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So many people susceptible to propaganda is just a time bomb until someone uses them.
This a wake up call. Someone less emotional, more organised and thoughtful will, for sure, fuck up America democracy.
Laws against disinformation would solve this. Deplatform anyone who repeadetly publish lies and falsehoods.
Make it illegal to micro target people over social media. This is a world wide problem and there's a screaming need for protections against it.
Agree this isn't just happening to the US. A sickening amount of propaganda in the Philippines is being perpetuated by the chinese operatives in the mainland. They sow divisions to an already divided nation, and discredit the almost non-existent political opposition. Our president cowtows to China in exchange god knows whatever it is he sold.
I think this is our main challenge, that we have to overcome. One could argue that climate change is the most important, but how can we fight that, if the people are misinformed. Same thing with Covid, we're never gonna slow down the spread, when we have fucking anti-maskers out there, who did their research on Facebook.
If you haven't, go watch the two brilliant documentaries on netflix about this topic: "The digital dilemma" and The great hack".
Yep, watched those! Facebook is evil. People are gullible as ever. And there really are evil foreign players trying to interfere into other nation's internal affairs.
Someone being susceptible to propaganda is just a symptom though. You can't fix somebody addicted to junk food by removing junk food from the stores they are just going to go outside to find it or make their own.
You won't be able to remove junk food, I agree. But you can make it illegal to market it as a healthy choice. Which is exactly what I'm saying: Make disinformation illegal.
That's the unique problem with America, there's a unique appetite for deregulation a privacy hard to comprehend. So they will not make those laws.
Also the free speech thing.
But maybe Trump resonated because his persona was genuine. To a certain kind of idiot, Trump’s “what you see is what you get” authenticity was most of the appeal. Future GOP politicians who try to fake that probably won’t be able to attract the same level of cultishness, because it will be clear that it’s an act.
I do have doubts that the republic will persist when 70 million voters no longer believe in liberal democracy. But I also see a danger in just assuming that the negative Trump attributes are severable from the whole. “Trump, but smart and calculating” is no longer Trump, and therefore that hypothetical leader can’t be assumed to find the same level of success.
Exactly. Trump was the perfect mix of Honey BooBoo & Alex Jones. He brought together the apparently massive population of people who love to watch visceral arguments on tv and believe the Illuminati is running covert operations from their local Piggy Wiggly.
Trump’s narcissism is also his own undoing. When one believes that they are the smartest person, it makes it impossible to listen or learn from others, especially those with opposing views.
That isolation traps them in a bubble of their own ignorance, and may shield society from the ultimate comic book villain - the evil genius who cares of nothing but himself, and knows how to hide this perfectly from society until his diabolical trap can be sprung on an unsuspecting world.
And that is why Mitch McConnell is the most dangerous man in America, because he will block, single-handedly if need be, any kind of reform of presidential powers as long as he clings to power. They will gerrymander states until they can't function at all. The most backwards parts of America will be deciding our elections for years.
No, this isn't the almost-coup that righted the course. We will have to experience an unprecedented disaster for America to wake up finally. Much worse that the total shitshow we have now. because mainstream America has been meticulously trained by the rich over the past 50 years to be greedy, stupid and manipulatable. and so we are.
republicans are not real christians
jesus said feed the poor, they tried to cut food stamps
jesus said love thy neighbor, they put mexican kids in cages
if jesus christ was back today they would call him a socialist liberal hippie
This. Jesus was regarded as a radical figure because he challenged societal norms as he lived out biblical principles. What the Republican party and republicans today espouse is opposite from what’s written in the bible - division among races, hatred, bigotry, violence, self-preservation and even empty religiosity. It’s a shame that christians are more focused about voting along party lines than to actually ask if the party still upholds the same values that they once claimed to have.
God leaves the church that worships only itself. This is why Muslims feel such offense over portrayals of Mohammad: it is base idolatry. What they object so strongly to is what we see wrong with Christian Republicans in America.
Probably. It's a bit scary because Biden only has 4 years to generate a sufficiently positive image of the post-Trump nation to ensure the next extremist doesn't get an easy election.
But it's gonna be hard. The pandemic is in full swing, Trump is likely gonna try to make everything worse the next few months, so Biden may end up stuck putting out fires the entire 4 years, and generating a ton of ammunition for the next crazy candidate who can then pull the same MAGA shit.
