady leadership. trump is the opposite due to his mental & childhood issues, heck he is the epitome of instability. And so he drags whole world into same instability, changing global markets from bullish to bearish within a week, losing literally all friends and allies, globally. No, puttin' ain't your friend and never will be, he is a murderous sociopathic p.o.s. till his last breath.
If simpler folks refuse to see all this and much more and connect those few dots, your idea of babysitting them and hald-holding in ever changing environment is laughable. Even in Europe you guys consider semi-communist we don't do that, we can't do that, its idiotic. This problem is not unique to US in any way and solution ain't what he wants to do. But its so nice to hear all that crap, "I will fix your woes", "the others are to blame for all your issues" and so on. Full on emotions, 0 rationality. Folks, even societies work like that, but get ready China will overtake you sooner than you would like.
I kept thinking he is just a russian agent brainwashed in 80s during his visit to moscow (maybe deep hypnosis or something else), but it seems more and more he is doing massive favors to China actually, since russia is already insignificant globally. I don't mean some pesky tariffs, I mean whole world will realign around China, and he is giving it all to them for free. Bravo.
How much is also the hate on LGBTQ and woke people? Just curious, I see in Romaia the rise of such fascist group that suck on Putin because he also wants the woke and LGBTQ dead and he is a Christian men that kills the assassinated the traitors in the name of God.
The culture war stuff FOLLOWS from economic depression. Once someone is in the financial dumps, they're already angry, and it's easy to redirect that anger to meaningless culture war stuff.
The anti-woke grassroots rhetoric around here is more about how much of a waste of time it is when they should be focused on issues that matter to people's livelihood. It's not hate on LGBTQ so much as irritation that something that doesn't seem to matter (to them) is given so much emphasis while the working class struggles.
It’s… largely being given emphasis by ‘their’ side, though? Which side of the political divide spends all their time going on about trans people? I mean, it’s very much the right.
But is it given so much importance by the politicians?
The reason I ask is that here in Romania the issue is completly fabircated by the social media and amplified by the algorithm. What I mean there was not a single law pro LGBTQ passed in Romania, the educational system is not teaching children about LGBTQ, there are no changes in schools or other places to unixes bathrooms, no forced or assisted transitioning programs.
It is just media with conspiracies like the COVID vaccines makes you gay, 5G makes you gay, Bruxelles wants to make your children gay, Soros wants to make the children gay. There are also staged video with transexuals making a circus and shared on TikTok. So now we have a lot of idiots that actually thinks that we need to surrender to Putin so he can kill the traitors and the gays.
The saddest part is that Biden's infrastructure, manufacturing, and chips work would benefit them a ton. They cannot see cause and effect, and in the end they will get hurt the most.
It's odd to me that you start your post with "No, that's not it", because I think that both your post and the one you are responding to are exactly correct.
You state "the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans. ...globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns."
I 100% agree with that. But I think that many folks are so enthralled with Trump because he was the first politician to really acknowledge this simmering rage, give it legitimacy, and say that it's all those woke, city-dwelling liberals fault. The GP comment says "The best explanation I've heard is that this (almost) half of the US population doesn't care if it hurts a bit, as long as it hurts the other half of the US population more", but that fits perfectly in with your explanation as well. A lot of Trump supporters are pissed as hell about the hollowing out of their communities, and they're looking to bring retribution for those they blame for their downfall (or the ones Trump has convinced them are responsible for their downfall). Heck, Trump even said it loudly and proudly, "I am your retribution."
It doesn't matter that Republicans are slightly more to blame then Democrats in the thinning out of rural places - the folks who live there, IMO, see both parties as the same thing.
They remember how their towns were when they were young, they had a bustling locally owned and operated main street full of commercial activity, they also often had a factory, or mill which provided good jobs too.
Some of the parallel commenters here only think rural = farming, and thats not true. If you look at the Carolinas for example, there were textile and lumber mills - farming there is still more or less as healthy as its every been - but all of those other sources of employment which brought money in from outside of the community are gone.
This story repeats itself in a bunch of places, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, and across the greater west too.
This rot started well before Reagan though - it's something I've called "the 1971 problem". If you go on a road trip across rural America, you'll rarely see a locally funded building (aka, not a chain store), built after 1971-3 - with the notable exception to this being places with a military base, college, or some other government facility - and I think the causes are multiple here, post vietnam drawdown of forces, détente, the 1973 oil crisis, stagflation, the Nixon shock, then later the so-called peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war.
Globalization thru the 80's-90's just made all of these issues worse, and hollowed out manufacturing too - now all of this this effected cities too, to some extent, but as you mention, cities got benefits of globalization - more information economy jobs, greater wealth flowing in from the financialization of everything, which while didnt replace the jobs lost in manufacturing, did replace the wealth generated by it. (there are even more things I've not really touched on - like the steady decrease in local ownership of businesses, and the corresponding civic rot that kicks in when this happens)
There is another issue I also want to touch on here - "jobs for regular people" - for a significant portion of the population, the best job they can hope for is a decent factory job, a job in the trades - or more likely today, a not so great service job. One of the reasons I want to onshore manufacturing is that we need those higher quality jobs to ensure the benefits of our economy are shared more broadly.
I'm a proponent of tariffs as a way to solve this - not what Trump is doing which are penalty tariffs - but what I've called cost adjustment tariffs - tariffs that adjust the price of imported manufactured goods to the same level as if they were made here, where you price in labor differences overall regulatory burden, environmental and climate rules, and other factors - on a fundamental level, I feel it is immoral to export all the externalities from manufacturing to another country (pollution being the primary one I'm thinking of).
While tariffs, even at some low level may result in slower GDP growth. People cannot eat or pay their rent with GDP - a more ideal answer (one I support) is UBI, but UBI doesn't appear to politically possible - and there is also value in being able to do work where you can see the fruits of your labor (both in the physical good you've made - and the pay check you get at the end of the week), for good or for bad, it gives you self worth and a feeling of purpose too.
So I get why rural voters vote for Trump, and its because my side has failed to understand the economic pain that anyplace that isn't a tier 1/2/3 city has experienced over the last 50 years - and what their needs are for the future. In the end, I think Trump will fail them, and probably make everything else worse - but he's the horse that the American people who could be bothered to show up to vote picked (I'll note much to my consternation, that 3m less people voted in 2024 vs 2020).
>(I'll note much to my consternation, that 3m less people voted in 2024 vs 2020).
I wonder how much of that is due to the media and the polls claiming that Kamala had this in the bag? The same way that they claimed Hillary had it in the bag? This would cause people to stay home no?
Also there have been reports of accelerated efforts to disenfranchise voters by challenging their registration and not telling them until election day when they go to vote. A combination of these two things could have swung the election.
> It doesn't matter that Republicans are slightly more to blame then Democrats in the thinning out of rural places - the folks who live there, IMO, see both parties as the same thing.
Yes, and they're very aware that Trump is not a Republican in the traditional sense. It doesn't matter to them which banner he hijacked, they know he's different.
I'm more skeptical of that statement - sure, I think some are aware.
Some are just blind partisans, otherwise those places wouldn't have been voting for team red for the last 35 years or so.
There is also the paradox of the low information voter too, which seemed to have broken for Trump 2:1 - that does concern me some.
Trump also has a huge benefit with low information voters, he spews noise all the time which the news media covers with baited breath.
I call it the "Trump says alot of things" problem - it allowed people to paint whatever they wanted him to be onto him by essentially cherry picking the various things he's said to make up their own collage view of whatever they wanted him to be.
Isn’t that wanting your cake and eating it too? Conservativism rejects progress and changes by definition, so these people purposefully didn’t adapt to changes since the rust belt occurred, and NOW they are so worse off and want blood in the water.
What changes should the Rust Belt have made that would have prevented the gutting of their communities when financiers and board rooms decided to ship their livelihoods to third world countries?
There isn’t a “progress” switch to turn on. The current state of the Rust Belt isn’t because they are full of knuckle dragging idiots inferior to the coasts. It’s because they were dealt the economic equivalent of a traumatic brain injury, and have spent decades trying to recover. Meanwhile, the areas of the country that inflicted this injury on them are now trying to convince everyone that it was their own fault.
I’m as disgusted by Trump as anyone, and would never vote for him. But I am from the Rust Belt and absolutely sympathize with the anger that would make someone want to burn the system down.
