Imagine coming out of covid, without a recession, only to be hit with inflation (both parties to blame) and sky high interest rates coupled with all other stuff like illegal border crossing to lack of majority support from Women to Harris to Harris being a silent VP for 4 full years and thrown to lime light.
She threw herself under the bus. She went thought a great deal of effort to end up there. It's the deftest act of self immolation I've seen in politics so far.
What are you talking about? Biden was utterly incoherent at the debate. She stepped up, and got the party behind her immediately, and brought hope back to the Democrats. In terms of her campaign, she did far better than we could have reasonably expected.
What’s frustrating is democrats never got to pick o their candidate like the republicans did. There was no. The powers that be picked her and many people didn’t even realize there was a switch.
I was listening to a podcast where Tucker interviewed Paul Manafort. Manafort had some theories about how Kamala was chosen. He believes that Biden was pushed out by Obama and Pelosi after the first debate. As revenge Biden said he would nominate his VP, who he knew wasn't very popular.
I honestly doubt it was anything other than trepidation masquerading as hope. She was the worst performing Democrat in the last open primaries. This hope was not based on anything other than an exigent fear of Trump.
> she did far better than we could have reasonably expected.
The metric, as always, is votes / campaign spend. Are you sure you've evaluated this earnestly?
To me she obviously cleared the incredibly low bar required to be better than her opponent: a self-serving demagogue who literally tried a coup and has a long history of grift and worse.
I’ve got family who support him, and I’ve heard their F-you sentiments against a government and liberals looking down on them and telling them how to live (get vaccinated, wear a mask, don’t have guns, don’t eat meat, don’t drive a hummer, don’t say slurs, don’t bully, men are toxic, etc).
My assessment is the root is a desire to retain their status as “real Americans” who are socially on top. Religion, racism, nationalism, heteronormativity, patriarchy are all just useful tools for this. Policing is crucial, and don’t be too gentle.
I probably am blinded by this assessment and can’t see past it.
During Covid it was incredibly obvious how some people positively got off on bossing other people around. I was vaccinated and boosted, and I felt guilty for that when I saw signs saying people who aren't vaccinated and boosted have to eat outside. Even if they wear a mask. For a vaccination that didn't even impact transmission meaningfully.
It was hysteric circus, and it was cruel and gloating, too. I remember the graffitis saying "we'll vaccinate you all". Who does that? Who goes around at night and sprays that on walls and pavements? People who want to lord it over others is who.
> My assessment is the root is a desire to retain their status as “real Americans” who are socially on top.
Everybody should be socially "on top" in that there is no other human being, ever, who can tell me what to think, surely not by persecuting me with a manifesto they can't even coherently remember themselves, much less argue for in their own words. At that point the content doesn't even matter, even if someone tried to enforce world peace and equality that way.
From here in TX, from the other side, I also remember a hysteric circus, where at school board meetings, as I reeled from the loss of someone close to me and pleaded for any mitigations, defiant unmasked parents behaved aggressively, spouted nonsense about ivermectin and whatnot.
Anyway, they won. It’s over. Bygones.
I do very much agree with your ideal of nobody persecuting one another.
I don’t see how you square that ideal with, e.g., anti-abortion policies, mass deportations, support for brutal policing, anti-trans hysteria including CPS interventions, bringing bibles and chaplains into schools, and the like.
Maybe we’re all the same. I see vaccines and espousing tolerance and demanding respect for people’s preferred pronouns and such as justified for what I see as the social good. Perhaps you see strong borders and order and christian values as a similarly imperative for the social good. We both feel victimized and like the other is a massive hypocrite, because we just want different worlds?
I agree with you that for a lot of people this is what it came down to, which is so sad. Short-term thinking will lead us to destruction.
Instead of asking whether things have improved over the last four years, think about what you want the country and the world to look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years. And what other countries looked like ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years ago. Think about the rises and falls of other nations. Think about the fact that it's getting measurably hotter every year, and that one party doesn't even acknowledge that fact.
Everything is more expensive, and yes, that sucks. But we've handed over the kingdom's keys to an authoritarian idiot who will dismantle the systems that took hundreds of years to establish. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it sure burned fast.
> Harris being a silent VP for 4 full years and thrown to lime light.
Funny that people constantly talk about how they're not voting for Trump, they're voting for the policies of the party etc. but then they can't apply the same rationale to the other side.
>think about what you want the country and the world to look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years.
