Every single bit of the right is projection. "The left hates America" = we (the right) will dismantle and destroy this 250 year experiment
But yes, projection. Like free speech, playing with World War III, etc.
Is this really the case in 2025? There's been more than a few self-described leftists/liberals writing about attending Trump rallies over the years and this not being their experience. One example: https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2018/09/what-i-learned...
The damage is already irreversible on any near to medium term timescale - how bad it gets on an absolute scale is the only thing left to speculate.
It will easily take a generation just for people to find solidarity and courage again.
Progress takes real sacrifice. People died fighting for basic dignity and rights. The anti-slavery movement in the US fought monied interests for centuries.
It took real sacrifice for the labour movement to gain rights such as voting, education, housing, health care in the face of deadly opposition from the rich and their legislative puppets.
It just takes a moment of complaceny on the part of progressive-minded people for the rich and their legislative puppets to undo the foundations of democracy.
1. Europe propped up Russia despite Obama and Trump’s warnings before the war
2. Europe still buys more from Russia than they give Ukraine in financial aid
3. Europe is more friendly towards America’s rival China
4. Europe expects US to spend more protecting Europe than Europe
Maybe on economic issues. On certain social issues it's definitely not "centrist" and arguably further left than other developed countries.
Normie centrist views tend not to garner much attention either in traditional media or in online forums. Instead, we tend to focus much more on the issues that clearly and quickly establish our membership and bonafides in a particular group.
The same extreme-voices-get-heard feature gets recapitulated through our political system. Especially the rise of getting primaried from the left or right. Break ranks with your side? Get primaried. The result is that, to get heard over the fray, political candidates need to articulate more extreme views and stick to them.
Lots of words have been spilled about how various electoral reforms could get us out of this mess. For me, I believe ranked choice voting and open primaries represent an optimal trade-off between "legal, and plausibly implementable" and "yield biggest improvements to electoral system." A major complaint against ranked choice voting is that it tends to bias for more moderate centrists, which I think would be a not-bad problem to have.
It's really only identity politics where the left is actually on the global left, and then it's far-left.
Left to me means workers movements, and there's very little of that in the US.
Americans should continue to conflate socially liberal and economically left-wing at their own peril.
If you want to copy Denmark, I'm guessing you also want their universal healthcare.
Trump is the result of anti-system vote by people who were ignored for decades by both parties.
Trump obviously won't solve their problems. Inequality won't decrease. Healthcare won't become more accessible. Workers' rights won't be fixed. Homes won't get more affordable. Inflation won't drop.
So - even when Trump disgraces himself completely - these disappointed voters will just vote for another anti-system con-man.
Trump's core voters desperately need Sanders to win. But they will vote Trumps and get fucked over time and time again.
This is how democracy dies. People distrusting the system so hard they destroy it.
Funny. Reminds me of the last time I visited Brazil. In the last day I heard someone justifying voting for Bolsonaro by saying "things are so bad that I just want someone who will destroy everything".
The American Problem is not one of systems or policies. The American Problem is about people, what they do to each other, and that you allow that to happen. The constitutional arguments they have are Red Herrings. What matters is what people do, and what they want to be allowed to do by their arguments.
It's not like in authoritarian countries where their votes just go down to trash. It's not like they cannot voice their opinion or organize demonstrations. I agree there is a sentiment of "I'm ignored", but at any point in time it's up to them to not being ignored in democratic society.
Nah, they were not ignored by both parties. It is votes by people who were listened to by the republican party again and again and again.
The most frustrating part is that Trump is sabotaging the US by enacting the pseudo-anti war policies that the republican party has been vilifying for decades.
Leftist now refers to that. The leftist of like over a decade ago. That leftist is now more centrist.
If the left was strong in the US there would have been a contest between Hillary Clinton and an actual left wing contender like Bernie Sanders. Even people like AOC would make a decent centrist candidate in Europe.
That’s the kind of persecution they are talking, and angry, about. If that incident had not happened, Trump may never have been elected.
How about you check out the rest of the western world, where each single democracy had their own pickings with communist tendecies. And most of them handled that in the common sense way of giving workers basic protections and ensuring their share of wealth so they don't feel the need to go to the communists.
Worked pretty well for most European countries.
Although, once communism was gone, the ideology of neolibral economic thinking took over and thus all benefits to workers were seen as unnecessary expenses. Leading to the current rise in nationalism and fascism nearly everywhere.
It is pretty simple: If you want all people to carry a system, all people need to feel like they profit from its existence. Once the mask slips and people realize they aren't profiting, they will be unwilling to hold up their side of the social contract. This is what is happening right now.
Yup, and the response to from the owner class is not to uphold the social contract, but to renegotiate it.
"the whole structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration." - Sam Altman
Has it though? It appears most of Europe is by and large a failed state collapsing under such communist-adjacent policies plus unbounded immigration. I would not want to be Europe today, so yeah, to the extent McCarthyism has been a protection against that, kudos.
the saddest part about a comment you are commenting on is that their mind has been so polluted that they only see the world through the views of two arbitrary political parties (who shift their own views every couple of decades, hard rightist from few decades ago is basically same-ish person as far-leftist today). all empires fall and USA is slowly getting there (now going “little” faster) because of thinking like this in part.
