DocWatts

To add to what's already been said, the metrics that have traditionally been used to gauge how well 'the economy' is doing - the stock market, unemployment, inflation - have become increasingly decoupled from the well-being of the bottom 80% of the country. While on paper the United States had a world-class economy under Biden, the numbers masked a cost of living crisis that has made owning a home or starting a family an impossible dream for at least half the country. 'Unemployment' may be something like 4%, but a huge portion of those jobs don't pay enough to meet a person's basic needs, let alone provide a firm foundation to build a prosperous life from. Trump cynically used this crisis to lie and con his way into power, having no intention whatsoever of addressing these kitchen table issues. On the contrary, the last 9 months have been a process of intentionally adding jet fuel to this dumpster fire. 40 million Americans are about to find themselves going hungry due to an abrupt disruption of nutritional subsidies, thanks to Trump's government shutdown. Add to that that the US economy is being artificially propped up by a speculative AI bubble, which is poised to pop in the coming years. No one yet knows what the fallout from this will look like, but a second version of the 2008 Financial Crisis and Great Recession isn't an unreasonable starting point.

$40 billion dollars to prop up Argentina's failing austerity economy for the benefit of billionaire investors while Americans go hungry.

If you can afford to, consider making a donation to a food bank in your community. Because the fascist regime that controls all three branches of our government - Does. Not. Give. A. Shit. if Americans are going hungry. If anything, Trump and Stephen Miller see millions of hungry desperate people as a benefit, since the regime has been going out of their way to provoke riots as a pretext for a military crackdown. They've failed to do so with the terror tactics that ICE is employing, children and families going hungry gives them another opportunity. The US House is currently shut down because speaker of the House MAGA Mike Johnson does not want a vote to release the Epstein files - is in fact refusing to inaugurate a newly elected Democratic representative for that very purpose, because it would give the House enough votes to release the files. Senate Republicans meanwhile are lockstep with their Cult leader who refuse to negotiate with Senate Democrats, who are demanding rollbacks to healthcare cuts and enforceable guardrails to illegal impoundments and rescissions of Congressionally approved spending. Meanwhile, Trump has earmarked $40 billion to prop up Argentina's failing economic experiment, while refusing to allocate the tiny fraction of that amount that it would take to fund SNAP until the end of the year.

In short, it's because we tend to use ideologies to meet our identity, belonging, and survival needs - with the truthfulness of the ideology being a distant, secondary concern. We like to flatter ourselves that we're rational actors who 'choose' our ideologies like how we choose between boxes of cereal at the grocery store - but this is putting the cart before the horse. In actuality, our sociopolitical views are of outgrowth of the lives we've lived. Tldr: the ideologies we adopt aren't a dispassionate 'choice' based on the merits of the evidence - we instead gravitate towards ideologies that accommodate our lived reality. 'Extreme' ideologies, then, are often linked to trauma or difficult survival circumstances. No one chooses to become an incel, for example - they slip into it out of despair due to negative experiences they've had with women, and a lack of self worth.

Yeah, that checks out, since we're living in a timeline where a vindictive man-child became the wanna-be king of America.

More like: First they came for the immigrants And I spoke out immediately because I read the rest of the damned poem.

Amazing how 7 million Americans had very little difficulty protesting against a fascist regime on No Kings Day without commiting any crimes. Yet if you put 2500 MAGAs at the steps of the Capitol Building, they can't resist the urge to bludgeon police officers with flag poles, trample people to death, and attempt to murder their political opponents. "Law and order for thee, not for me". The intent was always to let white bigots with red hats do whatever the fuck they want with zero consequences, while using a lawless state to persecute minorities. There are ways to remove people who are here illegally while respecting due process - so let's not pretend that the terror tactics we've seen over the last 9 months are anything more than racism for racism's sake and a ploy to consolidate naked, unaccountable power.

To be clear you made two claims. Stating that he got 78 million votes: true statement. Going on to claim that a majority of the country supports him: not even remotely true. The best propaganda is based on a kernel of truth that's been contorted to serve a deceitful narrative. The Big Lie here is that Trump's authoritarian power grab is somehow justified because a majority of the country supports his actions - this is, and always has been, utter horseshit.

That's not even remotely true. Less than a third of American adults voted for the wanna-be dictator. More Americans stayed home than voted for Trump. If 'didn't vote' was a candidate, it would have won the election handily. It would be more true to say that apathy won the election. Even among people who did bother to vote, Trump won a plurality rather than a majority. 9 months into his presidency, less than 40% of the country approves of the job he's doing - this is historically low when you consider the first year is typically the honeymoon period where presidents enjoy the highest approval ratings of their entire term. A larger percentage of Americans support having him impeached (52%) than approve of Trump 2.0 (< %40). He's underwater on every single issue, including the economy and immigration. An overwhelming majority of the country, including a majority of MAGA Republicans, want the Epstein files released. Stop spreading propaganda.

What got the country where it today is anticipatory obedience - institutions and individuals obeying in advance out of cowardice and political expediency. Or to quote Timothy Snyder: "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." I suspect that folks pooh-poohing what's likely to be the largest single day of protest in American history have spent very little time researching how authoritarian governments are actually toppled. Speaking from my experience as an actual activist - one who's involvement in the pro-democracy movement is far more extensive than attending a single protest - I can say with confidence that we don't need everyone to be doing everything, we just need a majority of people doing something. Civil resistance movements succeed when they're able to separate an authoritarian regime from its pillars of political, economic, military, and cultural support. In practice, this is achieved by building a demographically and ideologically diverse pro-democracy coalition while simultaneously fracturing the autocrats coalition. Demonstration like No Kings are important because they draw people into more active forms of resistance, push back against the atmosphere of fear and inevitability that the autocrat is trying to instill in the public, and make it abundantly clear that the regime is weak and unpopular.

We're starting to see seeing this already, in the frankly embarrassing ways that Trump and his enablers are trying (and failing) to discredit and intimidate the No Kings protests - from calling ordinary Americans terrorists to smearing No Kings as a 'hate America rally' to shooting missiles over freeways in California.

"I consider myself an animals right advocate, but we keep focusing on nonsense issues like factory farming." ----> This is you. I'm open to having a good faith discussion about the limitations of progressivism, but I can't take you seriously when you simultaneously claim that racism isn't a serious problem - especially in a context where here in the States we're fighting for our lives against a racist, authoritarian government. Learn to read the room, my man.

And this is how you do nuanced observation on the limits and potential drawbacks of progressivism (I agree with all of these points, btw). This is something which shouldn't be that hard on what's supposed to be a Conscious Politics Forum, but I've come to accept that the 'Conscious' part is more of an aspiration than a description, judging by some of the posts I see here.

Wow, gaslight much? "Minorites don't know how good they have it and the people pointing out racist behavior are the actual racists" - you managed to sockpuppet white nationalist propaganda verbatim. So congrats, I guess. Not sure if you live in the States, but maybe having a loved one disappeared to a detention camp by the secret police for the crime of not being white in Trump's America would cure you of some of these delusions.

Ill give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this isn't a deliberately bad faith take, but if so this is completely delusional.