Is this what every election is like?

No, they've been getting progressively crazier since 2016.

2000 was fairly divisive, it went to the Supreme Court after all. But it wasn't even a fraction this dramatic, people mostly shrugged and figured GWB would be like his father, which was unfortunate, but sane at any rate. Nobody was really predicting 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.

2004 was pretty dull. John Kerry challenged GWB but felt sort of like an empty suit.

2008 was nice, Obama was a strong and exciting candidate vs the very known quantity of McCain, who was a moderate repub known for bipartisanship. Sarah Palin provided for hours of entertaining impersonations by people like Tina Fey, but since she was the VP candidate nobody really cared.

2012 was dull. Romney was a strong candidate, another moderate repub. But Obama was fine, he hadn't broken the country or anything. Brought us out of a recession, even if people were upset about bank bailouts and stuff. Lot of people got health insurance.

Then it starts getting spicy.

165

And it should be said - politics should not be spicy. It should be boring. Just like investing, if things are getting too exciting you are not investing in the future - you are gambling.

87
- Unfortunately it’s the exciting politics that gets all the attention. Democrats likely lost because they’re just too boring.
  
  14
"Obama was fine" ???

Did you not see his tan suit? The humanity...

37
- Yes, he took all our guns, too. Look, there's none to be found anywhere.
  
  20
- Are people forgetting his Dijon Mustard scandal? Unforgivable.
  
  16
I actually feel a lot like I did in 2004. I felt sure that Bush’s lousy wars would be his undoing. Then people signed up for more of him and I realized “Oh, he isn’t the problem. It’s the electorate.”

You can say with hindsight that we shouldn’t be surprised, blah blah, but the truth is that a couple of days ago, most of us were saying “there’s no way people would actually RE elect this criminal, crazed, orange clown!”

And here we are. He could take a bullet tomorrow and we’d still share a country with all these deplorable people. Hilary took shit for using that word but she’s a smart lady and didn’t stutter.

13
- I kind of understand Bush vs Kerry. Bush had a vision. It was a crazy neocon vision, but it was a vision and he used it to communicate effectively enough that we still occasionally meme about bombing people into freedom.
  
  Obama had a clear vision, and communicated it well. Hope, prosperity for the middle class, international leadership. Biden had a vision, a less divisive America where we came together and worked on overdue problems. Hilary didn't really, nor did Kerry or Gore. They were more policy administrator types who focused on specific policies and administration, and the idea of incremental improvement just didn't resonate with people.
  
  Trump, for all his failings, does have a vision he is capable of communicating to the American people. Harris did too, better than Hilary anyway, but it didn't really come online until fairly late into the campaign and stayed a little too nebulous. I do think she was hurt in this regard by getting such a short campaign with no real prep time, she was evolving in the right direction.
  
  I think we need a Bernie or AOC, someone with a powerful vision and ability to clearly communicate it, to the point of literally cudgeling people over the head with it. And we need to vote them in during the primary, over any competent administrator types, despite the fact that we are fully aware of how effective and necessary those policy administrators can be. Our valuing of them is a place where we're out of touch with the broader American electorate though.
  
  edit: MLK Jr was good at this. He had a dream, and it was a simple one that any person could visualize in their head. It didn't require any policy expertise to understand it. We need that.
  
  8

Not even close. This was a turning point election.

This election determined that we will live with an ultra conservative Supreme Court for the rest of our lives. In just the last couple years that court has removed women's federally protected right to bodily autonomy and determined that presidents are above the law and can't be held accountable for anything they do while in office. Decisions like that will continue for the remainder of our lives and chip away at our nation as we once knew it.

Trump's administration ran on making fundamental changes to our government, including deconstructing the department of education. He promised to make an anti-vaxxer the head of the department of health. Ukraine will cease to exist. Palestine will cease to exist. Russia will expand their borders and threaten Europe. America will lose allies. NATO will be weakened.

We made a criminal who failed his last term as president by every conceivable metric and illegally attempted to overturn an election the most powerful figure on the planet. He will fill all positions with unqualified toadies, just like he did last time when he had the highest White House turnover rate in US history.

What Americans just did was change the political order we will be living under for the foreseeable future. And no one will suffer more for that than your generation.