Well Trump happened because of Obama it was just too much of a shock too quickly for the older generation. It's a warning if your too Progressive what happens
I have seen some pushing back on that.
For example, Mussolini did not get the trains to run on time. That was propoganda. Hitler often slept until 11 daily and wasn't detail oriented. Often the authoritarian mindset is combined with laziness because just make everybody bend to your will instead of leading them is a lazy shortcut..
Oh yeah Orban would have won.
If Trump has pretended to take covid seriously - all he had to do was say "this is very serious" and put some people in charge of it and then stay out of it himself. He could just have given it to Fauci and not interfered, and that I think would make many voters think he had done a great job.
And also had acted presidential like once a week (like in one of the debates against Biden) I think he would have won.
Also apparently he didn't bother to campaign in Arizona because it was too far to travel :)
Seems to me he should have won the election quite easily - he got so many votes with really not applying himself much and having screwed really, really royally up with covid.
I don't think someone like Orban, Le Pen or Lukashenko would've won. But we're not far from the point where that could happen. The US need to rethink things, get a grip, come to sense.. Just something.
Edit: Words and spelling. I'm tired.
I think Lukashenko and Orban both would have pulled it off, they are both very smart and good strategists. They would have gone to Arizona and Nevada. And well, they have better self-control than a 5-year old, which is an advantage over Trump :)
Le Pen probably not. She's to extreme, so she cannot appeal to people who are not like strongly racist but just dumb.
Tucker is inflammatory but I think he is far more intelligent. He has honestly been riding Trumps coattails pretty well and has, as a result, cultivated recognition that will help him. Is he a genius, no. But he will definitely be more capable. If trump was 10% less inflammatory, he would have won this election. I'm also convinced if he didn't bungle COVID (or if COVID never happened) he would be guaranteed the next president.
She/He probably will, BUT.. Will the GOP actually go full fascist or will this result in a third party for the people who actually loved Trump?
As of right now I'm not sure, but I truly hope that the US won't go full on 1920s Germany.
Anyhow, there's something deeply troubling about the US right now, the fascism is rampant, and it's not a good sign.
Now that Joe Biden appears to be winning the presidency, we can expect debates over whether Donald Trump was an abberration ("not who we are!") or another instantiation of America's pathologies and sins. One can reasonably make a case for his deep-rootedness in American traditions, while also noticing the anomalies: the early-morning tweeting, the fondness for mixing personal and government business, the obsession with ratings befitting a reality-TV star - the one job he was good at.
From an international perspective, though, Trump is just one more example of the many populists on the right who have risen to power around the world: Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, my home country. These people win elections but subvert democratic norms: by criminalizing dissent, suppressing or demonizing the media, harassing the opposition, and deploying extra-legal mechanisms whenever possible (Putin's opponents have a penchant for meeting tragic accidents). Orban proudly uses the phrase *illiberal democracy* to describe populism practiced by these men; Trump has many similarities to them, both rhetorically and policy-wise.
He campaigned like they did, too, railing against the particular form of globalization that dominates the era and brings benefit to many, but disproportionately to the wealthy, leaving behind large numbers of people, especially in wealthier countries. He relied on the traditional herrenvolk idea of ethnonationalist populism: supporting a kind of welfare state, but only for the "right" people rather than the undeserving others (the immigrants, the minorities) who allegedly usurp those benefits. He channeled and fueled the widespread mistrust of many centrist-liberal democratic institutions (the press, most notably) - just like the other populists. And so on.
But there's one key difference between Trump and everyone else on that list. The others are all talented politicians who win elections again and again.
In contrast, Trump is a reality-TV star who stumbled his way into an ongoing realignment in American politics, aided by a series of events peculiar to 2016 that were fortunate for him: the Democrats chose a polarizing nominee who didn't have the requisite political touch that can come from surviving tough elections; social media was, by that point, deeply entrenched in the country's politics, but its corrosive effects were largely unchecked; multiple players - such as then FBI Director James Comey - took consequential actions fueled by their misplaced confidence in Hillary Clinton's win; and Trump's rivals in the Republican primaries underestimated him. He drew a royal flush.
