United States Politics Thread 47

[Raphael]

OK, confession time: I had assumed the first big internal Trump Admin blowup would be between Trump and RFK Jr, because RFK Jr would try to take something that Trump likes to eat (or consume in some other way) and ban it for being (really or supposedly) unhealthy. That's how you can be wrong.

[zompist]

Oh,and Tesla stock is down 12% in the last day.

Tesla got a huge boost from Musk's perceived proximity to power: from $250 on Election Day to $425 (+70%) after the Inauguration. It lost all its gains and more (down to $222) as Musk broke things, including his own car business. Then recovered a bit, till this happened.

There's been lots of bad news and we're not out of the woods, but this little spat should be a reminder that we're dealing with really really stupid people here. They're not playing 4-dimensional chess. 1½ dimensions at most,

[Raphael]

There's been lots of bad news and we're not out of the woods, but this little spat should be a reminder that we're dealing with really really stupid people here. They're not playing 4-dimensional chess. 1½ dimensions at most,

To quote someone named Robert Evans on Bluesky:

I say this a lot but we are all so lucky this generation of fascists came of age on message boards and not stabbing people to death at close range in a trench while the world detonates endlessly around them

[hwhatting]

I'm not following this blow-by-blow, but is it also your impression that Trump is uncharacteristically restraining himself in this feud? As if thinking he hasn't lost Musk yet and giving him a chance to crawl back?
Musk coming back and kissing whatever part of Trump he will be ordered to is one option. The second is for him to stay in his corner, sulking and complaining, and concentrating on getting his businesses on track again. The most interesting would be if he went full Berezovski, maybe not going to exile in London, but starting to use his money to bring down the man whom he thinks he made and now wants to put back where he found him... (in case you need a soundtrack for this spat, this should do the job ).

[Raphael]

According to the Guardian, itself citing ABC and Politico:

ABC reported that Musk wanted to talk to Trump, but the president was not ready to talk to Musk.

Earlier Musk had suggested he may de-escalate his public row with Donald Trump after their spectacular falling-out.

The Tesla chief executive signalled he would back down on a pledge to decommission the Dragon spacecraft – made by his SpaceX business – in an exchange on his X social media platform. He also responded positively to a call from fellow multibillionaire Bill Ackman to “make peace” with the US president.

Politico also reported overnight that the White House had scheduled a call with Musk on Friday to broker a peace deal after both men traded verbal blows on Thursday. But later on Friday, multiple reports suggested there was now no call set up between the two men.

Sounds like Musk is already willing to make up (with a man he claims is a child molester), but Trump wants to see him squirm a bit more.

[WeepingElf]

To me this feels as if many African countries had better politics than the United States

[Raphael]

According to some, the Great Fallout has been staged to flush out disloyal followers.

Conspiracy theory by people who can't imagine their heroes getting anything wrong.

[jcb]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sduhcu_zriI

What do you all think Trump's nickname for Musk will be? Electro Elon, Lying Leon, Mendacious Musk?

[Torco]

I would think mendacious is too big a word for trump, who speaks (to his credit) at a level most people can quickly and easily comprehend.

speaking of us politics... i hear orange guy is sending soldiers to occupy LA?

[keenir]

I would think mendacious is too big a word for trump, who speaks (to his credit) at a level most people can quickly and easily comprehend.

speaking of us politics... i hear orange guy is sending soldiers to occupy LA?

One of the state governors (not of California) was asked about that, how the California governor was saying there was no problem & that Trump was inflaming the situation by sending the Guard...and the other governor said "does this look calm to you?"

...and I'm thinking "do you know what inflame means?"

[Starbeam]

Yes, they're calling the National Guard on LA protests. I don't talk politics in person or on boomer corners of the internet, so i'm not sure how the average American thinks of it. I think it's awful and fascistic. Hopefully they actually get rid of ICE or at least land some improvement.

[MacAnDàil]

I would think mendacious is too big a word for trump, who speaks (to his credit) at a level most people can quickly and easily comprehend.

The vocabulary Trump uses is often widely known, but the structure and the lack of coherence renders Trump's discourse often incomprehensible.

[Torco]

I would think mendacious is too big a word for trump, who speaks (to his credit) at a level most people can quickly and easily comprehend.

The vocabulary Trump uses is often widely known, but the structure and the lack of coherence renders Trump's discourse often incomprehensible.

