It seems that people like being in crisis, rather than having stability.

Oh but they believe it's the LGBTQ community that is destroying the democracy, not a fascist dictator and his billionaire cocksuckers
- Actually, the fascist dictator is the one who sucks the billionaires' cocks

We as a society love solving problems when it's a crisis. It's exciting watching people solve the problems when it's a crisis. It's boring watching people solve problems before getting to a crisis point.
Baseball catches are really great example of this. Watch any clip of "Great catches", it's someone running, diving to catch the ball. Those aren't great catches, the player fucked up reading the play. A great catch is when the player is under the ball standing waiting for the ball to land in their glove. That's boring, so we don't get clip shows of it.
It's the same when it comes to society crisis. We want our leaders to be seen solving the crisis, not preventing it from happening.
- 100% agree.
  That said, I was pretty happy when most of Biden's first term (except the withdrawal from Afghanistan) was pretty silent in terms of political news. I don't really agree with what he did (or rather didn't do) as President, but I liked that I didn't really feel the need to pay attention.
  Some of us prefer forgetting that government exists outside of tax and election seasons.
  
  The withdrawal from Afghanistan was about the only good thing he did in his whole career, and libs will never forgive him for it.
  
  This is a perfect encapsulation of privilege. People aren't upset that Trump is doing horrible things. They're upset that he's doing horrible things that might affect them. They want a Democrat who only does horrible things in other countries, so they can brunch in peace.

Starting to really believe in this "Elon used SpaceX Technology to hack voting machines" theory that Donald Trump keeps alluding to.
- So, are we gonna have the leftist equivalent of QAnon this cycle?

Americans have been told there is a crisis every fucking presidency for decades. Every election is the most important. Everything is a cultural fight. The president declares some form of emergency every fucking year to disallow certain laws to trigger since the early 90s. And we've seen how the electoral college steals elections.
Fuck the whole system.
- Because it has been a crisis for decades lol. They're all extremely important.
- We’ve been staving off fascism for decades, so yes, every election has been a crisis. If you've only been paying cursory attention, it may have sounded like we’ve been crying wolf, but if you actually looked up from your daily tasks and paid attention, you’d have seen the actual wolves circling the village.
  Now their plotting has paid off and they’ve breached our perimeter. Unfortunately, it’s harder to do something now the wolves are savaging the villagers. Instead of being annoyed with the people who called this and still saying we shouldn’t have raised the alarm, maybe finally join the efforts to do something about it.
  e: my autocorrect failed
  e2: The influencers at the founding of the US knew the wolves would always be at the door, because the nature of sociopathic demagogues hasn’t changed for centuries.
  Benjamin Franklin was asked what type of government the Constitutional Convention adopted, and he said: ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’
- Seriously, Trump is not the only cause. He is a symptom of a broken system and is making it worse rapidly. He is like the metastasis of a cancer, but removing the metastasis alone won't cure the cancer. It will just form new metastasis. You have to remove the entire cancer.
  If it wasn't for Trump to make the primaries, the alternatives on the Republican side were people like Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz... And even Nikki Haley as the supposed "opposition" to Trump only differed on not handing Ukraine to Putin. Otherwise she is the full spectrum of racial and sexual discrimination, destroying the environment, pardoning Trump for his crimes...
  
  A runny nose is just a symptom of a cold. I love blowing my nose until my nostrils are chapped and bleeding. Love that shit. It feels good.
  
  Look at the options on the other side though:
  Biden - dropped out because he's ancient
  Harris - didn't even primary, the DNC just picked her
  So you have an awful selection on one side and "mommy knows best" on the other. Which variety of corruption do you elect?
- since the early 90s
  Political shenanigans are an American tradition going way past the 90s...

Because memes aren't journalism:
The survey in question.
Sample 1106 U.S. adult citizens Conducted February 3-6, 2025 MarginofError ±4.2%
- MarginofError ±4.2%
  That's not too bad, a plurality at least agree, if not a majority.

23% of the country voted for Trump
- Libs gotta keep crying about their imaginary democracy because otherwise they stand for nothing but the status quo.
  
  can you explain your comments in terms that are understandable to normal people?

Sorry guys, I'm locking it. It's turning into an international politics thread and I don't have the bandwidth to watch it.

I feel like some of those who agree honestly believe trump will fix it. Like even if you dont believe it there are 100s of thousand of americans who believe crazy conspiracies like Qanon. I think instead of calling them idiots or brushing them off we need to face this and figure this shit out. No more letting them grow and fester.

- Do they make shirts with that?

