The catch-all thread for your 2020 election season post-election thoughts (even though as of the time of writing it’s not over yet).
The rise of Trumpism feels like the rise of a political religion - and religions aren’t something that can be defeated with rational discourse. How this plays out in the future is going to be hard to see.
https://www.ft.com/content/7eef4ec9-0dc5-4880-bb89-1fc83a72ad84
Do you mean commensurate, or commiserate?
I right clicked the red spell check. Thanks for catching that.
Just doing my civet duty! :)
Commiserate is the right word. No matter who wins, we all lost.
No. If Biden wins we live to fight another day.
It’s like waiting for a medical diagnosis. Do we have Stage 2 cancer or Stage 4 cancer?
People survived WW2. Most would survive a second Trump term. The fight will continue regardless.
Biden winning will make some fights easier, but new fronts might open, with their own fights.
And keep in mind: whether Biden wins or not, you have half of the population in the US supporting or enabling Trump and what he means. That won’t go away overnight if Biden is elected, nor will the reasons and the mechanics of how that came to pass. That is the real fight. And that’s the loss I mention. The nation is divided, the sides perceive different realities, and they have little common ground to bring unity back. That is the real problem and that is the real fight. And it’s a hell of a fight.
You know, @Enidigm, being on the West Coast means I just woke up. When I saw the thread title I thought something had changed from when I went to bed. It hasn’t.
shakes fist in the air
Absolutely. That’s the “live to fight another day” I was referring to.
But a Biden victory is absolutely not a loss, I totally reject that (not that I expect you accept that rejection, just my POV :)). Pushing out an incumbent is hard, it’s only happened… once, in my lifetime? I guess technically I was alive for Jimmy Carter but I was just a baby. Pushing out an incumbent with a crazy cult following and an entire propaganda network aimed at propping him up? Fuck no. This is a win goddamnit. We didn’t win the war by any stretch by it is a win.
It’s still an uphill push from here on out. You are absolutely right that the war is far, far from over. And I have no idea if we can win it. But a Biden win means we’re victorious here and we go on fighting that war, a Trump victory would be… catastrophic, in my lifetime.
Oh, absolutely. But fixing this isn’t going to be fun or easy.
Democrats can’t rely on demographic change anymore, they can’t reject the reality of white Americans as a block they have to appeal to anymore, and they can’t assume that rational discourse is going to matter, because the electorate isn’t.
That’s a fair point. Yeah, from that point of view, Biden winning would be a victory. I guess my question is how much of a victory it is, and how much of an impact would it really have.
And for me, unless the root cause is solved, it doesn’t change much. It might make things better for a while. But I’m not sure how much better and for how long, and how bigger the root problem will become in that time.
But maybe there’s no point in wondering about that either. I don’t know.
Don’t you dare “delete this” this one too!!!
Not the total one I think we are all really hoping for heading into this election, sadly. The polls made it look like that might be possible, but they were way way off. I think that’s part of the problem and why some of us are feeling down. A Biden victory is a big deal but it’s also disappointing if someone were expecting/hoping for a Democratic controlled Senate and a repudiation of Trump, because just maybe there would be a small chance the GOP would need to pull back from Trumpism at that point. They’re going to be all-in, though.
Yup. As it is, even if Biden wins, it’s a flesh wound for the GOP. Maybe 2022 will change that, but don’t count on that.
Is this where we talk about the need for civil war?
(ducks)
It was inspired by the main Atlantic front page where basically every article was an Eeyore gloom and doom read. I figured to make a thread where all the gloom and doom articles could be quarantined /cough.
I’m surprised by the “outcome,” as I was in 2016, even if Biden eventually takes it, which seems likely. Much like 2016, we will never know how much shenanigans, including (but not limited to) voter suppression, has affected things. I don’t have very much faith in the pure mechanics of our system anymore, not that I had a lot of it prior to these last few years. Even if Biden wins, it seems likely the Republicans will control the senate solidly (enough), so I wouldn’t expect much out of a Biden presidency. It’s possible he could use the Imperial Presidency to accomplish certain goals without the, ah, advice and consent of the senate, but given who he is I deem that very unlikely. A Biden win will be a victory in the sense that a holding action that results in the retreating army not getting completely annihilated is a victory.
Oh, one is coming. And it starts with California trying to secede from a GOP-controlled union.
That if a World War doesn’t happen first, which is also likely.
But don’t worry. Most of us will be speaking Chinese 80-100 years from now.