[tokioyoyo]

Not an American, but my 2c - a good chunk of people are actively trying to find a reason why their lives are worse than others, haven't gotten better in decades, and are seeing how life is fine across the pond despite not being the richest country in the world. They'll keep blaming everyone, and everything, and whatever comes into their sights. At the same time group of people will exploit it for their gains, as "fighting for a cause" is historically the best way to somewhat control people's emotions.

Every week a new target will be set, and no matter what will be done, people won't realize that the cause of their own problems are internal. Canada, Denmark, Mexico, Panama, you name it. At the same time there's a superpower (China) that is actively trying to unseat the leader. Superpower with more people, better manufacturing, more potential for the future income, more manpower, not cool with getting bullied and etc. That will also make the citizens unhappy, because "how dare China be better than us?!".

It also doesn't help that Americans aren't having children, which is objectively bad for the future of the leadership. The push for natalism, banning contraceptives, choice and etc. is points towards "you will have children no matter what and you will love it" scenario.

It's like a culmination of multiple problems that have been left rampant for the past couple of decades. Now they're trying to frantically swing the pendulum, but there's a chance that they'll end up pulling it a bit too hard so it will break.

[yibg]

I don't disagree with any of this and I can definitely see this in the election results. But this has been the case for a while now. The US has lagged other developed nations on many indicators for a long time. Income inequality, life expectancy, education, you name it. There was a lot of heated debates and intense feelings during the Obama era too.

But this time around something seems to have changed, where his supporters are ok with trump and team doing whatever. Be a forever president, rip up the constitution, rule by decree.

[roelschroeven]

But ... I'm not American, I'm just looking in from the outside, but to me it seems that all these things (income inequality, life expectancy, education, ...) are things that the Democrats try to improve while the Republicans want to limit social security, decent health care, and try to tear down decent education. Yet people vote Republican? To try to improve the things that Republicans will not improve?

It's a sentiment I often see, not just here, and I just don't understand it.

[msandford]

Democrats say they want to improve these things, then get in office and worry more about trivialities then doing the work of governing.

A green new deal that set out to get electricity to people's houses at $0.08/kwh and stood a reasonable chance of doing so would have been a great start. That's not what it was, alas.

You can't just look at what the parties say they want to do when they're in power. You have to look at what they actually spend their time and energy on while in power.

Both parties are pretty hypocritical when it comes to stated goals vs revealed goals.

[tokioyoyo]

My sister is naturalized American, and the way she describes it — even if dems were well-intentioned, they had no guts to pull the trigger to make things better. Because pulling that trigger will, for sure, hurt a lot of people and they care about their image.

I can see some truth to it while living across the border. The things move extremely slow due to enormous amount of legislative barriers and opposition. When you make any big disruptive change, obviously families will suffer, incomes will be lost and etc. So, if you want gigantic changes (good or bad) for a huge country, you need either backing of super majority of people or ability to be above the law because everyone would be afraid to go after you. From my point of view, that’s why China can do drastic changes to their established sectors (tech, private education, construction and etc.) and keep pivoting as necessary. Sure, I don’t agree with their political ideology. However they have an enormous bureaucracy that will sit down and rewrite laws when the goals change.

I’ve met some Republicans throughout my travels, and after some drinks have heard how they want to feel proud of their country. How they used to be proud of their land, origins and etc. Nowadays, they just don’t feel it.

It would be very dumb of me to generalize, but when a good chunk of people don’t feel proud of anything in their lives, it shows signs of cultural weakness. A weakness that’s incredibly easy to exploit as the feeling of pride actually feels good. Current admins are giving a sense of hope that they’ll restructure entire government to some point where citizens will be proud of their progress.

[kelipso]

An alternative perspective from someone say in the de-industrialized US Midwest four years after Obama was elected would be something like the following. They voted in Obama. Instead of improving income inequality, life expectancy, education, etc., the Democrats brought in a bunch of social changes. Life expectancy lowered in the US and I think lowered even more in the Midwest (mostly because of drug use, but economic factors must have contributed to drug use). In the end the Democrats didn't improve anything and they voted in Trump.

Biden comes in, it was similar, maybe worse because of inflation and increased income inequality. Imposed a bunch of social changed as well. Democrats say a bunch of things and all that ends up happening is a bunch of social changes that most of the country find strange. Now we have Trump again.

[roelschroeven]

> and they voted in Trump

Did that help things?