Half my family is from the south and I lived in Ohio for years. They could have stopped giving tithes to churches on every corner and giving away their land and resources at pennies to massive corporations that have no allegiance and invested in education and social programs for the long term instead or in addition. The Rust Belt and the South were WEALTHY economies don't ever forget it. You can see the remnants of that wealth in the slave quarters adjacent to every house in certain neighborhoods, the massive plantations, the rusting industrial areas. They HAD money to invest in the past for securing a better future.
I don't necessarily agree with Bernie Sanders about the medicine either, but his diagnosis is correct: the Democratic Party abandoned middle America and the working class, so they abandoned it.
America decided in the 1970s to liquidate its interior and its manufacturing base to make Wall Street rich from the labor arbitrage trade, and did so with the full throated support of both parties.
I live in the outer suburbs of a middle American city. The idea that all Trump supporters are cult members is vastly overblown. There is some of that, but much of his support is exasperation. Rural and working class Americans have nothing to lose and nowhere to go but down. The choice is to vote for Trump or keep watching everyone commit suicide with fentanyl. They know Trump might be full of shit or might not have any real solutions, but they also know Democrats and mainstream Republicans will continue to sell them out.
It's also important to understand that for the most part working class and small town Americans don't want welfare, which is the only thing the Democratic Party (possibly, maybe) offers them. They want jobs. They want to feel useful, to do useful things. Unless you are disabled, accepting welfare is disgraceful. I remember my mom (a lifelong Democrat BTW who hates Trump) feeling humiliated to use food stamps for a brief period when I was a kid. "These are for people who really need them. I don't need them." She worked as hard as she could to get off them. Americans want to do things.
MAGA is as much anti-traditional-Republican as it is anti-Democrat. In fact I know a few Trump voters whose hatred for the likes of Bush II and the Cheneys is greater than for Democrats. It's a third political party that has taken over the corpse of the Republican party that Bush II destroyed.
I didn't vote for Trump because I don't think he actually cares either, and I loathe the man in general. I also have two daughters, and his MAGA movement is full of people who cheer for pro-rape influencers like Andrew Tate or want to LARP the Handmaid's Tale. I can't vote for a movement that is openly allied with such people. Their performative scapegoating of LGBTQ people is gross too, and then there's the crazy autocrat ideologies lurking at the margins. Even if MAGA has some policy points I agree with, the movement is just too intellectually batty and personally disgusting to support.
I see nobody on the US political stage that I actually like. I voted for Harris as a "holding pattern" vote in the hope that something better will appear in the future. It's better to stay with the bad option than to go for obviously worse options. If you look around the world "just shaking things up" with nothing better waiting in the wings usually results in a bad outcome. Successful major political shifts or revolutions require a superior alternative with better ideas.
Do you think they'll be able to observe that prices are higher and their lives are even harder? My greatest concern is that the disaffected voters will be persuaded to go on a "long march," for some sort of "five year plan," that prevents them from reacting to the extreme negative effects.
They're not as dumb as you think. They know tariffs will raise prices. What they think is that tariffs may repatriate manufacturing, leading to more and better jobs and higher wages. Lower prices have resulted from outsourcing, which has resulted in their unemployment and under-employment.
They had a different reaction to price increases under Biden because those were not resulting from pro-American-worker trade policies, or at least were not perceived as such. In reality Biden was doing some things to try to repatriate manufacturing, but these policies were badly communicated if they were telegraphed at all, and they were not enough.
Constantly assuming these people are all just stupid isn't winning back any votes. To be fair: Republicans and MAGA spend a lot of time attacking straw man Democrats and liberals too.
BTW -- I see what they're thinking, but I suspect a lot of repatriated manufacturing will be so heavily automated it will not result in the mass employment gains they're hoping for.
Accepting price increases, agricultural failure and significant hardship because in five years someone might build a factory describes the five-year plan - the real one.
Sure. There are certain similarities between all authoritarian revolutionary movements with populist roots. MAGA shares commonalities with European fascism but also with Leninism and Maoism.
The basic template here is that the people (populism) become so discontented that they see no salvation in any of the existing elites or political movements, so they essentially appoint a dictator or an oligarchy to sweep it all aside in favor of <insert magical thing that will fix all their problems>. The level of naked authoritarianism and brutality varies between these movements -- some are more gloves-on and some more gloves-off -- but they all have an ultimately authoritarian character. The whole thing nearly always backfires into some form of "meet the new boss, worse than the old boss."
>> Except, that's the exact same outcome you get even if you vote for Trump, unless there's something I'm not seeing?
I think you are correct.
Trump promised change and had "concepts of a plan".
Democrats promised more of the same, and then realized that that was unpopular and then threw together a plan that they said would work.
The reality now is that Trump's promised change may or may not help those voters economically, but the accompanying geopolitical disruptions may be worse.
insightful -- you should know that California Senator Dianne Feinstein and husband Richard Blum, personally made a billion dollars from creating the China -> USA cheap goods conveyor belt. Blum also owned oil transportation business. This occurred over the decades between the Oil Shock 70's and dot-com 90s. The trade changes are still playing out.
The way I look at Trump/MAGA is they took over an ineffective, sclerotic Republican party that spent 40 years talking about “family values” while selling off the productive base of the country to globalization and letting rural America rot. The tea-party movement of the late aughts was their last chance to avoid being decapitated. They failed. The Republican party has been hollowed out and is simply not the same entity it was 10 years ago. It has been taken over by a very angry insurgent force.
As I see, the Democrat Party is where the Republicans were in 08/09. They have, perhaps, a few more years of whatever it is they are doing before they similarly get taken over.
Best case scenario: we end up with a new political party (or two) that represent the more sane interests of the old guard and of the population as a whole. Worst case scenario: we end up with two absolutely insane zombie versions of our two legacy political parties fighting for control of the nation.
At least we don’t have more guns than people and a bunch of nukes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I did read "Hillbilly Elegy" and come from a rust-belt city with rural family.
I understand your perspective, but I don't think that explains most of Trump's actions. The (very valid!) critique of globalist profiteering you shared has been boiled down into something beyond economics and into tribalism.
I blame decades of right-wing media dominance on cable TV and rural radio.
There’s certainly no shortage of MAGA folk whose primary motivations are “owning the libs”. But I think there’s plenty of people who just truly believed in the nonsense Trump was selling.
Briefly, the parts of the map that voted for Trump are largely known as flyover country. To oversimplify things, the people in this area have been neglected and talked down to by some portion of the political apparatus as far back as they can remember.
In some cases, the vote for Trump wasn't meant to be anything more than punitive. To get a rise out of the politically aligned groups that can afford to fly over and - literally - look down on.
Farm subsidies and other special programs have been flowing to "flyover country" at an enhanced rate for almost a century (for about as long as the government has done things like that) as a result of the constitutional rule that says each state gets two senators regardless of population. The trade war is presently creating an economic crisis for those farmers, who primarily sell their crops outside the US.
Flyover states versus costal states is too simplistic and inaccurate. A more accurate reduction is rural+suburban (isolated insular) communities versus urban (integrated diverse) communities.
Part of the reason many people consider those areas “flyovers” is that minorities, women, gays, nerds, really lots of people, can expect to get treated very badly in those areas.
Now, maybe there’s an obligation to turn the other cheek, reach out, and try to educate people in flyovers. But it is far too reductive to act like the blame points one way here and it’s just snobby elites who have abandoned these populations.
I think this is where "flyover" talk is so useless.
Look at Minneapolis, and Minnesota in general. Wealthy, hugely diverse, amazingly Red rural areas and unbelievably Blue urban areas. It's a lot like California, honestly.
I spend a lot of time in the “flyover” areas, and this is simply not true at all. Maybe it was long ago, but we are no longer living in that age. It seems like the media want to portray middle America as some kind of medieval redneck nightmare thunderdome, for reasons I cannot fathom.
I'm not even sure it was ever true. I think it's just become part of the folklore of urban leftists, potentially as a way to justify their lives even when nobody was demanding a justification.
I have visited. My long-haired male traveling companion got homophonic slurs yelled at him in the street twice in four days. I’m sure those yelling were trying to make a good life for their families by chasing undesirables out, and I suppose it worked.
> Part of the reason many people consider those areas “flyovers” is that minorities, women, gays, nerds, really lots of people, can expect to get treated very badly in those areas.
It's not all roses and butterflies but a blanket statement like "women/gays/nerds/minorities get treated very badly" in these areas is laughable and very "online"/detached from reality.
