I was gonna title this “And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice” and then write “Stuck inside of America with the fascism blues again” here, but I’m not sure if that comes off like gloating and that’s honestly the last thing I want to do this morning.
I’m not sure what your problem is. Is nobody allowed to point out the failures in the Democrat campaign?
No post mortem. Blind support for neoliberalism is the only way.
“Now’s not the time”
“Nobody could have predicted this”
etc…
As one of the dozens of people who are not American, I was chatting to my cousin the other day, and he said that after seeing the amount of dead kids that have come out of Gaza this year, and taking a mental health week off work due to the anxiety of watching the world not give a shit, he hopes Trump gets elected and America collapses into civil war… That Americans suffer for what their government has done, and is doing. He’s not a bad guy. Bad guys don’t have breakdowns from watching foreign children murdered.
I can’t logically support his view, but I completely emotionally understand it. He knew Trump would be objectively worse for humanity, but is a fascist genocide that kills 2 million people better than a fascist genocide that kills 5 million people? At that point you’re really just splitting hairs between failed states, and systems that deserve to be burned to the ground. After enough chances, opportunities, and desensitisation, you want the schadenfreude of watching the American electorate who voted for Trump shooting themselves in the face, destroying their livelihoods and lineage, along with all of their false patriotism and exceptionalism. I still suspect the conserva-russian PsyOps to be the main source of Trumps win, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s genocide is the straw that broke the Dems back.
With sympathy, panicked thoughts about what to do next, and quite a bit of horror? Absolutely.
With a casual blaming attitude, waiting for someone else to make it better? Sure, they’re allowed to, just like I’m allowed to tell them to go fuck themselves.
Panic doesn’t help anything. Neither does horror. We survived one Trump presidency, we’ll survive this one, despite it being monumentally worse.
Do what you can to help those you can around you. Work in and grow the support structures in your local community, family, and social circles.
Panic leads to stupid, rash, not well thought out decisions. It should be avoided as much as possible while you take a long, honest, realistic look at the situation and evaluate what is and isn’t in your power to effect.
You’re right that passive defeatism isn’t helpful, but you don’t have to go straight to the other extreme of emotional turmoil.
I have to be honest, I am panicking a little bit.
Nothing will change instantly, or everywhere all at once, but it could get very bad, and not even a long time from now.
What should my attitude be after decades of saying “triangulation doesn’t work, going to the right to chase ‘moderate republicans’ just depresses turnout.” and watching the dems do this over and over and over while getting accused of being a secret republican because I point this out?
You know what else doesn’t work?
Not voting and letting Trump get elected.
That shit’s going to do more damage to the left than a million Hillary Clintons depressing the turnout.
(I have more I could say on it, especially pertaining to the difference between accurately describing sins of the Democrats which are depressing turnout versus making up imaginary sins of the Democrats which people will then believe which will depress turnout, but I’m not planning on a long exchange so I’ll leave it there.)