I’m really not sure where I’d point to further back then that, though. Certainly, I’ll entertain any argument that points the finger toward Reagan, but that feels too far back. The thing is, the election of 2000 really seems like the moment the U.S. became fully captured, the moment non-violent resistance became impossible. It was the first time since the 1800s that a candidate won the popular vote but lost the EC, a trend that has continued. Our election was clearly meddled with in Florida, but no one really cared, so we just let them get away with it. Eventually, Bush appointed Alito and Roberts. While both replaced conservative justices, Sandra O’Connor was more of a moderate and could sometimes agree with more liberal justices. Meanwhile, Alito and Roberts are hardliners who secured the 4th and 5th votes for Citizen’s United.

Maybe the way they got there didn’t matter, and America was doomed to fall after decades of unregulated capitalism, but think about the lessons learned from 2000. Billionaires found out they could rig an election, get whatever they wanted, and the American public wouldn’t even notice. That feels like a pretty damning moment.

Looks like there’s one right here in this thread!

Coming to this realization myself. The coup happened in 2000. The false election of Bush was the first step on the path to Citizen’s United, at which point corporate interests bought America out from under the noses of its civilians.

The country I was born in collapsed before I was old enough to vote. We’re just starting to find out what that means.

The Trump campaign is only a dumpster fire if you’re a blind centrist who refuses to recognize the strength of the enemy.

The Trump campaign was exactly what his voters wanted. It was hours and hours of their god king and his cronies yapping their mouths about any racist thought that popped into their head. He brought up all the problems that his supporters are facing, and he promised change. It didn’t matter that his ideas for change are stupid, or lies, because his opponent was outright denying there were problems at all.

You can hate Trump as much as you want, but his campaign was clearly, grossly more effective than Harris. Whereas Democrats were arguing over all the blunders Harris/Walz was making, the Republicans were lockstep behind their golden god who promised to make all their wildest dreams come true. That’s how you win elections in the U.S., and it’s why everyone with a brain knew the election would be contested in the best case scenario.

The problem, as I alluded to, is that the Supreme Court is starting to hear the lawsuits filed in response to those policies and is striking them down as unconstitutional. It’s quite likely that things like NDAs being unenforceable will also get overturned.

Everything Biden accomplished has either been grossly undermined, hindered, or reversed by the current corrupt Supreme Court. Completely ignoring them for his full four years, especially after Roe V Wade, was pure incompetency. Again, it gives credence to the idea of a controlled opposition. He was allowed to say and do some progressive things, but anything that stepped over the line the Supreme Court would stop. He could have packed the courts, used the big public outcry against the courts legitimacy to pack it with additional judges, and actually make a meaningful change to our country’s fate.

Instead, Joe Biden will be remembered as a vain fool who gave the country to fascism. Nothing else he accomplished will matter, if any of it is still left.

It’s required in any system that uses a fiat currency. Maybe a fiat currency is evil incarnate, but it also offers a lot of conveniences. Personally, I think I’d prefer having some number that translates my labor into spending units, and fiat currency works about as well as anything else when carefully managed.

There’s also a part of this that could, if you were naive, be solved with time. My job gave me a solid raise last year, 4.9%. Assuming four years of Harris status quo could get inflation down to ~2.5%, and assuming I can maintain similar raises each year, I’d likely recover from the pandemic within the next four years. Inflation is a necessary evil, but when managed over time, it isn’t a big issue. Should work for everyone right, stupid Trumpies just don’t understand long-term economics!

Except it ignores that corporations are colluding in duopolies across many industries to steadily raise their prices above inflation to maintain profit growth. It ignores that landlords are treating maximum rent hikes as the expectation rather than the exception. It ignores that climate change is globally impacting our supply lines for food.

Inflation being healthy doesn’t mean a damn thing when unchecked capitalism is left rampant. The Biden administration, to their credit, did weakly try to fight corporate interests. However, they did nothing to fight the fully captured Supreme Court, which made Biden’s efforts so pitiful they resemble a controlled opposition.

There’s a growing contingent of Democrats who are showing very MAGA traits. The types that demand everyone fall in line and vote how they say, without listening to any compromises. The types who believe that the issue is that the Democrats are playing too fairly, and should stoop to the Republicans level. The types who believe that the issue with Kamala Harris is that she was a black woman, and that diversity should have been ignored for a secured political win by running an old white dude. The types that blindly listen and defend media bought and paid for by wealthy capitalists because they think it represents “their side.”

