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I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
Not really, because we didn't actually get the generation being "radicalized by Trump being a bad president", we just got them radicalized by Trump being president, despite him not doing anything all that radical or harmful.
What I want doesn't really matter in any material sense, but I'm not going to base electoral politics on how whiny the loser will be about. I want Trump to win because I think he'll do some of the things I want a President to do and few of the things I don't want a President to do. My top priority by quite a bit is reducing the role of the federal administrative state in everyday life, which Trump's leanings and setup with groups like Project 2025 seem likely to do. His judicial appointments will also assist with deregulation and disempowering the discretion of petty bureaucrats. My other top priority is stanching the flow of immigrants, which Trump seems likely to do.
If you disagree with those positions, that's fine, but being willing to sign up for federal policies that you disagree with so that political obsessives whine less just seems kind of cowardly to me. You're getting crybullied!
Roe vs. Wade just got overturned because of his SC nominations.
That might not be a big deal to you, but I assure you it's a big deal to a lot of women around the country, and the men who care about them. That's a big harmful thing, just on its own.
I'll also point out that most on the left will blame Trump for not having a strong response in the early days of Covid where we could have maybe actually headed off the worst outcomes, and for letting his party fall into turning COVID into a partisan issue where it was impossible for any policy to fight it because half the country would disobey. I don't in a million years expect I could convince you that;s factually true, so I don't want to argue about it, but you have to be aware that it's the type of thing the people who disagree with you think about when they say 'Trump was a bad president'.
This to me sounds pretty strongly like the perception-of-reality-warping whining that leftists did under Trump (see where I talk about it here). Trump needed to do exactly what the leftists told him to do. When he didn't do that, the leftists got everyone to believe that Trump was the one making a partisan issue out of it.
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