How? Trickle down has failed every time it’s been employed, most recently in Kansas. And as far as I can tell, massive tax cuts for the donor class is all we’re getting this budget cycle.
It’ll hurt the S&P500, sure. Far less clear how it’d benefit the working class, tho. Like, how does that work? You’d expect a decline in economic activity (ie fewer jobs, and lower or negative wage growth for what jobs do exist), and an increase in prices. That doesn’t help anyone much except _arguably_ the predatory super-rich (who can buy stuff up cheap), but even then it’s not a clear win for them either.
How do you see some sort of benefit for the working class? Has Trump, Musk, or literally anyone associated with this administration ever made any move towards that? Trump in particular is famous for not paying people.
Tariffs are an inefficiency that lowers profits and raises the cost of goods but they also create manufacturing jobs which benefit the working class. That's my mental model- I'm not an economist. I also strongly disagree with the tariffs on Canada and Mexico and almost all of the current policy decisions. There might be a method to the tariffs madness though is all that I'm saying.
This can kind of be the case with narrow, directed tariffs (protectionism of a vulnerable uncompetitive industry, for instance see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax), or in a developing country that has mostly primary industry (that is extractive industry, mining and that sort of thing). In a developed country, it’s a lot more complicated; a lot of that manufacturing probably depends on imported materials or parts (so tariffs hurt it from that direction) and a lot of the market is probably export (which tariffs also hit, for tariffs more or less inevitably lead to retaliatory tariffs).
And where you have heavy protectionism, the _consumer_ tends to suffer, as the protected industries have little incentive to make their products good or cheap. See British Leyland; for quite a while the British government attempted to keep it alive by heavily restricting the import of actually good cars. Spoiler: it did not work.
Say we put a tariff on socks. And Hanes opens a sock factory in the US. Is a few hundred sock jobs going to help the millions who aren’t making socks? Does working in the sock factory pay enough to buy computers and cars and other higher margin goods?
Generally speaking, for broad tariffs, the answer is “No”.
Tariffs could mean a few hundred sock jobs but also cotton jobs, nylon jobs, rubber jobs, dye jobs, etc.
All more expensive than importing but supports local economies. Again, I'm not an economist, and tariffs are not a panacea, but they are also not useless.
They’re useless when used as blunt instruments as we’re seeing today. Broad tariffs on raw materials and goods - the cost hurts the general public more than any benefit to the few.
There’s a place for tariffs. Protecting against countries that undercut us by skirting international labor or environmental laws is a decent example. Protecting a specific, narrow industry that has national defense implications could be another.
But against Canada and Mexico? GTFO. That’s nonsense that’s going to hurt the average consumer.
I agree with everything that you've said. I think you're attacking args I haven't made- im against almost all of the current admin's policies including the tariffs. I'm pretty much only pro tariffs on China
As an European with seizable(for me) position in SP500 etf, which I never inteneded to liquidate, am actually thinking to completely deinvest from US. Purely because of what Trump did and will do to Ukraine and because of his dismantling of postwar Atlantic security architecture
Here I was, thinking that the most self-sacrificing action an American well off enough to have retirement savings (no immediate tax on capital gains) could take would be to divest from all domestic stocks and funds and shift to international ones.
Might not turn out to be as self-sacrificing as I thought.
Since the Trump administration took over, Tesla shares and Musk’s wealth are up by hundreds of billions, tens of thousands of working class are fired, prices are up, tariffs are making imports more expensive, welfare help programs are cut, retaliatory tariffs are reducing exports.
How is your mental model literally backwards from reality?
It’s easy to prove that half is wrong as well because all the US’ (past) global friends are screaming at the US trying to save them from driving off the cliff. It’s one thing for the US to want to remake itself - gradual, cooperative plans to reduce engagement on the world stage over multiple years would have been something manageable.
Pulling the cord with such little respect will not be forgotten. The USD will be lucky to still be the reserve currency in 5-10 years time. The rest of the world is likely to sanction the US at this rate. It is violating all of its agreements in bad faith.
Practically speaking I think it requires a lot of will, momentum, and process to change this. The decision even if made soon would probably take a few years to complete.
Supplementing it may be faster (eg. adding Euro and/or Yuan) than outright replacing it, but it’s not my area of expertise. The timeframe was based on some light research.
And this will inflate away the debts tokenized in CCP-held US Treasuries. 4D chess! Russia did something similar in 1998 that sank the US hedge fund Long Term Capital Management.
What's truly eroding trust is the voting system. A system that places so much power in a single individual with complete immunity exposes its vulnerabilities-especially in a time when people can be manipulated so effectively. To be honest, I see the lack of justice as the biggest problem. If the highest courts in the U.S. are essentially political institutions, shaped by those in power rather than acting as neutral arbiters of justice, that seems absurd to me. It feels like you can basically do whatever you want. And the lifetime mandate? That's a joke. As a European, I'm sorry for shitting on Europeans. It's far from ideal here, but I'm finally starting to appreciate what we have. Let's hope this would not spread.
Lack of trust on voting system has been brewing for a while. The Democratic establishment has successfully and unsuccessfully tried to shoehorn choice candidates last few election cycles. While republican candidates have been questionable, there's no denying that they went with whoever the voters wanted.
Yea. I used word "complete" because when your last and absolute pillar of justice is political you can't expect nothing else than them behaving like politicians.
The main victim of this order is the US defense industry.
What Ukrainians need most are the low-cost drones made of commercial parts from Asia which have made it hard for the Russians to fire artillery and supply the front. To produce these drones, they need cash. The Europeans have mastered the art of sending cash to Ukrainian vendors that serve actual battlefront needs, and doing so under strict supervision to prevent fraud. Europe can fill the gap the Us is leaving in military aid if they spend their cash right.
For the last two years, I have supported a US non-profit sending non-lethal aid to Ukraine, my CB if it used for drone defense and EW.
Cheap is a technological frontier. If you operate on that frontier, you are able to trade less expensive pieces for more expensive pieces, pawns for queens. This is the cost-exchange ratio. All other things being equal, the country that best lowers the cost basis of its materiel will win a war of attrition; ie the other side exhausts its resources first.
The US does not operate on the frontier of cheap because of bad incentives, namely cost-plus procurement.
What about all the "liberals", including many on this site, that not only bought into but actively promoted the cult of personality around Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX? Musk has always been a charlatan, and the majority of this very site bought into it.
This is not about whataboutism. Musk has been supported by many when he shouldn't have been. It was clear from the beginning. Has every Tesla owner or investor divested? No.
To be perfectly clear, I am worlds away from today's extremist Republicans and centrist Democrats.
My point is that cult of personality led here, and many on this site ("the rest of us"), even when presented with evidence, ignored their part in it when it came to Musk. It's the same cult of personality lamented in the comment I replied to. Both brought us to here.
> I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests
> I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests
Sometimes people are more interested in inflicting pain to others than to improve their own situation.
If Taiwan didn’t give up on the US and start making alternative plans on Nov 7th, that was a huge mistake. The US has made it clear that not only is it abandoning traditional allies, it will likely side with any invading force that exercises the “might makes right” principle.
If the PRC should actually decide to invade, it is going to be extremely difficult to hold that off on their own for an extended period of time. Which means they need allies who can rapidly deploy a sufficiently large force to stabilise the situation.
But the only way to get there is with a naval force, and air supremacy would likely be critical to the outcome of that fight, which means you need someone with a large carrier fleet, and that is pretty much a pool of one.
Without US help, there is very little hope that Taiwan would not be overrun sooner or later. Their only real hope would be a nuclear weapons programme that would allow them to credibly threaten to nuke Beijing if invaded. But the PRC would never let it get that far and would make sure to strike before that could be completed.
Certainly ultra-secret nuclear program makes sense. Perhaps working with another country with development abroad so there is nowhere directly related for China to strike in Taiwan (the calculus for “we attacked a weapons development facility in Taiwan” is different from “we attacked Taiwan because they are participating in weapons development in the Philippines)
Probably also increased military and economic ties to South Korea and Australia, and an effort to build a NATO of the area, absent the US, perhaps under ASEAN. Or something new.
It’s a tough problem but it’s a real problem and I don’t see how Taiwan could ever go back to trusting the US to defend democracies facing invasion.
There is a trivial alternative that military strategists have been suggesting for decades. For a nation of 20+ M, having a reservist army of 1M would be feasible and make the island impossible to invade even if the rest of Earth would join forces to do that.