This is the candidate's job. She didn't center a coherent vision of the improved future only she could get the country to. Pick one thing that Trump wouldn't or couldn't run on, that wasn't just "getting back thing we lost (under our watch)." Green New Deal. Medicare For All. Defund the police. Build houses for everyone. Monorail. Anything for people to hang a hope on. But any big idea would piss off donor-investors who would be hurt by any change to the status quo. So she offered nothing.
> She didn't center a coherent vision of the improved future only she could get the country to.
So the default is to vote for a person who will run the world into the ground? I don't understand why the onus on the sane person to prove why they're going to make things better. I guess people think that any change is good change? Yet people voted Hitler into power.
My take is that America was founded during a time of very high "mental activity" and engagement. In the 1700s people read for fun, the printing press just having been invented the prior century; and listened to candidates debate for hours, at a level of complexity that is beyond people today. A democracy takes that kind of mental energy and engagement to sustain. The citizens of the US seem to be too complacent, too uncaring, to uneducated to preserve their freedom, and so they won't keep it. Sad to see.
It took about 150 years after invention before printing really took off in terms of how it changed the way people argued (which was critical to the early founders of the US - see "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change) - https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-printing-press-as-an-agent-...
It's really not neutral though in the outcome. It's as if a lever were going to be pulled to kill a bunch of people (for example) unless you pull on it the other way; and then you claim no responsibility for not pulling on the lever because merely "stopping the killing" wasn't a _positive enough_ outcome.
When people are going to do bad things, and you can make things a lot less bad for a little effort, you have a responsibility to do that.
Like, wouldn't you say that the people who didn't vote during Hitler's election should have voted for his opponent, no matter how unexciting their policies were? (Obviously Trump isn't like Hitler, but same principle to a smaller degree.)
You're conflating contexts. From the voter's perspective, yes, there might be a duty to mitigate harm. That's if you believe that harm can be mitigated in that regard; e.g., perhaps moving the lever simply kills a different (smaller?) group of people instead. In this case, now you're arguing utilitarianism, i.e., it's okay to kill some people to save others, it's okay to kill a few innocents to save everyone else. "I will not choose to kill anyone, and the world shall move as it does," is then an option, and the neutral one. You can, in fact, walk away from Omelas.
However, the issue is a lot more clear-cut from the CANDIDATE'S perspective, which is the one that I think matters (because it's the one that is closest to affecting how the candidate campaigns and behaves): you are not owed a vote. No one is being paid or forced at gunpoint into a voting booth. Before the choice of candidate, is the choice of participation, and to not participate is the default, passive choice. It is on you as the candidate to influence not just the pen stroke on the ballot but the step into the polling center.
> You're conflating contexts ... However, the issue is a lot more clear-cut from the CANDIDATE'S perspective
Ah, I hadn't realized you were wanting to shift to candidate's perspective, I thought you had said
>> think about what you want the country and the world to look like in ten, fifty, or a hundred years.
> This is the candidate's job
as if the fault lies with the candidate that the voters chose an authoritarian over democracy, and that she should have just done her job better. If you want to talk about the candidate's perspective, I don't think Harris thought people owed her a vote. She never said anything to indicate that, to my knowledge. Maybe you could make an argument that the party leadership thought they could pick whomever they wanted to run, and people would "have" to vote for their pick. I agree that the party shouldn't have that mindset. Ultimately it doesn't make a difference in this case, however, because, the facts being what they were, people chose an anti-democratic candidate over a democratic one.
And originally I wasn't talking about policies, I was talking about whether the country is tending toward democracy or authoritarianism in ten, fifty, or a hundred years, not whatever policies are the topics du jour that the campaign would need to comment on.
> ... But any big idea would piss off donor-investors
The "big idea" was that we don't like dictators, and that's all that should have been needed, but it wasn't.
> who would be hurt by any change to the status quo
Ok, so no change on one side, and a descent into authoritarianism on the other side. Seems like a simple choice to make, given that we have to make that choice. If we don't like the choices, then we should vote in other elections to replace the people giving us those options. But those are the options we have now (or, had), nonetheless.
Choose Harris, and you will have time to work your problems out. Choose Trump, and you may not get the chance. (It's not even about Trump himself, it's about what he's paving the way for.)