Turtle Island has been in crisis since the Europeans arrived. The terrorism has not stopped, and has only gotten worse.

40% of them didn't vote.

The Trump voters replied that we’re in a constitutional crisis because they believed we were (and still are) in one from the Biden administration. They believe Trump hasn’t fixed the crisis yet.
- This is unfortunately the answer.

Didn't trump win with about 27% of the population voting for him?
- Yes, but he actually has a net positive approval rating amongst Americans at the moment. That will probably wane a bit, currently people perceive him as delivering on his campaign promises through the executive orders.
  
  Citations needed.
  https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
- Why didn't more people vote then when it was public knowledge that this could be there result?
  
  Some of it was voter suppression. And not just the overt kind but also things like voting on a weekday and hour long queues when in most civilized countries voting takes less than half an hour total including wait time even at the busiest times of day.
  
  Turnout was one of the highest at 64%. (2020 was the highest recently at 66%) It's hard to get everyone to do anything.
  https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-15/how-many-people-didnt-vote-in-the-2024-election
  
  They should've, but.. it seems a lot of Americans just aren't compelled to perform their civic duty. I personally could never understand it, I obviously voted Harris, but in my experience (With Examples!) the average American is not:
  1) solution-oriented
  "I can't eat healthy to improve my health, it costs too much money! Oh, beans are incredibly cheap? But some people (not me) are allergic to soy!"
  "Everything costs too much money, I have no savings for retirement! Oh, I can dedicate even just a small portion of my income ($50 or so) to a retirement account, just to get into the habit of saving? But I'm already being as frugal as I can and it's just not possible!"
  And of course "Politicians are all evil and corrupt! Oh, since I live in a democracy I can vote for candidates who aren't or, if there's truly no good candidates, run for office myself? But that's too much effort and I'm too tired from work!"
  2) interested in learning
  "I don't think I can vote, since I don't understand politics (never mind the fact it takes maybe max 4 hours to research which candidates you like)"
  "I can't go to a climate rally, because I don't understand the issue enough (never mind the fact I hold the Library of Alexandria in the palm of my hand)"
  3) capable of caring for others in their community at potential cost to themselves (even if that cost is just "effort" or "time")
  "Communism is bad bc imagine if everyone's grades in school were equalized!" (heard this one in high school, the guy who said this was infuriatingly praised by the whole damn class. Regardless of any discussions of Capitalism v Socialism v Communism, this terrible analogy always irked me because it really emphasizes just how infantile most criticism of socialist/communist policy really is. You know what? If "getting a bad grade" because you "didn't work hard enough" in this analogy led to you literally dying because you couldn't afford healthcare, I would share my damn grades with you. And I was a straight A student lol)
  4) capable of thinking with their logic rather than their emotions
  See every single person who abstained from voting because they were single-issue voters over Palestine even though Trump was way worse on their single issue. Once someone even told me something to the tune of "If you're thinking with logic and doing anything other than outright crying at everything that's going on, you're an awful person" (susceptible to propaganda much?)
  Idk. This got long lmao, didn't realize how many gripes I had bottled up. This is all stuff I have actually heard or seen ppl say. People in the US frustrate me, and I am hoping this is an effect unique to America, perhaps because of American exceptionalism or the massive quantities of Russian/Chinese propaganda aimed to destabilize the US or too much individualism or something, because I really want to just leave the country and be done with American culture forever.
  
  The system has always been rigged. Many people can't vote, most people's votes don't matter at all, both candidates are trash, etc.

More importantly, with how this exact thing happened once 4yrs ago, how did the Democrats do nothing to add checks and balances for the abuses of power he so freely showed he was willing to commit last time? Not one law limiting executive orders, or codifying protections for positions the president chooses. So many additional steps they could have taken to curb the reach of the president, and they instead sat on their hands while the supreme court expanded the powers of the presidency to those damn near an emperor. Nearest we've ever been.
- Biden appointed an absurd number of judges, which is one check. That aside, republicans currently have all three branches of government. Four, if you count the bastardized agency of doge. You can’t fight something when you’re no longer in the ring.
- Tell me how that process would have worked? They would propose a law and then what?
  
  How come Trump can do whatever the fuck he wants, but Democrats are stopped by checks and balances?
- Even better: Use all these powers to help people instead of whining about how powerless the president is, and then they'd have been reelected in a landslide.

