As the Onion said, America defeated America in 2024. The question now is what will remain of this experiment in democracy after four years of the demagoguery and autocratic violence promised by the winning candidate and his army of sycophants who will take control of the federal government. Of course, that presumes meaningful elections will still exist in the United States.
I realize I am forcing my interpretation of what millions of Americans’ votes mean; it may look like the end of democracy to some, but it can look like a lot of other things, too. But that’s the problem with binary political and other types of systems (which trickles all the way down to the cultural “good/evil” narrative level of Western societies): You may pick one side for a position on one issue, but you’re empowering all the other positions, even those you disagree with, at the same time.
People far more politically astute than me have listed many reasons why around 74 to 75 million Americans (the total tally has yet to come) chose to empower a 78-year-old convicted felon, rapist, liar, failed businessman, racist, sexist, and aspiring dictator. I believe this acceleration of the descent into what appears to be self-destruction is rooted in the profit-driven collapse of our planet, which has caused the acquisition of resources essential to survival and joy to become more and more difficult and expensive. Go ahead and read The End of the World Is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan to dive into a resources-driven analysis of social collapse.
Also worth mentioning: Wealth (and the production of it) is becoming more concentrated. Why do income and wealth inequality matter? Even though a larger pool of people may still have a lot in absolute terms (we are very rich and comfortable in the USA, relative to many other nations of the present and past), they will will not care because they can see that someone else has even more-more-more and is getting more-more-more faster than they are. Read this: “Money only makes you happy if you are richer than your neighbors.”
In the meantime, enjoy the charts I promised in the headline, and remember that it is just one political party that consistently undermines the support of education and reliable information (and many other elements of a functional society that are the reason you form a society in the first place):
From: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/26/upshot/census-relative-income.html
From: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-09/60341-income.pdf | https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/why-donald-trump-won-election-white-house/
From: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/link-between-media-consumption-and-public-opinion
