On a purely personal note, I remember being in a teenaged relationship with someone who was very incompatible with me. There was a period of time when I simultaneously both knew, and kept myself...
On a purely personal note, I remember being in a teenaged relationship with someone who was very incompatible with me. There was a period of time when I simultaneously both knew, and kept myself from knowing, that the relationship wasn't a good one. Eventually, a small "last straw" causes a final, irreversible and immediate shift between "I can't find a way to let this go" to "it is crystal clear that I had let go a long time ago and I don't miss this at all". Zero heart break: clean, permanent and freeing.
That is how I feel as a Canadian since 2024, with the United States, and I would wager I'm not alone. As a Canadian millennial growing up in the shadow of soft lumber disputes, Team America ("F Yeah!") World Police, from Swift Boat Veterans to the first Trump presidency, I've known for so long that this is a problematic people group and a problematic Republic. But it was our bigger brother, as the metaphor goes, and just like an abusive employer, I was used to assuming loyalty because "we're family".
I don't think most Americans realize, still, what an abusive trading/geopolitical partner America had been this entire time, and how permanent and clean this break up is.
:) sparkling links remind me of ye Olde GeoCities pages full of under construction gifs and blinking links.
It's very like those videos of saturated solutions, where you tap them and then all the crystals form and suddenly you have this huge change that has, in reality, been building and building, but...
It's very like those videos of saturated solutions, where you tap them and then all the crystals form and suddenly you have this huge change that has, in reality, been building and building, but gets triggered in a moment, and it feels like it just flicks a switch and changes state. I've felt the same thing in the same way, I found it fascinating how I must have subconsciously been processing the relationship dying for a while.
No I'm not trying to police the post, but I thought you would appreciate that another user found it an important summary of the incompetence and corruption we are suffering.
No I'm not trying to police the post, but I thought you would appreciate that another user found it an important summary of the incompetence and corruption we are suffering.
The general guidance, is if it is noise specific only to the USA, it goes in the thread that everyone can either ignore or read. The threshold for noise/ not noise, USA/ Global is not community...
The general guidance, is if it is noise specific only to the USA, it goes in the thread that everyone can either ignore or read.
The threshold for noise/ not noise, USA/ Global is not community enforced, it used to be enforced by our solitary admin, but he has a lighter touch these days?
This is one of the most compelling analysis I have ever read.
I keep thinking about it.
I can only imagine the conversations behind closed doors that led to this united response from former allies.
It's cathartic to see the insanity laid out so succinctly, thanks for posting. I do have one problem with the framing though, it puts a little too much focus on Trump by ignoring the elephant in...
It's cathartic to see the insanity laid out so succinctly, thanks for posting.
I do have one problem with the framing though, it puts a little too much focus on Trump by ignoring the elephant in the room: The energy/military industrial complex. They're loving every minute of this profit bonanza and they almost certainly had a hand in making it happen.
It's not just Trump's childish whims running the world's most powerful military, it's the financial interests he uncritically listens to. And, of course, Israel.
You're missing one more group, the spineless, cowards in the Republican party who are too afraid to stand up for sanity or reveling in the destruction. There's much too much focus on the things...
You're missing one more group, the spineless, cowards in the Republican party who are too afraid to stand up for sanity or reveling in the destruction. There's much too much focus on the things Trump is doing and far too little on his republican enablers. When trump is out of office, all the enablers will still be there.
I still have it in my head that he’s a Russian pawn set about to destroy American soft power on purpose but all evidence suggests if not him any of the other candidates in 2016 were just as likely...
I still have it in my head that he’s a Russian pawn set about to destroy American soft power on purpose but all evidence suggests if not him any of the other candidates in 2016 were just as likely to be Russian pawns based on campaign contribution data.
So its about as provable as intelligent life in space, but, still.
It was so much cheaper for the Russians to take over America by spending a few million dollars buying and blackmailing republicans that it seems odd that they wasted so many years and resources on...
It was so much cheaper for the Russians to take over America by spending a few million dollars buying and blackmailing republicans that it seems odd that they wasted so many years and resources on the cold war.
You are assuming that US politicians treat bribes from Soviet leaders the same way they treat bribes from Russian dictators. Based on what I saw growing up in the US, I don't think it would have...
You are assuming that US politicians treat bribes from Soviet leaders the same way they treat bribes from Russian dictators. Based on what I saw growing up in the US, I don't think it would have happened easily.
Yeah the comment seemed to equate the Soviet government with the current Russian government to a bizarre degree, even if you set aside the differences in who's in charge on the US side of things.
Yeah the comment seemed to equate the Soviet government with the current Russian government to a bizarre degree, even if you set aside the differences in who's in charge on the US side of things.
I think it’s actually really important to hold on to this as at least partial reasoning for anyone trying to understand what’s going on here. Some of his actions make sense in the context of...
I think it’s actually really important to hold on to this as at least partial reasoning for anyone trying to understand what’s going on here. Some of his actions make sense in the context of enriching certain industries or individuals, and that’s almost certainly because they’re taking advantage of his corruption and gullibility even if they didn’t engineer the situation, but other things he does just don’t track even then.
I think part of it is straightforward stupidity and now advancing cognitive decline too, but a decent amount of his actions do also make sense if you contextualise them as “what decision would weaken the US’s global dominance in this moment?”. If you look at probably-Russia’s interests in terms of rebalancing power by damaging the reliability and credibility of the largest player, it makes more sense who’s likely to be seeding some of the crazier ideas with no obvious payoff even for vested financial interests.
The thing that gets me is he’s not just one person, he’s got a whole cabinet, and also hundreds of people contributing to his causes monetarily. One of those groups wrote up a whole plan which he...