1) Trump might be alienating his traditional allies and cosying up to Russia, but he still apparently sees China as a problem or adversary.
2) Thinking purely transactionally, the US is very dependent on Tiawan due to TSMC. Most of the US' largest tech companies are investing heavily in AI hardware (TSMC chips) and/or rely directly on TSMC for their own supply chain. I have no idea whether Trump et al see it this way, or this would be enough to trigger the US to protect Tiawan, but transactionally, it's immeasurably more valuable to the US than Ukraine.
> 1) Trump might be alienating his traditional allies and cosying up to Russia, but he still apparently sees China as a problem or adversary.
That's not a guarantee at all. The only thing he's every been honest, consistent and truthful about is that nothing is sacred, everything's on sale, no values (economic, patriotic, environmental, political) will stand in the way of his own profit, there's always the willingness to make a deal and sell something (someone) off, and fuck the consequences, no matter how gigantic, embarrassing, and suicidally bad they are. Negative-sum deals are absolutely on the table as long as he comes out richer or more powerful.
China just needs to make a good offer and Taiwan's fucked when it comes to Trump's support.
Sure, but I'm imagining a situation where China ensures the ongoing operations of TSMC via negotation with TSMC and the Trump government, to the satisfaction of all parties, and then being 'allowed' to take Tiawan as a result. For example, they could allow TSMC to function as an American-run entity for a number of years, or offer US companies very friendly terms, or something similar.
This doesn't account for the actions of Tiawanese nationalists working in TSMC setting off the kill routine themselves, irrespective of the deal struck, but it's still an interesting scenario.
Don't listen to what politician say, watch what they do, to be fair his decisions were very anti-china, I mean, maybe it going to backfire, but it was anti-chine in it's principle
He’s too erratic to take any past behavior as evidence of the future. If he breaks promises to a bunch of allies, no other ally should feel safe because he hasn’t broken theirs yet.
All it would take for a pro-China pivot is the right leverage. Cash, blackmail, who knows. But it’s just a matter of whether the price is met, not whether the deal is available.
Certain political factions* in Taiwan should be worried.
The actual Taiwanese people are breathing a sigh of relief that they are increasingly avoiding the "primrose path" of Ukraine: Catastrophic death and destruction based on lies, marginally enriching foreign countries and a corrupt domestic elite.
The idea I think was that China would also rather not engage in a hot war with the US over it, and therefore would be content with the status quo (or at least content to wait for a favorable political climate in the US...).
USA had two military alliances of central importance, one with Germany, one with Japan.
The first is to keep Russia in check, the second China.
The rumours of a carve-up, spheres of influence, begin to resonate.
Problem is, you cannot run a country as if it were a business, because to do is to value influence and power above freedom, human dignity, and human suffering.
Japan’s constitution and postwar treaties with the United States constrain their ability to rearm and use military force. Those need to be amended and renegotiated in order for Japan to be an effective ally in the Asia-Pacific region. Japan’s been asking for a change in the status quo for years. Trump is signaling not only a willingness to encourage Japanese rearmament, but a willingness to sell it to the American people in terms of their own interests.
And frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if the same weren’t true of Europe as well. Ever since at least the Obama administration, the US has been begging Europe to increase their defense spending. Aside from Poland, none of them have done so. That might be changing now. Europe didn’t rearm when Obama (whom you actually liked) asked nicely. Getting to sneer at Trump and the United States is a much more effective permission structure. And then the next time we elect a Democrat, Western Europe will give him a Nobel peace prize and pretend the whole thing never happened, just like the last time.
> This means that no country will want to buy F16s.
This is just HNers being late to the party.
Back in the 1990s, the US blocked sale of F-16s to Indonesia due to human rights concerns (eventually worked out).[0] Thailand has F-16s but more recently switched procurement to Swedish Gripens, partly to avoid reliance on a single combat aircraft supplier. Thailand also does bilateral training with PLAAF (Chinese Air Force), and their F-16s are apparently barred from participating. [1] There are rumors Egypt is switching from F-16s to Chinese J-10s, largely because the US refuses to sell Egypt modernizations and air-to-air missiles that would make them competitive against the Israeli Air Force.[2] The move away from the US as a combat aircraft supplier has been building steam for decades now. In the past there simply weren't many options competitive with the F-16 (both affordable and capable), but that's not the case in 2025.
> This is going to have a massive effect on the US economy, internal consumption will not save it.
I guess this really is the question: what is the expected overall quality of life for the average American when our continent-sized economy is largely functioning under conditions of autarky? The US's imports and exports are lower in 2023 than they were in 1913. Even in 1913 the US had the world's largest GDP (but not GDP/capita, was still much lower than the UK's at the time).
I think Ukraine is a bit unique in how they got the jets. Since they were given the jets during a war, there wasn't much negotiation involved, relative to a country trying to buy plane in peace-time.
In normal peace-time procurement, there is usually significant locally made content required, plus much deeper training. I'd suspect that countries who acquire arms in that way are much more able to continue without US support.
When Iran was still in the US good graces, they bought a bunch of F14s. After their 1979 revolution, they kept operating their F14s. The US actually retired and destroyed all their F14s during the retirement to prevent spares from finding their way to Iran.
It's not the first time it happens. For example, in 2006 the US stopped supplying spare parts to F-16s it sold to Venezuela.[0] Oddly, other countries kept buying F-16s.
Or think about Boeing and Airbus stopping servicing the planes they sold to Russia. Other countries are still buying from them as if nothing happened.
The difference is that now European countries, and other (former?) US allies are starting to see the US as a threat. With people like Trump in power, the chance of a military conflict between the EU and the US is now non-zero, so what's on everyone's mind going forward will be independence from US tech. Maybe you haven't seen European news and commentary.
US's republicans still don't grasp what a diplomatic mess Trump is causing, which will surely affect all trade. Actually, I'm expecting consequences for the entire US tech sector, not just the defence sector.
I fully expect that in some near future the civilian infrastructure also will be de-coupled from USA in the name of national security by other nations.
At this very moment, Apple and Google have the ability to disable communications for billions of people. They can make computers and phones totally unusable. Not just some features but everything.
EU was trying to legislate around this risk by forcing companies to bring data on EU soil and open their platform to alternative providers. They always tried to be gentle with it as companies will claim that they are taken advantage of but as the things unfold at this pace I'm pretty sure that it EU and probably the rest of the world will be very heavy handed the moment there's an instance of US president or US tech oligarch decides to shut down group of people from their devices to teach them a lesson or to compel them into something like they did with military systems in Ukraine.
I was afraid for years that people will be insulated into groups and the global community will be destroyed and now I feel like its happening.
I've thought about this for some time now, and am surprised I haven't seen this voiced more often.
The way almost all societies have allowed themselves to be completely dependent on a few providers is mind-boggling.
Someone else 10,000 miles away has the kill switch for your phone, your credit card, your brokerage account, your TV, likely your HVAC if you're into home automation, maybe your car.
Just recently Musk threatened cutting Ukraine's access to Starlink and then insulted the Polish foreign affairs minister once it was pointed out that its paid by Poland. Here: https://x.com/sikorskiradek/status/1898700362460070080
Even though later he claimed that he did not mean that, I guess more people will start thinking about these things.
> I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests
Self-interest is a middle-class religion. I think that a lot of Americans think that what we are doing is morally wrong. I also think that the idea that everybody else is going to shun our military exports over ditching Ukraine is absolutely hilarious. Ukraine isn't paying for any of this, they don't even count as a customer. Everybody has been free at all times to buy from the UK, France, and Germany, and if they don't see the difference between themselves and Ukraine, they should make decisions about their futures accordingly.
I might remind them in passing that borrowing money from Germany to buy weapons from Germany was what brought Greece's economy down. Also I'd remind them, for what it's worth, that again they're partnering with Germany or France or the UK to invade Russia for unintelligible reasons.
> they're partnering with Germany or France or the UK to invade Russia
Can we stop this nonsense on both sides? Russia does not want to invade NATO countries, and for sure Germany, France and the UK do not want to invade Russia.
Britain is hawkish because they love continental powers fighting against each other and pulling the strings. They will not send their 50,000 soldiers to Moscow.
Doesn't matter that countries doesn't want F16s, pretty much any US component inside these systems means that they require US approval for the whole thing. Saab Gripens use a Swedish built version of a US powerplant, which allowed the US to deny sales of the Gripen to Colombia.
