This is applicable to Americans in the country and better answered if you actually live in it. The question stands - have you given up on America or do you really think there is a shred of a chance for a turnaround?
I think I have given up on America to do anything better for itself. I think the passing general election nailed the final nail in the coffin, that people who voted wrongly, wanted to worsen things in general to appease selfish personal agendas.
I think Americans in general really are set in stone about baking a cake and having it too with their interesting levels of double standards. They complain about big tech having your information, but turn around wanting you to sign a petition that asks for your information. They complain about commercials all year long, but will tune in by the millions for a Super Bowl. They complain about unfair wages, bad workplace environments and shitty bosses but didn’t make so much of a fuss during the pandemic.
There’s just too many things internally wrong with this country, that dampens what hope I ever had for it. Politicians and the “Real Owners” want to keep Americans dumb, complacent, tight and stressed to do anything. But if you give Americans a bit of leverage that could chip at those odds, they shit the fucking bed with their own incompetence.
So what gives, really? Live you life, do the best you can for yourself and those around you. Live another day but god damn fuck the majority of Americans and this country in general.
don’t blame the Americans for where we are friend, that’s what the billionaires want you to do.
turn your attention to the rich and powerful who use vote suppression and information control. theyve worked very hard to crush democracy and also to turn away any blame from themselves.
They’re so successful that even you—one of the oppressed—would blame your poor and powerless brothers and sisters for the actions of the fascist rich who truly rule this land.
you’re right that there’s no future in electoral politics, but the Americans living here are as a rule not the problem. if you look past the foolishness of oligarch media and see how it benefits your real enemy you’ll understand the scope of the problem.
then once you see, turn away from that as well and focus on mutual aid within your own community. is you do that you will soon understand what i mean for yourself.
I explain all of that to those unfortunate manipulated victims of capitalism and they call me a slur and say I’m jealous.
You can absolutely blame the people at some point.
If I tell somebody “that guy’s an obvious con artist, don’t give him money he’s going to scam you. Here’s examples of him doing exactly that to the last 5 people. Heres my degree showing that i have specifically studied for years to be able to identify scams” And then that person calls me a cuck while handing his money to the scam artist, I’m going to blame the person I correctly and explicitly warned for not listening to me for the 500th time in a row.
And then the anger increases as every single one of the hundreds of people enthusiastically lining up to give the scam artist money has the same conversation with me.
And then a group of 50 of them get together and decide it’s my fault because they think I was being condescending as I explained exactly how they are fucking themselves over.
I explain all of that to those unfortunate manipulated victims of capitalism and they call me a slur and say I’m jealous.
You can absolutely blame the people at some point.
i understand what you mean, but your voice isn’t going to override the professional loudspeakers continuously propagandizing your fellows. right? even if youre the most eloquent and well read person, you don’t have the platform or the power
so when i touched on moving past electoral politics, i meant it. there is simply no point in casting blame on your fellows, full stop. nobody needs to hear another damn explanation, right? people are sick of *empty explanations.
if you want to get people to believe in you then focus on what actually matters, and that’s food on the table and safety. community. the first two things make up the second, and they are rapidlydisappearing from our lives. That vacuum will be filled. focus on being a part of the solution going forward instead of working about why we are here, and people will follow you
Kind of hard to build a community with the people with giant “fuck your feelings” flags on the side of their house.
That’s what I’m saying, maybe you can’t blame people for believing a lie but you can absolutely blame people for being literally antisocial and willfully ignorant.
I’m not going to waste my time and put my friends and family at risk by trying to build a community with people who would call them slurs. Especially because they are, fundamentally, antisocial assholes.
You try to build something with them and then as soon as that “thing” has any value they’ll attack you and try to take it from you. That’s their idea of a smart strong guy, being completely willing to fuck over and lie to other people. It’s why trumps president, and he’s still got north of 90% approval with people who voted for him, which makes up about 70% of my community.
As soon as you had more food then they deemed appropriate, which is going to be basically any amount, they’ll take that using the guns they’ve been hoarding in the hopes of having an excuse to shoot me. Kinda hard to focus on food and security with those people.