The thing that gets me is he’s not just one person, he’s got a whole cabinet, and also hundreds of people contributing to his causes monetarily. One of those groups wrote up a whole plan which he is actually carrying out.
I just don’t think that any percent of this is on accident caused by cognitive decline. I don’t think the people around him would let anything happen on accident.
Once you get there, theres nothing left but the idea that he’s sabotaging the United States on purpose. Its too perfect that he makes exactly the wrong decision every single time.
For example, theres a lot of ideas they talk about but you know they wont do, like introducing gold backed currency, because the Russians still hold US dollars and messing with that and causing deflation on purpose in one swift action is a no go. They need the collapse to happen slow enough to have time to get everyone on some other reserve method.
Trump has a very bombastic, “strong” and “tough” negotiator/dealmaker personality. He also tends to listen to folks who have most recently talked tom him (with the exception of core issues like...
Trump has a very bombastic, “strong” and “tough” negotiator/dealmaker personality. He also tends to listen to folks who have most recently talked tom him (with the exception of core issues like tariffs or immigration). The people who surround him today are mostly sycophants. Trump 1.0 at least had relatively competent people who prevented him from indulging in his baser instincts (esp. Jim Mattis with the DoD). Today, it’s almost all folks who owe their job to Trump and are sucking up to him. And they either agree with him or don’t care.
Right thats kinda what I’m getting at, theres no way this is an accident. Everyone around him is going in the same direction on purpose and that direction is “weaken the United States”. I’m...
Right thats kinda what I’m getting at, theres no way this is an accident. Everyone around him is going in the same direction on purpose and that direction is “weaken the United States”.
I’m suggesting we somehow ended up with an entire class of people willing and capable of looting the US government in the same way that Sears, Circuit City, Toys R Us, Gamestop were bought up and looted. Russian actors maybe, thats unprovable, but this is whats happening.
They are not intentionally trying to destroy the U.S. Folks like Hegseth, RFK Jr, etc genuinely (but incorrectly) think their actions (“lethalitymaxxing,” MAHA) will help the country, and help...
They are not intentionally trying to destroy the U.S. Folks like Hegseth, RFK Jr, etc genuinely (but incorrectly) think their actions (“lethalitymaxxing,” MAHA) will help the country, and help themselves in the process. Again, without Trump, they lose their job, so they are wholly dependent on him and cannot push back much as a result.
Its just a theory, I know the default theory is that they’re dumb and don’t know what they’re doing, my theory is that they do know what they’re doing and its on purpose. Its definitely a hot take...
Its just a theory, I know the default theory is that they’re dumb and don’t know what they’re doing, my theory is that they do know what they’re doing and its on purpose. Its definitely a hot take and I’m not actually trying to convince others, since theres no way for me to prove it.
Half of them are dullards and half of them are not. Rubio and Vance are not. Hegseth and Duffy are. Individuals are individuals and should be evaluated thusly, even cabinet member in this...
Half of them are dullards and half of them are not. Rubio and Vance are not. Hegseth and Duffy are. Individuals are individuals and should be evaluated thusly, even cabinet member in this administration.
I think both can be true. Meaning that they are both doing what they're doing on purpose, and think the consequences they've been warned about are either exaggerated, are worth it to achieve their...
I think both can be true. Meaning that they are both doing what they're doing on purpose, and think the consequences they've been warned about are either exaggerated, are worth it to achieve their goal, or just wrong. And they lack the humility and self awareness to truly consider if they might be wrong (eg, dumb).
Had to dig a bit to find that one, all I could remember was the much more generic "no villain believes themselves to be the villain".
It may be confidently asserted that no man chooses evil, because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. And the desire of rectifying these mistakes, is the noble ambition of an enlightened understanding, the impulse of feelings that Philosophy invigorates.
-- Mary Wollstonecraft
Had to dig a bit to find that one, all I could remember was the much more generic "no villain believes themselves to be the villain".
I’ve been meaning to come back to this, because I think it deserves a proper reply! The short version of my thinking is that it’s probably not as clear cut as there being any single agenda. I’m...
I’ve been meaning to come back to this, because I think it deserves a proper reply! The short version of my thinking is that it’s probably not as clear cut as there being any single agenda. I’m seeing it as a gestalt of different factions and interests, with the one necessary linking factor between them being an abject lack of empathy. If that’s the case, it means faction A won’t oppose faction B doing something destructive unless that thing also happens to interfere with faction A’s goals - and even then it’d have to interfere enough that it’s worth the political capital to fight it rather than just let it slide.
I agree with you that it’s not the case that things are playing out as they are by accident, basically, but I also think it’s not the case they’re all reading from the same sheet - each group is just seeding ideas where they can, capitalising as far as possible on random whims when they get blurted out, and ignoring most of the rest of what happens because they simply don’t care.
Add in factions C, D, E, and so on, plus the fact that most of the people involved will absolutely throw their own faction under the bus if it’s sufficiently in their individual interests to do so, and you end up with a situation that I think is risky to try and predict using any single lens.
This is why I was talking about partial reasoning: I think there’s absolutely an “advancing Russia’s interests by weakening America” faction, and I think there are also plenty of useful idiots doing so unknowingly across the whole morass, and I think there are a lot of people who’ll look at something like the Iran war, realise it’s going to weaken the US, and see that as nothing more than a chance for some quid pro quo to advance their own agenda so not have any reason to stand in the way.
Russia gets their splintering of global power, Hegseth gets his holy crusade, Trump gets his narcissistic feeling of power and strength, whoever’s making those massive insider trades before the tweets go out gets even richer, Thiel gets his biblical end times, the Epstein society get their ongoing protection, etc etc
None of them really care who’s driving or how many thousands of people get run over along the way - and I think none of them are driving, they’re all just shouting different directions over the top of each other and making the occasional grab for the wheel when they can - as long as they’re safe inside the vehicle and it’s not actively going away from their particular destination.