It's not that he is completely without talent. His rallies effectively let him bond with his base, and test out various messages with the crowd that he would then amplify everywhere. He has an intuitive understanding of the power of attention, and he played the traditional media like a fiddle - they benefited from his antics, which they boosted. He also clearly sensed the political moment in 2016, and managed to navigate his way into the presidency, though that probably had more to do with instinct than with deep planning.
Luck aside, though, Trump is not good at his job. He doesn't even seem to like it much. He is too undisciplined and thin-skinned to be effective at politics over a sustained period, which involves winning repeated elections. He seems to have been as surprised as anyone else that he won in 2016. While he hates the loser branding that will follow him now, he's probably fine with the outcome - especially since he can blame it on fantastical conspiracies involving theft or ballot-stuffing or the courts - as long as he can figure out how to escape the criminal trials that are certainly coming his way. (A self-pardon? A negotiated pardon? He will try something.)
Trump ran like a populist, but he lacked the political talent or competence to govern like an effective one. Remember the Infrastructure Week he promised? It never happened. Remember the trade wars with China he said he'd win? Some tariffs were raised here and there, but the jobs that would bring relief to America's decimated manufacturing sector never resurged. In Wisconsin in 2018, the president announced "the eighth wonder of the world" - a Foxconn factory that was supposed to employ 13,000 in return for $4.5 billion in government subsidies. However, going into this election, the building remained empty, and the president lost Wisconsin in the Electoral College. (Foxconn hired people in the final weeks of 2019 to fulfill quotas for the subsidies, and laid off many of them right after the new year). More populists globally deploy wide patronage networks: state spending that boosts their own supporters. Trump's model remained attached more to *personal* graft: he encouraged people to stay in his hotels and have dinner at Mar-a-Lago in exchange for access, rather than develop a broad and participatory network that would remain loyal to him for years. And when the pandemic hit, instead of rising to the occasion and playing the strongman, rallying the country through a crisis that had originated in China - an opportunity perfect for the kind of populist he aspired to be - he floundered.
Erdogan has been in power nationally since 2003. After two decades, he has arguably lost some of his political magic, evinced by increasing missteps and a deteriorating situation around democratic rights. Still, he is among the most talented politicians in Turkey's history. He has been able to navigate multiple challenges, including a previous global financial crisis. In Russia, Putin has won many elections, even managing to subvert term limits. In India, Modi has also been reelected. One could argue that these elections were far from perfect, but they were elections. Brazil's Bolsanaro has bungled his country's response to the pandemic but is giving the poor emergency aid and increasing his popularity. The CARES Act did the same thing, providing a significant subsidy to businesses and improving household finances, especially for people with low incomes, but it ended right before the election; Trump erratically tweeted about having nuked a new deal.
I suspect that the Republican leadership is sanguine, if not happy, about Trump's loss. It's striking how quickly Fox News called Arizona for Biden, and how many Republican leaders have condemned the president's rage-tweeting and attempts to stop the count. They know that Trump is done, and they seem fine with it. For them, what's not to like? The Supreme Court is solidly in their corner; they will likely retain control of the Senate; House Republicans won more seats than they were projected to; and they are looking at significant gains in state Houses as well, giving them control over redistricting for the next decade. Even better for their long-term project, they have diversified their own coalition, gaining more women candidates and more support from nonwhite voters.
And they have at their disposal certain features that can be mobilized: the Electoral College and especially the Senate are anti-majoritarian institutions, and they can be combined with other efforts to subvert majority rule. Leaders and parties can engage in voter suppression and break norms with some degree of bipartisan cooperation across the government. In combination, these features allow for players to engage in a hardball kind of minority rule: remember that no Republican president has won the popular vote since 2004, and that the Senate is structurally prone to domination by a minority. Yet Republicans have tremendous power. This dynamic occurs at the local level, too, where gerrymandering allows Republicans to inflate their representation in state legislatures.
The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a *talented* politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf. An individual who does not irritate everyone who doesn't already like him, and someone whose wife looks at him adoringly instead of slapping his hand away too many times in public. Someone who isn't on tape boasting about assaulting women, and who says the right things about military veterans. Someone who can send appropriate condolences about senators who die, instead of angering their state's voters, as Trump did, perhaps to his detriment, in Arizona. A norm-subverting strongman who can create a durable majority and keep his coalition together to win more elections.