Frankly I’m getting pretty tired of the response to me getting upset at fascist to be “yea but you gotta understand they’ve enthusisatically brainwashed themselves because somebody told them it was a trans person’s fault their boss fired him and that seemed like a good point to them”
i never said you have to reach out to those who’d have your head on a platter. i am telling you to focus on mutual aid programs.
community farms, food pantries are a good place to start. find like minded people near you.
im not telling ya to turn chuds into allies, im telling you to focus on doing what you can for the people around you who want the same thing you do.
start small, doing things you can do and joining with existing orgs that are doing good work. build from there. that’s what i mean.
I’m saying there’s like 4 like minded people and we all already know each other. My mom’s retired so she has time to volunteer at the local food pantry. The vast majority of people who come in are chuds who gloat to the volunteers about all the great stuff trumps doing because they know my mom and the other women who volunteer are all liberals.
I’m saying your strategy of not being realistic about how much of an impedance the slack jawwed local contingent is gonna be is flawed.
They’re the one holding us back, as has been true for the entirety of this country, and saying it’s not their fault that they are like this is a fundamental failure in planning.
It sucks but we’ve got to accept “if we just help these people improve their lives they’ll come around” is literally not true. I live in upstate new york surrounded by people that would either freeze or starve to death in the winter if it weren’t for state run organizations. They also all have giant flags on their homes and vehicles making it very clear they want to get rid of those programs because they dont like all the lazy undeserving people taking advantage of the programs that keep them alive.
No, you do not get it.
71+ Million. Yes, 71+ million Americans, decided the country’s fate last year. You are not going to skew this into a whole “blame the billionaires” spin.
Blaming the billionaires and rich yadda yadda even has its stretch. There are countless pieces of evidence that directly say that - yes - it is the people’s fault. It is the American’s fault. You wouldn’t know that because it sounds like you don’t live here and just know.
Trump did everything and I mean everything, to make him look and sound as unappealing as a candidate and retainer for presidency as possible. The guy is a fucking murderer of negligence to over 350,000k Americans during a pandemic. And STILL - Americans willingly picked him.
This reads like you are at the “scratch a lib” phase.
Go take your pills.
I don’t know what the fuck that means but if the Dems actually wanted to win, they’d run an actual candidate instead of a girlboss genocider cop.
Of course you jump to ableism when called out.
i replied to the superior comment. you don’t get nothin but a slap in yer gobb and a hearty fuck you
read my other messages until you understand them. you asked a question using words that show your ignorance. now read those answers. do not make this thread suffer your useless mouth and dont ever waste time askin questions you think you know the answers to, ya reddit assed dweeb
The true ignorance is everything you’re writing, chump. I don’t have to read everything from you, I skimmed your comment, determined rightly that you’re a fucking asshole and I was right. Do the world and society a favor and you know exactly what it is. Take yourself out, you waste of skin.
Enjoy the block too, attention whore.
being blocked by a commenter like this is a badge of honor to me. chat, i will in fact enjoy it ngl
Well this is one of the most incredibly smug and confidently wrong things I have seen in a while and that is saying something.
But you’re right, it isn’t individual billionaires that are the problem, it isn’t the American people as a whole either though, as has been explained to you above. The problem is the system that allows billionaires to exist. The problem is capitalism and that the US is a genocidal colonizer state. There is no such thing as voting “right” in the US. Perhaps you should actually listen to the people that are explaining this to you who have spent our lives tirelessly studying and working on the ground to address this problem at its root while doing our best to treat the symptoms of this cancer on the earth we call the United States.
Yep.
I think America will walk back from this particular brink, but I don’t think the American people have the chutzpah to liberate themselves from their shackles.
C’est la guerre, I wouldn’t raise kids here.
I’ve never taken down on them to begin with
Absolutely. Left America 15 years ago. The culture is glorified narcissism. The culture believes the earth is infinite. The culture believes they are the best in the world. The culture believes any criticism is self hatred and must be removed.
I’m not seeing much hope in the future, so yes I’ve given up. I want to leave so goddamn bad.
America has been dead to me for years. It’s a crumbling empire and I have no respect for any of its leadership. I will never give up on myself or the working class, but we have far too much rabid individualism and egos to work together.
The people will weather the storm and come out the other side, albeit differently, but any semblance of government here is trash. Both parties are nothing but greed-driven parasites and everyone knows it now. The new generations aren’t fooled by the same bullshit propaganda now and the ruling class knows it. That’s why they’re ruling with an iron fist and the cops have zero accountability.
