>>2845770liberals never stopped being nostalgic for obama, while left-of-average liberals who were more critical of obama have to reassess his relatively mediocre presidency in light of just how fucking awful each one that followed has been.
>>2845776thinking in terms of good and evil is unhelpful when you're dealing with greater and lesser evils. i do not mean this in a voting sense: you are not obliged to vote for anyone. "i don't want to vote because i'm too cool for it" is a perfectly valid reason so far as i am concerned, but it is not useful to go "brian mulroney was bad and hitler was bad and gorbachev was bad and jimmy carter was bad" rather than assessing their relative badness.
>>2845781this is a much better critique and helps you tell liberals what they really, really need to understand: rightist insanity is a demand-lead personality disorder and they should abandon nostalgia for the idea of compromise with it and identify it as the threat to all they hold dear that it is.
republican Thomas Massie once accurately identified this as an underlying thing behind the tea party movement:
>"I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul-searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race."libertarianism, for all its many flaws, is a set of ideas that appeals to intelligent people. selfish bastards, sure, but intelligent and somewhat open-minded people. libertarians calling obama a socialist was the closest the insane "muslim socialist keynan antichrist" cranks could get until trump came along and gave them what they wanted all along, a crazy son of a bitch who owns the libs even if every word out of his mouth is a lie. so you got the tea party movement, an uneasy fusion of libertarian ideas and actual clinical insanity.
the left is less vulnerable to this because it an ideas movement. the left has ideology, the right has a cult of personality, and libs have a cult of sensible moderation. they must be made to realise that if they want to keep their little cult intact, they're going to need to make like eastern european libs and purge the fuck out of republican institutions next time they take power.
>>2845783this would be a naive reading of it. trump (and all the crazies around him) are the most likely to destabilise the united states, but china doesn't necessarily want an unstable united states. enduring 50 years of "equal partnership" running the world with democrat presidents who turn a blind eye to the integration of taiwan because they're more focused on russia is a small price to pay to not have republicans start ww3 when they realise this is their now-or-never moment to stop the chinese century or, worse still, blunder into it Iran style.
>>2845798the alt-right would've arisen against liberalism even if liberalism hadn't been so socially progressive. you must think of these things as being demand lead rather than supply lead. liberals wanted a harder strain of liberalism and they got it in social justice, conservatives wanted a harder strain of anti-social nastiness and they got it in the alt-right/trump cult. the two incidentally played off one another, sure, but they're primarily a function of the internet removing gatekeepers to giving people what they actually wanted rather than of one another.
(e.g. rather than pushing rightoid slop on an innocent public, fox news actually limited the degree to which rightists could consume slop. now the internet lets a man in bangladesh ai generate videos of trump fighting actual demons side-by-side with jesus or AI generated slop about all the major democrat politicians being trans, which is much more exciting than any real news!)