2024 US Election
I agree with you both on that @Gazza M @flobaba.
It's a non echo chamber type space online, which is a bit of a rarity. We've also still got people from quite a few different places and walks of life on here. No bad thing we don't agree on everything.
My views on politics are actually a bit more relaxed (believe it or not) than they used to be. But I am damn sure I don't think what's happening in the US currently is a democratic restoration.
Gazza M he had the lowest popular vote margin since Gerald Ford
And that was competing with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, between them comfortably the two shittest candidates I've ever seen the Democrats put in the field, running the worst campaign.
Biden or Harris versus Trump: suggesting that Clayton's choice proves what's occurring now is the will of the people is like saying Burger King must be good food because I chose it over Wendy's.
The shocking state the Democrats are in is pretty good evidence of system capture.
According to this data (haven't vetted it) that age bracket is already the cohort with the worst nett negative on Trump.
What we're looking at is the next stage of disintegration, not a bright new movement.
Kel is right, Trump's doing the will of the people. Some really weak-willed dumb people.
LOL at the gall of this orange clown who did all he could to avoid disclosing his own financial records in his last term and will also avoid any scrutiny of the massive conflicts of interest at play in this DOGE scam. I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks there is any genuine 'public interest' motive or outcome in what these lot are up to is also a clown.
I mean, if you want to lick Trump and Elon's balls, then go right ahead if that's your jam. But please spare us from any attempts to paint this as some benevolent strategy to restore democracy and transparency in government.
est Definitely not elitist in any way.
nope definitely not. When a group of people vote against their best interests despite other groups in their own demographics warning them of such, there's little else that can be said. You don't have to be an elite to make that analysis. Their own peers are doing it.
The good thing though is that they can treat it as a learning experience and do better next time.
The bigger problem is that a trans people don't even have to do that to gain access to women spaces. A biological male can have his genitals intact and have no hormone therapy undertaken, but if they identify as a woman they can use female changing rooms which is scandalous.
JD Vance with a very strongly worded speech in Munich. A lot of hard truths there which people need to take on. There is a bit of hypocrisy which he conveniently misses out. He talks about the EU overturned the Romanian election and how Thierry Breton boasts about about they'd do the same in Germany if needed which is obviously about authoritarian as you can get. Unless there is some pretty hard evidence of election interference you can't go around cancelling elections because you don't like the votes. Then again Trump still hasn't accepted he lost in 2020! The migrant crisis from the middle eastern countries I'd argue has come about from American policy. The Americans triggered Article 5 for the war in Afghanistan and if they had left it there maybe we wouldn't have got into this mess. It was imo the war in Iraq literally opened pandora's box and destabilised the whole region and they didn't stop at Iraq. Out of that we had ISIS and this migrant crisis and even now people are suffering.
But Vance is completely right in saying we've got absolutely batshit crazy policies here. Europe needs to get its act together. These populist parties aren't just rising up because of people are stupid and falling for misinformation, which seems to be the popular view among some.
Mirth I did say "if this is correct" but again people going after me for the source but not the actual content which has become common. If what he is saying is wrong I'd love to hear it. I just found it interesting as there has been a lot of talk about the legality of this DOGE and how an executive order would give them this much power. From having a quick google and even running through AI broadly what he is saying is right, USDS was reorganized and renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS).
Gazza M I don't take it personally mate, go as hard as you like 
I've always been able to keep the politics separate, we don't agree and I leave it at that. I have plenty of disagreements here but never hold it against anyone or not respond on other parts of the forum.
flobaba Agreed and I think it is something which has gone wrong in society. Nobody has time or wants to hear the other side. No matter where you stand politically I don't think we should ever take it personally nor should we ever let it ruin long standing friendships/relationships. The thing to realise is these politicians do take their supporters for mugs, on camera they slam the other side but behind closed doors they are usually very friendly with each other.
banduan This is what happens when the so called normal politicians let people down, they look elsewhere. I think most people in the UK know Farage is a knob but his party is pretty much just ahead in the polls, not because they like him but because they are sick of the Conservatives and now Labour.
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JazzG These populist parties aren't just rising up because of people are stupid and falling for misinformation
"Ordinary people" are rational but they do have incorrect premises. Like anyone is, they're apt to prefer explanations for things that are more reassuring.
