politics

It will be gradual, and people will try to weather out the storm. Think, "The Grapes of Wrath" type of situation during the Great Depression.

Protests only work because of the implication that if things don't change, the people will force a change

Please don’t mistake the lack of immediate results with a lack of protest success.

It’s about growing the protest cause as much as the immediate effect.

Vietnam was much more personal to Americans with people directly seeing children and brothers turned to meat. Those protests took a decade to see effects.

The people who yammer about that are the ones donning ICE gear.

My Dad was a huge 2A nut, specifically because he thought the government will come get him. But he was explicitly afraid of brown people - terrified of Obama and the 'radical leftists'. He prophesied that the Gummit was gonna let "illegals" take over the country, and "regular folk" wouldn't have a home left (ie, a white christian ethnostate, which he believed the US should be)

Pretty much we need to change the entire system or nothing will change. You said it yourself, there are only two viable parties under our current system and they are both corrupt and serve the interests of our oppressors.

This is by design. The system of partisanship and electoralist statism, supported and maintained by the capitalist system of economics has never served our interests; it only ever served the interests of the ruling powers. They didn't buy the government. They built it.

And unfortunately, any time the people attempt to resist the overruling authority, that authority will engage in violence to keep their power. So a fight is inevitable if we ever want things to get better.

Way I see it, people with nothing left to live for could attempt some crazy shit.

Even if Americans resisted, it wouldn't matter, because "resisting" doesn't do anything if it's not well-organized by some organization or party that can channel the resistance into positive change. A lot of countries in the past have had "uprisings" that are largely disorganized, and the result is that the protestors don't actually have any clear goals or anything to even potentially replace the sitting government, and so the sitting government just uses the protests as an excuse to oust another faction.

It’s true that some people will always vote republican, but not enough for them to reliable win elections. Which means that if we can actually pass real progressive policies, like Medicare for all, then we can have the ratchet effect work in the other direction, dragging the republicans to the left. Because while some of their base will vote for them no matter what, the rest will cling on to their Medicare and will vote for a democrat if the republicans threaten to take it away

before i start i want to make sure that this should in no way be interpreted as a “both sides” argument: i think yall should choose the most likely to win, least bad candidate (ie defensive voting; as disgusting as it is) - which almost certainly means a democrat at this point

i think it’s important to remember that both republican and democrats are relatively symmetrical in a lot of regards (not all). there are likely a similar number of people who actively support the democrats (distinct from defensive voting) no matter what, and they’d likely be equally problematic fixing systemic issues

perhaps they’d be easier to persuade, but it’s really easy to think that people on “our side” are governed by logic alone, but study after study has said that both sides are susceptible to propaganda and other political tools to a similar degree

Give it some time. Whether intentional or unintentional, Trump has been teeing up economic collapse, and things are likely to come unglued in late 2026. Right-wingers have been harping on "the deficit" for decades, while doing nothing but increasing it. You can maintain a 2% budget deficit indefinitely so long as your economy grows by 3%. However, Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" boosts the budget deficit to ~6%, and ~1/3 of U.S. debt matures in 2026 and will have to be rolled-over into new, higher rate bonds. However, notwithstanding the rapidly approaching massive growth in the cost of debt service, Trump's policies are shrinking the economy.

It is well known that population growth = economic growth, as each additional person contributes their labor and needs to buy food, housing, clothing, transportation, etc., etc. Conversely, shrinking the population by kicking out people contributing to the economy causes it to shrink, and Trump is kicking out people that help produce food and work in construction, not only shrinking the economy but also boosting the costs of production, contributing to inflation.

In addition, tariffs shrink foreign trade, and levying outrageous tariffs on other countries invites retaliation. Look at what has happened to soybean farmers with respect to China's purchase of soybeans and alcohol distillers with respect to Canadian purchases of alcohol.

While all of this sets the stage for a future financial crisis, in the same that a household maxing out its credit card debt, rolling it over each month on new credit sets up a personal financial crisis, as eventually you run out of credit cards willing to underwrite your risk, there is reason to believe that the crisis will come sooner rather than later. This is because Jerome Powell's term as Fed Chairman is up in May of 2026, and Trump will definitely put in a lackey that will do whatever Trump wants, rather than what is prudent for the U.S., and Trump has made it crystal clear that he wants the Fed to lower interest rates to juice the economy.

So what is going to happen is that there will be low demand for U.S. government bonds to refinance the debt, forcing higher rates to compensate for the risky financial position the U.S. is in and also forcing the Fed to buy them, effectively printing money. Add in the fact that the world no longer sees the U.S. as a reliable partner, and it will destroy the dollar, further reducing it's demand and causing a massive inflation spike, and a financial crisis at a level not seen since the Great Depression, with bank runs, etc. There is a reason that gold is in the greatest bull market of all time, and continues to make new all-time highs. It's because central banks are shifting away from dollar assets (central banks now hold more gold than U.S. treasuries), and individuals are looking to protect their assets. We will likely have a "melt up" (massive stock market spike) as people scramble to get out of dollars and into harder assets, and then a collapse. I expect gold to top $8K in 2026. Buckle up, because we're living in interesting times!

Yeah, but you can imagine what it would be like if they were.

I feel like people using this analogy are forgetting that fevers don't always break. Sometimes they kill you.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That which can be gained can always be lost if we grow complacent, which we did.