Realistically, the only thing stopping these people from being MAGAts is personal life circumstances. Maybe their high school bully was a Republican, or they know just enough economic theory to realize how stupid conservative ideas are, or their grandad worked in a union job. In truth, they are as tribalistic and as ignorant as a Trump supporter; their fervor is just to a D instead of an R.

I actually hate the idea of using boomer as an insult to people who are just of the right age. To me, you gotta have a certain state of mind and actions to count as a shitty boomer. Just as there’s some super cool old hippies out there, there’s entitled 30-something Karens out there that need to hear “Ok Boomer.”

Right here, happy to tell Joe Biden he’s fucking wrong and his party knows it.

Biden’s ass got thrown to the curb because even armchair political analysts with access to only public data could read the writing on the wall. He was so unpopular he was effecting donors and down-ballot races.

The only reason Joe doesn’t realize he had no chance is because he’s so dementia-addled he has forgotten. Kamala Harris running on Joe Biden’s platform could not do it, how on earth do you seriously think Joe could?

In what universe? Certainly not the one where all polling data had Trump beating him in a landslide, where Biden was so unpopular that he was going to lose the Dems down-ballot races. Biden seriously thinks that the issue with Kamala Harris is that she was a black woman, instead of realizing the issue is that Kamala said she was going to be 4 more years of Joe Biden politics.

Rest in piss you dementia-addled boomer.

Nearly every incumbent in a Western democracy for the past two years has lost their re-election.

Desperately clinging to out of date concepts in the face of statistics is the reason why you’re not a political analyst. The reason Biden stepped down and the reason Trudeau just retired is because polling data made it abundantly clear neither incumbent had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

Ford was selling cars in the 1920s, trying to use absolute values is absurd. Take a look at things like market share. How many cars did Tesla produce this year compared to the rest of the auto industry? It’s a clear minority, not even close to the combined might of the rest of the industry. That is how I can say 7 million is not alot; because it isn’t. 15 million cars were sold in the United States in 2024. That’s one country, one year, buying twice as many cars as the lifetime production of Tesla. That is the scale we are playing in, one where Tesla sales are responsible for just about 11% of the total cars sold in the U.S. last year.

Toyota sold more than that in just 2024, and that’s just one car company. 7 million seems like a big number, until you realize what the rest of the automotive industry outputs. There’s really no way that Tesla is justified as being worth more than all of it’s competitors.

The U.K. and the E.U. are gonna have to figure out something to do against Musk, because now that the U.S. has fallen Musk and the rest of the manosphere are focusing their attention to supporting far-right groups abroad. Personally, I think banning Xitter is the easiest and most effective first step for them to take, as it will greatly limit Musk’s ability to control social discourse in these countries.

Think you’re overestimating how many Republicans hate Trump tbh.

We can all agree that Supreme Court justices shouldn’t face threats of physical violence.

Can we? I’m pretty sure if the U.S. is going to continue forcing children to face threats of physical violence, a corrupt Supreme Court Justice should be able to grow tougher skin. Or hey, maybe don’t be such a corrupt piece of shit that people start wanting to test the limits of your lifetime appointment.

Serious question, why should they have cared? The Dept of Justice didn’t care. US Attorney General Merrick Garland didn’t care. President Joe Biden didn’t care. If anyone actually cared, Trump would be in prison for treason, but the U.S. clearly has a two-tiered justice system that lets you engage in a coup as long as you’re considered wealthy enough.

Both sides called each other a threat to democracy, and neither side actually backed up those claims. When the Dems tried, their donors got mad at them and they shut up, because being rude to fascists is a hard line in our country. Voters saw this and decided it was all smoke, so they focused on what each candidate was promising them. Harris promised 4 more years of a status quo that was hurting them, and Trump promised change.

Why would you be surprised? Why are so many people really believing that there’s some mythical good core of the Republican Party?

They’re all Nazis. They supported a Nazi who wants to install himself as dictator for life. At this point, there are no excuses. Everyone who didn’t want to be a Nazi had 8 years to leave the party. Everyone left is a fucking Nazi.

Stop expecting Nazis to have any morals.

It’d put people in jail back in the day.

Good thing rule of law has completely collapsed for everyone above a certain threshold of wealth, otherwise you could hope for consequences.