American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

Scraping a little deeper, Kasparov discovers that multicultural America is still there. Somewhere.

“It’s Not Trump,” a recent New York Times opinion headline proclaims, “It’s America.”

"It’s an incendiary take. For columnist Lydia Polgreen, it’s not enough that America has a terrible president (and I agree, he is terrible!)—America, Polgreen insists, is a terrible country.

“Trump has revealed a much older malady,” she writes. That affliction is America’s “unshakable faith in its ability to shape the world to its liking.”

"I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, witnessing the arbitrariness and cruelty of communist rule from childhood. Frankly, as a chess prodigy, I had it easier than most. Still, I can assure you that there were no US puppeteers forcing the Party’s hand. The imperfect freedom I know in America is vastly superior to what I saw in the USSR, and its zombie successor, the Russian Federation."

"There are kernels of truth hidden amid Polgreen’s distortions. Yes, the problem is not Trump alone. Yes—as I have written—the presidency has become too powerful and unrestrained. I embrace self-reflection; what I reject is self-flagellation."

"Anyone who makes blanket condemnations of the US (“America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control”) is more interested in appearing righteous than in winning back their country. If Americans want to reclaim their democracy, then they need to carve out a middle ground in their self-image between the ideologically-blinkered history of the 1619 Project and the state-sponsored whitewashing of Trump’s 1776 Commission."
"Finally, I’d like to challenge Polgreen’s central conceit: her rejection of America’s “unshakable faith in its ability to shape the world to its liking.”

"The United States was the first country founded on principles rather than ethnic or religious affiliation, or upon the hereditary right of kings. It remains unique today, painting a sharp contrast to Russia’s blood-and-soil nationalism or Iran’s Islamic Revolution."

"I wouldn’t call Americans’ belief in global democracy “unshakable,” as Polgreen does. Yet that commitment is there, and, I’d argue, a good thing to fight for. The United States is not perfect, but the idea of freedom is."

https://www.thenextmove.org/p/why-the-n ... ts-america

[Tero]

I'm chatting with some Finnish Americans about Vance and UFOs. They are sort of casual voters. The Trumpists there are still quite convinced Biden was shaking hands with invisible people and that he was completely senile by the debate. These are people who would not bother with serious debate or ever look at the trump Biden debate again. But the debate was what convinced them to show up to vote at all.

Recent immigrants are usually in good health and are just in America to make more money etc. politics is typically not on their mind. And even the current situation is better than Finland. "I got fined by the county for putting up a sign to my wedding reception."

[Tero]

Despite the fact that 50 Republicans are keeping Trump possible and he has declared himself king, Democrats are blamed:

Their most common reasons for disliking Democrats are viewing them as do-nothing (22% say this), saying they’re not standing up enough to Trump and the GOP (11%) or they’re too liberal (10%). Another 9% call them weak or spineless, with another 9% saying the party doesn’t care about people.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/03/politics ... s-midterms

So they are to stand up to Trump but not be liberal. Doing liberal things like democracy and abortion. And that vaccination.

[Tero]

Elsewhere someone questioned the motives and attitudes of democrats. I told them it was not so much democrats or republicans who decided the election, as so many voters hate both:

Democrats will vote for many things that will improve our lives. Harris actually had some ideas. The Republicans are the ones with the completely negative ideas about government. We lost a lot of science that was federally funded. The American exceptionality was partly due to gov’t spending on scinece.

But on to voters. The typical democrat is not what decides elections. The people that do not care much for politics are. Another negative block.

I’ve run across a great deal of people that just are not interested in politics. They have some general ideas about politics, and what they get from media they try to fit to their old ideas.
My guess about their standing is that they are not in the center. Nobody is. A few people have problems since their views on specific topics end up left and right.

My conclusion is that these casual voters are just left or just right of center. The just left group fails to vote democrat because there are few issues they can agree on with democrats. So they don’t vote. So a 2-3% group of no nothings decide the presidential election. If they show up.