The atmosphere is so heated, and the statements are getting more and more extreme. Let’s just assume Harris wins the election. After a campaign like this, how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?
I’ve cut out all Trumpers after Jan 6 2021 basically except for maybe my wife’s parents. I’m afraid to ask them. All of us have a spoken agreement to not bring up politics because we all have to see each other and don’t want to fight. A major caveat to that is that we see them as little as we can though.
I don’t think there is a “normal” anymore? The 2028 campaigns will start on November 6.
Ignore it all in the first place.
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.
Was America ever “normal”?
Assuming Harris wins, same way we went back to normal after 2020 and Jan 6. Those people that lost will go back to being the same jackass people they were before, but there won’t be any “popular uprisings” this time around. Jan 6 was the best shot they had when Trump was in power and could’ve conceivably tried something, now they have nothing.
Trump will be diminished, his court cases start piling on again and he hopefully dies of natural causes while taking a shit on a golden toilet. How MAGA “moves on” after Trump is the bigger question. Do the moderates take back control of the Republican party, or do they become even more unhinged?
Shit goes to hell if Trump wins and takes the presidency or if he gets Seal Team-Six’d by Biden before he even gets into office, which he apparently has the legal standing to do, but likely won’t because Democrats are dumb and will “take the high road” into fascism.
Most my friends are republicans so we shit talk a lot back and forth. After the election we will just shit talk about something else. Yes we are over 40 and still act like teenagers.
My main concern right now is that my two oldest kids are asking me why I’m voting for Harris lol.
Yes we are over 40 and still act like teenagers
NGL that is something I hope to preserve with my friends too!
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
He’s also a major problem. Both can be true
No, because he’s a symptom. Calling him a problem is self-defeating because if he goes away the problem is not solved.
It seems likely to cause a rift though as they all fight to take the reigns. We saw in the primaries that no one was even up to the task for taking the reigns from an old criminal drowning in legal woes who attempted a violent coup, and also pissed off McConnell, the next most powerful republican.
I still don’t understand Trump’s “charisma”, but there’s no denying that it seems exclusively his. The other candidates tried saying the quiet parts out loud too, and didn’t manage to elicit any hint of fervor.
He may be a symptom, but a political defeat would stall their fascist movement. And only a Dem controlled house/senate/potus combined have much chance at stopping, or at least stalling, this freight train. And they may just eat each other if we can stall them long enough.
💯
I curse and shout whenever I see a political ad. I cut relations with all Trump supporters back in 2016 and now I am cutting off all Harris supporters.
Yes, things tend to calm down. If you read history books about US history, there were times in the 1800s where brothers were killing each other over slavery and where people were killing themselves in the 1950s over their children’s sexuality. Time heals wounds, and people tend to swing in a pendulum from progressive to conservative and back again (the 50s, the 90s, the 10s).
I recommend The Lavender Scare by David K. Johnson. It’s a fascinating book back when the US government shared a frightening similarity to the CCP. It shows how a community develops in the postwar period, how a moral panic gets set off, how people are affected, and how a social movement starts and heals the country over time. It is almost a word for word copy of what is happening in the US right now, and how people in the past defused a situation that was even more loaded in some ways than today’s world. If you are looking for reassurance, it’s a great read. Many of the landmarks in the book are still standing, by the way :)
hope my older relatives fucking die or figure out it’s time to change. on a more serious note, protest and try to help build coalitions against this but idk it seems quite grim.
We haven’t really since all this far right bullshit started. It gets less intense after elections, but it’s different from before: When the elections ended, things did pretty much go back to normal. This shit is a plague on humanity and it’s happening all over the place. I think it’s being driven by billionaires and corporate conglomerates, look at the history channel for example: They stopped showing actual history and now just air bullshit reality TV, like they want people to forget the horrors of fascism.
Elon turning Twitter into a Nazi bar, Bezos quashing the WaPo endorsement, Peter Thiel and all his bullshit, Putin and his oligarch buddies: This shit is a concerted effort to bring back some of the most horrific shit humanity has perpetrated just so they can keep on getting richer and maintain their power.
Finding normalcy isn’t hard at all. It’s fanning the fire of discontent to effect real change that’s the difficult part.
Don’t assume that the majority of people who vote for Trump, are MAGA.
Many, if not most, are the same as many Biden/Harris voters in that they hate both candidates, and are voting for who they view as the lesser of two evils.
As I’m a Lemmy user, you can safely assume I’m not one of them, but the point stands.
But, if you’re talking about people who have gone full on MAGA insanity, well they probably got there somewhere between 2016 and 2020, so there’s not a a ton of new converts to deal with.
