politics

Because America is fucking awesome and they're missing out.

We've got people of all creeds and none, food from places you heard of in the news, dogs and cats living together, the resurgence of organized labor, Lutherans and Jews and Quakers and Sikhs and Catholics all giving free food to who needs it, black dudes and white dudes cuddling, Hindu women dating French atheist women, legal weed, tiny houses, babies with four doting parents getting into someone's legacy college, BBQs with vegan options, consensual weird porn, cops that stopped a fascist coup, wind farms, renewable energy cheaper than coal, neighbors sharing backyard garden vegetables, Loki on Disney+, teenagers with silly hair, some guys practicing kendo in the park, cognitive-behavioral therapy, Dungeons & Dragons becoming too cool for Wizards of the Coast to ruin it, secular solstice rituals, agricultural universities creating new breeds of tomato that are extra nutritious and you can just grow them on your apartment balcony, and lots of other great shit going on

And they were too busy watching "Louder with Crowder".

Another Democrat who simply can not grok that the MAGAts have no real argument. There’s no debate. Nothing that is said matters at all.

Years of gish galloping and we’re still trying to talk to them?

Stop. Just stop. They’re gone.

Focus on getting out the vote. Because we’re not going to beat Fox News, they’ve got a lock on the right wing dementia. Stop being surprised that they’re so fucking stupid. That’s on us. Let’s move on.

Look, at the root of this is that you're fundamentally dealing with authoritarians. You can define that in two different ways for this context and they're both correct.

1. A belief that the state inflicting harm (physical, fiscal, mental, or otherwise) on a person or group of people as a means of accomplishing political goals is acceptable.

2. A belief that it's preferable to collect political power into the hands of a 'chosen few', whose political will is absolute or nearly so.

This is part of why so many frustrated Bernie people jumped ship to Trump, imo. The real desire here is for a benevolent (to them) dictator who can assume full power, snap their fingers, "fix" everything without having to "deal with the bullshit", and then everything will be great. For me, a millennial who became politically aware shortly after 9/11, this is a tremendous tone shift. In the oughts, if you suggested that the US was flawed or needed work in any way, you'd immediately get brow beaten for being unpatriotic scum and fiercely corrected that "we are the best country on earth". Fast forward eight years and it's "make America great again", because in eight years we somehow lost all of our glory as the greatest country on earth. In reality, imo, the "greatest country on earth" schlock was half jingoism, half denialism, and almost all before the great recession kicked everyone's ass. That is, I don't think the people saying it really believed it as much as they were invoking it as a kind of talisman to protect their ego or idea of the US.

I think it's beyond denying anymore that the US has some big fucking problems, and that's partly why the denialism has gone away. Everyone wants to fix it; yes, even the MAGAs imagine a future America where everyone lives happy and healthy, even if their path for getting there is unhinged. I think a lot of MAGAs actually know that these problems aren't easy to fix, which is why they want a benevolent dictator to step over "all the bullshit", the problem is that they don't realize where the difficulty in solving these issues is coming from. They think that a lot of the "bullshit" is the government DMV-izing everything from medicine to education to the military, and making the implementation of solutions impossible, and to be fair, that's a non-zero factor. What I think they don't realize is that our government has been functionally captured or hobbled at nearly every turn by wealthy groups or individuals that aren't really representative of or interested in the general public welfare. They don't realize that we've built a new economy that's monetized problem management instead of problem solving. That's why if the government needs to install Raytheon brand cameras in everyone's toilet and subcontract to Amazon to monitor the feeds (lol, what deficit?), that bill gets passed in ten minutes flat, but anything that actually helps anybody seems to be dead on arrival.

They've lost faith in our republic, and rightly so; it's done precious little to inspire any in the 20 years I've been paying attention. So, they're ready to choose their benevolent dictator in everything but name to come and just fix everything. I think the thing that they really believe about Trump is that he can destroy the republic, because the republic is something that deserves to die (in their view). They're ready to give Christian Nationalism a chance, to see if the HOA of religiosity really can fix America (spoiler alert). Obviously, it won't, but by the point that reality dawns on MAGA, the fuckheads purposely trying to erode our democracy for their own personal gain will already be too deeply engrained in the system and in control of the reaper drones to do anything about it.

