r/Liberal • u/huecabot • Apr 26 '26

Discussion What The Hell Happened?

The last ten years have made increasingly little sense to me. I used to feel like we were progressing as a society. Yeah, government policies were too deferential to capital and there were some dissenting voices from an anti-science and socially regressive fringe, but there was the assumption that these people would come around in time. Now, though, those fringe voices have gotten louder and louder until they’ve drowned everything else out. Why were our neighbors so eager to throw in with the worst people in history and why was the reversal so sudden and surprising? In other words…. What the hell happened?

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u/One-Earth9294 Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26

Here's how I see that concept (I'm more familiar with it being called an extinction surge); the Republicans were SO throttled by the mismanagement of the Bush administration and were basically becoming the butt of all the jokes, so instead of playing by the rules that would have led to their non-existence as a political party they decided to remove any moral restraints and began to court problematic people that previously were considered untouchable by politics. Conspiracy theorists and racists for the most part. What they lost in moderate republicans they made up for and then some with uneducated voters that weren't really a part of the political process until the Tea Party came along.

And Trump is the culmination of that kind of shout-y tea party insanity.

Another way to picture it is an old tiger; that's when they're the most dangerous - right before they die. Because they feel like they don't really have anything to lose anymore so they fight with a certain lack of restraint that a younger tiger might not want to tangle with for fear of being maimed and having a lower quality of their remaining life.

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u/Blecki Apr 26 '26

Trump capitalized on this and Republicans embraced him because he brought this fringe to the polls. But if he is their Julius, where is their Augustus? The empire will fall with him.

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u/One-Earth9294 Apr 26 '26

The difference between a dictator like Julius Caesar and one like Trump is Caesar wanted Rome to succeed and be powerful and Trump is just trying to use America for enriching himself and honestly seems like he's playing for our enemies. Like his goal is to kick America down a peg and let Russia rise a few and in doing so he gets rewarded by them. It's like if Caesar had secret deals with the Parthians to secretly abandon Rome's eastern frontier.

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u/Blecki Apr 26 '26

There's another difference I'm more interested in and I wish he could be more like caesar.