I agree that there are many factors in play and many bad actors with their own selfish interests that influence Trump in negative ways. I've seen compelling posts about how the overarching problem...
I agree that there are many factors in play and many bad actors with their own selfish interests that influence Trump in negative ways.
I've seen compelling posts about how the overarching problem is that the US is a collapsing empire no matter what happens and there are people who realized this and are picking the bones on the way down. Sort of like how an animal predator tends to cull the formerly strong but currently relatively weak. And Trump is a tool they use to facilitate this because he is transactional, immoral, and easily manipulated.
But just by looking at the arc of Trump and the results: It seems extremely obvious that he is specifically and individually compromised by Russia. This is an overarching pattern on top of any other influences.
He started making public statements that favor Russia decades ago after visiting there
He has multiple levels of financial dependency on Russia
He overwhelmingly makes policy decisions that favor Russia
He almost never has made negative comments about Putin
He overwhelmingly makes policy decisions that damage the reputation of the US and allies that oppose Russia
There are too many patterns that point to Russia on top of whatever other corruption he has.
Agreed on all counts, and picking over the bones of the empire on its way down is a very apt description of the situation. I think it’s totally reasonable to assume Trump himself is fundamentally...
Agreed on all counts, and picking over the bones of the empire on its way down is a very apt description of the situation.
I think it’s totally reasonable to assume Trump himself is fundamentally compromised by Russia, I just also think that there are enough other influences in play - on him as a person, and on what his government does outside of his personal control - that it’s tougher to untangle or predict the actions and outcomes as a whole.
Agree with all this, I just think that Trump being an actual Russian pawn was the start of it and now everyone is looting on the situation and I know we have a long, long way to go but I feel...
Agree with all this, I just think that Trump being an actual Russian pawn was the start of it and now everyone is looting on the situation and I know we have a long, long way to go but I feel like, if he was indeed a Russian pawn, that this was their intention in the first place, eventually the vultures would come in and loot the government just like they looted Toys R Us
The older I get, the more preoccupied I become with the concept of prime causes, first dominoes. I see it in other people's comments, too ... it's not just Trump, it's the fossil fuel industry,...
The older I get, the more preoccupied I become with the concept of prime causes, first dominoes. I see it in other people's comments, too ... it's not just Trump, it's the fossil fuel industry, it's the military industrial complex, it's the spineless Republican politicians, etc.
All true, of course, but how did we get here?
I've long said Trump is not--and never has been--the problem. I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the (roughly) half of American voters that thought Trump should run the country, not once but twice. And I stand by that assessment to this day. The wars, the insane healthcare policies, the destructi ... all of it, it is explicitly, maliciously, criminally, the fault of American voters who elected him once, saw what he was capable of, and then said, "yes, please, I would like even more of that".
And yet ... and yet ... why did 77M people think that was a good idea? Did it have anything to do with 30+ years of Faux News and 25+ years of Google search siloing people and 20+ years of Facebook outrage-algorithms? Or 40+ years of Exxon and Co maliciously manipulating anything and everything they could, to distract people from discovering that their one-and-only product was destroying the planet? Is it Capitalism in general, monetizing the dopamine drip for the shiny toy? Was Marx actually right?
( shrug )
Was the US already doomed after 9/11? I think so. But then, would 9/11 have even happened w/o Reagan? Would Reagan have happened w/o the Iranian Revolution? Or does it really all go all the way back to the Civil War? White men still just trying to get the brown people to do all the work for them, so they can live guilt-free lives of redolent leisure?
First dominoes. IDK. The more I look, the more I see other dominoes, stretching back in time. And I'm stuck wondering who to blame, until I come to the conclusion that human nature is just fundamentally incompatible with the modern society we've tried to create. Evolution has not kept pace with innovation; our lizard brains keep interfering.
Meh. Time for coffee. Sorry I don't have a satisfying conclusion here, but that kind of feels like the point.
It seems the country was founded by white people told that they each get to be their own little kings. Each man can even be his own military. It’s hard to get that out of the population even...
It seems the country was founded by white people told that they each get to be their own little kings. Each man can even be his own military. It’s hard to get that out of the population even hundreds of years later. People see a petty tyrant like Trump and think “Fuck yeah. I’d love to exact my will on the world just like him.” So they do what they’ve always done by voting Republican, vote for the life they wish they had. They are only a temporarily embarrassed millionaire after all.
I think populism is just one of the fundamental failure modes of democracy. Ultimately, we do not elect representatives based on their capability (i.e., their ability to implement good policy) but...
I think populism is just one of the fundamental failure modes of democracy. Ultimately, we do not elect representatives based on their capability (i.e., their ability to implement good policy) but rather their intelligibility (i.e., their ability to persuasively argue policy). Obviously capable politicians will have an advantage, but someone can also be technically capable but unable to effectively disseminate knowledge. Sometime it's from a lack of charisma, sure, but other times issues are simply complicated and cannot be distilled to a soundbite.
So what happens when you have a complex policy problem that cannot easily be addressed or explained (say, the shit economy at the end of 2024)? You get someone like Trump, a person who has a simple answer for everything (possibly because he cannot actually fathom complications). When Trump said that he'd fix the economy through tariffs, virtually every economist disagreed; but when Biden argued that his administration already had implemented policies to right the course, but that it'd just take time for their effects to be felt because of blah blah blah... Well, who did people believe? Some invisible experts with a forgettable message, or the TV personality who continuously boasted (falsely, for the record) about having presided over the strongest economy of all time?
Immigrants are particularly vulnerable to this type of scapegoating. It's much easier to blame "undesirables" for decaying infrastructure and "abusing" welfare than it is to build infrastructure or an effective welfare system.
You forgot the 200+ years of racism, but yes. There's a lot of threads leading up to this moment. And if we're adding sigificant modern events, I'll add in one of the most controversial Supreme...
id it have anything to do with 30+ years of Faux News and 25+ years of Google search siloing people and 20+ years of Facebook outrage-algorithms? Or 40+ years of Exxon and Co maliciously manipulating anything and everything they could, to distract people from discovering that their one-and-only product was destroying the planet?
You forgot the 200+ years of racism, but yes. There's a lot of threads leading up to this moment.
And if we're adding sigificant modern events, I'll add in one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions to end Florida's recount early and declare W. Bush the winner of the national election, despite the popular vote favoring Gore. 9/11 sealed the deal, but I feel that was a true inflection point on when America started declining as a "high-trust society".
We can (and some have and will) spend careers chronicling every little action that lead to this chain of events. But: while reviewing and reflecting upon history is important, I find it more important to focus on the present and near future that we have some minor control over collectively. What steps can we do to make sure we never get another Trump situation again?
I've thought a lot about it, but unfortunatly my immediate future is focusing on securing myself. I definitely want to make some action on these ideas in my community, if nothing else; I won't standing by the next time we risk such regression in our society.
For the last few years I've seen a lot of articles talking about who is responsible for our situation regarding Trump. Here's a recent one: Opinion | It’s Not Trump. It’s America - NY Times (note...
For the last few years I've seen a lot of articles talking about who is responsible for our situation regarding Trump. Here's a recent one:
(note that this article requires login to NY Times but I was able to read it in Firefox using the reader view)
Like a lot of other Americans, I’ve oscillated in these dark times between two emotional poles. At points, I tell myself that Donald Trump is a uniquely malevolent figure who has seized levers of power that no previous president had ever dared to grasp. The story doesn’t stop state violence in the streets or illegal military operations abroad. Yet it has its comforts. Once Trump passes from the scene — as the laws of nature, if not politics, require — some kind of restoration of the American democratic and constitutional project can take place.
On darker days, I find myself turning to a more thoroughgoing narrative: that Trump is the fulfillment of what America has always been — a self-satisfied nation, granted license by its myths about providence and exceptionalism to do whatever it wants. Trump didn’t come from nowhere, after all. His two victories were forged by choices made by Americans and the leaders they elected. If he had not existed, history would have invented someone like him. This explanation offers its own consolation. At least it is something a rational mind can grasp.
...
In December 1952, a Scottish scholar named Denis Brogan published a remarkable essay titled “The Illusion of American Omnipotence.” Writing as the United States was emerging as the world’s pre-eminent power, Brogan diagnosed a peculiar feature of the American mind. The United States, fueled by its myths and unswervingly certain of its vision for the world, could not see difficulty, much less defeat, as a reason to question its aims. Failure was never brought about through the strength or power of rivals. It came, instead, through blunder and betrayal.
Henry the VIII, more or less. The blue/red state divide fuzzily overlaps with "culturally Catholic" or "culturally Anglican." The early ruling class of the American colonies were also (Anglican)...
Or does it really all go all the way back to the Civil War?
Henry the VIII, more or less.
The blue/red state divide fuzzily overlaps with "culturally Catholic" or "culturally Anglican."
The early ruling class of the American colonies were also (Anglican) governors appointed by the crown, and wealthy people descended from that extinct aristocratic era deeply resent the greater power of the wealthy mercantile class, which is less likely to be English and more into the Catholic-derived cultural sphere. And so do their impotent malcontent followers.
This seems like a pretty bad take on a historical basis given the known religious makeup of the future-US colonies early on (particularly the opposition to the Anglican church that characterized...
The blue/red state divide fuzzily overlaps with "culturally Catholic" or "culturally Anglican."
This seems like a pretty bad take on a historical basis given the known religious makeup of the future-US colonies early on (particularly the opposition to the Anglican church that characterized many of them, but also the general lack of even cultural Catholicism in the vast majority of them) as well as the long history of Catholics as a minority and anti-Catholic sentiment in the US. I don't think this take is all that well-founded when one considers the history of Christianity within the US and its developments over time. There are interesting religious ties to the red/blue divide within the context of US Christianity, ofc, but this ain't it.
Many of those groups that opposed the Anglican Church were themselves splinters from it though. Puritans were just radical Anglicans, who finally separated completely after Cromwell was deposed....
Many of those groups that opposed the Anglican Church were themselves splinters from it though. Puritans were just radical Anglicans, who finally separated completely after Cromwell was deposed. They inhabit the same broader cultural sphere.
Many of the early colonies were also not English. They were French, Spanish and Dutch. Then the major 19th century and earl 20th century immigration wave dramatically changed the demographics of the country, very heavily in the northeast.
The anti-Catholic sentiment is the point. People were shitty about John F Kennedy being Irish in the 60s, and that same undercurrent hasn't gone away. The new world "old money" still deeply resents that the newer immigrants supplanted their power in the industrial boom that followed. The 1600s are a red herring, it's the shift that happened over time and where the cultural split started.
Also, what do Joe Biden, Barrack Obama and Bill Clinton have in common, besides party affiliation? I can find "Catholic" on their Wikipedia pages.
I simply think you're overrating Catholic influence -- even after the waves of Catholic immigration, which post-date several other much more salient factors in terms of the US red-blue divide,...
