Ask Lemmy

There hasn't been any normal for 8 years plus now. Somewhere between 30 and 45% of the population are openly trying for fascism.

Realistically it's only a matter of when unless we make some pretty damned sweeping changes which they are going to fight tooth and nail.

We need to unrig the judicial system. We need to unrig the voting system. We need to put guardrails up on media disinformation. And we need to start holding some of these fucking politicians accountable for openly lying in campaign. We need to roll back the dictator privileges they managed to shove in at the last moment for the president. We need to hold some of these oligarchs accountable for crimes.

They should lock Musk up for a month. Go ahead and have him shit himself that he's not above the law.

I don't know who the next Republican president will be. But you can bet money there's going to be plenty of bloodshed once they decide to do whatever they want with complete and total immunity.

hope my older relatives fucking die or figure out it's time to change. on a more serious note, protest and try to help build coalitions against this but idk it seems quite grim.

This is the new normal. It’s everyone angry all the time until something snaps or the culture changes. Personally I believe you have to wait until the older part of Gen X is dead before we get relief.

how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?

...Why would I want to? Seriously, why would I want to have a relationship with people that have shown me that the things they value are antithetical to the things I value? I don't give a fuck if people are nice to me; I want people to be kind across the board.

I've cut out all Trumpers after Jan 6 2021 basically except for maybe my wife's parents. I'm afraid to ask them. All of us have a spoken agreement to not bring up politics because we all have to see each other and don't want to fight. A major caveat to that is that we see them as little as we can though.

Honestly I'm as agoraphobic as they come so, since I hardly ever leave my residence, I find it quite easy to forget that it's an election year, aside from many of the news outlets and media posts dictating it. My life outside of the internet has hardly any political interference.

Yes I still vote, but I keep my political beliefs to myself, but As Marcus Aurelius said, "You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control"

I take a lot of solace in that. I know certain things and have certain opinions but I am absolutely not a politician and it's not something I'll wreck my soul over. Life is short enough as it is.

That's been a growing issue for the last 15 years. The answer is community groups but they haven't been very successful.

You don't. Most of us have already either fully cut-off contact with Trump supporting family members or limit our interaction with them heavily. Our country is rotted to the core, and this election won't be the end of it. Even if Harris wins, there will be contestion of the results. There may even be a successful coup by the Republican party. A civil war is not out of the question.

There is no normal. There won't be ever again.

I think it’s fantastic because know it is very clear who I need to exclude from my life.

You don't. You accept the fact things are progressively getting worse and move on

That's the funnest part of all: we don't

This has been the norm since 2016. Until the GOP unilaterally rejects Trumpism, this will be how it is every four years.

this is normal. half the country is composed of backward degenerates.

Boomer generation will be dead soon. And Gen X isn’t too far behind. This bullshit is already time-limited.

You don't. It wasn't really normal before 2016 and normal left the building since.

Since 2016, its been a constant onslaught of idiots that live on the internet creeping out into the real world with their bullshit and conspiracy theories and half of America taking them seriously

Don't worry, there's the insurrection and riots next.

Yes, things tend to calm down. If you read history books about US history, there were times in the 1800s where brothers were killing each other over slavery and where people were killing themselves in the 1950s over their children's sexuality. Time heals wounds, and people tend to swing in a pendulum from progressive to conservative and back again (the 50s, the 90s, the 10s).

I recommend The Lavender Scare by David K. Johnson. It's a fascinating book back when the US government shared a frightening similarity to the CCP. It shows how a community develops in the postwar period, how a moral panic gets set off, how people are affected, and how a social movement starts and heals the country over time. It is almost a word for word copy of what is happening in the US right now, and how people in the past defused a situation that was even more loaded in some ways than today's world. If you are looking for reassurance, it's a great read. Many of the landmarks in the book are still standing, by the way :)

you don't. you believe them when they tell you who they are and remove them from your life.

It is now easier to identify political whackadoos and disengage.

I moved to the bluest neighborhood in a blue town in a purple county in a bluish purple state. I actually enjoy talking to my neighbors about politics now, I can out out positive messages without getting my house egged.

What you see in the news and on social media doesn't paint a true picture of what daily life is like here for people. Most of Trump's supporters aren't the hateful bigots that the Internet makes them out to be, they're just convinced that he's the lesser of the 2 evils. This is why you see that his rallies are empty and he's still polling at ~47%.

Most of the deepest Trump cult fanatics live in communities where that is more prevalent, like rural Alabama, so if you don't live where they live, you just don't really encounter them. And if you do live in those areas, you're already used to the rampant racism because it's always been there.

So me and my immigrant wife will still go visit my pro-trump uncle for his annual pig roast, because he's not a bad person, he's just a moron. I'll still call my conservative mother every week because she's not threatening to kill me for voting blue, she's just consumed too much anti-Kamala propaganda. My religious sister is still welcome to visit because even though she's an idiot, my nieces are freakin adorable and I love them.

After a campaign like this, how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?

You're assuming those relationships survived the 2020 election. For many, myself included, they didn't.

I was willing to overlook 2016, but after 4 years of horror culminating in a (failed) coup, and those people still supporting him, I just cut them out of my life.

I don't want a normal relationship with my Trump loving neighbor. He and his racist wife can go fuck themselves. Their signs and banners told me who they are. I'm choosing to listen

In previous elections, I'd have been able to give you an answer.

For this election, the crazy will absolutely not be over once all votes are counted. This is a pivotal moment in American History and either result will cause a lot of distress for our collective psyche.