Sorry for the quiet here, but I have been shellshocked since the US election.
As most people who follow US politics, I knew that it wouldn’t be an easy win for the Democrats, but given the candidate and campaign, I had expected that Harris would win the election. What I had to not taken into account, is the misogyny and racism of the US. White people, especially men, in the US turned up for Trump, just like they did during the 2020 election, but across all demographics, there were a move from Democratic to GOP – a lot of this was because more people from the Democratic voting block stayed home this time. This makes absolutely no sense, when you look at what was at stake – Trump in 2024 was arguably more dangerous than Trump in 2020, where he had not yet gotten immunity from the SCOTUS , and where Project 2025 didn’t exist yet.
Let’s not mince words, Trump is the worst presidential candidate ever to run. He has been this every time he has run – somehow getting worse every time. He was the worst the first time he ran, the first time he won, the time he lost his position, and now when he won again.
Even though he is a rapist, a racist, and a monster at every level, people voted for him. Not only did they vote for him, they made sure to give him near-unlimited power by also giving the GOP the Senate and the House.
At this point, our only hope is the incompetence and infighting of the GOP – unfortunately their game plan has been made by the Federalist Society which have clearly shown that they can take advantage of these situations – just look at the current Supreme Court of the United States.
I think this was inevitable unfortunately. We can only hope either we’re allowed to vote in 2026 and the Dems take the Senate (and actually fucking *do something with it!*) or NATO decides to kick the US out and “bring democracy to America” via high explosives. I am not joking. We are now a rogue nation.
the total number of votes he got barely increased at all. i find this important to hold onto, mentally. the US didn’t get more evil, just more apathetic to the progress of evil. that’s an epic disaster, but i’ll take tiny cold consolations here and there.
I think that’s basically what happened. Trump got a narrow victory in the popular vote. If more Democrats had voted, we would have had a nail-biter in the Electoral College like in 2020. A lot of folks stayed home this time because of Biden’s cravenness wrt Israel.
And then there’s “It’s the economy, stupid.” By all the usual measures, the economy is doing just fine; but that doesn’t matter. White mem without college degrees have observed, correctly, that they’re doing much worse than a decade or so ago. This is principally because of the vast wealth that has moved to billionaires and corporate CEOs; and the Democrats did next to nothing to point that out. The DNC is basically just a fundraising organization these days, and Democrats are just as beholden to Big Money as are the Republicans. I sometimes think that we have Democratic and Republican wings of a single Oligarch party. (The Democrats are better on social issues and, as a rule, are not utterly shameless; but that doesn’t matter when you’re trying to feed your kids.)
I used to think that racism was primarily a tool of capitalists to divide the people so we wouldn’t see that capitalism is the problem. I’m now looking at racism in so many places, especially notable among minorities, that I now think racism may be a greater force than economics.
How can people be so blind? How can they rationalize what they do? We can justify anything, no matter how crazy, if it supports our sense of self.
2016: 65.8m
2020: 74.2m, or an additional 8.4m, an increase of 13%.
2024: 76.8m, or a further additional 2.6m, a further increase of 3.5%.
An additional 2.6 MILLION people (that’s more than the entire population (not just voters – every man, woman and child) of Houston, the fourth largest city in the country) turning out for Trump counts as “barely increased”? Bear in mind also that, statistically, Trump voters reliably skew older and more stupid, so it’s reasonable to assume that between 2016 and 2024 many more R voters than D voters died… and the numbers went UP despite that.
“his vote barely increased” comes across strongly as what I hear the young people referring to as “cope”, and what I understand to mean something like “staving off depression by deliberately deluding oneself”.
Based on the available data the rate at which the US is galloping into fascism has slowed, slightly. Whoopy fuckin doo. The direction is unchanged. It’s going to be an interesting four years, assuming there’s an election in 2028.
sonofrojblake@5,
It’s nevertheless true that the largest factor in Trump’s victory was the decline of nearly 6.9 million in the Democratic vote – nearly 8.5%. Millions of Americans didn’t actively support fascism, but couldn’t be arsed to vote against it. Harris quite clearly made the strategic choice to go for the votes of “moderate” Republicans and independents, and even hard right anti-Trumpists such as Liz Cheney, rather than make full use of the surge of enthusiasm from the Democratic base which her replacement of Biden prompted. We can’t know whether the opposite choice (which would have required explicitly breaking with Biden and attacking the corporate oligarchy) would have worked, but we do know the choice she made (which involved quietly moving to the right of Biden on economic issues) was disastrous. Not that I expect the Democratic establishment to draw that conclusion. We just have to hope – against experience – that the left accelerationists are correct, and Trump’s viciousness, corruption and incompetence will produce a backlash sufficient to overcome the anti-democratic measures we can confidently expect.
The “left accelerationist hope” would be that the incompetence will limit the damage, and it will act like an “attenuated virus vaccine” against the right down the line. There is weak, circumstantial evidence in support: after three decades of relentless rightward creep at the DNC, the backlash to Trump 1.0 put a Biden in the White House who governed to the left of Obama.
That being said, I had little enough faith in left accelerationism that I emphatically favored Harris over Trump. And now I have little hope.
Bekenstein Bound@7,
No, the left accelerationist hope is that a period of fascist rule will bring on “The Revolution” andor the disimtegration of the USA – which is of course the world’s sole imperialist power, without which world peace and socialism would automatically triumph.