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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Well the question is whether the poor behavior of Trump will turn voters in other countries off electing someone similar. A 'yes' answer may not be conclusive but a 'no' would probably be more so.
In this case, College Republicans is an actual student organization and when they do stuff like that they can be said to have lost the benefit of the doubt.
edited 9th Feb '17 6:51:42 PM by Elle
Only if you ascribe to the "Great Man" theory of history. The underlying conditions that created Trumpism, whatever you think they are, are still there if Trump lost, and it's very difficult to imagine Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders for another alternative path) defusing those considering the GOP would still be in control of most of the levers of power.
edited 9th Feb '17 6:54:27 PM by CaptainCapsase
@Capsase: " If America doesn't become a illiberal democracy, that'll be more a testament to Trump's incompetence than anything else. There's no indication he respects democratic norms, and no indication the GOP is willing to defy him to any real extent. He's in a position of power that most Presidents could only dream of."
I'm thinking that the millenial generation, if it does get involved in politics, has the chance to collapse the base of power the GOP has, assuming they are quick and overwhelming (or the GOP gets blindsided and doesn't account for them turning out). For all the talk about countries turning into illiberal democracies, mine is on it's way away from that, so I need to remind you all that illiberal forces in a democracy shatter easily if they're kicked out of power (the road to recovery afterwards is slow, but it can happen).
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KV"That's a rather fatalistic view of the world, I must say. So what you're saying is that we're living in the best of all timelines? I disagree with that notion. I don't even think it was too late to stop Trumpism in 2016, though that genuinely would have required a mass movement with the backing of the party."
Haha no. This is not the best of all timelines. We're fighting the Greatest Generation's fight all over again, only from the perspective of the White Rose movement, and we know how that ended.
I meant in terms of convergence of evidence. Mass movements for some kind of change have been ticking up in down in terms of occupy and the tea party. Trump, of all people, managed to harness it, probably because he never really said anything. In the background, I can gauge my peers' opinions of being far left of the Overton Window, but they rarely vote. Even beyond them, voter turnout alone is a sign of confidence in the political system.
In the background, states had been gradually shifting red, and minorities were kept off balance by the drug war, immigration hysteria, the glass ceiling and a number of others. The liberal bubble/ Ivory Tower thing has been in pop-culture for ages, while the existence of a conservative bubble has just come to widespread notice. And personally, I didn't know many basic things about my government before either researching them myself or going through a public administration program.
In essence, President Obama was standing against a tidal wave. I concede its possible, his administration could have addressed it, it's likelihood was along the lines of my teleporting to Rome to pizza by quantum dynamics. I just posit it wasn't the failure of a single person or a group of them. Reactionary movements out-organized both progressive and conservative ones and their victories went unnoticed or ignored until the 3rd act. Hence, it takes many, endeavoring in their daily lives, because we were long past the point where one guy could press a button and fix it.
Trumpism is something of a punchline in this universe- it's just that the jokes stopped being funny and we were forced to start taking the situation seriously.
You're right that the conditions that created it wouldn't have disappeared. You're also right that we should've been taking it seriously all along. But I challenge the idea that it should've been obvious.
Also, in the universe where Trump lost, the Dems probably regained control of the Senate, so we wouldn't have the GOP in control of everything.
edited 9th Feb '17 6:59:09 PM by Gilphon
In a universe where Trump loses it's only by a few electoral votes, it's not going to be a landslide because it was never going to be a landslide; the senate might be very marginally democrat leaning, but that only goes so far with the state level politics totally controlled by the GOP and the house safely red.
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Well no, it's not the failure of Obama alone, it's a failure of virtually the entire democratic party. In the same sense however, other Presidents' achievements were not accomplished singlehandedly either.
edited 9th Feb '17 7:04:02 PM by CaptainCapsase
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Yes, actually it was, in hindsight. There was significant uncertainty in the polling, hence the uncertainty in credible forecasters like 538, but if you could get an actual perfect snapshot of the race right before election day, you'd have seen it was quite close, that it would come down to the wire. We didn't know that at the time because polling has a margin of error.
edited 9th Feb '17 7:06:23 PM by CaptainCapsase
Wa-Po: Multiple anonymous US officials are saying that Flynn may have illegaly discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador before the inauguration.
However, no one has ever successfully been prosecuted under the particular law that was violated (forbidding civilians to conduct diplomacy).
Meanwhile, the White House continues to leak like a seive.
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Today is a good day for judicial smackdowns.
edited 9th Feb '17 7:08:34 PM by Elle
I mean, if you really want to get into that sort of thing, Trump actually had a 100% chance of winning, because that's what ended up happening. And elections, of course, are not actually random events so probabilistic interpretations of them are inherently flawed.
But that's not really the context of the current discussion. In a universe where Trump lost, things probably worked out somewhat differently in the time leading up to the election- it's entirely possible that the margin of error is polling would've swung the other way in said universe.
trump winning was also a number of thing, people have to remenber that he BARELY win, and so far he is not getting better by screwing thing up.
but what it was going to happen is the divide here between party and ideologic, the republican are pretty much a damn cult right now who workship themselves as the only keeper of democracy by virtue of being...well....them, they are going to break soon.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
in a way they already are: the republican get expose by trump, they are is party now and that wont go away any damn moment soon, they are the ones who fight against obama in all the ways posible and them demand bowing before trump.
Or to put it Games of thrones terms: they broke the guess right and they are already paying for that.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
That's not the point I'm making; my point is that the assertion that "it could have been a Clinton landslide" is wrong; at best we were looking at +6 in a best case scenario, and that's not a landslide, and requires many things to go differently. The mere fact that Trump got elected is indicative of a serious, serious problem with the democratic party and with the United States in general, and since I have more agency over the democratic party than I do of the entire US population (however little that is), I am focusing on trying to improve the democratic party.
edited 9th Feb '17 7:42:11 PM by CaptainCapsase
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The one good thing about Trump, as long as he doesn't get away with destroying Democracy, is that it essentially makes the Republican Party poison to anyone younger then 60. Generation X, the Millennials and Generation Z have seen the horrors that the Republican Party caused first hand: From Watergate all the way to Trump. The party has little to no chance at ever regaining the majority of these voters ever again. Only the Baby Boomers, who are a large group of old, dying reactionaries will keep voting for them, and their numbers are dwindling.
Trump has exposed the rot that has been seeping under, and occasionally appearing over, the surface of the party for some time. Future generations will remember, and never vote for these people again. Only small handfuls of these Generations, that embrace the kind of hatred and Fascism that the BB's embraced, will vote for any kind of Politician like Trump, or they simply won't vote at all.
edited 9th Feb '17 7:43:54 PM by DingoWalley1
We're just teenagers, and we all know what it's like to be a teenager. I wouldn't write us off just yet.
As a tangentially related aside, I've decided that I can't have a position on tax policies until I start paying taxes.
edited 9th Feb '17 7:46:38 PM by LinkToTheFuture
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas EdisonThe tendency towards political nilhism is much worse among generation Z than among Y though, in my experience, perhaps Trump will turn them against him, perhaps he'll simply drive all but the most mean spirited and hateful of them into apathy and nilhism.
edited 9th Feb '17 7:49:53 PM by CaptainCapsase

So I heard people were complaining about people being mean to College Republicans
?
Ever thought there's a reason for that?
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot