this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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STARTING to think? Honestly I don't even hate Trump anymore. It's like hating a shark or a snake or something. He's just doing what he does. It's the ~75 million people who enable him by voting for him that are disgusting and terrifying right now. Half of America is the problem, and he is just a symptom, and it is a BIG BIG BIG problem for the whole world.
I've been trying to fathom the amount of misinformation out of here that has accumulated in people's minds. There are people that I know and love, otherwise intelligent good people, that are thankful that Trump got elected. They believe that everything wrong with America and the world is due to "the Democrats". And they've been that way since before 04.
There are also people I know (many of whom are relatives) who seem like normal people but then support Trump and all of his policies. I want to think they're not horrible people and that they're just brainwashed, but recently I've been seeing some of my friends jump on the alt-right bandwagon and posting extremely racist stuff to be "edgy", even after leaving the far-right culture bubble they lived in. This is the sort of stuff that even when I was still a conservative I would never have thought it would be okay to promote, and I grew up in the same environment they did so it seems like they know perfectly well what they're doing. After all of this I'm starting to think that maybe many of them are genuinely terrible people.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Recently I looked up what has been going on in various European countries, and it seems like with a lot of them there's an extreme populist party with about 20% control, there's a less extreme party that's still queerphobic and anti-abortion but more willing to compromise with maybe about 15% control, and then there's more liberal but economically conservative parties parties making it so the total of economically conservative parties including the above two is above 50%. These countries also have actual progressive and even some left-wing representation in government.
Contrast this with the US, which only has a populist party and a socially liberal but economically conservative party that a bunch of people are brainwashed to think is literally communism. There is very little progressive representation even though the country has a significant number of progressives, and people who want less government regulations are voting Republican regardless of their stances on social issues. Meanwhile polls say that opposition to LGBTQ rights and abortion is probably around 30% which is not much different than the European countries I looked at. So I think half the problem is that democracy in the US is basically dysfunctional.
However, 30% opposition to LGBTQ and abortion rights is still fucking bad, and I'm still trying to figure out whether it is the propaganda to blame or the people themselves. Additionally racism and xenophobia had been on the rise everywhere and has basically gained popular support at this point so democracy clearly isn't going to solve this.