I simply think you're overrating Catholic influence -- even after the waves of Catholic immigration, which post-date several other much more salient factors in terms of the US red-blue divide, both religiously and otherwise. I don't think there's no influence from Catholicism on US Christianity and thus on US politics, but I think you're attributing far too much importance to Catholicism specifically, especially when there are much more interesting religious schisms within the context of US culture and politics specifically. Framing, for instance, the Northern-Southern Baptist split as being remotely related to even cultural Catholicism would be absurd, and that split and the reasons behind it remain very relevant to the current red-blue dichotomy. Insisting on seeing everything through the lens of the Protestant/Catholic divide ignores huge swaths of Christian history within the United States and a lot of interesting developments and schisms within Protestantism that are much more important context for modern US political issues.
Also, neither Obama nor Clinton is Catholic. They are both Protestant. The only Catholic president other than Biden was JFK. I don't know if you worded your comment to deliberately imply that this wasn't the case, but it came across that way, so I wanted to point it out explicitly and point to the surprisingly detailed page about presidential religious affiliation on Wikipedia.
You are missing a lot of detail within the history of protestantism. Anglicans and Lutherans and Methodists have bishops as opposed to the calvinist and other 'free church' traditions. The biggest...
You are missing a lot of detail within the history of protestantism. Anglicans and Lutherans and Methodists have bishops as opposed to the calvinist and other 'free church' traditions.
The biggest influence I see with regard to US right vs left political splits within protestantism is the roughly northern vs southern cultural split in the response to Darwin and historical literary criticism of the Bible. The churches that would openly claim that the Bible is inerrant are also anti-science, typically anti race integration, anti abortion and pro republican. They also tend to have fewer education requirements for their pastors.
My memory of what happened with Pennsylvania is foggy, but my assumption is the more belligerent sects didn't take too kindly to them and their influence would have been more vestigial as the...
My memory of what happened with Pennsylvania is foggy, but my assumption is the more belligerent sects didn't take too kindly to them and their influence would have been more vestigial as the centuries have passed. Pennsylvania did have an element of being a haven for the Quakers after being pushed out of one place or another.
Notably, the French, Dutch and Spanish were all there...and then they weren't. Many times, that changed through violence. (e.g. the "expulsion" of the Acadians during the Seven Years War.)
Anyway, many of those separate sets of values are passed along through generations, even among the non-religious. One of the ones I like to get people with: is good something you are or something you do (and worry if you're doing enough)?
It's something that leans more Catholic, even if people no longer are. Even if your family gravitated toward some other religion or you're an atheist (my grandparents on both sides were Catholic,...
It's something that leans more Catholic, even if people no longer are. Even if your family gravitated toward some other religion or you're an atheist (my grandparents on both sides were Catholic, but I'm squarely atheist), Catholic Guilt still lurks around. You should probably be doing good things to make sure you don't go to hell (even if you really don't think it exists). All the time. Maybe feel a little bad if you're not. The why isn't necessary...the weird sense is just built in.
Protestant faiths tend to put more emphasis on "if you're faithful you go to heaven, and bad people are people who don't believe." Good acts don't matter as much, but you need to save™️ (convert) people. Because you're either good or you're not, for the inherent reason of faith. (It's a very, very wide area to cover though, so that's a major generalization. But, uh...Southern Baptists, which are also "slavery flavored baptism," because the northern ones said that was wrong.)
This also lines up with progressive democratic values (heavy emphasis on lifting people out of poverty, giving opportunity, fixing injustices) vs the tribalism of the republicans (the bad Other is why you, the good in-group, don't have nice things).
It's hardly a hard and fast rule, but those are strong multi-generational influences. You can also look at it through the lens of the 19th/20th century immigrants from Poland/Ireland/Italy/etc vs the earlier ones.
On a purely personal note, I remember being in a teenaged relationship with someone who was very incompatible with me. There was a period of time when I simultaneously both knew, and kept myself from knowing, that the relationship wasn't a good one. Eventually, a small "last straw" causes a final, irreversible and immediate shift between "I can't find a way to let this go" to "it is crystal clear that I had let go a long time ago and I don't miss this at all". Zero heart break: clean, permanent and freeing.
That is how I feel as a Canadian since 2024, with the United States, and I would wager I'm not alone. As a Canadian millennial growing up in the shadow of soft lumber disputes, Team America ("F Yeah!") World Police, from Swift Boat Veterans to the first Trump presidency, I've known for so long that this is a problematic people group and a problematic Republic. But it was our bigger brother, as the metaphor goes, and just like an abusive employer, I was used to assuming loyalty because "we're family".
I don't think most Americans realize, still, what an abusive trading/geopolitical partner America had been this entire time, and how permanent and clean this break up is.
:) sparkling links remind me of ye Olde GeoCities pages full of under construction gifs and blinking links.
It's very like those videos of saturated solutions, where you tap them and then all the crystals form and suddenly you have this huge change that has, in reality, been building and building, but gets triggered in a moment, and it feels like it just flicks a switch and changes state. I've felt the same thing in the same way, I found it fascinating how I must have subconsciously been processing the relationship dying for a while.
I also posted about this article in the Weekly US Politics topic here
No I'm not trying to police the post, but I thought you would appreciate that another user found it an important summary of the incompetence and corruption we are suffering.
The general guidance, is if it is noise specific only to the USA, it goes in the thread that everyone can either ignore or read.
The threshold for noise/ not noise, USA/ Global is not community enforced, it used to be enforced by our solitary admin, but he has a lighter touch these days?
This is one of the most compelling analysis I have ever read.
I keep thinking about it.
I can only imagine the conversations behind closed doors that led to this united response from former allies.
It definitely warrants a separate post IMHO.
It's cathartic to see the insanity laid out so succinctly, thanks for posting.
