this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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The Democrat convention was the most aggressively warmongering, conservative, corporate friendly Dem convention in my lifetime, and I remember Kerry "reporting for duty" in 2004.
No one was allowed to speak in favor of peace - in Palestine, in Ukraine, anywhere else. Palestinian protesters were shouted down and silenced.
It had mindless chants of USA USA USA over and over again.
It had billionaires smugly congratulating themselves on their wealth - Christ, they had JB Pritzker, the billionaire Hyatt heir who bought his position from Rod Blagojevich, speaking directly after Bernie Sanders, and the next speaker was the fucking CEO of American Express, and I can't read that as anything but a personal insult to Bernie.
It had reams and reams of copaganda in favor of the would-be cop in chief, hammering the theme of "law and order", boasting of giving more funding to police.
It had Obama's director of the CIA - the man whose drone warfare program ~~killed thousands of innocent people~~ produced acceptable levels of collateral damage - publicly masturbating over killing Bin Laden.
There were a whole bunch of literal conservatives and Republicans who hadn't changed their conservative beliefs at all but just moved to Democrat because Trump was insane and the Democrats had moved right enough that their conservative beliefs were now mainstream in the party.
It was all law and order and aggressive policing and secure the border and sell more guns to Ukraine and sell more bombs to Israel and kill kill kill for freedom - and then Harris took the stage and boasted of having the most lethal military in the world and I tuned out and gave up.
This year's Democrat Party convention was indistinguishable from a generic Republican convention of the 2000s. It could have been hosted by Cheney and Kissinger and nominate Bush Jr for a third term and not a single word or policy proposal would need to change.
Okay, so do the Republicans of the early 2000s and Democrats of 2024 overlap with Trump?
Trump is the creation of the Tea Party movement of 2008-2010, when a fringe group of Republicans couldn't stop being explicitly racist about Obama, and then found out that, hey, there were millions of Americans out there who wanted racist candidates to vote for, and mainstream Republicans had made a huge mistake by pivoting away from overt racism after civil rights, because the market for hate was huge.
And more than that, Trump is the creation of Fox News, the inevitable result of the end of the Fairness Doctrine, the American proletariat finally spitting in the eye of the mainstream Republican Party's pretention to bipartisanship. After two generations of Two Minutes Hate, twenty-some years of indoctrination by Limbaugh and Hannity and pure raw hatred in a dozen forms, the American people finally chose a President who hated liberals and feminists and civil rights as much as they did and wasn't afraid to say it in public.
The difference between Trump and Harris isn't policy. Except for a few hot button social issues, both Democrats and Republicans are solidly conservative at this point. What Harris is promising is to administer, competently, the same aggressive foreign policy and domestic security state that Trump would administer incompetently. And what Trump is promising is open hatred and contempt towards immigrants, foreigners, transgender people, and unhoused people, while Harris would brutalize those groups politely, with a veneer of objectivity and pious words about respecting everyone's common humanity.
So that's a no? If Trump is people breaking from mainstream 2000s Republicanism, and Harris is mainstream 2000s Republicanism, then Trump and Harris must be different, right?
Anyway, more on the content: You seem to seriously underestimate how bad the USA can get. There are limits to how much you can brutalize people politely, so "brutalizing politely" also means brutalizing less.
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether or not being transgender in public carries the death penalty (project 2025 says trans = pedo and pedo = death).
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether or not people with an ectopic pregnancy will bleed to death.
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether the library has books written by feminists and Marxists or not.
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether the internet lets you access lemmy and wikipedia or whether it only gives you access to a ChatGPT-generated world of lies engineered to drive people towards fascism.
Harris means oppression, Trump means a suicidally fascist doomspiral.