I forget where I heard this take but it was describing trump's first election. The broader electorate knew it would be chaotic, that was almost the point. Everyone can tell that the status quo is bad, that things are getting worse for most people. When the options are 'more of the same that isn't working' and 'throw a grenade at it and see what happens' people chose the grenade. Low information voters don't care about Gaza, millions of voters couldn't even tell you what region it's in.
All they knew is that inflation was making everything unaffordable and their pay certainly didn't keep up. Did they correctly assign blame for the economic conditions? Of course not. But when your main basis for voting is just the general vibe and the vibe is bad then you either vote for the other guy or stay home. So yes, people do prefer crisis to stability when stability just means things continue to get worse at a steady pace.

Why do people trust the voting system in USA, when everything else is highly manipulated?
- This election in particular was very suspicious. Not the inordinate amount of bomb threats, not only the statistically impossible high numbers of bullet ballots only in swing states just enough to push the vote counts over the 'automatic recount' limits, not only the guy who lost the popular vote twice winning all the swing states and the popular vote, not only Elon knowing the results hours beforehand, and not only how much Trump & Elon openly bragged about how easy the election was to hack:
  "[Elon] was very effective. He knows those vote counting computers very well, and we ended up winning Pennsylvania, like, in a landslide." - Donald Trump (https://www.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/comments/1i5bnpp/trump_praising_elon_for_well_he_knows_vote/)
  Even still, the point does remain that a good plurality of our society is openly fascist even if you factor out those ridiculous bullet ballots, I guess. It's frustrating how it seems like everyone is just ignoring all the improbabilities just because Republicans have gaslighted us into believing that any and all election skepticism = stupid conspiracy theorist.
  
  I don't doubt there was some localized fraud going on. I do doubt fraud was responsible for the red-shift in the vast majority of counties as shown on this map: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/06/us/politics/presidential-election-2024-red-shift.html
  I think they tried to steal the election, but didn't need to. I do wish there were more investigations, because they're probably going to do all the same stuff and much more in the next elections.
  
  The word conspiracy theorist is extreamly effective, most people are afraid to be connected to that word.
- Because admitting that he cheated would take away all hope for our government. I suspect that no one wants to go there.
  
  Yeah, 100%.
  
  The admitted he was cheating when dude was convicted for like 20+ felonies.
  They also admitted that the injustice system is strictly for torturing poor people.

"Unsure: 19%"
(¬_¬)
- I have to wonder, this has to be a uniquely American problem, right? I mean, the sheer quantities of stupidity in our society? Somehow I feel like I gotta hold onto hope people are like this just because of "a poor education system" or "propaganda" or "leaded gas" etc and it's not just innate human nature for a portion of the population to be so goddamn stupid.
  
  Sadly there weren't polls to observe during previous dictatorship takeovers. None, that I know of. So to be able to gauge the stats of stupidity in Nicaragua or Germany during the world war isn't possible. But I guess we can at least look at the accounts from the people of that time. I have a sinking suspicion that the human species is genuinely just this stupid, though. I'm in process of reading the book, "They Thought They Were Free" and "Before the Revolution" and it seems people are genuinely just very simple. Sorry, friend.
- Wouldn't surprise me if 20% of people don't even know what a constitutional crisis is or haven't been paying attention to the news.

How hard could it be? You go into a voting booth, look at the ballot, see Donald Trumps name and pick the other one. It was literally that simple, yat half of Americans fucked that up.
- Half of voting americans.

A bunch of them think the crisis is we haven't done enough fascism yet.

Only 20% of the country voted for him (77mil votes out of 330mil pop) or 49% of people who voted (77mil out of 156mil) so statistically I guess that 27% accounts for people who voted for fascism.

Some amount of those may believe the crisis is that the Constitution itself needs to be ignored or rewritten, because they heard so on right wing media. The ladder-pullers who believe birthright citizenship needs to go, alongside those who now desire a king rather than our backsliding and slightly less corrupt system of checks and balances.

That's what my friend and I were saying tonight. The writing was on the wall. Why did they even voted for him when they knew what was going to happen?

"I want to be titillated all the time! Homework is boring!
I'd rather eat shit and destroy my life than show patience and consistency!"
Then, in an interminable sausage of typical hollow gestures, a lazy, atrophied mindless lack of self-awareness:
"This government in no way represents me!"
- Well, those are certainly a lot of words.
- Yeeeeee-ikes
- The planet is literally being destroying and this lib wacko is crying about kids doing their homework. Wow. Keep blaming the voters tho.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion

We were arming a genocide for over a year, in open violation of both domestic and international law.
If you’re just now noticing the crisis, you support genocide and share in the blame for how we got here.
- It isn't a crisis when it's over there. It is a crisis when it's over here.
  
  ‘Surely enabling politicians to disobey the law couldn’t backfire.’