Cop cities going up everywhere; a military base on every continent; Israeli money weaving into everything; the Democrats are useless fucks; the Republicans are unmasked fascists. This country is in the final stages of late capitalism. I don’t want to live here and haven’t for years, but I persevere for family and friends here. I’ve already told my wife of a revolution ever happens, I’m probably going to be the 65-year-old man that dies in it.
No, but the country has problems. It’s always had problems. Even with all of the economic hardship and political strife we have today, most people are safer, healthier and have better prospects today than they have had in most of US history. It’s by no means perfect and we have a lot of work to do. But, giving up and checking out has never improved anything. It also doesn’t help that we have a steady drip-drip-drip of negative information fed to us by our phones and algorithms. We are also facing one of the largest Constitutional Crises in US History, with the President pushing the boundaries of his Constitutional powers. Even if nothing breaks, we are likely to see many changes from all this. Hopefully, those changes result in better guardrails on the Presidency. And maybe even a repudiation of the Roberts Supreme Court. But, such a future is hard to see when we are in the middle of the storm.
I even have hope for the slight voting majority which put Trump back in power. It’s easy to dismiss those folks as a bunch of <insert invective terms here>. And some of them almost certainly fit those descriptions. However, there are a lot of them which are just scared and confused by the FUD sandwich being fed to them by the 24-hour news cycle, social media algorithms and politicians looking for easy votes. It’s going to be hard work to pull them back off the brink. And if you’re not up to that work, I understand. It’s hard to want to put in the effort for folks who seem so far gone. I’ve spent a lot of hours arguing with folks with whom I disagree wholeheartedly. It’s tiring and I can only take so much before I decide it’s time to move on for a while. But, I would rather keep up the argument than let the country slide into full blown autocracy.
So ya, I have hope. It’s a grim hope and one which recognizes that we could lose. But, giving up now feels premature.
I even have hope for the slight voting majority which put Trump back in power. [whole paragraph]
Many of them, probably the majority of them, have core mutual interests with us at the end of the day. We are the worker class. Once you’re able to strip away culture war crap and electoralist talking points, there’s a large amount of shared ground.
There truly are some people who are too far gone, and some other people who benefit from looting the country, but if you can find shared ground and teach instead of argue, picking battles, I’d say there’s a better shot at reaching through to some of them. In fact, to prove the point through exaggeration, if you’re a decent communicator who’s able to explain technical concepts in familiar language, you can straight-up outline Marxist economic theory to them without triggering an argument. This is more a playful example than a strong example, but it gets the point across, that you can sometimes draw out some smart insights from the rubble, because many of them are oppressed by the same system and fed up at it, they’ve simply been encouraged by that mass media towards the wrong way targets or the wrong solutions. For a personal example, I’ve seen union members complaining about legitimate grievances at work and the company’s abuse of progressive language (e.g. abusing the term “diversity” as a cover to outsource jobs to unqualified cheaper foreign labor) but unfortunately haven’t learned the tactful language to properly express their critique, so one could understandably mistake it for reactionary “them chinese took er jerbs!” rhetoric, falsely accuse them of racist values and push this person further anti-left. It’s certainly important to be aware of wolfwhistles and red flags, but it’s also important to not jump to conclusions either.
There are some lovely, smart and aware people in that huge country. It’s not homogeneous. But overall? It won’t get much better without a revolution. And that’s a huge ask. It’s possible, other countries have managed despite police repression and mass illiteracy, but it’s a long journey, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the people with the awareness and the means will just try fleeing instead.
Yeah, it would take a particularly competent, wise and self-sacrificial dude/tte or team to wrangle the masses of hateful tards, kindly direct them towards thought, morality and prosociality, and make something new out of country that was baptized in the blood of innocents (and loves taking blood baths!).
Make no mistake, this is far beyond one dude/ette. You’d need a whole (non-electoral) well-organized party to educate and agitate, and earn the support of many thousands or even millions of citizens through their actions, in order to build the necessary movement.
Again, it’s been done before and under more oppressive conditions, but it’s a tough road.
Maybe I give up too easily. Let’s hope God heard ya and has some plans for the few (?, am I just too negative?) Americans that can still be saved/lay the foundations for a new society. I kinda feel they’ll need Him, lol.
Forgive my ignorance but would you be willing to list those more opressive conditions where they were successful?
Could really use some hope right now…
Russia, China, Cuba, etc. Many such cases of successful Working Class revolutions in more dire circumstances.
