No Stupid Questions

Trump is not some outlier or momentary fluke. The roots of Trumpism go far back and there are material reasons why people support him. So long as those root causes are not addressed, you should not expect Trumpism to simply go away, and the only thing US liberals want is a return to the status quo (the same status quo that brought us Trump).

When Obama was president, the same sorts of voices existed. Trump himself entered politics by supporting the "Birther" movement (a conspiracy theory saying Obama was born in Africa and not the US). The right had a complete and total unwillingness to compromise or cooperate no matter how amiable Obama tried to be. They denounced him as some gay foreign Satan-worshipping communist, and that was while he was keeping the War in Afghanistan going, bailing out the banks, and enacting healthcare reform that was originally proposed by a Republican. This whole extreme-right media sphere developed that needed constant stories to run with, no matter was actually going on.

Before that, we had George W Bush. Bush created ICE, he tortured people, he invaded multiple countries and started decades-long wars of aggression, he enacted mass surveillance which illegally targeted not only innocent Americans but also foreigners, including heads of state.

At what point does it stop being, "When will the US go back to normal?" and start being, "When will the US finally change?" Trump is more mask off, and somewhat more unhinged and unpredictable, but most of what he's done is just following existing trends where they've been heading the last 20 years or more.

which I imagine they will settle down with the next presidency into a more so familiar behavior.

That’s putting a lot of faith in the idea our democracy is still even marginally functioning and Trump doesn’t illegally run and win a 3rd term which then gets validated by SCOTUS and Congress for [insert justification here], or a less bombastic but politically aligned successor takes his place. They’re going to have a hard time finding someone as uniquely obtuse as Trump, but he will die eventually and I have no doubt that’s why they’re speedrunning redistricting, deconstructing mail-in voting, overturning laws, normalizing executive orders as legislation, and embedding the surveillance/police state. They’re won’t always have a demagogue so they are making sure when they don’t their guy still gets in.

“The US/capitalism sucks so whoever the US says is an enemy must be good” is not a new phenomenon. I was raised by people who probably now support Trump and as a teenager began to reject their values.

Early on I found Marx and Che and adopted ML as my worldview. I looted the pin bins at the Army/Navy for old Soviet badges because it pissed off my parents. But the more I actually got involved in meaningful application of my changing worldview, the more I drifted towards anarchism-syndicalism with a willingness to compromise on social democracy because I agree with most that nations are not ready to abandon capitalism entirely and humanity isn’t ready to self-govern cooperatively. My role is to help transition to that, but I now strongly disagree that a top down, state driven approach is the right method. Soviet/Chinese style state reforms might thwart oligarchy and wealth hoarding, but it values the existence and welfare of the state over that of the people that live in the state. And I’ve gone rounds with people over anthropocentric environmental policies that accept present destruction of wild spaces and the depletion of natural resources in the present with the promise that they’ll be fixed “in the future”. There’s always an excuse each new year as to why “the future” hasn’t arrived and the practice needs to continue.

Trumpism is just the current face of American populism/nationalism/imperialism/evangelicalism and our unaddressed legacy of bigotry that finally managed to metastasize and expose the cancer a lot of people always knew was festering in this country. Even if he has been rigging the system, a substantial portion of our population is all in because he does accurately represent them. We’re in a three-way cold civil war between them, the folks who want to go back to “America as usual”, and the far left that keeps pointing out “America as usual” was not great, it was flawed enough to be gamed until we ended up with fascism, and instead of patching it up to get back to a half-broken system, why not use this moment to strip it down and build something fresh. The left then splits on the Chinese model versus a European democratic socialist model.

And neither can be a clean copy/paste. The US and China both have massive borders, substantial populations, world class militaries, access to natural resources, and industry/tech. The US does not have China’s thousands of years of culture, social order, or ethnic majority. Culturally and philosophically we share a lot with Europe, but all those factors that make us comparable to China make it difficult to scale the various forms of Euro dem-soc to the US. All we can do is see what is working positively in countries that have adopted socialist policies and attempt to replicate them in our own experiment with government, but actually analyze if they’re a positive change and adjust rather than cling to failing efforts because “that’s how we’ve always done it”.

Personally, I think a substantial amount of the pro-Soviet hype is coming from American leftists fed up with our country and hoping for a forcible change from their own populist leaders (whom they imagine will be benevolent), victims of American imperialism who rightfully want revenge and to see the nation decline, and Chinese mouthpieces capitalizing on both those opinions while amplifying the fight because the US at war with itself, Europe, and foreign nations China has little interest in keeps US and European influence (good or bad) occupied.

It’s not even about spreading democracy or communism, it’s about imperialism and influence abroad to outsource and mitigate the ugly expense of making life for the people ant home ideal. Europe enriched itself plundering Africa for its people and resources, the US built itself on the blood of those plundered people and eventually came for it’s resources, China’s coming for its resources. Europe justified their actions by claiming Africa was primitive, the US justified itself by claiming it was the natural order and later “spreading democracy”, China’s offering “development” but you guys are going to get the shit end of the deal.