We categorically failed you and the decline we are about to experience could last a generation and the suffering is currently unquantifiable. The decision we just made will change the world we live in in a negative way we can't fully fathom yet.

The remainder of your life just got a whole lot harder and I'm sorry. I did not vote for it to be this way.

82

You're an optimist. This decline is gonna be way more than a generation.

10

Yes, it was really crazy. In the past few decades our politicians had different goals, but generally still followed the same rules. Trump has shown he wants to dismantle any and all systems that don't serve him, and the Republican party is happy to let him do so, so this election seems like it might have far greater consequences than the ones in memorable past.

71

In former times if one candidate had promised to overthrow the entire system and abolish elections and democracy, then nobody would have voted for that clown.

55

It just goes to show how little faith people have in the system. They'd rather destroy it all just to see if something better comes out. Morons don't recognize that the game is rigged. Unless nuclear war breaks out, it will just keep getting worse.

5

I'm nearly three times your age and so will likely have a very different perspective, but...

I remember watching the news (from Canada) when Reagan was first elected. it felt HORRIBLE, and turned out to be just that - Reagan, Thatcher, and their psychophant hanger-on Mulroney ushered in a new era of "get fucked by the rich, fuck the poor" also known as trickle-down economics.

And yet, there was always a sense of decorum among them. Even Harper and Bush jr. at least pretended to be civil in the world of politics, no matter how corrupt and evil they were.

Trump changed everything. He was loud, abrasive, offensive, and off the rails. And he won! Suddenly the doors were open. Here in Canada, O'Toole did outhouse attack ads against Trudeau. Jingoistic, vapid, fear-mongering populism took root throughout Europe. And it just kept getting worse.

Now this election in the US was unhinged beyond description. Trump said things and did things that should have gotten him locked up. Musk should be facing either life in jail or the electric chair for his interference. There are no limits in American elections anymore - I would genuinely say including shooting someone onstage.

Here in Canada, Poilievre has been carefully fanning the same embers - stoking fear, instilling rage, creating groups to hate; and at the same time, throwing out meaningless attacks on his opponents. Unlike when O'Toole awkwardly attempted it, it is working very effectively. Having an entire room or stadium chanting "AXE THE TAX" without even offering an alternative shows that he's winning by being the same empty bully as Trump.

(And meanwhile, Harper is chortling quietly from behind the curtain as he pulls the puppet strings.)

So yeah, this is crazy - and it's the new normal, until we start showing politicians that it doesn't work, and can get them arrested.

42

Since all of these politicians are at the same time ensuring that they are above the law, I don't think you can count on getting them arrested.

5

To me, what's different is that the modern republican party seems to think that I'm an enemy of the people. Bush was awful but I never felt like he personally wanted to harm me just for existing. I knew Bush would send emergency aid to a democratic Voting area, no question. The "enemy" was abroad. Now it's within.

37

As a nonwhite person who vaguely looks mediteranian, growing up during Bush's presidency I 100% felt like the enemy. The amount of racism and threats I had just for not being white enough is pretty wild. To be fair it had nothing to do with my vote, but just passing my perspective along.

20

I started paying attention in 2000, even though I didn’t really understand it and couldn’t vote, however my first voting election was 2004 and I remember being disappointed when John Kerry lost to Bush, who had already gotten us involved in two wars that would cost trillions of dollars.

My experience has been that Republican administrations tend to be rife with corruption, cut taxes for rich people and run up the deficit.

Eventually, people get sick of the moral decay and tanking economic prospects and put a democrat back in, who tries to undo all the damage, but is blocked most of the time by Republicans in Congress acting in bad faith.

Then, the right wing media environment drums up a load of fear about immigrants and actual lies about the economy to get everyone voting for a Republican again.

That’s the cycle, except the Republican media ecosystem gets more extreme over time, and so do the candidates.

32

It's remarkable how effective that strategy has been.