To be honest, it seems to me like this is a really strong signal for socialists and communists to try and start making some inroads. People are desperate for something different, and the only people that seem to have been successful at getting themselves out there are the fascists. No matter what, though, the fundamental truth here is that everybody knows that the US is in a bad fucking way and anyone claiming otherwise is probably lying and doing it for the wrong reasons. What we're seeing here is a deeply misguided attempt to reckon with that truth.

Because the current American right finds its roots not in the USA, but the CSA.

The article is paywalled and it's Paul Krugman who isn't interesting to me anyway but here are my two cents from living in the US for a while now.

This is a really immature, lazy country, especially for those on the right. I'm talking about fully-grown men (at least physically) driving lifted trucks that roll coal and have decals describing the violence they would like to do to liberals stuck to the back.

They're lazy and stupid, so they never made anything out of their lives. Because they lack the ability to introspect, none of this is their fault. If they can't get a date because they're obnoxious, boring people with questionable hygiene, that's the fault of women. If they're stuck in a dead end job with no prospects, that because of immigrants, who took the good jobs these morons would never even get an interview for.

I don't know what the answer is, aside from pushing way more money into education, and hoping the next generation turns out better.

The cons never got over many things they lost - Nixon resigning, people who are not cishet white xtian men being given a fair shake and so on.

After LBJ passed the civil rights act, the Republican party pivoted in what is now called the southern strategy, when they sold out their political futures to religious preachers who literally intend to destroy the Constitution once and for all because they hate what it's allowed us to become and they don't have a legitimate means to claw back power anymore. QED.

Not posting an archive link to a paywalled article just means I get all my opinion from the comments.

Unironically, they hate us for our freedoms.

We have the freedom to read and say what we want, and they can't stand to hear their beliefs challenged.

We have the freedom to have sex and not get sick or pregnant, and they can't stand their purity religion being disobeyed.

We have the freedom to be who we are, and they can't stand to see their simplistic notions of sex and gender disproven.

We have the freedom to not be religious, and they can't stand to see irreligious people living happy lives.

We have the freedom to ignore them, and they can't stand not being the center of attention.

TL;DR;
Their wealthy, powerful handlers are working directly from the Ur-Fascist playbook to manipulate the isolate, keep them isolated, and keep them dependent on that small caste of unscrupulous wealthy, powerful handlers. "The world is burning" they say, while setting the fires "only we can save you".

Longer TL;DR;
Since wealth and power are the two sides of the same coin there is a relatively small caste of people (we're talking a fraction of 1% of the population) who are ultimately responsible for this. They know how to isolate people, and how to take advantage of that isolation, and all the right lies to tell and strings to pull to build up enough anger and fear to turn them irrationally against themselves... but against everyone else, too. Who benefits? Yep, that teeny tiny caste of rich, powerful handlers.

Because it's got some blacks and some gays and... Ok that's all I've been able to figure out so far.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A recent essay by Damon Linker in The Times profiled conservative intellectuals whose writing, he argued, helps explain where the MAGA right is coming from.

For example, Patrick Deneen’s “Regime Change” describes America thus: “Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight.

Cratering rates of childbirth, rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair,’ widespread addictions to pharmaceuticals and electronic distractions testify to the prevalence of a dull ennui and psychic despair.” And he attributes all of this to the malign effects of liberalism.

It’s true that U.S. society has changed immensely over the past half-century or so, and not entirely in good ways: Inequality has soared, and deaths of despair are a real phenomenon.

OK, that’s something of a Big Apple-centric view, and not every U.S. city has done as well as New York (although it’s remarkable how many on the right insist on believing that one of America’s safest places is an urban hellscape).

But don’t claim, falsely, that society is collapsing because it doesn’t match your preferences or blame liberalism for every social problem.

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