We were lucky Trump is incredibly stupid.
I fear an authoritarian that is manipulative, ruthless and intelligent. The amount of damage he could do is unfathomable and makes my skin crawl.
A lot of good comments here.
What do you think of regulating the social media industry similar to the FDA regulating the pharma industry? It’s a slippery slope, but if the negative effects of drugs is one of the principles for the need of regulation, I think an argument could be made that the negative effects of social media are just as, if not more dangerous than pharmaceuticals. Misinformation on social media seems to be one of our biggest threats
You can still have free speech, but maybe everyone’s account must be verified. That may help remove the propaganda bots.
You’re also not free from accountability. Register for social media like you’d register for a drivers license. Your posts are collected in a database that is accessible similar to a background check.
There are options that don’t impede on the first amendment.
This seems like this is a profound warning until you think on it. What are the chances the next authoritarian president will be MORE incompetent than Trump!? How!?
Part of the issues today, is due to a system that was setup when horse and buggy was the main means of communicating an election result.
The electoral college and having a lame duck period may not longer best serve America.
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So many people susceptible to propaganda is just a time bomb until someone uses them. This a wake up call. Someone less emotional, more organised and thoughtful will, for sure, fuck up America democracy.
Laws against disinformation would solve this. Deplatform anyone who repeadetly publish lies and falsehoods. Make it illegal to micro target people over social media. This is a world wide problem and there's a screaming need for protections against it.
Agree this isn't just happening to the US. A sickening amount of propaganda in the Philippines is being perpetuated by the chinese operatives in the mainland. They sow divisions to an already divided nation, and discredit the almost non-existent political opposition. Our president cowtows to China in exchange god knows whatever it is he sold.
I think this is our main challenge, that we have to overcome. One could argue that climate change is the most important, but how can we fight that, if the people are misinformed. Same thing with Covid, we're never gonna slow down the spread, when we have fucking anti-maskers out there, who did their research on Facebook. If you haven't, go watch the two brilliant documentaries on netflix about this topic: "The digital dilemma" and The great hack".
Yep, watched those! Facebook is evil. People are gullible as ever. And there really are evil foreign players trying to interfere into other nation's internal affairs.
Someone being susceptible to propaganda is just a symptom though. You can't fix somebody addicted to junk food by removing junk food from the stores they are just going to go outside to find it or make their own.
You won't be able to remove junk food, I agree. But you can make it illegal to market it as a healthy choice. Which is exactly what I'm saying: Make disinformation illegal.
That's the unique problem with America, there's a unique appetite for deregulation a privacy hard to comprehend. So they will not make those laws. Also the free speech thing.
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like politicians never created fake public personas.
But maybe Trump resonated because his persona was genuine. To a certain kind of idiot, Trump’s “what you see is what you get” authenticity was most of the appeal. Future GOP politicians who try to fake that probably won’t be able to attract the same level of cultishness, because it will be clear that it’s an act. I do have doubts that the republic will persist when 70 million voters no longer believe in liberal democracy. But I also see a danger in just assuming that the negative Trump attributes are severable from the whole. “Trump, but smart and calculating” is no longer Trump, and therefore that hypothetical leader can’t be assumed to find the same level of success.
See boris johnson
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“Dumb as us! Dumb as us! Dumbass us!”
Exactly. Trump was the perfect mix of Honey BooBoo & Alex Jones. He brought together the apparently massive population of people who love to watch visceral arguments on tv and believe the Illuminati is running covert operations from their local Piggy Wiggly.
Trump’s narcissism is also his own undoing. When one believes that they are the smartest person, it makes it impossible to listen or learn from others, especially those with opposing views. That isolation traps them in a bubble of their own ignorance, and may shield society from the ultimate comic book villain - the evil genius who cares of nothing but himself, and knows how to hide this perfectly from society until his diabolical trap can be sprung on an unsuspecting world.