In the OECD the domestic wage share of revenue has stagnated for over fifty years, as these nations have unevenly deindustrialised due to globalisation.
The familiar public goods of the post-WWII social democratic wave (like the NHS) were brought about by the mass politics of the labour movement and the need and opportunity of renewal following disastrous warfare. That politics relied on strong unions with high density in the workforce. But those unions relied on the industries that started moving offshore during the era of globalisation, so this way of doing things began to slowly fail.
The first big way this failure emerged was in the union-busting conflicts of the 70s and 80s. Traditionally powerful unions fought rearguard actions against an alliance of national governments with freshly international and mobile forms of capital. They lost.
We still talk about these conflicts now (eg the coal miners' strikes of the Thatcher era or the Australian airline disputes of the 1980s) because there have been few to match them since. The bosses won, and the labour movement's role has been reduced to bargaining since.
In the 80s and 90s, Thatcherism or "third way" politics (pick your poison) brought the managerialist neoliberalism we have now. Centre left parties disaffiliated themselves from the weakened labour movement. Tottering deindustrialising economies were patched up by way of privatisations, credit booms, and the rise of new forms of knowledge and service work.
All through this history, social and economic inequality has continued unevenly to rise. There's no mechanism that keeps it in check now. A gap in living standards has tended to rise everywhere, with degraded relative expectations about welfare, housing, and access to health and education for the majority.
This inequality has been masked by the price benefits of offshoring production, making many everyday goods wonderfully cheap by historical standards, but it becomes impossible to ignore.
By around 2000 "pasokification" (named after the old Greek centre left party PASOK) was in motion. Centre left parties have been getting irregularly hammered at the polls by a rational public increasingly aware of the reduced appeal of its offering. No labour movement, no proper labour parties.
But parties of the centre right are actually worse: all they do is sell things off, abandon helpful economic regulation to attract capital, apply austerity measures to people who don't vote for them, and use tax policy to redistribute overall wealth to their constituency. In effect these parties accelerate system failure.
The last decade's wave of ambiguous populism comes about because these old parties of government are failing. Greater numbers of "ordinary people" are resentfully severed from both sides of the parliaments supposed to represent them. It is highly rational they want new politics that appear to be different.
This new populism has two basic traits: nostalgia and scapegoating.
Its nostalgia harkens back to before globalisation and deindustrialisation. It promises its supporters a powerful phantasm, supported by cherry-picked history, film and photography, of an era when their nations manufactured advanced goods, and everyone was more equal with much fairer access to public goods. It edits out all the bad points, the relative poverty, the racism and misogyny, etc.
Along with this nostalgia come varying stories about who to blame. These go along with fantasies about rolling back social changes of this past half century: women entering the workforce, multiculturalism, etc.
"Ordinary people" prefer not to admit that for fifty years they've been spectating economic changes their withering politics has never been in a position to prevent.
Populists never, ever state that they're not magically in a position to reverse these changes. No one votes for that.
With "ordinary people" and their politicians preferring neither to accept the situation nor be accountable, it becomes a question of scapegoating.
So now it's terrorists, the Chinese, the migrants, the Muslims, the EU ... and now it's affirmative action and trans people wrecking the joint. Even during Trump's political career, the emphasis of blame has changed up a few times.
As the emphasis changes, so too does the symbolic spectacle of "something being done": Rwanda deportation flights, confiscating asylum seekers' family heirlooms at the border, "building the Wall", national enquiries, assassinations and airstrikes ... and now it's purging HR departments of efforts to reduce workplace prejudice.
Let's be clear. Trump, Farage, Le Pen and other populists have nothing more to offer than the centre left and right figures and parties they're displacing.
They have no renewed mass politics, no base in society, and no loyalty to the collective interest. They have no coherent plan and no particular expertise. And since women, migrants, and trans people aren't the problem, punishing and disciplining them will fix nothing.
The populists can "win", but the framework of power doesn't change. A general decline of civic standards leaves the door wide open for unprecedented looting of public goods by capital.
Quite likely the United States federal apparatus is about to get rolled over, ripped off and wrecked in a way that'll resemble the Tory Cabinet feeding their in-laws contracts during COVID-19.
