I have spent my whole life intimately involved with southern Republicans. They will never ever not vote Republican, let alone vote Democrat. It is an identity marker.
It doesn’t even really matter what the policies are. They’ll complain for a while, but they will always internalize a Republican policy shift no matter what it is. They used to treat “free market economics” as a religion just 10 years ago.
Secondarily, they love to define their identity as opposition to the northeast (a stereotypical fictional version of northeast). Democrats and “coastal elites” are the same to them. Once they elected a black man, they all got more racist. They nominated a woman, then they got more sexist. They campaigned on social programs, fuck the poor (even if they are poor).
And there is a cognitive dissonance between their beliefs and their experience. They’ll say “deport them all” but be personal friends with immigrants from church. They simply don’t connect their political beliefs to their reality.
I’m a southerner and I don’t see a future for this country. I used to think if they felt enough pain, then they would take politics seriously, but then a whole bunch of them died of COVID and it changed nothing. If I was a non-American, I’d be telling my government to do what they can to remove all dependence on this country as possible because it won’t get better.
I don’t really know how we’d get there, but the US would be better structured as an EU of regions, IMO. The states are too small, but we’ve got regions with definite noticeable cultural differences (Northeast vs Southeast, etc etc). These areas have more similar values than the country as a whole, and are big enough to handle 99% of their issues. Like, we should not have done the ACA, just merged all the various already successful Northeastern healthcare systems. Then the South could decide to copy it if they wanted, after they saw it working. Or not. What can you do? Trying to impose it seems to have drastically backfired.
Since these regional governments would be picked from the inside, hopefully there wouldn’t be as much of a contrarian reflex to oppose everything they do.
The EU is moving in the opposite direction and trying to become more cohesive. The politicians and technocrats see the Euro as hamstrung with weak fiscal policies.
Kind of, but also it’s complicated. For example, Chicago is blue blue blue. 500 miles in every direction outside the city is red. 90% of the area of Illinois is red. But Chicago is so much more massive that Illinois votes blue in the end. So what the heck region is Chicago in, and the red part of IL?
I don’t know CA well but I know it’s blue with very deep red pockets.
This really sounds like the population just isn't ripe for democracy yet. We also had that, this is a major reason why our 1848 revolution failed and why we didn't become a democracy between 1848 and 1918.
So what you actually kind of miss is a nobility that has common sense and class-consciousness of the leading class.
Great comment. To have democracy, you must have an educated, informed electorate. Religiosity is still very high in the US, and religiosity is negatively correlated with intelligence. Perhaps “democracy ready” levels can be inferred from other countries with more functional governance systems and their lower levels of religiosity as a sort of baseline.
>So what you actually kind of miss is a nobility that has common sense and class-consciousness of the leading class.
I don't agree here, but I can seen in this lens if needed.
But that's not what Trump voters miss. And that's the issue. What they want is a "return to good times", aka times where anyone else who wasn't a white male did in fact not have good times. But they don't care about the non-white non-males.
They are smart enough to not say the quiet part out loud, and even now there's signs they are trying to backtrack internally on all of this[1]. But this is always what's in their minds. I don't know what needs to be done on that end, but the positive thing we can do is hyper-energize the country to come out in droves and not let this sneak back in again (or at least, have way more guardrails for next time).
What I meant with "what you actually kind of miss" is what would be needed to have a stable state despite your population, not what the population actually desires.
This kind of resonates with the idea, that populations education and governing regime beget each other. When the people don't care about their freedom, they eventually loose it, if they do care a lot about it, they will eventually gain it.
Honestly, the current events (as in last 100years) make me think, that maybe monarchy was in fact the best option for some kind of population. I mean a good democracy is a lot better than an average monarchy, but monarchy is also better than a bad democracy that leads to authoritarianism. Even in the worst time of absolutism, the king had a budget, that nobility needed to vote on. So when the king said "I want a bigger palace" and the nobility says, my bridge is old and my workers are hungry, then that's it. Same with war. I mean when your nobility wants to play warlords, that sucks, but a elite that has their richness in real estate and agriculture has a lot to loose in a war. And what happens when your elite wants to play warlord regardless, can be seen in the USA currently.
>... It is an identity marker. It doesn’t even really matter what the policies are....They simply don’t connect their political beliefs to their reality.
I’ll never be able to respect someone who voted for tariffs because they were upset about inflation. Five minutes on Google would have shown how dumb that was.
I don’t remember there being a big discussion before the election about Trump using tariffs as a giant stick to try to make the world do what he wants by punishing US citizens.
You are right that America isn’t going to fix this problem until Trump supporters feel the pain. It is coming, but I’m afraid of what we will have to go through to get there.
The people who love the second amendment are the ones that support the president. Most of them would gladly shoot me or you if their president told them to. In fact, a significant portion fantasize about being able to shoot other Americans and get away with it.
This is one half of the country holding the other half hostage. Despite what you think, there are many protests going on. But a lot of Americans simply agree with what is happening.
I lost 40 lbs with Ozempic and kept almost all of it off a year after stopping the drug. The little I have gained is almost certainly been muscle. But I have had to pay attention to what I eat. Nothing crazy. I don’t count calories, but I can’t house pints of ice cream in the middle of the night anymore.
My wife has been similar. She came off, gained a small amount of weight, but her diet has stabilized to a much healthier norm than before. I would argue that she's healthier now than just before she stopped, because she is eating enough to have energy for exercise/activity.
I played WoTMUD for years. It is a Wheel-of-Time themed PVP-focused MUD. To this day, I check it out every Christmas because the holiday events were a special moment of my childhood.
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