politics

I think everyone has cleared up that we don't actually like Trump. We hate all US presidents. But i wanted to explore a real split that happened when he got elected between people who are still libs, and people like me who were libs but reevaluated my received ideology, in large part due to his election.

Trump getting elected completely invalidates everything libs believe about this country. Myth of meritocracy, shattered. The belief that the "good republicans" will come back, the faith in the electoral system, etc.smashed.

When something like that happens, a real thing happens that invalidates your world view, your ideology, there's two ways it can go. One way is reevaluating those beliefs, and the other is doubling down on them.

To double down, you have to view the real thing that happened as an abberation. It can't be integrated into your worldview it has to be refuted. So what did libs do? Immediately after the election there was, "well maybe he won't take office, the electors could save us". They retreated into a belief in their electoral system. Next they moved onto the Russian conspiracy belief, because it would expunge the record of our electoral system. "If Russian interference happened, then theres nothing wrong with the electoral process!" And they needed nothing to be wrong with the electoral process, because its the only mechanism they have that allows them to believe this is a democracy. Of course, then theres a series of things, the Mueller report/Mueller worship, the hollow ceremony of impeachment.

If you reevalute the system, you integrate reality. You realize that Trump is not an aberation. Trump is the norm, just far more grotesque. Every president is a war criminal whose purpose is to further an imperialist, white supremacist world order. It doesn't matter if they are civil, or have "merit" (whatever that means), or if they're the first black president. They're the figurehead of global system of exploitation.

For me personally, i hadn't become a communist yet, and Trump winning was something that made it clear that the recieved ideology i was operating under was clearly wrong and had to be evaluated. At some point, and for whatever reason people who become communists, or anarchists, or whatever left tendency from the starting position of received American ideology have to reevaluate the world from usually a combination of catalysts.

I think a lot of this shows why theres so much acrimony between us and libs. We invalidate their world view. The thing that allows them to believe they live in a democracy, one that is more democratic than other nations, and freer (libs may except other western nations as free, or even superior, but they chauvanistically know they are better and freer than the global south or any AES).

And many of us are frustrated because we already know what they believe is wrong, because many of us believed it! And we learned it was wrong by integrating the realities we've witnessed into our understanding of the world.

That's probably why some libs think we like Trump, because we don't share the view that he's an aberration, or uniquely bad. He's just a republican. And they can't accept that