I think this is more a thing his opposition says than a real thing. let's take a selection of tweets of the guy on his truth social platform:

Looking really bad in L.A. BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!
seems pretty self-explanatory. he's very often using these extremely simple framings: you know, this is good, so good, the most good, the best, best. this is bad, the most bad, SAD!. very simple, very comprehensible.

AMERICA IS HOT! SIX MONTHS AGO IT WAS COLD AS ICE! BORDER IS CLOSED, PRICES ARE DOWN. WAGES ARE UP!
pretty simple too. wrong, of course, but simple: what might confuse one is like... prices are actually up, so what does he mean prices are down? what's the spin? etcetera. but the message itself is clear.

The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!
okay, why is dollars and budget and contracts in uppercase here? no one knows. but still, clear: the complication, again, is in the lie, or the inconsistency, but that's just filled in by the personality cult mentality: if he's surprised biden didn't do it, then why didn't he himself do it? but the first order message [elon's subsidized and we could un-subsidize him] is something a kid could grasp.

Rand Paul has very little understanding of the BBB, especially the tremendous GROWTH that is coming. He loves voting “NO” on everything, he thinks it’s good politics, but it’s not. The BBB is a big WINNER!!!
he even helps the reader to reduce the message to its most simple form with the uppercases: BBB IS GROWTH, BBB IS WIN, RAND DOESN'T THINK SO.

__

this is a strength the right has in my country as well: while leftos weave complex, high-brow speeches like "we must tend in all circumstances towards the protection of the most vulnerable sections of the population: their needs must take precedence to the pecuniary interests of the financialized oligarchs. my opposition does not see this, and wants to take steps towards increasing their vulnerability through this regrettable decision. we hope, for their sake, therefore, that they reconsider their vote on this subject" a populist [a competent one at least] would say something like "poor people are more important than rich wall street fatcats. the other guys don't think so. SAD!".

[Lērisama]

okay, why is dollars and budget and contracts in uppercase here? no one knows.

I'm pretty sure this is Trump using the small child's rule of thumb that important things get capitalised. It works for names and titles, and I definitely remember not accidentally capitalising particularly prominent words in a text as being something to check in primary school¹ when I had to check school work for SPaG³. This goes double in government-adjacent circles, as many things can be written in a document somewhere and become proper nouns⁴, and if you aren't particularly at home with the written word, it's not too difficult a mistake to imagine making.

¹ It definitely wasn't on my need to check this, because there will be examples of getting it wrong list by GCSEs², which is why I went with small child's above
² i.e. by 16
³ To those not versed in the joys of the National Curriculum of the United Kingdom, this is Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar
⁴ For example, I had a moment of paralysis on the subject of whether “National Curriculum” was a proper noun or not while writing this, and so whether I should capitalise it

[jcb]

I would think mendacious is too big a word for trump, who speaks (to his credit) at a level most people can quickly and easily comprehend.

The vocabulary Trump uses is often widely known, but the structure and the lack of coherence renders Trump's discourse often incomprehensible.

I think this is more a thing his opposition says than a real thing. let's take a selection of tweets of the guy on his truth social platform:

Trump often rambles, jumping from one barely relevant topic to the next, like the time he mentioned Secretariat, the famous racehorse, out of the blue.
- https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video ... great.html

this is a strength the right has in my country as well: while leftos weave complex, high-brow speeches like "we must tend in all circumstances towards the protection of the most vulnerable sections of the population: their needs must take precedence to the pecuniary interests of the financialized oligarchs. my opposition does not see this, and wants to take steps towards increasing their vulnerability through this regrettable decision. we hope, for their sake, therefore, that they reconsider their vote on this subject" a populist [a competent one at least] would say something like "poor people are more important than rich wall street fatcats. the other guys don't think so. SAD!".

Be careful, Torco, or this board will attack you for being disloyal to liberals and "repeating Republican propaganda"!

Never mind that Zompist himself recently posted on his blog about the book "The Road to Wigan Pier" where Orwell makes the exact same complaint nearly 100 years ago!
- https://zompist.wordpress.com/2025/05/2 ... igan-pier/

What were the problems Orwell saw?

• Most socialists were middle class and were terrible at communicating with workers.
• Socialism was associated with crankery, from vegetarianism to nudism.
• Socialism believed in a machine-dominated future, which left no room for manual work or a love of nature.
• Socialists were addicted to impenetrable jargon and their own quarrels.
• They’re no good at literature or even songwriting.

