Not normal at all. This was America’s 1932 Germany moment, there’s no going back now. 70 plus million of the dumbest Americans on the planet welcomed the Nazis with open arms.

Yes, read history or take a serious gov class.

This was almost a 1:1 repeat of 2016 and yet lemmy is still getting spammed with denialism posts with hundreds of upvotes.

Trump is representative of the systemic issues America has left unresolved, not a cause, and the writing has been on the wall for decades; so much so that people think old media (ex: simpsons) was very cunningly predicting the future when in reality it was parodying the same issues at the time.

The one key difference has been the rather recent introduction of the internet. You can often find both much more reliable and higher quality information in less than a minute that what you could get from something like 10 newspapers combined 30 years ago. Especially for the younger generation, not everyone is falling for the same stupid tricks anymore.

Great example is Washington Post. People think it dropped in quality after it was bought by Bezos, but ask any international academic and they’ll probably tell you WaPo was always hot trash.

All this stuff you see being “worse” has been predicted for years on end, so while you can technically say it is “new”, it’s nothing unexpected. Even the next level filthy mouth ramblings of Trump are just something the previous guy did off camera (cough bush).

Please take this shit somewhere else.

Politics under Clinton seem civil now

I started paying attention in 2000, even though I didn’t really understand it and couldn’t vote, however my first voting election was 2004 and I remember being disappointed when John Kerry lost to Bush, who had already gotten us involved in two wars that would cost trillions of dollars.

My experience has been that Republican administrations tend to be rife with corruption, cut taxes for rich people and run up the deficit.

Eventually, people get sick of the moral decay and tanking economic prospects and put a democrat back in, who tries to undo all the damage, but is blocked most of the time by Republicans in Congress acting in bad faith.

Then, the right wing media environment drums up a load of fear about immigrants and actual lies about the economy to get everyone voting for a Republican again.

That’s the cycle, except the Republican media ecosystem gets more extreme over time, and so do the candidates.

Yeah pretty much. 2016 was crazier than this one for sure. This one didn’t have a competitive primary on either side, and it was predicted as a toss-up whereas in 2016 every poll and media outlet was saying it was impossible for Trump to win, and there was no precedent to predict what would happen when he was in office. This is like, after people have had eight years to come to terms with Trump being a thing in whatever form that looks like. The general trend though is that things are getting crazier, and that trend is likely to continue.

No

No. It’s always been rather cordial if not a bit of mud slinging. Till trump entered and started questioning Obama birth certificate imo. Maybe I’m just too young to remember insane shit like that prior though.

No. This is extremely abnormal. I grew up in the 80s and elections were boring. Something happened in 2000, where Al Gore should have won but Bush was favored in court. That was the start of a sense of wrongness with our political system, that has manifested into what we have today.

I’m nearly three times your age and so will likely have a very different perspective, but…

I remember watching the news (from Canada) when Reagan was first elected. it felt HORRIBLE, and turned out to be just that - Reagan, Thatcher, and their psychophant hanger-on Mulroney ushered in a new era of “get fucked by the rich, fuck the poor” also known as trickle-down economics.

And yet, there was always a sense of decorum among them. Even Harper and Bush jr. at least pretended to be civil in the world of politics, no matter how corrupt and evil they were.

Trump changed everything. He was loud, abrasive, offensive, and off the rails. And he won! Suddenly the doors were open. Here in Canada, O’Toole did outhouse attack ads against Trudeau. Jingoistic, vapid, fear-mongering populism took root throughout Europe. And it just kept getting worse.

Now this election in the US was unhinged beyond description. Trump said things and did things that should have gotten him locked up. Musk should be facing either life in jail or the electric chair for his interference. There are no limits in American elections anymore - I would genuinely say including shooting someone onstage.

Here in Canada, Poilievre has been carefully fanning the same embers - stoking fear, instilling rage, creating groups to hate; and at the same time, throwing out meaningless attacks on his opponents. Unlike when O’Toole awkwardly attempted it, it is working very effectively. Having an entire room or stadium chanting “AXE THE TAX” without even offering an alternative shows that he’s winning by being the same empty bully as Trump.

(And meanwhile, Harper is chortling quietly from behind the curtain as he pulls the puppet strings.)

So yeah, this is crazy - and it’s the new normal, until we start showing politicians that it doesn’t work, and can get them arrested.

In my experience mostly yeah. Except my first one, 2012 was a glorious election

I think most elections would have been as if a Kamala Harris ran against another Kamala Harris. In other words, two normal politicians so that the result wasn’t perceived as much of a difference who one. Also, in the past if a politician said things like, “you won’t have to vote again” or called the opponent names, he would have been shredded in the media and probably lost the election due to scandal. I mean a felon has never run for president before. Trump just somehow has different rules.

Not every, but a lot of them yes.

Well luckily for you, it will never matter ever again.

Going forward? Maybe and I fear likely. Im over 50. voting for a republican when I was young was not completely crazy. Especially moderate ones in a liberal areas. Believe it or not there used to be institutional biases. Like senators were sorta snooty about the senate to the level they would be with a senator of the opposing party over a house rep from their own party. And party members in congress would be adversarial to their own parties president. A lot of this was a stay in your lane kind of thing. Like woa mr pres thats a congress thing and woa mr rep thats a senate thing. Also legitimately conern for the good of the country over party. If you have the patients read this wikipedia on ross perot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot# you can see he is a conservative rich bastard but then click on the presidential campaign. Higher taxes, investing in education, direct democracy. Granted he was third party stuff but it was a coming out of the conservative side. Back then drug, prostitution, and other victimless crimes legalization was a major part of the libertarian party. Over time the conservative side got worse and worse and voting for them became more and more unacceptable and also made voting third party a dangerous proposition. I was never really for the conservative party but I miss the days when they could be a legitimate option and individuals in the party could be decent.