I do have one problem with the framing though, it puts a little too much focus on Trump by ignoring the elephant in the room: The energy/military industrial complex. They're loving every minute of this profit bonanza and they almost certainly had a hand in making it happen.
It's not just Trump's childish whims running the world's most powerful military, it's the financial interests he uncritically listens to. And, of course, Israel.
You're missing one more group, the spineless, cowards in the Republican party who are too afraid to stand up for sanity or reveling in the destruction. There's much too much focus on the things Trump is doing and far too little on his republican enablers. When trump is out of office, all the enablers will still be there.
I still have it in my head that he’s a Russian pawn set about to destroy American soft power on purpose but all evidence suggests if not him any of the other candidates in 2016 were just as likely to be Russian pawns based on campaign contribution data.
So its about as provable as intelligent life in space, but, still.
It was so much cheaper for the Russians to take over America by spending a few million dollars buying and blackmailing republicans that it seems odd that they wasted so many years and resources on the cold war.
You are assuming that US politicians treat bribes from Soviet leaders the same way they treat bribes from Russian dictators. Based on what I saw growing up in the US, I don't think it would have happened easily.
Yeah the comment seemed to equate the Soviet government with the current Russian government to a bizarre degree, even if you set aside the differences in who's in charge on the US side of things.
I think it’s actually really important to hold on to this as at least partial reasoning for anyone trying to understand what’s going on here. Some of his actions make sense in the context of enriching certain industries or individuals, and that’s almost certainly because they’re taking advantage of his corruption and gullibility even if they didn’t engineer the situation, but other things he does just don’t track even then.
I think part of it is straightforward stupidity and now advancing cognitive decline too, but a decent amount of his actions do also make sense if you contextualise them as “what decision would weaken the US’s global dominance in this moment?”. If you look at probably-Russia’s interests in terms of rebalancing power by damaging the reliability and credibility of the largest player, it makes more sense who’s likely to be seeding some of the crazier ideas with no obvious payoff even for vested financial interests.
[Edit] Typos
The thing that gets me is he’s not just one person, he’s got a whole cabinet, and also hundreds of people contributing to his causes monetarily. One of those groups wrote up a whole plan which he is actually carrying out.
I just don’t think that any percent of this is on accident caused by cognitive decline. I don’t think the people around him would let anything happen on accident.
Once you get there, theres nothing left but the idea that he’s sabotaging the United States on purpose. Its too perfect that he makes exactly the wrong decision every single time.
For example, theres a lot of ideas they talk about but you know they wont do, like introducing gold backed currency, because the Russians still hold US dollars and messing with that and causing deflation on purpose in one swift action is a no go. They need the collapse to happen slow enough to have time to get everyone on some other reserve method.
Trump has a very bombastic, “strong” and “tough” negotiator/dealmaker personality. He also tends to listen to folks who have most recently talked tom him (with the exception of core issues like tariffs or immigration). The people who surround him today are mostly sycophants. Trump 1.0 at least had relatively competent people who prevented him from indulging in his baser instincts (esp. Jim Mattis with the DoD). Today, it’s almost all folks who owe their job to Trump and are sucking up to him. And they either agree with him or don’t care.
Right thats kinda what I’m getting at, theres no way this is an accident. Everyone around him is going in the same direction on purpose and that direction is “weaken the United States”.
I’m suggesting we somehow ended up with an entire class of people willing and capable of looting the US government in the same way that Sears, Circuit City, Toys R Us, Gamestop were bought up and looted. Russian actors maybe, thats unprovable, but this is whats happening.
They are not intentionally trying to destroy the U.S. Folks like Hegseth, RFK Jr, etc genuinely (but incorrectly) think their actions (“lethalitymaxxing,” MAHA) will help the country, and help themselves in the process. Again, without Trump, they lose their job, so they are wholly dependent on him and cannot push back much as a result.
Its just a theory, I know the default theory is that they’re dumb and don’t know what they’re doing, my theory is that they do know what they’re doing and its on purpose. Its definitely a hot take and I’m not actually trying to convince others, since theres no way for me to prove it.
Half of them are dullards and half of them are not. Rubio and Vance are not. Hegseth and Duffy are. Individuals are individuals and should be evaluated thusly, even cabinet member in this administration.
I think both can be true. Meaning that they are both doing what they're doing on purpose, and think the consequences they've been warned about are either exaggerated, are worth it to achieve their goal, or just wrong. And they lack the humility and self awareness to truly consider if they might be wrong (eg, dumb).
Had to dig a bit to find that one, all I could remember was the much more generic "no villain believes themselves to be the villain".
I’ve been meaning to come back to this, because I think it deserves a proper reply! The short version of my thinking is that it’s probably not as clear cut as there being any single agenda. I’m seeing it as a gestalt of different factions and interests, with the one necessary linking factor between them being an abject lack of empathy. If that’s the case, it means faction A won’t oppose faction B doing something destructive unless that thing also happens to interfere with faction A’s goals - and even then it’d have to interfere enough that it’s worth the political capital to fight it rather than just let it slide.
I agree with you that it’s not the case that things are playing out as they are by accident, basically, but I also think it’s not the case they’re all reading from the same sheet - each group is just seeding ideas where they can, capitalising as far as possible on random whims when they get blurted out, and ignoring most of the rest of what happens because they simply don’t care.
Add in factions C, D, E, and so on, plus the fact that most of the people involved will absolutely throw their own faction under the bus if it’s sufficiently in their individual interests to do so, and you end up with a situation that I think is risky to try and predict using any single lens.