[Travis B.]

this is a strength the right has in my country as well: while leftos weave complex, high-brow speeches like "we must tend in all circumstances towards the protection of the most vulnerable sections of the population: their needs must take precedence to the pecuniary interests of the financialized oligarchs. my opposition does not see this, and wants to take steps towards increasing their vulnerability through this regrettable decision. we hope, for their sake, therefore, that they reconsider their vote on this subject" a populist [a competent one at least] would say something like "poor people are more important than rich wall street fatcats. the other guys don't think so. SAD!".

Be careful, Torco, or this board will attack you for being disloyal to liberals and "repeating Republican propaganda"!

Never mind that Zompist himself recently posted on his blog about the book "The Road to Wigan Pier" where Orwell makes the exact same complaint nearly 100 years ago!
- https://zompist.wordpress.com/2025/05/2 ... igan-pier/

What were the problems Orwell saw?

• Most socialists were middle class and were terrible at communicating with workers.
• Socialism was associated with crankery, from vegetarianism to nudism.
• Socialism believed in a machine-dominated future, which left no room for manual work or a love of nature.
• Socialists were addicted to impenetrable jargon and their own quarrels.
• They’re no good at literature or even songwriting.

Your idea of who 'workers' are is at odds with that, from a socialist perspective, all people who sell their labor to survive are workers, not just traditional blue-collar industrial workers. Workers are the 99% or, more likely, 99.9%. Just because people may be paid relatively decently, may be well-educated, and may not fit the stereotypical blue-collar aesthetic does not mean that they are not workers.

And frankly, the very idea of a 'middle class' can go to hell. Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans. The idea of a 'middle class' only serves to divide the proletariat against itself and align better-off portions of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and against other portions of the proletariat.

[Raphael]

Never mind that Zompist himself recently posted on his blog about the book "The Road to Wigan Pier" where Orwell makes the exact same complaint nearly 100 years ago!
- https://zompist.wordpress.com/2025/05/2 ... igan-pier/

What were the problems Orwell saw?

• Most socialists were middle class and were terrible at communicating with workers.
• Socialism was associated with crankery, from vegetarianism to nudism.
• Socialism believed in a machine-dominated future, which left no room for manual work or a love of nature.
• Socialists were addicted to impenetrable jargon and their own quarrels.
• They’re no good at literature or even songwriting.

Your idea of who 'workers' are is at odds with that, from a socialist perspective, all people who sell their labor to survive are workers, not just traditional blue-collar industrial workers. Workers are the 99% or, more likely, 99.9%. Just because people may be paid relatively decently, may be well-educated, and may not fit the stereotypical blue-collar aesthetic does not mean that they are not workers.

And frankly, the very idea of a 'middle class' can go to hell.

Well, culturally the term certainly makes sense, and I don't think it's a good idea to appeal only to the "culturally middle class" part of what you would apparently call the "proletariat". (I myself think by now I prefer the term "non-rich". Simple, straight-to-the point, and non-jargon-y.)

[jcb]

this is a strength the right has in my country as well: while leftos weave complex, high-brow speeches like "we must tend in all circumstances towards the protection of the most vulnerable sections of the population: their needs must take precedence to the pecuniary interests of the financialized oligarchs. my opposition does not see this, and wants to take steps towards increasing their vulnerability through this regrettable decision. we hope, for their sake, therefore, that they reconsider their vote on this subject" a populist [a competent one at least] would say something like "poor people are more important than rich wall street fatcats. the other guys don't think so. SAD!".

Be careful, Torco, or this board will attack you for being disloyal to liberals and "repeating Republican propaganda"!

Never mind that Zompist himself recently posted on his blog about the book "The Road to Wigan Pier" where Orwell makes the exact same complaint nearly 100 years ago!
- https://zompist.wordpress.com/2025/05/2 ... igan-pier/

What were the problems Orwell saw?

• Most socialists were middle class and were terrible at communicating with workers.
• Socialism was associated with crankery, from vegetarianism to nudism.
• Socialism believed in a machine-dominated future, which left no room for manual work or a love of nature.
• Socialists were addicted to impenetrable jargon and their own quarrels.
• They’re no good at literature or even songwriting.

