Ask Lemmy

Sometimes you just don't talk about politics, to avoid fighting with in-laws. That has always been true, and it will always be true.

But I hope you don't "go back to normal", because hundreds of millions of Americans acting "normal" had the power to prevent this kind of scenario from occurring in the first place. Of course there's a ton of corruption, and shady corporations and billionaires (all of them) are major culprits in the badness, but also we the people have a lot of power to fix problems if we can get ourselves organized and motivated. So let's do that.

Nothing to get back to when you don't pay attention in the first place

Why go back to normal? Conservatives all over the world have revealed themselves to be 5th columns who will take any opportunity at power, even if it means working with foreign powers.

They seem to have a fundamental belief that God is on their side and no matter how bad things get He will protect them because only they are real people.

Trump is not the problem. Trump didn’t make Duterte happen, or Orban, or Meloni, or Brexit, or Putin, or Bibi, or le Pen or any of the others. He’s a symptom of a dying world

We need the fascists to stop being fascists. That’s it. Literally once they stop we may not like them anymore but we can learn to live together again

Finding normalcy isn't hard at all. It's fanning the fire of discontent to effect real change that's the difficult part.

Well, thats the thing. Once the mask is off it can't be put back on. My relations have cooled with the Trump supporters I know. At least they stopped putting signs out in the neighborhood.

Extreme is only coming from one side. The hateful one.

Ignore it all in the first place.

Considering I usually don't spend a lot of time focusing on the election, just enough to know roughly what's going on, I just do business as usual. I also am not in any groups where I deal with major politics during election past my parents watching the news and such.

I wrote off politics media as hyperbolic and manipulative propaganda in 2016 and I actively distance myself from it, so I've only seen the broad strokes of this current election cycle. Unless you honestly believe you are doing important activism work, give yourself permission to just chill out about politics. If your life is full of problems caused by politics such that it's impossible for you to chill out about politics, you have my sympathy.

You're looking at the new normal, at least for a while. Trump's 2016 election was a paradigm shift in politics around here. Sure, Republicans were generally grifting ultra-capitalist race-baiting snowflake hypocrites before, but trump really lifted the veil and showed them their true selves. No longer do the need to actually govern or occasionally throw some benefits to their base. All they need to do is keep the hate baiting rage machine running, and their supporters will look the other way as long as they can hate anyone else for any reason rather than just deal with the fact that people exist outside their comforting illusion of "normal".

You think next round is going to be any different? The next round of their presidential primaries are gonna be Desantis, Abbott, and MTG. They are going to keep using those same tactics, because fear and hate are easier for them to live with than hope and acceptance.

ask again in a week and then again in three months

We don't. We are in a new era where only one of the major parties is committed to democracy. Until that changes, we will remain just one election from an authoritarian theocracy.

I don't think there is a "normal" anymore? The 2028 campaigns will start on November 6.

We... don't? Have you not been watching American news for the last... 9 years? I don't speak with my family because me being trans is not fully accepted by them. I don't really want to associate with anyone who is okay with increasing trans suicides via politics. I moved from North Carolina to Oregon to be in a queer friendly state, and I don't regret it one bit. And I have an appointment to get my passport tomorrow... just in case. I don't know if this country can be fixed. People talk about getting along with our neighbors or meeting in the middle, but I don't know how to get along with people who wish I didn't exist.

The short tl;dr answer is, we don't. For me, it's something I contended with around 2003-2004 when my father stood with most staunch Republicans in advocating for extrajudicial torture of POWs and eventually of civilians including Americans who were mistaken for terrorist agents.

On the other hand, the same event drove me to study moral philosophy so I could explain at length why torture was wrong; he didn't care, which was the gaze into the abyss moment. I saw who my dad was in the dark.

Cut to 2024, and even if Harris wins (and any coup d'etat attempts are put down) we are a long, long way from the scare being over. This has been reviewed at length by CIA and we've heard from experts on civil wars, how they erupt and historically what must happen to prevent social unrest from turning violent to the degree that it overwhelms responders.

The universal panacea is the restoration of power to the people. So that's not to say we can merely preserve elections in the US. Our election system is corrupt and relies on FPTP voting models (one person, one vote) which means third parties cannot be competitive. It also means the two principal parties don't have to be very public-serving to stay in power.

This means Harris not only needs a cooperative Congress (and cooperative state populations) but also the impetus to operate against the interests of her party for the good of the public, and we all struggle to discard the One Ring. She'll also have pressure from establishment politicians, as well as progressives who are not progressive enough to go the distance and let power be diffused to a wider body of persons and interests.

What we can expect are some shorter-term measures, maybe some social safety nets, some relief for people caught in the debt crisis or homeless crisis, even some labor reform so that most of us aren't one crisis away from homelessness and a ruined life. But this will kick the can down the line, and allow the Republican party (whose only trick now is election subversion and procedural coup d'etat when not violent coup d'etat) to persist as it is (and has been at least since Reagan).

Election reform would force the Republican party to reconsider its far-right-wing position and actually offer a platform worth voting for. But so long as we don't get that, they still have viable pathways to seizing power.

All this said, some people will come to their senses as the precarity lets up. Some people will realize they can afford to be less afraid, and that a public-serving society is something worth fighting for. But that is a long, and personal process for each of them, and usually they're pretty repentant when they realize what they had become.