Hey, please don’t use ableist slurs. It’s easy to criticize conservatives without doing so.
Fair enough, I made the adjustments. 🙏
Thank you!
Given up? I don’t know. I’ve been appalled pretty much non-stop since 2000, though. When we were taught history, the X’ers learned that the pendulum always swings back the other way. And when you looked back, the notion always kind of held water. But, draw a line from Nixon through Reagan, the Bushes, to Trump, and the conclusions you’ll draw are pretty grim.
There was an influential statement that was true in 1990 that was haunting, though: “The only presidential democracy with [more than 41 years] of constitutional continuity is the United States.” (I think there are around 5 others now between 40 and 70-something years old now.) Despite having a long run, this system isn’t particularly sturdy.
We’ll see, I guess.
When the US tries it’s hand at nation building, and our government diplomats, consultants, and mentors are making suggestions to nascent nations in what kind of republic framework to use, we do not suggest the same Constitutional system we have. We normally try to guide others to a variation of parliamentary systems with a weak president figurehead.
Our own government knows not to use it’s own model for other nations! It’s not that we’re exceptional, just that we’ve beaten the odds so far. We used to try to copy the US system other places, but they kept failing to executive branches that seized power. How the US held on as long as it did is a wonder. That said, it looks like our exceptional run is effectively over. The fox is in the henhouse and Congress is cheering the bloodbath.
Of course, if you’re going to use US foreign policy, you have to include things like the 1973 coup in Chile when the US overthrew a democratically elected leader to install a dictator, because the US didn’t agree with the democratic leader’s politics
Yeah, our big democracy talk is just like the pirates code from Pirates of the Caribbean: flexible, with a strong vein of selfishness.
It’s time to start working on dual power structures in your respective city.
I’m pretty much done with this country. My plan is to get whatever education I can, then skip off to the EU for employment and not pay any student loans that I happen to rack up.
Only half my life ago, but as a surly teen I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to explain why
I know you’re looking for people currently living there, but I left not long after Trump got elected the first time (coincidence, not cause), and I feel like it’s helped me be a bit more objective about it.
I’ve seen my dad go from a die-hard conservative who makes a couple edgy jokes to someone who isn’t even trying to hide his support for Trump. At best, he says that Trump’s statements are overblown, at worst he supports them wholeheartedly. It didn’t improve under Biden’s term, and his behavior was one of the big reasons I feared a Trump victory in 2024. He felt no need to hide what he had before (that is, if he had it then. It could have grown over time as well). There was no reform coming for him, just deeper entrenchment.
On the other hand, my sister and Mom represent some of another segment of the US. Neither one follows politics because they’re just busy. When they do have time to relax, the last thing they want to do is catch up on things they’ve missed. Unless my sister has something blasted across her social media feeds, she doesn’t know about it. My mom just doesn’t really watch anything at all, mostly because she’s dealing with her own stuff.
I got to see the US change drastically when Trump got elected, with issues that affected literally everyone, and it turned out that part of my family ignored it, and the part that did know about it supported it. I know my immediate family isn’t a representative sample of the entire US (hell, they’re not even representative of my entire family), but seeing is believing. I never would have thought that people could be like this, but if this can happen to people I know, it’s not that hard to see it happening to others.
So, yeah. Even assuming Trump peacefully leaves power in 2029 (I’ve got no hopes of removal from impeachment), that’s four years of destroying good will, soft power, government services, and legal protections, and this is happening just after we had a president who, at best, could stabilize the country a bit before building back some of what was torn down in the four years prior. This time, the administration is moving faster and with more purpose in some of these areas, too. Assuming it takes twice the amount of time to completely rebuild all that the Trump administrations have removed, that’s still 20 years down the road to be at par with where we were 8 years ago. Foreign countries don’t trust the US to not elect a lunatic. It can be a normal country, some day, but not until I’m old, and not without a lot of internal changes I don’t see happening yet.
America is in a very bad situation in current freedoms and, worse yet, the trajectory is wrong-headed too. However, Europe is in no shape or form in any better situation. The erosion of liberties is really appalling in both side of the Atlantic.
Now, the question is if Americans have given up. Mostly do, specially since it has become clear that millions of voices can be silence with just a resourceful lobby. However, the lack of social net in the US, if a crisis like 2008 ensures again, Americans will demand changes like never before. I see more possibility of real change in the US than in Europe if both are affected by a similar recession.
