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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.
George W Bush was really bad. He invaded a country under false pretences, got the US into two inglorious, expensive, losing wars. He provided the example for the pre-emptive strike/who cares about international law doctrine that Russia is now implementing. Maybe Afghanistan was necessary but he managed it with the same contempt and neglect he showed in Iraq. There was no plan for running the occupied territory, no clear and sustainable objective, nothing! Bush also pointlessly threatened a bunch of countries with invasion - lo and behold Iran did its best to cause problems for America lest it be the next Iraq. After being put on the Axis of Evil North Korea decided to nuclearize.
On domestic policy he wasn't great either. No Child Left Behind was a huge waste of money. He started the unconstitutional mass surveillance program. What is there to like about Bush?
I'm not a Bush fan, but if I were to try to say:
I disagree - I think he was part of the dissolving. Look at the profits accrued to Halliburton et al as a result of the Iraq war, a war which has had ruinous consequences for the rest of the world. Those private profits came about through the expenditure of the USA's blood and treasure.
I also disagree here - he (if he actually had much power personally) exploited those feelings to drum up support for a terrible war that he and his friends personally profited from.
This truly sounds more academic than realistic. I think it's well easy to say what you might have done in a perfect hypothetical world, but actually leading the country, and leading the country through such an unprecedented, harrowing event is another thing
Perfect hypothetical world? Who needs that? I can absolutely do a better job that would have far more positive consequences for the future, and I can do it with a single policy statement: Don't start a war of aggression in the middle east so that my friends in business can juice their profit margins at the cost of thousands of lives, billions of dollars and creating not just a refugee crisis but the Islamic state terror group.
I have an intensely heartfelt and deep disagreement with your post and what it implies. There's nothing "academic" about simply not starting a war - there are several US Presidents who avoided starting wars of aggression or invading other countries. The only way I can make sense of your comment is if you're so deeply cynical you believe that the military industrial complex has so much power over the government that the role of President is largely ornamental, and making the decision to avoid the war would have just lead to me getting shot in the head in public so that my war-hungry VP could take the top job.
I definitely don't disagree that he should not have gone into Iraq, and probably not Afghanistan, too. Uhh, I was responding in the car and maybe I got your post mixed up with another one at a similar time, also about Bush and how he responded to 9/11, when I said it was more academic.
This is actually illegal in my country - please keep your eyes on the road and drive safely!
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He blew 9/11 way out of proportion. The smart play would have been to ignore it and build the trade center back exactly how it was. That would have been the true power play. It was just a mosquito bite after all to a multi-trillion dollar economy and a country of almost 300 million. It could have been ignored. Instead, the terrorists won.
Oddly enough there was a Trump plan in the early-mid 2000's to do just that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Towers_2
Also the country basically runs on auto-pilot. You could have no president and not much would change. In fact, 8 years with no president would have been better than bush.
That is so unrealistic. No one would have stood for that. Maybe you weren't in America at the time, or maybe you weren't even born yet. But trust me it was a harrowing experience well before Bush said anything. No leader would have simply done nothing in response to an unprecedented attack of American citizens on American soil, and if he had, no one, not even most of the people on the left would have stood for him.
I was in my freshman year of college. I helped put together the google page of news as it was happening. I said this exact same thing then. I stand by it now. It was crazy and stupid to respond the way we did. I voted for Bush and was against leftist nonsense. It was just a bad way to respond.
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I was in high school in 2001, and the view espoused by @AhhhTheFrench , that we should do nothing and that Bush is playing into the hands of Al Qaeda by attacking Afghanistan (even moreso Iraq) was basically the mainstream consensus where I lived. It certainly wasn't universal, but enough that there was social pressure to conform. I recall thinking at the time that this was just another murder, scaled up by not even 3,000, and thus only criminal proceedings are justified.
Given that my environment wasn't typical, I think you're right that most leftists still would've complained if Bush took the pacifist route, but I think there would still have been quite a bit of support. Minority support, to be sure, though.
88 % of Americans supported military action against Afghanistan in October 2001.
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Just to make my point clearer, I don't necessarily think that Bush needed to parlay 9/11 into attacking Afghanistan, and definitely not Iraq, and I don't think there was universal support for those specific actions. But I think to simply ignore it, as @AhhhTheFrench said, was out of the question. Where I was (in the blueish-purple part of northeastern US), it was basically a given that he had to acknowledge the loss and try to coach the country through it in some way, swear vengeance, and at least try to go after Al Qaeda in some fashion.
It was so far out of proportion or balance. They killed a few thousand people, they were not a nation state. It was an immune reaction almost killing the host.
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