(April 19, 2025 at 6:25 pm)Alan V Wrote:(April 19, 2025 at 4:32 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: As an independent, it strikes me as fairly plausible. Sanders had a small but vocal base here in Central Texas. While I doubt they voted for Trump en masse, I'm sure at least a few did -- and more to the point, many sat out the polling altogether.
At least Sanders was a real populist. Trump was a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing populist. It's just too bad that too many Americans fell for Trump's lies.
As I said before, Trump was a super-normal stimulus: a tall, white billionaire who said everything with confidence. Too bad he was also a demagogue just trying to deceive people.
That's why I see the failings of human nature to be at the heart of our present political problems. We are now deeply immersed in a huge national psychodrama.
And of course that does little to help climate change, brutal wars overseas, our democratic institutions, our economy, or even people's tendencies to rationalize bad decisions.
Right, but for whatever reason, he spoke to enough people that Democrats didn't speak to, and that includes Berniebros who either flipped or sat out. I also think that in the denouement of the 2024 election, the way the DNC went after their progressives is pretty telling. Rather than explicate why Dems are different from Repubs, the Democrat leadership went after the one wing of their party that actually draws a real difference.
They then spent two months eating each other about what went wrong. How are Dems approaching this to help renormalize things like democracy or ecology? How are they selling their "program", such as it is, at all?
Sad to say, the American polity clearly doesn't care about democracy or ecology or foreign affairs.
