[Jensson]

It gets that way when being pro trump gets you banned from r/politics, so all of those who are pro trump take over some other subreddit. It used to be they had their own, but after thedonald was banned they migrated to r/conservative.

The more you separate people the more unhinged they become. If you went back and talked about how reddit tried to hide that Biden was demented or that Harris was unpopular so would be a catastrophic election loss that would also have been onion worthy but today its reality.

[lotsofpulp]

The election results were 77,302,580 votes against 75,017,613 votes, or 49.8% versus 48.3%.

I would not call that unpopular.

[jacquesm]

That subreddit was taken over just like the conservative party in the USA was taken over. If you allow that to happen (both the party and the subreddit) then that's your problem. In other countries Trump would have had to found his own party, he'd still have captured a chunk of the vote but at least the Republicans that once were would not have squandered their identity. Now the house is on fire and it doesn't look like there are any mechanisms to stop it from getting much worse.

You don't let people like Trump near the levers of power if you want to keep your country in one piece. We have a similar problem here in NL and the only thing that saved us so far is that even the most rabid right winger will have to form a coalition. That still was a dime on its side and we'll see what happens at the next elections but single-issue-parties are less of a problem here, as are strongmen (though, like everywhere else, there is a fraction of the population that just wants to follow some glorious leader).

[nomdep]

Keeping the country in one piece is exactly why Trump won, the alternative was falling off the cliff.

[jacquesm]

So, how is it working out for you so far? I find it hard to believe that otherwise intelligent beings can both make claims like this and at the same time observe reality. The USA has in all of its history since the civil war not been this divided. And it is falling off a cliff as we speak.

[WillPostForFood]

This is is deeply ignorant historically. The US has cycled through extreme division over and over. There was 100x more civil unrest over Vietnam, civil rights, reconstruction, early labor wars. We've had 4 presidents assassinated, one shot, but survived. There were 2,500 domestic bombings in the 1970s. In 1972 there were 31 plane hijackings - 1 every 12 days.

There is a lot of hot talk, a lot of insular bubbles working themselves into online frenzies, but it is, objectively, a boring, passive time out on the street. No, there is no cliff.

[jacquesm]

Of course man, everything is 'just fine'.

Outside of the USA: talk of invading Canada, Greenland, indiscriminate execution of people on the high seas, a tariff war that seems to be a series of own goals, destabilization of NATO, the burning of 75 years of goodwill.

Inside the USA: military in the cities, half the country is being depicted as 'the enemy' by those in power, an embarrassing cadre of incompetents are in powerful positions and are wrecking the departments they are nominally in charge of, North Korea style adulation of an idiot leader, attacks on judges and members of congress are on the order of the day, teams of masked man snatch people (men, women, children) off the streets and out of their beds, endless violations of the law by the authorities, naked power grabs and abuse of pardons, attacks on the free press, destruction of the machinery of the state are the order of the day.

Those things you mention were bad, but they were still within the framework of the normal functioning of a state, it never looked as though there was a real chance of the USA fracturing or turning on itself no matter how bad they were. But this time it looks very much different. If you can't see that then that's fine with me but 'historical ignorance' is an easy card to play if you have already decided that what's happening right now in the USA is business as usual, and to me it does not look like 'business as usual' at all. This is unprecedented, and it is getting worse every day.

What I think is happening is that the 'flooding the zone' strategy is working so well that people are simply no longer able to keep up with all of the assaults and they hunker down, hoping that it will pass them by. That's a coping mechanism.

[WillPostForFood]

Again you are speaking from ignorance, and the inability to differentiate online bubble talk, shit talking by politicians, and reality. The Candian PM was sitting in the White House laughing with the president two days ago, are you seriously saying there is some sort of invasion threat? I don't like that twitter shit talking has bled into people's actual mouths, but I am capable of understanding that it is just talk.

George HW Bush deployed national guard to cities to deal with unrest, Lyndon Johnson deployed the national guard multiple times to deal with unrest, Eisenhower didn't just deploy the National Guard, he sent in the 101st Airborne - the real army. The current deployments are small and peaceful in comparison.

[mallowdram]

The anocracy variable is at the highest level since the first Civil War. Technically the system is blinking red, and the lack of street fighting is not an indication of Civil War, it's law-abiding discourse that separates polities from power access that determines Civil War.

[nervousvarun]

Is that actually true? The U.S. was pretty damn divided in the late 60s.

Widescale race riots, Vietnam war protests, a President and Presidential candidate assassinated etc. That said a few cms or so difference and that bullet takes out Trump.

Certainly divided right now just genuinely not sure if it's quite at that level or not.

[jacquesm]

> That said a few cms or so difference and that bullet takes out Trump.

That could have been reversed. Kennedy could have lived and Trump could have been dead, either way, I was four at the time, my most recent memory from that era is the moon landing. But the depiction of half the nation as the enemy and the active tour of revenge that is happening right now is unprecedented, not even the McCarthy era - or at least, what I know of it - came close.