yes i am an american.
but the general sentiments i see online about americans are wildly ignorant and it genuinely pisses me off how the global rising tide in fascism is == america in a lot of people’s minds. guess it’s just easier to engage in the same idiotic nonsense the fascists do than to engage in any critical thinking.
two primary points:
-
americans aren’t just fucking lazy and aren’t just “letting” things happen. some victim blaming bullshit if i ever heard it. it also very much demonstrates that despite your “european worldliness” you’ve never left your tiny village/corner of the earth and seen anything different in this world besides the one time you went to monaco as a teen. americans don’t protest for a variety of socioeconomic and political factors, not one of which is “they don’t give a shit.” most americans live in cities that are incredibly far apart from one another and, in the context of a single given city, usually pretty demographically consistent actually. a given city won’t vary much inside that city, but might be very different from another city. this means americans, limited by their lack of walking infrastructure and their cities being massively spread apart in a spatial sense, really can only choose to effectively spontaneously protest in their local city and neighboring municipalities. most people there already probably agree with you to a degree, it’s preaching to the choir. seats of political power here are hundreds of thousands of miles away from most people. it would be like, a literal fucking LOTR scale and size adventure for most americans to go protest their government. and this is intentional. that is why they don’t. not because they don’t want to. not because they’re ignorant. not because they’ve given up. it is because they physically, economically, and even rationally; just can’t do it. they’re as much a victim as anyone else. this is something being done to them, not by them.
-
this stupidly fucking ignorant notion that somehow americans are single-handedly responsible for western neofascism. guess what? for decades, you guys lazily sat and got fucking fat on corpo cheese too; it isn’t just americans who fell prey to this centuries spanning grift! europeans have exactly all the same problems with entrenched corporatism in their societies and feel too proud to notice it or do anything about it before the same things happening here happen there; except this time in an entirely homegrown sense instead of being imported from america. americans just, for better or worse, did capitalism more and better than anyone else in history. our collapse and reckoning happened to come first chronologically, for that reason. make no mistake, though, friend. we all have our hands in the collapse-pot. this is something much bigger than just a nation state or people. this is the end of nation states, the end of an existing world order. those who recognize this will do well in this life, those who don’t won’t.
sorry for my unhinged babbling rant i just got lots of feelings, ideas, and thoughts and nowhere to have discourse.
hope not to offend anyone. love all the european homies.
EDIT: at exactly 16 upvotes and 16 downvotes on this post rn. proud to have said something truly divisive lmao ;)
I’m all in favour of increasing voter turnout and improving election reliability (making voting days holidays, redesigning the system that allows for gerrymandering, voted ID laws with easily accessible ID, removing the requirement to register to vote at all) but your misinterpretation of how democracy works isn’t helping anyone.
Elections, unless mandatory, are a sample of the general population. In this case, the sample size is more than large enough to represent all citizens. Voter turnout during the US presidential election was the one-but-highest turnout since 1976. If anything, this has been one of the most representative elections in your country’s history. That turned into a win for the idiots, but that’s the risk of an increased voter turnout.
Most democratic countries don’t implement mandatory voting, and even the ones that do implement it often come up with less than 100% turnout. Australia only ends up around 90% of the eligible voters despite the 20/50/75 $AUD fine associated with failing to show up to vote.
Most people not showing up doesn’t mean a sample taken from across the population is bad. By that argument, every election in the history of the United States has been completely meaningless, because nobody has ever achieved 100% voter turnout, except for maybe in some suspicious elections in Soviet Russia and North Korea. Your country would not have had a legitimate government since the introduction of democracy, or ever if you only accept democracy.
You can call me names if you want, but it won’t change the fact that the problems both the US and Europe are facing are bigger than “oops we accidentally didn’t let enough people vote”. Being in denial about the baffling amount of people actually supporting Trump is exactly how we got here in the first place.
my initial reply to you was flippant, reactionary, and misguided. for what it’s worth, i do genuinely apologize and shouldn’t have engaged in ad hominem. i won’t delete it because, despite regretting the comment, it would be contrary to my ideas of free information (lmao that sounded cringe in my head and it looks cringe on “paper” but idk how else to say it).
i appreciate your genuine response and discussion.
you are correct in your analysis of democracy as an institution and the observation that there does truly exist a large contingent of people in the West who really do support and encourage what is going on as of late.
i shouldn’t let my own feelings get in the way. i think my qualm is less about the claim “americans want this” and more about how it is phrased and the implications of that statement. it is reductionist in the same way a lot of actual fascist rhetoric is and it rubs me the wrong way.
i think there’s actually a very interesting social/political philosophy question that will be demanding an answer during our lifetimes. we have a cultural reverence for democracy and liberalism in the west. they are strongly associated ideas. however, recent advances in statistical analysis seemed to have spurred a pushback against this assumption in the cutting edge of sociopolitical thought (i say recent but these ideas have their origins in the 60s and 70s, even earlier depending on your bar. recent in a “meta,” societal sense). maybe democracy isn’t the most liberating form of politics, maybe it inherently lends to developing neofeudal fascism; and maybe if there exists a form of organization that offers the individual more freedom and liberty, we have an obligation to attempt to overthrow democracy and establish it.
i think these were some of the most interesting ideas i was permitted to explore during college sociopolitical courses. of course, in retrospect, we very intentionally explored these ideas. because, as i said, these are questions that will likely be demanding an answer before we die, for better or worse. what do you think? how should we organize, as humans?