> because it's the one that is closest to affecting how the candidate campaigns and behaves
The campaign's behavior was nothing special, and it shouldn't take anything special to vote against someone with a dictator's mindset. The Harris campaign made their stances clear to anyone who was listening, and the Democratic Party's platform is not hard to find. Trump was never closeted, it's apparent to everyone who and what he is. Blaming the rooster for not acting differently somehow is a terrible defense for the hens who gave the fox the keys to the henhouse.
> That's if you believe that harm can be mitigated in that regard; e.g., perhaps moving the lever simply kills a different (smaller?) group of people instead. In this case, now you're arguing utilitarianism, i.e., it's okay to kill some people to save others, it's okay to kill a few innocents to save everyone else. "I will not choose to kill anyone, and the world shall move as it does," is then an option, and the neutral one.
Please don't waste our time trying to make this a political trolley problem.
> You can, in fact, walk away from Omelas.
Abstaining from voting (while remaining in the US) is not walking away from Omelas. It's staying in Omelas and also not lifting a finger to change anything. Even this is a tortured analogy, because Omelas is about to burn too.
In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the people reap the benefit, but they also must bear responsibility.
>She never said anything to indicate that, to my knowledge.
You did, in her defense.
>Maybe you could make an argument that the party leadership thought they could pick whomever they wanted to run, and people would "have" to vote for their pick.
That's exactly what happened. There is no argument.
>Ultimately it doesn't make a difference in this case, however, because, the facts being what they were, people chose an anti-democratic candidate over a democratic one.
That's incorrect.
>And originally I wasn't talking about policies, I was talking about whether the country is tending toward democracy or authoritarianism in ten, fifty, or a hundred years, not whatever policies are the topics du jour that the campaign would need to comment on.
Harris' policies on the border, incarceration, and many other topics appear as the accoutrements to authoritarianism, especially in the ways she intended to continue some of Biden's policies (which were continuations of Trump's policies).
>The "big idea" was that we don't like dictators, and that's all that should have been needed, but it wasn't.
That's not a "big idea." That's a basic tenet of democracy. If all you are going to fight for is the right to vote, and not anything worth voting for, you've given people no reason to care about voting.
>Ok, so no change on one side, and a descent into authoritarianism on the other side.
This assumes that we have not already descended to a state of demi-authoritarianism. The Supreme Court is stacked with radical, activist, ultra-conservatives, and so are lower courts. The legislature is ineffectual. The local police abuse and attack protestors and uninvolved citizens alike. The federal police gather all of our communications surreptitiously. Traveling has involved, "Papers, please," theater and secret no-fly lists since I was in elementary school. Every sporting event begins with a jingoistic morality play. Which side made any efforts to curtail any of this? Has any side succeeded?
>Choose Harris, and you will have time to work your problems out.
We've been out of time for 8 years, unless someone decides to embark on a radical campaign to reform the courts and whip legislators into meaningful action. That was why Biden was elected. He failed. There is apparently no appetite within the Democratic Party for any of that. Even if we "had time", the notion fails on its face, in its complete lack of substance. Buy time to do... What? Regain rights lost under Democratic rule (e.g., reproductive)? Stop climate change? (Utterly missing from her platform in any meaningful form.) What did she intend to change? What elite interests did she say she was going to throw under the bus, in order to do something for everyday Americans? ...You know, maybe that's the key. People feel hurt at the expense of the wealthy and well-connected. They wanted equivalent exchange: an elite's head on a pike, in the process of building something for Median Joe. Democrats see that as something unseemly to avoid when, for many, it's a feature. Harris couldn't provide one, so they took hers.
>The campaign's behavior was nothing special
That's a problem.
>and it shouldn't take anything special to vote against someone with a dictator's mindset.
Well, it does. Face reality.
>The Harris campaign made their stances clear to anyone who was listening
Quite. She wasn't as wishy-washy as Clinton. She was explicit about not having anything substantial in the works except the worst, most gross paeans to the right.
>Please don't waste our time trying to make this a political trolley problem.
...
>Abstaining from voting (while remaining in the US) is not walking away from Omelas. It's staying in Omelas and also not lifting a finger to change anything. Even this is a tortured analogy, because Omelas is about to burn too.
I disagree. Omelas, in this case, is not a place. it's a system. You walk away from it by not participating.
>In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the people reap the benefit, but they also must bear responsibility.
Woah, cool. You first.
