EldritchFeminity
I agree on all points, I just understand where that other person is coming from because when you’re told that America is patriotic when it’s actually just nationalism in red, white, and blue, it’s hard to spot the difference.
Like, I can be proud of my state for what they’ve done to help people, but I wouldn’t call it patriotism. I still see the government as the policies and actions of individuals with power, and that is something that should never be fully trusted lest we face the consequences that we are currently seeing as a possible near future from the actions of the party of Trump. I don’t care about America; I care about her people and what those individuals have accomplished alone and together. To quote a silly sci-fi movie series, “My loyalty is to the people. To democracy!”
I get what they mean in that it’s a thin line between the two, especially in the US. I was recently talking to my dad, a Bernie Sanders voter who is about as left-leaning as I’ve ever seen, and he was talking about how after 9/11 happened the country really banded together and there was a real outpouring of patriotism. I told him that what I remembered from the days after 9/11 was that attacks against Jews doubled overnight, attacks on Muslims more than tripled, and increased against pretty much any other kind of minority you can think of.
American patriotism and nationalism is basically a “to-may-to, to-mah-to” situation. Patriotism in the US is defined by things like 9 year old kids pledging their undying loyalty to the flag of the country with a hand over their heart every morning at school.
It’s not just like how people created cults, it’s the exact same recipe. They are cults. I have a friend who is obsessed with true crime podcasts about cults, like, listened to the final recordings of the Jonestown massacre where you can hear people dying from cyanide poisoning in the background obsessed, and he was recently telling me how both Trump and Hitler’s speeches sound exactly like Jim Jones.
Yep. It’s been a thing for a long time now, at least since 2001, but “it’s just a joke” became a way for bigots to disguise their hatred, and was picked up by “edgy” teenagers in places like 4Chan…which would later reveal as they got older that they were actually just bigots themselves all along or the joking had normalized that mentality in them to the point where they started believing it. It’s definitely not just an American thing, but Republicans in the US tend to be extremely sensitive and volatile emotionally (despite calling everybody else “liberal snowflakes” for how easily offended they claim they are) while being very emboldened by the events of the past decade or so to openly spew their hatred and bigotry.
There’s a great stand-up bit about it by James Acaster from 2019 called What’s Wrong? Too Challenging For You!?
Correction: He lost big time because of mail-in votes. Trump in 2020 got the record high for votes for a Republican candidate at something like 67.2 million, which was just about a million votes less than what Obama got during his first election (which was a record-breaking turnout). Biden got around 80 million votes in 2020, breaking every voter turnout record ever.
Swing voters are still crucial because that’s how Hillary lost despite having only 100,000 less votes than Obama did in his second election, but I feel like swing voters have probably more or less already made up their minds. If you don’t see Trump for what he is already, the odds of his reaction here being the final straw seems unlikely. I think if people had better access to voting, we’d easily see a repeat of 2020 even if we were to vote right this minute.
I don’t have a link to it, but I did see a picture from the rally showing it, and the best way I can describe it is that he looked like that guy Mike Tyson took a bite out of. There was a decent chunk of cartilage that got blasted out of the upper and outer edge of his ear, maybe about an inch across at the widest part.
I hate to say it, but voting against the other guy has been going on a long time, and I think it has a lot to do with why we find ourselves in this situation. “Vote for me because I’m not the other guy” is one of the oldest political strategies there is, and Democrats have been using it for a long time; even going so far as to donate to the campaigns of the most extremist candidates in their race to set themselves up with an easy win.
However, as my boss when I was a teenager would say - and my grandfather decades before him - “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee.” There’s a core block of Republicans who don’t care who the Republican candidate is. They’re gonna vote for him regardless of his policies just because he’s the Republican. He could be Trump, Biden, Putin, or Stalin himself, risen from the grave to destroy the specter of capitalism once and for all. And the Democrats have never accounted for these people voting against them rather than voting for a candidate they like, which has led to this slide further and further towards right-wing extremism as the craziest candidates get propped up by Democrats looking for an easy win - to the point that even the old Republicans have lost control of this core group of voters who became the MAGA cultists, and the party as a whole along with them.
It’s unfortunate, but all we can do at this point is vote against the crazies and hope that the Republicans clean out their party of extremists. But I don’t think we’ll see that happen any time soon. The rot is rampant.