Reagan/Bush run up the deficit by 300%+ due to tax cuts and massive military spending, foreign wars

Clinton pays off the deficit, gets the economy booming, scales back military spending and foreign entanglements

GWB campaigns on a platform of tax cuts and increased military spending, along with denying climate change, barely wins

deficit skyrockets due to tax cuts, multi trillion dollar wars, lack of financial regulation collapses global economy

Obama has to save the economy again, extricate us from foreign entanglements again, while fighting against a republican establishment that refuses to pass any legislation

Trump administration completely fails to deal with COVID pandemic and tanks the economy yet again

Biden has to clean up that mess, and the resultant inflation is blamed on the Democrats

How many times are people going to fall for this shit?

26

2012 was what felt like a more normal election where the candidates respected each other and it played out a lot more typically. (Same for 2008). Trump changed that up and it’ll possibly stay that way going forward.

30

Certainly, at the presidential level, however I recall Congress having a bunch of “tea party” nut jobs elected that shut down the government over the passage of Obamacare.

2

It didn't used to be, but I'm guessing this is how it'll be from now on. It used to be a pretty mundane activity, and people could even agree to disagree. When I was your age I remember asking friends who they voted for, and those conversations would go something like this

Friend 1: Who did you vote for?

Friend 2: So-and-so

Friend 3: haha, that guy is an idiot! You're so stupid

Friend 2: lol, yeah maybe

Friend 1: whatever, let's go find a party

And it wouldn't really change much. Now everything after friend 2 would be full of hatred, people disowning each other, and outright vitriol. If we can't even talk to our friends about this stuff, how the hell are we going to talk to people who we completely disagree with that we don't know? Of course it's been engineered to be like this now. This isn't people changing of their own accord. This is intentionally manufactured division and strife to keep people fighting amongst each other while the billionaires pick everyone's pockets, and the fascists consolidate power. It's not going to go back to the way it was without significant activism and hardship.

29

Yeah, now it's entirely reasonable to drop a human being from your friend pool for the rest of your life because of which person they voted for.

If I find out somebody has voted for Trump they are now persona non grata to me.

And before you say I shouldn't let politics rule my friendships, my dad is dead because of how Trump bungled the covid pandemic response, so any person who has voted for that person has said that my dad dying is less important to them than that guy being given the highest office in the land.

I cannot think of a graver insult, and it is one that cannot be apologized for short of bringing my father back to life.

So if you voted for Trump, fuck you.

21
- I've also cut people out of my life because of it. It says more than I care to type right now about a person if they're voting for trump. Even discounting any possible statements it makes about their personal values, it tells me they don't live intentionally, don't think about their actions, don't read, and don't think critically. If they do those things, then it tells me a lot about where their other values lie. I'm too far along in my own personal journey to allocate time in my life for people like that.
  
  12
This is true (edit: for fairly recent history; going back more we have women's suffrage times and the civil war times), but I also don't know that it's great. When we see people having their rights denied or, worse, taken away, standing complicity by or with the people working to deny or strip those rights does not work for me. I have cut people out of my life and am even low-contact with some of my family because they want to hurt people I love and that's not OK with me.

6

Not even a little bit.

And you're probably not gonna get a point of comparison, because it's looking likely to be one party rule by the absolute shittiest american embarrassments forever at this point. At least until America does some stupid shit globally and gets themselves invaded by a united band of good guys down the road.

24

Would take China and/or India in that case. Europe and Canada don't have the population, Mexico probably doesn't the will.

3
- Mexico probably doesn't the will.
  
  Yup, we do not. We have enough problems at home created or perpetuated by Americans like gun violence, organized crime and now gentrification on top of everything else. Good luck.
  
  9
- China definitely aren't the good guys.
  
  4

No. This is extremely abnormal. I grew up in the 80s and elections were boring. Something happened in 2000, where Al Gore should have won but Bush was favored in court. That was the start of a sense of wrongness with our political system, that has manifested into what we have today.