Your idea of who 'workers' are is at odds with that, from a socialist perspective, all people who sell their labor to survive are workers, not just traditional blue-collar industrial workers. Workers are the 99% or, more likely, 99.9%. Just because people may be paid relatively decently, may be well-educated, and may not fit the stereotypical blue-collar aesthetic does not mean that they are not workers.

Why are you telling me this? I already know this! You should be telling the white-collar workers, who think they're better than the blue-collar workers, and vote like it.

My complaint is not that well-educated workers don't fit the stereotypical blue-collar aesthetic, but that they betrayed blue-collar workers and helped enact policies that devastated the lives of people who were working those blue-collar jobs, and never bothered to replace them with anything of equal value. Instead, they just told them to go to school and "learn to code", regardless of whether there's actually enough jobs in the market for everybody to do that, or whether that was even a viable option for everybody, or how a flood of qualified graduates would degrade the value of a degree. (Or just told them to make do with "gig" work (Uber, Door Dash, etc).)

When I see AI driving white-collar workers out of their jobs nowdays, I can't help but feel a little bit of schadenfreude. Now *they* know how the blue-collar folk felt when their factory closed and moved overseas a generation ago. At the very least, I hope it humbles them and grows their sympathy for and solidarity with blue-collar workers.

And frankly, the very idea of a 'middle class' can go to hell. Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans. The idea of a 'middle class' only serves to divide the proletariat against itself and align better-off portions of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and against other portions of the proletariat.

Again, why are you telling me this? I realized that "middle class" was a weasel word long ago. The idea of the "middle class" and how it pits the proles against each other is exactly what I'm railing *against*!

[Torco]

this is a strength the right has in my country as well: while leftos weave complex, high-brow speeches like "we must tend in all circumstances towards the protection of the most vulnerable sections of the population: their needs must take precedence to the pecuniary interests of the financialized oligarchs. my opposition does not see this, and wants to take steps towards increasing their vulnerability through this regrettable decision. we hope, for their sake, therefore, that they reconsider their vote on this subject" a populist [a competent one at least] would say something like "poor people are more important than rich wall street fatcats. the other guys don't think so. SAD!".

Be careful, Torco, or this board will attack you for being disloyal to liberals and "repeating Republican propaganda"!

you know me, ever eager to trigger the libs

its very tricky to talk about the social stratification characteristics of current societies, not least because of how immensely confused [and confusing, perhaps intentionally] the common sense about it is: even amongst well educated progs, I hear bullshit like calling someone who makes single-digit multiples of the minimum wage salaries as "rich" or "privileged". Because of how immensely unequal and segregated-by-wealth these societies are, it's often the case that that is the most rich person most people have ever traded words with.

then again, it is true that it's more comfortable to make 6 minimum wages than it is to make 2. but like... when we're talking about the ruling class we're talking about people who are faaar beyond these parameters.

[zompist]

And frankly, the very idea of a 'middle class' can go to hell. Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans.

I don't think those are the "actual classes" today, as opposed to 1848-- if it was even useful then.

I think the most useful distinction is the one introduced by the Occupy movement: the 1%, the 10%, and the rest of us. It's simple, objective, and pretty predictive.

The 1% (currently the income cutoff is about $750,000/year) are by no means all right-wingers, but they are the capitalists and almost always get what they want... and what they want is increasingly divorced from what's good for the rest of us.

The 10% is a useful category too (the cutoff is about $150,000/year)-- because these are the people needed and courted by the 1%. You can see here that this group leans more Republican than the 1%. And that's not hard to understand: if you make $200K/year you want to make more and are hyper-conscious of things that hold you back (like, oh, workers). A billionaire is already in effect ruling the world, so they can care about other things.

Now, even the 10% isn't enough to run the country-- you need half the voters. And this is where I'm afraid Marx fails us. People don't vote for what would be best for them... a fact that's been evident since the 1800s. Not even union voters, 41% of whom supported Trump in 2024. Nor is this a new thing: 54% of union voters supported Nixon in 1972.

Everybody's got a theory on why-- as jcb noted, Orwell was writing about the problem 90 years ago. Again, I don't think it's hard to understand: when people get better off, they are also more invested in the status quo, far less interested in radical change, and apprehensive about people lower on the socioeconomic scale.

It's hard to get hard numbers on the nation's mood-- most polls are from 3 or 4 months ago. This page is useful: basically the Republican agenda is not popular... Republicans should be worried when 52% of the country agrees with the statement that Trump is a "dangerous dictator."