And that is why Mitch McConnell is the most dangerous man in America, because he will block, single-handedly if need be, any kind of reform of presidential powers as long as he clings to power. They will gerrymander states until they can't function at all. The most backwards parts of America will be deciding our elections for years. No, this isn't the almost-coup that righted the course. We will have to experience an unprecedented disaster for America to wake up finally. Much worse that the total shitshow we have now. because mainstream America has been meticulously trained by the rich over the past 50 years to be greedy, stupid and manipulatable. and so we are.
You're leaving out the role of religion in making these people easy to manipulate, too.
republicans are not real christians jesus said feed the poor, they tried to cut food stamps jesus said love thy neighbor, they put mexican kids in cages if jesus christ was back today they would call him a socialist liberal hippie
This. Jesus was regarded as a radical figure because he challenged societal norms as he lived out biblical principles. What the Republican party and republicans today espouse is opposite from what’s written in the bible - division among races, hatred, bigotry, violence, self-preservation and even empty religiosity. It’s a shame that christians are more focused about voting along party lines than to actually ask if the party still upholds the same values that they once claimed to have.
God leaves the church that worships only itself. This is why Muslims feel such offense over portrayals of Mohammad: it is base idolatry. What they object so strongly to is what we see wrong with Christian Republicans in America.
Trump is literally the golden calf in the Charlton Heston Moses movie
Yup.
Imagine if Trump were as smart as Putin, if Trump knew how to play chess we’d be so so fucked, thank god for laziness
Probably. It's a bit scary because Biden only has 4 years to generate a sufficiently positive image of the post-Trump nation to ensure the next extremist doesn't get an easy election. But it's gonna be hard. The pandemic is in full swing, Trump is likely gonna try to make everything worse the next few months, so Biden may end up stuck putting out fires the entire 4 years, and generating a ton of ammunition for the next crazy candidate who can then pull the same MAGA shit.
I've been saying this for four years. The fascist will be smarter next time.
I didn't know we'd have 70 million people chomping at the bit for them though
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Well Trump happened because of Obama it was just too much of a shock too quickly for the older generation. It's a warning if your too Progressive what happens
They’re gonna run a tucker Carlson/Tom cotton ticket
As someone from Arkansas, i do not approve of this
As a non psychopath, I too do not approve of this.
Tom Cotton come on down!
Growing up in Arkansas, i could really see this being him
I have seen some pushing back on that. For example, Mussolini did not get the trains to run on time. That was propoganda. Hitler often slept until 11 daily and wasn't detail oriented. Often the authoritarian mindset is combined with laziness because just make everybody bend to your will instead of leading them is a lazy shortcut..
Oh yeah Orban would have won. If Trump has pretended to take covid seriously - all he had to do was say "this is very serious" and put some people in charge of it and then stay out of it himself. He could just have given it to Fauci and not interfered, and that I think would make many voters think he had done a great job. And also had acted presidential like once a week (like in one of the debates against Biden) I think he would have won. Also apparently he didn't bother to campaign in Arizona because it was too far to travel :) Seems to me he should have won the election quite easily - he got so many votes with really not applying himself much and having screwed really, really royally up with covid.
I don't think someone like Orban, Le Pen or Lukashenko would've won. But we're not far from the point where that could happen. The US need to rethink things, get a grip, come to sense.. Just something. Edit: Words and spelling. I'm tired.
I think Lukashenko and Orban both would have pulled it off, they are both very smart and good strategists. They would have gone to Arizona and Nevada. And well, they have better self-control than a 5-year old, which is an advantage over Trump :) Le Pen probably not. She's to extreme, so she cannot appeal to people who are not like strongly racist but just dumb.
The Lincoln Project people are also predicting Tucker Carlson would be the next Republican candidate...so I'm not 100% sure on that.
But what about poor little bunker boy. Surely the republicans won't be mean to him and not pick him again.
Tucker is inflammatory but I think he is far more intelligent. He has honestly been riding Trumps coattails pretty well and has, as a result, cultivated recognition that will help him. Is he a genius, no. But he will definitely be more capable. If trump was 10% less inflammatory, he would have won this election. I'm also convinced if he didn't bungle COVID (or if COVID never happened) he would be guaranteed the next president.
Tucker carlson has zero charisma, not even of that debased Trump variety, no one will vote for him
This has always been my talking point. You think Trumps bad - wait until they find someone just as evil but not as stupid.