Did Ukraine buy any F-16’s? No. They’ve benefitted from the generosity of the United States since 2017, and thanks in large part to that generosity they succeeded in the defense of Kyiv in 2022. Now it’s 2025 and the war has been stalemated for a couple of years. Does the United States have an open-ended obligation to continue supporting, at its own expense, yet another forever war on the other side of the world?
The United States is still being taken for granted. And I have to laugh at the implication that the American economy will be ruined by the effect on the American arms industry when almost every American ally was neglecting their own military, instead taking American security guarantees for granted.
Interesting how the exact phrases "forever war," "open-ended obligation," and "taken for granted" keep coming up. Always in comments that lack critical thought or explanation, and never support these talking points and just take them as a given.
It's an attempt to pretend that real USA screwups, like Vietnam and Iraq II, are at all similar to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So, philwelch, please compare and contrast. Without just echoing what you've heard, what are the pros and cons of supporting Ukraine in fighting off Russia?
ETA: Also "on the hook." As though Ukraine is forcing us to give them money?
F-16 arrived from Netherlands as USA was unwilling to supply them.
About defense of Kyiv, it has nothing to do with usa generosity and everything to do with creativity and a lot of luck. i'll suggest to read about how it was managed. there is a 50 pager released by uk miliary on this topic
> F-16 arrived from Netherlands as USA was unwilling to supply them.
Even more to my point then. If it wasn’t even the United States that gave them free fighter jets but a third country, how exactly did the US get stuck with an obligation to continue providing support?
> About defense of Kyiv, it has nothing to do with usa generosity
The United States provided six years of military aid to Ukraine prior to the 2022 invasion. If none of that aid actually helped them, I guess it was all wasted and there’s no problem discontinuing it.
you should google what kind of military aid usa provided to ukraine between 2014 to 2022. if it won't help you, probably your internet wasted and there's no problem discontinuing it.
can't find it :( looking myself for an hour already. too much junk on internet and it pushes only "new" stuff.
but to sum up:
- ukraine messed up by not anticipating attack from belorus through chernobyl
- didn't anticipate russian airborn forces flying to hostomel airport on few dozens of helicopters and taking over it (as preparation for full blown deployment on 2 dozen of planes)
got lucky with:
- battle of ivankiv delayed russian forces moving to kyiv
- shelled the crap out of hostomel airport, causing russians to loose control over it (airborn forces on planes literally made u-turn in the air ). i think only a couple of russians survived it.
- blew up a few dams of small rivers, turning large area to impassable swamps what prevented russian forces from getting to hostomel to support paratroopers there.
there was some russian unit of national guard or swat that somehow outrun rest of russian army and they decided to show initiative and play "capture the flag" in kyiv (not clear what exactly they planned), but they did manage to drive into kyiv in a couple of cars, and were all hunted down and killed within few hours
Not being troll-y or intentionally obtuse but I have to ask: when has The Military Industrial Complex acted in my / our best interest?
Sure there’s plenty about US policy and actions that have been normalized, but that doesn’t mean they should have been adopted. It doesn’t mean those things should persist without thought or challenge. Even going about that the wrong way is more productive
Yes, The System is fragile (as opposed to antifragile). But then let’s discuss that, not insist on the persistence of fragile-ness.
> when has The Military Industrial Complex acted in my / our best interest?
[Not a US citizen/resident; never worked in MIC-related area]
a). MIC is an industrial sector creating jobs, doing some R&D (which can trickle down into the civilian sector) and bringing hundreds of billions they do in exports into country; all of those seem benefitial for the overall economy. Of course those can be achieved in non-military-related areas, but so far there was a working machine - and a wrench is already thrown into the gears.
b). The last three years have shown that large-scale wars are still on the table and having a working and oiled MIC is much better than having a degraded one.
The number one benefactor from the US invasion of Iraq was the MIC poster child Halliburton. Then VP Dick Cheney was a former executive at Halliburton.
Not to worry, our MIC is oiled with gold. Even after the WMDs panic was uncovered as a lie, no one was held accountable. Our MIC does media control well too.
People believe what they want to believe. When reality turns out to not match their expectation, they quietly drop out of the conversation, without admitting they misjudged things.
Best example of that is to take a look at HN in 2022 when Musk announced the Twitter takeover. A good half of the comments were quoting Voltaire and Snowden and applauding Musk for 'protecting free speech'. The other half saw it for what it was. When Musk stories come up now, there is no one still pushing the free speech angle.
> I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests (they have proven already that other's interests do not matter for them). This sounds like self-flagellation seen from the outside.
They aren't thinking, really. If you look at the online comments from people who support these actions, you'll notice these characteristics: they are usually listing the same talking points, using the exact same collection of key words or "facts" (even in different languages, across different cultures) often strung together like chants, have a conspiratorial notion of a hidden puppeteer directing events or people they disapprove of, conversely they often have a messianic belief in their chosen prophet, and they are usually inexplicably very angry.
You will also notice that the vast majority of them very rapidly, and across cultural boundaries, start parroting the latest talking points. Talking points that didn't exist days before and weren't on anyone's minds.
I used to believe that. Trump got elected twice. And now he's spewing the most ridiculous lies that are swallowed whole by the MAGA faithful (don't get me wrong, there are similar problems on the other side of the political spectrum. Each side occupies their own bubble). I don't believe it is bots anymore. Now even real people on LinkedIn are posting with the same characteristics.
There are some bots, for sure. There are disinformation campaigns but people are organically amplifying them. While social media is artificially amplifying them to maximize engagement. The social media amplification is why many of these people are so angry. Anger is the ultimate engagement hack.
A strong economy only exists with a strong democracy. Billionaires thought this administration would be good for them, but they are just as stupid as anyone.
Oh no! We lost our "shine" because we aren't the premier weapons dealer on the planet anymore!
> a massive effect on the US economy
You see the problem. You just ignore it. You pretend it's a secret virtue.
> end of an empire
Good. I'm absolutely tired of being a citizen of an "empire." Take your dusty imperialism and go away; please, your warmongering ways absolutely disgust me.
> a direct attack against their own personal interests
It's not. You want it to be for propaganda purposes. See what I mean about living in an empire? This is completely churlish and gross.
US needs to diversify and have an industrial policy. It also needs to rethink capitalism. Maybe new capitalism with US characteristics and more humanism thrown in. As to the defense industry it needs to shrink and be part of the industrial policy, not depend on warmongering to exist. You can have peace and a defiance industry without wars.
As a U.S. citizen, I don’t want to “bend the knee”. I want to maintain the Pax Americana that keeps us rich and safe. Ceding global leadership to Russia and China and Europe is a myopic move.
How is global leadership being ceded to either Russia or China? That would only happen if European countries prefer building economic and strategic ties with China over the US. If that happened it would mostly be revealing the true colors of Europe, choosing to side with a dictatorship and system that has killed tens of millions. As for Europe itself, I doubt Europe will be able to lead anything given its economic condition. These changes essentially just force people to resolve this one conflict.
Europe will prepare for a future independent of the US, as they have proven to be an unreliable and fickle ally. This breaks the western blocks global dominance, as it is now no longer aligned, breaking into two (or more) blocks. As a result, the US loses much of their global influence.
This just isn't true. He had been publicly stating that there needed to be security guarantees for weeks before the meeting. Also, perhaps if Ukraine had been involved in the prior "peace talks" he would have had an opportunity to state this directly to the US administration.
Those absolutely are in the context, given they already had a document that was ready to be signed and _expected_ to be signed if Zelenskyy even took the trip. That is also the reason this got so public, it was NOT supposed to be a negotiation but Zelenskyy just faux pa'd hard.
The US hasn’t been isolationist since WW2, quite the opposite once we were relatively unscathed by the conflict and rose to the worlds #1 military superpower.
"Since"? US was isolationist for a large part of the war. It's their underlying policy. Sure they do sometimes deploy to get oil from the middle east and such, but that is quite different. As was the whole libya thing, concerned about the gold dinar, not some leader figure.
It seems to me Trump is following the logic that the current danger to the US is China, not Russia. Approaching Russia may be a strategy to ensure China and Russia (and maybe all BRICS) are not aligned against the US. He probably believes that Europe is not a threat, and won't become one even when the US behave in ways that go against its interests (Which I would say is correct).