Right. That's out of the way. I hope that this is not going to turn into a point-by-point essay-writing contest where the goal is to wear the other person out with paragraphs of pedantry. I hate feeling like I have to put energy into such things, but then, I also spent months filling a video game blog comment section with just such a tit-for-tat over Final Fantasy XIII. So, like, don't think that you can scare me with a wall of text.
I understand that you are shocked and upset about what happened Tuesday. I did not vote for Harris (or Trump), but I get that the outcome, in it's totality, is not the most ideal for the vast majority of American residents. However, here we are. The results are the results, and there are lessons to be learned from them.
I am telling you, emphatically, that that lesson cannot be, "The electorate just needs to suck less."
If that's your takeaway, we are just fucked right up the wing-wong. People (individually, but especially in groups) do not just become "better" spontaneously. They have experiences that change their outlook; they develop hopes which broaden their horizons and steel their resolve. A candidate curates the collective experience; they polymerize disparate hopes into a common movement and mission. They cannot conjure experiences people don't remember, or that people reject as painful; they cannot incorporate hopes that people don't have (or, in the case of Cheneypalooza et al., hopes that others have already claimed more effectively).
Harris generally couldn't manage the curation OR the polymerization process. In the few ways that she did, Trump did it better. Of course, for the latter, the experiences were horrible and violent, the hopes toxic and horrifying. So, many said, "Neither." No amount of haranguing or kvetching will change that. No one is going to torture themselves after making an intentional decision that they feel to have been moral. Certainly not just to make you, Stranger On The Internet, feel better.
For your own sake, primarily, but also for the sake of the hopes that you wish to survive four more years of Trump, that you desire to find fertile till in some future time: I'm asking you to find some other way of looking at this. The blame game wall-o-text, complete with trite trolley problem (that you introduced!) is profoundly useless.
> Funny that people constantly talk about how they're not voting for Trump, they're voting for the policies of the party etc. but then they can't apply the same rationale to the other side.
Different people, different sides. I guess the Republican Party did something very well here compared to Democrats, though I don’t know what or how.
> coupled with all other stuff like illegal border crossing
I've seen a few comments talk about this, but this doesn't affect my day-to-day literally at all. This never crosses my mind because there aren't illegals I come across or maybe just don't ever cross paths with. Is this primarily a border state thing? If so, wouldn't that limit it to just CA, TX, NM, AZ? And only one of those is a swing state.
Impossible to say, but as someone who lives in Texas and has actually lived on the border, it's simply not a real problem. Nobody notices, or cares, about it. What happens is people attribute seemingly random events to illegal immigration.
Higher prices? Immigration! (never mind that immigrants are cheap labor, which should lower prices). Crime? Immigration! (never mind crime continues to go down and has been for decades). Your shoes untied? Immigration!
It's just such a stark disconnect from reality. They're just used as scapegoats, enemies of the American people.
The housing crisis is caused primarily by middle class and rich domestic white people. The problem is we're not building affordable housing, the reason being housing is the primary and most effective investment for the middle class. People who already own property have the highest incentive imaginable to NOT build more housing. Affordable housing means your investment depreciates.
No, the housing crisis is caused by an imbalance of supply and demand.
Immigration (legal or otherwise) increases demand for housing. Your argument that immigrants are poor doesn’t change that, immigrants still live somewhere, and that drives the demand for housing up.
Increasing the housing supply is a solution, but allowing demand to increase is also exacerbating the issue
Yes, that's what I said. Housing isn't being built due to low supply - and immigrants actually RAISE the supply, not lower it, because they are cheap labor.
Demand has not been the issue nor is it solvable. You can't make people go away, you can only increase housing (supply).
We're not increasing supply enough because domestic Americans are greedy. We've set the incentives up in such a way to maximize the amount of friction to building new houses. Nobody with a house wants more homes built.
The math isn't this simple, because immigrants are willing to work jobs domestic people won't, and they're willing to do it for a low wage. Sometimes, even a wage below the federal minimum.
But even past that, what I'm saying isn't "demonstrably false". I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion.
Suppose I work for a contractor, and it typically takes a crew of 20 to build a house. I'm being incredibly generous to your argument here, because in the neighborhoods I've seen it's done with 5 people. But suppose 20.
I would only need to be involved in 21 jobs across my career to produce more than I've used. Really, it's even less than that, because homes house multiple people.
To me, that not only seems achievable, that seems obvious.