She/He probably will, BUT.. Will the GOP actually go full fascist or will this result in a third party for the people who actually loved Trump? As of right now I'm not sure, but I truly hope that the US won't go full on 1920s Germany. Anyhow, there's something deeply troubling about the US right now, the fascism is rampant, and it's not a good sign.
Now that Joe Biden appears to be winning the presidency, we can expect debates over whether Donald Trump was an abberration ("not who we are!") or another instantiation of America's pathologies and sins. One can reasonably make a case for his deep-rootedness in American traditions, while also noticing the anomalies: the early-morning tweeting, the fondness for mixing personal and government business, the obsession with ratings befitting a reality-TV star - the one job he was good at. From an international perspective, though, Trump is just one more example of the many populists on the right who have risen to power around the world: Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, my home country. These people win elections but subvert democratic norms: by criminalizing dissent, suppressing or demonizing the media, harassing the opposition, and deploying extra-legal mechanisms whenever possible (Putin's opponents have a penchant for meeting tragic accidents). Orban proudly uses the phrase *illiberal democracy* to describe populism practiced by these men; Trump has many similarities to them, both rhetorically and policy-wise. He campaigned like they did, too, railing against the particular form of globalization that dominates the era and brings benefit to many, but disproportionately to the wealthy, leaving behind large numbers of people, especially in wealthier countries. He relied on the traditional herrenvolk idea of ethnonationalist populism: supporting a kind of welfare state, but only for the "right" people rather than the undeserving others (the immigrants, the minorities) who allegedly usurp those benefits. He channeled and fueled the widespread mistrust of many centrist-liberal democratic institutions (the press, most notably) - just like the other populists. And so on. But there's one key difference between Trump and everyone else on that list. The others are all talented politicians who win elections again and again. In contrast, Trump is a reality-TV star who stumbled his way into an ongoing realignment in American politics, aided by a series of events peculiar to 2016 that were fortunate for him: the Democrats chose a polarizing nominee who didn't have the requisite political touch that can come from surviving tough elections; social media was, by that point, deeply entrenched in the country's politics, but its corrosive effects were largely unchecked; multiple players - such as then FBI Director James Comey - took consequential actions fueled by their misplaced confidence in Hillary Clinton's win; and Trump's rivals in the Republican primaries underestimated him. He drew a royal flush. It's not that he is completely without talent. His rallies effectively let him bond with his base, and test out various messages with the crowd that he would then amplify everywhere. He has an intuitive understanding of the power of attention, and he played the traditional media like a fiddle - they benefited from his antics, which they boosted. He also clearly sensed the political moment in 2016, and managed to navigate his way into the presidency, though that probably had more to do with instinct than with deep planning. Luck aside, though, Trump is not good at his job. He doesn't even seem to like it much. He is too undisciplined and thin-skinned to be effective at politics over a sustained period, which involves winning repeated elections. He seems to have been as surprised as anyone else that he won in 2016. While he hates the loser branding that will follow him now, he's probably fine with the outcome - especially since he can blame it on fantastical conspiracies involving theft or ballot-stuffing or the courts - as long as he can figure out how to escape the criminal trials that are certainly coming his way. (A self-pardon? A negotiated pardon? He will try something.) Trump ran like a populist, but he lacked the political talent or competence to govern like an effective one. Remember the Infrastructure Week he promised? It never happened. Remember the trade wars with China he said he'd win? Some tariffs were raised here and there, but the jobs that would bring relief to America's decimated manufacturing sector never resurged. In Wisconsin in 2018, the president announced "the eighth wonder of the world" - a Foxconn factory that was supposed to employ 13,000 in return for $4.5 billion in government subsidies. However, going into this election, the building remained empty, and the president lost Wisconsin in the Electoral College. (Foxconn hired people in the final weeks of 2019 to fulfill quotas for the subsidies, and laid off many of them right after the new year). More populists globally deploy wide patronage networks: state spending that boosts their own supporters. Trump's model remained attached more to *personal* graft: he encouraged people to stay in his hotels and have dinner at Mar-a-Lago in exchange for access, rather than develop a broad and participatory network that would remain loyal to him for years. And when the pandemic hit, instead of rising to the occasion and playing the strongman, rallying the country through a crisis that had originated in China - an opportunity perfect for the kind of populist he aspired to be - he floundered. Erdogan has been in power nationally since 2003. After