I have to say that while that world view may be misguided, and certainly is not a worldview Europeans would agree with, it is nonetheless a rational view, and is almost certainly correct in that Russia alone is not a serious threat to the US, and won't be in the medium term at least (it can barely win in Ukraine, to think it could win against NATO and then go on to take the US is just delusional).
No it is quite simple, driven by a president who prefers simplicity. You might be detached well though, given you just state that with zero elaboration as you can't produce one.
After Zelenskyy came to the White House with the intention of running the already-decided deal to the ground with some newly invented security guarantees not talked about previously, heavily expecting US to bend the knee to him is just out of place.
This is a completely bonkers take. You actually expected him to sign over an absurd mineral commitment with no agreed benefit for Ukraine? Just toss Ukraine up on the table to be sliced up by the US and Russia?
The US hasn't been remotely isolationist since at least the start of the 20th century. Once industrialization made the world small, isolationism became a myth. It's just a phrase used by people who want to shirk their duty.
> This is a completely bonkers take. You actually expected him to sign over an absurd mineral commitment with no agreed benefit for Ukraine?
Yes because that’s what they agreed to in advance of the meeting. The in person meeting, requested by Zelensky, was supposed to be a photo op. But he unwisely tried to steer it into a different direction and ended up losing the whole thing.
> Just toss Ukraine up on the table to be sliced up by the US and Russia?
Yes that’s traditionally what happens to the losers in a conflict. Ukraine does not have the money, guns, or soldiers to win this thing, doublely so without the USA.
Their end state in this is not going to be some pre war border as a NATO state. It’ll be losing land, losing mineral rights, and at best third party non-NATO peacekeepers manning a DMZ.
Zelenski indicated that he was willing to sign a deal if there are security guarantees. He was then presented a "deal" with no such guarantees in it. Your statements are simply false.
> Zelenski indicated that he was willing to sign a deal if there are security guarantees. He was then presented a "deal" with no such guarantees in it. Your statements are simply false.
Did you even read your own link?
>> Ukraine has agreed on the terms of a minerals deal with the United States and could sign it as early as Friday on a trip to Washington by President Volodymyr Zelensky, a senior Ukrainian official said.
And then later on:
>> The source said the draft of the deal includes a reference to "security", but does not explicitly set out the United States's role.
He agreed to the deal without any explicit guarantees. Told them he'd sign in in the USA. Then after he got here, he demanded additional things that were not part of the already agreed upon deal.
The disinformation is you claiming that they had not reached an agreement that does not include explicit security guarantees.
That’s never been disputed by Ukraine and there are multiple US sources claiming that they had come to that agreement. The only formality was actually signing it and Zelensky said he wanted to do it at the Whitehouse.
Otherwise why was he in the USA? One doesn’t fly halfway around the world for a photo op if there’s no deal in place. And there’s no record of the USA ever offering explicit security guarantees. Only the opposite.
You are missing the whole point. Regardless of the deal, Zelenskyy acted the wrong way by even attending if that was his line. He tried to make the whole thing a media spectacle and make everyone look bad. Shame is on him.
US's underlying line is to be isolationist, see other comments here. "Duty" to be world police LOL
Zelensky said ahead of time he wound sign it. The entire point of him visiting was to sign it. He insisted on coming in person to do it even though the White House said it wasn’t necessary.
What actually likely happened is that Democrats who met with Zelensky right before the meeting with Trump and Vance, like Chris Murphy, pressured or convinced Zelensky to reject the deal. This is disputed by the Democrats. So maybe it was something else - like simply a last minute impulsive choice by Zelensky. Either way it was unexpected that he would change his mind and would lead the event in a different direction.
As for “no agreed benefit” - the benefit was continued US support in the short term until a peace is negotiated. After all this conflict has costed America something like 200 billion. European countries are not only providing less useful help to Ukraine, but also are extending loans rather than grants. But for American taxpayers this is a huge expense adding to the dangers of a debt spiral.
Your “actually likely” take lasted exactly two sentences before you admit it wasn’t actually likely. You might want to reconsider your assumption that this was decided by the person with the least agency, especially when undisciplined revenge and extortion are well-established patterns by the guy who made the attack. He’s had a personal grudge since the events of his impeachment so the most parsimonious explanation is that this is exactly what it looks like.
As for “no agreed benefit” - the benefit was continued US support in the short term until a peace is negotiated.
False:
Ukraine had asked for security guarantees from the US as part of any agreement.
The source said the draft of the deal includes a reference to "security", but does not explicitly set out the United States's role.
"There is a general clause that says America will invest in a stable and prosperous sovereign Ukraine, that it works for a lasting peace, and that America supports efforts to guarantee security."
There was no "deal". There was a contract where Ukraine would sign over minerals with nothing but vague platitudes. Ukraine has already been through that with Russia and denuclearization.
After all this conflict has costed America something like 200 billion.
False:
To date, we have provided $66.5 billion in military assistance since Russia launched its premeditated, unprovoked, and brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and approximately $69.2 billion in military assistance since Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. We have now used the emergency Presidential Drawdown Authority on 55 occasions since August 2021 to provide Ukraine military assistance totaling approximately $31.7 billion from DoD stockpiles.
European countries are not only providing less useful help to Ukraine, but also are extending loans rather than grants.
False:
Since the start of the war, the EU and our Member States have made available close to $145 billion in financial, military, humanitarian, and refugee assistance, of which 65% have been provided as grants or in-kind support and 35% in the form of highly concessional loans.*
False. The US GDP is nearly $30 trillion. Our military spending is nearly $1 trillion. This is a drop in the bucket to support an ally and defend democracy from an aggressive dictator. Additionally, our aid allows us to dispose of old armaments that are otherwise costly to destroy, and our aid to Ukraine comes with long-term purchasing agreements for American weaponry.
I don’t have time to reply to all your points, so I’ll just pick a couple.
> False:
> To date, we have provided $66.5 billion in military assistance since Russia launched its premeditated, unprovoked, and brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and approximately $69.2 billion in military assistance since Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. We have now used the emergency Presidential Drawdown Authority on 55 occasions since August 2021 to provide Ukraine military assistance totaling approximately $31.7 billion from DoD stockpiles.
There’s a lot of editorialization here. But Russia was provoked. By NATO expansionism as well as the illegal coup in 2014 in Ukraine, which basically denied voting rights for the half of Ukraine that supported relations with Russia.
As for the numbers - your numbers are misleading because they’re only about part of the what’s been set aside overall, which is indeed around 200 billion.
> False. The US GDP is nearly $30 trillion. Our military spending is nearly $1 trillion. This is a drop in the bucket to support an ally and defend democracy from an aggressive dictator. Additionally, our aid allows us to dispose of old armaments that are otherwise costly to destroy, and our aid to Ukraine comes with long-term purchasing agreements for American weaponry.
It’s not a drop in the bucket. It is a huge amount to anyone. It can be used in many other ways. They aren’t just “old armaments” - a lot of this equipment is still in service, usable in war, and at least can be sold to generate income and help taxpayers or pay off debt. Also Ukraine is not an ally.
Fun how you project your own lack of source diversity on others. Fox I see as much as I see any other legacy media. X is just a platform though, and is the best in not hampering speech so I do read it more than Reddit, which I would prefer not be so hard left nowadays as I like the site's structure more.
this is the best news ever... all these other countries keep up conflict to keep the bankers happy while they exploit our resiurces for corrupt politicians and business men... Everyone crying about the economy, but our economy is already shit and extending out these corrupt ppl corrupt directives will only keep us (on the private side) in economic turmoil... We've been in perpetual conflict over 2 decades... It's time to focus on us...
If someone thinks that "We've been in perpetual conflict" includes the support being to given to ukraine, in which we send them cluster munitions that we would otherwise have to pay to dismantle while risking virtually zero american armed service member lives, they need to recalibrate their senses because they're not doing a good job.
The Ukrainian people deserve sovereignty, full stop. If someone believes in traditional American values, (e.g. life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) they should support the fight against russian aggression, and IMO the flimsy and poor arguments being made about focusing on our economy reek of dishonesty when someone thinks about how integrated the US economy is with the world's.
No one is using fighter jets in this war. Why? And everyone (who knows) knows this: The anti-air technology is too good to field a jet. It will just get shot down. so the Jets are now useless. so there’s no point in supporting useless jets. And no country is going to buy useless jets. But go on and make this political and not about some physical reality of our world.
