There seems to be a lot of negativity from the HN crowd about this. But, the reality is that your fellow Americans voted for this. If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea. Getting worked up about Trump or Musk or SV bros isn't getting us anywhere.
> If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea.
You can't convince people whose attention bandwidth is entirely consumed by the social media engagement algorithms controlled by the very people doing this.
I'm afraid this might be a fait accompli for democratic institutions. The chance to stop this was 10 years ago, by breaking up concentrated media ownership and regulating social media. We didn't, and it's too late.
Hard to say what people voted for. Any winning candidate's coalition is going to be not unified on lots of issues, but Trump's especially. Project 2025 and many of its specific policies pulled out separately all polled like total garbage, so Trump simply lied and said he'd never heard of it and wasn't doing it, and the media dutifully reported the denial. So what did the people who voted for him vote for?
His dizzying array of contradictory statements, lies, and flip-flops have always made him someone where people, his supporters in particular, see the Trump they want to see. Isolationist or imperialist, the man who would ban TikTok or its savior, pro/anti vaccine, really pick just about anything.
There was a popular sentiment in his first term that Trump seemed to believe whoever had talked to him last on any issue, but he manages to have that same effect on other people, too.
Going back to the concept of the will of the voters, Trump won Muslim-heavy Dearborn, MI on the back of people voting to protest Biden/Harris's approach to Gaza. He just announced side-by-side with Netanyahu that he wants to totally depopulate Gaza and have the US take it over and rebuild it as a resort, and throw in the West Bank too while you're at it. Is that what those people voted for?
First, Trump voters didn't exactly vote for this, at least not many. Identify politics and owning the libs, sure, but I'd say that a minority of his voters wanted to totally dismantle the administrative state - or if they thought that sounded good, they may not have been aware the repercussions of that on their lives.
Second, we all have a right to bitch about what seems like a new America being formed. If things go as badly as many of us seem to think, well it doesn't really matter if we convince trump voters they were wrong, because democracy will be have evaporated anyway. Our society has been almost molded for this moment: Americans are more isolated and alienated from each other than ever. The internet today is a fundamentally difficult place to organize any sort of coherent protest when the places people post are algorithmically controlled, manipulated by bots, and moderated.
We are broken as a society. What a waste was all that 20th century plundering and bloodshed and brilliance and effort. I would imagine that even for someone looking at the teetering American Empire with satisfaction, there is a bit of emptiness in just how stupid and pathetic this all is.
Well voters have two-four years to vote this out of office if they don't like the results. History says the Republicans will likely fail to keep power, and it will be the Democrats turn again to set the ship right, or whatever.
