They voted for a massive grab-bag of obviously bad stuff. They may not have examined every single item in it, but they obviously wanted this style of bad stuff to happen. This action is aligned with their revealed preferences.
That was kind of my point. They actively voted for a lot of bad stuff, but it was framed in a very different way. They voted for things like ending the tyranny of woke liberalism, and believe that end is so essential to achieve that it justifies essentially abandoning the rule of law. What they did not vote for is the long-term consequences of supporting that position.
What?! They most certainly did vote for those consequences! Why infantilize these voters? Nobody robbed them of the agency needed to see that an obvious criminal tyrant was worse than a woman, twice. They just didn't care. It's ugly and depressing to imagine them not caring about things that matter to them intimately, but here we all are.
It's not that Harris was "a woman". It's that she was -- or so the propaganda line went -- a treasonous saboteur who would continue the woke left-liberal-socialist agenda, which is a path to certain destruction, and along the way allow American governance to be co-opted by corrupt plutocrats and criminals, as well as politicizing and weaponizing the executive branch against political enemies to suppress opposition to the agenda.
That of course is all setup for consent: Trump doing all that stuff is just fighting fire with fire, the justified means to the end of not only making America great again but now saving it from certain doom.
People are both more clever than you think, and dumber than you think. Few non-experts would claim to understand skyscraper design. And yet somehow everyone with a social media account and 4th grade literacy skills claims to understand how to govern 300m people and the largest economy in the world.
I don't consider myself a Jeffersonian Republican, but I can see clearly that tens of millions people voted for short-term action to fight against this or that perceived boogeyman, and did so largely from an emotional perspective with little foresight into what the consequences might actually be, beyond "X candidate says he will fix Y bad thing and I think Y is very important". The fact that 3-time Trump voters feel disappointed and betrayed and yet somehow still claim that Harris "would have been worse" points to a serious lack of unemotional big-picture thinking when it comes to the future of the USA. Hell I see people going all the way back to Obama -- "yeah OK so Trump did [100 unimaginably horrible things that will eventually hurt me] but Obama once hit a US citizen with a drone strike so what's the big deal? get lost snowflake god bless my president"
One big difference is that the US has been led by four different people since 2000 instead of one. Another big difference is that it's legal for Americans to insult political leaders, wish bad things upon them, or demand an end to their stupid wars.
If you weren't aware of these differences, I'd encourage you to radically change your media diet; there are unfortunately many outlets which find it advantageous to exaggerate how bad the US is and deemphasize how bad dictatorships are. (Some are paid Russian propaganda, I've seen a shocking number of people send me RT links as though they're a legitimate news source.)
What do you mean by "manufactured consent for each other the whole time"? I'm familiar with the Noam Chomsky book Manufacturing Consent, but this book was about the dynamics that shape coverage decisions in mass media, not some concrete process which Person X could perform "for" Person Y.
I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests. If the funding rules for scientific grants are changing, and defenders of the old rules argue that this is a terrible change that will cause huge problems, how can it be that both the old rules and the new rules serve the same interests?
> What do you mean by "manufactured consent for each other the whole time"?
> I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests.
Using the polarizing topic of COVID (whose risks remain in 2026) as an example, we can answer both of your questions:
This can be applied to virtually any topic. The party of "good cop" and the party of "bad cop" promise no change from the status quo. Of course, anybody easily distracted by the culture wars will not see the commonality between both corporate parties, by design. These people see a close election and use that as "proof" we still have a functioning democracy.
Covid is a great example, because outside of hyperpartisan spaces, it was not a polarizing topic at the time these pieces were written. As the second link details, by 2022, the American people strongly felt that there were more important problems to tackle and we would have to eventually accept Covid as a fact of life. Ms. Doubleday perceives her problem to be with "the press" because she's out of touch, and doesn't realize that they're simply reporting what most Americans want and how most Americans feel.
People who are concerned about "corporatism" have the same problem. I often see them get confused and frustrated when the news presents "big government" as a scary thing that people are worried about - doesn't everyone know big business is the more important concern? Most Americans don't agree with them (https://news.gallup.com/poll/701054/perceived-threat-big-bus...), but if all your friends think big business sucks and government programs are great, it's hard to know that this is something you should check.
Captain Obvious here, but the number of defenestrations (or generally mysterious "suicides" of people not agreeing enough with the government) is much higher in Russia than in the US.
In the US you might get your funds cancelled, in Russia you'll get your life cancelled instead - and not in the metaphorical sense.
Also as incompetent as the current US government is, the incompetence of the Russian government is on a whole different level (the "3 days to Kyiv" are taking longer than the whole "Great Patriotic War").
> Russia is a de-jure democracy
As is North Korea, it must be even more democratic than the rest of the world because it calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" ;)
They have a head start on you, but you're catching up quickly! Worth remembering they have been shooting peaceful protestors recently in the US too.
Trump and Hegseth are explicit in their admiration for Putin and Xi. So being technically right here is largely to miss the point. The trajectory the US is on is pretty clear.
I'm not from the US and neither do I try to defend the current US government.
Just pointing out that Putin has systematically turned Russia into a full-blown fascist autocracy, but even in Russia this took nearly two decades until all opposition was crushed.
MAGA has the same goal (turning the US into a fascist autocracy), but I bet it will be much harder and would take much longer to dismantle the checks-and-balances system in the US as completely as Putin did in Russia.
Russia at this point has no functioning democratic institutions, and even political institutions - for example at this point no document inherited or signed by the regime is worth anything.
That's why they're considered a rogue state at the moment.
So at best you can say the Russian regime claims Russia is a democratic, that's not de jure, because for it to be de jure you'd need institutions to make sure it was in fact de jure.
There's none, just signs with the name on the wall, and people roleplaying.
USA has had 3 different presidents from opposing parties just in the last 15 years. Putin hasn't allowed a challenger in nearly 30 years and he actively bans them, imprisons them, or kills them. It's a big difference.
> I'm not sure what difference there is between them.
Have the Democrats ever put any power-grab instruments back in any boxes? I don't remember a time they have, and I don't think they'll start now. They are meek cowards.
New York neutered the power of appointed officials and authorities after Robert Moses.
As the other poster mentioned, the post-Vietnam Church committee was a democratic party-led, bipartisan committee that effectively heeled the CIA and exposed many of the pretty dark abuses committed in that era.
They joined Republicans in limiting presidential power after Watergate. Granted, these limitations usually come after gross abuses. But these are gross abuses, and there's no reason to think they won't get grosser.
Wanting more independence from a former imperial master != building an oppressive government on theology and building a nuclear program that seems to exist to back that theology by threatening a nation that causes you theocratic issues.
I just focused on how the work of DJ is reduced to "twiddling USB controller". But if you want to dig into that filming part, let's goo, because it's at best irrelevant and at worst harmful.
Irrelevant because if you are NOT filming you don't magically become people participating in art which is what that comment is about. You don't expect people at a show to play.
Harmful because if you ask any real musician or event organizer who's not very famous already, filming & posting and tagging is probably the biggest way to support them that you can do as audience. On par with actually coming to the show. For two reasons, it spreads word of mouth to people's followers and it gives musician/venue promo material. I chatted with many performers after events and they are always grateful for this.
And anyway literally no one pays ticket money to spend the entire show fimling. No one wants to be unpaid video guy. People film some bits to post and then hang out with others which is why they're there. Grifters who actually film entire shows hoping to earn more money than they spent on the ticket are annoying but very rare and they only go to already famous performers.
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