They are absolutely using 'fighter jets' for standoff munitions delivery. You probably have heard of Storm Shadow and JDAM-ER.
Even if this wasn't the case, they would still not be useless in that the firearms in your house aren't useless if you aren't actively shooting a home invader.
Actually we just want the war in Ukraine to end. Hope that helps.
There's a lot of bloviating from the chattering class about cozying up to Russia, but I've yet to hear a cogent alternative. And no, I don't think "endlessly funding Ukraine to a forever stalemate" qualifies.
It may surprise you but Russia is not winning. It has been exhausting itself for no measurable benefit, at the cost for US taxpayers of roughly a coffee per day.
Up to now, Ukraine has never received the support it would need to win, just enough not to lose. Weapons deliveries been too little, too late, making the war longer and bloodier than it needs to be. In the meantime domestic production has increased to the point Ukraine covers 30% of its needs.
Russia has lost other wars, it can and should lose this one.
How many billions is it worth spending to stop the new hitler from overrunning Europe? The answer naturally depends on who you ask (and how positively they view hitler).
This isn't the US's first go-round with nazis, obviously.
Back in WWII, just as now, there were capitulation proponents.
Then, just as now, they espoused the supremacy of bettering their own position over helping others.
Then, just as now, they advocated for leaving Europe to fall to invaders.
Then, just as now, they allied themselves with American fascists.
Then, just as now, they campaigned on the slogan, "America First" [0].
There's nothing new here, and personally, I'm glad hitler lost. That dude sucked.
> How many more billions do we need to send to ensure Russia loses? Any how many more years will it take?
You have to compare with how much will it cost if the war continues to grow in scale or intensity. Russia is dedicating more and more resources to its war machine. And I have no reason to think it will stop if Ukraine. In 2022 Putin already said he wanted NATO back to 1991, IOW he wants Eastern Europe defenseless.
Russia's economy is just the size of Spain or Italy: not negligible, but not formidable either. Europe should do more, much more, if only for its own sake.
> And what does "loss" even look like? Are you genuinely proposing they will simply pack up and head home from all captured territory?
Territorial issues are somewhat secondary. What matters is that the defeat is clear and Russia's leaders discouraged from attempting to go to war again. It happened to Russia against Japan in 1905, and to the USSR in Afghanistan. It can happen again.
Does it sound strange to anyone that during Iraq war there were many embedded journalists covering the war. I don't see that now in Russia-Ukraine war. What could be reasons?
There are some. But my guess is that there's so few because nobody wants to pay for journalism anymore. Reporters want to get paid, especially if they're going to work in a warzone.
The best plan to prevent Russia from winning would be to cut off Russia's oil revenue. Fossil fuel exports are the only way that Russia can sustain their war effort. First, other European countries need to get serious and stop buying from Russia. Second, give Ukraine enough long range missiles to wreck Russia's fossil fuel infrastructure: pipelines, tank farms, refineries, ports, etc. Russia was heavily dependent on foreign technical experts to maintain that infrastructure and has little capacity to do so on their own.
This can be done with very little US funding. And sharing intelligence with Ukraine literally costs us nothing.
Turning oil into cryptocurrency requires electrical power plants and related infrastructure. Russia has very limited industrial capacity to build this stuff anymore. They're still heavily dependent on pre-1991 industrial infrastructure. I think most people don't realize how weak Russia really is.
You're right. How can any state with nuke-backed right to issue ultimatums slowly get weakened like that? If Russia states limits, and convinces U.S. that they will launch if the limits are crossed, and these limits are within the threat budget of Russia, can they not make U.S. agree to things (and vice versa)?
just because it hasnt worked so far doesnt mean it won't work. the time horizon matters. is russia gonna give up in 10 years? this is a bad plan. in 1 year? maybe not so much.
why do you want the war to end? is it just a moral calculus of lives lost? how can you be sure that ukraine capitulating to russia will lead to less lives lost than one more year of war? 100,000-600,000 people died in the occupation of iraq, why do you think that a russian occupation of Ukraine will be less bloody?
I don't think it is wise or ethical to spend billions of dollars prolonging a forever-war thousands of miles away.
I also don't think it's wise or rational to presume that every aggressive action necessarily means that the aggressor is Hitler or bent on world domination. Or even that opposing them by sending resources to their enemy is the most effective way to stop it.
For the US, this is an extremely cheap [1] way to counter Russia. Ukraine is doing 99% of the work. We give them money which they immediately give back to us to buy hardware. Or we give mothballed hardware slated for destruction. Most prefer this to a future with dead Americans and US boots on the ground in Europe when NATO countries are invaded by Russia, emboldened by a world that gave up on Ukraine.
[1] as a percentage of the US$850,000,000,000 _annual_ Pentagon budget
Chamberlain tried to bargain peace for Britain at the sacrifice of the Czechs and other nations and in the end his country got bombed to shit anyway. You guys make it seem like Russia has no agency here
I honestly don't know what else Putin would need to say or do to convince you that he is, in fact, a fascist bent on world domination. He's not exactly been shy about it.
If Ukraine stops the fight they cease to be a sovereign nation. If Russia stops they loose face. The former is existential, the latter is not. Why is this so hard to understand?
Any ceasefire or peace without security guarantees will be used by Russia to rearm and try again in a few years time. It will be a continuation of the conflict that started in 2014. That, too, isn't hard to understand.
Giving Ukraine all the weapons it needed and asked for, instead of destroying them soon, would be a good start. Also, you know, not forbidding Ukraine to use its long-range drones to damage Russia's oil industry would also be helpful. This is to get started. I can continue.
Winning the attrition war. They have most likely less than a year left before their economy crumbles. 21% interest rates, capital controls, official 10% inflation, annihilated non military sectors (fe cars), forcing their banks to give loans to anything military adjacent while forbidding them to call them in.......
I am sure the Europeans would be willing to shoulder more of the cost but the US has been cutting Ukraine off from intelligence sources and now also support. There is no cost argument for that.
Also do you really think that these decisions will not cost the US in lost sales, reassurances for everything because of lost trust....
Absolutely. With Russia disintegrating China can get it's lost territories back and dominate Russia's former pacific region.
Right now China is pressuring Russia into lots of one sided deals and is taking over large parts of the economy but that holds no candle to taking over the Vladivostok region.
The real story here, contrary to the framing, is that Rubio admits that a reverse Kissinger - splitting Russia and China - is NOT achievable.
He says that the US will "[never] be successful completely at peeling [the Russians] off of a relationship with the Chinese,” and that the best outcome the US could hope for is "to have a relationship" with Russia so they don't exclusively deal with China.
That's actually realistic and indeed probably the best outcome the US can possibly hope for.
I see many people commenting that the US is trying to pull a reverse Kissinger, wooing Russia away from China, completely missing the obvious truth right before their eyes: if there's a split happening, it's a Euro-US split.
That's a common flaw in human nature, we're often incapable to conceive that the status quo we've lived with our entire lives has fundamentally changed. We look to patterns from the past, seek to refight the previous war; it's far easier and more comforting to believe you're still in the box even when the box has disappeared.
Russia isn't going to split again from China, there is not a single chance in hell, it learned that lesson the hard way... Putin, as a famously keen student of history, understands how much damage that did.
And why would he? What benefit would Russia possibly derive from this? The world has changed: as we've seen during the Ukraine war the West unleashed its entire economic arsenal against Russia, only to demonstrate its own impotence. Russia last year was Europe's fastest-growing economy even when completely cut off from Western markets. So if the West's maximum pressure amounts to so little, its maximum friendship isn't worth much more.
It's utterly delusional to think that the two torch bearers of the Global South would split just as the emergence of the long sought multipolar order is finally coming true, all in exchange for a return of Western trade which they now know is dispensable, and an end to sanctions which they now know don't hurt much.
Also, kind reminder that Kissinger didn't actually split Russia and China: he took advantage of an already existing split. Geopolitically speaking, it's incredibly hard to split powers - especially great powers, but it's much easier to leverage an existing split. And looking at the landscape, those that are already split - or rather splitting - aren't Russia and China, but very much the U.S. and Europe.
A Euro-US split was bound to happen sooner or later, as the cost of the alliance increasingly outweighed the benefits on both sides. Especially with the rise of the Global South, China in particular, which initiated a profound identity crisis: suddenly you had countries "not like us" being far more successful, taking over an unsurmountable lead in manufacturing, and increasingly science and technology.