It's also possible some things can incrementally improve, because there's no doubt fifty years of shittifying managerialism have left a fair few easy wins.
I predict we'll hear all about savings and victories through this period, but at its end the US system and its agencies will become even more dysfunctional, half the services they used to provide will be gone, the US will be a pariah in many more multilateral institutions, and nothing will get better for "ordinary people".
When the dust settles on Trump and Musk (or Farage or Le Pen or Beppe bloody Grillo) we're left right back where we were with the other parties. There's no politics here that can check capital and enforce outcomes in our collective interest. Let's hope the new bosses are kind.
Burnwinter Let's be clear. Trump, Farage, Le Pen and other populists have nothing more to offer than the centre left and right figures and parties they're displacing.
Possibly so, do you think people should accept their decline in living standards and just be told to suck it up? Clearly there were policies which were not popular with people. I mean the reason why the Conservative party imo is facing near extinction is they campaigned on enforcing stronger borders and then ended up letting a record amount in legally and illegally. There are perfectly valid reasons to argue that not having this immigration would have made us even worse off than we are now but that isn't what people voted for.
A lot will look to America, I know many have ruled Trump out already but what if, and that is a big if, he does turn things around and there. If not then we are back to square one and someone else has a crack at it. That is how democracy works isn't it?
daredevil A biological male can have his genitals intact and have no hormone therapy undertaken, but if they identify as a woman they can use female changing rooms which is scandalous.
Said it already but I don't believe this is a real tendency or a thing that is happening. Perhaps it is and you have experienced it or someone you know has, I haven't.
I'm not saying it has never happened. But if we're going to argue the toss over the politics of the full social and legal integration of trans identity based on this pathological portrait, we need a clear picture of the scale and degree of the pathology.
If you're going to use words like "scandalous" it's probably on you to give us some clear numbers on cases in which trans women assaulted, harassed or discomforted cis women in shared bathrooms or changing rooms.
I believe these cases are at the margins, both in absolute and relative terms, compared to those cases in which cis men commit assault or harassment against women. But I could be wrong, and I'm open to that.
However, if I'm right, it'd be fair to ask: why the strenuous objections while men's violence against women remains prevalent? Because men propagating "bathroom intruder" discourse would then look like a displacement or projection of their anxieties about that situation.
JazzG Possibly so, do you think people should accept their decline in living standards and just be told to suck it up?
Of course not. The people should rise up and build a collective power capable of taking back control of their conditions.
Trouble is what's happening now is the opposite of that. The "ordinary people" remain disaffected, ambivalent and without unity, and they remain weak.
Whether we like Trump and Musk or not, we don't have control of them. We're enthralled by the show they put on because millions depend on their benevolence.
We've already had one failed term of Trump and the failure of Brexit. Gotta say I'm confident we'll witness the disintegration of this lot plus the rise and fall of several populist variations across Europe before some start to figure out it's a dead end.
And Trump and Elon aren’t the people. They aren’t leading some common man revolution. By the time they’re done, they’ll have just made it easier for those with capital to continue accumulating it.
Trump got rid of US foreign corrupt practices rules. So US companies can come here to Africa and bribe freely. He’s handed over the government finances to the world’s richest man who owes his company’s very existence to the Obama government. He’s assembled the richest cabinet in history. It’s a large scale looting enterprise dressed up as something more noble.
JazzG JD Vance with a very strongly worded speech in Munich
Next president in the US.
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Claudius aye. populists on the left and right have railed against the influence of money in politics. here we have a situation where things have evolved to a level beyond the corrupt corporate lobbying environment, where big dollar donors are virtually inside the government making executive decisions over public money with no oversight. yet right wing 'populists' are cheerleading it, as are old school law and order conservatives. it only adds to the cult accusations. it feels like the right is on a revenge tour that they've been planning since Nixon was impeached, but never thought theyd have the opportunity to enact. all pretense of principle has gone in the bin, and they've gone completely off the deep end drunk with power.
https://www.404media.co/anyone-can-push-updates-to-the-doge-gov-website-2/
Wow. Clearly Musk and his kids are in need of a DOGS also staffed by 20 year olds, whose only task is continuously red-teaming DOGE.