24

It's usually between someone you kinda don't like and someone you kinda like, so the stakes are lower. This year we had to choose between The Antichrist and Some Boring Lady, but this country hates women 🤷‍♂️

22

Going forward? Maybe and I fear likely. Im over 50. voting for a republican when I was young was not completely crazy. Especially moderate ones in a liberal areas. Believe it or not there used to be institutional biases. Like senators were sorta snooty about the senate to the level they would be with a senator of the opposing party over a house rep from their own party. And party members in congress would be adversarial to their own parties president. A lot of this was a stay in your lane kind of thing. Like woa mr pres thats a congress thing and woa mr rep thats a senate thing. Also legitimately conern for the good of the country over party. If you have the patients read this wikipedia on ross perot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot# you can see he is a conservative rich bastard but then click on the presidential campaign. Higher taxes, investing in education, direct democracy. Granted he was third party stuff but it was a coming out of the conservative side. Back then drug, prostitution, and other victimless crimes legalization was a major part of the libertarian party. Over time the conservative side got worse and worse and voting for them became more and more unacceptable and also made voting third party a dangerous proposition. I was never really for the conservative party but I miss the days when they could be a legitimate option and individuals in the party could be decent.

20

I think most elections would have been as if a Kamala Harris ran against another Kamala Harris. In other words, two normal politicians so that the result wasn't perceived as much of a difference who one. Also, in the past if a politician said things like, "you won't have to vote again" or called the opponent names, he would have been shredded in the media and probably lost the election due to scandal. I mean a felon has never run for president before. Trump just somehow has different rules.

19

“Somehow” ie. billionaires support his insanity.

7
- Billionaires lost their fear of publicly supporting fascism.
  
  7

No, they have been getting extra crazy lately.

19

2000 was bugfuck insane.

13

This election has the same dreadful feeling as 2000.

Nevermind the crazyness, it's the certainty that something worldwide bad is going to happen due to the incompetence of the American government.

9
- It's easy to forget all the shit Ashcroft said he was going to do, like misinterpret existing laws to go after porn producers, harrass gay folks, all kinds of other Christofascist shit. Then 9/11 happened, and this is a pretty good summary of what happened:
  
  he sought to sweep away any meaningful restrictions on his power and use the fact of September 11th to do so.
  
  But this is an attorney general who treated dissent and criticism as if it was treason, who launched the largest campaign of ethnic profiling we've seen in this country since World War II, who sought… who treated judicial review and congressional oversight as inconvenient obstacles to getting the job done.
  
  And I think ultimately he'll be seen as a disaster, both from a civil liberties perspective and also from a national security perspective.
  
  4

Not normal at all. This was America's 1932 Germany moment, there's no going back now. 70 plus million of the dumbest Americans on the planet welcomed the Nazis with open arms.

13

It's not Nazis, it's different. It's probably just as bad but it's a weirdo mix.

Trump is a mobster wannabe. He is also dumb as fuck and a useful idiot who is controlled on the one hand by foreign powers, but also by right wing extremist Christians, some of whom actually see him as a Messiah figure. I fully assume he is going to install himself as a dictator fast, as that's what the past 4 years of preparation were about. He'll also die, probably. He's old, fat, doesn't exercise, eats unhealthy, in a super stressful job and loads of people want him dead.

I can't remember the time (in my time anyway ) that so many people wanted a US president dead.

Anyway, he'll die soon and the the christo fascists will start the infighting who can become the next US dictator.

I fully expect chaos in this year with chaos being the sweet synonym for that mass deportation starting, people will resist, people will get shot and die, people will start terrorist attacks. Whenever you work for years to pit one group of citizens against another, it's not going to end well.

Man this is fun....

2
- Hitler wasn't very smart either. Still did tremendous damage.
  
  1

Permanently Deleted

13

This election was special, cause the candidate who got the most votes actually won.

12

Basically it just gets more and more ridiculous every 4 years.

11

No

10

Nah don't worry this was your first and last election anyway

10

as a ~40 year old Canadian looking from the outside at the US election

this one was crazy for sure but the last couple have been kinda out there to say the least. before the internet we Canadians always knew when it coming, but it was never covered in a 24h news cycle like now. other than daily newspaper (that was a physical unit of paper that was like social media, where we could not really choose who to follow other than politically left or right and only updated every 24h) we'd get news at 6-7pm and 11pm. then the noon news showed up. while there have always been issues between right and left, there had never been violence on the scale we see now. like Reagan getting shot, happened just after i was born, so not like it was all sunshine and rainbows but nothing like the scale that's seen now.

this could be from the mass news reporting and social media, or people have just gone off the rails. I'm guessing option 2.