At some point there are three choices in front of you: join them, beat them, or isolate yourself from them and slowly decay into irrelevance. The West has been trying the "beat them" approach for the better part of the past 10 years and we've seen the results: an increasingly desperate series of failed strategies that only accelerated Western decline while strengthening the very powers they meant to weaken.
It also tried the "isolate yourself" approach with the various plans of "friend-shoring", "de-risking", "small yard, high fence", etc. That wasn't much more successful and the West undoubtedly sees the writing on the wall: the more you isolate yourself from a more dynamic economy, the further behind you get.
This leaves us with "join them", and here Trump's calculation seems to be that if the U.S. does so first, it undoubtedly can negotiate much better terms for the U.S., much like China did with Kissinger back in the late 1970s when it joined what was at the time still the U.S.-led international order. With Europe, like the Soviet Union back then, left with no choice but to accept whatever crumbs remain.
The situation of course isn't exactly similar. We're outside the box, remember... For one the U.S. isn't remotely in the same conditions as those of China back then and, unlike the Soviet Union, Europe lacks both the military might to resist this new arrangement and the economic autonomy to chart its own course. Which means that in many ways, geopolitically speaking, the U.S. is in better conditions and with more leverage than China had (and therefore able to get itself a better deal), and the EU ends up in worse conditions than the Soviets.
Still, the fundamental reality remains that Trump, for all his faults, seems to have understood earlier than Europeans that the world has changed and he'd better be the first to adapt. This was clear from Rubio's very first major interview in his new role as Secretary of State when he declared that we're now in a multipolar world with "multi-great powers in different parts of the planet" (https://state.gov/secretary-marco-rubio-with-megyn-kelly-of-...).
As a European though, I can only despair at the incompetence and naivety of our leaders who didn't see this coming and didn't adapt first, despite all the opportunities and incentives to do so. They foolishly preferred to cling to their role as America's junior partner, even as that partnership was increasingly against their own interests, something which I've personally warned about for years.
Turns out, strangely, that the Europeans were in fact in many ways more hubristic and more trapped in the delusions of Western supremacy than the Americans. The price for this hubris will be very steep, because instead of proactively shaping their role in the emerging multipolar order, they will now have to accept whatever terms are decided for them.
Can you point to a single thing that China did to help Russia at its own expense?
Certainly not resource deals, where China sets cut throat prices.
Talk is cheap and China holds historical grudges, like those lost territories, forever. Having strong dominance over the northern pacific areas would also be far more stable and lucrative than any geopolitical advantages that might be very fleeting.
As for Europe and the US, time will tell. The US is going to pay a high price for the lost credibility. Would you really make yourself dependent by buying US weapons and leave yourself open to such thuggish blackmail tactics we have seen the last weeks? Also the US is a consumer based society that tries to change to a more balanced system. Absolutely understandable but very hard and risky.
We are moving to a multipolar world order and its going to be a time of blood and iron. Russia was just the one making the first move and with the US no longer interested in a rule based world order the mice are coming out to play. I sincerely hope I am wrong.
I don't think that anyone can seriously predict how things will fall out.
The fact that people who are paid to predict future didn't predict China's unprecedented rise in EVs is all that you need to know how manipulated with lies our information ecosphere is.
Our experts completely misjudged China and its ability to innovate. Now they're ahead everywhere.
@China, sure they got a good thing going. We will see how long it lasts.
@Rare earths. That has been obvious from the start. There are always massive potential resources everywhere. Trillions in Afghanistan, Ukraine....and if you don't have an ambiguous enough surveying report you can always postulate a pipeline is going to be build there, like with Syria. It seemed to me that was always some kind of intentional face saving exercise to please Trumps electorate, but I might be overestimating him. That extortionist act of him is doing so much damage, it is not rational.
If you think Taiwan shouldn't cease to exist, how else can you guarantee that? It's either nukes or US protection and nobody trusts the Americans anymore.
Taiwan makes some of the most complex devices humans have ever constructed! They can figure out the almost 100 year old technology to make a gun bomb nuke.
I'm Australian and I already don't trust the US to help us.
I've literally never thought that the US wouldn't help us before Trump came to shit on everything.
Now I imagine we'd have to buy Trump off with "raw earth" or something in exchange for not being abandoned to China, and our head of state would quite possibly be berated publicly for wanting some kind of security guarantee for his people's future.
It's sad, I still feel like the US and UK people are closest to our values, but Trump only works for himself and his billionaire crony parasites.
He will end up with the loyalty he has earned.
Everyone around Trump hates him, and the US is heading in the same direction.
so your alternative of inaction involves a likely outcome of raping and murdering thousands of civilians in the name of peace for thousands of soldiers.
the us can do plenty of things without spending billions of dollars that are short of this, and yes, i have personally donated to the Ukrainian effort.
An obvious alternative is to increase support to Ukraine to give them what they need to expel Russia. The good old USA has the resources to do that but Republicans have blocked increasing aid at the orders of Donald Trump for years now. And now that he is in power he is finally blocking it altogether.
You must be being deliberately obtuse at this stage. He's not saying the Crimea incursion should have been fought again more. He's saying that allowing the annexation of Crimea to be relatively peacful didn't prevent the subsequent imvasion of Ukraine, and as such, stopping the war now and allowing Russia to keep the gains it has made may lead to a short-term peace, but will likely not prevent another war in the future.
Given Putin's stated wishes, this will only stop if Russia is unable to make such moves (for whatever reason) or states at risk of invasion are defended such that it's strategically stupid for Russia to even try.
I believe a big crux is in definition of "war ended".
You (and Donald Trump) seem to be using "Ukraine and Russia stop shooting at each other right now", while Ukraine operates more under "Russia stops shooting at us for the foreseeable future, 20 years at least." Russia has previously broken a number of ceasefires and written agreements (including the infamous Budapest memorandum) and so Ukraine is not super trusting to agreements not backed by anything.
What Ukraine will accept is entirely dependent on how much funding they will get from foreign powers to continue their war effort.
I've had a lot of responses to my comment, yet I've seen no alternative ideas presented that will result in a different outcome. What is your plan for getting Russia to lose this war?
The alternative is to destroy Russia. Destroy its economy, kill their soldiers until there isn't one left standing, ravage its cities. Set fire to its oil fields. Sink its ships. It's a good alternative. A pleasant sight and a nice thing to look forward to.
I would rather not have to live through an emboldened and desperate autocracy rolling over Europe and opening up the very real possibility of a third world war.
and while we're here, since the US is ostensibly going isolationist, maybe they should stop telling the Ukrainians they need to submit to subjugation.
I think the story is Russia becomes powerful enough to threaten Europe, one state at a time.
Ukraine has an amazing job, but they wouldn't have been able to do even that without convincing others that it was in their best interest to fund the war. That's been clear from the beginning.
The war is the genocide. Putin’s invasion would have killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands and been over in a week. Western involvement changed that into the deaths of hundreds of thousands. What more effective means of self-genocide could Europe conceive? Germany cannot exactly round up a whole class of their own for slaughter again in their current political environment. The West (England, Germany, France, etc) caused WWI and WWII not Russia. Now we (America) should trust their vision to avoid WWIII? We should be clear who the problem is and stay out of it.
This is such incredibly twisted logic. I would have honestly been aghast to see this on HN a few years ago, but now the site seems nearly as infected as Facebook or X with this.
You know buddy, I was there in Kyiv in that first week of invasion, and you know, the Western involvement was no where to be found, except for some infantry weapons (thanks for that). Again, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians joined the military with full understanding that Russia has more of everything, that foreign support may not come and so on.
Yes, the primary effect of the war has been to kill young European men, and both Russia and Ukraine… and now perhaps England and others are all too eager to see it happen.
For Ukraine to continue existing, the russians have to be driven out. Otherwise the genocide will continue. The genocide caused by russians, caused by russians invading Ukraine, caused by russians stealing Ukraine's children.
In america's right wing trump followers, there is utter, sociopathic, monstrous indifference to Ukraine's suffering.
So I'll ask you, personally: If the neighbouring state or country decided to invade and take over an area of your state, and you were told "you've been resisting too long, give in already and give up your fight", would you lay down and welcome the invaders you've been fighting? If you knew that the invaders were stealing children, and murdering whole towns?
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I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests (they have proven already that other's interests do not matter for them). This sounds like self-flagellation seen from the outside.