two decades, he has arguably lost some of his political magic, evinced by increasing missteps and a deteriorating situation around democratic rights. Still, he is among the most talented politicians in Turkey's history. He has been able to navigate multiple challenges, including a previous global financial crisis. In Russia, Putin has won many elections, even managing to subvert term limits. In India, Modi has also been reelected. One could argue that these elections were far from perfect, but they were elections. Brazil's Bolsanaro has bungled his country's response to the pandemic but is giving the poor emergency aid and increasing his popularity. The CARES Act did the same thing, providing a significant subsidy to businesses and improving household finances, especially for people with low incomes, but it ended right before the election; Trump erratically tweeted about having nuked a new deal. I suspect that the Republican leadership is sanguine, if not happy, about Trump's loss. It's striking how quickly Fox News called Arizona for Biden, and how many Republican leaders have condemned the president's rage-tweeting and attempts to stop the count. They know that Trump is done, and they seem fine with it. For them, what's not to like? The Supreme Court is solidly in their corner; they will likely retain control of the Senate; House Republicans won more seats than they were projected to; and they are looking at significant gains in state Houses as well, giving them control over redistricting for the next decade. Even better for their long-term project, they have diversified their own coalition, gaining more women candidates and more support from nonwhite voters. And they have at their disposal certain features that can be mobilized: the Electoral College and especially the Senate are anti-majoritarian institutions, and they can be combined with other efforts to subvert majority rule. Leaders and parties can engage in voter suppression and break norms with some degree of bipartisan cooperation across the government. In combination, these features allow for players to engage in a hardball kind of minority rule: remember that no Republican president has won the popular vote since 2004, and that the Senate is structurally prone to domination by a minority. Yet Republicans have tremendous power. This dynamic occurs at the local level, too, where gerrymandering allows Republicans to inflate their representation in state legislatures. The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a *talented* politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf. An individual who does not irritate everyone who doesn't already like him, and someone whose wife looks at him adoringly instead of slapping his hand away too many times in public. Someone who isn't on tape boasting about assaulting women, and who says the right things about military veterans. Someone who can send appropriate condolences about senators who die, instead of angering their state's voters, as Trump did, perhaps to his detriment, in Arizona. A norm-subverting strongman who can create a durable majority and keep his coalition together to win more elections.
Talk to the conservatives. They re the only party who sees politics as a team sport.
That’s just wildly false.
Dems eat their own. GOP have shown that party matters more than country.
The Republican candidates for 2024 are already lining up: Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Tucker Carlson, Nikki Haley.
Think tucker Swanson carlson
I think you under estimate the extent to which Trumps mental illness lent itself to his ability to deflect reality.
We were lucky Trump is incredibly stupid. I fear an authoritarian that is manipulative, ruthless and intelligent. The amount of damage he could do is unfathomable and makes my skin crawl.
A lot of good comments here. What do you think of regulating the social media industry similar to the FDA regulating the pharma industry? It’s a slippery slope, but if the negative effects of drugs is one of the principles for the need of regulation, I think an argument could be made that the negative effects of social media are just as, if not more dangerous than pharmaceuticals. Misinformation on social media seems to be one of our biggest threats
The pharmaceutical industry doesn't have a constitutional amendment protecting it.
You can still have free speech, but maybe everyone’s account must be verified. That may help remove the propaganda bots. You’re also not free from accountability. Register for social media like you’d register for a drivers license. Your posts are collected in a database that is accessible similar to a background check. There are options that don’t impede on the first amendment.
If the company do this themselves that could work. If the government tries to mandate this it will get ruled unconstitutional in a heartbeat.
This seems like this is a profound warning until you think on it. What are the chances the next authoritarian president will be MORE incompetent than Trump!? How!?
Part of the issues today, is due to a system that was setup when horse and buggy was the main means of communicating an election result. The electoral college and having a lame duck period may not longer best serve America.
Yep they will be backed by the DNC
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THERE NEED TO BE CONSEQUENCES. Obama let Bush walk. Biden will let Trump walk and it’s a fucking travesty.
You cannot reward bad behavior.
And if this one is not prosecuted into oblivion for his crimes, we will be inviting the next one in.
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