That distancing is weird and worrisome. They voted for this bullshit, twice. Now they act surprised and distancing themselves from their politics while the whole country falls
I’m not an American, but I live in the US (for now!), and I’m the poster of the comment above.
Perhaps if you’re unfamiliar, you may not realize just how undemocratic the US is. The Economist magazine downgraded it from a full democracy to a flawed democracy about 9 years ago. The list of reasons and flaws is long and quite intractable.
This has compounding effects, a vicious circle. For example, there was a non-trivial number of people who sat out the last election, or voted for spoiler candidates, because they didn’t feel that either of the major parties represented their interests.
As a result of those kinds of factors, the number of eligible voters that actively and directly “voted for this bullshit” is about 32%. Two-thirds of eligible voters didn’t vote for Trump. And a substantial proportion of that 32% is explained by the flawed democracy, such as how political influence correlates directly to money due to legal rulings about how money is speech, corporations are people, and so on.
As such, I stand by my comment, and I don’t agree that the attitude I expressed is a distancing one, or would be even if it had been said by an American citizen. I think you’re just rather unfamiliar with the situation, or the realistic impacts of it. This is a situation that has been brewing since at least the Civil War, if not the Revolutionary War or even the original settlement. It’s not something with easy fixes.
I get what you are going at. But who if not the people could and would change anything? Letting all of this happen is basically the same as asking for it to happen.
Saying that people are "letting it happen" is misleading. What would you do about the situation if you were a US citizen?
People are working on these issues every day. I'm politically involved and my wife, who's a citizen, works on it full time. But as I said, the issues are many, systemic, and quite intractable. Systemic issues like the outsize influence of rural areas, the first-past-the-post system, the effective two-party system, the influence of money which has been ruled to be constitutionally protected, and so on mean that changing the system as a voter or even a large voting bloc is all but impossible. It's why some people believe that letting it burn is the only way forward - it's easier to motivate change when things are bad.
There are some positive signs recently, such as the election of Mamdani as NYC mayor, which is a much bigger deal than many people realize, being a member of Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a Muslim running in a city famous for a very strong Jewish constituency.
Mamdani ran as a Democrat, and powerful, well-funded elements of the party pushed back hard against that, or were weakly supportive at best. The previously Democratic ex-governor of New York ran a racist campaign against him as an independent. Hakeem Jeffries, the currently minority leader, didn't endorse Mamdani until very late, and said that he didn't view him as the future of the party. With political allies like that, who needs enemies?
The reality is that the Democratic Party is "controlled opposition", primarily serving capital interests. Mamdani's election did a good job of making that much clearer.
Having lived in four countries, in my experience, politics everywhere is messy. The countries that have it easiest are basically either relatively small (often with populations less than a single major global city) or else they're ethnostates that are often run by authoritarians.
If you look at Europe, the impact of immigration is fueling the exact same rightward shift that happened in the US. It's why some American billionaires, like Musk, Thiel, and the Murdoch family, are so interested in European politics - they see the potential for achieving the same success in much of Europe as they did in the US.
So unless you live in a country that's heavily multicultural as well as very democratic, you perhaps should be less quick to judge.