10

In my experience mostly yeah. Except my first one, 2012 was a glorious election

10

No. It’s always been rather cordial if not a bit of mud slinging. Till trump entered and started questioning Obama birth certificate imo. Maybe I’m just too young to remember insane shit like that prior though.

9

If blue still has any branch of government then this might have been a nothing burger. Yeah, we'd be set back 10 years but nothing unfixable.

Trump has absolutely no checks on his whims. Even the supreme Court is in lockstep. He could make it illegal to not be orange on day one and actually enforce it. Not everywhere equally, since blue states still exist. But we'll see if trump doesn't use military force on them.

8

A whole lot of "not state rights" are coming

2

This election was crazier than the last election. On the other hand it will be less crazy than the next election.

8

That's cute that you think there'll be another election... If you think for a second these Nazis are going to let the chance that they could be voted out of power ever occur You're a fool

2
- There will probably still be elections, but the outcome will be predetermined. Honestly that's just doomerism. It might happen, it might not. There's a lot up in the air right now.
  
  3

US presidential elections have been approximately this way since at least 2016, actually I think this one may have been less crazy than the last two.

8

The hanging chad would like a word with you.

3
- I wrote "at least".
  
  I am older than OP, but not old enough to remember the 2000 election very much.
  
  1

Yeah pretty much. 2016 was crazier than this one for sure. This one didn't have a competitive primary on either side, and it was predicted as a toss-up whereas in 2016 every poll and media outlet was saying it was impossible for Trump to win, and there was no precedent to predict what would happen when he was in office. This is like, after people have had eight years to come to terms with Trump being a thing in whatever form that looks like. The general trend though is that things are getting crazier, and that trend is likely to continue.

5

Yes, read history or take a serious gov class.

This was almost a 1:1 repeat of 2016 and yet lemmy is still getting spammed with denialism posts with hundreds of upvotes.

Trump is representative of the systemic issues America has left unresolved, not a cause, and the writing has been on the wall for decades; so much so that people think old media (ex: simpsons) was very cunningly predicting the future when in reality it was parodying the same issues at the time.

The one key difference has been the rather recent introduction of the internet. You can often find both much more reliable and higher quality information in less than a minute that what you could get from something like 10 newspapers combined 30 years ago. Especially for the younger generation, not everyone is falling for the same stupid tricks anymore.

Great example is Washington Post. People think it dropped in quality after it was bought by Bezos, but ask any international academic and they'll probably tell you WaPo was always hot trash.

All this stuff you see being "worse" has been predicted for years on end, so while you can technically say it is "new", it's nothing unexpected. Even the next level filthy mouth ramblings of Trump are just something the previous guy did off camera (cough bush).

5

Trump is representative of the systemic issues America has left unresolved

Him and literally every other politician, so thanks for defining politics for us. The problem is that enough people think he’s the right solution. Oh boy are they wrong.

0

Not every, but a lot of them yes.

4

Politics under Clinton seem civil now

4

It's part of a trend of a significant portion of the electorate feeling ignored. It's a trend that's happening in large parts of the West, we're seeing it in Europe too in places like France and Germany.

Now you can argue about whether these people have a genuine grievance or not. But if we don't try and address the underlying causes of these people abandoning moderate parties, we're going to see more and more extreme candidates and parties being successful. And I don't think that's something any of us want.

3

Well luckily for you, it will never matter ever again.

3

No it just depends on the candidates. Most have been boring but Obama, Clinton, Trump, Harris were all controversial.

2

You might be younger or forgetting but before Obama it was George W., definitely not controversial.... And before that there was more controversy. Americans have always had divisive elections, but there's been a noticable uptick in the elections involving Trump.

2
- Preferring Dijon mustard, or wearing a tan suit are hardly legitimate controversies. There are real complaints about some of Obama's actions, but there wasn't really any legitimate controversy surrounding his presidency outside of the pointless stuff manufactured by Limbaugh and Hannity. Those two guys were the canaries in the coal mine, and society and the government alike should pushed back on what they were starting a lot harder than they did. They ushered in this new era of hate and strife.
  
  6

Annoying isn't it.

2

Please take this shit somewhere else.

-3

Liberals screaming that the world is falling apart when they lose? Yeah

-18