- I am not saying you shouldn’t shame people for their voting choice as a demonstration of lack of critical thought or moral compass. You should.
- I am not saying that all the political parties are equally guilty. I am obviously talking about Trump as the much greater evil of the available evils.
- I am not saying that votes never count or have impact. They sometimes do.
All I really want to say is that blaming your friends and family for the election outcome is misguided and probably serves to benefit the political machine in its current form more than it serves to affect voter choice.
Lemmy is a bit of a liberal echo chamber.
“Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
When Hillary Clinton refused to connect with the “working class” base that was supposedly the realm of the Democrats, she started the trend that not only lost her own personal election, but looking back, I think we’ll pin the demise of the entire modern Democratic party upon that pivotal point.
People said the same about what Trump did to the Republican party but… the facts seem to speak for themselves: they were wrong (apparently, even while unfortunately).
We were warned. People like Dave Chappelle offered what I consider great insight into the situation - especially now that he is validated for having been able to correctly predict the outcome. Donald Trump at least SPOKE TO the working people (here I mean the “middle class” - the poorest people actually still voted Dem, as too did the richest, but the largest group in the middle felt that the Dems were not listening to their needs). Now mind you, HE LIED, but at least he bothered to speak to them.
And it is human nature to want to feel heard, rather than ignored. Although now how ironic that the Democratic party, having mostly ignored the middle class, got ignored by them in turn (or even the opposite: having switched them to vote Repub). It’s almost like karma is a bitch, and tends to (even if not always then most of the time) circle back around so that our actions bite us in the ass?
Even Jon Stewart (my hero) tried to warn us. But I gave up posting such content b/c it was always so heavily down-voted and people spoke with such hostility against it (while also somehow simultaneously choosing to miss the entire point). In one example, my post “[Opinion] Biden Must Resign”, which mind you was not even my opinion but an article written by The Atlantic - one of the last stalwart hold-outs of reasoning left in American media. Forget for a moment whether it was validated or not, and forget even whether Biden resigning was a good idea or not - why should it not even have been something that people could choose to discuss, as rational agents of free will & choice? Instead, that post is among the least popular content that community has ever seen - earning what looks to me like a unique distinction of having the highest mixture of number of downvotes and downvote-to-upvote ratio present since its inception (sort the community by Controversial and scan downwards until you see the first post with a DOUBLE-DIGIT negative score; Lemmy makes it next to impossible to see actual separated vote counts but on a mobile but not desktop I can see that it has 15 total upvotes and 61 downvotes, and you can read the comment section for yourself to see how relevant and/or controversial the topic was).
And similarly, literally award-winning videos such as this post get passed over and criticized with shallow rule-based comments, with at least one person there (and in its cross-post) outright admitting to downvoting it without having watched it.
Which is… what it is, we can’t push content onto people that are not receptive to it. Your post here hasn’t been removed, but it wasn’t exactly promoted in people’s feeds either, so that it could be discussed. Instead it is far more of just you shouting into the void, to a non-receptive audience.
TLDR: don’t expect much in the way of “deep thought” here on Lemmy. If you do manage to find such a community, please let me know and I will join too? Despite how people say that Lemmy is reminiscent of the olden days when Reddit was new (I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t on it at the time yet), that kind of content still seems too “niche” to appear here. I do see glimmers of it, and overall here we are far more kind than on Reddit, but while the average experience is better here than there, the top end of wanting to have rational discussions about controversial topics is denied to us by overall lack of interest.
One exception is [email protected], but you can see how few posts appear there, plus as a rule it can only feature content posted first elsewhere (and I have gotten several posts removed from there or locked for not matching their rules or being too controversial, e.g. Very well-stated (& calm) response to what is turning into a heated discussion about users on the hexbear.net instance).
So… it is what it is indeed.
This is a truly awful take even though I think your heart is in the right place.
If someone voted for Trump, they likely spoke highly of Trump which emboldened others to vote for him. It’s insane to imply they are blameless when they participated in and promoted a culture that props Trump up as a good guy.
I actually do not think that’s a fair assumption. In my experience conservative voters are significantly less likely to talk about their beliefs and choices
In fact I would argue that across the political spectrum, there’s a loud minority
Every vote for Trump normalizes his behavior. It’s as simple as that. A clueless voter see 60 million people voting for him and thinks hey, he must not be so bad!
This is a good and fair point
But I would counter that there are a number of co-mingling biases and suboptimal, systematic, societal issues at play which led to this, and I would argue that no one knew there were 60 million like minded votes until election day
I think your argument puts the cart before the horse. These people were prepared to vote for Trump long, long before, and it wasn’t because they all loudly talked about it together
Fox News for example is infinitely more at blame than your racist uncle, and my original point was that giving your racist uncle even an ounce of your attention is a kind of misplaced hate
In my experience, they are quite vocal. Anecdotes are weak
Yeah, no. Fuck my hate filled, transphobic parents and Kool aid drinking ultra conservative siblings. They knew exactly who they were voting for, and they can get fucked.
See point 1
It’s very difficult to reconcile situations such as mine where all but two in my immediate family are reliable red voters whose candidates want to remove rights from myself and my friends who are mostly some form of queer.