This is why I was talking about partial reasoning: I think there’s absolutely an “advancing Russia’s interests by weakening America” faction, and I think there are also plenty of useful idiots doing so unknowingly across the whole morass, and I think there are a lot of people who’ll look at something like the Iran war, realise it’s going to weaken the US, and see that as nothing more than a chance for some quid pro quo to advance their own agenda so not have any reason to stand in the way.
Russia gets their splintering of global power, Hegseth gets his holy crusade, Trump gets his narcissistic feeling of power and strength, whoever’s making those massive insider trades before the tweets go out gets even richer, Thiel gets his biblical end times, the Epstein society get their ongoing protection, etc etc
None of them really care who’s driving or how many thousands of people get run over along the way - and I think none of them are driving, they’re all just shouting different directions over the top of each other and making the occasional grab for the wheel when they can - as long as they’re safe inside the vehicle and it’s not actively going away from their particular destination.
I agree that there are many factors in play and many bad actors with their own selfish interests that influence Trump in negative ways.
I've seen compelling posts about how the overarching problem is that the US is a collapsing empire no matter what happens and there are people who realized this and are picking the bones on the way down. Sort of like how an animal predator tends to cull the formerly strong but currently relatively weak. And Trump is a tool they use to facilitate this because he is transactional, immoral, and easily manipulated.
But just by looking at the arc of Trump and the results: It seems extremely obvious that he is specifically and individually compromised by Russia. This is an overarching pattern on top of any other influences.
There are too many patterns that point to Russia on top of whatever other corruption he has.
Agreed on all counts, and picking over the bones of the empire on its way down is a very apt description of the situation.
I think it’s totally reasonable to assume Trump himself is fundamentally compromised by Russia, I just also think that there are enough other influences in play - on him as a person, and on what his government does outside of his personal control - that it’s tougher to untangle or predict the actions and outcomes as a whole.
Agree with all this, I just think that Trump being an actual Russian pawn was the start of it and now everyone is looting on the situation and I know we have a long, long way to go but I feel like, if he was indeed a Russian pawn, that this was their intention in the first place, eventually the vultures would come in and loot the government just like they looted Toys R Us
The older I get, the more preoccupied I become with the concept of prime causes, first dominoes. I see it in other people's comments, too ... it's not just Trump, it's the fossil fuel industry, it's the military industrial complex, it's the spineless Republican politicians, etc.
All true, of course, but how did we get here?
I've long said Trump is not--and never has been--the problem. I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the (roughly) half of American voters that thought Trump should run the country, not once but twice. And I stand by that assessment to this day. The wars, the insane healthcare policies, the destructi ... all of it, it is explicitly, maliciously, criminally, the fault of American voters who elected him once, saw what he was capable of, and then said, "yes, please, I would like even more of that".
And yet ... and yet ... why did 77M people think that was a good idea? Did it have anything to do with 30+ years of Faux News and 25+ years of Google search siloing people and 20+ years of Facebook outrage-algorithms? Or 40+ years of Exxon and Co maliciously manipulating anything and everything they could, to distract people from discovering that their one-and-only product was destroying the planet? Is it Capitalism in general, monetizing the dopamine drip for the shiny toy? Was Marx actually right?
( shrug )
Was the US already doomed after 9/11? I think so. But then, would 9/11 have even happened w/o Reagan? Would Reagan have happened w/o the Iranian Revolution? Or does it really all go all the way back to the Civil War? White men still just trying to get the brown people to do all the work for them, so they can live guilt-free lives of redolent leisure?
First dominoes. IDK. The more I look, the more I see other dominoes, stretching back in time. And I'm stuck wondering who to blame, until I come to the conclusion that human nature is just fundamentally incompatible with the modern society we've tried to create. Evolution has not kept pace with innovation; our lizard brains keep interfering.
Meh. Time for coffee. Sorry I don't have a satisfying conclusion here, but that kind of feels like the point.
It seems the country was founded by white people told that they each get to be their own little kings. Each man can even be his own military. It’s hard to get that out of the population even hundreds of years later. People see a petty tyrant like Trump and think “Fuck yeah. I’d love to exact my will on the world just like him.” So they do what they’ve always done by voting Republican, vote for the life they wish they had. They are only a temporarily embarrassed millionaire after all.
I think populism is just one of the fundamental failure modes of democracy. Ultimately, we do not elect representatives based on their capability (i.e., their ability to implement good policy) but rather their intelligibility (i.e., their ability to persuasively argue policy). Obviously capable politicians will have an advantage, but someone can also be technically capable but unable to effectively disseminate knowledge. Sometime it's from a lack of charisma, sure, but other times issues are simply complicated and cannot be distilled to a soundbite.
So what happens when you have a complex policy problem that cannot easily be addressed or explained (say, the shit economy at the end of 2024)? You get someone like Trump, a person who has a simple answer for everything (possibly because he cannot actually fathom complications). When Trump said that he'd fix the economy through tariffs, virtually every economist disagreed; but when Biden argued that his administration already had implemented policies to right the course, but that it'd just take time for their effects to be felt because of blah blah blah... Well, who did people believe? Some invisible experts with a forgettable message, or the TV personality who continuously boasted (falsely, for the record) about having presided over the strongest economy of all time?
Immigrants are particularly vulnerable to this type of scapegoating. It's much easier to blame "undesirables" for decaying infrastructure and "abusing" welfare than it is to build infrastructure or an effective welfare system.
You forgot the 200+ years of racism, but yes. There's a lot of threads leading up to this moment.
And if we're adding sigificant modern events, I'll add in one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions to end Florida's recount early and declare W. Bush the winner of the national election, despite the popular vote favoring Gore. 9/11 sealed the deal, but I feel that was a true inflection point on when America started declining as a "high-trust society".