This is a misunderstanding of the US housing crisis. The problem with housing in the US is that it's an investment, so there's a real cost to Americans when it comes to building affordable housing. That's why nobody would do it - it's bad for the people with capital, and the people with capital matter more. The people with hypothetical future capital don't matter much.
Net change in the amount of known immigrants who live in the US in 2023: 1.6M
% of immigrant workers in construction, natural resources, and maintenance industries in 2023: 14%
If we can generously attribute that 14% of the new housing supply is because of the immigrant labor force, then that’s 190k housing units attributable, to house an increased population of 1.6M.
Again, you're simply blaming the wrong people because it's easy and intellectually lazy.
New housing isn't being built not because we don't have the workforce. That is not the limiting factor on new housing.
New housing isn't being built because local governments DO NOT APPROVE new housing. They purposefully limit it, because the residents do not want their investments to go down in value. They go so far as to put laws in place to prevent affordable housing being built altogether. In many cities, you can't even put more than 1 unit on a lot and you need a special approval process to build apartments. Duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, dingbats - these are straight up illegal to build in a most areas.
You're talking about demand because you won't acknowledge the supply side part of the problem!
You're not making an argument; you're being purposefully dense. Talking about demand and then straight up ignoring supply makes no sense, you gain absolutely no information from that.
I don't know why I continue to argue with dishonest people. This is exhausting. If you won't even begin to touch the core of my argument then why even bother?
There're two solutions here. One works and the other just doesn't.
We can reduce demand by getting rid of immigrants. This will be extraordinarily expensive and will backfire - this is a bad, bad non-solution.
OR we can increase supply by building more housing, which we will be required to do no matter what. We can't keep up, we need more affordable and middle housing.
I'm sure you've heard of renting. It doesn't matter whether the people seeking housing can buy or only rent -- either way if there's more demand than supply, costs must go up. I wrote "housing costs" earlier rather than "prices" precisely because of this. I'm rather shocked that you ignored rent in your reply.
I didn't ignore rent, rather I did not fall into the intellectually lazy trap of blaming whatever poor and exploited minority of the day for economic struggles.
I'll say it again - new housing isn't being built to keep up because domestic people, that means you and me, do not want it to be built. New housing is purposefully limited by local governments in order to preserve the value of existing housing.
In most cities it's illegal to build more than one unit on a lot. You also typically require a special approval process to build apartments. If you look at the states, HUGE cities will often approve only half a dozen or so new apartments a year. Duplexes, triplexes, dingbats, townhomes - these are straight up illegal in most of the country.
You can't have a city that gets ~100 new units a year and expect prices NOT to go up.
If you want an example of what to do right, look at Austin Texas. Austin built 100,000+ new units in the past couple years and average rent actually decreased ~10% between 2023 and 2024. Yes, you heard that correctly - decreased.
The reason why this works should be obvious, but Americans suffer such severe cognitive dissonance around housing they refuse to admit it. They'd rather blame random poor brown people. We require more housing, particularly dense affordable housing. And yes, that includes in your neighborhood. The sooner people admit this reality the sooner we can fix the housing crisis.
You have people looking out for your future regarding topics you don’t know to watch out for. This happens all the time everywhere around you, that people are fighting silent battles so you don’t have to.
You are clearly not representative, as so isn't most of HN, of the average demographic that has to worry about their blue collar jobs (whether that be a real risk or not)
People who worry about immigration, have their own job security in mind, rather than worrying about crime, you're saying?
(Makes sense to me I guess, just sounds different from what Trump seemed to be taking about: crime and eating people's pets. I'm in Europe and don't know much.)
Outsiders coming in and changing the society. People who don’t speak English sending their kids to their schools. Moving into their neighborhoods and making it more competitive for their friends and family to move into their neighborhoods. Creating “bad neighborhoods” and increasing crime.
A very similar thing happened here in New Zealand where we tracked right with fairly dire and predictable consequences, from a left-wing government that was shouldering the blame for a whole lot of macroeconomic issues they had little control over.
It doesn't really matter if they did the right thing or not - enough people were looking to punish them regardless.
But that focuses on the person of the candidate. When you think that's important, there are a few remarks to be made about Trump. So why do you think this matters? The 15M missing voters?
"Have i felt better over the past 4 years" .
Imagine coming out of covid, without a recession, only to be hit with inflation (both parties to blame) and sky high interest rates coupled with all other stuff like illegal border crossing to lack of majority support from Women to Harris to Harris being a silent VP for 4 full years and thrown to lime light.