And even with then, they’re the minority of a minority.
Of course, if someone is of the opinion that anyone who votes for Trump, no matter the reason, must be excised from their life, well that’s their choice, but I kind of pity them.
Trump is not Hitler. He’s too lazy and stupid to be Hitler. Let’s not pretend that voting for Trump is the same as supporting Hitler, it’s not.
He’s a piece of shit authoritarian, but on the scale of American Presidents, the areas where he deviates the most from the norm, is how stupid and crass his corruption and racism is, not that he was corrupt and racist.
No sane person can listen to a second of Trump and call him less evil than anyone. Anyone who votes for him is voting for a fascist state, and you’re not fooling anyone by pretending you’re not.
You’re the type of liberal who actually believes Dubya is a good man, or a better president than Trump.
Nevermind that he killed over a million people in Iraq.
Trump is a malignant tumor, no doubt.
But so are people who campaign alongside Dick Cheney.
Good man? No. Better than Trump? Yes. That is not a high bar. As far as I am aware, Dubya didn’t cheat on his wife with a pornstar, then embezzle money to silence so he could win an election, all the while talking about taking advantage of his fame so he can molest women.
Well it’s good to see that a million dead Iraqis is definitely not worse than fucking pornstars and embezzlement…
That’s dark dude, like holy shit your sense of morality and justice is so bent that I’m blown away.
Trump has not been in a situation where he can declare war on Iraq. He has been in a situation where he can threaten to pull support from Ukraine if they don’t help him rig an election, and has said Biden is too hard on Israel. So they’re the same on morals in that regard, if not opportunities.
But both of them have been in elections. So with the same baseline situation, Trump is worse.
You’re comparing tangibles to intangibles, hypotheticals, and combining it with a very confused sense of morality.
The fact that you can’t see past Trump to understand that actually killing one million human beings is worse then anything he did, is depressing.
Do you not understand that Trump can be a malignant tumor and dangerous all on his own, without having to pretend that anything he did even remotely compares to directly killing 1 million innocent people?
Or maybe you don’t care because they’re Arab? I know you’ll balk at that, throw out all the right signifiers, and maybe even throw a “how dare you” my way, but I’m not left with many other options to understand to your rational.
Yes, Trump hasn’t killed a million people. Trump was not the president in the days after 9/11, where the majority of americans supported a war on Iraq. Trump did not have the same opportunity to kill a million people that Bush did.
However, we can see Trump’s opinions on Palestine. We can see Trump’s opinions on Ukraine. We can see just as much malicious support of genocide as Bush had, if not more. The only difference is the opportunity to act on it.
So I won’t use the Iraq war as a marker of morality. That’s not a fair comparison.
I will instead judge them based on a situation that both of them had, where only one of them took it. Bush had the opportunity to cheat on his wife and embezzle campaign funds to hide it. Bush had the opportunity to hide government secrets in his private residence. Bush did not do these things.
Please note that being better than Trump is such a fucking low bar, it’s astonishing you think that means I’m saying Bush isn’t a piece of shit. Less repugnant than Trump is still fucking repugnant.
Voting for Trump (or for any Republican candidate for elected office) is voting for one-party autocracy. Even if the individual is ethical, they will be pressured into serving the party (or removed for a more loyalist alternative). Not voting for a Democrat when there’s a Republican candidate is not voting against one party autocracy.
Trump is not Hitler. He’s the Secret Hitler of this election. Even if he’s less bright than Hitler and less charismatic than Hitler, he’s fulfilling the same role, and the outcome will be the same, a one-party autocracy propped up by fascist enemy-within rhetoric and a massive deportation effort that will ultimately turn into a massive evacuation effort. (That is, evacuation into mass graves, or even an ash pit).
We are on the precipice. Do not fuck around. Do not think otherwise. Do not let anyone else think otherwise. If Trump wins, the world is going to hold America’s beer while it works to enact a holocaust that dwarfs the Holocaust… unless the resistance is really good (it’s probably not) or the Allies overrun Washington (not in time).
Help them to understand what happened, why it happened, and what will happen. After 2016, I had to explain to my lib family members that no, black people didn’t cause Hillary to lose, the dems gave us trump by failing to even promise to improve people’s material conditions, and to my conservative acquaintances “no, trump is not draining the swamp, he is a billionaire, he IS the swamp.”
In 2020, it was “no, Biden isn’t going to stop covid, empty the migrant camps, or abolish the police, he’s going to continue 95% of Trump’s policies, we’ve seen this all before under Clinton and Obama.”