We can (and some have and will) spend careers chronicling every little action that lead to this chain of events. But: while reviewing and reflecting upon history is important, I find it more important to focus on the present and near future that we have some minor control over collectively. What steps can we do to make sure we never get another Trump situation again?
I've thought a lot about it, but unfortunatly my immediate future is focusing on securing myself. I definitely want to make some action on these ideas in my community, if nothing else; I won't standing by the next time we risk such regression in our society.
For the last few years I've seen a lot of articles talking about who is responsible for our situation regarding Trump. Here's a recent one:
Opinion | It’s Not Trump. It’s America - NY Times
(note that this article requires login to NY Times but I was able to read it in Firefox using the reader view)
...
Henry the VIII, more or less.
The blue/red state divide fuzzily overlaps with "culturally Catholic" or "culturally Anglican."
The early ruling class of the American colonies were also (Anglican) governors appointed by the crown, and wealthy people descended from that extinct aristocratic era deeply resent the greater power of the wealthy mercantile class, which is less likely to be English and more into the Catholic-derived cultural sphere. And so do their impotent malcontent followers.
This seems like a pretty bad take on a historical basis given the known religious makeup of the future-US colonies early on (particularly the opposition to the Anglican church that characterized many of them, but also the general lack of even cultural Catholicism in the vast majority of them) as well as the long history of Catholics as a minority and anti-Catholic sentiment in the US. I don't think this take is all that well-founded when one considers the history of Christianity within the US and its developments over time. There are interesting religious ties to the red/blue divide within the context of US Christianity, ofc, but this ain't it.
Many of those groups that opposed the Anglican Church were themselves splinters from it though. Puritans were just radical Anglicans, who finally separated completely after Cromwell was deposed. They inhabit the same broader cultural sphere.
Many of the early colonies were also not English. They were French, Spanish and Dutch. Then the major 19th century and earl 20th century immigration wave dramatically changed the demographics of the country, very heavily in the northeast.
The anti-Catholic sentiment is the point. People were shitty about John F Kennedy being Irish in the 60s, and that same undercurrent hasn't gone away. The new world "old money" still deeply resents that the newer immigrants supplanted their power in the industrial boom that followed. The 1600s are a red herring, it's the shift that happened over time and where the cultural split started.
Also, what do Joe Biden, Barrack Obama and Bill Clinton have in common, besides party affiliation? I can find "Catholic" on their Wikipedia pages.
I simply think you're overrating Catholic influence -- even after the waves of Catholic immigration, which post-date several other much more salient factors in terms of the US red-blue divide, both religiously and otherwise. I don't think there's no influence from Catholicism on US Christianity and thus on US politics, but I think you're attributing far too much importance to Catholicism specifically, especially when there are much more interesting religious schisms within the context of US culture and politics specifically. Framing, for instance, the Northern-Southern Baptist split as being remotely related to even cultural Catholicism would be absurd, and that split and the reasons behind it remain very relevant to the current red-blue dichotomy. Insisting on seeing everything through the lens of the Protestant/Catholic divide ignores huge swaths of Christian history within the United States and a lot of interesting developments and schisms within Protestantism that are much more important context for modern US political issues.
Also, neither Obama nor Clinton is Catholic. They are both Protestant. The only Catholic president other than Biden was JFK. I don't know if you worded your comment to deliberately imply that this wasn't the case, but it came across that way, so I wanted to point it out explicitly and point to the surprisingly detailed page about presidential religious affiliation on Wikipedia.
You are missing a lot of detail within the history of protestantism. Anglicans and Lutherans and Methodists have bishops as opposed to the calvinist and other 'free church' traditions.
The biggest influence I see with regard to US right vs left political splits within protestantism is the roughly northern vs southern cultural split in the response to Darwin and historical literary criticism of the Bible. The churches that would openly claim that the Bible is inerrant are also anti-science, typically anti race integration, anti abortion and pro republican. They also tend to have fewer education requirements for their pastors.
It might be more of a high church/low church divide. But that's harder to quantify on a map. I'm intrigued and may poke at this a bit.
My memory of what happened with Pennsylvania is foggy, but my assumption is the more belligerent sects didn't take too kindly to them and their influence would have been more vestigial as the centuries have passed. Pennsylvania did have an element of being a haven for the Quakers after being pushed out of one place or another.
Notably, the French, Dutch and Spanish were all there...and then they weren't. Many times, that changed through violence. (e.g. the "expulsion" of the Acadians during the Seven Years War.)
Anyway, many of those separate sets of values are passed along through generations, even among the non-religious. One of the ones I like to get people with: is good something you are or something you do (and worry if you're doing enough)?
It's something that leans more Catholic, even if people no longer are. Even if your family gravitated toward some other religion or you're an atheist (my grandparents on both sides were Catholic, but I'm squarely atheist), Catholic Guilt still lurks around. You should probably be doing good things to make sure you don't go to hell (even if you really don't think it exists). All the time. Maybe feel a little bad if you're not. The why isn't necessary...the weird sense is just built in.
Protestant faiths tend to put more emphasis on "if you're faithful you go to heaven, and bad people are people who don't believe." Good acts don't matter as much, but you need to save™️ (convert) people. Because you're either good or you're not, for the inherent reason of faith. (It's a very, very wide area to cover though, so that's a major generalization. But, uh...Southern Baptists, which are also "slavery flavored baptism," because the northern ones said that was wrong.)
This also lines up with progressive democratic values (heavy emphasis on lifting people out of poverty, giving opportunity, fixing injustices) vs the tribalism of the republicans (the bad Other is why you, the good in-group, don't have nice things).
It's hardly a hard and fast rule, but those are strong multi-generational influences. You can also look at it through the lens of the 19th/20th century immigrants from Poland/Ireland/Italy/etc vs the earlier ones.